The King's Blood

smelled rank, but it was soft and her body curled against it with the weight of exhaustion.
    He brought her a wineskin filled with water and a wool blanket that smelled more of him than of the room.
    “There’s no common room here,” he said. “But there’s a fire to sit near in the kitchen. The man across from you shouts sometimes, but he’s harmless. If you need me, I won’t be out of earshot.”
    She nodded.
    “My family doesn’t know where I am,” she said.
    “Should we send word, my lady?”
    “No,” she said. “Not yet.”
    “As you see fit.”
    He leaned close and kissed her once gently on the temple. He hesitated for a moment the way she would have if she’d been a man and she’d wanted to kiss a woman’s mouth. She shifted her eyes to his, and he stood.
    “I’m old enough to be your mother,” she said.
    “My mother’s considerably older than you, my lady,” he said.
    “Why are you doing all this?”
    “Because you’ve let me,” he said. “Sleep now. We’ll talk later.”
    The door closed behind him, and Clara lay in the dim and stinking gloom.
    “ Well ,” she said to no one, and didn’t finish the thought.

Geder
     
    L
    ord Palliako , the letter said, I am very sorry to have been called away on such short notice, but word has come from the holding company that requires my immediate presence. Thank you very much for the offer of your hospitality and your company during my time in Camnipol. It has been a singular experience, and one I will recall fondly. The challenges of governing a nation as great as your own must take precedence over matters like small personal correspondence, but I will be paying close attention to the news from Antea.
    The chop was Cithrin bel Sarcour.
    He’d read the words a thousand times already, and he expected he’d read them a thousand more. He could hear her voice as if the paper itself had soaked it in. The softness in her throat. The slight melancholy in her inflection of fondly . He had read love notes before, but usually in the form of poetry or song. To cast it as business correspondence was both odd and exactly what he would have expected of a banker.
    He’d been worried after the execution of Dawson, that he’d offended her, either in the way the execution had taken place or from the way he’d reacted after. He’d often heard that killing a man was an upsetting thing, especially the first time, but he’d nearly been sick in front of the whole court. It hadn’t been in keeping with his dignity, but he’d do better next time. And anyway, she seemed to have forgiven him if there was anything to be forgiven.
    As he reached the door, he tucked the letter in his pocket. The voices of men so rough and grating by comparison to the woman he’d conjured leaked through the door. Geder motioned to his personal guard that they should wait for him to precede them, then pushed his way through into the meeting room. Basrahip followed on his heels and before the guard. That wasn’t a matter of etiquette so much as the habit that they had all formed.
    Maps littered the table, four and five layers thick in places. Canl Daskellin and Fallon Broot stood over the mess, scowling and angry-looking.
    “Gentlemen,” Geder said. “I take it we’ve made no particular headway.”
    “Asterilhold, in practice,” Daskellin said, “is posing several problems we hadn’t anticipated.”
    “You’re damn near out of noble families,” Broot said. “There were only about forty to start, and that’s counting the eastern Bannien group as their own that just happen to have the same name. The ones we lost in Kalliam’s rebellion, that’s down to thirty-four, thirty-five.”
    “Broot wants to redraw the map of Antea while we’re about it.”
    “Doesn’t make sense for a man to have two holdings on different sides of the river. How are you to oversee them both? Spend half the winter one place? Only see a holding every second year? It’s just sense to expand the existing baronies.”
    “These aren’t just dots on a map, Broot. These are places. My family has lived on its holding for ten generations. My grandfathers are all buried there. It’s not as if we can switch that to some field in the middle of Asterilhold and call it the same.”
    Geder raised his eyebrows. This wasn’t the part of being regent he was best at, but they were right. It would need to be addressed.
    “And there’s the problem of the cities,” Broot said, pointing an accusing