The King's Blood

Perhaps it wasn’t.
    “I went through it all as best I could, Magistra,” the woman said. She was Firstblood, thicker than Cithrin. Darkerskinned with ruddy cheeks and dark smudges of exhaustion and loss under her eyes. “I found what I could, but it was little. They took a good bit before they burned it, and the fire took the rest, most part.”
    “Show me,” Cithrin said.
    The little courtyard was laid out in squares now. A bit over two dozen of them. At a guess, they were the men and women who’d paid for the woman’s hospitality and been overtaken. The woman stopped at a square of blackened cloth.
    “This was in about the right place, Magistra,” she said. “It was in the corner away from the worst of it. There’s a few things might be worth keeping.”
    Cithrin squatted down. Everything smelled of smoke and ash. Yes, here was the green dress she’d brought from Carse. Here was a thin silver necklace, the links fused. If this had been in the corner farthest from the fire, it had still been a kiln. The notebook she’d kept had burned along all its edges, but the center pages had only yellowed and curled. When she flipped through them, the reek of smoke was over-whelming. She tossed it aside. The blue silk cloak, ruined. The wool, ruined. A ring of gold and gems that wasn’t hers she put aside for the innkeeper to either find its right finger or keep for herself.
    Moving the ruined scraps of cloth, her fingers touched something hard and solid as stone. She pulled the dragon’s tooth free. It was perfectly white. The complicated roots looked like a sculpture of water. Amid all the human destruction, the dragon’s tooth stood untouched. She wasn’t sure whether she found the idea reassuring or eerie, but either way, the tooth was hers. She slipped it into her pocket.
    Another man came, and the innkeeper went to speak with him. Not another guest of the ruined house, but a tax assessor come to negotiate. The small people might suffer their tragedies, but the taxmen had bought the rights to collect, and if they couldn’t make back the contract, their own children would go wanting. And so it all went on, endless and merciless and unyielding.
    Cithrin stepped out to the street. The necklace she could sell as silver. The tooth was as uselessly beautiful as it had ever been. Everything else was a loss.
    The tailor’s shop was across a wide courtyard from the bathhouse where Cithrin had spent a full day after rising up out of the bolt-hole. She’d washed in the wide copper tubs, scrubbing her hair until it stood wide and unruly as a dandelion puff. She’d scraped herself with the wooden slats until her skin was pink as a newborn mouse. And still, when she’d walked out to the street, she’d felt the grit at her scalp and smelled the cat piss on her skin. In the end, she’d been forced to conclude it was all an illusion of habit, and she’d best just pour on the rosewater and wait for the feeling to fade. But in leaving, she’d seen the tailor’s and made note of it.
    Part of what made the place stand out was that the proprietor was Dartinae. Camnipol was a Firstblood city, and while there were a few people here and there of many of the races, to see a Dartinae with a business of his own was strange enough to make Cithrin well inclined toward him even before she went in.
    “Yes, miss,” he said as she stepped in from the street. “Can I help you?”
    “I hope so,” she said. “I am here from Porte Oliva, and my entire wardrobe has been reduced to ash. I’m going to need several pieces and I’m in a bit of a rush.”
    It was, she knew, the unsubtle merchant signal that she was willing to pay a little more coin if he was willing to give her a little more of his attention. It worked as she knew it would. He took her measurements with string and wax, making small notations in a system she’d never seen, and then bringing out samples of his work. She commissioned two dresses formal enough to stand before a king, or in this case Lord Regent. It was odd to think of dressing formally to attend Geder, but that was the world now. They weren’t living like beggars and refugees, so she couldn’t dress like one.
    She’d also need something warm and sturdy for the journey back to Carse, but for those she’d check the rag shops and talk with Cary about where the company was getting its costumes. Maybe she could even commission something very simple from Hornet. He had a decent eye as a costumer, and