by Peter McLean
‘Someone has to,’ Ailsa snapped.
‘Aye, of course, but he hardly seems . . . regal.’
‘Of course he doesn’t,’ she said. ‘He’s a weakling and a fool, but what do you suggest, Tomas? We got through the last month by simply pretending that the queen was ill and carrying on as normal, but that was hardly going to do forever. The governing council may look after the day-to-day details of the bureaucracy but they don’t rule and they never will. The last thing this country needs is power in the hands of the sort of people capable of getting elected to councils. No, there must be a monarch, and as the princess is too young to rule, that means there must be a regent. If it has to be him, then so be it. If he needs guidance, which he obviously will, then that guidance will be provided to him.’
‘I see,’ I said.
I left the question unspoken, and Ailsa chose not to answer it.
It didn’t take a great deal of intellect to see who would be providing that guidance.
Chapter 11
‘I want to see Mama.’
I looked at Billy, and sighed.
‘Aye, lad, I know you do,’ I said.
It was late afternoon, and the sounds floating in from the streets outside the Bountiful Harvest were frankly astonishing. I’d been trying to sleep but I’d had to give it up for a bad job, and now I was back downstairs in the private dining room with Fat Luka and the lad. Anne was somehow asleep in her room despite the noise outside. I could hear wailing and keening, a public outpouring of shock and grief that was nothing short of ridiculous.
The queen herself led a full military triumph through the city when victory in the south was announced, and the cheers all but reached heaven itself. Everyone rejoiced in the streets, and do you know why? There were agents of the crown spread throughout the crowd to lead those cheers, and Queen’s Men to note the names of any who did not join in.
I remembered Ailsa’s father telling me that the previous year, in hushed tones that said he was fearful of his own servants overhearing him, perhaps informing on him.
In Dannsburg, you show respect to the crown. You show your love for the queen publicly and loudly and often, or you disappear and are never seen again.
It seemed you showed grief the same way, if you knew what was good for you.
‘So can I come? To the palace, I mean?’
‘Aye, I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Half the city will be there, mind, and I don’t know we’ll get anywhere near her, but aye. You can come if you want.’
‘Thanks, Papa,’ he said, and showed me a grin that I hadn’t seen on his face for far too long.
A thought struck me just then.
‘Billy,’ I said, ‘listen to me for a moment. I don’t know exactly how it will be, at the palace. I might just be out in the crowd with everyone else but I might not, you understand. If I have to go inside and talk to some people, people that I work with, then you keep absolutely quiet, do you understand me? Luka will be coming as well, and if we get separated then you stick with Luka and you come back here and wait for me. Will you do that for me?’
‘Yes, Papa,’ he said. ‘Is there going to be trouble?’
I thought of Iagin, and how he must have spent his day.
There will be no unrest.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t think so, but there’s going to be a fuck of a lot of people and that’s always a danger in itself. You stick with Luka, you both hear me?’
‘Aye, boss,’ Luka said.
‘Yes, Papa,’ Billy said again, and I nodded.
I was probably worrying about nothing, of course, but then parents do that where their children are concerned and Billy was my son in every way that mattered. Luka would look after him, I knew that. Anne would be coming as well, but I wanted her with me.
If there was trouble, I definitely wanted Anne with me. The right person for the right job, always, and Bloody Anne was a fucking force of nature in a close-quarters fight.
That was how she had earned her name in the first place, back in Messia.
*
Sunset saw us standing in the parade ground before the palace, along with half of fucking Dannsburg. If Ailsa was there then I had no idea where, but no doubt she was. Inside the palace somewhere, I could only assume. I could have got in there myself, of course, but not with Billy and probably not with Anne or Luka, either. The crush of the crowd was overpowering, and Billy and Anne and me were actually holding hands to keep together as the surge of humanity moved around us like a living thing. Luka just was, beside me, his bulk like an immovable rock in the swirling tide of people.
