Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  We made our way through streets that thronged with people of all colours and creeds, surrounded by conversations in a dozen languages that I didn’t know. I saw dusky Alarians, blond Skanians, and men and women darker of skin than Black Billy was. From Varnburg our country mostly exported wool and broadcloth, leather goods and wine and brandy, and we imported silk and salt and lamp oil, spices and hemp and tea, along with iron to meet the growing demands of our foundries. That much at least I had learned from the books in the library of the governor’s hall back in Ellinburg. There were merchants in the streets from perhaps as many as twenty countries I didn’t even know the names of, if not more.

  I am not an educated man, and although my brief time in school had at least taught me how to read and write and figure simple accounts, I knew little of history and nothing at all of geography, and that shamed me now. I resolved then that when I had the time, if I ever had the time, I would remedy that. I thought of the great library in Dannsburg, and the university, and all the knowledge they must contain. I thought I might enrol Billy there as a student, when he was older. As the son of a wealthy knight he had no need of a trade, of course, and would live the life of a gentleman, but to my mind a gentleman should know certain things. I didn’t, and I wouldn’t have my son carry that same shame. No, I would see him educated one way or another. All the same, such thoughts did nothing but remind me how much Lord Vogel seemed to hate those noble institutions of learning and want to shut them down.

  I wondered why that was.

  Ill-informed and ignorant people are easier to suppress and control.

  Ailsa had told me that once, and I dare say she had the right of it.

  ‘They’ll know us there,’ Rosie said, breaking my train of thought. ‘They’ll know the Queen’s Warrant, at least. The Sea Keep holds to the queen’s peace.’

  ‘Aye, that’s good,’ I said, but I was beginning to wonder if it truly was.

  *

  We presented ourselves at the gates of the Sea Keep at dusk, Anne and Rosie and me. We had left Beast and Billy and our coachman at the inn Beast had found for us close to the city gates. A sliding hatch in the door opened, and the narrowed eyes that looked out were about as welcoming as you might expect. One did not call at the door of a duchess uninvited, after all. I said nothing, just held up the Queen’s Warrant and let the guardswoman on the other side of the great oak-and-iron doors stare at it until the realisation sank in.

  The Queen’s Men had come to her door, and no good ever comes of that.

  At last the sally port opened, and the guardswoman offered a stiff bow as we filed inside.

  ‘My lord,’ she said, her voice cracking in a dry mouth.

  The Queen’s Warrant conveys fear wherever it is shown, and that’s a thing that has long interested me. If you’ve done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear, but everyone fears the Queen’s Men. Does that mean that everyone is hiding some wrong or another? I doubted it, but what would I know? That was a philosophical question, and I knew little of philosophy. What I did know was that I was now standing in the great hall of the Sea Keep of Varnburg with Bloody Anne and Rosie at my side. That was all the crew I needed that night, and that meant it worked and in Our Lady’s name fuck why it did, it just did and I would take that and be thankful for it. Results were what mattered, not the how and the why of it. That wasn’t my problem. I’m just a soldier, and I follow my orders.

  I was just following orders.

  *

  The lad was in floods of tears, and that was only to be expected.

  ‘I’m sorry, Your Grace,’ I said, in the private family drawing room I had been reluctantly shown into. ‘Your father suffered an attack of the heart. It was very quick, and he would have felt no pain.’

  ‘Your Grace is my father, not me,’ the boy managed through streams of snot. ‘He’s . . . he’s my papa!’

  He broke down once more, and I cleared my throat and sat forward on the plush red velvet couch I had been ushered to by a terrified-looking footman. Anne and Rosie were waiting in the great hall while servants and messengers hurried back and forth. There were Queen’s Men in the Sea Keep, and all was in turmoil and disarray.

  ‘I know, son,’ I said. ‘I know, and it’s a hard thing, but there it is. You are the Grand Duke of Varnburg now, and you are needed in the capital.’

  The newly made Dowager Duchess of Varnburg was dry-eyed, her expression murderous behind her expensively made eyeglasses. Their gold half-moon rims shone in the lamplight as she stared at me over the finely ground lenses. She had some forty years to her, I supposed, although something in her manner made her seem much older.

