Bright Ruin

by Vic James

  ‘Surely she’ll be suspicious?’ Astrid asked. ‘I mean, swap Gavar out and Faiers in? Isn’t it too neat?’

  ‘She’ll realize she was wrong to accept Gavar,’ Jon replied. ‘But me? I was born into their little resistance. Both of my parents – Speaker Dawson and Rix – have worked for the commoner cause all their lives.’

  ‘Your father was responsible for her uncle’s death,’ Whittam objected.

  ‘Accidentally responsible. My father was actually aiming at you, and yet here I am.’

  ‘On my daughter-in-law’s recommendation. She evidently trusts you, for whatever private reason . . .’ Whittam’s gaze swung towards Bouda and she steeled herself not to flinch beneath it. What was he insinuating? ‘And I tolerate you because I know you know that I could break your neck as easily as I can do this.’

  There was a sharp snap, like a twig underfoot, and Faiers cried out. He stared at his hand in disbelief.

  Bouda looked too. His little finger had been snapped in half like a pencil, the bright core of bone sticking through the skin. It had been done with a practised efficiency. Bouda remembered Gavar drunk and confiding one night, telling her about his father’s war stories, and his boasts of Skillful interrogation. Clearly mental assault wasn’t the only way Whittam had prised secrets from his victims.

  ‘Unnecessary,’ she hissed. She reached for Faiers’s hand. ‘I can fix it.’

  And she tried, she really did, but everyone knew that DiDi had been better, and Meilyr the best. The shard of bone tucked itself back under the skin, like a needle disappearing into a fold of cloth, stitching it together from the inside. Stitched together a little wonkily. He’d probably get arthritis there when he was older. Jon didn’t look like he was complaining, though. There was a gleam in his eyes that suggested he almost thought the injury worth it to have her Skill upon him again.

  And there were more like him, she knew. Many, many more, for whom the demonstration of Skill was a thrill and a wonder. They would all belong to her when this was over.

  ‘Any more questions?’ she asked. ‘Preferably not accompanied by injury to my staff.’

  ‘If his story is that he’s been working for them inside your office all along, surely they’ll want to know why he didn’t tip them off about our plans at Fullthorpe?’

  Jenner. Even Jenner was presuming to question her.

  ‘That’s precisely the cover story. Faiers tells them he wants out from my office because he thinks we’re on to him. Case in point is that he knew nothing about our Fullthorpe plans. He’ll say that if he’s suspected and marginalized, no longer getting useful information, there’s no benefit to him staying in Westminster. In fact, there’s only risk. If we interrogate him, he might reveal information that endangers all those he knows in Midsummer’s network.’

  Really, this was elementary statecraft. Be plausible. Lie with the truth.

  ‘It’s not like she needs to believe me for long,’ Jon added. ‘The net is closing. London is where it ends.’

  Whittam grunted and sat back.

  ‘Good. Fullthorpe delivered, and this will, too. When your little weasel here squeaks all Midsummer’s plans in your ear, we’ll have her. When she fails in London, it’ll be in front of millions. And this pathetic delusion of commoner equality will fail with her.’

  Bouda returned to Aston House alone. She’d had enough of the lot of them. Jon had suggested they go back to her office, but Bouda knew what that meant, and she really wasn’t in the mood. She wanted to avoid any similar ‘suggestions’ from Whittam that might be harder to get around. And Astrid and Jenner? Well, they were like knives she held in each hand: cruel and useful. Neither of them had much to offer beyond that.

  Walking through the vast palace’s echoing corridors, she instructed a parlourslave to bring her a chicken salad, no dressing, then shut herself into her apartments.

  It was at moments like this that she missed her sister so much it was like a physical pain. She and DiDi had lived separate lives, Bouda busy at parliament, Bodina distracted – so she had thought – with shopping, travel and parties. And yet just knowing her sister was there had been enough. Bouda’s thwarted admirers would call her an ice queen. But three people could always melt her heart: her darling parents and sister. Now she only had one of them left.

  She unzipped her dress and stepped out of it, turning in front of the mirror to admire her taut figure. She brushed a hand over her flat stomach. If she had a child, would she love it – and would it love her?

