“Eight to four in favour of a state visit,” said Savine, making a neat little note. “High Consul Flassenbeck, would you summon the Styrian ambassador so we can advance a formal invitation to King Jappo? Then Lady Selest, could you liaise with my private secretary Zuri on an agenda for the talks—”
“What the fuck?” snarled Leo, spraying spit.
Another silence, even more awkward than the last. Savine went on writing for a moment, then looked up from her papers. “Perhaps the Closed Council might give His Highness and I a moment to confer?”
By the speed they scrambled from their seats, they were desperate to do exactly that.
With one nervous backward glance, Selest dan Heugen pulled the door to the White Chamber shut, leaving Savine alone with her husband.
She could not help shifting in that uncomfortable bloody chair at a sudden pang. With impeccable timing, her menses had come for the first time since she fell pregnant and just as painfully as ever, the familiar dull ache through her belly and down the backs of her thighs with an occasional sharp twinge into her arse by way of light relief. As she always used to, she struggled with every muscle to look perfectly relaxed, and forced her grimace into an expression of quiet dignity.
“Do you think I’ll let you steal this from me?” whispered Leo, white with fury.
Savine had no doubt that he had become a very dangerous man. She remembered seeing him stab Lord Marshal Forest in the chest without a hint of hesitation. But she had faced dangerous men before. Preparation was the key. That and never backing down.
“Steal this? The Union, you mean?” Savine spoke slowly, precisely, like a schoolteacher explaining arithmetic to a pupil prone to tantrums. Perhaps that would only enrage him further. She rather hoped so. “It is not yours, Leo. It belongs to our son, the king. We are merely the caretakers. The joint caretakers.”
He clawed at the table, catching some papers and crushing them in his trembling fist. He might only have the one that worked, but she knew how strong it still was. “Get out,” he snarled through gritted teeth.
Savine set her jaw. “Let me be blunt. You will beat me in a foot race before you remove me from this chamber.”
“I am in command here—”
“Are you sure? I begin to think you did not read the Open Council’s Grand Declaration very carefully. I wrote it carefully, I promise you that. It gives me exactly the same rights, privileges and powers as you. Matters of policy are decided by votes in this council and, as you see, the strong majority are on my side.”
“Then I’ll remove them.”
“Until His Majesty reaches his majority you cannot remove them without my approval, as I could not appoint them without yours.”
“Then I’ll march a company of soldiers in here!” He had become even paler. The skull-like rings around his eyes reminded her more than was comfortable of her father. But while her father had done awful things, he had stopped short of having heroic paintings made of them. “We’ll see which way these bastards vote with drawn swords at their necks.”
Savine narrowed her eyes. “You will beat me at left-handed darts before you do that. You should know that I have made comprehensive arrangements. Try to seize power and the coal will stop coming, and the bread will stop coming, and the money will stop coming. I’ll chain you up in strikes and riots. I’ll bury you in a blizzard of pamphlets. Have you seen how popular I am these days? Threaten the Mother of the Nation? Depose the Darling of the Slums? You’d have another Great Change on your hands, supposing the army fought for you. But bear in mind, their oath isn’t to you, it’s to the king. And you are not king, Leo. You’re less king than I am.”
There was a brooding silence as they glared at one another down the length of that battered table, in the dingy, stuffy, faintly horse-smelling room that was the very pinnacle of power.
“So you’ve stabbed me in the fucking back.” His voice had a wounded whine to it. “My own wife. I should have left you to the Burners.”
It was his bad luck that this reinvention of the past coincided with a particularly savage cramp, as if there was a fist clenching around her guts. She jerked forwards, showing him her teeth. “You fucking did, you treacherous shit! And then you seized the throne against my wishes, and then you killed my brother, and now I’ll make you pay the fucking bill!”
