The Carrion Throne: Court of Knives

The gates of King's Rest groaned open at dawn, their iron teeth black against a sky the color of old bruises. Sera Vant pressed her shoulder blades against the cold stone of the outer wall, watching the spires of the inner city rise beyond the murder-holes like the fingers of a buried god reaching for light. The smell hit her first: woodsmoke and tallow and something sweeter underneath, the cloying rot of a city built atop the bones of another. They called it the Conquered Quarter, the district where the old kingdom had been swallowed brick by brick. Nobody walked there after dusk. Nobody sane walked there at any hour.

"Runner." The guard's voice was bored, professional. "Papers."

She fished the folded square from her belt and held it out without meeting his eyes. City writ. Permission to pass for the procurement of goods on behalf of a merchant house. It was a lie built on a lie, but the seal was real enough. The House of Mareth did not care what its sigil was used for, so long as it stayed unaware.

The guard inspected it, grunted, and waved her through. Sera slipped past the checkpoint with the silence of long practice, her boots finding the worn grooves in the cobbles where a thousand other runners had walked before her. The street beyond was wider than she expected, lined with awnings of faded green and the sigils of minor houses stitched into the canvas. Vendors were setting out their wares: salted fish, iron nails, small carved saints with painted eyes.

She did not look at the saints.

The first man stepped out of a doorway as she passed the chandler's stall. He wore the plain dark coat of the Regent Council's messengers, a single silver quill pinned at his throat. He did not speak. He simply fell into step at her left shoulder, close as a lover, and there he stayed.

The second came from the fruit market, a woman in the grey robes of the Faith, a censer at her belt that trailed a thread of pale smoke. She did not fall into step. She simply walked, half a pace ahead, her sandaled feet soundless on the stone.

Sera felt the space between her shoulder blades narrow to a needle's width. Two factions, one runner, and not a single soul on this street who did not know what she was.

She kept walking.

The Mareth quarter opened before her like a wound stitched shut in gold. The streets here were swept clean, the fountains running with water that tasted of nothing, the very air scrubbed of the Conquered Quarter's rot. Sera had seen wealth before. She had stolen from wealth before. But the Regent Council had a way of making opulence look like a weapon, all those clean lines and gleaming surfaces hiding the knife behind the smile.

The runner in the dark coat cleared his throat. "Lady Yvenne will receive you in the Lesser Hall."

The woman in grey did not turn her head. "High Septon Tallis has asked that you attend him in the Chapel of Veils."

Both voices, the same instant, the same tone of courteous command. Sera's mouth twitched. She had not been in the capital twelve hours and already she was a bone with two dogs snarling over it.

"Gentlefolk," she said, keeping her voice light, "I only arrived this morning. Surely a lady of the Council and a servant of the Seven Veils both have better things to do than chase a runner from the docks."

The dark-coated man smiled without warmth. "Lady Yvenne does not consider it a chase."

The grey woman inclined her head, a gesture as smooth as oil on water. "The Septon does not consider it pursuit."

Sera stopped walking. The fountain at the corner sprayed a fine mist into the air, cold against her cheek. Somewhere in the distance a bell tolled the hour, a low brass note that rolled across the rooftops and faded into the noise of the market.

She looked from one to the other. The dark coat. The grey robe. The silver quill. The smoking censer. The whole city was a stage set for people far above her reach, and here she stood in the wings with a scrap of borrowed paper in her belt and the name of her missing brother on her tongue like a coin she could not spend.

"Which of you is going to cut my throat first?" she asked.

The dark-coated man's smile thinned. "That would rather depend on which hallway you walk down, wouldn't it?"

The grey woman's smoke curled upward, indifferent. "The Septon says the Seven Veils do not concern themselves with such matters."

"Then perhaps," Sera said, "the Septon should keep his opinions to himself."

She turned on her heel before either could answer and walked toward the great doors of the Mareth manse, her hands loose at her sides where they could not be mistaken for weapons. The doors were bronze and taller than any door had a right to be, carved with the rearing hounds of House Mareth, their eyes set with chips of polished jet. Two men-at-arms in the house livery flanked the entrance, halberds upright, faces arranged in the perfect blankness of well-trained servants.

