by Peter McLean
“What?” I asked.
“You do realize the army isn’t coming, don’t you?” she said, keeping her voice low.
“You said—”
“Yes, well, I said that for Anne’s benefit. Morale, and all that. Dannsburg will never admit that a crown-appointed governor has sold a major industrial city to an enemy nation. It’s absolutely impossible. Sending in the army would be difficult to hide, to speak lightly of it. My messenger will apprise Lord Vogel of the situation, but that’s all. This is upon me to resolve. This is what the Queen’s Men are for, Tomas.”
“And that’s why you’ve got me. This is what I’m for, isn’t it?”
The lioness met my eyes with a pitiless stare.
“Precisely.”
* * *
* * *
The magicians came at dusk.
There were four of them, flanked by twenty of the City Guard, and they didn’t come down the narrows after all. They marched straight down the main road toward the barricade, and the shield of their magic turned the crossbow bolts we loosed at them and sent them swerving harmlessly away into the buildings that lined the street.
One of them, a tall woman in a purple robe, raised a thin, pale hand. The cart that formed half the barricade simply exploded, and so did the two men who had been crouching behind it. I heard curses and screams and the sound of someone vomiting. Crossbows thumped uselessly and found no targets.
The woman fell back, looking wearied by her effort, and a youngish man with long hair sent a blaze of flame from his hands through the hole in the barricade. Someone shrieked, burning in their own personal Hell as the fire consumed them.
The Guard charged into the breach and there we held them, blade to blade.
Siege and fire and screams in the gathering darkness, and it was like Abingon all over again. I heard Bloody Anne bellowing orders, and the crank of ratchets as crossbows were reloaded. Chaos and smoke and shouting. I heard a deafening crack and rumble as a house was torn in half by magic to collapse on top of half a dozen Stink folk. Clouds of dust filled the street, choking and blinding us.
Abingon.
Somewhere in the darkness, Jochan was praying at the top of his voice as he fought and killed. Who needed cannon when they had magicians?
Well, I had magicians too.
“Billy, Mina, Matthias! Go!”
The three of them fought as one unit, as I had taught them. That was an old raiding trick of the captain’s. When you are outnumbered, you concentrate the strength you have on a single target at a time, and you crush it without mercy and move on to the next. It had worked when we raided the enemy baggage train on the road from Messia, and what had worked once would work again.
My three cunning folk struck together, and the long-haired young man fell shrieking. A second later his heart exploded out of his chest in a gout of blood and shattered ribs.
“Filthy whore’s rancid pus-leaking cunt . . .” I heard Mina snarling as she advanced, with Billy at her side.
The Skanians were no fools, though. They knew my trick, and they had tricks of their own. Two of the men turned on Matthias together while the woman threw Billy and Mina back into the burning barricade and held them pinned there by some force of her mind that I can’t pretend to understand. Matthias was the only adult among my cunning folk, and they had obviously assumed he was the most powerful of the three.
There I think they were wrong.
“Hold the line!” Anne roared. “Hold, you cunts!” Battle shock didn’t seem to touch her. It never had, not in Abingon and not now. Bloody Anne had lived through a lifetime’s worth of horror before she ever went to war. “Hold the fucking line!”
We held.
Matthias fought well, insofar as I can understand such things. Light flashed between him and the two Skanians, something like lightning that made the dust-choked air feel tight and dry and burned. I rammed Mercy into a guardsman’s ribs and ripped her clear as he fell in a spray of blood, then drove my shoulder into another to turn him before he could stab my brother. Jochan’s axe split his head and he grinned at me with savage joy while one of Florence’s Flower Girls opened a man’s throat behind him. Cutter moved like a wraith in the dust-choked darkness, like the very heart and soul of Abingon, and wherever his hands went, men died.
One of the pair of Skanian magicians caught fire and pinwheeled into the middle of the road, waving his arms and screaming as he burned. Matthias hurled something at the other, something black and blurred that shrieked like a thing alive as it moved, but it detonated in the air between them and did nothing. Matthias threw his arms out to his sides and lightning crackled between his hands as he snarled laughter into the face of battle.
“. . . plague-raddled donkey-fucking bitch!” Mina screamed, and the Skanian woman’s intestines exploded out of her mouth in a fountain of blood and filth.
Billy the Boy was free and moving then, but he was a second too late. The last Skanian magician rallied, and Matthias Wolf went in so many directions at once he might as well have been hit by a cannonball. There wasn’t enough of him left to bury afterward.
Mina and Billy turned on the remaining magician with hungry murder in their eyes. I cannot bring myself to record here what those two strange, damaged children did to him.
He died, and that is enough.
The Guard were already falling back, and those of us who still had crossbows sent bolts flying after them. More than one found its mark and left a guardsman sprawled dead in the street to be trampled by his fleeing fellows. I turned and saw Bloody Anne and Rosie standing each with an arm around the other’s waist and a crossbow in her free hand, looks of grim triumph on their faces. They were made for each other, those two, and no mistake.
That was how the second battle of the Stink was won.
