by Peter McLean
Anne nodded, but her expression was unreadable and I knew that hadn’t been the answer she was looking for.
* * *
* * *
When I left Chandler’s Narrow I went into the Wheels alone. That was madness, I knew, but I did it anyway. It had been just over a week since Yan Wainwright had come to the Tanner’s Arms, crippled and burned and pushed in a handbarrow by a son sent mute by the horror of what I had done. I had to find him.
I survived Abingon, he had told me. I went home to my little house in the Wheels, and then some cunt blew it up. Aye, he knew I was responsible for the bombings, of course he did. Half the fucking city knew that, for all that no one could prove it. But that wasn’t the point.
He knew, and so did I.
I walked the streets of the Wheels alone and unguarded, calling into workshops and taverns and inns, asking where I might find Yan Wainwright. I got no answer.
“That burned beggar with no legs, Mr. Piety?” a smith said to me at last. “You won’t be finding him; he’s dead. Drowned in the river he was, and most like by his own hand. Poor bastard.”
I stared at the smith, a lean, bearded fellow standing there in the ruddy glow of his workshop with a hammer in his hand like an illumination of the Forge Father from some old book in the temple.
“What about his boy?”
The smith just shrugged. “That I couldn’t say, sir.”
I left him to his work and went back out into the cold, heartless street. I had thought at the time that Wainwright had the look of a man who’d had enough, who just wanted to have his say to me before he died. It seemed I had been right about that.
I drew my cloak around me against the freezing wind and I walked, paying no mind to where I went. Eventually my feet took me down the alley that led to Old Kurt’s door. There was a rat nailed to it, as was his custom, and it didn’t look more than a day or two old. I raised a fist and knocked, and the door opened before I had the chance to call out the words.
“Piety,” Old Kurt said, and there was neither welcome nor friendship in his voice.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked him.
The old man spat on the cobbles beside my boot, his seamed and creased lips working as he thought on it for a moment. He must have had eighty years to him at least, but his eyes were still bright with a sharp intellect.
“Aye,” he said at last. “Might be I’ve a thing or two to say to you, in return.”
I nodded and let him lead me into his parlor, a cramped and filthy room filled with junk that he claimed was treasure. That sword that hung over the fireplace had once belonged to a king, or so he said. The skull on the windowsill with its temple bashed in had supposedly belonged to the same king. I had believed it, too, when I had been a lad.
The boy was there, sitting on the low stool by the fire where my own Billy had used to sit when Old Kurt was teaching him the cunning. Yan Wainwright’s son turned and looked at me, and turned away.
“That’s Wainwright’s boy,” I said to Kurt.
“That it is,” Kurt said, and waved me to another stool while he took the room’s only chair. “You knew his father, then?”
I told Old Kurt how Wainwright had come to me in the Tanner’s Arms a week ago, and what he had said. The old man just nodded, and I realized he already knew.
“It was hate kept him alive, I reckon,” Kurt told me. “The lad here brought him to me in a barrow after what happened. He was shrieking and burned, with his legs crushed to pulp by a falling timber. I took the ruin of his legs off with an axe and closed him up with the cunning, but still he should have died. Hate kept him going. Hate for those who took his world away.”
“You might have the right of that,” I had to admit.
“Boy turned up here two days ago,” Kurt went on, “and I knew that his da was dead. I weren’t surprised. I’d already heard how he came to see you, to say his piece. He were done after that, I reckon, nothing left in him. Drowned himself, the way I heard it.”
“I heard the same.”
Kurt ignored me and continued.
“But the boy come to me and he had a gold crown in his hand to give me, and for that I took him in. He don’t speak no more but maybe that’ll change, in time, and I’ll teach him if he’s got the spark to learn. If he ain’t, well, I’ll raise him anyway. I wonder how a boy like this came to have a gold crown, Tomas Piety. I wonder if perhaps that’s guilt money, for what someone might have done.”
