The King's Blood

swamp.”
    At last, the drums beat out the defense. The men at rest came out from behind Klin’s walls, pressing the attackers back to the barricades Dawson’s forces had made. He was going to have to pull back farther still. With Bannien gone, he had too few men to command all the streets around Klin’s estate. And God alone knew when Bannien would return.
    And if.
    *    *    *
    T
    he halls of Klin’s estate were frankly ugly. Like Issandrian and Maas and all of that cohort of young iconoclasts, the old aesthetics were lost on them. There were no clean lines here. No austerity or dignity or gravity. Nothing held the beauty of classic architecture. Instead, the doorframes were carved into small riots of form: monkeys lifting frogs, frogs with lions on their backs, lions pawing at stretch-winged herons who were also the lintel. The tapestries were gaudy, busy things that dripped fringe like a drool from a man with a bad tooth. No floor could be left alone. They had to be inlaid with different colors of stone and chips of stained glass.
    Sitting in the withdrawing room, Clara was like a gem in a pile of stones. The bed that Klin had supplied took up the better part of the room, but she sat on it as if it were the most elegant silk divan. The interior of the house was viciously hot, and without even the advantage of the smoky breeze, so she had the shutters cracked open, the soft daylight on her needlework. The web of pink threads and yellow and green were growing together into a pattern he couldn’t yet make sense of. He’d always had the sense that she complicated the work intentionally, putting the thread together as a puzzle for her to resolve. In the end, it would be as if each step had been perfectly straightforward. Elegant.
    “You shouldn’t be here,” she said without looking up. “You’ll only make me feel guilty for distracting you.”
    “And if I told you I was looking for Jorey?”
    She smiled. Clara had always had the talent for looking pleased without denying that she felt weary.
    “I’d ask why you weren’t looking in his room or the barracks.”
    “I was going to,” Dawson said. “But I got distracted.”
    She put down her work and patted the mattress at her side. It was too soft, of course. Klin was a weak man at heart, and always had been.
    “Tell me again,” Dawson said, “what happened when Phelia Maas died.”
    “Well, you recall we were in the drawing room, you and Jorey and Geder and that very large religious friend of Geder’s. And poor Phelia was in a state of nerves. When Palliako began unveiling everything that had been going on with Feldin, the poor thing fell apart…”
    She told it all again, as she had before. The pretended errand to Maas’s mansion, the priest’s insistence when challenged that they were there at the baron’s request. Then the letters that proved his conspiracy, and the discovery. Phelia’s death.
    And after, when Vincen Coe had stood against the baron and his men in the corridor while Basrahip the goatherd priest hectored Maas into walking away. Dawson tried to picture it, and failed. He had fought Feldin Maas many times, and more than one of those had been with a blade. To go meekly. To drop his sword and turn away.
    “They have some evil magic,” he said. “It breaks men. It broke Maas and the men in the keep at the Seref. And it’s breaking Klin. I can see it in him. He spoke to them, and it’s drowned the fire in him just the way it did for the others.”
    “Are you sure it isn’t the fever and fighting that’s doing it?” Clara asked. “It doesn’t take magic to break someone’s spirit. The world can be enough.”
    There was a truth in her words he didn’t want to acknowledge, but it was there, patient and implacable. The exhaustion pressing down on his shoulders drew from more than the battle dragging on. More than his frustration and fear. It was also grief. He had done his best for his kingdom. He had done his duty as he saw it, standing bulwark against the small, shortsighted men who would change it. If Simeon had lived only a few more years, enough to give Aster the throne without a regency…
    Clara took his hand, and he tried to muster some hope.
    “Skestinin’s got to be getting close by now,” he said. “Once he brings his men south, he’ll get the gates opened. We’re too evenly matched now, and he can tip the balance.”
    “Will that be a good thing?”
    “If it was only Barriath being under his