The King's Blood

and hilarious, and it made Geder want to try it, just to see the great men and ladies of the court trying to stay awake and pretending to enjoy themselves as the night grew longer beneath them.
    His father found a bench and sat on it. Geder sat at his side.
    “It’s quite a lot in not much time, isn’t it?” his father said. “My son, the Lord Regent. Who would have thought it, eh? It’s an honor. It’s… yes.”
    “I wish Mother’d lived to see it.”
    “Oh, oh yes. Yes, she’d have had something to say about it all, wouldn’t she? She was a firebrand, your mother. Hell of a woman.”
    A cricket sang. The first one that Geder remembered hearing all season. A sudden powerful sadness rushed up in his chest, and with it a sense of grievance. He had done everything he could. He’d come as near to kingship as any man could who wasn’t chosen by blood. He’d saved Aster and protected Camnipol. He’d won, and still his father seemed distant. Disappointed.
    “What’s the matter?” Geder said, more harshly than he’d meant to.
    “Nothing. Nothing, it’s just the war. You know. All that fighting last year. All that unease. And now this, and… I don’t know. I was never meant for court life. All these people used to ignore me, and suddenly they pretend to care what I make of it all.”
    Geder snorted.
    “I recognize that,” he said.
    “Do you ever wish it would all just go back to the way it had been? You back at Rivenhalm with me?”
    Geder leaned forward, his hands knotted together.
    “Sometimes, but it wouldn’t have happened that way, would it? If I hadn’t been in Vanai and then come back when I did, Maas and Issandrian’s showfighters would have taken the city. Aster would have died. We couldn’t be who we were anyway.” Geder shrugged. “The nature of history defies us.”
    “I suppose that’s true. And still, I look at the future, and I dread it. Where does it all end, after all?”
    “I don’t think the war will go on much longer,” Geder said. “And when it’s over, this mess will all be ended.”

Dawson
     
    D
    awson didn’t like it, but the war now was in the south. His men couldn’t cross the river, and barring a fresh rebellion in Anninfort, Asterilhold had nowhere to land on the eastern side. The blockade in the northern sea blocked trade and kept Antean ships from being harassed, but as long as the border with Northcoast remained open, food and supplies could pour into Asterilhold from the back.
    The late spring was thick with mosquitoes, but cold. The high grasses rose to a walking man’s elbow, hiding bogs and cutting the horses’ flanks until they bled. The roads weren’t paved, only thin paths of stable land laced between creeks. The chill water had been fresh when it left the high glaciers topping the mountains to the south and was now undrinkable. Trees blocked their path where pools didn’t. The men’s clothes were starting to fall apart from mildew, and he had lost more soldiers to fever than to the enemy’s swords. His only comfort was that the forces of Asterilhold were suffering the same. There were no garrisons to take shelter in, no holdfasts. The nearest thing to real battle that anyone had seen was the poor idiot Alan Klin whom Geder Palliako had insisted be at the vanguard, and he’d only had a single real skirmish in a high meadow and been driven back from that.
    And then the orders had come, written in Palliako’s own hand and under his seal. Withdraw his army to Seref Bridge to meet a group of priests who would somehow overcome the round keep and open the fast way to Kaltfel. Dawson had sent back for clarification. Not that he’d misunderstood, but if he accepted the order and drew his men to the north, it would only mean hauling them back down and beginning the whole painful campaign again when Palliako’s cultists failed. Clarification came, and Dawson had been left nothing except to obey.
    Marching north on the cusp of summer, he had at least imagined that he would find a company of warrior priests, drunk on theology and righteousness and ready to throw themselves across the narrow bridge. Even that was a disappointment.
    The three men wore robes the grey-brown of sparrows. Their wiry, coarse hair was pulled back from their faces, and they wore expressions of serene benignity that Dawson associated with men drunk past reason or else simple from birth. They stood at the end of the little parade ground outside the keep and bowed to