In Ashes Lie

by Marie Brennan

  Then he opened his eyes, and she saw the agony he had tried to conceal from her. “And in the end,” he said, “it would only confirm Charles’s invincible certainty that Heaven is on his side. The Almighty, not the people of England, has made him King, and no lesser force may deny him. He believes his failure in war is Heaven’s punishment for acceding to Strafford’s death, against his own sworn word. Last-minute salvation of such supernatural kind would be a sign that his penance is done. Once restored, he would thereafter reign in the absolute assurance that his power is divinely ordained. And he would be worse than ever.”

  Laying her hands in stillness on her skirt, Lune said, “What is your wish?”

  It surprised a bitter laugh from him. “My wish? For sanity and reason to return to this land. A King who heeds those below him, as well as the One above. And these past six years erased, as if they had never been. But you cannot offer me that; you can only offer this. And as generous as it is...” His breath came out in an anguished grunt. “No. We cannot rescue the King.”

  Tears pricked her eyes unexpectedly. It was the sensible choice, the realistic one; the cost of acting would be too high. But some part of Antony had died when he made that decision, and she suspected it was the dreamer in him, the man who believed that working with the fae would help him transform his own world for the better.

  They did not always rule in harmony, but she called him friend—and she grieved to see him change.

  She rose from her chair and would have reached for his hands again, but he stepped away, armoring himself in stoicism. “We will continue to watch,” she said. “If a chance offers itself...”

  “Indeed,” Antony said, but there was not much hope in his voice. “If it does, we shall be ready.”

  WESTMINSTER HALL, WESTMINSTER : January 20, 1649

  They could have held it at Windsor Castle, in far greater safety. But men who believed they enacted God’s will would not be satisfied with a circumspect execution of justice, out of the public eye; instead, they brought the grand delinquent of the kingdom to the very seat of his power. In the knife-edged cold of a Saturday morning, Antony, Kate, and Soame took a coach upriver to Westminster Hall, to witness the trial of the King.

  Soldiers stood watch on the rooftops, repelling those who would have climbed up to peer through or even break the windows. A great mass of people waited for access to the floor of the hall, but Antony directed his coachman to a house abutting the eastern side. There he paid for the three of them to pass through onto one of the hastily constructed galleries inside the hall itself.

  On the floor of the chamber, they had knocked down the partitions customarily separating the various courts that met there. Instead of claiming the middle of the hall, this great affair was wedged into the southern end, normally occupied by the Court of King’s Bench and the Court of Chancery. It weakened the spectacle—the common folk crowding in behind the wooden barriers would hear little and see less—but Antony, alert to possible dangers, understood. Ireton’s men had eschewed the safety of Windsor, but controlled what they could here. Few galleries meant fewer opportunities to shoot the participants.

  Yet no one seemed to be weighing that threat today. The soldiers certainly knew where the gallery entrances were, but they made no move to search those who passed through. I could smuggle a pistol up here—even a musket—and no one would be the wiser.

  If he believed it would do any good, he might have brought one.

  They had come early, to ensure a place; now they waited, through the morning and into the afternoon. Kate, white-faced, made little conversation. Soame’s attempts at jests fell flat. Antony, for his own part, found himself praying—but for what, he did not know. Inarticulate pleas filled his mind.

  The bells had just rung two when at last the doors were flung wide, admitting twenty halberdiers and officers bearing the ceremonial sword and mace. Behind them...

  Scarcely half of the Commissioners had even come. Antony counted sixty-eight in total, though it was hard to be certain. They arrayed themselves on benches beneath the great south window, and one, in a black barrister’s gown, took the Lord President’s raised chair in the front row. “Bradshaw,” Soame muttered, and Antony nodded in recognition. The man used to be a judge in London, but he was hardly one of the great lights of English law. Every detail spoke the low character of this trial.

