The King's Blood

she’d known it was an unpleasant ailment, she hadn’t understood the degree. She forced herself not to stare. Something in the cunning man’s fingers clicked, and he grunted as if in pain. Komme Medean ignored him. Pale brown eyes swept up and down her, evaluating her not the way a man would a woman, but as a carpenter might a plank of lumber.
    “I’ve brought the reports from Porte Oliva,” Cithrin said.
    “All right. What do you want?” Komme Medean said. And when she didn’t answer immediately, “You carried your reports yourself instead of sending a courier. You came here yourself. You want something. What is it?”
    The moment balanced on the edge of a blade. It was true, she’d come all this way, and for this. To speak to the man at the center of the great labyrinth of power and gold and win him over to her. She’d imagined the delicate conversation of a courtier, the half-playful and half-serious questions that Magister Imaniel had raised her with. She’d imagined herself impressing the man slowly over the course of hours or days. And now, instead, she stood before a mostly naked, sick man, as the central question lay out on the floor between them like a broken toy.
    The moment stretched, and Cithrin felt her opportunity slipping just beyond her reach. She was embarrassing herself in front of the very man she’d meant to impress. And then, from the back of her mind, an old voice whispered. Cary, the actress who’d helped Cithrin play the part of a banker, of a woman full-grown and at the height of her power. The woman you’re pretending at , her imagined Cary whispered, what would she say?
    Cithrin raised her courage and her chin.
    “I’ve come to tell you your notary has the soul of a field mouse and the tact of a landslide. And after that, I want to charm you into giving me more of your money and greater freedom to use it,” Cithrin said. Her voice a little hard and buzzing at the edges. “How’m I doing so far?”
    The room was silent. Even the cunning man stopped his chanting. And then Komme Medean, soul and spirit of the Medean bank, barked out a laugh, and Cithrin let herself breathe again.
    “Bring her a chair, and pass me those reports,” he said. She put the sealed books into his hand. He was a bigger man than he’d seemed at first. He broke the seals and opened the ledgers, reading the ciphered text as easily as if it had been simple letters. “All right, Magistra. Let’s see how you’re doing. So far.”

Geder
     
    A
    s a boy, even a young man, Geder had imagined what it would be like to be king. His daydreams had seemed perfectly benign at the time. If he were king, men like Sir Alan Klin would be called to heel. If he were king, he would see that the libraries of Camnipol—of all Antea and its holdings—were well stocked and maintained. If he were king he would command any woman he wanted to his bed, and no one would laugh at him or reject him or comment on the size of his belly. They had been the sort of fantasies a young man could have safely, without any threat that they might one day come true.
    Except, of course, that they had.
    Now he woke in the mornings with a dozen servants already standing around his bed. There was the ritual humiliation of being bathed and dressed. He understood that it was all meant as a show of dignity. The Lord Regent of Antea was not a man who put on his own clothing, who shaved his own chin, who laced his own boots. He submitted to being helped up from his bed, to having his night clothes taken from him and standing naked for that terrible moment until other men’s hands pulled fresh undergarments over his body. He could not bathe without his body servants attending him. Or perhaps he could, but it would have meant ordering them away, and ordering them away would have been admitting that it bothered him to have them see him undressed. And once he admitted that it bothered him, then every time it had happened up until now became shameful in retrospect.
    He should have refused the very first time, but he hadn’t known then, and now it was too late. He was trapped by what had come before into enduring what was inevitably going to come next.
    As to the idea of asking a woman to bed with him, he’d have died first. There was no doubt— none —that at least one servant would be discreetly in earshot the whole time. Even if he’d known how to bring up the subject to a woman, the idea that he would be putting on a display for the help