The footman, of course, did not have an answer to that.
‘Tell them I’ll be along in five minutes.’
Looking down at her casual wear of pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, Meri contemplated going as she was. Wrong move, her wiser self told her. Power was about appearance as much as anything. She dressed quickly in jeans and a Jerez University polo shirt. Had they heard already about her removing Daro from the palace? That might explain the sudden summons.
Entering the small meeting room, a blue-tiled chamber that opened onto a quiet courtyard, Meri found only the senior members of the council present: Rayne, Derwent, Tegel and, of course, Rio.
‘This better be good,’ she announced, going on the offensive as she entered. ‘I’ve an assignment to finish.’
Her prime minister handed over a letter without a word. From the creamy stationery, Meri knew at once it was from the London lawyers. Her feeling of being hard done by evaporated. ‘Oh wow! Thank you!’ She pressed it to her chest. ‘Is that it?’
‘Not quite,’ said Rayne. ‘If you wouldn’t mind putting off reading that until we’ve finished, we’d be grateful.’
Meri registered the careful tone of her prime minister. There was something else, something they thought had to be handled with kid gloves. ‘OK. I suppose I’ve waited over two months for news, I can wait an hour longer.’
‘Please, let’s all sit down.’ Rayne took her place at the right of Meri’s chair at the council table.
Meri sat. ‘What is it? Is Theo OK?’ She wondered suddenly if the letter brought bad news and Rayne had been tasked to break it gently to her.
‘He is in good health, as far as I am aware,’ said Rayne. ‘As you ordered, I have not opened or read the correspondence with your lawyers.’
‘Then you’ll forgive me if I just see if it contains what I expect.’ Meri cracked the seal and glanced at the contents. A typed letter from Mr Rivers and a handwritten one that was in Theo’s curling script. He was alive and well—the rest could wait. ‘OK. What do you have to tell me?’
‘Tegel?’ The prime minister deferred to the German.
‘You are aware by now that I have a network of informers keeping an eye on Perilous activity?’ he said briskly.
‘Yes.’ Tegel held the position of Intelligence Chief in her cabinet so it was no surprise to find he ran his own spies, though they’d not yet discussed this in open council.
‘I have two pieces of news that I have had verified by a secondary source so I believe both are reliable.’
‘OK. Go on.’
‘First, the Perilous you know as the crown prince, Ade Waters, released your guardian and friends from house arrest a few weeks ago.’
So that's why Theo was able to write. ‘How many weeks?’
‘About six.’
‘And you are only just telling me now?’
‘I did not receive confirmation until today. I imagine your correspondence will repeat some of what I now know. Waters let them go. They didn’t escape.’
That didn’t make a lot of sense. ‘Why hold them so long only to let them go?’
‘We don’t know but we think he might have turned them.’
‘Turned them how?’
‘To his side.’
Meri couldn’t help it: she burst into laughter. ‘Ade, turned Theo, Saddiq and Valerie into supporters of the Perilous? If you knew them even a little, you’d realize how wrong that is! They don’t even know what any of this means—Tean, Perilous, our feud.’
‘My informer in Osun’s household says that he gave permission for that information to be shared—and he only reveals the secret of our existence when he has an urgent need to do so.’
Meri’s laughter died. It was a dangerous secret. Ade had just made her guardian and his friends a target for Teans as well as Perilous.
‘I would be grateful if you would let me see what your guardian is writing to you. It will give me more information as to what he has been instructed to do.’
‘You think he made a bargain to get out of house arrest?’
‘Yes.’
Meri placed her hand over the letter. ‘I will read it and tell you if it says anything relevant. But I’ll tell you one thing right off: Theo will not betray me. He’d die first.’
Tegel looked sceptical but didn’t contradict her.
‘You said you had two things to tell me?’ She looked up from the letter and saw Rio was watching her intently, cat at the mouse hole. Her shoulders stiffened. ‘Well?’