She did not slow. She reached the threshold, and the dark-coated runner reached it beside her, and the grey-robed woman arrived at the same moment from the other side, and for one ridiculous heartbeat all three of them stood in the doorway like actors frozen at the curtain.

"Mistress Vant." The man-at-arms on the left bowed, stiff as a board. "Lady Yvenne is in the Lesser Hall."

"Mistress Vant." The man-at-arms on the right bowed in mirror image. "High Septon Tallis is in the Chapel of Veils."

Sera stared at the doors. Behind the bronze, the manse breathed wealth, the smell of beeswax and roasted meats and something floral she could not name. Somewhere deeper, past the receiving rooms and the gallery of portraits, the Regent Council sat in its great chair and counted the cost of keeping a kingdom whole.

And somewhere else, past the cloisters and the gardens and the ringing of the temple bells, the High Septon watched the smoke and read what he wished to read.

She had come to King's Rest with a name and a question and the dull certainty that one of them would kill her before the other answered. She had not expected the killing to come with such good manners.

"Which of you," she said quietly, to no one in particular, "is going to tell me why I'm here?"

The dark-coated man tilted his head. "Lady Yvenne will explain."

The grey woman spoke to the smoke. "The Septon will clarify."

"And if I refuse both?"

The dark coat produced, from somewhere inside his plain coat, a square of vellum sealed in green wax. He held it out between two fingers. Sera took it. The wax bore the imprint of a hound's head.

The grey woman produced her own vellum, sealed in white. She held it out the same way. Sera took that too. The wax bore a seven-pointed star.

"Open the green one first," the dark coat advised.

"Open the white one first," the grey woman said.

Sera looked down at the two squares of vellum in her hands. One green, one white. The weight of them was negligible. The weight of what they meant pressed down on her chest until she thought her ribs would fold.

She tucked them both into her belt beside the city writ. The dark coat watched her do it with the expression of a man who had expected exactly that.

"Then," she said, "I'll see for myself which hallway is shortest."

She pushed through the bronze doors before either runner could move to block her, and the Mareth manse swallowed her whole.

The Pale Shepherd came through the bronze doors three paces behind her, the soft brush of his pale coat against the doorframe marking his passage like a whisper of silk on stone. Sera did not look back. She had learned, in alleys where looking back could mean a knife between the shoulder blades, that the safest place for a man who wished to remain unnoticed was somewhere behind her left shoulder, and that was where the shepherd walked, patient as a shadow.

The entrance hall of the Mareth manse swallowed the city whole.

The floor was laid in black and white marble, each tile a foot across, the pattern repeating in long diamonds that stretched the length of a courtyard. Sera's boots echoed against the stone as she walked, the sound too clean for the grit she had tracked in from the wharf. Her reflection wavered beneath her in the polish, and for a strange half-breath she thought she saw the shepherd walking beside her in the marble, though no second figure stood at her shoulder in the air.

She blinked. The reflection steadied to only herself.

Doors lined both walls of the long hall, dark oak banded with iron, each carved with a different sigil. A hart at rest beneath a seven-pointed star. A tower wreathed in flame. A black ship running before a storm. Sera marked them as she passed, her eyes cataloguing the way a runner's eyes learned to catalogue, until she came to the end of the hall and the doors there.

These were tall and pale, ash wood instead of oak, hung with long curtains of moth-grey velvet. Two men in the Thessyn grey stood at attention before them, halberds upright, faces arranged in the polite vacancy of men who had been told to see nothing.

The one on the left studied Sera's face, then the shepherd's pale hood, then the mud on Sera's boots, and decided that he was looking at a woman of uncertain rank in the company of someone whose rank he would prefer not to know. He cleared his throat.

"Lady Yvenne receives in the Ivory Court. The runner is expected."

It was not a question. Sera lifted her chin anyway.

"Which door?"

The grey man blinked, as if the question had been posed in a foreign tongue. "The door before you, my lady."

"This one?"

