The King's Blood

changeless.
    Around every great city fed by paths of dragon’s jade, there were others—townships, hamlets, some little more than waystations—where the roads were paved by human hands. Where the great roads met, and the great cities grew, the farmlands were, over the course of centuries, used up. The richer soil farther away grew in value, and new places— peculiarly human places—were born.
    And as the landscape changed, so did humanity, straining at the bindings woven into its blood. The races were unmistakable and unmixed only in the minds of the people. True, not all races could interbreed. A Cinnae woman could no more bear to a Yemmu man than a rat terrier could whelp a mastiff, and there were other combinations of blood that gave no offspring, or whose issue were themselves sterile. The difficulty of bearing a mixed-breed child allowed the thirteen races to stand apart from one another, but considered carefully, no race but the Drowned was pure. A Tralgu with wider-set, darker eyes might have Southling blood somewhere generations back. Secret marriages between Haaverkin and Jasuru could take place. Between Firstblood and Cinnae, such pairings were merely distasteful and scandalous. History was also marked by less pleasant pairings, and not all women who suffered rape at the hands of enemy soldiers could bring themselves to slaughter the babes that came of the crime.
    The history of the races was a complex tissue of love and revulsion, landscape and design, war and trade, secrets and indiscretions. Cithrin bel Sarcour was only one example in Marcus’s broad experience. The man who sat across the low wooden table from him was another. Capsen Gostermak was the child of a Jasuru mother and a Yemmu father. His skin was pocked where the bronze scales of his mother’s race never fully formed and his jaw was crowded with pointed, vicious teeth that were as unlike the Yemmu tusks as Jasuru teeth. He looked like a monster from a children’s story, neither one thing nor another, but entirely built to fight. No one who didn’t know the man would have guessed that he styled himself a poet or that he raised doves.
    The house was stone and mortar near the center of Cemmis township. In the falling twilight outside, Capsen’s sons played in among the other children of the township, kicking the body of a dead rat around the base of the dovecote, shrieking with the glee that comes of disgust and the heart-lessness of boys.
    “There is a place,” the half-breed said. “It’s not nearby, but it’s not far either. A cove that people don’t go to.”
    “Can you guide us there?”
    “No,” Capsen said. “I will tell you where to look, but I have a family. This isn’t any business of mine.”
    Marcus glanced up at the doorway. Yardem Hane leaned against the stone frame, arms crossed and expression unreadable. It was half a day back to Porte Oliva along a road that followed the shore. Marcus didn’t like both of them being away from the bank and its safebox, but Yardem had insisted that he not come alone. Outside, a child screamed in what could have been pain or joy.
    “All right,” Marcus said. “Two weights of silver for a map. Another two if our pirates are there when we get there.”
    “Paying me to talk and paying me to keep quiet?”
    “You win both ways,” Marcus said.
    Capsen rose and walked to the cupboard. It was made from wood that the tide brought to the beach, and it left the room smelling faintly of tar and salt. As Marcus watched, he reached to the top shelf and brought down a bit of parchment a bit wider than Marcus’s hand. Dark ink marked it.
    He put it on the table and Marcus picked it up. The curve of the coastline was unmistakable, and four good landmarks were already drawn in and labeled. The man had been prepared. That was either a very good thing or a bad one. If the township was ready to help him against the pirates, it made recovering the cargo more likely. If Capsen thought someone was going to be brought to justice, it would be a little more awkward.
    But that was for later. Marcus took a pouch off his belt and pulled out four measures of silver and put them on the table. Then two more. Capsen’s eyebrows rose.
    “For the name,” Marcus said. “I like to know who I’m fighting.”
    “Why do you think I know his name?”
    Marcus shrugged and reached for the extra coins.
    “Rinál. Maceo Rinál. He’s some sort of noble blood in Cabral.”
    “All right, then,” Marcus