Daniel Abraham - The King's Blood

Barriath and Jorey were in the greatest danger, and so she concentrated her work there, doggedly calling on everyone she knew, everyone she could think of who might still accept her socially. Anyone to whom she had once been known. She used all those past moments of grace and unnecessary kindness as a tool now. And like any untested tool, sometimes it would work as she hoped. Other times it would fail under strain. She might never know which was which. Nor did it matter, so long as her children were safe.

She stopped at the beginning of evening meals when she could no longer politely intrude uninvited and found a small baker’s shop that sold yesterday’s rolls with sausages and black mustard and beer. She reached for her pipe again and put it away cursing under her breath. She would have to find a way to afford a bit of tobacco. And for that matter, a bit of food. And whatever shelter she could manage after Lord Skestinin’s hospitality came to its inevitable end. One didn’t take in the wife of a traitor indefinitely. If Barriath became commander of the fleet or Jorey won a war in the field, she might remake herself as the mother of a respectable man. But for the future that she could imagine, she was doomed to be her husband’s wife.

For a few minutes, sitting at the little stall with its splintering wooden tables and unsteady chairs, she let herself stop smiling. She was lost now, and emptied in a way she hadn’t ever imagined she would be. Her marriage, her family, the small and peaceable intrigues of the court, and Dawson with his archaic love of duty and his blindness to the inconsistencies of his application of it. Those had been her life since she’d left her own mother’s house. She hadn’t built that life, but rather grown in it.

Now she felt like a flower plant that had been dug up gently and washed in water. She wasn’t injured precisely, but her pale roots were all exposed. If she couldn’t find soil, that would be enough to kill her. She knew it like she knew the sun would rise and the autumn would come.

And the center of it all was the powerful absence of Dawson Kalliam. The man who had loved her better than he had understood her. The constant in her life. She could still remember what he had looked like the first night she’d kissed him. The way he’d hidden his fear behind chivalry and she’d wrapped hers in modesty until she was more than half certain neither of them would do anything, and they would sit in that garden, aching for each other until the earth itself grew old. He’d been young and handsome. The best friend of Prince Simeon. And who had she been? The girl that his father had chosen for him. The marriage arranged before either of them had had the chance to refuse it.

She wondered if there might have been something that she could have done that would have changed his course. She wanted there to have been something. If all this disaster was her fault, at least she would have had some control. But it was a fantasy. There was no dinner party or distracting conversation that would have reconciled Dawson to being ruled by Geder Palliako’s priests. Stones would fly like birds first.

It had been inescapable. And even if there had been something, it was gone now. She sighed and took a bite of the sausage. Too much gristle and oregano, but otherwise perfectly acceptable, and the black mustard hid an abundance of sins. She wept quietly while she finished her little meal and beer, then gathered herself, regained her smile, and returned to the world. She was heartbroken, and she would be for a very long time, but she needn’t be ineffective.

She came back to Lord Skestinin’s house near nightfall. Her feet ached and her back. The hem of her dress was filthy from walking in the common street with the dogs and horses. The smell of animal shit seemed a part of the life of the city she might have to get used to. She bore worse. It was nothing.

As she came into the house, she heard Barriath’s voice raised in anger and Jorey’s responding in kind. Her lips pressed thin, and she followed the sounds of fighting through the dim hallways and into the dining room lit by cheap tallow candles and decorated for a family that didn’t live there.

“He’s my wife’s father,” Jorey said.

“And I’m your brother,” Barriath roared, his face red to the edge of purple. “When did that stop mattering? Next you’ll be cozying up to that son of a whore in the Kingspire, asking him if he’ll give you room and a scrap of meat.”

Sabiha stood in the doorway at the far side of the room, her knuckles white around a bit of lace handkerchief. Her expression told Clara how much damage Barriath had already done.

“Good God,” Clara said, stepping into the room confidently as a bear tamer walking into the pit, “I’d think you were children again and someone had taken your best toys. What is this about?”

“You’re taking shelter with Skestinin,” Barriath said, turning his wrath on her. “I won’t have it. He took my position with the fleet. I served him for years, and as soon as there’s a bit of trouble, I’m overboard like old fish.”

“There are certain realities—”

“I’m the eldest man in this family. That makes me responsible for our name,” Barriath said. “And I won’t have my dignity compromised by this.”

Clara didn’t know what change of expression came to her face, but she saw Jorey’s eyes go wide and Barriath’s blood-thickened face grow apprehensive. A faint smile touched Sabiha’s lips. Clara met her firstborn son’s eyes. One day, he would have been Baron of Osterling Fells, she thought. His future had gone away without warning or reason, and grief made people mad. They did things they would never have otherwise done.

She began to speak, paused, and began again.

“My husband,” she said, softly and with terrible precision, “is not dead. You are my son. Jorey is my son. Sabiha is my daughter. Lord Skestinin is your family, and it would be best for all of us if he found that burden light.”

Barriath scowled, but he looked away. The bear tamed, for the time being.

“Jorey’s going to renounce Father,” Barriath said. He sounded peevish.

“I know he is, dear,” Clara said, sitting down at the table with a sigh. “So are you.”

Under Clara’s eye, Lord Skestinin’s house kept its uneasy peace for the night. Barriath sulked and pouted the way he had since the day he’d drawn breath. Jorey brooded more subtly, and with greater consideration for those around him. Clara sat by an unfamiliar window that looked out on a garden not her own, knotting lace because her needlework was lost to the Lord Regent’s justice. Just before bed, Sabiha found her, a small leather sack of pipe tobacco in her hand. Clara had kissed the girl’s cheek, but they hadn’t said anything. Some nights, Clara decided, were too delicate to risk with words.

In the morning, the news came that Lord Geder Palliako was prepared to announce his judgment on the traitor Dawson Kalliam.

If Cithrin had known when she went to the tailor that she would be dressing for an execution, she might have made different choices. In Vanai, the gaol had been open, and those waiting to see the magistrate could be seen and mocked, but the justice of the prince was done in private, the bodies of the condemned buried if they had families to watch over them and bear the cost or left on the hills outside the city if not.

Porte Oliva was just the reverse. Waiting to be judged was a private matter, but once the sentence was passed, or the enforcement fees paid, the punishment was open for anyone walking by to see. The idea of holding a ceremony with all the highest levels of the court in attendance in order to carry out a slaughter that everyone knew was coming seemed perverse, and her limited wardrobe didn’t support it.