The King's Blood

themselves down the sides of his mouth. For a long moment, Cithrin had the sick feeling that he was about to resign. Quit her and the bank and everything else. Then he looked at her and he softened.
    “Well,” he said. A dog yelped and a man’s voice cursed not far away. Marcus scratched his cheek, the sound like sand falling against paper. “I suppose someone’s got to keep an eye on Pyk.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You’ll still need guards. If it’s not me and Yardem, you’ll need four at least. We’re just that good.” Cithrin smiled and Marcus managed to smile back. “Just… just promise me you’ll be safe. I have a bad history of losing people in Northcoast.”
    “I promise,” she said.
    F
    or all that Cithrin had remade herself as an upstanding and important citizen of Birancour, she had never been inland farther than the coastal mountains and foothills that separated it from the Free Cities, and then in the grip of winter. She had imagined it all to be like that—rolling hills and stones punctuated by forests and meadows. The land between the Free Cities had been like that where it hadn’t been mud and snow. It was only when she passed out from the last trailing houses and farms of Porte Oliva that she saw the wide, open sweep of the land and heard the voice of the grass singing for the first time in her life.
    The interior of Birancour was flat, without so much as a hill to break the horizon, and the dragon’s jade road passed through it. Cithrin found herself imagining that the road was a living thing that folded in on itself behind them and rose up before, a companion sea serpent escorting her across the oceanic grass. If she’d been asked, she would have said that the sound of tall grass shifting in the breeze would be like a scratching, like rubbing handfuls of straw together. It was like walking under a waterfall. Even the lightest breath of wind roared, and after the third day, Cithrin began to hear things inside it—voices and music, flutes and drums and once a vast choir of voices lifted together in song.
    Farmhouses and cultivated fields seemed to rise up and fall away like images from a dream. She almost expected the men and women they met on the road to be some new, unknown race, or to speak with the hush of the grasslands in their voices, but instead they were Firstblood and Cinnae, their faces leathery with the sun and palms yellow and callused. The people seemed so familiar and common and prosaic that Cithrin began to tell herself it was only the unfamiliarity and her own anxiety that made the place seem somehow less than real. When a massive creature easily half the size of her own horse but black and wet-looking with dagger teeth and an improbably ornate and flowerlike nose slid across the road before them, it took her guard’s yelp of alarm to convince her it was real.
    In the end and despite his joke, Marcus had sent only two guards with her. Two Firstbloods named Barth and Corisen Mout. When night came without a wayhouse or caravanserai, one would take his horse out into the grass, walking it in a circle like a dog until a round space had been crushed down. Even though the grass was wet and green, they didn’t start fires.
    Cithrin lay in her tiny leather sleeping tent, one arm out before her and her head pillowed on the flesh of it. The top of it was only a few inches above her, and it held the heat of her body surprisingly well. She was shakingly tired, her back and legs sore from riding. The knot in her gut was like an old, unwelcome companion, returned when it was least wanted, and it would not let her sleep. So she feigned it, closing her eyes when she remembered to and trying without success or hope not to listen to her guardsmen talking. Gossiping. About Marcus.
    “The way I heard it, Springmere knew the captain was the only reason he was winning the war,” Barth said. “Got to where he’d scared himself half crazy that he was going to switch sides. So after the battle of Ellis, Springmere got a bunch of the uniforms off Lady Tracian’s dead, put his own men in them, and sent ’em after the captain’s family. Held the captain down while his wife and baby burned.”
    “Wasn’t a baby,” Corisen Mout said. “Girl was six, seven years old.”
    “His little girl, then.”
    “Just saying she wasn’t a baby. How’d the captain find out it was a trick?”
    “Don’t know. Wasn’t until after Lady Tracian’d been put in the stocks, though.”
    “I