As she snarled the words his expression changed from fury, to amazement, and ended in a joyless bark of laughter. “Oh, so I’m the villain? Funny what we forget, isn’t it? Remember our rebellion? I wanted to change the Closed Council but leave Orso on the throne! That’s what you told me you wanted. And the Darling of the Slums wouldn’t lie to her own husband, would she?”
Savine swallowed, and said nothing.
Leo stabbed with a finger at Isher’s empty chair. “Because the flexible Lord Isher told me a different story. That you agreed with him Orso would be quietly shuffled off, so you could be queen. And that wasn’t the only deal you made behind my back, was it? I thought it was strange how Stour
just…” And he snapped his fingers. “Changed his mind about helping us! No wonder, since you offered him Uffrith!”
Savine had to stop herself grimacing. But her husband had not finished listing her crimes.
“When we hanged your precious brother, I didn’t hear you begging for his life. You knew it had to be done. You knew, but you wanted someone to blame. Do you believe your own lies, or just pretend to? The hypocrisy!” And he clutched at the tabletop, wrenched at it as though he’d rip it off. “How can you sit there with a straight face, talking of the horrors of the old regime? You were the old regime! It was your own father who carved those names into the Square of Martyrs! No one profited more than you and no one cared less! Now you dare to put on a white dress and preach to me that it can’t all be for nothing? Play the saint of Adua out there if you please, Savine,” he sneered at her, “but in here let’s not embarrass ourselves. You can call me treacherous. Call me ruthless. But ask who I learned it from.”
Another brooding silence as they glowered at each other from the hard chairs to which their ambitions had swept them. Then, for once, Savine let her shoulders drop.
“You’re right,” she said, wincing as she tried to press at her aching belly through her corset. He was right, after all. “Maybe… I came to regret the things I had done, and so I hated to see you do the same. The truth is I played my part in it all. The lead role, even. I schemed and lied and betrayed. And you are the one who has paid the price. You, and Orso, and all those I ground to dust in my mills, and turned to meat on my battlefields, and let rot in my slums. I am sorry for that. Sorry for Orso and sorry for you. Sorry for all of it… but… thinking now, if I had the same choices to make… I cannot say I would not do it all again.” She met his eyes, and gave a little shrug. “Maybe, after all… I’m the villain.”
Leo glared at her from the other end of the table. “So. You’ll back down about Sipani?”
“Oh, no. I won’t back down about anything.”
He stared a moment longer, mouth slightly open. Then he sagged in his chair. “Is this how it always is? You get what you wanted, but somehow it’s not what you wanted at all? Every victory turns out to be just another kind of defeat?”
He looked so withered, so ruined, she was caught between disgust and pity. She could not forgive him, but she knew she had helped make him what he was. For better or worse, they were shackled together. She put aside her anger and gave a weary sigh.
“This is not a victory or a defeat, Leo, it is a marriage.” Now she slipped the box from her sleeve and took a pinch up one nostril. “I suggested to
you, before our wedding, that you should look on it as a business relationship.” She smothered a sneeze. “I suggest you continue to do so. Partners need not see eye to eye on every point. They can even, frankly, detest
each other on a personal level.” She took a pinch up the other nostril. “But sensible ones collaborate, for the good of the business. I suggest
we collaborate, for the good of our children. They need their father. For the good of the Union. It needs its champion.” She dabbed her nose clean. “We have the chance to do so much good together. It would be a crime to throw it away simply because we cannot agree.” And she closed the
box with a snap.
“I’ll fight you, if I must.” Leo shifted his useless left arm in his jacket. “I’ve never backed down from a fight.”
“Please.” Savine suppressed a wince at another twinge in her belly. “This is no storybook. You might not be the villain but you’re for damn sure not the hero.” She forced her shoulders back, and her smile back on. “Selest!”
The door opened a crack to show the well-powdered face of the new Minister for Commerce. “Your Highness?”
“Bring the Closed Council back in. We have work to do.”
Curses and Blessings
In the blackness of the night the Long Eye opened, and she saw it all.