The keening and wailing of the afternoon had died away to a low murmur of expectation, but the great banners that flew all across the city were standing at half-staff and there wasn’t a man, woman or child in that crowd without a black sash or armband of mourning. The death of a queen was a serious thing, and even more so when no one could ever be sure who was watching them.
‘What’s happening, Papa?’ Billy asked beside me, having to raise his voice to make himself heard.
‘The Prince Regent is about to show himself, to assure us everything will be all right,’ I said, as much for the benefit of those around me as anything else.
The Queen’s Men have no uniform or insignia, and as far as those around me were concerned I was just another reasonably wealthy-looking member of the general public. No one gave me a second look, standing there holding hands with my son. If Anne drew any stares, and perhaps she did in her men’s coat and britches, then the long scar on her face and the daggers at her belt were enough to tell folk to be wise and hold their peace about it. My bodyguard, perhaps they thought, some mercenary from the war years. Those were common enough among the middle classes in those days.
‘When?’ Billy said, obviously growing bored and restless.
I glanced up towards the balcony just as a great number of footmen with lanterns in their hands emerged through the tall glass doors and spread out behind the colonnaded stone rail.
‘About now, would be my guess.’
True enough, the newly announced Prince Regent strode out a moment later, in the immaculate crimson and white dress uniform of a cavalry general. His chest was a constellation of medals that I couldn’t possibly imagine had been earned in combat, and he wore a wide black sash of mourning across the whole affair. At his side was the Princess Crown Royal.
The little girl was swathed in black from head to toe, in a huge gown of midnight silk brocade. Her blonde hair was covered with a black silk cap, making her look like something between a nun and a wealthy child’s porcelain doll. Even at that distance the effect was strangely disturbing.
‘That the princess?’ Anne rasped in my ear, and I nodded. ‘Fuck, she looks like a handful.’
Odious child, I remembered Ailsa saying, although to me she just looked like a sad and overwhelmed little girl.
‘Aye, perhaps,’ I replied, keeping my voice low. ‘We’ll have to see, I suppose.’
The Prince Regent was speaking now, giving some address that no one more than twenty yards deep in the crowd could possibly have heard. I realised it didn’t matter in the slightest what he was saying, anyway. He was there, that was all that mattered; he was seen, and he was addressing the crowd, and he looked the part. Those who couldn’t hear, which was virtually everyone, would be told tomorrow what he had said. If that didn’t match the words heard by those at the front then what did it matter? The truth is so easily drowned by the words of the majority that it counts for little, in my experience.
The prince spoke for a good long while, and I’ve no idea what he said. Once he was done the crowd erupted in cheers, and the Princess Crown Royal stepped forwards to the rail of the balcony. I thought her father startled somewhat when she did that, but she didn’t speak and even if she had, no one would have heard her over the cheering anyway. She just stood there, her pale hands resting on the stone balustrade, staring out over the crowd.
I cheered as loud as I co
uld and Anne and Luka followed my example, encouraging those around us into a greater frenzy of adoration for what remained of the royal family. That was how succession was handled, in Dannsburg.
After that there was nothing more, and the Prince Regent waved to the crowd once more and then turned and put a tentative hand on his daughter’s shoulder and led her back inside the palace. The footmen followed and took the lanterns with them, and with that, it was over.
‘Well, that’s done,’ Anne said beside me, and it seemed she had no more words to say on the subject.
It was a mummer’s show, pure and simple, but I had come to realise and even accept the necessity of such things. People were leaving all around us, the human tide flowing thick and slow as treacle towards the parade ground gates. It would take hours for those closest to the palace to get out, I was sure, and if there wasn’t at least one fight along the way it would be a miracle. When you cram that many people together in one place, whatever the occasion, there always is. A jostled shoulder, the wrong foot trod on in the crush, that was all it took. I tightened my grip on Billy’s hand and looked around me.
