by Peter McLean
“Just visiting,” she said.
That was unlikely, to my mind. Rosie was Bloody Anne’s woman, a redhead in her early twenties who worked out of the Chandler’s Narrow house, where she ruled the other girls with a firm hand. Even now she wore the bawd’s knot proudly displayed on her shoulder in yellow cord. Anne didn’t know it, but she was also Ailsa’s contact in the Queen’s Men. There was only one reason for Rosie to be calling on Ailsa, and that was if there was news from Dannsburg.
News, or orders.
Of course, I didn’t get to find out what those orders might be. Rosie worked for Ailsa, not for me, at least where crown business was concerned. I had given my loyalty to the Queen’s Men, but I wasn’t one of them, or even really part of their network of spies. I was just a man Ailsa was using, I was under no illusions about that. She was my wife for convenience only, and her expression made it quite plain that I wasn’t welcome to join their conversation.
I left the two of them to talk. I found Desh still in the hall with a crossbow propped beside his chair while he watched the door. He got up smart enough when he saw me, and all but saluted. Guard duty is the most boring thing there is, every soldier knows that, and I felt for him.
“How do you like the life?” I asked him, taking a sip of my brandy.
He gave me a respectful nod.
“Very well, thank you, Mr. Piety,” he said.
He wasn’t a Pious Man yet, but he had been with me a good while now. I knew little enough about him, for all that.
“Tell me about yourself, Desh,” I said. “Do you have family? A special girl, maybe?”
He shook his head. “No one special,” he said. “My parents and my sisters still live down on Hull Patcher’s Row, but we don’t see a lot of each other anymore.”
“Family is important,” I said.
“This isn’t the life they’d have chosen for me, and that pains them,” he admitted. “They’d have seen me work my hands raw on the boats until I was half crippled, just like they did. Honest work, they’d call that. A fool’s errand is what I call it.”
I smiled at that, and thought of how I had turned my back on bricklaying as a young man and become a businessman instead. There was something in Desh that reminded me of myself at that age. That might be a good thing, or it might not. He was ambitious, I could see that much, and ambition is always to be admired. To a point.
He was wearing a good coat, I saw. Not as expensive as those the Pious Men favored, of course, but cut in the same style and certainly richer than anything a lad from Hull Patcher’s Row might ever expect to own. Status mattered to Desh, I could see that. That might well be the lever that moved him, and again there we weren’t so very different.
“I agree with you about that, as you won’t be surprised to learn,” I told him, and showed him a smile. “There could be a future for you here, in the Pious Men.”
“That’s what I want, sir,” he said. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted, as far back as I can remember.”
I nodded slowly. I had thought as much.
“Good,” I said.
Rosie came out of the drawing room then, a thin cloak draped over her kirtle to hide the bawd’s knot on her shoulder. Ailsa would never have wanted the neighbors to see a whore come calling at the house, not even a licensed one. Those who wore the knot were a good deal more respectable than unlicensed street scrubs, to be sure, but even so I knew that would never have done.
I found myself wondering what had happened to the sweet, funny, common girl called Ailsa who had come to work for me in the Tanner’s Arms last year. The girl I had started to fall in love with.
She never existed, I reminded myself. She was just a false face.
That was true enough, but the thought pained me all the same.
I watched Rosie leave, then turned back to Desh.
“There’s going to be work soon,” I told him. “I was wondering if perhaps you’d like to do something more than guard a door. Would you?”
He straightened at once, a determined set to his jaw.
“I would, sir,” he said.
“It might be harsh work, I won’t lie to you about that, but harsh work is well rewarded.”
He nodded. “I can do that.”
He wasn’t a veteran and I didn’t know if he could, but there was only one way to find out.
SEVEN
I held a council of war that night at the Tanner’s Arms.
We were in the back room where the men had used to sleep. Many of the lads had their own homes in the Stink by then, and those who didn’t were content living out of one or the other of my boardinghouses. Only Anne, Hari, Sam, and Black Billy lived at the Tanner’s now, and the big storeroom had been converted into my headquarters.
There was a long table and twelve chairs set up in the big windowless room, lit by half a dozen oil lamps stood along its length. I had the head of the table, with Bloody Anne in her place at my right hand and my brother at my left. Fat Luka was beside Anne, with Aunt Enaid opposite him at Jochan’s side. Those were all I had summoned to this meeting, them and young Desh.
He sat nervously beside Fat Luka. Enaid was staring at him with her single eye, and I could tell it was making him uncomfortable.
“Why is this foreign boy here?” she said.
My aunt had been a soldier in the last war, and she made no pretense to being a lady. She had some sixty years to her, and she was one-eyed and half-crippled and blunt and rude and fucking a lad called Brak who was barely a third her age. No one would think she had been a nun, barely a year past, but then I doubted many would think me a priest, either.
“His name is Desh, and he’s here because I invited him,” I said.
“Why?” she demanded. “He’s not a Pious Man. Barely old enough to shave, and he’s off the tea ships at that.”
“He’s not off the tea ships; he’s from Hull Patcher’s Row,” I said.