She saw a bald weaver, and the work on his loom was all in ruins, a million threads hanging severed. But he was stitching it back together, patience, patience, and smiling as he worked. He put out his hands, and one fell on the head of a black-haired boy, and the other on the head of a blonde-haired girl.
She saw the girl become a laughing woman, flashing lenses on her eyes, a tall hat perched on her golden curls, and the hat belched smoke, spat ash, blotted out the bleeding sun and cast the world into twilight. She blew a kiss, and the kiss became a coin, a thousand coins, a million golden chains. She offered her hand, and the fingers became iron rails, and the rails reached across the sea and made a cage, the cage that Stour had forged, and the whole North was inside.
She saw the black-haired boy became a black-haired man, and he sat on a hill of bones in a circle of fire with a grey sword across his knees, a grey sword never sheathed, a grey sword marked with one silver letter. His scarred mouth spoke, but his words were drops of blood that made a stream, that became a river, that became a sea that broke upon the beaches of the North. A tide of blood. A flood whose red waters would not recede.
She saw the Crinna boil. She saw Uffrith burn again. She saw the graves open and spew up the dead. She saw Skarling’s Chair split in two and the broken wood bleeding. She saw a plague of worms writhe in the poisoned fields. She saw a plague of crows shower from the bare trees and blot out the moon, sink the world in darkness.
And in the darkness she saw a bald weaver, and in his eye she saw a burning stone, and in the burning stone she saw a circle of runes, and in the circle of runes she saw a black door, and beyond the door a figure rose from the seething sea, a figure made of blinding light, and his feet left smouldering footsteps in the shingle, and he spoke in thunder.
“I am returned.”
Rikke tore free of the furs on her father’s bed and crouched in the darkness, trembling, gasping, the sweat of her vision clinging cold to her and her left eye burning hot as a coal in her tattooed face.
She couldn’t say whether the Long Eye was a blessing for giving her this warning, or a curse that she would wake every day in terror of what she’d seen.
Maybe the truth was it was both. It had always been both.
“You look like you saw the dead,” said Isern-i-Phail, frowning at her as she dropped into Skarling’s Chair.
“I did,” whispered Rikke. The light from the great new windows she’d had built, with their fine view of the ocean, stabbed at her eyes. The sounds of Uffrith beyond hammered at her ears. Flashes of what she’d seen the night before lurked at the edges of her sight. Seen as if they were already done. She closed her eyes, the one that saw nothing and the one that saw too much, and wiped the greasy sheen from her forehead.
Her father’s hall was busy. Folk from every corner of the North, come to pay their respects.
“People,” she said, but her voice died in her throat and became a croak. “People!” And they stopped their chatter and looked around, shifting eagerly towards her. “In the night, I had a vision!”
There was a hushed murmur at that. An awestruck murmur, like she spoke with the voice of Euz.
Shivers frowned at her, his metal eye twinkling. “What did you see?”
Rikke hardly knew how to start. Her heart was thumping at the splintered memories of it. She opened her mouth to speak—
Then the doors to the hall shuddered open and the Nail stomped in out of the brightness, with a new cut down his cheek which rather suited him and a great smile on his face which suited him even better. “Ollensand surrendered!”
“You beat ’em?” asked Hardbread.
“Didn’t have to,” said the Nail, slapping him on the shoulder with one big hand and near knocking him down. “They opened their gates to us. And we were gentle with ’em, don’t worry! All we took was their promise to kneel and pay their tithes to Black Rikke.” He gave a shrug. “Well, that and one other thing freely given…” And he waved towards the door, and a set of Carls came in, each rolling a great cask ahead of him. “A dozen barrels of their best ale so we could toast the new North!”
And they hefted one of the barrels onto the table while folk whooped and cheered and one of ’em banged the peg out with his axe and sent a jet of frothy beer spurting, a couple of folk dancing in the foam till Hardbread had a tap knocked into the spouting hole and started handing out cups.