"This one, my lady."

"And the shepherd?"

The grey man hesitated. Sera watched the calculation cross his face, the small arithmetic of whether to insult the lady of the house by admitting he did not know what to do with a wandering stranger in a pale coat, or to insult the stranger by naming him something he was not. He settled on a compromise.

"The shepherd may wait."

Sera glanced sideways. The shepherd inclined his head, the smallest motion, the hood dipping like a flower bowing under rain.

"I will wait," he said. His voice was low and unhurried. "Tell Lady Yvenne that the runner from King's Landing wishes an audience."

The grey man's eyes widened a fraction at the name of the city. He nodded, once, and pushed one of the pale doors open. Warm light spilled out, and beneath it the scent of beeswax and something sweeter, dried rose petals crushed into the rushes.

Sera stepped through.

The Ivory Court was a small room made to feel larger by the cleverness of its construction. Mirrors lined three of the walls in tall panels, each framed in thin gilt, and the candles in the iron sconces multiplied themselves across the glass until the room seemed to blaze. The fourth wall was a window, tall and arched, looking out over a courtyard where a fountain sang to itself in a voice too delicate to be heard over the rustle of the wardrobe. The floor was carpeted in a deep blue so dark it drank the candlelight, and the chairs that lined the walls were pale ash wood with cushions of cream silk.

At the far end of the room, in a chair that was not so different from the others except that it sat upon a low dais, sat a woman.

Sera took her measure the way she took the measure of any new street. Lady Yvenne Mareth was older than the king by enough years to have mothered him, had the king been her son and not her nephew, but her face was the kind of face that had learned to be beautiful and then had learned to be something more dangerous than beautiful. Her hair was a pale silver-gold, drawn up into a net of seed pearls that caught the candle flame and scattered it. Her gown was grey, but a grey that was almost white, and at her throat sat a brooch in the shape of a seven-pointed star, picked out in moonstone. Her hands, folded in her lap, were still. The stillness was the kind that costs something.

She did not rise.

"You are younger than I was told," Lady Yvenne said. Her voice was the room's voice, refined, measured, a voice that had been taught to make even small words sound expensive. "Sit, if you wish. There is a chair by the window that suits a woman who has run a long way."

Sera did not sit. She had learned, in the alleys of King's Landing, that the first chair a woman took in a foreign room was the first step in a long walk down. She stood with her weight on her heels, her hands loose at her sides, and let the lady look at her.

"I have walked a city and a half," Sera said. "Which half were you told?"

A small motion passed over Lady Yvenne's face. It might have been amusement. It might have been the rehearsal of amusement. The lady inclined her head a fraction of an inch.

"Sit or stand, then. I will not pretend to care which. I have little enough time today, and less tomorrow, and I have asked you here because the Prince wakes from his own sleep like a man dragged out of a river, and the Regent Council will not hear a word of it that does not flatter them. Sit. There is wine. The cup is silver, not poisoned, though I cannot promise the wine is good. It is from the eastern marches, where the lords believe that a wine worth drinking must taste of the barrel it was shipped in."

Sera crossed the room and sat. The chair was softer than it looked, and the cushion gave beneath her with the kind of sigh that suggested it had been occupied, only this morning, by someone whose bones were finer than hers. The cup on the small table beside her was indeed silver, and it was indeed full. She did not drink.

Lady Yvenne watched her not drink, and made no comment on it. The lady's gaze moved past Sera, to the door, to the open square of warm light where the runner still stood at attention, and back to Sera.

"You came alone," Lady Yvenne said.

"I came with a shepherd."

"The pale one."

"The pale one."

"And he waits in my hall, uninvited, with the patience of a man who has been told to wait in many halls. You travel with strange company, for a runner from King's Landing."

Sera said nothing. The candle flame in the nearest sconce guttered as a draft moved through the room, and for a moment the mirrors multiplied the darkness. Lady Yvenne's reflection sat in a hundred chairs, all of them still.

"The Prince," Lady Yvenne said at last, and the word fell into the room like a stone dropped into the fountain's bowl. "My nephew's son. Caelan. Do you know why I sent for you, child?"

