The King's Blood

squares and the gangs of swordsmen moving together like packs of wolves. She walked quickly and with her head down. She was too clearly not Firstblood to be mistaken for someone with power in the city, but she could play the servant. There were any number of lower-class people of the crafted races, and if she were one of those, no one would wonder particularly where she was going or why.
    On her solitary way back to the warehouse and the hole, three men followed her for nearly half a mile, calling out vulgarities and making crude suggestions. She kept her eyes low and kept walking. She told herself it was a good sign, because it was how the men would have treated a servant girl walking alone through the streets, but she still felt the relief when they lost interest and wandered on.
    At the warehouse, she stopped, turning slowly in all directions. There was no one there to see her. She went through the usual ritual, tying the length of rope to her ankle and crawling in. The others hadn’t come with her this time, so she didn’t bother using the tray. Everything she had already fit in the sack.
    The first time she’d crawled through the black passage, it had seemed to go on forever. Now it felt brief, trivial. When she reached the dropoff where it broadened out into the sunken garden, Geder and Aster were sitting beside each other, drawing patterns in the dirt by the light of a candle.
    “Has that been burning since I left?” Cithrin asked.
    Geder and Aster looked at each other, an image of complicity. Cithrin sighed and began pulling in the pack.
    “It’s going to run out, you know. And won’t get another one until tomorrow at the earliest.”
    “Dark now or dark later,” Aster said. “It’s not a great difference.”
    “The difference is dark now would be a choice,” she said. “Dark later’s by necessity. What are you playing at?”
    “Geder was showing me Morade’s Box,” Aster said.
    “It’s a puzzle I found in a book,” Geder said. “It’s about the last war.”
    “We had a last war?” Cithrin asked, pushing back a lock of her greasy hair. “I’m not sure everyone knew to stop.”
    “The dragons, I mean,” Geder said. “Here, look.”
    Cithrin came and sat beside them as Geder drew out the problem fresh. Morade was a dot in the center, his clutchmates were set one on either side. And three stones were the places Drakkis Stormcrow might be hiding: Firehold, Matter, and Rivercave. The puzzle gave each of the dragons rules on how they could move and in which order, and the puzzle was to find how Morade could check all three hiding places while blocking his clutch-mates.
    “What if Stormcrow’s in the first one?” Cithrin asked.
    “No, you don’t ever find him,” Geder said. “It’s only to look in all three places.”
    “What if…” Aster reached for the little improvised board and tried a series of moves that didn’t work. Cithrin left them to it, opening the pack and putting everything out where she could locate it again by touch. The candle wasn’t going to last all the way to nightfall. Not that day or night meant much in the darkness.
    They ate their dinner in darkness, and Aster crawled up through the dark tunnel to watch the sunset fade at the bottom of the ruined warehouse. Cithrin sat against a wall of stone and earth, her wineskin in her hand. Geder, invisible, was before her and to the right.
    “Do you think they really all died?” she asked.
    “Who? The dragons? Of course they did.”
    “I went to the Grave of Dragons before I came out here. The man I was with was saying that Stormcrow would put pods of them to sleep, hide them away so that they would wake behind enemy lines and attack from the rear.”
    “I’ve read about that,” Geder said. “They had ships too that would carry people into the sky. They had spines of steel and knife blades as long as a street. They’d fight dragons with them.”
    “Did they ever win?”
    “I don’t think so,” Geder said. “If they did, I never read about it.”
    “When I was a girl, I dreamed about riding dragons. Having one as a friend who could carry me up and away from Vanai and everyone I knew. Everything. I had these elaborate stories about how it would obey me and let me do whatever I wanted. And then…” She laughed, shaking her head though no one could see it.
    “What?” Geder asked.
    “And then the dragon turned out to be money,” she said. “Coin and contract and lending at interest were what