The King's Blood

sigh.
    “That man,” he said, “has no idea the things I sacrifice for him.”
    “He never will,” Clara said.

Dawson
     
    T
    he Kingspire was not the original building that took the name. For as long as there had been a Camnipol, there had been a Kingspire, and so with every remaking of the city, every layer of history and ruin, some new castle had been built. Somewhere deep down, pressed into stone and forgotten, was the first Kingspire and the bones of the first kings.
    The building Dawson had known as a boy, the one he walked through now, rose high at the northern end of the city, looking out over the Division. In the lower buildings, King Simeon kept his mansions as his father had before him, and his father before that, back four generations to the Black Waters War. Paths of white gravel wound through gardens kept with a precision that approached mathematics. No leaf seemed out of place, no stone off its center. Only the air was wild here, blowing off the southern plains, up through the city, and making its way along the paths in sudden gusts. It plucked the blossoms from the trees, scattering petals like snow and swirling them high into the air to fall slowly back to earth.
    The old temple stood apart, its bronze doors permanently locked by Simeon’s grandfather, unopened in Dawson’s life-time. The private temple, with its pearl-white windows and sheets of green-enameled steel like the scales of a great lizard or a dragon. Above it all, the great tower rose, smooth-sided, the height of a hundred men, and within it the high-vaulted ceilings rose like the architecture of dreams. Dawson had been in the great tower only three times, and of those, twice had been in the company of the boy prince when they’d both been young and green. He still dreamed about those spaces on occasion. They had been made to awe those within them, and made well.
    The king’s chambers themselves were surprisingly understated, given the setting. Elsewhere they might have seemed ostentatious or gaudy, but in the shadow of the great tower, a building encased in gold leaf and strung with roses would still have seemed modest. In fact, it was a wide building of stone and wood, glass lanterns set into the walls themselves so that the candles lit within would glow both inside and out. In the bright afternoon sun, the lanterns were dark and ominous.
    A servant man in silks and a bronze chain waited for Dawson at the stone garden that led to Simeon’s withdrawing rooms. Dawson acknowledged the man’s bow with a nod and allowed himself to be led into the cool shadows within.
    King Simeon sat beside a small fountain. He wore a shift of simple white cotton, and his hair was disordered as if from sleep. His gaze was on the falling water, silver and white where it sheeted down a bronze dragon almost lost to verdigris.
    “A casual audience, is it, Your Majesty?” Dawson said, and his old friend turned. His smile was melancholy.
    “Forgive me if I don’t rise,” Simeon said over the splashing water.
    “You’re my king,” Dawson said. “However low you sit, it’s my duty to kneel deeper.”
    “You always have loved form,” Simeon said. “Oh, stop that. Stand up, or at least come and sit by me.”
    “Form is what gives the world its shape,” Dawson said, rising. “If you don’t hold to tradition, what is there? A thousand different people each with his own idea of justice, every man trying to force his ideas on the next? We’ve seen how that ends.”
    “Anninfort,” Simeon said darkly. “You live in a frightening world, old friend, if the only thing between us and that is etiquette.”
    “Order has always been precious and fragile. By the time the small things have washed away, the large ones are too powerful to stop. Every man in his place. Those meant to lead, lead. Those meant to follow, follow. Civilization doesn’t fall into anarchy. That’s how it should be. And it’s the world you live in too, Your Majesty.”
    “So it is,” Simeon said. “So it is. And still I wish I could leave Aster a better one.”
    “Change the nature of all history for one boy?”
    “I would. If I could, by God I would do it. A world where not everything rests on his shoulders. Where his own people don’t plot to have him killed.” Simeon seemed to sink in on himself. His skin was greyer than Dawson remembered it, like a pale shirt gone too many times to the launderer’s yard. The king combed his fingers through his hair absently.