The Russian officer smiled at Raechel, then led them through a pair of solid doors. Cold air slapped at Gwen’s face as they passed through the second door; she almost slipped on ice below her feet. Raechel muttered a very unladylike word, just loud enough for Gwen to hear, as they walked through a final door and out into the open air. The palace grounds were covered with snow, either lying flat on the lawn or pushed into piles away from the road. It was bitterly cold, despite the fur coats they’d been given. Gwen drew on magic to warm herself as they were escorted towards a large golden carriage. Beyond it, there were dozens of other such carriages. A handful were already making their way towards the gates, escorted by Cossacks.
“I feel like a queen,” Raechel said, and giggled.
“Or a target,” Gwen muttered back. If she’d wanted to advertise someone’s wealth and power, she would have used a carriage like the one the Russians had prepared for them. It looked to have been made of real gold. “And let us hope it will be warm inside.”
She shook her head in disbelief as the Russian opened the door, allowing them to scramble into the carriage. Inside, there was a small heater, with a fire burning merrily inside the grate. Raechel sat down next to it, then looked over at Gwen expectantly. Gwen sighed and expanded her magic, warming the small compartment quickly and efficiently. Raechel settled down on the seat and looked over at Gwen.
“So,” she said. “What do we do now?”
“It depends,” Gwen said. The carriage looked large enough to seat more than two people, but it was quite possible the Russians intended to leave them alone. “If we’re alone, you can work on your meditation.”
She waited until the carriage lurched into life, then leaned forward and stared out the window as the massive convoy started to move. There was a small army of Cossacks escorting them, she noticed, many of them blocking her view of the city. The locals didn’t seem too happy to see them, she did manage to see; their sullen hatred followed her until the royal procession was finally out of St Petersburg. Gwen silently prayed that they managed to complete their mission and leave Russia before the powder keg finally exploded. The Russians, it seemed, were on the verge of a revolt that would make the Swing look like a minor disturbance.
Closing the curtains, she turned to face Raechel. “You can work on your meditation,” she ordered. “And I will be poking at your mind from time to time.”
Raechel sighed. “I wish I had never come,” she said. “There’s nothing to do here.”
Gwen laughed. “Next time we go somewhere, you can be the maid and I will be the spoiled brat,” she said. She’d had the Russian servants doing most of the work in St Petersburg, but there had still been a great deal for her to do. And Janet, she suspected, had had the same problem, with the added issue of Lady Standish finding work for idle hands. “See how much you like it.”
“I wanted to be in dramatics,” Raechel muttered. “But my parents would never allow it.”
“Of course not,” Gwen said. “You do know what they say about women who go on the stage?”
Raechel sighed again, then closed her eyes and started to meditate. Gwen concealed a smile, remembering when she too had wanted to be an actress. But acting was no profession for an aristocratic young woman. Everyone knew that women who went on the stage were whores ... and if they didn’t have a lover when they started, they would have one soon enough. King Charles II had formed a relationship with an actress. He was far from the only one.
She tested Raechel’s mental shields carefully, but provoked no response. Gwen wasn’t too surprised; it could take weeks or months to build up a working shield, particularly without magic of one’s own. But it posed a security risk ... briefly, Gwen considered arranging for Simone to have an accident. It would be relatively easy to kill the girl without arousing suspicion, yet she was hardly the only Talker in the country. The Russians had Talkers of their own guarding the Tsar. She would just have to hope that none of them considered Raechel worthy of their attention.
Bracing herself, she pulled the curtain aside and peered out into the Russian countryside. It was prettier than she’d expected, with long tracts of untamed wilderness reaching out for miles around the royal road. But the impression of pristine countryside vanished as they passed through a small village, barely larger than an English hamlet. She sucked in her breath in horror as she saw the peasants making their way through the fields. They looked so ... so inhuman, compared to the glittering creatures who made up the Russian nobility. It was easy to see why so many aristocrats considered the peasants to be animals.
“Disgusting,” she muttered.
Pity – and an odd kind of shame – ran through her heart as she saw how the peasants lived. Their village was practically swimming in mud. She saw pigs and a handful of other animals waddling through the sludge, while children worked with their parents in the fields. It was impossible to tell which children were male and which were female; they were dressed the same, their hair cropped close to their skulls. They were so thin that even the older girls, the ones who should have been developing breasts, were hard to separate from the men. And the older men and women looked beaten down by life.
“This is disgusting,” Raechel agreed. “Why doesn’t someone do something about this?”
“They don’t care,” Gwen said. She saw a legless man sitting beside his house, drinking from a large glass bottle. “The aristocrats simply don’t care.”
They paused at a large guesthouse as the night started to fall. No one seemed in the mood for dinner and dancing, or for anything more than sleep. They resumed their journey over the following days, passing through five more guesthouses before they reached their destination. Even with a change of horses every twenty miles or so, Russia was vast. It took days to travel from St Petersburg to Moscow.
