The King's Blood

angry-looking Timzinae man barreled out toward them, waving black hands.
    “Not open yet,” he said. “Come back in an hour.” “Forgive me,” Master Kit said. “Your name wouldn’t be Epetchi, would it?”
    The Timzinae’s eyes went wide, and then disconcertingly did it again as his nictitating membrane slid open with an audible click.
    “Kitap!” he shouted, leaping to put his arms around Master Kit. “Kitap, you old bastard! We all thought you were dead by now. You and your friend come back to the kitchen. Ela! Kitap’s here, and you won’t believe it. He’s old and fat.”
    Marcus found himself carried along on a wave of other people’s enthusiasm, seated at a cutting table, and eating from a bowl of something that looked like the waste scraped off a cooking grill and tasted better than anything he’d had in years.
    All around him, Timzinae men and women were smiling, and little boys and girls so young that their scales were still light brown were trotted out bored but patient to Master Kit, who delighted over each one. When he introduced Marcus by his full name, he could tell that the first man—Epetchi, his name was—was skeptical. But if old Kitap wanted to travel with a man who pretended to be the murderer of kings from Northcoast, it was apparently fine by him.
    They weren’t permitted to sleep under the stars anymore. Instead, they had a room in the back of the café and bedded down on a thin cotton mattress that had seen cleaner days.
    “Friends, I take it?”
    “When I first came into the world, I spent the better part of a year in Suddapal,” Master Kit said, laying his bedroll out over the mattress. Probably wise. At least all the insects living in their bedrolls were familiar. “I stayed here. Epetchi was just a boy then. Thin as a stick and couldn’t think about anything but girls.”
    “Do you think they can help us, then?”
    “I think that if they can, they will. That may not be quite the same thing. But I have more faith in goodwill built with meals and shared stories than goodwill bought from strangers with coin.”
    “You know,” Marcus said, “I didn’t force you to pay the finder’s fee.”
    “The world’s an odd place,” Kit said, and sat down with a grunt. “The last time I was here, everything was different. I was different, they were. Even the building’s changed. There wasn’t a wall there, at least not that I recall. And yet it was all related. It’s as if the world was a stone, hard and unchanging as we lay paint over it, one layer and then another and then another. We change it by the weight of the stories we bring to it, but we only change what’s there. Not the stone nature of the world.”
    “That sounds very deep,” Marcus said. “Don’t know what the hell it’s supposed to mean, though. Do you think they know someone with a good boat?”
    T
    he captain of the little sailing boat was a Timzinae woman with a broad face and a wicked smile. At Epetchi’s instructions, they met her near the end of one of the long piers. So far from the shore, Marcus felt he’d already left the city. She sat in the back of her boat, wrapping long, braided ropes in patterns that Marcus, in another context, would have mistaken for art. Her name, they’d been told, was Adasa Orsun.
    The boat itself was small enough for one person to manage, large enough to carry five if they didn’t need to lay in provisions for a long trek across open water. The deck was white as snow and its sails were square sheets of thick canvas dyed the blue of the sea. It bobbed with the waves, a little up, a little down. As close as it rode to the waterline, Marcus couldn’t imagine how it would keep from being swamped in a storm. But there were at least a dozen other boats similar to it tied to the pier, so there was something to the design or the handling that made it possible.
    That or they just didn’t put out to sea if there was weather.
    Master Kit made the introductions.
    “We were led to understand you might be willing to take passengers south to Lyoneia,” he said.
    “Might be,” the woman said. “For the right price. When are you wanting to leave?”
    “Sooner would be better,” Master Kit said with a smile. “Can’t go for a month,” she said with a shrug. “Other work already agreed to.”
    Marcus didn’t need little black things living in his veins to know it was a lie. The woman smiled up at them. The next move was theirs.
    “I am a friend of