‘The second piece of intelligence involves the Perilous called Kelvin Douglas.’ Tegel slid some photographs towards her. Meri snagged them and leafed through the images. They showed Kel standing in a courtyard of what looked like a fairytale castle, hand-in-hand with a girl with long blonde hair. She would make a good casting for Cinderella. They stood a little apart from the gathered crowd but everyone was listening to a man sitting on a stone chair like a bishop in a cathedral. The girl was holding a guitar. Meri took a breath. Don’t jump to conclusions. That’s what stupid people do. She continued through the stack of surveillance photos. Other shots showed Kel and the girl playing by a fountain together, then running down a street.
‘Can you explain these to me?’ she asked, proud of how even her voice sounded. ‘Where were they taken? When?’ Not England by the looks of it. Kel was still in France.
‘Kelvin Douglas has been followed since he left you.’
She clenched her fists in her lap. They’d known all this time where he was. ‘Who is tracking him?’
‘I called in my nearest agent: Cabot. You’d conveniently left him on hand when you ordered him ashore.’
‘You’re joking? You sent the man who tried to kill Kel to tail him?’
‘He has no reason to repeat the attempt now you two are separated. He caught up with the Perilous in a small town in the Loire but kept his distance as ordered.’
‘Because Kel knows what he looks like.’
‘I’ve sent backup so Cabot doesn’t have to manage this alone.’
‘What is “this”?’
‘Knowing where our enemy is, and how much he knows about you.’ Tegel obviously suspected she had, or would try to get in touch. He wasn’t wrong.
‘Kel is not our enemy.’
‘The good news is that he hasn’t tried to make his way south so he is dropping down my threat list. He’s not attempting to join you as far as I can see.’ He arched a questioning brow, as if expecting her to fill in what he didn’t know.
The fact that Kel was deliberately travelling in the opposite direction to the one in which he knew she had been going felt like a slap in the face. ‘I see. And if I ask you to contact him for me via your agents?’
‘I will resign before I agree to do that.’
‘And if I ask you to remove your surveillance?’
‘Same answer.’
Meri shoved her chair back and paced out into the courtyard. Goldfish swam heedless in the shell-shaped pool in the centre of the garden, innocent of human machinations.
I’m not going to be the faithless person who believes the worst about her boyfriend just because of a picture. That’s what they want me to think.
She sat on the edge of the pool and trickled water through her fingers. Kel was alive and had a blonde companion: that was good, wasn’t it?
‘Meri?’ It was Rio of all people who had joined her. ‘You forgot this.’ He handed her the letter.
‘You used my name.’
‘Yes, well, I don’t like to kick people when they’re down.’
‘Really?’
‘Not if I don’t need to,’ he amended. ‘You might not believe me, but I understand how you feel.’
‘You do?’ How could Rio possibly understand the agony of being in love? He loved only himself as far as Meri could see.
‘Yes, I do.’ Rio sounded like he meant it. ‘If you need to talk…’
‘You’d be the last person I’d go to.’
‘I
might be the only one you’ve got left. I dismissed the council, told them to leave you to think things over.’
‘Was there a point to the revelations?’ Meri suddenly felt very tired. ‘I can’t imagine Tegel sharing them with me unless he wanted something.’
‘To put you on your guard when you read your letter and to clear your mind and conscience for what you need to do as our ruler.’
‘Which is?’
‘Agree to an alliance with me.’
‘Over my dead body!’
Rio laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s what I feel, but I’m just telling you what they’re all thinking. You’re not…popular in Tean circles.’
‘And you are?’
‘They love me.’ He said it like it was obvious rather than a boast. ‘You should agree to marry me and your problems with the council will go away. I’m what they think a ruler should be.’
‘So if we were together, they’d get the monarchy they want, one set in the old ways?’
‘Yeah, exactly.’
Meri stood up. ‘Thanks for the letter and for explaining that to me. I’ve got homework to finish.’