"To hear the answer to a question."

"Wrong." Lady Yvenne's voice sharpened with it, a single edge laid along the word. "I sent for you because you are a runner, and runners know what is said in the alleys of King's Landing when the lords of the city are not listening. And because the Regent Council has decided that the Prince suffers from a fever of the mind, a sickness of the blood, a humour of the season, a malady of the gods, and any other explanation that does not name the truth. And I am tired, Sera Vant, of explanations that do not name the truth."

Sera blinked. "You know my name."

"I know every name that has been spoken in King's Landing for the past three moons, child. It is the habit of queens dowager to know names. What I do not know," she said, and her voice dropped half a register, "is why the Prince wakes screaming with no memory of the dream, and why his hands shake when he thinks no one is watching, and why the court physicians keep writing the same word in their reports."

"What word?"

"Fever." Lady Yvenne's mouth curled. "Fever, and ague, and humour, and chill. They have a vocabulary for not saying what they mean. I am asking you, Sera Vant, because you are not a court physician and you do not have a vocabulary for not saying what you mean. I am asking you because you know what is bought and sold in the alleys beneath this city, and who is buying it, and what it does when it is taken. I am asking you what is being given to my nephew's son."

The candle flame steadied. The fountain's voice rose a half-tone in the silence. Sera looked at the wine in the silver cup, then at the brooch at the lady's throat, then at the lady's eyes.

"I am not a poisoner," she said. "I am a runner."

"Yes." Lady Yvenne's voice was cold. "And if a man in King's Landing wished a thing delivered to a prince in King's Rest, and wished it delivered by hands that could not be traced to a noble house, he would send a runner. That is what I am paying for. The knowledge of runners."

"You have not paid me anything."

"You have not yet given me anything." Lady Yvenne lifted one hand from her lap and laid it along the arm of her chair. The motion was small, but the rings on her fingers caught the candlelight, and for a moment her hand looked like a weapon laid down. "I will pay. In coin or in kind, in name or in silence, in whatever a runner from King's Landing values. I will pay well, and I will pay in private, and the Regent Council will not know of it unless you wish them to."

"And what do you want for the price?"

"I want the name of the man who is making my nephew's son sick." Lady Yvenne's voice did not waver. "And I want to know whether the sickness is meant to kill him, or only to make him unfit to sit a throne. There is a difference, child, and the difference is everything."

Sera looked at her for a long breath. The mirrors multiplied the moment. Lady Yvenne sat in a hundred chairs, asking a hundred times, with a hundred faces that did not blink.

"And if I find the name," Sera said, "what will you do with it?"

"That," said Lady Yvenne, "is my concern."

"It will be."

"It will." The lady's hand closed once, briefly, on the arm of her chair. "I am tired of councils, Sera Vant. I am tired of regents who bow to me in the hall and sharpen their knives in the small rooms. I am tired of physicians who write fever when they mean poison, and I am tired of a nephew's son who looks at me across the breakfast table with eyes that do not know me. I am asking you to help me. I will not ask twice."

The fountain sang. The candles burned. Sera looked down at the silver cup, and for the first time, she lifted it, and she drank.

The wine was thick on her tongue, older than anything she had ever been offered, sweet at the first swallow and bitter at the second, like a story told twice with different endings. Sera set the cup down and the small click of silver on marble was louder in the mirrored room than the fountain had been.

"There is a man," she said. "I do not yet have his name. I have a shape. A taste. The flavor of the poison, and the hand that pours it, and the hour it is poured, and the room in which the cup is left." She watched Lady Yvenne's face. "I can find the name. I can find it before the next council sits, if I am given leave to move through the palace as I need to move, and if no one asks me where I am going."

"You will have a pass signed by my own hand," Lady Yvenne said. "Warded against forgery. The guards at the western stair will know it."

"And the Regent Council?"

