The King's Blood

chance for last year’s rivals to become this season’s friends or, failing that, at least friendly acquaintances. It was the other side of the battles and intrigues, this creation of bonds and connections. They were weaving the fabric of civilization. What Dawson protected with common rites and tradition, Clara built for herself out of notes of gratitude and imported hand mirrors. Neither strategy was better than the other, and both were necessary.
    She went to bed late, Dawson still not returned to the house, and slept almost at once. She was dreaming of mice and a spinning wheel when the familiar touch brought her partway to wakefulness. The dream receded and her own room swam into focus. Dawson sat at the edge of the bed, still in his festive black and gold. For a moment, she thought he had come to celebrate in his own way, and she smiled lazily at the prospect of their familiar physical intimacy.
    The candlelight caught his face, the tear tracks shining on his cheeks, and all vestige of sleep in her died. Clara sat up.
    “What’s happened?”
    Dawson shook his head. He smelled of fortified wine and rich tobacco. Her mind went instantly to Jorey, to Sabiha. Too many tragic songs called forth the calamity of the bridal night. She took her husband by the shoulder and twisted him until his eyes met her.
    “Love,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “You have to tell me what’s wrong.”
    “I am old and growing older,” he said. “My youngest son has a wife and a family of his own, and the companions of my boyhood are leaving me. Pulled away into darkness.”
    He was drunk, but the sorrow in his voice was unmistakable. He wasn’t sad because he’d drunk too much, rather he’d drunk too much from being sad.
    “Simeon?” she asked, and he nodded. When he answered, his voice was melancholy.
    “The king is dead.”

Cithrin
     
    N
    ortheast in Narinisle, the grey stone city of Stollbourne, center of the bluewater trade. Southeast in Herez, Daun the city of lamps and dogs and the great mines of the Dartinae. South in Elassae, the five cities of Suddapal commanding the trade of the Inner Sea. In Northcoast, Carse and the Grave of Dragons and Komme Medean and his holding company. Once, not very long ago in the Free Cities, Vanai, and now in the southern reaches of Birancour, Porte Oliva. The branches of the Medean bank spread across the continent like spokes on a wheel. Cithrin sat at her table and traced her fingertips across the map and dreamed of them.
    Her life for as long as she remembered had been in Vanai. When it burned, her past burned with it. The streets and canals she’d played in when she was a child were gone now, as were almost all the people who remembered them. If she couldn’t quite recall whether a particular street sat north or south of the market square, the knowledge was simply lost to the world. There was no way to find out, and worse, no reason to.
    Porte Oliva was her home because chance brought her there. The branch bank was hers—to the degree it wasn’t Pyk’s—because she’d gambled and won. And also because Magister Imaniel had taught her his trade. Suddapal was only stories to her. She had never been so far east, had never seen the great fivefold city standing out on the ocean. Never heard the cries of the black seagulls or watched the gatherings of the Drowned under the waves. But she knew quite a bit about how the gold and spice came up from Lyoneia through it. How the oxen of Pût would float on great flat barges along the coast and be sold at the markets on the shore below the city. Given a week to study the books at the counting house, she would understand the logic of the Suddapal and the forces that drove it better than the native-born. Coins had their own logic, their own structure, and that she knew. So in a sense, she knew everywhere, even if she’d never been.
    She traced the western coastline. There was no branch in Princip C’Annaldé. But there was family. Her mother’s people, full-blooded Cinnae. She knew nothing of them except that when they’d been offered the half-breed orphan babe, they’d refused her. The rejection didn’t sting. It would be like a man full-grown missing a toe he’d been born without. It was a fact like the sky’s color and the sea’s rhythm. People of her blood lived here—she tapped the map—and they might as well have burned in Vanai for all it changed.
    And north of them, Northcoast. To its west, the Thin Sea and