FIFTY-TWO
We nursed our wounded back to the Tanner’s Arms and set all the fresh men we had to repairing and manning the barricade, but they didn’t try us again that night.
Hari brought out what food and brandy we had left, and I sat and drank until I gradually felt myself begin to relax. That evening had been hard for most of my crew, I understood that. The fight at the barricade had been like Abingon all over again, a window back to a past that none of us ever wanted to see again. For veterans, that was a hard thing.
For the new men, men who hadn’t ever been to war, it was much worse. I saw one of Florence’s crew cradling a young lad’s head in her filthy lap while he wept for what he had seen and done that day. She was a hard, scarred killer with the look of a veteran about her. I didn’t know her, but she held that boy while he cried, and for that alone I respected her. That was true comradeship, and it was good to see.
Aunt Enaid was offering what comfort she could as well, soothing brows or telling bawdy jokes, whatever each man needed. There’s an art to that sort of thing, to knowing a man and the damage done to him, and how best to approach healing it, and it was something my aunt was very good at.
Ailsa came to me after a while, and she joined me at my table. With the Tanner’s so crowded everyone was sharing, even me, and my brother and Sam and two men I didn’t even know were at my corner table with me.
“How are you?” Ailsa asked, and I knew what she meant.
“Well enough,” I said.
My battle shock hadn’t come out anything like so badly that day as it had after the sit-down with Vhent, and I thought I knew why that was. Anne hadn’t been there at the sit-down, but today she had. With Bloody Anne bellowing orders in the darkness it had felt like my war, the one I knew I had survived, not the one I died in every night in my dreams. Nothing seemed quite so bad when Anne was there beside me.
“I need to speak to you, in private. Come to the back room with me.”
I nodded and got to my feet, and stepped over the man beside me who had either fallen asleep or simply passed out
from exhaustion. He had his head cradled in his folded arms on the table, and every so often he whimpered in his sleep. I let him be and followed my wife.
“What is it?” I asked, once we were alone.
Crowded the Tanner’s might be, but the back room with its long table and twelve chairs remained closed to all but the actual Pious Men. This was our inner sanctum, and some things had to remain sacred even in this time of war.
Ailsa stood with her hands folded in front of her and looked at me, her dark eyes appraising. Those were the eyes of the lioness and no mistake, and the lioness was made of stone and iron.
“I have something for you,” she said, after a long moment had passed.
“What? You’re giving me a gift, now of all times?”
“No, not that,” she said. “Not that at all. This was made for you when we were in Dannsburg, in readiness for the time when you should be given it.”
She reached into her belt pouch and took something out, and handed it to me. It was a thick piece of folded leather, and it came to me as I took it from her that I had seen its like before. She carried one herself.
I swallowed. I had to be mistaken, surely? In Our Lady’s name, this couldn’t be what I thought it was.
“Open it.”
I did as she said, and I looked down at what was inside.
The leather was thick and strong but of the very highest quality, butter soft in my hands, and it unfolded around an ornate seal. I looked down at that seal, a white-gold rose set upon a golden crown to represent the royal arms.
I knew what that was.
I swallowed and found that I had no words to say to her.
“I have the Queen’s Warrant,” she said. “That is an official license to do absolutely anything, with the full and unconditional backing and funding of the crown. It means that I am above the law. I am utterly untouchable. Lord Vogel gave me a second one before we left Dannsburg, and told me to wait until the time was right to give it to you. This one is for you, Tomas. Welcome to the Queen’s Men.”
* * *
* * *
I stayed in the back room after Ailsa left me. I slept a little, as much as I could, but my head was busy with too many things to allow me the rest I needed, however tired I was.
Ailsa had given me the Queen’s Warrant and welcomed me into the Queen’s Men.
Me, a Queen’s Man.
Do what your father says or the Queen’s Men will come and take you away.
The Queen’s Men were what people like us used to frighten our children with, like the monster that lives under the bed. That was only in stories, though, the sort of scary stories that children enjoy because they know they’re not real.
The Queen’s Men were.
The Queen’s Men were very real indeed. They were subtle, unseen, and officially nonexistent. The Queen’s Men made people disappear.
Now that was something to be frightened of.
Was that what I was now, something to frighten little children with?
I had to allow that I probably was.
I felt there should have been more ceremony to it, in some way, some anointing into the knighthood, but perhaps that would come in time. If I survived the week, anyway, and that was in no way a certainty. This felt very much like a battlefield promotion to me, the way the line was filled when an officer fell.
I passed the night in fitful unease, turning and turning in my chair at the head of the empty table and thinking over what Ailsa had given me and the dark implications of it. It meant she trusted me implicitly and that was good, and it must mean that Vogel did too. I supposed that was good as well, to a point, but I had met Vogel and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be the sort of man who would earn his trust. Vogel was as close to a devil walking as I ever wanted to meet, I had thought at the time, and he had done nothing to change my opinion of him.
