The Trouble with Peace

by Joe Abercrombie

  Savine was not often lost for words, but she hardly knew how to reply. “I had no idea you picked the leaders of the Union.”

  Bayaz only smiled wider. “Recognising one’s own ignorance is the first step towards enlightenment. Lady Savine. Your Eminence.” He gave them a brief nod and strode off jauntily down the Kingsway, the tails of his expensive coat flicking behind him.

  Savine’s heart pounded as she watched him go. As if she had parried a few thrusts to the heart, rather than replied to a few strange remarks. She used to be razor-sensitive to the subtext of every conversation. The dangers lurking beneath the surface, like rocks to the unwary vessel. But she hardly trusted her own instincts any more.

  “What exactly was he offering me?” she muttered.

  Her father gave a bitter snort. “The First of the Magi never gives, only takes. That was not an offer to you, it was a threat to me.”

  “Threats, and blackmail, and banks?” It was one of those moments when you realise the world may not be quite what you had thought it was. She had been experiencing a lot of those lately. “What kind of wizard is he?”

  Her father frowned up at Bayaz’s towering statue. “The kind you obey.”

  “I’ve been made some outrageous proposals,” Savine threw over her shoulder to Zuri as she pulled off her gloves, “but that must be the first time a statue on the Kingsway has been put on the table…”

  She became aware of the muffled burble of conversation from the door to her mother’s parlour. Odd, that she should have a visitor so early. It usually took something special to get her out of her bedroom before lunch.

  Zuri had her black brows significantly raised. “I believe Lady Ardee might have an outrageous offer of her own to put to you.”

  “My mother and I are not on the best of terms at the moment.”

  “I realise. But the scriptures say those lost in the desert should take such water as they are offered.” She gently swung open the door. “No matter who it comes from.”

  Her mother’s voice spilled out as Savine stepped suspiciously into the room. “… my husband might as well be dead, as far as that department goes, and then— Savine, you’re here!” She smiled over from the cabinet where she was, it hardly needed to be said, pouring herself a glass of wine. “We’ve a visitor.” Another woman was rising from a chair, something of a military cut to clothes mud-spotted about the hem from riding. “This is Lady Finree dan Brock.”

  Savine prided herself on being hard to rattle, but Leo dan Brock’s mother in her own mother’s parlour was not an easy thing to write off as coincidence. Especially when she was currently carrying the woman’s grandchild.

  “Savine.” Lady Finree took her hand in both of hers, and a fearsomely firm grip it was, too. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  “All good, I hope.”

  “Mostly.” Finree dan Brock had an unflinching stare that even Savine found slightly intimidating. “But a woman who produced only good reports would not be fighting hard enough. I am a great admirer of your achievements as a lady of business.”

  Savine assumed her sweetest smile while she tried to work out what was going on. “As I am a great admirer of yours as a Lady Governor.”

  “All I did was mind the shop for a few years.” Finree dan Brock sat as if for a business discussion rather than a social call. “My son Leo governs Angland now.”

  Savine refused to react. “So I hear. What brings you to Adua?”

  “An invitation to Lord Isher’s wedding.”

  “It’ll be the event of the season,” said Savine’s mother, “though if you’re asking me, the man’s a bloody viper. Wine, Savine?”

  The conversation with Bayaz had felt somehow dangerous. This felt even more so. Savine had a sense she would need her wits intact. “Not for me.”

  “Lady Finree?”

  “No, but don’t let me stop you.”

  “You won’t stop mother drinking unless you brought a few fathoms of chain with you.”

  Savine’s mother plopped herself down on a chair, making a perfect triangle of the three of them, wiped a streak of wine from the side of her glass and sucked her fingertip. “You’re salty this morning.”

  “I don’t care for the feeling of being ambushed,” said Savine, looking from one woman to the other, both formidable in their own ways and as a pair positively daunting.

  They exchanged a glance. “You go,” said her mother. “I’ll chime in if needed.”

