The King's Blood

mock swords and considering it. “But I’m not sure how much the Lord Regent is going to want to remember his time with the company.”
    “Don’t know about that,” Sandr said. “It was an adventure, wasn’t it? It isn’t like it’s a thing everyone in court will have done.”
    “I don’t think court grandees score points off each other by bragging on who’s lived in the most squalid filth,” Cary said. “Really, that hole reeked.”
    “I suppose it did,” Cithrin said. “Well, if you don’t make yourselves the favorite company of the noble classes of Camnipol, then what? Come back south?”
    “Anyplace that’s not so hot the stones sweat would be fine with me,” Sandr said.
    “Oh, don’t bother leaving for that,” Smit said. “This heat’s about to break. You can smell it, if you know how.”
    Sandr snorted and rolled his eyes.
    “You can’t call the weather,” he said.
    “Sure I can,” Smit said.
    “No you can’t. You always say the same thing. It’s always that there’s a storm coming. You’ll go on for weeks that way.” Sandr shifted his face, lengthening his jaw and pulling down in the eyes somehow that Cithrin didn’t entirely understand. The imitation was so good, he seemed like Smit’s brother. When he spoke, the voice was Smit’s. “Storm’s coming. Mark me, storm’s coming.”
    “And I’m always right,” Smit said. “Sometimes it just takes a little longer for it to get here.”
    “But you could just as well say snow’s coming and claim every winter proved you right.”
    “I would be,” Smit said. “And besides that, storm’s coming.” Cary turned, catching Cithrin’s eye. They smiled at each other. This was Cary’s family, and she loved it. Cithrin loved it too, though it wasn’t hers. They were friends, some of them dear, but her home wasn’t in the cart or on the stage or sleeping in the hayloft above some new stable. Hers was in
    the counting house and the café.
    “All right,” Hornet said. “Let me throw some stitches on that, and you’ll have a nice simple traveler’s dress, perfect for any occasion involving mud, mules, and mischief. And I’ve put in a little pocket here you can hide a knife in case the caravan master sets his aim for your virtue.”
    “I will fear no caravan master,” Cithrin said in an artificial voice, the parody of stagecraft. Her bow was florid and unlikely to match. “My eternal thanks.”
    Hornet returned the gesture in kind, perfectly, and they both laughed.
    Cithrin knew the rule from the first time she’d traveled with the company, back when Master Kit had been its control: run against the stream. In a city struck by plague, comedy. In a rich city in prosperous times, tragedy. The power of the stories they told was in the distance they took the people standing in the audience. Tonight, they were doing The Dog Chaser’s Tale, which was about as low and bawdy a farce as Cithrin had ever seen. They did it well. Sandr’s delivery of the lines had, she was sorry to admit, a certain genius to them. But her attention wasn’t on the stage, but the men and women looking up at it.
    When Smit leaped to the stage with the enormous leather phallus bulging out of his costume, the crowd roared and pointed. Tears streamed down their cheeks. They were hungry for this, Cithrin thought. They were desperate for pleasure, joy, laughter. And of course they were. They’d faced a conspiracy by their neighboring kingdom, the death of their king, war, and now a vicious battle on their own streets. They had earned their desires.
    But she couldn’t look away. A boy barely old enough to shave was laughing so hard he rolled back on the stone-paved ground. On the stage, Charlit Soon pretended to be a cunning man changing his shape into a woman and then being wooed by another man, and an ancient-looking tooth-less woman slapped her knees and roared. It was too much. The laughter bordered on the grotesque. Cithrin sat on the side of the crowd, stage and audience equally in her view.
    There was no sense of victory. There had been when she’d first arrived. There had been banners and cloth, and children running in the streets throwing handfuls of bright and shining confetti. When Antea had conquered Asterilhold, the empire had been giddy and drunk. The defeat of Dawson Kalliam had no joy for them. The hilarity wasn’t a mask. It was one side of a coin, and Cithrin had the growing suspicion that the image on the coin’s other side