The King's Blood

a softness in his own heart. He could feel his outrage fading. He plucked the pipe from her mouth, leaned forward, and kissed her gently, his mouth filling with her smoke. When he drew back, she was smiling.
    “As long as she’s not unfaithful,” Dawson said with a sigh. “I won’t have someone in the family being unfaithful.”
    A cloud seemed to pass over Clara’s eyes, a moment’s darkness but nothing more.
    “When the time comes,” she said. “We can worry when the time comes.”

Captain Marcus Wester
     
    I
    t was a week past his thirty-ninth name day, and Marcus squatted at the alley’s mouth, waiting. A soft rain fell on the nightdark streets, beading on the waxed wool of his cloak. Yardem stood in the shadows behind him, unseen but present. In the house across the narrow square, a shape passed in front of the window—a man peering out into the darkness. A less experienced man might have stepped back, but Wester knew how to keep from being seen. The man in the window retreated. The tapping of raindrops against stone was the only sound.
    “It’s not as if I can tell her what to do,” Marcus said.
    “No, sir.”
    “She’s a grown woman. Well, she’s almost a grown woman. She’s not a child, certainly.”
    “It’s an awkward age, sir,” Yardem agreed.
    “She wants control over her life. Autonomy. The problem is that she didn’t have any her whole life, and then had all of it at once. She had free rein with this bank for months. Long enough to see that she could do it well. After getting a taste for it, I don’t see how she turns her back.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Marcus sighed. His breath barely misted. It was a warm spring. He tapped his fingertips against his sword’s pommel. Annoyance and concern gnawed at him like rats in the grain house walls.
    “I could talk to her,” he said at last. “I could tell her that she’s got to be patient. Give the situation time to change on its own. Could she hear that, d’you think?”
    For a moment, the rain was the only reply.
    “Did you want me to answer that?” the Tralgu asked.
    “I asked it, didn’t I?”
    “Could have been a rhetorical point.”
    Across the square, a thin line of light marked an opening door. Marcus went still for a few seconds, but the door closed again without opening fully. He eased his grip on his sword.
    “No, I really meant it,” he said. “She’s my employer, but she’s also… Cithrin. If you’ve got a suggestion here, I’m open to hearing it.”
    “Well, sir, I believe that every soul has its own shape—”
    “Ah, God. Not this again.”
    “You asked, sir. You might let me answer.”
    “Right, sorry. Go ahead. I’ll tell myself it’s all a metaphor for something.”
    Yardem’s sigh was eloquent, but he continued.
    “Every soul has its own shape, and it determines the person’s path through the world. Your soul is a circle standing on its edge. At your lowest point, you will only rise, and your highest is when you are most likely to fall. Someone else’s soul might be shaped like a blade or a brick or a branching river. Each of them would live the same life differently.”
    “Which would make it the same life how?”
    “I can explain that if you’d like, sir. It’s theological.”
    “No, forget I said anything.”
    “If the magistra’s soul leads her in one way, it will seem the simplest path, whether it is or not. If she’s left within herself, she’ll turn in that direction just like Old Imbert drifted to the left after he took that hammer to his head. To make another choice would require the action of a different soul—”
    Marcus raised his hand, and Yardem fell silent. The door that had opened before shifted. The light behind it was gone, and the movement was only a deeper bit of darkness. Yardem shifted. Marcus squinted into the dim.
    “He’s going north, sir.”
    Marcus took to his feet and shrugged back his cloak, the rain dampening his newly freed sword arm. Around them, Porte Oliva slept, or if it didn’t sleep, at least huddled close to its fires. If there had been moonlight, the pale walls and blue-painted lintels of the merchant quarter would have glowed. Instead, Marcus navigated by shadows and memory. Here and there, a lantern hung from an iron hook beside a door, spilling thin light, but there was more than enough gloom to cling to for a man who didn’t want to be seen. The bricks under his feet were slick with grime and rain. Marcus walked quickly, not quite