The King's Blood

small force. Twenty knights with their squires. Four hundred sword-and-bows, most of them peasant farmers taken off the land in the middle of the planting. Perhaps two dozen were professional soldiers, though almost a hundred had walked a battlefield sometime in their lives. They wore what armor came to hand and carried the swords and pikes and hunter’s bows kept in attics and cellars against this day. They marched even as the word went out to the south and east that the others would gather. It might take a month for the second and larger force to come together, marching up from the southern holdings or west from the border with Sarakal. At an estimate, the empire could field an army six thousand strong, armed and armored, and still have men enough in the fields to avoid starving next spring.
    But that would come later. Now the horses of the knights rode along the wide jade path, and carts of food and fodder came along after. Behind the column, Camnipol faded until the Kingspire itself was little more than a smudge against the horizon. And at the head of the army, Lord Marshal Dawson Kalliam rode with his son Jorey at his side, moving fast as if trying to pull the army along behind by example and force of will.
    To look at the map, Asterilhold was little more than a wide strip of land dividing Imperial Antea from Northcoast, caught between the two great northern kingdoms like a squire standing between two knights. The length of Asteril-hold’s coastline was the least of all three nations. It boasted only two great cities: Kaltfel and Asinport. Its protections were deeper than simple lines of ink on parchment would show. In the south, the river Siyat found its mouth by draining wide marshes fed by runoff from the mountains along its southern border. Invasion from the Dry Wastes would be difficult and time-consuming. From the west, boggy and prone to disease. The river itself—the Siyat—was navigable in the northernmost reaches, but for most of its length was muddy, cold, unreliable, and deep. The only Antean city to declare itself against the Severed Throne in a generation was Anninfort, which sat on the river’s edge, breathing the air of Asterilhold and giving home to men loyal to both kingdoms.
    Dawson had studied the wars between the minor kings and the separation of Antea before it became an empire of its own, and the difference between a fast conflict, quickly ended and a grinding, bloody war that could stretch out for years was Seref Bridge.
    A day’s ride south of Kaltfel, a ribbon of dragon’s jade spanned the water over a rapids. The story was that the road predated the river, that the dragon’s road had once passed through a plain, and thousands of years of erosion had made a bridge of it. Garrison keeps squatted at both sides, glowering at one another across the span. The nation that controlled both keeps controlled the war, and Dawson’s best hope was to reach the bridge with a great enough force to overwhelm the farther side before King Lechan had recovered from the shock of Geder Palliako’s rage. Any assault across the bridge would take its toll in blood, but to lose five hundred men in an afternoon now would save five thousand from dying in marshes and fords, on ships and beaches, over the course of years.
    Dawson’s camp tent stood solid as a house. Thick leather stretched across iron frames to make walls and rooms. A brazier stood in the middle of the central chamber, its smoke rising in a pale grey spiral to the chimney hole in the roof. Crickets sang all around him as he ate a dinner of chicken and apples and outrage. His sometime ally Canl Daskellin sat across from him, peeling an apple of his own with a dagger and the strength of his thumb.
    “I don’t know what you’re proposing, old friend,” Daskellin said.
    “I’m not proposing anything.”
    “No?” A long green spiral of skin fell to the floor, pale flesh clinging to one side. “Because it sounds as if you were accusing the Lord Regent of treason against the crown.”
    “I’m not calling for a coup. I don’t want anyone’s head on a pike. Or at least not anybody important. If we whipped all Palliako’s cultists out of the city with chains, I can’t say I’d mind.”
    “Still…”
    “I know what I saw, Canl. You’d have seen it too if you’d watched. He goes everywhere with that pet priest. And what do we know about them and their spider goddess? We moved too quickly. We let the panic over Maas and the