Aunt Enaid had a deep-seated dislike of Alarians, I knew, although I had no idea why. That hadn’t gone well between us, when I married Ailsa. My aunt had taken that very ill indeed. All the same, it had given me an idea.
Desh looked somewhere between embarrassed and angry, hearing my aunt talk, but he held his peace about it, and that was wise of him. I could see he knew his place at this table. The lad was clearly no fool.
“He’s a good man,” Fat Luka said, “but I’d ask the same question. This table is for Pious Men.”
“Aye, it is,” I said. “It might be that Desh will be joining us at this table, someday. I wanted to introduce him to you all. We’ve work, and soon. Bloodhands and the Northern Sons need a good kicking. They hold Convent Street, and I want it. There’s a lot of taxes to be taken from the warehouses along there, and it’ll allow us to spread our streets across west from the docks and cap the north end of the city all the way to the racetrack. Desh is going to help us with that work, and then we’ll see.”
Luka nodded to say he understood.
“Pious Men are Ellinburg men,” my aunt said.
I turned and glared at her.
“He’s from fucking Hull Patcher’s Row,” I said again. “You could stand on the roof here and hit his da’s front door with a thrown rock. Enough of that.”
“I’m not from Ellinburg, nor a man,” Bloody Anne said in the quiet, rasping tone she used when she was getting angry. “Do you question my place at this table?”
“I’ll question who I like in my own city,” Enaid growled. “He’s a fucking tea monkey and you’re a cunt-eater, and why should I sit with either of you?”
Anne was across the table faster than a blink, and one of her daggers hammered down into the wood barely half an inch from my aunt’s hand.
“Enough,” I said, in the voice that threatened harsh justice to come.
Anne glared into Enaid’s eye for a moment, then f
inally wrenched her dagger back out of the table and regained her seat.
“I won’t be spoken to like that,” Anne said.
“No, you won’t,” I said. “You’re my second, but I’m the boss here. If there’s justice to be done at my table, then it’s me who’ll deal it. If anybody, and I mean anybody, disrespects my judgment like that again, then Lady help me I will fucking blind them. Is that absolutely understood?”
Enaid looked at me and then away.
“Yes, Tomas,” she said.
“Aye, Tomas,” my brother muttered.
“Yes, boss,” said Fat Luka, and Desh echoed him with a tremor in his voice.
Anne gave me a short nod.
That was done, then.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll hear no more about that, and you mind that it doesn’t leave this room. Desh, you can go and get a drink now. We’ve business to discuss.”
He nodded and left us there, and to my mind he looked a sight less cocky than he had before the council had started. That was good. I had needed him to know what he would be getting into if he became a Pious Man, and who he would be sitting with at the table. He had been starting to think of himself as a big man, I had realized, so it was my job to show him that he wasn’t. Not yet, anyway. I think he understood the lay of things in the Pious Men now and who was in charge.
The door closed behind him, and a moment later Jochan roared with laughter.
“Fuck a nun! If he still wants to join us after that then the boy’s made of the right fucking stuff,” he said.
Anne and Enaid grinned at each other across the table, obviously pleased with themselves and rightly so. Anne had told me once before that she was no actress, but she was wrong about that, to my mind. Between them they had made a fine job of the little mummer’s show I had set them to perform for Desh.
“Exactly,” I said. “He ain’t a veteran but that’s through no fault of his own, and he’s just proved he knows when to sit still and keep his mouth shut. We’ll put him to work on this, and if word doesn’t spread of what he just saw then we’ll see about his future.”
“To work on what, exactly?” Enaid said. “And why are you so bloody keen on him, Tomas?”
“I’m planning some mischief, Auntie,” I told her. “That’s not your side of things, I know, but it means I’ll want to take Anne away from the business and put her back into the sergeant’s role. I need you to run things again for a while.”
Enaid just nodded at that. She knew the Pious Men business inside out, after all.
“And the lad?”
“We lost a lot of good men this last year,” I said. “We’re enough, for now, but not if we mean to expand. And I do mean to expand, you mark me on that. All of you, you mark me. All of eastern Ellinburg belongs to the Pious Men, but all that means is there’s half the city that doesn’t, and I mean to change that. If I need to make a few of the hired lads up to this table, then that’s what I’ll do, and Desh is the most likely of them so far. Any questions?”
I stared around the table, meeting their eyes one by one. Anne was resigned, Luka calculating, Jochan eager. Only my aunt was unreadable, her one blue eye glittering in the light of the lamps.
“Where, and when?” my brother asked.
“The racetrack,” I said. “There’s a big meet on Coinsday, and I want us there. We’re going to make a statement.”
* * *
* * *
Coinsday was the day before Godsday, the day when working folk got paid their wages for the week. It was traditionally a day of drinking and gambling and excess. A man might give two thirds of his pay to his wife to keep their house but the rest was his, and he’d waste it as he saw fit. It was the busiest night of the week in the Tanner’s Arms, and the busiest day at the track, too.
We were there shortly after noon, perhaps an hour before the first race of the day. The racetrack lay to the north and west of Trader’s Row and the docks, just outside the northern city wall. I was with Jochan and Bloody Anne and Fat Luka, all of us dressed in fine clothes and out for a day at the races with Stefan and Borys and Simple Sam following as our bodyguards.