  There was a sharp rap at her door. Bouda slipped on a silk dressing gown and went to answer. But it wasn’t a slave with a tray.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Gavar said.

  ‘Finished lullabying your bastard?’ she snapped. Because even if she had a baby with this man, she would always doubt if he could love it as much as he loved his firstborn, the slavegirl’s child.

  ‘Just stop it, Bouda. Okay?’

  Gavar pushed his hair out of his eyes. He looked subdued, and for once, she couldn’t smell booze on him. Bouda hesitated, then held the door ajar. She locked it after. When the servant came with her supper, he could leave it at the door. She wasn’t hungry.

  ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’

  But Gavar didn’t snipe back. He just raised a hand – was it a plea for silence or an admission of defeat? – and lowered himself into a chair in Bouda’s sitting room.

  ‘Will it end here?’ he said. ‘All this. When Midsummer’s protest has been shut down.’

  ‘As long as she ceases to stir up classist agitation, yes.’

  ‘We don’t have to persecute them, you know. Just for the crime of being common-born and Skilless. That’s a kind of punishment in itself. Your sister—’

  ‘Don’t speak about my sister.’

  Bouda pulled her dressing gown tighter. The rooms of Aston House were horribly draughty. High-ceilinged and impressive, and perpetually cold and empty.

  Gavar rubbed his chin. ‘I was only going to say that your sister was a better person than either of us could ever be.’

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me that.’

  ‘Do you think he knew it was her?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My father. Do you think he knew it was your sister on the bridge at Riverhead? It’s just . . . what happened at Fullthorpe today got me thinking. Snipers, again. That was his suggestion, wasn’t it? He liked to use snipers in the desert, when he was on military attachment.’

  Goosebumps broke out over Bouda’s body. The draught in here was absolutely intolerable. If only she had DiDi’s snug cashmere robe. But she had ordered the servants to pack it away, along with the rest of her sister’s possessions. Of all Bodina’s things, only Stinker the pug remained in Papa’s care, becoming ever more corpulent and inert in his grief, like Daddy himself.

  Bouda was afraid that her three people to love would soon become none.

  Her thoughts were racing all over to avoid going back to that bridge. To her sister’s passionate pleading and the tears in her eyes. How fragile Dina had looked, yet how strong her voice had been as she told Bouda to break with Whittam and to say ‘enough’.

  ‘Whittam wasn’t there. Besides, why would he want my sister dead? She was just a misguided girl. Not a danger to anyone.’

  ‘He wasn’t there on the bridge, but he would have been watching the cameras. And with our sharp Equal eyes, he could have seen that it was her, even if none of the commoners did. A kill-order only takes a moment.’

  ‘Why are you saying this, Gavar? Are you trying to get me on your side after that childish display earlier? Or do you finally see how far you’ve tested your father’s patience, and think that the only way you’ll get back in his favour is by alienating me from him? What’s wrong with you?’

  She expected her husband to get angry. Instead, he sounded tired and disbelieving.

  ‘Wrong with me? Doesn’t it get exhausting, Bouda, thinking that everyone’s playing the same pitiful power games that
you are? “Dividing people.” “Taking sides.” That’s talk for playgrounds, not parliaments.’

  ‘Governing isn’t easy, Gavar. But some of us at least have a sense of duty that makes us try.’

  He still didn’t get angry. Just looked at her. And something about his expression reminded her, unbearably, of Dina on the bridge. ‘Do you really not understand?’ her sister had asked.

  Bouda understood, all right.

  She understood that no one was on your side except yourself. Not really. And that nobody could be trusted. That people would always try and use you for their own ends, and the only way you could prevent that was to be one step ahead, working out better ways of using them instead.

  And she understood that she was cold and alone – though neither as cold nor as alone as her sister, lying in the Matravers family mausoleum back at Appledurham.

  She’d wanted to be Gavar’s wife, once. Had dreamed about it for years, when a teenager. The future they’d build together and the dynasty they would create. Both of them taking turns at that greatest office of state, the Chancellorship, not as rivals but as running mates. Was it too late for that? What if they could still unite and be the First Family that Whittam talked of?