"They will be told that you are mine. That is the truth, after a fashion. Let them chew on it." Lady Yvenne rose, and Sera had to rise with her or be left looking up, which she would not have. The lady's gown whispered as she moved, a sound like pages turning in a book no one wanted to read. "There is a small chamber behind the music room, off the gallery with the tapestry of the Saltmarsh. The door is painted to look like the wall. My late husband's humor. You will sleep there tonight. You will not be seen entering. Tomorrow, you will come to me again, and you will tell me what you have learned. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Say it back to me."

"I will find the name of the man who is making your nephew's son sick. I will tell no one but you. I will sleep in the painted room tonight. I will come to you tomorrow." Sera paused. "And if I find that the sickness is meant to kill him, I will tell you that first, before I tell anyone else, even myself."

Lady Yvenne looked at her for a long moment, and something in the old face shifted, a small stone turning in a deep bed. "You are sharper than I gave you credit for," she said. "That is a compliment, in my mouth. Do not let it make you careless."

"I won't."

"You will." Lady Yvenne almost smiled. "But you will be careful anyway. That is the difference between a useful knife and a foolish one. Go now. The music room is through the green door on your left, and the painted door is behind the harp with the broken string. The string has been broken for nine years. Do not ask me why."

Sera bowed, not low, but correctly, the way she had been taught in a house she no longer visited. Then she walked to the green door and put her hand on the handle, and Lady Yvenne's voice stopped her.

"Sera."

"My lady."

"If you find the name, and it is a name I know," Lady Yvenne said, "do not bring it to me in anger. Bring it in silence. Anger is a fire that consumes the hand that lights it. I have lit too many such fires. I do not wish to light another."

Sera looked back. The mirrors showed the lady sitting again, alone among a hundred of herself, the candles guttering in their bronze holders.

"I will bring it in silence," Sera said. "If I can."

She stepped through the green door and let it close behind her.

The music room was dark and smelled of rosin and old velvet. A single harp stood near the far wall, a string missing, the gap a small black mouth in the instrument's throat. Sera counted the steps, felt along the wainscoting with her fingertips, found the painted seam of the hidden door, and pressed until the latch gave way with a click like a knuckle cracking.

The chamber behind was small, narrower than the pallet she had slept on as a child, but it was dry and it was warm and there was a narrow bed with clean linen and a candle already lit in a brass holder. Someone had prepared it. Someone had known she would need it. She thought of asking who, and then she decided she did not want to know, and that was a kind of knowledge too.

She set her back against the wall and listened to the palace breathe around her. The fountain in the mirrored room was a faint music through the stone. Somewhere above her, a floor creaked under a slow footfall, and then the footfall was gone. She thought of Caelan Mareth, pale in his bed with the wet cloth on his brow. She thought of Lord Aedric Vane, watching her with the careful patience of a man who had learned to wait out sieges. She thought of the pale stranger with the shepherd's crook, and of the way the High Septon's smoke had curled around his shoulders as if the man were a part of the altar.

She slept, in the end, because her body would not let her stay awake any longer, and her dreams were of three corridors and three doors, and behind each door a name she could not quite read.

She woke before dawn. The candle had burned to a stub and the wax had pooled into a shape like a small white bird. She dressed in the dark, moved her knife from her boot to her sleeve, and slipped out through the painted door.

The gallery with the tapestry of the Saltmarsh ran the length of the eastern wing. The tapestry itself was enormous, a long woven scene of men in boats crossing a flat grey water, the sky above them the color of an old bruise. She stood before it for a breath, and the salt smell of the sea was so strong in her nose that she had to remind herself it was only thread.

The corridor split at the end of the gallery. To the left, the stairs down to the physicians' wing, where the Prince lay in his fever. To the right, the stairs up to the Regent Council's chamber, where the small men in their fine robes would be gathering to argue about a kingdom they were trying to inherit.

Sera stood between the two staircases and let the palace make its choice for her.

Down.

The physicians' wing was quiet at that hour. A single lamp burned in the corridor, and the floor was cool through the thin soles of her shoes. She passed two orderlies who did not look at her, a door left ajar through which she heard a man coughing in the dark, and the small chapel of Saint Halis with its iron candle stand and its icon of the saint with his mouth sewn shut. She did not bless herself. She had never been sure which of the seven veils she would be lying to.