Away out in the crowd, shabbily dressed and inconspicuous but with daggers and other things hidden under their coats, were eight of the hired lads, including Desh. He had the command of them, and he had his orders.
We circulated, Anne and my brother and Fat Luka and me, exchanging nods and handshakes and pats on the shoulder with people we knew. The betting tents were open by then, and men were calling odds on the races to come. Men from the Northern Sons, I knew that much.
Ailsa had reminded me yet again before I left that I was to keep a distance between myself and the inevitable bloodshed, and she had sent me off with a stern reminder that I was to be back at the house by sundown. I fully intended to keep my distance that day—I was enjoying a day at the races with my friends, that was all. Besides, it was her who had wanted the fight taking to the Sons and their Skanian backers. That was what I was doing, to my mind.
We made our way to the betting tents, and now heads were turning in the crowd to follow us. We were known, all of us. Of course we were; that was half the point. We were dressed like lords and flanked by guards and everyone knew exactly who the Pious Men were.
I placed bets, seemingly at random, and my brother did the same. Today wasn’t about silver, and it didn’t much matter if we won or lost. Today was about steel, and there we would win. All the same, I only bet on horses that I knew weren’t owned by the Northern Sons.
That done, we visited the tavern tents and circulated some more, drinking and making merry and being seen. Desh and his boys weren’t visible in the crowd anymore, and that was good. Lady willing, they were about their business.
The time came for the first race, and we crowded to the rail with the common folk. They left a respectful space around us, and any who forgot to do that were sharply reminded by Borys and Stefan.
The track was a great oval of grass, with the winning post not a hundred yards from where we stood. The ground seemed to tremble as the horses pounded down the home straight, their riders bent low over their necks and whipping them into a frenzy. A horse called Glory’s Dream had the lead, a horse owned by the Northern Sons and the clear favorite according to the odds. Glory’s Dream led by two lengths, then by one length, then her front legs buckled and she crashed to the turf and pitched her rider head over heels out of the saddle and under the merciless hooves of the pursuing horses.
Clear Water galloped home, and I allowed myself a smile. I’d had ten marks on her at three to one.
There was shouting in the crowd, and men rushed onto the track to see to the fallen rider. He was alive but grievously hurt, and I doubted he would ride again.
Four races we watched that afternoon, and each time the horses owned by the Sons fell or collapsed or simply refused to start. By the time the day was done my purse was a good deal heavier than it had been, and the atmosphere at the track was turning ugly.
Desh had done well.
EIGHT
“They’ve been nobbled!” I heard a man shout, somewhere in the crowd.
There were angry rumbles of agreement from the men around him.
I could feel Simple Sam drawing closer to me, and Stefan had Anne’s right while Borys minded Luka and my brother. I could see Desh and his crew now, in the distance near the stables. He had five men with him, where before he had had seven, but it was done.
“We should go,” Anne rasped, close to me, and I nodded.
It was known that we had been there, and what had happened, and that was enough. I hadn’t forgotten my own racehorse and I hadn’t forgiven anyone for what had happened to it, and I had sent that message loud and clear to the Skanians.
Desh had done the work I had set him. His orders had been simple enough: break into the Sons’ stables, kill their guards and drug th
eir horses. Him and his boys had nobbled the Sons’ horses like he had been told to, and if he had lost two men in the process, then he had seen hard fighting doing it. Truth be told, I had expected that, but the lad had stepped up and done what he was told and that was good.
We left without waiting for them, me and Anne and Luka in my carriage while the others rode. Desh and his remaining crew would slip out in ones and twos, mingling with the crowd in their shabby clothes until they could make their way back to the Tanner’s Arms on foot.
“That went well enough,” I said, once the carriage was under way.
“Desh lost two of his crew, unless I missed my count,” Anne growled. “That’s not well enough to me.”
“They’re just hired men, Anne,” I said. “The weakest fall first, just like conscripts in the army, and they weren’t anyone we knew. Our Lady welcomes them. They may have crossed the river, but Desh didn’t and he did what I wanted him to do, and that’s good.”
She had no answer to that.
“The Sons aren’t stupid, and most everyone saw us there,” Fat Luka said.
“Aye, they saw us betting and drinking and standing at the rail, and if we were doing those things then we weren’t anywhere near those horses, were we?” I pointed out.
“That’s true enough,” he admitted.
“Two men dead, and I don’t see what we’ve achieved,” Anne said.
“Little enough, save a pile of silver,” I said, “but that was today. Today was about sending a message to the Sons, telling them I can hurt them if I want to. Telling them I do want to. They’ll have half their boys guarding the track and their stables tonight, and that means they won’t be guarding everywhere else half so well as they should be.”
Anne nodded slowly, and her scar twisted as the corner of her mouth turned up in a smile. She might say she’d had enough of fighting, but I didn’t think that was strictly true. Bloody Anne had earned her name at Abingon, and a hundred times over since then. She had been getting bored, I could tell that much, and the prospect of a raid was cheering her.