The King's Blood

blank and pleasant as always. In all her life, Cithrin had never known anyone better at not giving information away. As good, but not better.
    “I thought I’d made that clear,” she said, trying for the brash half-humor she used with Komme Medean.
    “No,” Paerin said, and there was no lightness in his voice. “What you’ve said is what you want. What I’m asking is why you want it. What are your ambitions?”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t understand the question. I want to run my bank.”
    “Yes, but why is that what you want?”
    “Because it’s mine,” she said.
    Paerin took a deep breath and shifted on the bench so that he was half facing her. The tree above him cast shadows across his face, and for a moment he reminded her of children’s pictures of forest ghosts.
    “Do you want to be rich?” he asked.
    “I suppose,” she said.
    “Then that isn’t the answer. Do you want power?”
    “I want the power that belongs to me,” she said. “I want what I’ve earned.”
    “Even if you’ve earned it through forgery and fraud?”
    “I haven’t harmed anyone,” Cithrin said, crossing her arms. “What I’ve done was good business. I kept my contracts. They’re only not legal because I’m too young.”
    “Not for much longer, though,” Paerin said, more than half to himself. He tapped his fingers against his knee, frowning. “Are you aware that Komme’s been shoving Lauro at you to find out if you’re fishing for a husband?”
    “He could have asked. I’m not. I don’t want someone to run my bank for me. If I did, I’d marry Pyk Usterhall and be done.”
    Paerin laughed.
    “There’s an image. All right. There’s something I’d like you to do tonight,” he said. “Not a feast, just a meal. But the man who’s coming is important.”
    “All right,” she said. “Why do you want me there?”
    On the street, a horse neighed and a carter shouted. The breeze shifted the shadows across the pale man’s face. She waited while he weighed his answer.
    “I recall being your age,” he said, portioning out each word, “and I remember what it was like to look for something without knowing what it was. You have one of the best minds for coin and the powers of coin that I’ve ever seen, but you lack experience. That’s not a criticism, it’s only true. And there’s a negotiation happening tonight. I would like you to be there. See how the game is played.”
    Cithrin turned this over in her mind. Her heart was beating a little faster, and she felt the flush in her cheeks. This might be the opportunity she’d come all this way to find.
    “May I ask you a question?” she said.
    “That seems fair.”
    “Why is that what you want?”
    He nodded. Almost a minute passed.
    “You’re young. You’re still making yourself into the woman you’re going to be, looking for the project that your life will become. People sometimes need help to find that. I am older, and in a position of some power, and I think you may become the sort of person I would like to owe me favors later on.”
    The smile forced its way to Cithrin’s lips. It felt like victory.
    “And here I thought it was altruism,” she said.
    “Oh, Magistra.” Paerin Clark smiled. “We don’t do that here.”
    The meal began just before sundown around a table of wooden planks no grander than a laborer might sit at. Platters filled the space between: clams in garlic sauce, pasta and cream, bottles of wine, loaves of fresh-baked bread. Komme Medean sat at one end, the swelling in his ankle and knee gone down enough that they looked almost normal. Cithrin and Lauro sat along one side across from Paerin Clark and his wife, Chana, who looked even more like her father than Lauro did. At the other end of the table, the Antean nobleman with skin as dark as coffee. Canl Daskellin, Baron of Watermarch and Protector of Northport and the Regent’s Special Ambassador to Northcoast, grinned and broke bread with his hands.
    “Think how I feel,” Daskellin said. “I’m sent on a fast boat with desperate pleas for King Tracian to help us in the war, and by the time I get here, we’ve all but won. It doesn’t make me look smarter, let’s say.”
    Komme Medean chortled and nodded.
    “I know just how you feel,” he said. “I was trying to win a concession in a sugar plantation on an island off Elassae. Year and a half of negotiation, and I was just sending back the final contracts to their council when the whole damn