"What," Clara said. The exhaustion in her voice weighted the word so heavily that it was all she could manage. "What?"

Jorey looked to his brother, then down. When he spoke, his jaw was set forward. It was something Dawson had done too. Clara wondered whether it was the boy imitating the man, or if there was something in the blood that would have made Kalliam men do that even if they'd never met.

"Sabiha arranged a garden party," Jorey said. "A half dozen of her old friends. Some that had stayed by her even through the... last scandal. They all sent regrets."

"And he's blaming me," Barriath said. "I wasn't rude. I didn't track these girls down and tell them to turn their backs on Sabiha."

"You didn't need to," Jorey said. "Everyone knows we're here."

"We're not," Barriath said. "You are, but I'm elsewhere. I'm sorry, Mother."

She wanted to ask where he was going. How she would reach him. All the thousand questions that would have let her keep some semblance of family together. But she was too tired, her mind too scattered. He brushed past her as he walked out the door, and she felt like the motion of his passing could have knocked her over. Jorey hadn't moved. His face was pale and pained. Sabiha had appeared at his elbow.

"Mother, this isn't going to work."

"It will," she said. "It's only hard now, but it will work. Barriath is in mourning. We all are. You have to treat him gently."

"That's not what I mean," he said. "You said that you wanted me to be to Sabiha what Father was to you."

"That's right. I want that."

"Father put you ahead of everyone. Everything. If you'd asked him to, he would have done anything. There was no limit."

"That's true, I think," she said, but Jorey was shaking his head. Tears flowed down his cheeks the way they hadn't since he was a child. Not even on the terrible day when Geder had killed her husband.

"I can't do this," he said, and then again, more softly. "I can't."

"I will," Sabiha said, and put a hand on Clara's shoulder. "Please. Come sit with me for a moment, my lady."

Clara let herself be led to a window seat. Sabiha sat beside her, holding her hand. The girl looked thinner. And not just in her face and body. For a time just after the wedding, there had been joy in her. A hopefulness born of seeing the changes that her new reputation brought. That was gone now, and Clara knew why. She knew, almost, what Sabiha was steeling herself to say. The words that had defeated Jorey.

"We love you," Sabiha said, "and we will always be your family, but you need to leave this house."

It was strange. Clara actually felt the words cut into her. It was a physical sensation at the neck and heart.

"Oh," she said.

"It's hard enough for Jorey alone," Sabiha said, her fingers pressing Clara's hand. "But everyone saw him when he renounced Lord Kalliam. They're willing to give him a chance. Well, some of them are. But you didn't speak. Bar riath didn't. And truly, even if you had, my lady, no one can see you without seeing your husband too. You were too much the same thing, and even with him gone, you carry him with. You see that, don't you? You understand?"

"I do," Clara said. "I feel him myself."

"Until the court forgets, at least a little, having you with us taints us more than it protects you."

"I will go," Clara said. "If there's room at the holding, I can... exile myself, I suppose."

"We were thinking that we could pay for a boarding house," Sabiha said. "Something that wasn't in my father's name. Something to give us a little distance in the eyes of the court."

Not even that much? Clara wanted to say. Can't you give me that one small thing? Must it be an anonymous grave of a room, in among people she'd never known?

"I can see why that would be wise," she said. "I'll gather my things."

"No, please," Sabiha said. "I'll have them brought. You shouldn't have to."

"None of us should have to," Clara said, patting the girl's shoulder. "But we live in a world of necessities. Don't bother yourself. I understand. I should go now."

"No, please," Sabiha said. "We'll have someone go with you to find the right place. And we'll bear the price of it."

Clara's smile almost felt real. She took her hands out from the girl's grasp and stood. She kissed Sabiha and Jorey both, each of them on the forehead, and took herself back out. There was no staying now. No sitting in the kitchen and discussing what sort of boarding house might be right for the widow of a famed traitor and enemy of the throne.

By renouncing Dawson, they were supposed to have gained something. Protected it. Kept it. And perhaps they had. Perhaps if Jorey hadn't said what he'd said, Clara would have even less than she did now. But she could hardly imagine it. She felt like the queen of nothing.

She walked without knowing where she was walking to. Her feet ached terribly, but she ignored the pain. Once, she'd ridden through the city as the small people in the street made way for her, and she'd thought nothing of it. Now she found that she was moving aside to let carts of meat or turnips pass. She was avoiding the eyes of the men and women she passed.

