The King's Blood

Cithrin

Northeast in Narinisle, the grey stone city of Stollbourne, center of the bluewater trade. Southeast in Herez, Daun the city of lamps and dogs and the great mines of the Dartinae. South in Elassae, the five cities of Suddapal commanding the trade of the Inner Sea. In Northcoast, Carse and the Grave of Dragons and Komme Medean and his holding company. Once, not very long ago in the Free Cities, Vanai, and now in the southern reaches of Birancour, Porte Oliva. The branches of the Medean bank spread across the continent like spokes on a wheel. Cithrin sat at her table and traced her fingertips across the map and dreamed of them.

Her life for as long as she remembered had been in Vanai. When it burned, her past burned with it. The streets and canals she’d played in when she was a child were gone now, as were almost all the people who remembered them. If she couldn’t quite recall whether a particular street sat north or south of the market square, the knowledge was simply lost to the world. There was no way to find out, and worse, no reason to.

Porte Oliva was her home because chance brought her there. The branch bank was hers—to the degree it wasn’t Pyk’s—because she’d gambled and won. And also because Magister Imaniel had taught her his trade. Suddapal was only stories to her. She had never been so far east, had never seen the great fivefold city standing out on the ocean. Never heard the cries of the black seagulls or watched the gatherings of the Drowned under the waves. But she knew quite a bit about how the gold and spice came up from Lyoneia through it. How the oxen of Pût would float on great flat barges along the coast and be sold at the markets on the shore below the city. Given a week to study the books at the counting house, she would understand the logic of the Suddapal and the forces that drove it better than the native-born. Coins had their own logic, their own structure, and that she knew. So in a sense, she knew everywhere, even if she’d never been.

She traced the western coastline. There was no branch in Princip C’Annaldé. But there was family. Her mother’s people, full-blooded Cinnae. She knew nothing of them except that when they’d been offered the half-breed orphan babe, they’d refused her. The rejection didn’t sting. It would be like a man full-grown missing a toe he’d been born without. It was a fact like the sky’s color and the sea’s rhythm. People of her blood lived here—she tapped the map—and they might as well have burned in Vanai for all it changed.

And north of them, Northcoast. To its west, the Thin Sea and Narinisle. To its east, Asterilhold and Imperial Antea. It was the center of the bank’s web, touching all the trade along the north. Its shadow fell all the way to the warm blue waters of the Inner Sea.

They might trust you once they know you better. The captain had said that, only they never would. The way they might have—they way she’d hoped they would—was through the reports she sent north. If they could have seen how she guided the bank, how the profits and losses balanced, how the contracts grew, they’d know her mind at work. Shackled by her notary, Cithrin was the servant of her servant, and there was no way to break free.

She wished she could send Pyk away. If there was some errand of the bank, something important enough that it had to have someone there, but not so much that it constrained the rest of the operating funds, maybe Pyk would have no choice but to leave things in Cithrin’s hands.

And while she was dreaming, maybe a dragon would come back to life, carry Pyk out to sea, and feed her to a gigantic crab. Why dream small?

The knock at the street door at the bottom of her stairs broke her reverie. She stood, tugging at her dress to pull it back into order. It was the first job of a banker to be able to appear one thing while doing something else. In her case, she would seem to matter.

The knock came again.

“A moment,” she snapped.

She pulled back her hair in the fashion Cary and Master Kit had said would make her seem older and fit pins through the back to hold it in place. She looked at the face paints. She never used much, and what she did was intended to age her. Well, she hadn’t bothered, and if Magistra Cithrin happened to have a day where she looked a bit younger than usual, perhaps she was just feeling good about things. Even in the privacy of her own mind, the wit was acid.

The woman waiting for her wore the livery of the governor. Her pelt was a soft brown, and the pattern of beads woven into it were the green and gold of the city. The copper torc fitted around her neck marked her as a courier.

“Magistra Cithrin bel Sarcour?”

“I am,” Cithrin said.

The woman bowed and presented an envelope of cream-colored paper sealed with wax and bearing the seal of the governor. The gravity with which she presented it was such that it might have been the head of an enemy king. Cithrin plucked it up between two fingers and popped the seal open with her thumb.

To Magistra Cithrin bel Sarcour, voice and agent of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, I, Iderrigo Bellind Siden, Prime Governor of Porte Oliva of Her Royal Highness…

Cithrin skipped down the page, not reading so much as skimming meaning off the top of it like the skin off a soup. A formal dinner in a month’s time to celebrate the city’s formal creation three hundred years before. Of course there had been a city here before that, and before that and before that, back to the time of the dragons. There were ruins in the hills outside the city carved from stone and eroded almost back into it. But three hundred years ago someone had signed a bit of paper, someone had cut her thumb and pressed a bloody mark on the page, and now they were going to slaughter a few pigs, drink some recent wine, and make speeches.

