His real friends were with him at last, and he hadn’t even known how much he’d missed them until they appeared.
Marcus Wester, dressed in the bright tunic of a servant, walked across the kingdom, stepping carefully over the dragon’s road between Kavinpol and Camnipol, then looking to the south and the markers of Jorey Kalliam and Canl Daskellin and the approaching Timzinae army. The man’s expression was a strange combination of amusement and despair. Geder found himself trying to imitate it. The Tralgu—Yardem Hane—stood with his feet in the blue glass beads of the northern sea, his arms crossed before him. The news of Kavinpol’s fall hung in the air between them like smoke.
“That’s going to make things harder,” Wester said, then turned to Geder. “We’re sure about the numbers?”
“No,” Geder said. “We aren’t sure about anything. But it’s what Daskellin wrote, and I don’t have a better source.”
Wester grunted. “All right. The next question’s whether Karol Dannien’s going to turn east to join them or keep pressing north.”
“North,” Yardem said.
“That’s what I figure too.”
“Is that bad?” Geder asked.
“It’s different, anyway,” Wester said. “We’re hard-pressed for good in any of this. We’ve slowed him to a crawl, but that was with support coming from the east. With that cut, Kalliam and Daskellin… well, I don’t see a way to keep Dannien in the field. Better to have them pull back to the city. The road up the cliff on the south’s a nightmare. We could hold it with two legless men and a slingshot. The question’s whether we want the siege to come in from the east or the west. He’ll go to one of them.”
“There are still priests coming in from the Keshet,” Geder said. “All of them from Asterilhold are here already.”
“And Birancour?”
“Soon,” Geder said, hoping it was true.
“Better to have Karol dancing out west of the city, then. So draw Jorey and Daskellin here”—he pointed to a hill to the east of Camnipol, where the landscape of Antea grew rough—“and here.” A small lake halfway between Kavinpol and the city.
“But the traditional families…”
“They won’t set foot out of Kavinpol,” Marcus said. “They’ve taken themselves a city, and they know better than to push on past their strength.”
He spoke the words with a bland matter-of-factness, but Geder felt the sting of them anyway. They would know better how to fight a war than he had. Well, that was fair, after all. They didn’t have Basrahip pouring poison in their ears. It wasn’t his fault the spiders had tried to ruin everything.
“I’ll send out the orders,” Geder said. “Anything else I should tell them?”
“No,” Marcus said. And then, “There hasn’t been any word from Magistra Isadau, has there?”
“There hasn’t,” Geder said.
“All right, then no. Just have them set up where I showed you and we’ll see what comes next.”
Geder made his way out first. So far as the court was concerned, he was planning out the rest of the war by himself. With Mecelli lost in his own despair and Daskellin in the field, the only one of his advisors left was Emming. And he’d been happy enough to leave Geder to himself.
He walked out to the gardens and the private house where King Simeon had spent his last days. Geder understood the sense of keeping rooms outside the Kingspire. Walking up numberless stairs for the pleasure of looking down over city and empire could get wearisome, especially for a man in failing health. He’d have been tempted to use the house himself just for the convenience of it, except that he’d been thinking of Basrahip’s comfort. Holding the royal apartments where he had given the big priest a way to come only halfway down from his temple. Geder didn’t care a wet slap about that anymore. Let the huge cow of a man puff his way up and down a dozen flights of stairs and have his priests haul him the rest of the way on a rope. It didn’t matter to Geder.
But the other reason not to was Aster. These wooden walls with their carved shutters, this fountain with its verdigris-taken statue of what was supposed to be a dragon, were the place Aster’s father had belonged. Better, Geder had thought, to leave it behind. Sitting with the sorrow would only make the boy sad.
And so, when Geder walked in and found Aster sitting beside the little fountain, it surprised him.
The prince wore a dark leather cloak, full cut in the style that Geder had started years ago, with a green sash that had only come into fashion this season. His hair was slicked back and dark with the water, and his face was terribly still. When Geder cleared his throat, announcing that Aster wasn’t alone any longer, the prince stiffened.
“Didn’t think to see you here,” Geder said.
“I can go if you want,” Aster said, and the raw hurt in the words felt like a slap. Geder paused.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” Aster said. “Everything’s fine.”
The water chuckled and murmured to itself as he came nearer. He more than half expected Aster to rise up and storm away, but he didn’t. The prince only kept his gaze fixed on the water and scowled. It was an expression Geder knew well, though from the other side of it. He’d worn it enough himself.
“Is it something I did?” he asked, gently. “If it is, I’ll apologize. If it’s someone else… I don’t know. Maybe we could think of some way to make me useful?”
“It’s not you. It’s not anyone,” Aster said. And then, a moment later and softly, “It’s me.”
“Feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?” Geder said, his words pressing gently to see where the hurt was and trying not to make it worse. “You don’t have to say if you don’t want to. But if you do want—”
“Then what?” Aster shouted. “You’ll take time out of your busy schedule to nursemaid me? Put a rag in some warm milk so I can suck on it? Why would you suddenly start caring about me?” The pain in the boy’s voice was like violence.
“I’ve been thinner on the ground than I should be,” Geder said. “That’s truth. I’m sorry for it.”
“Why be sorry? You’re busy doing all the things that I should be. If I could. Trying to keep everything from falling apart because I can’t. And all the armies and the dead men and…”
When Geder took the boy’s hand, Aster tried to pull away. He wouldn’t let him. By main force, he pulled Aster close, wrapped his arms around the boy’s shoulders, and held him. Aster struggled for a moment, trying to break free, and then the sobbing came in earnest and he held tight to Geder instead.
He’d been a fool to forget Aster. All the effort that Geder had put into avoiding Basrahip and the other false priests had also kept him away from the boy, and that was a cruelty he hadn’t intended. He thought of all the confusion and pain he’d suffered before Cithrin came. The sense of wrongness that had filled the world and his heart and everything in between. Of course Aster felt the same things, only more so because he was young and fatherless and doomed to spend a lifetime on the throne that Geder had the chance to walk away from. In Geder’s mind, Aster was still a child, and what you didn’t point out to him he wouldn’t know. Likely he’d been wrong about that last part even when the first had been true.