Daniel Abraham - The Dragon's Path

Cunning men, then. Dawson made a note.

“Do you think the blow will come before the games commence?” Daskellin asked as if wondering aloud about the chance of rain.

“There doesn’t have to be a blow, does there?” Odderd asked.

“More likely during,” Dawson said. “But anything’s possible.”

“Reconsider Paerin Clark’s offer,” Daskellin said.

“I will not,” Dawson said.

“We have to. Or aren’t you seeing the same display I am? If we’re standing against this, we need allies. And, frankly, gold. Do you have a way to get them? Because as it happens, I do. ”

A troop of swordsmen marched past. Fifty of them, all in the bright-burnished armor of Elassae, and evenly divided between black-scaled Timzinae and wide-eyed Southling. Cockroaches and night-cats. Races created in slavery to serve their dragon masters, marching into the center of Firstblood power.

“If we can’t win as Anteans, we deserve to lose,” Dawson said.

The shocked silence behind him meant he’d gone too far. He noted the swordsmen.

“I began this because I believed you were right, old friend,” Daskellin said. “I didn’t say I’d crawl into your grave.”

“Something—” Odderd began, but Dawson ignored him.

“If we win this by putting ourselves out to bid, we’re no better than Maas or Issandrian or Klin. So yes, Canl, I will go to my grave for Antea. And with one loyalty. Not so many hundredths to the throne and so many on a green table in Northcoast.”

Daskellin’s face went still as coal.

“You’re talking out of fear,” he said, “and so I’ll excuse—”

“Both of you, shut up!” Odderd snapped. “Something’s happening.”

Dawson followed the man’s gaze. On the royal platform, an older woman in the colors of the Kingspire bent her knee before King Simeon. A youth was at her side, leather-armored and still dusty from the road. Prince Aster was looking at his father, the parade forgotten. King Simeon’s mouth moved, and even at distance, Dawson recognized shock in his expression.

“Who’s the boy?” Canl Daskellin said, almost to himself. “Who brought him news?”

Footsteps came from the wooden stairs behind them, and Vincen Coe appeared. The huntsman bowed to the two other men, but his eyes were on Dawson.

“Your lady wife sent me, lord. You’re needed at home.”

“What’s happened?” Dawson said.

“Your son’s returned,” Coe said. “There’s news from Vanai.”

He what ?” Dawson said.

“He burned it,” Jorey said, leaning forward on the bench and scratching a dog between its ears. “Poured oil in the streets, closed the gates, and burned it down.”

The year that had passed since Dawson had seen his youngest son had changed the boy. Sitting in the sunroom, Jorey looked more than a year older. His cheekbones had the thin look that came with time on campaign, and the smile that had always lurked just behind whatever expression he wore was gone. Exhaustion pulled at the boy’s shoulders, and he smelled of horse sweat and unwashed soldier. It struck Dawson like a detail from a dream that Jorey and Coe could have passed for cousins. Dawson rose and the floor tilted oddly beneath him. He walked to the windows and looked out at the gardens. Snow still haunted the shadows, and the first press of green was softening the bark of the trees. At the back, cherry trees bloomed white and pink.

Geder Palliako burned Vanai.

“He didn’t even have us loot it,” Jorey said. “There wasn’t time, really. He sent out a courier the day before. I’ve killed horses trying to beat him here.”

“You nearly did,” Dawson heard himself say.

“Does he know that you were the one who put Geder in place?”

It took Dawson almost a breath to understand the question, and by then his mind was on to questions of its own.

“Why did Palliako do it?” Dawson said. “Was he trying to undermine me?”

Jorey was silent for a long moment, looking into the dumb, bright eyes of the dog before him as if they were in some private conversation. When at last he spoke, his words were tentative.

“I don’t think so,” Jorey said. “Things were going poorly. He made some bad decisions, and they were bearing fruit. He knew that no one took him seriously.”

“He put one of the Free Cities to the torch because he was embarrassed?”

“Humiliated,” Jorey said. “Because he was humiliated. And because it’s different when it isn’t before you.”

One of the dogs groaned long and soft. A bluebird fluttered onto a branch, peered in at the two men, and flew off again. Dawson put his fingers to the cold pane of the sunroom’s glass, the heat of his flesh fogging the glass. His mind darted one way and then another. The stream of show fighters and mercenaries coming to Camnipol, paid by Issandrian with coin borrowed from Asterilhold. The bland, implacable expression of Paerin Clark, banker of Northcoast. Canl Daskellin’s anger. And now, the burned city.

Too many things were moving, all in different directions.

“This changes everything,” he said.

“He was different afterward,” Jorey said as if his father hadn’t spoken. “He was always apart from the rest of us, but before it was that he was a buffoon. Everyone laughed at him. They mocked him to his face, and more than half the time he didn’t even notice it. But after, no one laughed anymore. Not even him.”

The boy’s eyes were toward the window, but he was seeing something else. Something distant, but more real the than the room, the glass, the spring trees in the garden. There was pain in that emptiness, and it was one he recognized. Dawson put aside the chaos. His son needed him, and so however much it howled for his attention, the world would wait.

Dawson sat. Jorey looked at him, and then away.

“Tell me,” Dawson said.

Jorey smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. He shook his head.

“I’ve been to war,” Dawson said. “I’ve seen men die. What you’re carrying now, I’ve carried as well, and it will haunt you as long as you hold it. So tell me.”

“You didn’t do what we’ve done, Father.”

“I’ve killed men.”

“We killed children, ” Jorey said. “We killed women. Old men who had nothing more to do with the campaign than to live in Vanai. And we killed them. We took away the water and lit them on fire. When they tried to come over the walls, we cut them down.”

His voice was trembling now, his eyes horror-wide but tearless.

“We did an evil thing, Father.”

“What did you think war is?” Dawson said. “We’re men, Jorey. Not boys swinging sticks at each other and pronouncing the evil wizard’s defeat. We do what duty and honor demand, and often what we do is terrible. I was hardly older than you are now for the siege of Anninfort. We starved them. It wasn’t fire, but it was a slow, painful death for thousands. And the weak die first. Children. Old men. The plague in the city? We put it there. Lord Ergillian sent riders out to find the sick from all around the countryside, and who we found, we named emissary and sent into the city. They were killed, but not before the illness spread. Every day, women came to the gates with babies in their arms, begging us to take their children from them. Usually we ignored them. Sometimes we took the babes and killed them there, just out of their mother’s reach.”

Jorey’s face had gone pale. Dawson leaned forward, his hand on the boy’s knee as he had since the child had been old enough to sit. Dawson felt a moment’s sorrow that that thin-limbed boy was gone, and this moment—this conversation so like one he had had with his own father once—was part of that child’s passage out of the world. The child had to go and make way for the man. It gave meaning to the loss, and made it bearable. That was the most Dawson could offer.