The King's Blood

story, the dragons once met were kept clean and ready, as if someday the masters of humanity might return.
    Cithrin had spent her childhood in Vanai with narrow streets and canals, her adulthood in the tight ways and white walls of Porte Oliva. Carse was huge and grey, stately and sober and dignified. The wide streets felt like a boast, the high towers rose like trees. A single man in fine chainmail, a blade at his side, walked through the street, and Cithrin realized with a start that he was part of the city guard. In Porte Oliva, the queensmen traveled in pairs at the minimum and more often groups of five or six. The prince’s guard in Vanai had worn ostentatious gilt armor and carried leaddipped clubs for beating down those who they saw fit. To have a single man with no apparent allies in sight was either high folly or the mark of a city where violence was rare. She wasn’t sure if she felt safer or more threatened.
    On the street corner, a cunning man conjured flashes of lightning from the air, tiny booms of thunder accompanying him like an aggressive drum. He had no beggar’s box. Cithrin wasn’t sure if she was meant to watch him or keep moving on.
    It took her an hour to find the Medean bank. The front was even more modest than her own counting house; a black door between a fish-seller’s shop and a small, disreputable temple. Only the symbol of the bank and a wooden sign in the shape of a coin marked it. She motioned to her guards that they should stay in the street. Anxiety snaked through her belly and exhaustion plucked at the muscles of her legs and back. The calm of watching the Thin Sea was like a dream half recalled.
    She stood before the door, breathing deeply. In her memory, Master Kit reminded her to hold her weight low in her hips and walk with her chin higher. She remembered his voice saying, You can do this .
    She could, but she didn’t have to. No one was expecting her. She could have Barth or Corisen Mout take the books in, and they could go back home without ever imposing on Komme Medean or anyone else. If she didn’t go in, they couldn’t turn her away or belittle her. As long as she didn’t try, she wouldn’t fail.
    She pushed the door open and walked through.
    Within, the counting house was less gloomy than she’d expected, lit by clerestory windows and filled with potted ivies and violets on the edge of bloom. A man about Marcus Wester’s age—beginning to thicken and grey, but not yet old—with skin the color of polished mahogany leaned out of a door she hadn’t seen.
    “Help you?” he asked.
    Cithrin held up the books as if they were a ward against evil.
    “I’ve brought the reports from Porte Oliva,” she said. Her voice was tight and high. She gave thanks she hadn’t squeaked.
    “Ah, you’ll want the holding company. It’s three streets north and one west. Use the gate on the west side.”
    “Thank you,” she said, and then, “Are you Magister Nison, then?”
    A degree of interest came into the man’s expression.
    “I am.”
    “Magister Imaniel used to talk about you,” she said, forcing herself to smile.
    It wasn’t truth. She’d taken his name from the papers and books that had come with her from Vanai. But Magister Imaniel was dead. Cam was dead. All the people who could say otherwise were gone from the world, and so the truth could be whatever she wanted it to be. And right now, she wanted it to be that she and this stranger shared a connection, however slight.
    In less than a heartbeat confusion gave way to surprise, and surprise to amusement.
    “You’re bel Sarcour, then,” Nison said. “Wait just a moment.”
    He vanished again, and she heard his voice calling for someone, and another man’s voice calling back. The accent of Carse was fast and clipped, and the only words she could make out were old man and tomorrow . Not the most informative.
    He stepped back into sight wearing a cloak of undyed wool and a smile that didn’t seem entirely benign.
    “Let me escort you, Magistra,” he said.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    If the counting house had been modest, the holding company more than made up for it. Five stories high, it looked less like a building within a city than a fortified keep of its own. The unglazed windows were thin as arrow-slits and the roof had decorative stonework that could easily act as ramparts. Nison guided her through an iron gate and into a courtyard like a palace’s. A fountain chuckled and burbled, and incense