He stood up. ‘Your answer?’
‘To what?’
‘My proposal of marriage.’
‘There was a proposal in there? Sorry, I missed it among the insults.’ She put her fingers to her brow in mock thought. ‘So, let me think about it. Um. No.’ She gave him a fake grin. ‘Right, homework. See you tomorrow, Rio.’
She waited until she was out of sight before she started running for her apartment.
14
The conversation with Ade had made a few cracks in Kel’s foundation of believing he was doing the right thing staying out on his own. The easy course would be to go home to London—and yes, Ade’s house did still feel like home: after all, he’d lived there since he was five and those kind of ties were like bindweed, hard to untangle as the tendrils pushed into every nook and cranny of memory and familial loyalty. As Ade had spelt out plainly, he had the choice to return and mend fences. But what was ‘easy’ led to ‘difficult’, if not ‘impossible’. He couldn’t expect them to put aside their battle with the Teans and he would never fight that war again. And if he went back, wouldn’t he be saying he was giving up on Meri?
‘You look like you have the cares of the world on your shoulders,’ said Nixie, strumming on the guitar as they hitched a lift in the back of a lorry headed for Paris. Rashid had decided there were richer pickings to be had in the capital and the difficulty of finding camping grounds was outweighed by the chance of earning a week of square meals. They had all been instructed to hitch separately and rendezvous on Montmartre in two days time.
‘If you had a chance to go home, Nixie, would you take it?’ Kel asked.
‘Home? You mean to my mother?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’ Her family farm had to be abandoned, he remembered.
‘Maybe, one day. When I can forgive her.’ She plucked a run of notes, the last one jarring.
‘Forgive her for what?’
‘She abandoned Dad, the boys and me.’
There were two sides to every story, Kel knew that from personal experience. To the Perilous he was a traitor; to himself, he had done the only thing that he could and they had betrayed him. That made him less quick to condemn than he might’ve been before. ‘Maybe your mum fell in love with the new guy?’
Nixie glared. ‘Her heart took a very convenient direction then. She ran off to her new farm on his high ground at the first sign we were going to lose ours.’
Kel understood, even if Nixie did not, that it might well have been more complicated than that. Nixie probably felt that reconciling with her mother would be a betrayal of her father—and there was nothing more powerful than the memory of a dead parent. His biggest obstacle to falling in love with Meri had been disassociating her from what had happened to his mother, killed by her Tean parents. The rest of his family couldn’t do that. He let the subject of Nixie’s mother drop. Nixie would have to work this out in her own time. ‘Fancy trying busking again in Paris?’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘I was thinking it might be safer to get an under-the-counter job—waitress or cleaner.’
‘Once bitten, twice shy?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘I can’t believe Paris will be as crazy as VilleFrançois.’
Nixie chuckled. Now they were safe, it was easier to find the incident so outlandish that it could be remembered as a bizarre aberration, a tumble down Alice’s rabbit hole, rather than a murderous regime that could have done them mortal damage. Looking round the climate-stressed world, Kel knew that such enclaves of madness, even whole countries under deluded leaders, were more common than anyone wished to believe.
‘Hey, did you see the news report on Rashid’s phone?’ Nixie asked. The leader of the band was the only one they could afford to keep in data while they roamed. ‘Mayor François has been taken away by a team of psychiatrists. They claimed he had escaped from an asylum in Romania and his babbling about skin patterns was all a delusion.’
‘Yes, I saw that.’ And recognized the Perilous clean-up team at work. Hopefully the seeds of doubt Kel had planted with his fight had meant that those around François were ready to question his hold over them. The Perilous had been able to extract the renegade without a battle. How they would go on to convince the townsfolk they’d imagined it all, he didn’t know, but they would, given enough time. They’d had plenty of practice over the centuries. It was how the Perilous had always kept their existence a secret.
‘Was that…?’ Nixie shook her head. ‘No, I’d better not say.’
‘Say what?’
