Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  ‘I’ll see her if she wants me to,’ Billy had said, ‘but I’m with Mina now so she’d better not get any silly ideas. Anyway, I thought you said she was getting married?’

  ‘She is betrothed to the young Grand Duke of Varnburg,’ I said, ‘but betrothals can be broken. By princesses they can, anyway. You have to understand, lad, she isn’t going to be quite like any other girls you may have known. She has grown up very differently to normal people. Truth be told, I have no idea why she wants to see you, but it could be that. If so, she might promise you things. She might offer to make you a prince. She might offer you a throne.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a prince,’ Billy said at once, and he got a hurt look on his face as he said it. ‘I don’t want a stupid throne. I want Mina.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘That’s good, Billy. It’s made me very proud, to hear you say that.’

  I gave him a hug then, and he grinned at me to say that all was well.

  Now it was morning, and Billy and me were in an anteroom of the palace waiting for an audience with the Princess Crown Royal herself. I had no idea how this was going to go, and had it been up to me I would have had Bloody Anne there beside me. Of course, it hadn’t been up to me. Ailsa had arranged this introduction, and Ailsa and Anne were far from what you might call friends. The invitation to the audience with Her Highness had been for Billy and me only and no one else, and even so I had been somewhat surprised to be included myself. I could only suppose that Ailsa felt that she owed me that much, at least, as Billy’s adoptive father and legal guardian.

  She could have been there herself, of course, as his adoptive mother, but she wasn’t.

  Fool, fool.

  Of course she wasn’t. Ailsa was a busy woman, and what did she care that the heir to the throne appeared to be trying to court her son? I felt the bitterness swell in my chest for a moment, but then I remembered how horrified she had looked when I told her that the princess’ ‘shining boy’ was our own son, Billy. I wished I could know where I stood with Ailsa, me and Billy both.

  Fucking fool.

  ‘Sir Tomas?’

  The voice snapped me out of my thoughts, and I looked up to see a nun standing in the doorway. She was a strong-looking woman with some thirty or so years to her. She was tall, and her habit pulled tight across the width of her shoulders. That one had been a soldier before she was a nun, I would have bet gold on it.

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘And this is my son, Billy.’

  ‘Good,’ the nun said, and nodded to Billy. ‘My name is Sister Galina. Come with me.’

  We followed her out of the anteroom and onto one of the many staircases that seemed to worm their way through the palace like the roots of old trees.

  ‘Tell me, Sister,’ I said. ‘You have the look and the age of a veteran about you. Were you at Abingon?’

  ‘Messia,’ she said, without turning to look at me. ‘I was assigned to the garrison there, after the city fell, and I missed the final battles of the war.’

  ‘I was at Messia too,’ I said, feeling the need to build some sort of bridge between us. ‘Missing Abingon . . . aye. You should thank the gods for your good fortune.’

  ‘I do no such thing!’ Sister Galina snapped, and turned on the stair to glare at me. ‘I am a Daughter of Our Lady of Eternal Sorrows, and I should have been there. I wanted to be there, but the army said it was not to be. It was my holy duty to be at Abingon, to see Our Lady’s will be done!’

  ‘And I am a priest of Our Lady,’ I told the nun, and I watched her face flush as I spoke. ‘I was there. I saw Our Lady’s will be done enough for all of us, trust me on that. I waded through rivers of blood at Abingon, for Our Lady.’

  ‘Forgive me, Father,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t know you.’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ I said. ‘Our Lady respects your service, and She thanks you for it.’

  I just had to sound like I meant it, after all. Sister Galina curtseyed deep to me, there on the stairs, and then she led us up to the Princess Crown Royal’s personal apartments. She was mine now, I knew that. That was how it was done.

  The levers that move people. Sister Galina was moved by religious fervour.

  At last we reached the door that led into the princess’ residence, where Ailsa had left me that time before when she went in to speak to Her Highness and ended up slapping her. There were guards outside now as there had been then, but I had no way of knowing if they were the same ones.

