by Gwynn White
“The queen mentioned Khmeria.”
“Did she?”
“She said she’s sending me out there. I think I’m being lent to you, as protection for your …”
“Oh, Tim. Yes. That is unexpectedly generous of her.” Vivienne’s tone was dryly humorous. Leonie tried to force herself to relax. She reckoned it was the clever thing to inform Vivienne about her new assignment herself, rather than let Madelaine conveniently ‘forget’ to mention it, and then have Vivienne wonder why they’d been circumspect about it.
There were two factions at the Tower of London: the queen’s and her aunt’s. Leonie was in Madelaine’s camp. But she liked the Countess of Dublin, appreciated her dry sense of humor, and believed she had the best interests of Great Britain at heart. For ten years Vivienne had worked tirelessly to prop up the Wessex regime, even though House Sauvage had also been a contender for the throne. She’d even proposed higher taxes—which would fall most heavily on House Sauvage, of course. Now that was what Leone called the true noble spirit. Not many of Britain’s other noblemen and noblewomen had it.
“I don’t reckon I’m giving anything away,” she said. “Have you heard about Her Majesty’s plan to appoint this Scully bloke to the top spot in Khmeria?”
Vivienne put down her pen. She steepled her fingers in front of her mouth, pressing them to her lips. “Yes,” she said after a moment. “It is a regal stroke. She knows Jon Merryweather has been a disaster, and is sending Scully to tidy up after him.”
“I thought it was something like that.”
“The Scullys are a very minor House. They have no alliances with her enemies—the Stuarts, the Lancashires, et al.”
Lord Gordon Stuart was the defense minister. Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer, that was how a queen had to think—but Madelaine was sending Leonie away … Suddenly Leonie felt very tired. “Well, I reckon you’re right, my lady. She knows what she’s doing. I’ll get out of your hair now.”
Forty Minutes Later. Barking
“They were here again,” Sam said.
“They don’t let the grass grow under their feet, do they?” Leonie had just got home. She lived with her sister Sam and Sam’s family. She stripped off her t-shirt and bent over the bathroom sink, splashing water on her face. “Saints, I’m shagged out.” It was two in the morning. It felt later.
“We were in the middle of tea. I had to give them a cuppa. I’d’ve liked to throw it in their faces.”
“How late is Quentin’s payment this time?”
“Only three days. They said from now on there’ll be a late fee for every additional day.”
“They can’t do that. That’s illegal.” Leonie didn’t know if it was or not. She was no expert in mortgage law.
“I’m just telling you what they said.”
“How’d you get them to leave?”
“Quentin promised we’d pay by the end of the week.”
Leonie straightened up. Their eyes met in the mirror. Sam leaned in the bathroom doorway, arms folded over her robe. She looked as tired as Leonie felt. But healthy, her curls shiny, her figure substantial under the robe, which was stained with baby formula and sick. You’d never guess that ten years ago, she’d been a wisp of jaundice and thin air, dying of chronic lung disease. The head of St. Adolfina von Bismarck-Wessex, a gift from Madelaine, had cured her.
Unfortunately, they had had to sell St. Adolfina a few years back and the money was long gone.
“You can get it, can’t you?” Sam pressed.
“End of the week might be tricky.” When you worked for the Crown, no matter how secretly, even your brown paper envelopes had to be officially disbursed and rubber-stamped by half a dozen shiny-arses. “I can let you have a hundred quid now, but…” When she got the money, she’d have to give at least some of it to Littlejack’s family. The chances were high that Madelaine would order a death benefit to be paid, and then some wally in the Treasury would trim it to nothing.
“That’s not enough,” Sam said. She turned away, her steps heavy.
“Well, it’s the best I can do.” Leonie scooped up a wodge of cold cream and slathered it on her eyes to remove the last of her vaunter makeup.
“Your own brother-in-law …”
Anger pulsed through her chest, the pent-up rage of the night taking shape. Yes, Quentin was her own brother-in-law. He was Sam’s husband and a good one, a good father to their three kids, a good cop in the London City division of the Wessex livery… and an utter bloody lamb to the slaughter when it came to money. The daft sod had mortgaged his relics to pay for this house. It was a nice house, five bedrooms and three bathrooms on a quiet street in Barking, with a back garden for the little ones and parking space for two cars. Far too nice a house for a mere livery cop.