I looked at the old man, and I remembered that he heard confession the same as me and every other priest in the city. He shouldn’t, to my mind, as he was no priest, but he did all the same and I realized he was waiting to hear one now.
I shouldn’t have done it, I knew that. That was twice in one day I had broken Ailsa’s trust, first to Bloody Anne and now to Old Kurt, but I said my confession to him that morning. I left Ailsa out of it, of course, and I never mentioned the crown, but I owned to the bombing of the Wheels and that was enough.
When I was done the old man just looked at me, and he said no words of forgiveness.
“Well, that’s something half the city already knew,” he said, and he spat into the fire to show me what he thought of it. “Tell me this, Tomas, while you’re in the mood for confessing your many and varied sins—what happens to those cunning folk who don’t join you when they’re told to? What happened to Arndt the cooper, from Rigger’s Alley?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” I said. “I’ve known you a long time, Old Kurt, and you taught Billy the Boy as well as you were able. I won’t come knocking on your door with my offer.”
“That ain’t what I fucking asked,” he hissed at me. “Arndt was found dead in the yard behind the Barrel o’ Tar and you know it. ‘Join or die,’ is that the lay of things?”
“What if it is?” I snapped at him. “I confessed to you, and Lady only knows why I did that, but you stay out of my head. If I find out you used the cunning on me to make me talk I’ll fucking gut you, Old Kurt.”
He laughed, a horrible sound that was thick with phlegm and malice.
“I’d like to see you try,” he said. “Now get the fuck out of my house.”
TWENTY-ONE
It was late when I finally got home, and I was frozen and hungry. I found Ailsa waiting for me, and she was in a cold fury.
“You told Anne,” she said, as soon as we were alone together in the drawing room.
I looked at her and I realized that yes, of course Rosie would have sent a runner as soon as Anne was gone, or perhaps she had even come herself. Rosie’s loyalty was first and foremost to Ailsa. Or perhaps it was to Anne by now, I wasn’t sure about that, but it certainly wasn’t to me.
“Aye, I did,” I said.
“You broke an oath sworn to me under the Queen’s Warrant. I could have you hanged as a traitor for that.”
I poured myself a brandy and stood close to the hearth as I drank it, soaking up warmth from the fire and the spirit both.
“I know,” I said.
“So why, pray tell, did you do it?”
I turned to look at Ailsa, at the lioness. I didn’t think she’d truly have me hanged and lose everything she had gained in Ellinburg, not now, but I wouldn’t have bet on it. I knew I had to try to make her understand.
“What we’re doing here,” I started, “I know it’s important, Ailsa, and I know why we’re doing it, but we’re ruining people all the same. My brother finally lost his mind last night, do you understand that? He ate human flesh, and he maybe lost his soul for it. Only the gods can say. We killed hundreds of folk, down in the Wheels, and . . . Anne’s my second. She has to support me, in everything I do, otherwise the Pious Men will tear themselves apart and we’ll have nothing. She’s spent all this time thinking I’ve been doing it just for me, destroying lives to line my purse, and I know her, Ailsa. That wasn’t sittin
g well with her and it wasn’t going to do, not for much longer it wasn’t. She had to hear the truth of things eventually or I’d have lost her.”
Ailsa looked into the fire for a long moment, and she sighed.
“Perhaps you’re right,” she said at last. “Perhaps. It’s done now, and nothing more to be said on it save for this—do not do it again!”
“No,” I said. I thought on what I had told Old Kurt that afternoon, and decided it was best to keep that to myself. I hadn’t mentioned the crown to him so it was none of Ailsa’s business, to my mind. “No, I won’t.”
“You had better not,” she said, her voice cracking like a whip in the empty room. “Now, there’s news.”
“Oh? What news?”
“From Dannsburg.”
I nodded. News from Dannsburg meant orders, most likely, and urgent ones at that. I pitied the rider who had braved the West Road in the snows. I refilled my glass and waited.