  ‘Sir Tomas,’ she said in a voice cold enough to have frozen the sea itself. ‘Marcus is not your son, as I am quite sure you are aware. He is mine. I will thank you to address him in the style he has so suddenly inherited.’

  ‘Of course, Lady Varnburg,’ I said, and bowed my head. ‘My apologies, Your Grace.’

  The lad waved my words away and blew a great bubble of snot from his left nostril as he sobbed, somewhat robbing himself of his noble countenance. The tutor who had brought him into the room produced a silk-and-lace handkerchief from her sleeve and handed it to him, and he blew his nose into it with all the dignity of a cart horse. The price of that handkerchief could have fed a family in the Stink for a week at least, I was sure.

  Perhaps Varnburg wasn’t so very different from the capital, when all was said and done.

  ‘You absolutely cannot take my son away from me,’ the Dowager Duchess pronounced. ‘I will not allow it. He is only ten.’

  ‘With all respect, my lady,’ I said, ‘I can and I will. I have the Queen’s Warrant.’

  ‘And I have three hundred guardsmen loyal to the Duchy of Varnburg. How many men did you bring with you, Sir Tomas?’

  Her face was like granite, and I had to agree that she made a strong argument. All the same, I was acting on Lord Vogel’s orders and I knew very well that failure wasn’t an option.

  ‘Let’s start again,’ I said, spreading my hands in what I could only hope was a conciliatory gesture. ‘I mean no threat or ill by my words, but here are the facts of the matter. Young as he is, your son is now the Grand Duke of Varnburg, as his father was before him. He is needed at court, to represent his duchy and his people. Surely you understand that.’

  ‘I understand that a Queen’s Man is trying to take my son away from me,’ the duchess said. ‘I remember the last Queen’s Man who came calling at the Sea Keep, that woman!’

  Sabine, I thought. Oh, in Our Lady’s name, what legacy had she left behind her?

  ‘I know nothing of that,’ I said.

  The duchess cleared her throat and looked into the fire that crackled and spat in the great stone hearth, and for a moment there was almost an expression on her face.

  She’ll try to seduce you, Iagin had said. She always does.

  I wondered what exactly had happened when Sabine came calling on the Grand Duchess of Varnburg, and decided that I really didn’t need to know.

  After a moment the duchess reached out and took a sip from the tall glass of dark wine on the table in front of her.

  Wine like blood, I thought. Mother Ruin.

  ‘You wish to take my son away from me,’ she said, her voice somehow becoming even colder. ‘I will not permit it. However, I am not a fool, Sir Tomas. I understand that if I eject you from the Sea Keep and send you home with your tail between your legs, soldiers will come from Dannsburg. If I have you murdered and your body dumped in the harbour, soldiers will come from Dannsburg. If you simply suffer some misfortune on the road home through no action of mine, soldiers will still come from Dannsburg. That is the reality of how the provinces are ruled from the capital. Very well, if it must be so then it shall. Marcus will go to court, but you will not take my son away from me. I am coming with you.’

  I hadn’t been expecting that.

  ‘It’s a long way,’ I said.

  ‘I
have carriages and coachmen,’ she responded.

  ‘The roads can be dangerous.’

  ‘I have guardsmen, as I may have mentioned. We will have an armed escort, as befits my son’s new status. A large one.’

  I looked at the Dowager Duchess of Varnburg, and for the first time in a long while I felt like I might have met my match. She had a great deal in common with Ailsa, it suddenly occurred to me, although her dark hair was streaked with grey in a way that Ailsa would never have allowed and there was no paint or powder on her face, so far as I could tell. All the same, there was a singleness of purpose and an iron will about her that very strongly put me in mind of my lioness. This one was protecting her cub and no mistake, and I could see she was prepared to go to war to do it if she had to.

  ‘Aye,’ I said at last. ‘That’s fair.’

  ‘It was not a request, Sir Tomas,’ she said. ‘It was a statement of fact. I am coming with you.’