And, of course, she would go. Even though her competitor and once-lover Qahuar Em would be there. Even though the night would bore and chafe. She would go and laugh and talk and behave as if she had power. If she didn’t someone might notice, and the illusion of influence once broken was hard to rebuild.

“Thank you,” Cithrin said. “That will be all.”

The courier bowed and trotted off, her beads clicking against each other. Cithrin considered going back up, maybe putting on the face paint after all, but decided against it. There was the empty form of a meeting at the café she might as well attend. She closed and locked the door.

She could tell a great deal about the state of the city by walking through the streets near the Grand Market. The food sellers on the corners showed what harvests had been good and what disappointing. If crime had been low, there was more horse and ox shit on the street waiting for the guests of Porte Oliva’s magistrates to come and clean it. The number of beggars who’d made their way in from the dragon’s road leading into the city said whether there were caravans expected or if the traffic to the city was all local. It was like a cunning man smelling someone’s breath and knowing the condition of their liver. Cithrin did it automatically, as she had all through her childhood. Only now there would be no Magister Imaniel to go home to and show off her con clusions. It was only a habit.

Pyk wasn’t at the café, which on one hand was a blessing because Cithrin could spend a few hours working on the bank’s business without her. On the other, anything she did here would have to be discussed with the foul woman later. All the faces around the table were familiar. Maestro Asanpur smiled at her and winked his milky eye.

“One moment,” he said, stepping to the back, and she knew he would return in moments with a mug of fresh coffee and a barely sweetened honey roll. She sat at a table in the front looking out over the square and waited. Maestro Asanpur brought her just what she’d known he would, patted her shoulder gently as he did, and made his slow way back inside. Someday, Cithrin thought, he would die and the café would change. It would become something different and unknown. She wondered what it would be like.

She knew the man when he stepped into the square. She had never met him except through the letters of proposal he had left at the bank, but he walked with a sense of purpose. He was thick across the shoulders for a Dartinae and his eyes glowed brighter than most. His tunic was leather and the sigil of a dragon was inked on it. When he came up to her table, she nodded to the chair opposite her own. He sat with the grace of a dancer and leaned forward, his elbow on the table.

“Dar Cinlama, I presume,” Cithrin said.

“Magistra bel Sarcour,” he said, bowing from the neck.

“I’ve read over your proposal. I’m afraid our bank doesn’t have a history of backing expeditions like the one you propose.”

“There is great risk, it’s true. There is also great reward. When Seilia Pellasian found the Temple of the Sun, she came home with gold and jewels enough to last a hundred lives. Sarkik Pellasian didn’t find gold, but the designs in the old library are what everyone uses in siegecraft now. The list is very long, Magistra.”

“And doesn’t include the name of anyone now living,” she said.

“Not yet,” he agreed with a smile. “But who in a generation has taken the chance? The world is sick with history. The dragons were everywhere, you know? It’s only us who hold to the roads. We go where it is convenient. Build where it is convenient. But what’s convenient for us was nothing to the dragons. Their roads were the open sky. Is there a lost treasure in Porte Oliva? No. People have been building on their own outhouses since forever. But in the Dry Wastes? In the north of Birancour where no dragon’s road runs? No one touches these places deeper than a plow will cut. I was a boy in such a place. We would go out to the fields and dig for dragon’s teeth. By the time I left, I had a dozen.”

The lines were compelling and delivered with the ease of long practice. Cithrin shook her head.

“It’s a pretty story,” she said, “and there’s some sense to it, but—”

He leaned forward and placed something on the table before her. The tooth was as long as her hand and curved. The sharp end was rough. Serrated. The base was a tangle of hooks and broad places meant to root the thing in a massive jaw. Cithrin picked it up, surprised by its weight.

“There are hidden things in this world,” he said. “More than you might imagine. And some of them are good for more than decoration.”

Cithrin turned the great tooth over in her hand, her mind lit like a fire. It didn’t show the bite of a chisel she’d expect on sculpted stone or the flat place that a poured cast would leave. It might still be a forgery, but if so, it was a better one than she could catch out. Even if it was a tooth, there were any number of beasts that might have such a thing. She wondered what Pyk’s tusks had looked like before they’d been taken out. For all Cithrin knew, this might have come from nothing more exotic than a particularly large Yemmu.

Or it might be a dragon’s tooth.

