The King's Blood

was intolerable.
    Once he’d gotten through the worst of it, though, the breakfast was always brilliant, and the mornings until midday he spent in the personal library reading ancient books and working on his translations. Or else he would visit Aster and they’d mock his tutors together. Usually his awareness of the great cloud of servants would diminish over time until they almost seemed to be there for their own reasons, and Geder stopped feeling quite so much onstage.
    The Kingspire itself seemed constantly implausible. Dur ing his time in court, Geder had been to a few of its great halls, but living in it he began to see the place less as a build ing and more like a great insects’ mound like something out of Southling fairy tales. The walls were only apparently solid. Most were crisscrossed with servants’ passages and hidden ways. A thin, dingy hallway might loop through the basements only to open into a vast private bathhouse with indigo tiles and heated water steaming down in a waterfall. There were listener’s holes everywhere—under benches, hidden inside archways—where an eavesdropper might be placed.
    There was even an entire chamber that was built as a massive dumbwaiter and ready to haul the king and his guests up to the greatest heights of the spire without the trouble of being carried up stairs to get there. All the air was perfumed. All the conservatories stood ready with musicians to play at the king’s command, or in Geder’s case, the regent’s. He constantly felt as though he was living inside someone else’s idea of who he should be, and it left him feeling a bit tentative. Unless, of course, Basrahip was with him. The priest was a steadying presence.
    “Little change, Lord Regent,” Lord Daskellin said as he stepped across the war chamber.
    Wider than a dueling field, the floor of the room had been covered in soil and sod all formed and shaped to match the geography of Asterilhold and western Antea. Geder’s working desk stood near the wall where Camnipol would have been. The promontory on which the city stood was a little step down. The mountains dividing Asterilhold from the Dry Wastes came up almost to his knees. The northern coast was bordered by tiny blue beads poured out until the false sea met the walls like running into the edge of the world.
    Canl Daskellin stepped across the fields of Asterilhold, over the great knot of armies playing stop-me-stop-you in the marshes of the south, then the Siyat and the arrayed army crouched around the Seref Bridge. The only changes since the day before were the positions of the ships on the sea of beads, and really only four of those were significant.
    “Good morning, my lord,” Basrahip said.
    “Minister,” Daskellin replied, and both men seemed pleased to leave the conversation there.
    “I haven’t had word from Lord Kalliam,” Geder said. “Something could have happened in the south, still.”
    “Could,” Daskellin said, and his tone finished the sentence. Something could have happened, but it hadn’t.
    Geder hated the vague apology in his own voice, but Canl Daskellin had been King Simeon’s Protector of Northport, among other things. Growing up, men like Daskellin and Bannien, Issandrian and Maas had been the great lights of the court. Now that Geder was Lord Regent, Daskellin paid court, and still Geder always had the feeling of being the junior when the man was in the room. That he had recalled Daskellin from the field and was prepared to command him again now only made the awkwardness more profound.
    “I was thinking,” Geder said, rising from his desk, walking gently to avoid crushing his own forces camped near the Seref, “that we could build a second bridge. I read an essay about Koort Mahbi, the third Regos of Borja? He had a moving bridge designed with little boats on the supports. The way he did it, his army could push the bridge out over a river, and then move across it, and pull it up on the other side. There and then gone again. If we made one like that we could go to the river over here.” He touched the ground where the Siyat curved. “We wouldn’t be near a good road, but even overland, I don’t think we’d be more than three days from Kaltfel.”
    “It’s a thought,” Daskellin said. “There’s still the problem of getting enough men onto the far side. If Kalliam had managed to get us both sides of the Seref, there would have been a protected place for the troops to gather. A movable bridge