  He hardly listened as the opening rituals were observed. While the halberdiers went to fetch the King, one of the clerks rose and droned through the roll call of Commissioners. Those who were present stood. But when the man called out, “Thomas Fairfax, Lord Fairfax of Cameron,” movement came, not from the Commissioners’ benches, but from the gallery in which Antony sat. A masked lady rose and shouted back in a furious voice, “He has more wit than to be here!”

  Shocked murmurs rippled outward. On the floor, it seemed she had scarcely been heard; the clerk went on with the names. The lady shoved her way free of the crowd and vanished. “Lady Newburgh, I think,” Soame said in an undertone.

  Antony shook his head. Lady Newburgh was an unabashed Royalist, true, but he knew that voice; he had approached her two weeks before, hoping through her to persuade her husband to denounce the actions of his Army. The speaker was Lady Fairfax, the general’s wife.

  And then the hall fell silent—as silent as such a crowd could be—for the entrance of the King.

  He did not come the length of the hall; they brought him through a side door, safely behind the barriers. From above, Antony could see little more than his black cloak and hat, and the radiant star that was the badge of the Garter. A red velvet chair had been set out for him, which he took with calm dignity, baring his face to his accusers and the spectators in the galleries.

  The years of strife had been no kinder to Charles than anyone else. His hair and beard were solidly gray, and his eyes bore the shadows of a man who has not slept. But he showed no weariness as Bradshaw read his self-consciously formal statement. “Charles Stuart, King of England: the Commons of England, assembled in Parliament, being sensible of the great calamities that have been brought upon this nation and of the innocent blood that hath been shed in this nation, which are referred to you as the author if it; and according to that duty which they owe to God, to the nation, and to themselves, and according to that power and fundamental trust that is reposed in them by the people, have constituted this High Court of Justice before which you are now brought, and you are to hear your charge upon which the court will proceed.”

  At Antony’s side, Kate shivered. He moved to put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off with stiff pride.

  Below, they read out the charges. Charles was a tyrant and a murderer, and had subverted the fundamental laws of the realm; he had committed treason against his own people, all to glorify and exert his own will.

  To which the King of England merely laughed.

  His cause for humor was plain enough. When they finally gave him leave to speak, he replied clearly, without any hint of the stammer that normally impeded him. And with his first words, he cut straight to the heart of the matter. “I would know by what power I am called hither,” he said. “I would know by what authority—I mean lawful. There are many unlawful authorities in the world, thieves and robbers by the highway...”

  What he said after that, Antony could not catch; there was noise and movement in the hall below. His heart leapt into his mouth, and he realized for the first time just how frightened he was. It seemed impossible that such events as these could proceed without dissolving into sheer anarchy and bloodshed.

  But this was no hotheaded attempt to rescue or kill the King. Cries of “Justice!” arose in the crowd, as if by chance. “They planned that,” Antony murmured in Soame’s ear, and his friend grunted in agreement. The Puritans despised theater, but what was this if not a staged play?

  The King, however, refused to follow the script. Batting aside Bradshaw’s weak counters, he hammered the point again and again, questioning the
authority of the court, and asserting his right to ask that question.

  Tom scowled. “Why does he not plead?” he demanded in an undertone. “Every time Bradshaw asks for his answer, he deflects it with more arguments—but a man who does not plead is assumed to be guilty!”

  “Because to plead innocence or guilt is to grant legitimacy to this court,” Antony said.

  “But it seals his fate. He could win on points of law, if only he would defend himself !”

  Kate’s bitter laugh answered him, from Antony’s other side. “Do you think these men are concerned with the law? They answer to God, and none other. No defense would save him.”

  Soame’s answering noise was pure, inarticulate frustration. “At least it would show how nonsensical these charges are!”

  Nothing Antony had seen that day brought home the injustice of the trial more than hearing Soame—no friend to the King—condemn its conduct. Much of the behavior they named, Charles was guilty of, though perhaps not to such exaggerated extent. Yet it could not be termed criminal under the structure of English law; in prosecuting his transgressions, these men committed their own.