  Sister Galina rapped on the door and pushed it open without waiting for a reply, and I thought that in itself said a lot. The Princess Crown Royal was technically the ruling monarch of the country, but of course due to her age she was nothing of the sort.

  She was subject to her regent, and her regent just happened to be Dieter Vogel. Vogel, publicly the Lord Chief Judiciar and secretly the Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men. I gave Sister Galina a sideways glance, and I wondered how much of that she understood. Did we even have nuns on our payroll? It wouldn’t honestly have surprised me.

  Another nun was there waiting to receive her, and she nodded to Sister Galina and gave her what amounted to a very small curtsey. I knew little about nuns, but it seemed they had a form of hierarchy of their own. Almost all organisations do, in my experience, whatever they may be.

  ‘Sister,’ she said. ‘Her Highness will join you in her drawing room, and she is very much looking forward to receiving her visitor. And his father, of course, as is only proper under the circumstances.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sister Galina said.

  The circumstances were of course extremely fucking awkward. The Princess Crown Royal was publicly betrothed to the Grand Duke of Varnburg, young as he was, and yet here she was receiving the much older son of a provincial knight, and in her personal chambers, no less. I had to be there to act as chaperone and protector of propriety every bit as much as these nuns did. Even so, I dreaded to think what the Dowager Grand Duchess was going to say about this if she ever got wind of their meeting.

  We were shown into a magnificent drawing room, even more opulent than the late Prince Consort’s had been. I wondered if this had been the room in which Ailsa had slapped the Princess Crown Royal.

  ‘Do please take a seat,’ Sister Galina said, and she waved Billy and me into chairs beside which were set low tables laden with sweetmeats and jugs of fruit juice and bottles of wine and brandy, plates and glasses. ‘Please, help yourself to the comforts offered.’

  I poured myself a glass of brandy and sipped it slowly. Billy took nothing, for all that he wasn’t usually one to turn down food. The lad was nervous, I realised, and under the circumstances I could hardly blame him.

  She entered a moment later, on the arm of yet another nun. The Princess Crown Royal wore a dark-red gown, somewhat less formal than those I had seen her in before, and black lace gloves. Even so, I could see the blistered burns on her fingers as she extended one hand towards the nuns. Billy and I both stood and bowed to her as protocol dictated, but neither of us spoke. Sister Galina hastily poured a glass of fruit juice and put it in the princess’ waiting hand before giving her a low curtsey.

  ‘Highness,’ she all but whispered, and I could hear the reverence in her tone.

  ‘He shines,’ the princess said, and a slow smile curved her painted doll’s mouth. ‘This boy, he shines.’

  It came to me then that she was looking at Billy in the way that twelve-year-old girls often look at fifteen-year-old lads, and I didn’t like it. Her betrothed had only ten years to him, so I doubted she had ever looked at him like that. I didn’t like it one little bit, or what it might portend.

  ‘Highness,’ I said, and bowed once more. ‘It is an honour to see you again.’

  ‘Sir . . . Tomas,’ she said, and I was surprised that she had remembered my name. Or perhaps she had been reminded of it just before the meeting, of course, which I supposed was much more likely. ‘A pleasure.’

  She turned back to Billy then, ignoring me completely, a
nd cocked her head to one side as she studied him.

  ‘Your Highness,’ Billy said awkwardly.

  He plainly didn’t know what to say, and there I felt for him. I had to admit that I didn’t either. Neither of us were used to being in the apartments of princesses.

  ‘Will you play shining games with me?’ she asked suddenly. ‘I have no real friends, and my maids are so fragile I fear I keep breaking them. I am only trying to make them pretty, but it never works.’

  ‘If you like,’ Billy said, and suddenly he grinned. ‘Do you know how to draw with the lights?’

  ‘Lights?’ the princess asked. ‘I don’t know what you mean, boy.’

  ‘It’s easy,’ Billy said. ‘You just do this. I often do this, to keep myself amused when I can’t sleep at night.’

