by Peter McLean
“No, of course not,” I said.
I told her what Billy had told me, that brandy afternoon.
“Interesting,” she said, in a soft voice that perhaps I hadn’t been supposed to catch. “Yes, he may well be what they seek.”
“What?”
Ailsa turned and looked at me, and her dark eyes were pitiless.
“Nothing,” she said. “You need to consider this carefully, Tomas. We will be away a good long time, I suspect. The business must continue to run without you.”
“Aye,” I said. “Bloody Anne’s my second, she’ll take over the business. Fat Luka can—”
“I would prefer that Luka came with us,” Ailsa interrupted, in a tone that made her preference an instruction.
I blinked at her. “What the fuck for?”
“He’s a clever man, and he’s devious and he knows how to find things out,” Ailsa said. “Dannsburg is . . . not like Ellinburg. I think he’ll be useful to us there.”
“You’re a fucking Queen’s Man,” I snapped at her. “Don’t you know everything that happens in the capital?”
“If we did there would be no crime and no sedition,” she said. “Of course we don’t know everything, just almost all of it. Luka will be useful, and he is coming with us.”
That sounded like that was the end of it, then, but something was bothering me all the same. Ailsa was right; Fat Luka was a clever man. Too clever, perhaps. He was devious, too, as she had said.
If we were going to Dannsburg on crown business, and I couldn’t think that it was anything else, then perhaps Luka might find his way to working that out for himself, in time. Still, I thought, that wasn’t my problem. If Ailsa trusted him, then well and good. I had thought before that perhaps she sensed a kindred spirit in him, and it might be that I had been right about that. That wasn’t my concern, though. My only concern was how best to keep the Pious Men going without me.
“Right,” I said. “Well, Anne’s still in charge here. My aunt will have to step up again, and Mika too. He’s a clever lad, and it’s probably time I gave him some more responsibility anyway. I’ll—”
“I don’t actually care, Tomas,” she said, cutting me off. “Arrange your men how you see fit; just see that you lose no ground to Vhent and the Skanians while we’re away. That’s the only thing that really matters.”
* * *
* * *
Dannsburg is maybe a week’s ride from Ellinburg for a messenger, if the weather is fair. That’s if you pack a saddlebag and bedroll, get on a horse and point it down the West Road, and sleep under a hedge wherever you stop each night. Of course, it wasn’t going to be that simple.
Traveling with Ailsa meant carriages and wagons, servants and guards, and stopping at an inn every night to sleep in real beds. It meant her and Billy and me in one carriage and Fat Luka and Salo, our steward, and Ailsa’s fucking lady’s maid in another with a wagon for the baggage and five men ahorse as guards. It meant making five miles a day if we were lucky instead of the twenty with ease that a lone rider could have made, and it resulted in my patience wearing very thin indeed.
The whole point of money is to make life easier, to my mind, but it seemed Ailsa thought differently about that. Almost the complete opposite, in fact. Money in the way people of society manners had it seemed designed to make life as difficult as fucking possible, as far as I could see, and that made no sense to me.
Our caravan crawled through the mining country in the hills to the west of Ellinburg, then into the open farmland beyond it. There was nothing to do but sit there and watch plowmen toil endlessly up and down their fields, or to attempt to count the heads of sheep and cattle until I fell asleep on the bench.
Sometime near the end of the second week of travel, when we had again stopped at a village inn for the night with hours of daylight still left to us, I lost patience with the whole business.
“It’ll be high summer before we reach Dannsburg at this pace,” I complained to Ailsa. “I’ve seen cannon moved faster than this.”
“I am in no hurry,” she said. “I have been summoned, but not by those for whom I must make haste. I have sent word ahead that I am on my way, now let them wait on my pleasure. That sends a message, in itself, and every extra day that I take only serves to reinforce that message.”
I had no idea who or what she was talking about, so there was little enough I could say to that. This was how society folk fought their battles, I had come to realize: not with blades but with insults disguised as courtesy. It was a whole different world to mine, I knew that much.
Eventually, after well over a month of travel and tedium, the road crested a hill and in the distance I saw the walls of Dannsburg at last. Banners flew everywhere, the queen’s white rose rippling across an endless field of red. This was the capital, then. This was Dannsburg, the city of the Rose Throne.
This was Ailsa’s home, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I might not be welcome here.
TWENTY-THREE
Things worked differently in Dannsburg.
That much was plain enough even before we passed the walls. The City Guard here wore heavy plate half-armor, with red surcoats emblazoned with the white rose of the royal house. There was a long line of people waiting to enter the city, and it was plain that those without coin to pay the gate tax were being turned away. Old women, barefoot children, crippled men—if they couldn’t pay they were refused, and driven off with the butts of spears if need be.
Those who had coin were allowed through the gates, but grudgingly all the same. From what I could see the amount of the tax appeared to vary depending on the mood of the guard and the desperation of the plaintiff.
“What are they running from?” I asked Ailsa as we sat in our carriage behind a line of wagons.