“These cunning women you have recruited,” she said. “I assume you still know where they both are?”
I nodded. There was Katrin the herbalist, in her shop in the Stink, and Gerta the midwife out in the west of the city who passed notes to Luka’s spies.
“Of course I do.”
“Good,” she said. “They’re to go to the capital. I will arrange a wagon and guards, and laborers to clear the road, but they have to go and they have to be on the road by Queensday at the latest.”
I blinked at her. “In this weather? And besides, that’s only three days away. These women have lives, and jobs, and Gerta has a family. I can’t just—”
“I don’t care,” Ailsa said, cutting me off. “They have to be rounded up and put on that wagon, and that’s all there is to it.”
“Why?”
She fixed me with a look.
“Because my orders say so,” she snapped. “And you need to find more of them. We’ve only recruited two, and stopped one other from joining the Skanians. That’s not good enough.”
“Maybe that’s all there is,” I said. “Them and Old Kurt, and he’s no use to anyone. The cunning is a rare thing, Ailsa.”
“Is it? The Skanians have magicians enough to make me think otherwise.”
“You’ve got a whole fucking house of magicians, in Dannsburg,” I pointed out.
“That’s different,” she said, although I couldn’t see how.
That made me think of something, though, some memory I couldn’t quite grasp. Something Old Kurt had said to me once, perhaps.
The look on her face told me that the time for questioning her was over. I sighed and nodded. If it had to be done, then it did, I supposed, although I couldn’t think what the two women would make of it, and I said as much.
“Tell them it’s an adventure,” she said. “Tell them it’s an honor, or their duty to you and the Pious Men, or even to the queen. You can tell them anything you like, but you will make it happen, Tomas.”
“Aye, right you are,” I said.
Fat Luka would make it happen, I knew that. He could sell water to a drowning man, could Fat Luka, and I knew he’d think of something. Failing that we would pay them, and failing that we would force them.
That was how business was done, in Ellinburg.
* * *
* * *
Three days later Katrin and Gerta were on a wagon on the West Road, headed for Dannsburg.
When the Queen’s Men say jump, you jump.
Governor Hauer had told me that once, and he’d had the right of it. Still, when I gave Fat Luka the same orders he had jumped just as high for me, so that was well and good.
The day after that Cook came to tell me she’d had word that Hanne had birthed a baby girl and was asking for her husband. I just nodded and thanked her. What I was going to do with that I had no idea. Jochan was still locked in Aunt Enaid’s coal cellar, too dangerous to be allowed near a newborn, or anyone else for that matter.
The weather that day was foul, and it matched my mood. Rain and hail whipped almost sideways outside the windows, bad enough that Billy the Boy hadn’t made his usual journey to Slaughterhouse Narrow to train with Cutter. Instead he was haunting the house like an ill-tempered ghost, sullen and withdrawn the way boys of that age get when their hands are idle.
“What’s wrong, lad?” I asked him when I finally caught him in my study, stealing a glass of my brandy. “Oh, drink if you want it, there’s plenty. But don’t let Ailsa see you drunk in the house or it’s me who’ll get the sharp side of her tongue.”
I earned a smile for that, and Billy almost looked like his old self again.
“Something’s not right, Uncle Tomas,” he told me.
I frowned at that, and I topped the lad’s glass up and got one for myself as well. I waved him into a chair and took the seat behind my desk, and I looked at him.
“Is Our Lady speaking to you?” I asked him.
“I don’t know,” Billy confessed, “and that’s part of what’s not right. There’s something . . . I don’t know.”
He looked sullen again then, and I didn’t want that.
“Is it something now, or something to come?” I prompted him.
Billy was a seer, as I have written, and that must have been a heavy burden to carry on shoulders so young.
“Both, I think,” Billy said, “but they might be different things.”
“Right,” I said, and took a sip of brandy. “Well, the captain always said that today matters more than tomorrow, for we may not live to see tomorrow. What do you think is wrong right now, Billy?”