“Not only that!” growled Flatstone, following the Nail into the hall with grinning men at his back, “but we sent the last o’ those savages back across the Crinna, crying for his mummy. Reckon it’ll be a good few years ’fore those bones-and-hides bastards dare to stick a toe on our side o’ the river.”
More cheers, and more ale, and more good news. “The North’s ours!” roared the Nail. “Well, yours.” And he grinned at Rikke, then it seemed as if he might be blushing, and he scratched his sandy beard, and looked down at the floor. No one much noticed, though, all too busy slapping each other on the back, and marvelling at how everything had come out right.
They all looked so happy. Faces Rikke was used to seeing stamped with fear or sadness. One old bird who’d lost two sons in the last war had tears on her cheeks. Even Caul Shivers was smiling.
“The North’s united,” he whispered, like it was a puzzle he couldn’t solve. “From the Crinna to the Whiteflow. By the dead, your father would be proud.”
Rikke thought of her father, then, sitting on his bench, rubbing his grizzled jaw. Making the hard choices so his people wouldn’t have the trouble of ’em. Bent under a load of other folk’s fears so they wouldn’t have to carry their weight.
Isern-i-Phail was showing her missing tooth in a girlish grin. “Always knew we’d get great things from you, Rikke. But I’ll confess I never expected half o’ this. Not a quarter. Now then.” And she offered out a chagga pellet. “What was this vision o’ yours?”
Rikke blinked at her, and at the happy room. Then she took the pellet, and stuck it up behind her lip. She forced a queasy smile onto her face.
“Nothing,” she said. “All good.”
Acknowledgments
As always, four people without whom:
Bren Abercrombie, whose eyes are sore from reading it.
Nick Abercrombie, whose ears are sore from hearing about it.
Rob Abercrombie, whose fingers are sore from turning the pages.
Lou Abercrombie, whose arms are sore from holding me up.
Then, my heartfelt thanks:
To all the lovely and talented people in British publishing who have helped bring the First Law books to readers down the years, including but by no means limited to Simon Spanton, Jon Weir, Jen McMenemy, Mark Stay, Jon Wood, Malcolm Edwards, David Shelley, Katie Espiner and Sarah Benton. Then, of course, all those who’ve helped make, publish, publicise, translate and above all sell my books wherever they may be around the world.
To the artists responsible for somehow continuing to make me look classy: Didier Graffet, Dave Senior, Laura Brett, Lauren Panepinto, Raymond Swanland, Tomás Alm
eida, Sam Weber.
To editors across the Pond: Lou Anders, Devi Pillai, Bradley Englert, Bill Schafer.
To champions in the Circle: Tim and Jen Miller.
To the man with a thousand voices: Steven Pacey.
For keeping the wolf on the right side of the door: Robert Kirby.
To all the writers whose paths have crossed mine on the Internet, at the bar or in the writers’ room, and who’ve provided help, support, laughs and plenty of ideas worth the stealing. You know who you are.
And lastly, yet firstly:
The great machinist, Gillian Redfearn. Because every Jezal knows, deep down, he ain’t shit without Bayaz.
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The Big People
Notable Persons of the Union
His August Majesty King Orso the First—unwilling High King of the Union, a notorious wastrel while crown prince but won an unlikely victory over Leo dan Brock.
Hildi—the king’s valet and errand-girl, previously a brothel laundress.
Tunny—once Corporal Tunny, pimp and carousing partner to Orso, then his standard-bearer.
Yolk—Corporal Tunny’s idiot sidekick.
Bremer dan Gorst—a squeaky-voiced master swordsman, First Guard to King Orso.
Lord Chamberlain Hoff—self-important chief courtier, son of the previous Lord Hoff.
Lord Chancellor Gorodets—long-suffering holder of the Union’s purse-strings.
High Consul Matstringer—overwrought supervisor of the Union’s foreign policy.
The Wisdom of Crowds Page 62