When the great arcing span of the Autumn Bridge rose up before her, she began across it, but at the midway point, she stopped. It wasn't even that she intended to, it was only there that she was when her resolve finally broke. Leaning against the great beams and looking down over the abyss of the Division, she felt something like peace come over her. Not peace, not really, but something like it. The world looked almost beautiful at this distance. The Kingspire. The walls of the city. The clouds scudding quickly overhead, caught in some unthinkably high wind that she herself could not feel.

She considered how little it would take to step over the edge. Not that she intended to. Self-slaughter was too easy, in its way. But it did have its appeal. She'd never been religious, but neither had she refused the priestly stories of life and justice on the farther side of death. Perhaps Dawson was there waiting for her.

But not yet. Vicarian's position wasn't assured, even now. And Barriath... poor Barriath, turned out of the house by his own brother. He needed her still. And Jorey would. Even Sabiha might. And how terrible would it be for the girl to have sent her husband's mother out, only to have her leap off a bridge. The poor thing would never recover.

No. Another day, she would. Later, when all her children were taken care of and no one would feel responsible for a decision that was utterly her own. Then she could come, dressed perhaps in bridal array, and take one last brief dance with Dawson. She was weeping now. She didn't know how long she had been. Days. Weeks. All her life, it seemed. All those years of content had been an illusion. A thin line that she had walked over an abyss. Without a home to go to, without a friend to rely on, she was reduced to the aspect of a madwoman wailing on the bridge, and she found the role fit well enough.

"My lady," a man's voice said, like warm flannel on a cold night. "No."

She turned, surprised. Some part of her that still cared about such things reached to straighten her hair and tug her dress into its best drape. The rest of her, the vast majority, collapsed in a hilarity of relief and embarrassment and an amused kind of dread that was much more pleasant than the sincere one she'd been inhabiting.

"Coe," she said, laughing and crying. "Oh, not this too."

He put a hand on her shoulder. His expression was so sincere. So open and concerned and young.

"This isn't the way, my lady. Come with me."

"I wasn't going to jump. I wasn't. I mean not now, not with so much to do. There's the boys, you see. And my daughter, my new one, you won't have met her. She's a dear child, but troubled. Troubled. And to go now, to leave now with everything in such a state." She had trouble with the words because the sobbing was so hard now that there was very little room for them. "I couldn't leave it all like this, so broken and so empty. Oh God. What have we done? How? How did I come to this?"

Somewhere in the middle of it all, he'd lifted her up, taken her in his arms like she was a child.

"You can't do this," she said. "I don't love you. I don't know you. I can't ever be what you want me to be. I'm married. I mean..."

"You don't have to speak, my lady."

"I'm poisoned," she said. "Everyone I know is tainted by me. My sons. Even my sons. They'll look at you and they'll see me. And if they see me, they'll see him, and they'll do to you what they did to him. I can't stop it. I can't even slow it down."

"I'm no one, my lady. I have nothing to lose."

"And I'm getting your shirt all wet. This isn't wise. You should go. You should go."

"I won't," he said.

She was silent for a long time. His arms weren't even trembling. She felt he could carry her forever if he chose to. He smelled like dogs and trees and young man. She laid her head against his shoulder and heaved a sigh. When she spoke again, the hysteria was gone.

"I'm not some fucking little girl who needs rescuing," she said.

"No, my lady," he said, but she could hear the amusement in his voice. She sniffed. Her nose was running. The streets around them were close and dark. Three men couldn't walk abreast through them. The poorest quarters of Camnipol closed around her like a blanket. Vincen Coe carried her through the shadows and the light.

"Shit," she said, and clung to him.

T.

he rooming house was terrible. It stank of old cabbage, and the walls were stained green and black in drips that had dried solid years before. There was a wardrobe with a missing door and nothing inside, and the dirty little window no wider than her hand let in only enough light to condemn the surroundings. The bed was small and stained, but it had a mattress. He put her down on it, and she curled up. It smelled rank, but it was soft and her body curled against it with the weight of exhaustion.

He brought her a wineskin filled with water and a wool blanket that smelled more of him than of the room.

"There's no common room here," he said. "But there's a fire to sit near in the kitchen. The man across from you shouts sometimes, but he's harmless. If you need me, I won't be out of earshot."

She nodded.

"My family doesn't know where I am," she said.

"Should we send word, my lady?"

"No," she said. "Not yet."

"As you see fit."

He leaned close and kissed her once gently on the temple. He hesitated for a moment the way she would have if she'd been a man and she'd wanted to kiss a woman's mouth. She shifted her eyes to his, and he stood.