“Starvation, I imagine,” she said. “The winter was even harder in the west, and many farmers will have gone hungry, but the granaries and storehouses of Dannsburg could withstand siege for two years and more. There is food in the city, and that draws people like flies.”
“I see.”
There was food in the city, but only for those who could pay. A prince looks after his people, but it seemed that perhaps a queen did not.
An armored man rode down the line of those waiting to enter the city, a Guard captain by the look of him, and he reined up in front of our carriage. He exchanged a word with one of our men, and then his face was at the window.
“Sorry to keep you waiting, m’lord,” he said to me. “Shouldn’t be too much longer.”
“It shouldn’t be any longer,” Ailsa said, her voice sharp enough to cut glass.
“No, m’lady,” he said. “My apologies. I’ll see to it.”
Ailsa sat back in her seat and turned away, dismissing him with a cold indifference that said she expected no less.
A moment later I heard shouting, and then armored guards were beating people out of our way with cries of “Make way, make way!”
“I don’t think there’s any need—” I started, but Ailsa gave me a look that silenced me.
“If we had sat and waited patiently it would have looked conspicuous,” she whispered. “The nobility don’t behave like that, not here.”
“I see,” I said again.
There was a jolt as the carriage started moving again. Salo must have already paid whatever was asked, I could only assume, as we weren’t stopped at the gates. That or nobles weren’t expected to pay at all, which wouldn’t have much surprised me. Our two carriages rumbled through the gatehouse tunnel under the massive city wall, the baggage wagon creaking along behind us, and then we were in Dannsburg itself.
The cobbled street was wide and busy, and one of our guards had to ride ahead to clear people out of our way. I saw carts and wagons and folk afoot, and guardsmen. I saw a great many guardsmen, distinctive in their red surcoats. Something seemed to be
missing, too, but I couldn’t have said what.
“A lot of guards,” I observed.
“They keep the queen’s peace,” Ailsa said.
“I’m sure they do.”
They looked tough, those guards, well armed and obviously well drilled and well disciplined. The City Guard in Ellinburg were little more than another gang, just a bigger and better-armed one, but this lot looked like proper soldiers. It seemed to me that doing business in Dannsburg might be a sight harder than I was used to, although as far as I knew that wasn’t what I was there for. Truth be told, I still had no idea why we were there. Ailsa had refused to be drawn on the subject through all of our long, tortuous progress here, and young Billy had sunk into a state of silent dread the closer to the city we got, and refused to talk at all.
“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked her. “There’s a lot of us to try and get into a city inn.”
“My house,” she said, and that surprised me.
“You’ve got a house, here?”
“Yes, of course I have,” she said. “Did you suppose that I lived on the streets before I came to Ellinburg? I am a lady of the court, Tomas. Of course I have a house.”
I must admit I hadn’t really given it any thought, but I supposed that she would have. Again I remembered that I knew practically nothing about this woman who I called my wife.
“And am I to be your husband here?”
She shot a pointed look at Billy and kicked me under the seat, but the lad had his eyes closed and seemed to be asleep.
“Of course, my love,” she said, and I couldn’t miss the acid in her tone. “I will be very pleased to introduce you to society.”
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to enjoy that.
“Of course,” I repeated, and turned my attention back to the window of the carriage.
This part of the city at least was grand enough, all built of stone and with statues and fountains in the squares. It didn’t stink like Ellinburg did, either. Lines of neatly clipped trees ran down the middle of some of the wider roads and cast pleasant shade in the spring sunshine. A massive castle loomed on a hill in the distance, red banners fluttering from its heights, and beyond it to the north I could see the soaring spires of a great temple. Every building that wasn’t obviously residential seemed to be flying the royal flag, and it seemed to my eye that the city was a sea of shifting red and white.
Billy had his eyes open by then, and he had obviously noticed the same thing.
“There are so many flags, Mama,” he said.
It still made me smile, to hear him call Ailsa that. He had started with Ma, but Ailsa had informed him that was common and told him the correct way to address us. I was Papa now instead of Uncle Tomas, not Da. Ailsa seemed to have quite taken to her new role as his adopted mother, and that pleased me a great deal.
“They show allegiance to the queen, my dear,” Ailsa said.
“It’s quite the show,” I said.
“It is best, in Dannsburg,” she murmured, “to show allegiance to the queen. Openly, and often.”
That made me frown. The royal standard flew in Ellinburg, of course, over the governor’s hall, but only there. How much allegiance did one woman need to be shown? I supposed royalty needed to be shown respect in the same way that a businessman did, although obviously on a far greater scale. A man could have enough of banners quite quickly in a place like this, I thought.
Ailsa’s house was much like the one we had in Ellinburg, although larger and set back from the street with walls around it and guards on the gates. It’s good to have guards, to my mind, but only if you know and trust them. I had no idea who these men were, and that troubled me.
They opened the gates for us and admitted the carriages and the wagon into a spacious area of grass in front of the house. I frowned as two more armed men came out of the house and started toward us.
“Do these people all work for you?” I asked her quietly.
“For my friends,” she said, and that was exactly what I had been afraid of.