Quentin had bitten off more than he could chew, confidently expecting a promotion that never came, counting on his sister-in-law’s close relationship with the queen. Now his head was on the line, and the dodgy little mortgage agency he’d picked had begun sending kneecappers around.
“You wouldn’t have missed any payments if you didn’t spend more than you’ve got coming in,” Leonie muttered.
Sam came back into the bathroom. “Why don’t you just say what you mean, Lee-lee? We should pull Davey out of St. Anne’s, right? Send him to the Corporation school with the barefoot toughs from the estates. Oh, and I should be scrimping on the grocery shopping, too, shouldn’t I? Bread and sugar sandwiches for tea, water on their cereal instead of milk, chicken on Sunday and bone soup the rest of the week. That was good enough for us when we were little, after all. We never went on holiday, either. We never had piano lessons. We never rode in a car from the end of one year to the next. And we’ve turned out all right, haven’t we?” Her sarcasm stung. “So Quentin and I should just stop trying to give them a better start than what we had, right?”
Leonie reached on top of the medicine cabinet and took down her makeup bag. She reapplied her slap. A lighter foundation this time. “You need to stop living the entitled lifestyle. No one here’s got a bobble on their head, but you spend as if you do. That’s what you need to face up to.”
Sam’s face was bright pink. “You could put a word in for Quentin with her.”
“Oh Sam, wake up, will you? Quentin’s commander thinks he’s a good cop but he’s not cut out for captain. That’s in confidence, that’s what the queen said when I asked her, because I did. And she’s not in the business of overturning the decisions of her own bonded professionals.” Leonie’s hands were shaking. Mascara streaked her eyelid. “If you need the money by the end of the week, ask Wynnie. She’s got her boutique. Ask Bastian, he’s got rich friends.”
“I can’t. I’d be that ashamed.”
“I know.”
A moment passed. “We could just say your rent’s gone up,” Sam said.
Skipping blusher and powder, Leonie went down the hall to her room. She tossed her shorts and boots into the corner and threw on a dress, an outrageously flirty little thing she’d got at their sister Wynnie’s fashion boutique for a discount. Sam watched from the door in silence.
“Mum? Mum…”
“Go back to bed, love.”
“I can’t.” Six-year-old Davey hung his head.
“Oh, Davey. You haven’t wet your bed again! You promised Mum!”
Leonie squatted in front of her nephew. Chapped cheeks, lank dark hair, so shy that his school reports described him as “sullen” and “withdrawn.” He could break her heart in half, just like his namesake, her brother Dave who’d died in action at the age of twenty-two.
Davey smelled of urine. He had started wetting his bed when the kneecappers first showed up.
“Davey. Davey. Look at me. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“The bad men aren’t going to get your dad.”
“They’re going to cut his h-h-head off!”
“Now you’ve frightened him,�
� Sam snarled, scooping Davey into her arms.
“He’s already frightened, Sam. He’s not deaf and blind. He knows what’s going on. Davey? Davey? Everything’s going to be all right. I promise.” She thought: This job in Khmeria ought to have a bonus attached, anyway.
Half An Hour Later. Lambeth
Lambeth had changed dramatically since Leonie was little. Where the butcher’s shop, the bakery, the ironmonger’s, and the plastination parlor used to stand in a row, there was now a café, a fancy jewellery shop, and a pet shop that sold giant spiders and winged monkeys. Graffiti decorated the riot shutters: Chivalry Defense League, Knights of the Bryde, Bloody M Boys.
Turn a couple of corners and you were in another world again. The corner pub had transformed into a benga club, crackling with neon. The elders of the Kenyan community lounged outside on broken plastic chairs, apparently not noticing that it was a chilly British spring night. A couple of doors down, the smell of coconut wafted from a pot-sticker shop where Kenyan cooks were preparing tomorrow’s fast food. The Crown Arms was still British, though.