  ‘I don’t want to talk about my sister,’ she said. ‘Or your father. But . . . perhaps you need not go back to your rooms tonight.’

  She let the silk robe slip off her shoulder and looked at her husband.

  But there was no lustful spark in Gavar’s eyes. No indication that he might succumb. Just a bone-deep weariness and that maddening kind of pity.

  ‘I don’t think so, Bouda.’ He hauled himself out of his chair and briefly kissed her cheek as he passed. ‘Try and get some sleep. I’ll show myself out.’

  He left her standing there in the middle of the room. And something that must have been fury, because it couldn’t have been disappointment, roared in her ears.

  She never heard the crack like a gunshot – like a sniper’s bullet taking down his kill – as the four great fountains in front of Aston House turned, in an instant, to ice.

  17

  Abi

  Telling Mum had been the hardest thing Abi had ever done. Scarier than running from Kyneston. More terrifying than trying to trick Crovan into releasing Luke from Eilean Dòchais. She’d left out the details, simply saying that Dad had been shot during the escape, and Mum had howled and pummelled her as if Abi was the one that had killed him.

  She wasn’t. She knew that. The guilt that had choked her before the Fullthorpe raid had been burned away by the pure, blazing hatred she now felt for the regime that had done this.

  It burned so fiercely, she could barely think. And yes, logically she knew the anger was a way of coping, a displacement mechanism. That had been in the textbooks; every doctor would have to recognize the stages of grief. But rage was better than feeling sad and helpless and utterly, unendingly heartbroken. Rage gave you purpose and a reason to get out of bed.

  Abi gave Mum some sleeping pills, then washed her face and went downstairs, still dressed in the same clothes she’d worn for the raid. Clothes she had put on when her father was still alive. When he was still in the world to sling an arm round her shoulders and kiss the top of her head – the only one in the family tall enough to do so – and proudly call her Daddy’s Not-So-Little Genius.

  Don’t think about Dad. Think about how you can make the people who killed him pay.

  It was afternoon already. And in the rotunda, along with Midsummer and the others, was a new arrival: Jon Faiers.

  ‘Abi,’ he said, and those brilliant blue eyes were full of compassion. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss.’

  ‘You work in Bouda’s office. Didn’t you know what they were planning? Couldn’t you have stopped it – or warned us, at least?’

  ‘Abi, Jon didn’t know anything,’ Midsummer said. ‘That’s why he’s here. He’s been worried for a while that they suspect him. The fact that he didn’t hear a whisper about their response to Fullthorpe only confirms that. He’s come to join us permanently.’

  Midsummer laid a hand on Jon’s arm, and close on his other side sat his mother, Speaker Dawson. Abi felt rebuked, although she knew that hadn’t been Midsummer’s intention.

  ‘Something’s changed in parliament, Abi,’ Jon said. ‘It’s getting more brutal. More desperate.’

  ‘More brutal than the Blood Fair? Yeah, I guess, because this time they actually managed to kill the innocent guys they framed.’

  This anger. Abi knew it was unfair. But if it wasn’t anger, then it would be helplessness and tears. She could feel the salt stinging her throat and the back of her nose as she tried to hold them back. But there was someone more deserving of her anger than Jon, who had merely failed to discover what the Jardines were planning.

  ‘Where’s Gavar? I need to know if he knew anything about this.’

  On Midsummer’s other side, Layla sighed. One hand rested on top of her bump and there were dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked like she’d barely slept.

  ‘He’s not been back here. He went off in the second chopper lift, you know, and got all those rescued matched with their handlers for the getaways. Then he just disappeared. We know where he went – straight back to Westminster. Jon says he was at a meeting with his father and Bouda last night.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Abi,’ Midsummer added. ‘He obviously wasn’t genuine with us. I know you trusted him, and I did too. I know you wanted to believe the best of him – so did I. You mustn’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Blame myself? Why would I blame myself?’ And here it came, fury bubbling up. She was getting louder, and the noise reverberated round the vast brick dome as if dozens more were adding their voices to hers. ‘Why should I blame anyone other than the Equals? The Jardines. This has to end, Midsummer. We have to take the fight to them. Hit back.’