  Kate was right: it had little or nothing to do with the law. “The people would not understand,” Antony said. “If Charles pleads his innocence, they will spend the next three days describing all his sins in exquisite detail. That is what the crowd would remember. He will not give them that opportunity.”

  What they would remember, instead, was the King’s unflappable eloquence, not in his own defense, but in demolition of those who faced him. When Bradshaw called him “elected King,” Charles reminded him of the inheritance of English monarchy; when he asserted the authority of the Commons, the King pointed out the absence of the Lords, who were essential to the constitution of a Parliament. “You have shown no lawful authority to satisfy any reasonable man,” he said, and it was true.

  A tight knot formed in Antony’s throat as he watched. He saw Charles with clear eyes; the events of the war had established all too clearly the man’s duplicity and arrogance. When he claimed to defend the liberties of the people, it was laughable—and yet, he might lay a greater claim to that defense than the men who now held England at the point of a blade. A tiny spark of respect flared in Antony’s heart, and he despised himself for it. But there it was: the man faced his judges, overriding their attempts to interrupt and silence him, with all the unshakable confidence of the martyr resigned to his fate.

  He will not avert it, Antony realized, as Bradshaw finally lost his patience and ordered the soldiers to remove the King. And he knows it. But he will sell himself dearly, with words alone.

  With the prisoner gone, the day’s work was ended; people began to depart. Kate stood unmoving at his side, her lips pressed tightly together, her eyes blazing with rage. “It’s a disgrace,” she said, when she saw Antony’s eyes on her.

  “Yes,” he agreed, and took her arm gently. “And more disgrace to us, that we have fallen to such a state.”

  THE ONYX HALL, LONDON : January 26, 1649

  Dejection weighed down Lune’s spirit like iron shackles, dragging at her steps as she paced restlessly from one side of the library to the other. The fae who frequented this room—scholarly sorts, uninterested in the active amusements of most courtiers—had been startled to see their Queen appear, and had ceded the chamber to her without pause. Lune herself rarely came here, and that was why she sought it now: for the unfamiliarity, for surroundings bare of all her usual comfort.

  I have failed.

  Failed Antony, failed England. Failed the promise made to an old woman decades ago. Not a vow, sworn on an ancient name of Faerie, but Lune had tried to behave as if it were. Yet it was just as well she had not so sworn: she could not defend England from itself. From a King so unworthy of his people; from subjects so unworthy of their land. Or from the faerie enemies who found and exploited those cracks, hammering at them until the whole of the state shattered.

  In nearly sixty years on her throne, she had never faced a test such as this. And now that it had come, she failed.

  So she came here, to keep company with her guilt. She could not share it with Antony, who bore so great a burden himself. Michael Deven, who would have comforted her, was dead—and a part of her was grateful he was not here to see this fall.

  A knock at the door brought a snarl to her lips. Fae did not weary as mortals did; she’d shunned all attempts to bring her food, to make her sleep, until her ladies and her advisers understood that all she wished for was solitude. “Leave me be!”

  Despite her command, the heavy oaken door swung open, admitting Lord Valentin Aspell and Sir Prigurd Nellt. They both went to their knees immediately, and her Lord Keeper said, “Your Grace, I most humbly beg your forgiveness for this disturbance.”

  “You shall not have it,” she snapped, dashing wetness from her cheeks before it could be seen. “We wish to be left alone.”

  “Madam, it concerns the safety of your realm.”

  It might have been a leash, pulling tight about her neck. Lune’s body jerked, caught between a desire to strike him, and an impulse to flee. To go somewhere they could not find her and burden her with such news.

  But duty was a bridle she had put on herself; she could not cast it off. Digging her nails into her palms, Lune said, “Tell me.”

  Aspell visibly inhaled with relief. “An Islington lubberkin has brought word from an oak man north of the City. There were fae in his grove last night—foreigners. Perhaps as many as a dozen.”