She waded into the rock music, took a barstool. The lass behind the bar knew her: they’d been at school together. “Pod’s here.”
“It’s Bobby Two-Shoes I’m looking for.” Leonie accepted a G&T. “He been in?”
Soon enough, Bobby waddled over to her, lager in hand. “’Ello, beautiful.”
“Hello yourself, Bobby.”
They clinked glasses.
The Crown Arms reeked of cigarette smoke, Bleechol, and the combat dogs that many of the local boys pratted about with on choke chains. Bobby drained his lager, belched, and hitched his beltless, black-braced trousers. He’d been a friend of Leonie’s brother Dave in Dave’s pre-army days, when he went around with one of the original London vaunt gangs. In those days vaunt had been gentler, almost idealistic, like a tourney club for lads who’d never be knights. They’d fought organized bouts with staves and blunts. Now, Lambeth alone was home to chapters of four or five national gangs, divided between the politicals, like the Chivalry Defense League, and crime rings like the Bloody M Boys and the Sinner Knights. They travelled far and wide to support Wessex tourney knights and mix it up with the vaunters who supported rival Houses. Some of their kingpins had ties to MI5.
Bobby Two-Shoes was a Chivalry Defense League man. He’d got his sobriquet in a bust-up with the livery, when he somehow ended up fleeing through the Stacks with only one shoe on. Halfway down the stairs, he’d taken off his other shoe and thrown it at the pursuing cops. The legendary incident cast a benign glow over his present career as a rent-a-kneecapper.
“Littlejack’s dead,” Leonie said.
“Heard. Bloody M Boys. Vail.”
“Vail. It wasn’t the Bloody M Boys. I mean, it was, but he wouldn’t have died if we had a relic with us.”
“Didn’t you?”
She shook her head. “Mase lost it. At a bucket shop.”
Bobby looked reflectively at the ceiling. After a time he said: “Berk.”
“I want you to do him.”
“Cost you.”
“How much?”
When they’d finished haggling, Leonie slumped on her barstool, exhausted. The music had changed to old pop ballads. Couples shoved back the tables and lurched drunkenly to and fro in the puddles of spilled lager. This was where Leonie belonged. I don’t want to go to Khmeria. But she was sworn to the queen.
“Grant.”
She looked up, head spinning.
“What’re you having?”
“G and T,” she mumbled.
It was Pod Elthurst. Another of her old mates, a former Intelligence Company operator who now ran a wholesale office supplies business. He’d aged better than most, his stomach still flat and his moustache dark, his eyes twinkling with warmth. He braced his arms on either side of her as he craned over the bar to get the bar girl’s attention.
“Don’t bloody box me in like that.”
“What’s got your knickers in a twist?”
“I need another drink.”
Pod scrutinized her. “No, you don’t. You need to get out of here.”
They stumbled down the now-empty street. Leonie shivered in the cold wind. Pod took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
“Everything going all right with Her Majesty?”
“None of your bleeding business.” She knew Pod still resented her for not cutting him in on her undercover work. But he had his own business, a wife and two kids. Responsibilities. People with responsibilities were craven. “She’s sending me to Khmeria,” she boasted. “I’m going to be an aide to the new High Commissioner.”
“You jammy bitch. A desk job, frozen cocktails by the pool, servants to paint your toenails, eh?”
“Can you see me in a desk job? It’s a close protection gig. I’m to look after this chap from House Sauvage. A savant. I’ll probably have to knot his hair for him, make sure he doesn’t put his shirt on back to front.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. What’s he look like? Fat, short and bald, I hope.”
“Not a bit. He’s a Sauvage, which means he’s tall, blond, and studly. Nothing like what you normally imagine as a savant.”
“There’s all types. What’s he want in Khmeria?”
“Oooh, it’s complicated. Financial stuff. But I don’t have to understand it, I just have to stop the Khmer Rouge from blowing him up.” They reached Pod’s car. Leonie collapsed into the passenger seat, a deep and chilly womb of ecru leather. “It’ll be just like the good old days,” she mumbled.