“Old Kurt,” he said at once. He looked surprised to be saying it, like he hadn’t known what he was about to say until the words fell out of his mouth. Perhaps he hadn’t, at that. “Old Kurt’s sore at you, Uncle Tomas. He’ll make trouble later.”
“Aye, I’ll allow that might well be the lay of it,” I said. “We had words a few days ago, me and Kurt, and I don’t know that we parted friends.”
Billy nodded, and he looked relieved to have got that part of it right at least.
“It’s more than that, though,” he said. “Not today or tomorrow, but yesterday.”
“Really yesterday, do you mean? Or . . . before.”
“Before,” he said, and I knew he meant the war.
It’s a thing that has to be understood, that the war broke a lot of strong men. It had broken Cookpot and Jochan, and it had almost broken me, and we were grown men and Jochan and me at least were no strangers to violence even before we were conscripted. When we had found Billy, in the ruins of Messia, he had been a child. An orphan child living wild in the devastation like an animal, killing to survive. A child who joined our regiment, and then went through the Hell of Abingon with the rest of us. A child who was touched by a goddess or possessed by a devil or maybe both, and who could truly say which was the truth of that?
I loved Billy, in my way, but I’ll admit that he scared me, too.
“Aye,” I said. “It’s a hard thing, Billy, I know that. If you want to talk to me about the war, then I hope you know that you can.”
“I know,” Billy said, but he said no more about it.
“Well,” I said, and took another drink. “That’s up to you, of course.”
“I don’t want to go, but I know that I will,” he said suddenly.
I blinked at him.
“Go where, Billy?”
“Dannsburg,” he said.
“You don’t have to go to Dannsburg,” I assured him. “I know Katrin and Gerta did, but that’s different. They’re cunning folk, aye, but you’re my . . . my nephew, Billy. You don’t have to go.”
“I do, and it’ll be bad,” he said, his voice dropping to a hoarse whisper. “That’s the tomorrow. You’ll see.”
PART TWO
TWENTY-TWO
Spring finally came to
Ellinburg after one of the hardest winters in memory.
Even the midwinter festival had been a subdued affair, with not enough food or work to go around among the common folk. Ailsa and I had marked the occasion by enduring a joyless midwinter ball at Governor Hauer’s invitation. But the real highlight of the season had been the day I signed the papers of law that made Billy officially my son.
My adopted son, to be sure, but I would take what Our Lady offered and be thankful for it. After that day in my study when Billy had got drunk on my brandy and told me his fears for the future, I had resolved to protect him the best way I could. His name was Piety now, and in Ellinburg that was the strongest shield that I could offer.
To be sure, that name hadn’t saved my brother from his own madness. His daughter was three months old now and still he hadn’t seen her, or even thought to ask if she had been born alive. He remained confined to Aunt Enaid’s cellar, and the city was the safer for it. That had been hard to explain to Hanne, and she had wept once she finally grasped my meaning, but eventually even she had come to see that it was in the best interests of the child that she held so close to her ample bosom.
That was done, then, and no more to be said about it. I hired maids to look after Hanne and to help her with the baby, and I put guards on her house. She was my sister-by-law now, after all, and I wouldn’t see her go without or come into harm’s way. Family is important, as I had once told young Desh. Perhaps one day her husband could come back to her, but until then she was still a Piety and that gave her a certain status in Ellinburg.
The winter snows melted away eventually and the West Road became passable again, and a rider came to our house.
“There’s word from Dannsburg,” Ailsa told me that evening. “We are summoned to the capital, Tomas.”
I remembered Billy’s words to me in the winter, his fears for the future, and I swallowed.
“Us and Billy,” I said, and I knew I was right.
“Yes,” she said, a slight frown creasing her perfectly powdered brow. “Yes, that’s right. Were you listening at the door while I spoke to the messenger?”