‘OK, then. Was that anything to do with you? You made a phone call shortly after we escaped. That’s not like you—I’ve not known you try to contact anyone. And when we were in the prison, you talked about having your own tricks up your sleeve.’
He regretted his weak moment when he considered a public flare out. ‘Just that I knew how to fight.’
‘But while you were fighting him, he tugged your shirt and I thought I saw….’
He put a finger to her lips. ‘Please, you didn’t see anything.’
She huffed against his finger. ‘All right. You keep your secret then.’
‘Thanks.’
She gave him a grin. ‘But at least you have admitted to having a secret. I was only wanting confirmation of that.’
He groaned. Idiot that he was, he’d fallen into her trap. He had to stop underestimating her. ‘God save me from clever women.’
‘She can’t do that: there are too many of us.’ Nixie leant forward, lips now very close to his. ‘We’ve got you surrounded.’ She waited. It was the perfect moment for a first kiss: just the two of them in the privacy of a smoothly moving vehicle. A lock of her white blonde hair dangled between them, swinging like his uncertainty. Will he, won’t he, will he…? He could feel the prickle of his markings waking up.
Kel moved back. ‘I’m sorry, Nixie, but I can’t. I have a girlfriend. But more to the point, I would never betray her, and I’d never want to.’ He felt terrible that he had wanted, even if just for a moment, to see what a kiss would be like. Nixie was a lovely person and he was feeling tired and lonely. But that had been his instincts nudging him, not his heart.
Nixie blushed. ‘In that case, sorry. I don’t poach.’
‘No need to be sorry.’
‘Where is she, this girlfriend of yours?’ Nixie couldn’t keep the note of bitterness out of her voice as she busied herself tuning the guitar that was already set at the right pitch.
‘I don’t know exactly. I’m trying to get back to her but I think I’ll have to go the long way round.’
He closed his eyes and rested against a box of apples. Sorry, Meri. As the miles passed under the humming wheels of the lorry, he vowed he would do better and find a way out of this cage the Teans and Perilous had built around them.
The signs for Paris promised that they woul
d be there in half an hour at most. The lorry wasn’t going all the way to the centre, much of which was uninhabitable thanks to the Flood. Businesses, government and people had relocated to the periphery. Now you could take tourist boats around the Eiffel Tower and wade into Notre Dame which had barricades and pumps going twenty-four seven to keep the building viable. The city had surrendered much of its embankment, the right and left bank were further apart than ever before. New bridges had had to be built quickly, ugly things compared to the beautiful ones that could still be glimpsed poking above the new level of the Seine. There had been talk of reengineering the course of the river so that Parisians could reclaim their capital but so far that had proved too expensive. It might be cheaper to move the buildings than the Seine.
By contrast, Montmartre, as a natural high point, was still exactly as it had been, with the exception of much loftier house prices forcing out most of the Bohemian crowd who had once lived there. Now the bankers and stockbrokers crammed into the apartment buildings that surrounded the white dome of Sacré Coeur.
Kel and Nixie chose to walk the last few miles to the rendezvous. They had been lucky with their lift, arriving a full day ahead of schedule. They decided to scout out the territory so they could save Rashid and the others a task.
They passed the Gare du Nord. The huge station complex was still sending trains to the UK and other European countries. There were quite a few railway arches that were possible camping places for a band of No-Homers, at least ones who could defend themselves from the neo-Nazi thugs and slavers who preyed on foreigners. There would have to be a twenty-four hour guard and readiness to move on, but they would shelter them from any climatic storm that might strike. Spring was always a high risk season and it would be unwise to risk a public park. The main problem was that there was plenty of competition for the space under the viaduct from homeless French people as well as migrant No-Homers like them.
‘Let’s go into the station and see if there’s somewhere we can busk,’ suggested Kel, giving up on identifying the exact arch they should return to.
Nixie rolled her eyes. ‘You’re willing to risk it?’
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