Half An Hour Later. Lewisham
“They’re very nice toenails,” Pod whispered, kissing them. The lights of the city shone through the skylight of the break room behind his office, and onto the sofa that folded out into a saggy bed. Gooseflesh travelled up Leonie’s body as Pod kissed the inside of her calf.
“C’mere, Elthurst.”
“Don’t rush me when I’m on the job.” His moustache tickled her inner thigh.
She shuddered, reached for the glass of whiskey on the chair beside the bed. Flopped back with the burn trickling down her throat.
“Stick it in me, for God’s sake.”
“I said don’t rush me.”
Beside the glass of whiskey lay her P&K machine pistol. Their clothes were scattered around the room but she never let the P&K out of her reach. She thrust it into his hands. “Stick it in me.”
“God, you sick bitch. I love you. I should have married you.”
“I’m married to this.”
He parted her thighs and rammed the barrel of the gun between her legs, kissing her while he ground it home. Yes, it was sick, she knew that, but it was safer than having his cock in her. You couldn’t get knocked up by a gun.
3
Ran
Later The Same Day. May 16th, 1989. Konigsberg, Germany
Randolph Sauvage hurtled down the emergency exit stairs of Baltika Stadium in Konigsberg, once briefly the capital of Germany. He ran because he was nervous, not because he was in a hurry. There was another hour before the tilts started. He had plenty of time.
He slipped out of the stairs into a loading bay open to the tyre-tracked slush of a parking lot. A couple of horseboxes were backed up, unloading destriers in blinkers and sling girths. Ran strolled past them towards the stables. Warm air blasted from vents. Overhead, the crowd roared.
It was the aerials right now. Knights hurling spears from the backs of dragons so heavily armored they could hardly fly. He was glad to miss it. He had always loved dragons, and believed that all the new safety rules had ruined the aerials, as well as ruining dragon breeding practices on the Continent.
The stables smelled of manure, sweat, and the pungent hot mash given in small amounts to pep up destriers that had been deliberately starved for twenty-four hours. Ran barely saw anyone as he walked the aisles of stalls, only a few grooms and lads dragging pallets laden with cruppers, crinets, and bards. He’d judged his timi
ng precisely. The knights entered in the tilts would now be getting their armor buckled on by their squires, a process that took forty minutes. Meanwhile, they would not start caparisoning the destriers for another ten or fifteen minutes. For insurance reasons, modern horse armor was so heavy that you didn’t want to burden your steed with it until the absolute last minute.
Ran was dressed as a knight. That is, he wore his usual jeans and leather jacket, with a hairpiece in a readymade knot. But more than his clothes, it was his manner that convinced the passing grooms he belonged here. He was nobly born, and he still remembered how it was done.
Helpfully, the armor and caparisons piled outside the stalls identified their tenants. Ran located the House Magyar row and unlatched the stall of Plains Princess, his first victim.
Easing into the stall, he met the destrier’s eyes squarely. She towered a magnificent twenty-eight hands high, her nostrils flaring red, the armored ridges of skin over her shoulders rippling as she pawed the floor. Destriers were horses with fey blood—their tough hides were living armor. They had once been bred for war and were now bred for tourney. It was a crime to load them up with half a ton of cruppers and chamfrons.
Ran uncurled a palm to reveal a chunk of rock sugar. Plains Princess considered it for a moment and then snatched it with her lips. “Good girl,” Ran whispered.
Plains Princess and her Magyar rider were tipped to win the heavy jousts, favored at odds of five to two. Ran moved alongside her and reached up to her mane. Quickly, he undid one of her braids, getting his hands sticky with oil.
Normally, a highbred destrier would never have allowed a complete stranger to mess around with her like this. But Ran had the fancier’s knack. He vaguely thought he might get a job in some lord’s mews or stables some day.
The rubber bands that fastened the destrier’s braids were generic, without insignia. Ran stuffed them into his left hip pocket and extracted a different pair from his right pocket. These looked the same, but were magical. His friends Katrina and Sonya had prepared them in secret at school. His fingers flew, making the switch. Done, he gave Plains Princess another lump of sugar and backed out of the stall.