  He looked towards the fireplace, and a mote of light began to dance in the cold grate. It was followed a moment later by a second and then a third and then more, until there were a score or more dancing points of light floating in the shadows. They slowly changed colour from white to red to blue to green, swirling and dancing in an intricate pattern.

  The princess clapped her gloved, burned hands in delight.

  ‘More!’ she demanded.

  Billy concentrated until he had conjured maybe a hundred or more specks of light. He began to make shapes out of them, human figures and fabulous beasts, forever changing colour and shifting in an endless dance. Two of the figures began to fight, and the princess squealed with joy.

  ‘You try,’ Billy said.

  She dropped her untouched glass of fruit juice on the floor and fixed him with a savage stare.

  ‘Me?’ she demanded. ‘How can I try? This is witchcraft. It is wicked and it is entertaining, but do you dare suggest that I am a witch, boy? I am a princess!’

  ‘You shine,’ Billy said flatly, as sticky juice soaked into the priceless Alarian carpet beneath the princess’ velvet slippers.

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she said, and the rage left her as quickly as it had come. ‘Sometimes I shine so bright I keep myself awake at night. Bright at night, that rhymes. Bright at night. If the doctor is late with my medicine I shine so bright I can hardly see for the light. That rhymes. Bright light. But that is different. I shine because I am a queen. I struggle to contain it all. Sometimes I feel like I will shine so bright it will consume me. My mother shone like a star, and she was a queen and now she is dead. That is what queens do. We shine and then we die.’

  I swallowed, and glanced at Billy. He had a deeply concerned look on his too-tight face now, and he was looking at her. I got the distinct impression he was really looking at her, with the cunning. I had no understanding of what was going on, but Billy’s expression alone was enough to tell me that it was nothing good.

  ‘How do you play shining games, Highness?’ I asked her.

  She turned and looked at me, and for a moment I thought that it may have been a mistake to speak.

  Then she laughed.

  ‘Like a queen,’ she said. ‘Queens give commands, and things happen. Fire, light!’ she said, and flames leaped suddenly in the grate. ‘You see? To shine is to command. It is a thing for queens.’

  ‘And for boys, it seems,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Boys should not shine. That is why yours interested me so much. Why does he shine?’

  Because he’s got the cunning in him, I wanted to say, but I could already see how unwise that would be. Because he’s a witch or possessed by a devil, and oh, by the way, so are you. No, no, that really wouldn’t have been anything I would call fucking wise at all.

  ‘I don’t know, Highness,’ I said. ‘Priest I may be, but that is a question for mystics, and I’m not that. He just . . . does.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and nodded slowly as though I had disclosed some great philosophical revelation to her. ‘Sometimes things just are. Mother was, and now she is not, but my doctors just are. If I break one, another will appear and there will still be a doctor because doctors just are. Yes. Some things just . . . are.’

  She sank into a chair, and her chin slowly drooped against her chest. Billy looked at me, and I shrugged. The princess made a noise, a half-formed word, perhaps, but I had no idea what, if anything, she was trying to say.

  She seemed to be getting sleepier by the moment, and I thought perhaps she was entering into the next cycle of the drugged rhythm of her life. Was she ever truly herself, I wondered, between the timed cocktails of stimulants and narcotics she was being force-fed? For a moment I felt pity for this sad, insane little girl, until I remembered the tales of her maids and the horrific burns some of them had supposedly suffered at her blistered hands.

  Beauty is pain, and pain is beauty.

  She had told me that once, I remembered.

  I am only trying to make them pretty.

  Oh gods.

  Chapter 48

  We left the palace as soon after that as I could manage to get us away. I waited until my carriage was rolling, then turned and looked at Billy on the bench beside me.

  ‘What did you make of that, then?’ I asked him.

  ‘She’s very ill, Papa,’ Billy said.

  ‘How do you mean, lad?’

  ‘She’s not healthy, in mind or body. There’s something about her that’s just not quite right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t right. She’s got the cunning in her, like I said, and she’s very, very strong, but it’s . . . wrong. I don’t know. It’s wrong. It’s like . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know.’

