The King's Blood

well, Captain?”
    “Apart from it being a corrupt and fallen world,” Marcus said, and the boy laughed as if it were a joke. Marcus shouldered his bedroll and climbed to the roof. A pigeon startled when he pushed open the trap, flailing at the air in panic. Marcus unrolled his bed, and then lay back and watched the clouds grey and the sky darken. Voices came from the street and from the barracks beneath him. His mind kept returning to Alys and Merian. The family he’d had, back when he’d been the kind of man who could have a family. Alys’s dark hair with its threadings of grey. Merian’s long face, slightly indignant from the moment she’d left her mother’s womb. He could still hear his little girl laughing in her crib, could still recall pressing his lips to his wife’s neck just where it turned to shoulder. The brilliant young general, champion and Lord Marshal of the rightful heir, Lian Springmere. He’d been going to remake the world, back then.
    It was more than a decade now since Alys and Merian stopped feeling all pain. Some days he could barely remember their faces. Some days, he had the physical certainty that they were in the room with him, invisible and sorrowful and accusing. Grief did things to men, but knowing that didn’t help.
    It was full dark when the trap opened again. Marcus knew without looking that it was Yardem. The tall Tralgu folded his legs beside Marcus’s head.
    “Pyk was asking for you, sir. Wants to know why things you’ve bought are in the bank’s warehouse.”
    “Because I’m guard captain for the bank.”
    “She might find that more convincing from you.”
    “Unless she wants to go haul it to the street herself, the reason doesn’t much matter.”
    Yardem chuckled.
    “What?” Marcus said.
    “That was the argument I offered her too. She didn’t seem to find the prospect interesting.”
    “That, old friend,” Marcus said, “is a powerfully unpleasant woman.”
    “Is.”
    “Still. She’s not the worst I’ve worked for.”
    “Quite a bit of room in that, sir.”
    “Fair point.”
    The pigeon or one like it landed on the edge of the building, considering the pair with one wet, black eye and then the other.
    “Well, Yardem. The day you throw me in a ditch and take over the company?”
    “Sir?”
    “It’s not today.”
    “Good to know, sir.”
    “Do you think Merian would have made a good banker?”
    “Hard to say, sir. I imagine she would have if she’d decided to be.”
    “I think I’m going to get some rest. Face the Pyk in the morning.”
    “Yes, sir. Also?” Yardem cleared his throat, a deep and distant rumble. “If I went too far…”
    “Going too far’s your job. When it’s called for, you should always go too far. Everyone else respects me too much,” Marcus said. “Well, except for Kit.”
    “I’ll remember that, sir.”
    Yardem rose and padded away. The moon hid behind dark clouds. The stars came out, first one, and then a handful, and then a host so large as to beggar the imagination. Marcus watched them until his mind began to slide sideways of its own accord, and he pulled his blanket around him. The smell of roasting pork flirted and vanished, borne on the fickle breeze.
    When the nightmare came, as he had known it would, it was almost the same as always. The flames, the screaming, the feeling of the small body, dead in his arms. Only this time, there were three figures in the fire. He woke before he could tell if Cithrin was the third or if he was.

Cithrin
     
    I
    n facing her first sea voyage, Cithrin had expected many of the hardships that came with being in a ship: the nausea and the close quarters and the fear of knowing that her life depended on the ship remaining afloat without any particular control over whether it did. All had proven real, though few as unpleasant as she had anticipated they would be. The surprise was how much the enforced inactivity calmed her. At any time of day or night, she would take herself to the deck, lean against the rail, and consider the waves or the distant dark line of the coast as it slipped past. There was nothing she could do, and so there was nothing required of her. If she willed the ship on faster toward Carse or grew homesick for her little rooms above the counting house, it made no difference, and before long she found herself simply inhabiting the moment. She was one of the first to see the Drowned.
    At first, it was no more than a slightly lighter tone to the blue. Then