"I'm old enough to be your mother," she said.

"My mother's considerably older than you, my lady," he said.

"Why are you doing all this?"

"Because you've let me," he said. "Sleep now. We'll talk later."

The door closed behind him, and Clara lay in the dim and stinking gloom.

"Well," she said to no one, and didn't finish the thought.

Geder.

L.

ord Palliako, the letter said, I am very sorry to have been called away on such short notice, but word has come from the holding company that requires my immediate presence. Thank you very much for the offer of your hospitality and your company during my time in Camnipol. It has been a singular experience, and one I will recall fondly. The challenges of governing a nation as great as your own must take precedence over matters like small personal correspondence, but I will be paying close attention to the news from Antea.

The chop was Cithrin bel Sarcour.

He'd read the words a thousand times already, and he expected he'd read them a thousand more. He could hear her voice as if the paper itself had soaked it in. The softness in her throat. The slight melancholy in her inflection of fondly. He had read love notes before, but usually in the form of poetry or song. To cast it as business correspondence was both odd and exactly what he would have expected of a banker.

He'd been worried after the execution of Dawson, that he'd offended her, either in the way the execution had taken place or from the way he'd reacted after. He'd often heard that killing a man was an upsetting thing, especially the first time, but he'd nearly been sick in front of the whole court. It hadn't been in keeping with his dignity, but he'd do better next time. And anyway, she seemed to have forgiven him if there was anything to be forgiven.

As he reached the door, he tucked the letter in his pocket. The voices of men so rough and grating by comparison to the woman he'd conjured leaked through the door. Geder motioned to his personal guard that they should wait for him to precede them, then pushed his way through into the meeting room. Basrahip followed on his heels and before the guard. That wasn't a matter of etiquette so much as the habit that they had all formed.

Maps littered the table, four and five layers thick in places. Canl Daskellin and Fallon Broot stood over the mess, scowling and angry-looking.

"Gentlemen," Geder said. "I take it we've made no particular headway."

"Asterilhold, in practice," Daskellin said, "is posing several problems we hadn't anticipated."

"You're damn near out of noble families," Broot said. "There were only about forty to start, and that's counting the eastern Bannien group as their own that just happen to have the same name. The ones we lost in Kalliam's rebellion, that's down to thirty-four, thirty-five."

"Broot wants to redraw the map of Antea while we're about it."

"Doesn't make sense for a man to have two holdings on different sides of the river. How are you to oversee them both? Spend half the winter one place? Only see a holding every second year? It's just sense to expand the existing baronies."

"These aren't just dots on a map, Broot. These are places. My family has lived on its holding for ten generations. My grandfathers are all buried there. It's not as if we can switch that to some field in the middle of Asterilhold and call it the same."

Geder raised his eyebrows. This wasn't the part of being regent he was best at, but they were right. It would need to be addressed.

"And there's the problem of the cities," Broot said, pointing an accusing finger toward the blotches of Kaltfel and Asinport. "We can't make them part of a barony and check in on them once a year. We could try it, but they'll revolt by spring and we'll be right back where we were when the whole damned thing started."

"There will be no revolt," Basrahip said.

"Easy for you to say, Minister," Broot said. "All respect, but you've never run a city. They're worse than children."

"They have the temple of the goddess within them," Basrahip said. "The Righteous Servant will keep them true."

Daskellin and Broot shared a glance. Daskellin looked away first.

"We did just have war in the streets for the best part of the summer," Daskellin said.

"Yes," Basrahip said, his smile broad. "The city was tested and purified, and note, Prince Daskellin, that we are here, and the enemy is slain."

"Speaking of slaying enemies," Broot said. "There is a third option, but it does mean abandoning the wholesale slaughter of the noble classes of Asterilhold."

"And means less reward for the people who stayed with the crown," Daskellin said.

"It's not a reward if you can't manage it, Canl. If you would stop thinking with your purse and see sense, you'd know that."

"Stop!" Geder shouted, and the two men went silent and abashed. "There's a third option. What is it?"

One of the maps slid to the floor, pooling in great loops and folds. Broot tugged on his mustache.

T H E K I N G ' S B L O O D 455 "We could keep Asterilhold under its own rule. Take men from their best stock, let 'em swear fealty to the Severed Throne. Not all that many. Just five or six to... well, to replace the ones we lost. As it were. Even if they weren't on our side before, it doesn't take a wise man to see where the power is now."