  Well, that was something to look forward to.

  Chapter 31

  I was sad to leave Varnburg behind, and wished I could have spent more time there. I will never forget my first sight of the sea. That aside, the journey back to Dannsburg was a trial. The Dowager Duchess had brought fifty men of the Sea Guard with her, far more than I was comfortable with, but there was little enough that I could do about it. As Beast had said, the Queen’s Warrant had no magic to it and it worked only as long as everyone agreed that it did, and then in truth only when it was backed up by the power of the City Guard or the army.

  Out here on these country roads, where there were no guardsmen and no witnesses, it worked purely on loyalty and fear of consequences. If the Dowager Duchess had ordered me murdered I would have died on that road, Billy or no Billy, and all the wrath of Lord Vogel and the army of Dannsburg wouldn’t have brought me back to life again after the fact. But as a Queen’s Man there would have been consequences to my death, brutal and bloody ones, and the duchess obviously understood that. Lord Vogel’s reach and power was well understood by the aristocracy, and no one had the appetite to test him. That was wise of them, and it certainly served my own primary interest of surviving the journey home. Even so, I don’t think either Beast or Bloody Anne slept more than three hours a night each for all the four weeks it took us to return to Dannsburg in the worsening weather. They took turns in standing guard over me every night, and I owed them both a great debt of gratitude for that.

  It was a lesson to me, it has to be said, in just how much fear the Queen’s Men inspired that no one even attempted to kill me, for all that I knew they must want to.

  Anne was dozing on the bench of our carriage beside me that afternoon as our coachman led us ponderously behind the ridiculously ornate conveyance of the Grand Duke, drawn by eight beautiful grey horses and flanked by mounted Sea Guard with tall spears held upright at their stirrups. Rain was falling outside again, threatening to turn into sleet at any moment and churn the road into mush beneath our wheels. The young Grand Duke and his mother stayed within their own coach, and I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Our Lady for that. Billy had worked hard in the evenings to build a friendship with Marcus, as I had intended him to do, and he frequently rode in the Grand Duke’s carriage with the lad and his obviously disapproving mother. That she allowed it at all proved that Billy’s company was helping her son through his grief, and that was good.

  ‘We’re coming back to that town,’ Rosie said from the bench across from me, jolting me from my reverie. ‘Jordan’s Field, where Anne had her fight with that arsehole and his jokes about dead whores.’

  We were, I realised. I was slightly surprised that she had remembered the name of the place, but of course she had. It seemed to me that Rosie never forgot anything. I nodded to her in understanding.

  ‘We’ve fifty armed men with us now,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll have any trouble this time.’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ she said, and she looked up at me with a hard expression in her eyes. ‘I want to burn the place to the fucking ground.’

  She had a passion about her that I had never seen before. Rosie took most things in her stride, but it seemed that this was different. Burn it to the cunting ground, I had told Billy, that night two years ago when we had stormed the Stables and rescued those underage boy whores, but that had been different. That had been personal. Perhaps for her this was too, in its way, but I knew I couldn’t allow that. Not when we were on official business I couldn’t. Things had changed since the Stables. Too many things had changed, and not all of them to my liking.

  I looked at her for a long moment, then I shook my head.

  ‘No,’ I said at last. ‘No, I can’t have that. I know you want to, Rosie, and I understand why, but we can’t do that.’

  ‘You’ve got the Queen’s Warrant,’ she spat at me. ‘You can do fucking anything.’

  ‘Aye, I can,’ I had to agree, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I should. Would Heinrich have done that?’

  ‘Don’t you use his name against me,’ Rosie said, but I could see the doubt in her eyes.

  ‘He wouldn’t have, Rosie, and you know he wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘The power of the Queen’s Warrant is to be used sparingly, and only when it’s needed. All the Queen’s Men know that. Would burning a market town truly change the minds of country folk on a matter most of them don’t even understand? Of course it fucking wouldn’t, and Heinrich would have seen that as well as I do. We’d end up blade to blade with our own countrymen, and for what?’

