The King's Blood

it was something under the water—a barkstripped log or some pale-fleshed fish. Then it was the body of a Firstblood man, naked, staring emptily up toward the air. A sailor called, laughter in the sound, and footsteps pattered behind her as the crew came to the rail with her. The Drowned man wasn’t alone. Cithrin saw a woman floating at his side, and then another beyond her. And then hundreds more. Between one moment and the next, the sea was full of them. The slow movements of their limbs could almost have been the water pushing them. As Cithrin watched, one rose up from the depths just under her—a young man almost a boy with the thin, coltish frame of an adolescent or a Cinnae. His dark eyes seemed to find her, and slowly, he smiled.
    “Never seen the Drowned before, Magistra?” Barth asked. She hadn’t noticed him there.
    “Once,” she said. “There was one in one of the canals in Vanai. But never like this.”
    “Usually travel in pods a little smaller’n this. We got lucky, seeing so many at once.”
    A sailor shouted and leaped, diving out into the water. With his splash, the Drowned sank at once, falling away beneath the water as fast as stones. Cithrin watched the boy beneath her vanish. In the water, the sailor laughed and tried to dive after them.
    “What an ass,” Barth said with no particular heat in his voice.
    “Why do they run?”
    “They’re slow, they’re weak out of water, and they’re naked. Sailors and shoremen sometimes have cruel ideas of sport,” Barth said. “The Drowned are like anyone else. They see a threat, and they avoid it. Even fish do that.”
    Cithrin nodded, but she also watched the sailor when his shipmates pulled him up grinning from the water, and she made a point of avoiding him for the rest of the voyage.
    C
    arse. The white chalk cliffs began half a day before the city came into sight, rising from the seashore like a glacier. The sea itself seemed to take on a paleness, and the hazy sky was lighter than blue. The first signs of human life—or rather of the dozen races who built above that water—were the fishing ships. Small and black, they were coming back toward the cliffs now, or else making their way north toward the smaller towns nearer the water.
    Despite being on the sea, Carse was not, properly speaking, a port. It sat at the end of the dragon’s roads in the north and looked down over the waves. A great network of docks encrusted the base of the cliffs, but few merchants chose to use them. Rather they would travel to where the cliffs ended and haul their goods overland to the great city. Cithrin and the other passengers, having little to carry, got off at the docks and made their way up the switchbacks that rose to Carse proper. She found it somewhat unnerving to see the other, older paths still marking the cliffs, but eroded and crumbling past usefulness. One day the white chalk that paled her shoes and dress as she staggered up the cliff, her balance not yet accustomed to the stillness of earth, would be that same impassable ruin. Only hopefully not today.
    At the top of the cliffs, the trail bent east, transforming itself into broad iron stairs that led up to a great courtyard and the city itself. If it had been designed to impress someone walking up to it this way, it could hardly have been better. The council tower rose up, ten stories high, its stone as smooth as skin. The top floor sported a dozen windows on each side with colored glass in each, ready to announce the edicts and decisions of the Council of Eventide whenever it met. Even in the height of war, the tower was sacrosanct. No king or prince would cross the theologians and cunning men who made up the council, and Carse would have been less of a jewel in any crown without it.
    Beyond that, a jade dragon larger than the ship she’d sailed there in lay curled with its great snout tucked under a carved wing. Cithrin had read of the Grave of Dragons and the statue of sleeping Morade, last of the Dragon Emperors, at its mouth. Even warned, it took her breath away.
    But the city hadn’t been built to be seen from the top of the cliff. It had been made to be seen from the air. Buildings had fallen and been rebuilt, what could burn, ancient armies had burned and restored and burned again, but in its heart, Carse was a city of dragons. Its streets and squares were wide to make room for great bodies that had not walked them in more than centuries. The great perches where, according to