Three of the Palace Guard were working their way slowly through the crowds towards us, and I didn’t think that was an accident.
‘Just keep still,’ I said, for all that I made it sound easier than it was.
Luka’s bulk helped, to be sure, and Anne’s sharp elbows and sharper looks helped clear a small space around us, but all the same we struggled to hold our place in the crush. The three guardsmen reached us in the end, and I saw that the one who led them was the sergeant who had been guarding the private gate that morning.
That guard sergeant is on my payroll, Ailsa had told me.
‘Mr Piety?’ he asked me, making it sound like a question, but I was sure he remembered me. Ailsa had introduced us for a reason, after all.
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘These are with me.’
He frowned at Anne and Luka and Billy, and shook his head.
‘You’re invited, but only you and one other. Lady Ailsa wants you.’
Billy’s head snapped up at that, and the look of hope in his eyes drove sense from my head. I’d wanted Anne with me, of course I had. I’d said before we left the inn that if this happened, then Billy was to stay with Luka and Anne was to come with me, but he’d heard now and I was struggling to find a way to refuse him.
I want to see Mama.
I knew he did, the poor lad, and I found that I didn’t have it in me to say no. I had lost my own ma so young, and I didn’t want Billy to have to go through the same pain of loss that I had.
I had no idea what was about to happen and I’d wanted Anne’s daggers with me in case it was anything ill, but it came to me then that Billy was even more dangerous than Anne was.
In his way he was, anyway.
‘Aye,’ I said at last, and squeezed the lad’s hand. ‘Me and our Billy here, then. She’ll want to see him, I’m sure.’
I had no idea if that was true, of course, but Billy smiled fit to burst and I could only pray that it was.
‘Should we wait?’ Luka asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You two head back. If . . . well, Leonov will know how to get to me, if need be.’
Luka just nodded at that. Leonov was Iagin’s right-hand man in Grachyev’s organisation, and he was almost certainly on the payroll of the Queen’s Men. I don’t know what I thought I was expecting to happen, but I was fast coming to learn that within our family of spies and torturers and assassins it was well to build your own support network as fast as possible and trust your actual colleagues as little as you could get away with.
I squeezed Anne’s arm, bid her goodnight and let the guard sergeant and his men clear a path through the crowd for Billy and me.
We headed for the palace, and whatever was awaiting us within.
Chapter 12
It took a while to get there even with the three guardsmen forging through the crowd ahead of us, but once we were in sight of the nearest entrance another three came forward into the press of bodies to help clear the way. I was aware of heads turning in the crowd to watch us pass, obviously wondering who we might be. I was well dressed but not conspicuously so, and Billy was much the same. We could have been any reasonably well-to-do merchant and his son, but no more than that. But middling merchants don’t get invited into the palace, do they? It seemed that the affair could have been handled a sight more subtly than it had been, but perhaps that was the point. Perhaps the Queen’s Men liked to keep the populace always in doubt, always wondering if the middling merchant they knew might be someone with hidden connections, someone they had to watch and worry about. In all honesty it wouldn’t have surprised me, in Dannsburg.
At last we were ushered inside and a set of heavy doors swung closed behind us, shutting out the constant noise of the crowd. It was cool and quiet in the marble hall within, and there Ailsa was waiting for us.
‘Mama!’ Billy exclaimed.
He broke free of my hand and ran to her, and wrapped his arms around her in a great hug. It came to me then that he was slightly taller than her, now.
‘Hello, Billy,’ Ailsa said, and she returned his hug with a warmth that I desperately wanted to believe was genuine.
‘I missed you, Mama,’ Billy said, his face buried in her neck as he held her.
‘I’ve missed you too,’ she said, but she was looking at me over his shoulder as she said it and I wondered exactly how to take that.
Don’t be a fool, I told myself.
‘Ailsa,’ I said, giving her a nod.