  ‘Take your time, son,’ I said, as the carriage rumbled through the gates of the side entrance to the palace and onto the streets of Dannsburg, taking us back towards the Bountiful Harvest. ‘Explain it to me like I know nothing at all about the cunning, because in all honesty I don’t.’

  ‘We shine,’ Billy said. ‘I told you that. All cunning folk shine, if only to each other. It’s something inside us, something that’s part of us. Something we just do. But the princess, it’s more like . . . I don’t know. It’s more like something she is. There’s too much of her, if that makes sense. It’s hard to put into words, but she’s wrong. She shouldn’t be like that. After . . . after the fight, in Ellinburg, when Mina and me stole the strength of that Skanian magician, we got a bit like that. You remember when I told you there wouldn’t be any more magicians but there was one, and Cutter lost his face over it? It was that. I was . . . I was wrong, for a while. Me and Mina both were. We still are, a bit. Like there’s too much of us, if that makes sense. It’s all right, but it’s . . . I don’t know. Hard to control, sometimes. When I made the lights for the princess I wanted to fill the room with them. I wanted to fill the whole city with them. And I could have done, I think, if I’d let myself. It’s too much!’

  He put his head in his hands, clutching his skull as though it was about to burst.

  ‘It’s all right, lad,’ I said, and gently pried one of his hands away from his head and held it the way Anne did with me when the battle shock came down on me.

  I didn’t really know what else to do. Billy looked like he had battle shock right then, and I supposed that having too much of the cunning in you could do that to anyone. He had been in the war as well, I had to remind myself, even young as he had been then. Billy had been the half-feral orphan we had found in the ruins of Messia, starving and desperate, who had begged to join our regiment and go on to Abingon with us. It was no wonder he wasn’t quite right in the head, but then none of us really were. Nobody would be, after what we had been through.

  Billy squeezed my hand for a moment then turned and looked at me.

  ‘I’m glad they’re drugging her,’ he said. ‘Don’t let them stop. Please, Papa, don’t ever let them stop.’

  *

  I took Billy back to the Bountiful Harvest and sent him up to his room to rest, and for once he did what he was told and went to bed. I think his encounter with the Princess Crown Royal had left him more drained and disturbed
than he would ever have admitted, and when I walked past his door half an hour later after having a wash and changing my clothes, I heard his soft snores floating out into the corridor from inside. Billy slept lightly and seldom, and it was testament to how exhausted he was that he was obviously sound asleep in broad daylight with the inn alive and clattering and banging around him.

  I left him to it and went back down to the stables, and had my coachman drive me to Ailsa’s street and wait across the road from her gates. I could have ridden, of course, but something about turning up ahorse instead of in a carriage always made me feel conspicuous in her moneyed neighbourhood. I really was becoming a Dannsburg gentleman, I realised, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I didn’t ever want to lose sight of where I had come from, but I was also a Queen’s Man and there were certain standards to be upheld.

  I remembered Sabine, inciting a riot with her long, filthy iron-grey hair hanging loose and wild around her face, and I wondered about that. The Queen’s Men have no uniform or insignia, and perhaps they have no prescribed look either. Perhaps we present whatever false face is required at the time, and adapt and move on.

  Sister Deceit.

  I looked at Ailsa’s house, and shook my head. Ailsa wasn’t Sabine, I knew that, but did I really want to take this to her? I knew I had to take it to someone, and I would far rather speak to Ailsa than Vogel any day of the week. Either way, this was a thing the house of law needed to know.

  I thumped on the roof to tell the coachman to proceed once more, and he drove his team of four to the gates of Ailsa’s residence. One of the gate guards came over to the side window with his hand on the hilt of his sword. He was young, and I didn’t recognise him.

  ‘Help you?’ he asked.

  I looked around for Brandt, but he wasn’t there that day.

  ‘Let me in,’ I said. ‘I’m her husband.’

  ‘And I’m the fucking king of Skania,’ he said, giving Oliver and Emil the hard eye at the backboard of the carriage where there should have been liveried footmen.