  Chilling as the words were, they concentrated her mind wonderfully. “The Scots.”

  “I do not think so, madam. The oak man said they wore red armor.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  Faerie knights painted and lacquered their armor, but according to their own tastes—usually. Red armor, in a group, pointed unerringly to one source. “Knights of the Red Branch,” Lune whispered.

  Not Scots, but Irish. Ulstermen. The elite of King Conchobar’s warriors, as the Onyx Guard were of Lune’s. Ulster—the place to which Eochu Airt had returned so suddenly, not long ago. She doubted the two were unconnected.

  But what purpose did they aim at? Lune’s eyes had been so firmly fixed on Scotland, she’d given Ireland little thought of late. Could it be—

  Her heart leapt for one brief, foolish instant. Could it be they come to rescue the King?

  Charles had been willing to promise the mortal Irish many things, in order to gain their aid in war. How much more might he give, in gratitude for his liberation?

  But common sense asserted its leaden weight, reminding her of the obstacles that blocked the Red Branch, even as they blocked her. And surely Conchobar knew as well as she how little the King’s promises could be trusted. And—

  And you have put the hounds in front of their prey, running madly off to nowhere. She had no reason to believe their intentions good, and more than enough caution to fear otherwise.

  Aspell and Prigurd waited silently, breathing more easily now that she had not lashed out in anger. Strangely, her misery had subsided; it waited for her, too, but could not compete with the thoughts now racing through her mind. I must try to discover what the Red Branch intends in London—and in the meanwhile, prepare for the worst. “Lord Valentin,” she said. “Bid Lady Feidelm attend me in my privy chamber. Do not, however, say anything to her of the oak man’s message. Sir Prigurd—” The giant twitched, head still down. “Make certain that all entrances are under guard, by knights you can trust. If the Red Branch plans some assault or infiltration of our realm, we shall defend if necessary. But do not offer battle first. We may yet settle this peaceably.”

  Peace was unlikely when the Ulster fae came in secret, not informing Temair’s ambassadress of their approach. But Conchobar was not Nicneven, and Lune would avoid having two such enemies if she could.

  WESTMINSTER HALL, WESTMINSTER : January 27, 1649

  Sunday was a day of rest; Monday a
nd Tuesday were more of the same mockery as before. Bradshaw, it seemed, could not bring himself to believe that Charles would cling so stubbornly to his position, refusing, as always, to plead. Time and again they removed him forcibly from the hall, and with every repetition it proved the King’s point more: that their only authority lay in force of arms.

  Antony’s words to Soame proved prophetic. On Wednesday the High Court summoned witnesses to testify before a committee, enumerating all the King’s sins, and the following day their statements were made public—but in the Painted Chamber, where the Commission met to debate, not in Westminster Hall. They could not conduct the trial as a trial. The King had barred that door.

  Kate did not go with Antony to hear the session in the Painted Chamber. I should never have given her access to the printing press, he thought ruefully; in a few short months she had become a more prolific author of pamphlets than ever he was. London seemed snowed under by the competing publications, many of them openly against the trial. Yet it was still nothing more than words, and they held no more force than the ink used to print them.

  On Saturday the High Court convened again, to pass sentence on the unrepentant King.

  Antony saw Lady Fairfax slip into the gallery, masked once again, with a friend at her side. The declaration made against disturbances on the second day did not seem to have deterred her. When Bradshaw claimed once again to speak in the name of the people of England, she cried out once more: “Not half, not a quarter of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!”

  “Down!” Antony snapped to Kate, almost before he registered the sudden move of the soldiers; half the gallery quailed as the Army men brought their muskets to bear. Half-crouching himself, he forced his way to the speaker’s side. “Lady Fairfax—”

  She snarled a curse that never should have fouled the mouth of a lady, and desperate, he took her by the arm. “They will shoot!”

  Lady Fairfax went with him, but not willingly. Outside, she lifted her chin and insisted, “I care not for their guns—but I would not endanger those around me.”