I was a prince, in Ellinburg, and I hadn’t had a boss since I had turned my back on bricklaying as a young man and become a businessman. I worked for myself, and I liked it that way. I didn’t know who I worked for now, Ailsa or Vogel. Vogel, I supposed. Ailsa had told me how each Queen’s Man ran their own operation like an independent crew and seemed to answer only to him, with no chain of command between them. But then she was right there in Ellinburg with me, so why do this? Why give me the Queen’s Warrant now?
An hour before dawn I still had no answers. I gave sleep up for a bad job and went out the back to take a piss, and then had a wash from the freezing water in the horse trough. That woke me up some, and afterward I walked softly through to the common room. Folk were sleeping where they had sat the night before, or curled up on the floor under tables with their coats over them for blankets. I knew Ailsa was asleep upstairs, in the room next to Anne’s that Mika had given up for her. Aunt Enaid was sprawled on the floor in front of the fire with Brak wrapped in her heavy arms, holding him close to her heart even in sleep. Mika had the watch at the door and he gave me a nod, but he held his peace for the sake of those sleeping, and I did the same.
In the kitchen I found Billy the Boy and Mina. They were entwined in each other’s arms on the threadbare rug in front of the banked fire, both asleep with their clothes in wild disarray. I thought perhaps they had found a closeness together the night before, young though they both were, and that was good. If they were old enough to fight and kill, then they were old enough to fuck, to my mind.
I raided some salt pork from Hari’s dwindling supplies and drew myself a mug of small beer, and I sat at the table to break my fast alone.
The sun was coming up outside now, and the kitchen’s small window had no shutters. After a while Billy stirred in the light and sat up, disentangling himself from Mina’s arms with a gentleness that was quite touching to see.
“Papa?” he whispered.
I saw the look on his face, and I had to smile. I had been his age once myself, for all that it seemed like it had been a lifetime ago.
“Shhh, don’t wake her,” I murmured, and nodded toward the door.
I took up my mug and my food and led the boy through to the back room where we might talk alone.
“I like her, Papa,” Billy said, his face red with embarrassment but with something in his eyes that spoke of pride as well. As far as I knew Billy the Boy had never been with a woman before. “I like her a lot. Please don’t tell Mama.”
“Aye, that’s well and good, and I won’t tell your ma if you don’t want me to,” I said. “There’s no shame in it, though, so long as both are willing.”
“She was,” Billy said, and now he had a shy smile on his face.
“Good,” I said again, and found that I had run out of words to say about that. I cleared my throat and looked at him. “You did well last night, both of you, but I need you to conserve your strength in case Hauer has more magicians to send against us.”
“He hasn’t,” Billy said at once, and now he was speaking with the voice of Billy the Seer, Billy who was never wrong when he said that a thing was so. “The cunning is a rare thing. They threw everything they had left at us last night and we beat them, Mina and me. She’s very strong. There won’t be any more magicians, Papa.”
The cunning was a rare thing in Ellinburg, that I had to allow, and apparently it was in Dannsburg as well, but was it so rare in Skania? Billy certainly seemed to think so, but how the fuck would he know? Did Our Lady truly speak to him, or through him? I had no idea. I was a priest, not a mystic, after all, and that was a question for mystics.
“Aye, well, I hope not,” I had to say. “All the same, lad, you need to rest.”
“I’m not so tired,” Billy said. “Mina taught me a thing, how to steal another magician’s strength, and I can do that now. We feasted on that last one before we pulled him apart.”
“That’s good,” I said, although I didn’t really understand what he was talking about.
I didn’t understand it, but I wasn’t sure that it sounded healthy, to feast on another man. I remembered my brother in the snow-swept moonlight of the previous winter, the blood black around his mouth. I remembered the pieces of human meat stuck between his teeth and how I had thought maybe he had lost his soul for it. Perhaps this wasn’t the same thing, not exactly, but it made me uneasy nonetheless.
The cunning was a mystery to me, as I have written. I have no talent for it at all, no more than most people have, and I could only accept on faith that Billy knew what he was talking about. I’m not an overly religious man, priest though I may be, but some things I’ll take on faith. Billy’s ability was one of them.
I sighed and sipped my small beer, tasting the oaty thickness of it on my tongue, and I put such matters out of my mind. Small beer was the taste of breakfast, the taste of having lived to see another dawn.
It tasted good.
FIFTY-THREE
Three hours after dawn a runner came from the barricade at the end of the street, some Stink man with holes in the elbows of his shirt, and he pushed his way through the groggy crowd in the Tanner’s to speak to me.
“It’s Cap’n Rogan, sir. He wants to talk to you.”
My brother was awake by then, and in a foul temper brought on by brandy and battle shock.
“He can fuck himself,” Jochan growled, but I raised a hand to quiet him.
“Be quiet, boy,” Aunt Enaid snapped at him, in the voice that we both remembered from our childhood. I thought perhaps her head might be somewhat the worse for drink that morning too, and her mood was no better than his.
“I’ll see him,” I said. “I’ll see him, but he comes alone and he comes unarmed.”
“He is alone, sir,” the man said. “All alone; there’s no Guard in sight anywhere on the streets. And he’s not wearing his right uniform, neither.”