There were more horrors as the carriages raced onwards. Gwen saw a field where chained men worked, picking what they could from the harvest, supervised by armed soldiers wearing fancy uniforms. A large house, larger than Cavendish Hall, had been badly damaged by fire and seemingly abandoned, along with most of the hovels nearby. The fields looked to have been left untended, although it was hard to be certain. She was sure she caught glimpses of men hiding in the forests as the coaches passed through them, stopping for nothing. The armed escort, she realised grimly, might be the only thing between them and bandits in the countryside.
Raechel caught her arm, pulling her back to the seat. “Is there anywhere in England like this?”
Gwen hesitated. “Not in England,” she said, recalling what she’d heard of the slave plantations in America. “But there are places just as bad as this in the British Empire.”
Something would have to be done, she told herself, as she settled into her seat and closed her eyes. She had power and influence, both as the Royal Sorceress and as the person who had brought Howell’s reign of blackmail and terror to an end. There were people who owed her favours. She could use that power to try to change things for the better, to ensure that servants were treated decently and slavery was finally abolished ... but how could she tackle the economic underpinnings? If there was a surfeit of cheap labour, what was the incentive to treat maids and menservants better? And if slavery was profitable, why would slaveholders free their slaves?
“That can’t be right,” Raechel said, breaking into Gwen’s thoughts. “I would have seen ...”
Gwen laughed, without opening her eyes. “How much of the world have you seen?”
But she’d been just as big an ignorant fool, she knew. If Jack hadn’t shown her the dark underside of London, the horrors that had been completely out of her sight, what choice would she have made during the Swing? Would she have thrown herself completely behind Master Thomas?
“Not enough,” Raechel muttered. “Clearly, not enough.”
Gwen tried to sleep, only to be woken – what felt like only moments later – by the carriage swaying to a halt. The Russian servants moved from carriage to carriage, handing o
ut sandwiches and bottles of juice, before the carriages rattled back into life. Gwen was silently relieved she wasn’t anywhere near Lord Standish or Talleyrand, although she was privately certain the latter wasn’t showing any reaction. Diplomats should have calm and peaceful journeys through the countryside, not pell-mell rides to a far from welcoming city. And they should have nine-course banquets too ...
“Your uncle isn’t going to be very happy,” she warned, as she picked her way through one of the sandwiches. The meat inside seemed to be chicken, but it was basted in so many sauces that it was hard to be sure. “This isn’t how most countries treat diplomats.”
“He never has any time for me in any case,” Raechel assured her, chewing through her sandwich with obvious enthusiasm. “I think there are days when he simply forgets he has a ward.”
“I’m sorry,” Gwen said, and meant it. “My father did that too, sometimes.”
She must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing she was aware of was Raechel poking her and waving to the window. Gwen opened her eyes and looked out, just in time to see the line of carriages passing through a set of gates and into the city. Moscow looked darker and grimmer than St Petersburg, even though there was less snow on the ground. The buildings at the edge of the city were brooding monstrosities, without any of the strange charm of St Petersburg. Even the older structures towards the centre of the city seemed to lack charm.
The population, though, looked as battered and weary as the population of St Petersburg. It was easy to see the hatred in their eyes, despite their constant exhaustion and the watching soldiers patrolling the city. Gwen had never seen so many soldiers in one place, even in St Petersburg, or London after the Swing. They looked weary too, but also alert ... and they never went anywhere alone. The smallest group of soldiers she saw was of no fewer than nine.
“Nice building,” Raechel commented, as the carriages drove up to a large building that seemed a cross between a castle and a mansion. It might be defendable, Gwen noted, if it wasn’t attacked with artillery. “Is this where they want us to stay?”
“It looks that way,” Gwen said. The carriages slowly rattled to a halt. “I suggest you keep your head down.”
Raechel looked at her. “You have a bad feeling about this too?”
The door was opened before Gwen could answer, allowing them both to scramble outside, into the cold. She heard someone talking loudly and angrily and looked over towards the door, where Lord Standish was talking to one of the Russians, gesturing angrily. The diplomat didn’t sound very diplomatic, she decided, but it was hard to blame him. She felt tired and crabby after the nightmarish ride down nightmarish roads through nightmarish scenery. And Lord Standish was a professional diplomat. He wasn’t used to being treated in such a manner.
A Russian officer bowed deeply to Raechel, then invited her to enter the building and walk up to her suite. Gwen followed, looking from side to side as they passed through another maze of corridors. The walls were lined with bladed weapons, she couldn’t help noticing, ranging from standard swords to oddly-shaped examples from China or Japan. Notes written underneath in the Russian alphabet, she presumed, told the stories of those weapons. But she couldn’t read them.
“Spoils of war,” the Russian officer said, when Raechel asked. “Taken from our enemies in glorious combat.”
Gwen sighed, inwardly. She would have bet half her inheritance that the Russian officer had seen no serious combat. Beating up unarmed peasants was very different from fighting armed men – or magicians – intent on killing you.
“There will be a dinner tonight, hosted by the Tsar,” the officer said. He bowed again as he opened the door to Raechel’s suite. “You will be welcome.”