  ‘We all want change, Abi . . .’ Abi could hear the ‘but’ in Midsummer’s tone – and here it came. ‘But we’re not going to use their tactics to win it, and we can’t beat them like that anyway. They have Skill and they have military power. We have right on our side, and the ninety-nine per cent of the population that doesn’t have Skill. We have to win with what we have.’

  ‘We’d win by killing Whittam Jardine.’

  And in the echoing chamber that magnified the smallest sound, silence fell.

  She’d argued it back and forth with herself, at first unable to believe that this was where her anguish over Dad’s death had led her. ‘First do no harm’ was the physician’s guiding principle, after all. But she wasn’t a doctor, was she? And sometimes you did have to cause harm. Surgeons performed amputations to prevent the spread of infection – and Whittam Jardine’s regime was pure poison. What if he could be cut away? Then Britain could heal.

  Midsummer was looking at her with what Abi suspected was disappointment. Fine. Abi was disappointed, too – that no one was willing to do what was necessary.

  ‘Better futures never begin in blood, Abi.’

  ‘One man. The blood of just one man, and it’s all over. We do to him what he did to my father – a bullet, from a distance, that he won’t see coming.’

  Please let Dad not have seen it coming.

  ‘There are other ways than killing of showing that we’re serious, and that we won’t give up,’ Midsummer said. ‘We need to get the whole of London out on the streets, Abi. We need to get people coming to the capital to add their voices to ours. You remember what we did in London before – targeting the Queen’s Chapel and Mountford Street? We can do that across the city, take out key buildings, show people that you can hit the Equals where it hurts without risking – or taking – lives.’

  ‘You’d be risking lives if you’re talking about arson. Caretakers or firemen might die. And that still might not be enough to win people over. Yet you won’t take out Jardine, when it could put an end to this.’

  ‘We wouldn’t be risking lives, Abi.’ Jon leaned forward, and turned around a
stack of folders on the table in front of him, flipping open the one on top. ‘There wasn’t much I could take from the office – Bouda and Astrid Halfdan don’t exactly leave top-secret files lying around. But look at this: it’s a register of Equal-owned assets. Jardine’s no fool. He knows that if you threaten a person’s wealth, you threaten them. Here’s the property section. It’s got detail on current usage. There are places in here that are massive, incredibly valuable, but unoccupied. Or buildings with symbolic significance, which we know will be empty at night – or would contain so few people that we can clear them out.’

  ‘This sort of thing works, Abi.’ Midsummer’s eyes were bright. ‘We’ve seen that in revolutions in other countries. All it takes for a tyrant to fall is for the people to rise. They just have to have the courage and inspiration to do so – and I don’t believe a bullet in Whittam Jardine’s skull would inspire anyone.’

  Abi disagreed.

  She had a gun – the one she’d picked up in Fullthorpe. Unfortunately, she had no idea how to fire it – let alone with enough accuracy to take down a man from a distance. Could pistols even do that?

  There were two people Abi could think of who would know. One was Gavar Jardine, so scratch that. The other was Dog. The man owed her for all the food and antibiotics she’d taken to him in the Kyneston kennels. And while he loathed all Equals, he surely hated the Jardines in particular. His tormentors, the Vernays, were a Jardine branch-family. She shuddered as she recalled their encounter outside Euterpe Parva’s funeral, Dog carrying the severed head of Ragnarr Vernay before he lobbed it at Jenner and Lady Thalia.

  She wasn’t sure where he was, but she knew who would know. She saw in her memory the night that everything changed: Dog, moving among the ruins of the East Wing, leash in hand, preparing to choke the life out of Hypatia Vernay. And Silyen’s careless ‘I’ll see you later’, as though the two were friends arranging to meet after class.

  That strange boy was now Lord Silyen of Far Carr. The estate was in East Anglia, a half-day’s drive from Lindum. Silyen would have no reason to tell her where Dog was – if he knew. But then he had no reason not to, and the promise of mischief in the offing might be enough to pique his interest. She just wouldn’t tell him that it was mischief which would end with his father’s death.