These were Queen’s Men, then, or their soldiers anyway. It occurred to me that I had never thought to question Ailsa’s rank within the Queen’s Men, if they even had such a notion, but this was how I had always imagined a colonel’s house might be.
One of the house guards made to open the door of the carriage then, and he found one of my guards between it and him before he could complete the action. My man was still ahorse, and he had a hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Peace, Oliver,” I said. “We’re among friends here.”
I hoped that was true, but I wasn’t completely sure.
I looked over Oliver’s horse and saw yet another man at the door of the house, a loaded crossbow raised to his shoulder.
“Oh, for the gods’ sakes,” Ailsa snapped. “Brandt, stand back. Oliver, don’t be a fool. This is my house, and I am mistress here. You both disgrace yourselves in front of my lord husband.”
I thought this Brandt fellow might injure himself, what with how fast he bowed to her. He seemed to be in charge of her household guards, from what I could see.
Oliver reached down from his horse to open the carriage door, and I climbed out onto the churned-up grass and offered my hand to my lady wife. Ailsa stepped gracefully down beside me and Billy jumped down after her, staring around him with his eyes wide.
“This house is safe, Papa,” he said after a moment.
That was good to hear, especially coming from Billy. When he knew a thing was so, then it was so, and I was past arguing with that or doubting him. I no longer even cared whether he got that knowledge from Our Lady or from some devil in Hell. I would take what help I was given and be grateful for it.
“Yes, Billy, it is,” I said, for the benefit of the men around me. “This is our house, just like the one in Ellinburg.”
“Exactly,” Ailsa said, and she gave me a nod of approval to say I had handled that well.
Fat Luka and Salo were out of their own carriage now and looking around them. Luka had a thoughtful look on his face as he took in the sight of the household guards, and right then I found I was glad to have him with me despite my earlier misgivings. He was wondering the same things I had been, I knew—who these men were and how much we could trust them. Ailsa’s lady’s maid was sitting waiting patiently for one of them to give her a hand down, which neither of them thought to do.
I went over to Luka while Salo started to supervise the unloading of the baggage wagon. Eventually the maid climbed down by herself with a pinched look of annoyance on her face.
“Well, Tomas,” Luka said, scratching his belly through his fine doublet, “this is Dannsburg, then.”
“Aye,” I said. “It seems that it is. Don’t wander off exploring just yet—I’ll need to speak to you in private as soon as we have the chance.”
* * *
* * *
That chance was a good while coming. Everything in Ailsa’s house was even more formal than it was back in Ellinburg, which chafed me raw. No, I wasn’t supposed to go into the kitchen; that wouldn’t have been seemly. Yes, of course I could have a drink, but that meant ringing a bell that summoned a footman who sent a houseboy to the kitchen to pester an undercook to draw me a mug of beer from the barrel and give it to him to bring back to the footman to give to me, when I would quite happily have just gone and got the fucking thing myself. What the point was I had no idea, but the result was that I was thirsty and in short temper by the time I finally got it. Perhaps this sort of nonsense was why nobles always seemed to be angry about something.
Ailsa’s steward was fucking insufferable. He was a tall, thin man with perhaps sixty years to him. He had elegantly styled gray hair and he thought far too much of himself, to my mind. I wondered if he hadn’t perhaps been playing lord of the house while she had been in Ellinburg these last two years. His name was Aliyev
, and he and Salo hated each other on sight.
Aliyev ran the house his own way, it soon became clear, and he quite plainly did not want another steward there. My men were assigned to servants’ quarters without consultation. It wasn’t until he tried to put Luka in a servant’s garret that I had to speak to him.
“This man is my friend and my guest, not a servant,” I told Aliyev. “He’ll be treated as such and put in a guest room.”
Aliyev looked at me, and his nose crinkled ever so slightly as though he could smell something bad and was trying to pretend that he couldn’t. It was my voice; I knew it was. My accent is strongly Ellinburg, nothing at all like Ailsa’s cut-crystal Dannsburg tones. He thought I was some common oik from the provinces who had no class and no business being his mistress’s husband, that much was plain enough.
I didn’t care for it.
“I see, sir,” he said.
He did as he was told, that was something, but the man’s manner all but dripped disrespect onto the polished wooden floor beneath him. He gave orders to a pair of housemen to install Luka in a guest room, and he turned away from me without another word or so much as a nod, as though he was dismissing me.
I wasn’t having that. This needed sorting immediately, so everyone understood how things were going to work from now on.
“Aliyev,” I said, my voice falling into the flat tone that meant harsh justice wasn’t far away.
He turned back to me with a look of thinly veiled disgust at the way I pronounced his name.
“Sir?”
“Show me the wine cellar,” I said. “Right now.”
He cleared his throat and led me down a corridor, and then through a low door and down a flight of steps under the house. I had only been guessing that there was a wine cellar, but of course there was. It was dark down there, with only the single lamp Aliyev was carrying to light the low, vaulted chamber and its rows and rows of dusty bottles. He put the lamp down on a shelf and turned to face me, his gaze expressionless.