“All sorts of things were lost in the fall of dragons,” the Dartinae said. The glow of his eyes was like twin candle flames. When he blinked she could see the blood vessels tracing through his eyelids. “What could rot’s rotted, but there are things that time won’t touch. Give me the coin to hire carts and shovels, and I’ll bring back treasures that humanity forgot. Things we don’t dream of now.”

Yes, she wanted to say. Yes, take it and take me with you. Get me out of this city and let’s make enough money to found a whole new bank and drive Komme Medean and Pyk Usterhall into the streets. Instead, she pushed the tooth back across the table. It was a romance. A dream. Even if Pyk hadn’t been sitting on the strongbox, Cithrin knew the right answer to this was no. It was a desperate man’s game, and that it attracted her said more about her state of mind than the true risks.

Dar Cinlama pursed his lips.

“No, then?”

“No,” she said. “You’ll find someone. You’re very good at telling the tale, and the logic of it’s persuasive if you find someone who wants to be persuaded. I’d try a nobleman with more money than sense. I run a bank. We don’t make our coin on grand gestures and glorious adventure.”

“More’s the pity for you,” he said. “You think it’s a trick, then? That I’m playing a confidence game?”

“No,” she said. “I think you’re sincere. But I also wouldn’t think less of you if you weren’t.”

The man nodded and stood.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “Thank you, Magistra. I’ll be off looking for a nobleman with more money than sense. Preferably one you haven’t cleaned out already.”

There was a little heat in his voice. But there would be. She’d just disappointed him.

“Don’t forget your tooth,” she said.

“Keep it. Remind you of me when you hear what better I’ve found.”

“Thank you, then,” she said and watched him walk away.

She had had her season traveling off the dragon’s roads. Moving through snow and freezing mud, desperate to stay ahead of the Antean army and sitting on the wealth of a whole city. It hadn’t seemed at all exciting at the time, but the farther away the past drew, the more warmly it glowed. She finished her bun and coffee, licked each finger individually to take the last of the glaze off, put the dragon’s tooth in her purse, and started back.

He was right, of course. It wasn’t only treasure hunters. Smugglers knew it too. The dragon’s roads covered a great deal of the continent, but not all. And where it was not, people were scarce. Dragon’s jade ran through forests, but not deep ones. The deep ones were too hard for loggers, because there was no road. Better to find a stand of oaks that had been there for a hundred or two hundred years than go through mud and farmers’ paths until you found the ones that had lived for a thousand. And with them, whatever slept in their roots. The desperate and the dreamers and those with something to hide. They left the jade roads.

She remembered slogging through snow with Master Kit and the players. The Timzinae caravan master and his religious sermons over dinner. The way the tin merchant would always try to start arguments. Cary and Mikel and Hornet and Smit. And Sandr, who’d kissed her and almost more. And Opal. If the snows hadn’t blocked the pass at Bellin, she would never have known them. Not really. The caravan would have gone to Carse as it was meant to, and never left the—

Cithrin’s heart began to beat almost before she knew why. The plan came to her fully formed, as if it had been drawn on the inside of her skull and a curtain pulled back to reveal it already done. Simple and obvious and incontrovertible, the solution to the problem of Pyk Usterhall spread out before her. She stopped in the street to laugh out the relief.

There was no room for the notary in the counting house itself. She’d taken private rooms two streets over between a secondrate bathhouse and a butcher’s stall. Her door was heavy oak with a worked iron knocker in the shape of a dog’s head. If there was some symbolism there, it was lost on Cithrin. Pyk’s voice was muffled and thick, but once it was clear that Cithrin wasn’t a taxman or a thief, the bar scraped and the door creaked open on leather hinges.

“May I come in?”

“Of course, Magistra,” she said, stepping back. The rooms were smaller than her own, but only just. Her desk was, if anything, larger. The account books were open, and a half-written report waited for pen and ink. Cithrin could see the careful marks and numbers of the bank’s private cipher. There was no key. Pyk could read and write directly into the cipher. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“The reports. When will they be ready to go?”

She crossed her arms.

“A week, I think. Not longer than two. Why?”

“I don’t suppose you’d be open to carrying them to the holding company yourself? Spending a little time in North-coast? I could watch things in your absence.”

The sneer took up the better part of her face, as Cithrin had known it would.

“I think not, Magistra. My instructions were quite clear.”

“Well,” she said, holding out a sheet of soft, cream-colored paper, “don’t say I didn’t try to save you.”

Frowning, Pyk took the page and unfolded it. Her eyes scanned it, confusion and distrust growing.

“You’re invited to a feast?” she said.

“I am,” Cithrin said, “but you will have to attend in my place. I’ll be taking the reports to Carse.”