  ‘For my life,’ Rosie said quietly. ‘For my and Anne’s right to live our fucking lives.’

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I know, Rosie. I know, but it’s not something that’s in my power to change. We’ll be back in Dannsburg soon enough.’

  ‘So that’s it, is it? We’re allowed to exist in the cities, but woe fucking betide us if we venture outside them?’

  ‘That’s not . . .’ I started, but perhaps it was. Perhaps that was what the world was like for Rosie and Anne, Cutter and my brother and all those like them. I had to admit that I really didn’t know, and for the best of me I couldn’t see my way to ever understanding something I was so far away from. ‘I don’t know, Rosie. Our Lady doesn’t much care who anyone lies with, so long as both are willing, but they hold to other gods out in the countryside. The Harvest Maiden, mostly.’

  ‘The Harvest Maiden is a goddess of fertility and love,’ Rosie said. ‘Doesn’t say nowhere in the scriptures love between who and who.’

  I could only shrug. Anne’s village had held to her Stone Father, who I didn’t know, and apparently He had very much cared about such things. To my mind that only meant He had too much time on His hands and couldn’t be much of a god worth knowing, but what would I know? I was an unwilling army priest of the fucking death goddess, for Our Lady’s sake, and pastoral ministry wasn’t really one of my skills.

  ‘You know she loves you,’ I said.

  Anne’s eyes opened then, and she smiled at Rosie across the carriage in a way that said she had been awake for the last few minutes at least.

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  *

  Little enough else happened on our journey home, until the night Billy burned the inn down. Lady’s sake, I could have done without that.

  We had only been a few days’ travel from Dannsburg at that point, so close I was already making plans for my return and how the fuck I was going to explain the Dowager Duchess to Lord Vogel. Billy and Marcus, the young Grand Duke of Varnburg, were firm friends by then. I could tell that Marcus, starved of the company of his peers throughout his sheltered aristocratic upbringing, looked up to Billy. Billy was five years his senior, and he had been a soldier after a fashion. He had fought in a war, anyway, and in the way of young lads he had told Marcus all about that in the tedium of the carriage rides and the dull evenings in roadside inns. He boasted of it, of course he did, and had made a performance of showing the lad the evil little knives he carried, and how to hold them the way Cutter had
taught him. He had barely fifteen years to him, so far as anyone knew, and I remembered well enough what I had been like at that age. Billy was young for his age too, as I have written, and I could see he soaked up the young duke’s adoration.

  Oh, aye, Marcus looked up to Billy and Billy loved every moment of it, and I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was what the fuck had gone through Billy’s head the night he took it upon himself to show Marcus the cunning.

  The two lads had been up in Marcus’ room in the inn, and perhaps Billy had had more beer than he was accustomed to. Most of us were drinking in the common room and the Dowager Duchess had retired to her bed complaining of one of her frequent headaches that were a transparent excuse not to mix with the rest of us. That was well and good, as I hardly craved her company any more than she did mine.

  All was well until the screaming started, and the smell of smoke began to fill the common room. By the time everyone was up off their arses and moving, it was too late. The top floor of the inn was ablaze, the fire well into the thatch and nothing to be done about it by then but run. The lads came pounding down the stairs safe and well, if sooty, thank Our Lady, and the duchess and her maids were hot on their heels as the burning rafters began to fall in above their heads.

  We spent an uncomfortable night in our carriage that had been hastily moved to the village green while the inn blazed and fell in with a great shower of sparks. Billy was with us, being quite clearly no longer welcome in the duchess’ carriage with his terrified young friend.

  ‘What the fuck did you do?’ I asked him quietly.

  ‘I just wanted to show him, Papa,’ Billy said. ‘Wanted to show him the cunning. What I can do.’

  ‘Aye, you can set fires,’ I said. ‘You can fucking well put them out too. I’ve seen you do it. What happened?’

  ‘I . . . I couldn’t,’ Billy said, and he started to cry. ‘It got away from me. Should have set it in the grate, not . . . not there. I don’t know. It was too much. It just got away from me. I’m sorry, Papa!’