The door to Prince Caelan's chamber was guarded by a single man, young, with the soft chin of a boy who had not yet had to shave and the watchful eyes of a boy who had been told to watch. He straightened when he saw her, and his hand went to his sword, and then stopped.

"Lady Yvenne's runner," he said. It was not a question.

"I have leave to see the Prince."

"I have orders from the Lord Steward that no one enters without his word."

"And I have a pass from the Queen Dowager." She held up the small square of vellum she had been given the night before, the wax still bright, the sigil pressed deep. The guard looked at it. He looked at her. He looked at the door. He made the small sound of a young man who has been told one thing by one master and is now being shown a piece of paper by the mother of the other.

"Wait here," he said, and went inside.

The corridor was very quiet. Sera could hear the lamp oil whispering in the bronze. She could hear, through the door, the soft rustle of someone moving in a sickroom, and then the low murmur of the guard speaking to someone, and then another voice, older, a woman's voice, a physician's voice, answering in the careful tones of a person who had been asked a question they wished they had not been asked.

The door opened. The guard looked at her with the face of a boy who had been overruled by a higher authority and was not sure whether to be relieved or afraid.

"You may enter," he said. "But I go with you."

"Step where I step," she said, and went in.

The room smelled of vinegar and sweat and the sweet, sickly undertone of fevered breath. Prince Caelan lay in the great carved bed with the coverlet pulled up to his chest and his arms outside it, the way children sleep when they do not know they are being watched. His face was the color of tallow, and his lips were cracked, and the wet cloth on his brow had dried to a limp square of linen that the physician was just now lifting away.

The physician was a tall woman with her hair pinned under a cap and her hands clean and dry and her eyes the color of weak tea. She looked at Sera the way a cat looks at a dog that has wandered into the kitchen.

"The Queen Dowager's runner," she said. "I am told."

"You are told."

"I am also told that the Prince is sleeping, and that he is not to be disturbed."

"He is not sleeping," Sera said. "He is pretending. He has been pretending since I first saw him, because he does not trust the room." She looked at the Prince. "Your grace. I am not here to harm you. I am here to harm whoever is harming you."

The Prince opened his eyes. They were very dark, and they were very tired, and they looked at her with the long, careful attention of a boy who has learned that everyone who comes to his bedside wants something from him.

"My grandmother sent you," he said.

"Your grandmother hired me. There is a difference."

"To a queen, there is no difference."

"To a runner, there is everything." She pulled the stool to the bedside and sat. The physician made a small, disapproving sound, but she did not move to stop her. "Tell me what you have been given to drink, your grace. Every cup. Every draught. Every sip of water. From the beginning of your sickness."

He looked at her for a long breath. Then he began to speak, in the low voice of a boy who had been keeping a count and was glad, at last, to be able to unburden it.

She listened. She wrote nothing down, because she had no paper, and because a runner who writes is a runner who can be searched. She listened, and she counted, and she built the shape of the day in her head, the cups and the hours, the orderlies and the physicians, the small offerings of broth and medicine that a sick boy had been given to keep him alive, or to keep him closer to death.

When he had finished, she nodded once, rose, and bowed to him as she had bowed to his grandmother, not low, but correctly.

"I will find the name," she said.

"I know you will," said the Prince. "You have the look of a person who has been finding names for a long time."

She left him there, in the cool room with the vinegar smell and the watchful guard and the physician with her tea-colored eyes, and she went back into the corridor, and she stood for a moment with her hand against the wall, and she let the stone be cool against her palm.

Then she went up the stairs.

The Regent Council was already in session when she reached the chamber door. She could hear them through the oak, the low murmur of men trying to sound like kings. She did not go in. She had no need to go in. She had been given her pass, and her work, and her small painted room, and she had three names now where she had had one before.

She went back down the stairs and out into the dawn, where the pale light was coming over the roofs of King's Landing like a slow tide, and where the bells of the temple were beginning to ring, and where the city was waking up under the eye of a prince who was pretending to die.

She had work to do.