  “My son has inherited a weighty responsibility,” said Lady Finree. “One that he is in some respects well suited for, but in others… less so.”

  Savine could well imagine. “He’s hotheaded, ignorant and reckless, you mean?”

  “Exactly.” Savine should not have been surprised. A woman who had faced down an army of screaming Northmen was unlikely to be put off by a little plain-speaking. “You, meanwhile, are known to be cool-headed, calculating and patient. It seems the two of you are complementary.”

  “Fire and ice!” threw in Savine’s mother between sips.

  “My son likes to think he can do it all but, like his father, he has always needed someone beside him. Someone to give good advice and make sure he takes it. Someone to guide him to the right decisions. There comes a time when a mother can no longer do that for a son.” She raised her brows expectantly.

  Savine did not like the way this was going. “I’m not sure what I—”

  Her mother gave an explosive sigh. “Don’t be obtuse, Savine. Lady Finree and I have been discussing a match between you and Leo.”

  Savine blinked. “A marriage?”

  “Well, not a bloody fencing match.”

  Savine stared from her mother to her prospective mother-in-law. It was an ambush. An expertly prepared pincer movement, and she was outflanked on both sides.

  She lifted her chin and played for time. “I’m not sure the two of us are suited. He is a good deal younger than—”

  “I understand you felt differently when he last visited Adua,” said Lady Finree, looking at her significantly from under her brows.

  It took a moment for the implications to sink in. “He told you that?”

  Savine’s mother raised a hand. “I told her that.”

  “How the hell did you find out?”

  “Don’t be cross and don’t be coy. Neither suits you. Zuri is worried for you, as a good servant should be. As a good friend should be. She is thinking of your best interests. We all are, believe it or not.” Her mother leaned forward, holding her eye, and put a reassuring hand on Savine’s knee. “She told us about your… situation.”

  Savine’s face burned. She found she had put a hand to her stomach and angrily snatched it away. She was used to stabbing other people with their secrets. She did not at all enjoy being impaled on one of her own.

  “Forgive me if I am blunt,” said Lady Finree. “I have spent much of my life around soldiers—”

  “Fancy that,” snapped Savine. “So did mother, in her youth.”

  “It’s a shame youth has to end,” sang Savine’s mother, fluttering her eyelashes. Then she gave Savine’s knee a parting pat and sat back, murmuring out of the corner of her mouth, “You see that bluntness won’t be a problem.”

  “Then let us speak plainly,” said Lady Finree. “It will not be long before your condition becomes difficult to hide.” Savine angrily set her jaw, but she could hardly dispute the facts. The laces of her corsets already needed even more brutal handling than usual. “It could be a disaster for you. Or it could be an opportunity. Turning disasters into opportunities is what an investor does, isn’t it?”

  “Wherever possible,” muttered Savine.

  “My son has title, fame, courage and loyalty.”

  “And is a damnably handsome fellow,” observed Savine’s mother.

  “You have wealth, connections, cunning and ruthlessness.”

  “And in the right light can look rather well yourself.”

  “I doubt there is a more elig
ible young man in the Union,” said Lady Finree. “Unless you were to marry the king, I suppose.”

  Savine’s mother coughed wine down her dress. “Damn it. Silly me.”

  “Your pride is well earned,” said Finree, “but the time has come to put it aside.”

  Her mother was dabbing at herself with a handkerchief. “Really. You could be the most envied couple in the Union! You’re far too clever not to see the sense of this.”

  “And certainly far too clever to raise a bastard alone when you have such an advantageous alternative. By all means lead my son a little dance if you please, no man values what he gets too easily. But there really is no need to drag this charade out any further between the three of us.”