She stepped back from Billy’s embrace, but allowed him to continue holding her hand like a lad half his age might have done. He had perhaps fifteen or so years to him by then, no one was really sure, but we were the only parents he had known since he had escaped the horrors of Messia as a ragged orphan child. I knew it meant a lot to him, to have a family again. It meant a lot to me too. The war had hurt Billy, I knew that as well, hurt him in the mind where it didn’t show. In some ways he was much younger than his years, and I knew I had to remember that. If he could take some comfort from holding Ailsa’s hand and calling her Ma then I wished him well of it.
‘Come, Tomas,’ she said. ‘You are expected.’
I’d had a feeling that I might be.
Ailsa led me deeper into the palace, Billy still clinging to her hand as we walked. There were Palace Guard everywhere but they paid us no mind, their eyes seeming to look straight through us as though we didn’t exist. Perhaps it was best, for a guardsman, to pretend never to see the comings and goings of the Queen’s Men. It was certainly safer, I was sure. Word had no doubt got around about the six of their number who had simply disappeared one night and not been seen again. Soldiers gossip like no one else, after all, but beyond that there was no reaction to our presence.
Dannsburg, I had to remind myself, was nothing at all like Ellinburg. Dannsburg was like nowhere else I had even heard of, and the palace was the strangest place of all.
We ascended a sweeping stair and walked the length of a corridor, the stone underfoot giving way to smooth polished wood and then thick carpets. We were nearing the private apartments of the royal family, I realised, and still not a single guard moved to intercept us. Ailsa’s face was obviously known by everyone in the palace by then and I suspected mine would be soon too. She stopped and opened a door that led into a well-appointed study. I had been expecting to find the Prince Regent sitting there behind the desk, but he was nowhere to be seen.
Lord Vogel was waiting for us instead.
‘Come in, both of you,’ he said. ‘And who’s this young man?’
If I have to talk to some people, people that I work with, then you keep absolutely quiet, do you understand me?
Billy had obviously remembered my words and he said nothing, although I knew very well that Vogel already knew exactly who he was. Lord Vogel knew everything; I had already made my peace with that fact, for all that I didn’t like it.
‘This is my son, Billy,’ I said. ‘Our son.’
Ailsa nodded shortly, but said nothing.
‘The child magician,’ Vogel said. ‘The magician’s bane, to be precise. Aren’t you, boy?’
Addressed directly, Billy had no choice but to answer.
‘What does that mean?’ he asked.
‘Means you killed a magus,’ I said. ‘Last year, Billy. You remember.’
‘Yes, Papa,’ he said.
‘Yes indeed,’ said Vogel. ‘Welcome to the royal palace, young Billy.’
Billy shuffled his feet and drew a bit closer to Ailsa, and said nothing.
‘Billy, this is Lord Vogel, the Lord Chief Judiciar,’ Ailsa said. ‘He’s a very important man.’
Billy looked up at Vogel then, and for an awful moment I was worried he was going to make one of his prophetic announcements. That, I thought, could have been very unfortunate.
‘It went well, I thought,’ I said, to cut him off. ‘I’m sure the Prince Regent said what was required of him.’
Vogel’s thin lips twitched at that.
‘And what exactly is it you suppose he said, Tomas?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said, ‘and I know it doesn’t matter in the slightest.’
‘Quite,’ Vogel said, and now his mouth formed the razorblade smile that I would forever associate with him.
‘What was the princess doing out there?’ Ailsa asked.
‘The gods only know,’ Vogel snapped at her. ‘It should have been you on that balcony with him, not the princess.’
‘We agreed to have no presence on the balcony,’ she said. ‘There’s only so far I can stretch my influence before people begin to question how I have risen so high when I am only a knight.’
‘Yes,’ Vogel said. ‘That’s quite the position you put us in, Ailsa, as you well know. We could have had you married to a duke by now, and then nobody would be questioning anything.’
Ailsa stiffened as though he had slapped her.
‘I did what had to be done at the time to achieve the objective.’