“Thank you,” Raechel said. She sounded tired, but willing to carry on. “I will be there.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
If there was one advantage to being considered a devil-child, Gwen had come to realise slowly, it was that she wasn’t invited to very many balls. Normal aristocratic girls were taken to balls as soon as they could curtsey properly, and taught their place in society, particularly the deference due to the Grande Dames. But Gwen hadn’t been taken to many of them, not when the aristocracy thought that woman shouldn’t have magic – or if they did have it, they should keep it to themselves. Her social isolation was very definitely a relief.
She peered down from the balcony at what had to be one of the least welcoming balls she’d ever seen, worse even than those that had been held in the midst of family feuds and other unpleasantness. The different Russian factions were starkly clear, men cleaving to their allies, the women gathered around them, while the foreigners sat together and watched their hosts with growing concern. Lord Standish and Talleyrand seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement not to bicker, despite the approaching war. Gwen would have been impressed if the meal hadn’t been sending chills down her spine.
Beside them, Sir Sidney ate his food, his face set in an unreadable mask. He had to be using mental discipline, Gwen realised, knowing that both Simone and Russian Talkers were in the room. She wanted, desperately, to talk to the older man, to ask his advice, but she knew that was impossible. Lady Standish would react badly if Gwen was caught with Sir Sidney a second time, particularly after Gwen had been ‘disciplined’ by Romulus. The last thing she needed, right now, was to be caught doing something indecent. Gritting her teeth, she looked away from Sir Sidney towards the head of the table.
The Tsar himself lounged on his throne, staring down at his food with a curiously deranged expression on his face. Gwen couldn’t help wondering if he were drugged, or under some form of magical influence; he seemed to verge between the deepest depression and an oddly childlike enthusiasm, as if he were waiting for Christmas Day. His bodyguard of dark-clad men had been reinforced with a pair of men in monkish robes, one of whom whispered to the Tsar from time to time. Were they his bodyguards, Gwen wondered, or his masters? But when she reached out with her senses, all she picked up was mental distortion aimed at Simone and the other Talkers. The Russians were determined to ensure that no one learned anything through magic.
Romulus poked her arm, making her jump. “I’ve never seen His Lordship so concerned,” he muttered. “And Her Ladyship is picking up on it too.”
Gwen followed his gaze. Lady Standish was talking – too loudly – to Simone, who looked torn between boredom and amusement. Gwen had no idea of Simone’s social standing, but she had managed to woo the London rakes before Talleyrand had been told to go home and take his fake daughter with him. Lady Standish either hadn’t heard about that experience, Gwen guessed, or she’d simply decided it couldn’t possibly have happened. She was chatting to Simone as if the girl was a new ward. Judging from Raechel’s expression, she was being compared – unfavourably – to the French girl.
But it was clear that Lady Standish was nervous. Gwen had to admit that that was more than a little frightening. Women like Lady Standish walked through life protected by an invisible bubble, an overwhelming confidence that no one would so much as try to hurt them. They rarely even considered the possibility that they could be torn down from their pedestals and made to suffer like ordinary mortals. For someone like her to be nervous was worrying. It meant that the mood pervading the palace was even seeping into her.
“I see,” she muttered back, as a line of Russian servants brought out the next course. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“I don’t know,” Romulus said. “But it looks as though the Tsar is waiting for something.”
Gwen nodded as she scrutinised the Tsar and his bodyguards. The Tsar was definitely waiting for something and not, she noted, doing a very good job of hiding his anticipation. But someone like him wouldn’t have to wait for anything, not normally. He was an absolute ruler, after all. What was he waiting for?
“I’m going back to our rooms,” she said. Janet would still be there, helping to unpack the clothes she’d packed into bags only yesterday. �
�I don’t think Her Ladyship will need me for a while.”
“Probably not,” Romulus agreed. “Watch yourself.”
Gwen smiled as she stepped through the door, then headed up the stairs towards the topmost floor. If this building was anything like the Winter Palace, the important offices would be on the uppermost floor. But as she reached the top of the stairs and looked around, it became alarmingly clear that, just like the Winter Palace, the building was almost completely empty. She peered into a handful of rooms and saw nothing, apart from lines on the floor where tables and chairs had once stood. It looked as though the building had been stripped before the British – and French – representatives had been moved into their rooms. There weren’t even any guards on the uppermost floors.
She went down a flight of stairs and searched the next floor, only to find little more than a smoking room, a handful of meeting rooms and a large room crammed full of yet more bladed weapons. She checked, carefully, but found no firearms or anything more advanced than a bow and arrow. Puzzled, she crept into the next room and discovered that it was crammed full of furniture. They’d moved everything down one flight of stairs and then abandoned it.
This doesn’t make sense, Gwen thought, sourly. What are they doing?
Down below, she heard the band start to play. The tune was unfamiliar, but the beat was recognisable as one of the diplomatic waltzes. Rolling her eyes, Gwen crept back down the stairs and back into the balcony. The tables had been pushed to one side, the diplomats and noblemen had moved onto the dance floor and a number of women had appeared from nowhere, making up the numbers. A nobleman was calling the dance, his voice echoing through the entire room ...
... And there was no sign of the Tsar. Gwen felt ice shivering down her spine. Where had he gone?
Necropolis (Royal Sorceress Book 3) Page 22