  Savine slowly sat back. There had been a golden moment when her fingertips had brushed the crown. Her wildest ambitions, so nearly in her grasp. Her August Majesty the High Queen of the Union, before whom all must kneel or suffer! But, she had to admit, Her Grace the Lady Governor of Angland was not a bad second best. She had tried following her heart, and it had led her straight to shit. She and Leo dan Brock were an excellent match in every way that counted. He would need some moulding, some steering, some discipline. But who could argue with the quality of the raw materials? A wedding to a famous hero might be the very thing to turn her fortunes around.

  Savine had spent her whole life scheming, plotting, striving to control events. There was a certain relief in yielding to the inevitable. “No,” she said, almost a sigh. “I don’t suppose there is.”

  She had been made many proposals of marriage, but this was the first she had actually accepted. And the only one made not by the prospective husband, but by his mother.

  “I think I’ll take that drink now,” she said.

  “I, too.” Lady Finree issued a neat little smile. “Since we’ve something to celebrate.”

  Savine’s mother grinned as she trotted to the cabinet.

  Gentle Temperaments

  The Lords’ Round was an awe-inspiring space, all marble and gilding and friezes of noble forebears. Heart of the Union and all that, light streaming from the stained-glass windows, through the echoing vastness, to splash the tiled floor where the great noblemen of the past once set the course of the future.

  But all Leo saw were the steps down through the empty banks of seating.

  Before his duel and the damn leg wound, he’d never noticed how many steps there were in the world. He’d sprung up them three at a time and gone blithely on his way. No more. They were everywhere. And down was worse than up, that was the thing people never realised. Going up, you couldn’t fall that far. He took the usual moment to curse the Circle, swords and Stour Nightfall, then set off slightly sideways, grumbling with each lurching stride.

  “Leo!” Isher ignored the offered hand at the bottom of the steps and instead folded him in a hug. “Wonderful to see you again!” A bit overfamiliar given they’d spoken no more than three times, but better too friendly than the opposite.

  “Congratulations on your forthcoming marriage.” Leo winced at a twinge in his leg as he broke free. “Haven’t seen my mother this excited in years.” He turned slowly around, looking up towards the gilded dome high, high above. “Doubt you could find a grander venue.”

  “Nor a bride with better pedigree.” Isher stroked at the air as though they were discussing a racehorse. “Isold dan Kaspa, do you know her?”

  “Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Excellent blood. Good old Midderland stock. Wonderfully gentle temperament.”

  “Wonderful,” said Leo, without much joy. To him, a woman with a gentle temperament was like a sword without an edge.

  Isher frowned down at Leo’s cane. “How’s your leg?”

  “Fine.” Along with the constant pain was the constant need to pretend you weren’t in pain at all, as though the worst thing about your agony was that it might put other people out. “Sword wounds can take some time to heal.”

  “Ah, yes. Sword wounds.” As though Isher knew a damn thing about swords or wounds. He leaned close. “Things have not been going well since your last visit.”

  “No?”

  “I hate to be unpatriotic,” he murmured, as if he could hardly wait, “but King Orso proves to be every bit the empty vessel we were expecting.”

  “There’s nothing unpatriotic about the truth,” muttered Leo, wondering whether there might be.

  “He offers not the slightest check to Old Sticks and the rest of those withered bastards on the Closed Council. It’s all liars and swindlers in the White Chamber.”

  “Always has been,” muttered Leo, wondering if it had been.

  “They’re set on limiting the powers of the Open Council. Stripping us of ancient rights. Clawing land back to the Crown. Taxing us to the bloody balls.”

  “Huh,” grunted Leo. “I feel your pain there. Angland’s being squeezed hardest of all.”

  “And if anyone’s earned some clemency, it’s you, who held back the savages alone, with no help from the Crown!”

  “We fought the king’s war. We won the king’s war! We paid for the fucking…” Leo brought his voice back down, with some difficulty, “… king’s war. And what did we get back?” He slapped angrily at the lion-head pommel of the commemorative sword he’d so proudly accepted from King Jezal last year. “One sword. And it’s not even properly bloody balanced!”

  “It’s a scandal.”

  “It is a scandal.” Leo wondered whether he was saying too much but couldn’t help himself. “A breach of the contract between the Crown and the provinces. There are folk back home asking if we’re subjects or livestock.” Jurand had told him to be careful what he said in Adua, but Jurand was a long way away, sadly, and the truth was the truth. “There are folk on the verge of bloody rebellion,” he hissed, grinding the end of his cane into the tiles.

  “A bloody scandal,” lamented Isher. “Still. Nothing compared to what they’re doing to poor Fedor dan Wetterlant.”

  “Who?”

  “You never met?”

  “Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure…”

  “One of us, Wetterlant. Seat on the Open Council, estates down near Keln. Good old Midderland stock, you know.”

  “Gentle temperament?”

  “Little wild, truth be told, but we’ve known each other for years. I believe he’s a fourth cousin of mine or some such. Once removed, maybe?”

  “Never really understood how all that once removed stuff works…”

  “Who does? The charges are trumped up, without a doubt. Some ruse of Old Sticks’. I hear he’s confessed but no doubt it’s under torture.”

  “They tortured a member of the Open Council?” Leo could scarcely believe it. “I didn’t think Orso was the type.”

  “I’m telling you, the man’s a cipher! He has no idea what’s done in his name and wouldn’t do a thing about it if he did. They’ve got Wetterlant locked up in the bowels of the House of Questions, away from friends, away from family. Not even a window! His poor mother is beside herself. Cousin of a cousin as well, it’s taken quite the toll.”

  “By the dead,” murmured Leo, then realised it was a Northern saying and meant nothing here.

  “He’s appealed for the king’s justice. Anyone with a seat on the Open Council has the right to a trial here with His Majesty as the judge but, well… I doubt there’s any justice to be had in the Union these days.”

  “By the dead! I mean, bloody hell.”

  “Even members of the old families, even members of the Open Council, even patriots like you or I aren’t safe. It hardly feels like our country any more.”

  Leo rubbed at his thigh, the simmering pain a spur to his simmering anger. “Someone should do something,” he growled.

  “Someone should.” Isher nodded sadly. “But… who has the courage?”

  Leo tried not to limp as he walked back down the Kingsway, past the statues of the great men of history. Kings loomed on one side. Real kings.
Harod the Great. Arnault the Just. Casamir the Steadfast. Great figures from their reigns loomed a little lower on the other.

  Leo wondered if a statue of him would stand here one day. Holding sword and shield in recognition of great victories, gazing sternly across the roadway to a taller and more impressive statue of King Orso. That thought hardly filled him with joy. He was paying for his glories with every step and didn’t fancy sharing with a man he was losing all respect for.

  Crown Prince Orso had struck him as a good enough sort, but the throne only amplifies a man’s bad qualities, and his Closed Council were the same corrupt old worms who’d driven King Jezal’s reign into the ditch. What the Union needed was men of courage, men of passion, men of action.

  Men like him.

  The quarters he and his mother had been given were high up, blessed with views but cursed with steps. When he finally got to the top, his leg was on fire. He had to pause to settle his breath, mop away sweat and force his grimace into a carefree smile. He told himself he didn’t want his mother to worry. In truth, he didn’t want to prove her right.

  “How was your meeting with Lord Isher?” she asked as he strode in.

  “Well enough. He’d a bastard of a story about this poor fellow Wetterlant. There’s a rot in the Agriont, but no one’s got the courage to…” There was someone behind him. A woman perhaps a few years older than his mother but still rather handsome, a lopsided smile on her lips as if she knew secrets he didn’t.

  “This is Lady Ardee dan Glokta.”

  “Oh…” By the dead, he saw the resemblance to her daughter now. That direct, searching, slightly mocking look was just the same. He was blushing to the roots of his hair. “Wonderful to meet you, of course—”

  “The wonder is all mine, Your Grace. A genuine hero, adorned with the scars of great deeds. Will you catch me if I faint?”