“Thanks for that option.” Rikke felt a bit teary, had to sniff back hard. But it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it, and all that. “Reckon I’ll go for the tattoos, then. If that’ll fix it.”
The witch gave a hiss of impatience. “Nothing is ever fixed. From the moment it is born, from the moment it is built, everything is always dying, decaying, drifting into chaos.”
“I could stand a mite less philosophising and a couple of actual answers in the conversation, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Look about you, girl. If I had all the answers, do you think I would be standing in a freezing lake with my head stitched together?”
And the witch held up her skirts and sloshed back towards the shore, leaving Rikke scared and shivering, up to her calves in the frosty water.
“Oh!” Caurib had turned back to shout at her. “And if you need to shit, make sure you do it well away from the cave!”
The King’s Justice
“Spoke to the king myself, at length.” Isher lounged on the front bench as if he was in his drawing room. “Orso’s every bit his father’s son.”
“None too bright.” The Lords’ Round was full, but Barezin hardly seemed to care if they were overheard. “And ever so easily led.”
Open disdain for not one but two kings felt a mite disloyal to Leo, especially here at the heart of government, attending a trial where a man’s life would hang in the balance. His mother would’ve been most displeased to hear it. But then, sooner or later, a man has to stop making everything about pleasing his mother.
“Last year, outside Valbeck, Crown Prince Orso presided over the summary hanging of two hundred supposed revolutionaries,” said Isher. “Without trial or process.”
“Their gibbeted bodies were used to decorate the road to Adua.” Barezin stuck his tongue out and mimed a hanging. “As a warning to other commoners.”
“Now they want to do the same to a member of the Open Council.”
“As a warning to other noblemen.”
Heugen leaned in close. “He may’ve inherited his mother’s mercy along with his father’s brains.”
Barezin’s eager whisper could scarcely contain his amusement. “He certainly got her weakness for the ladies!”
“By the dead,” breathed Leo. He found neither the Queen Dowager’s preferences nor the king’s brutality a laughing matter.
Isher shook his well-groomed white head. “At this rate, not even the best of us will be safe.”
“It’s the best who are in the most danger,” said Heugen.
Barezin grunted agreement. “Wetterlant hasn’t a bloody chance. Bet you they present no evidence at all.”
“But… why?” asked Leo, struggling to find a position on the hard bench where his leg didn’t nag at him.
“Wetterlant has no heir,” said Isher, “so his estates will be forfeit and the Crown will sweep them up. You’ll see.”
Leo stared in disbelief at the chamber’s stained-glass windows. The proudest moments of Union history. Harod the Great bringing the three kingdoms of Midderland together. Arnault the Just throwing off tyranny. Casamir the Steadfast taking law to the lawless in Angland. The Open Council lifting King Jezal to the throne, uniting behind him to defeat the Gurkish. The noble heritage his father once loved to talk of. Could the corruption really have spread so deep?
“They wouldn’t dare,” he breathed. “In front of the whole Open Council?”
“You’d be a bold man to bet on what Old Sticks wouldn’t dare,” said Isher as the announcer struck his staff upon the tiles for order.
“My lords and ladies, you are commanded to kneel at the approach of His Imperial Highness…”
The announcer’s voice echoed through the gilded doors and into the stuffy darkness of the anteroom, and Orso hooked a finger inside his stiff collar and tried to get some air in. His regalia was bloody stifling, in more ways than one.
“… the King of Angland, Starikland and Midderland, the Protector of Westport and Uffrith…”
Orso twisted the considerable weight of the crown this way and that. Given the hours the royal jewellers had spent measuring his skull, one might have hoped they could have made the damn thing fit. Perhaps his head was simply the wrong shape for a crown. No doubt there were plenty who thought so.
“… His August Majesty, Orso the First, High King of the Union!”
The vast doors were heaved open, the crack of light down the middle gradually widening. Orso set his shoulders in what he hoped was a regal bearing, plastered on a smile, realised that was utterly inappropriate to the occasion, swapped it for a solemn frown and stepped through.
It was far from his first visit to the Lords’ Round, of course. He remembered being mildly bored when his father had shown it to him as a building site, rather impressed when his father had shown it to him largely completed, then exceedingly bored when his father had presided over the first meeting of the Open Council there.
But Orso had never seen it from this angle—the way an actor might a theatre. An ill-prepared understudy, in his case, suddenly called on to face an audience of hostile critics. The curved benches brimmed with lords and proxies, all weighty furs and weighty frowns and weighty chains of office. The original Lords’ Round, the one Bayaz destroyed, had boasted only the one public gallery. The architects of the replacement had clearly felt a speaker might not be sufficiently overawed, so they had added another above. Both were now crammed to the rails with brightly dressed onlookers, frothing with anticipation at the delicious prospect of a stranger’s downfall.
There could easily have been a thousand in attendance. There could easily have been more. All kneeling or sunk into curtsies at his approach, of course. But the aristocracy of the Union could kneel and radiate contempt simultaneously. They had centuries of practice at it.
“Bloody hell,” he murmured under his breath. He could have sworn that by some acoustic sorcery, it was carried about the entire vast chamber and echoed back to his ear as he shuffled across that lonely expanse of tiles to the High Table, dragging a mighty weight of cloth of gold cloak behind him.
Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell…
He flinched as he felt hands reaching around his neck, but it was only Gorst, unfastening the golden clasp and whisking the royal vestment away, while one of his legion of footmen did the same with the crown. Orso wasn’t even sure he knew the man’s name. He wasn’t even sure he had a name.
Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell…
Orso cleared his throat as he sank into the great gilded chair, had a momentary panic as he wondered whether he should have been sitting somewhere else, then reminded himself that, however improbable it felt, he was king. He always got the biggest chair.
“All rise!” bellowed the announcer, making him startle.
There was a rustling wave through the crescents of benches as lords took their seats, a muttering and whispering and grumbling as they discussed the forthcoming business. Clerks dumped monstrous ledgers at either end of the table and heaved them thumping open. High Justice Bruckel took his seat on one side of Orso. Arch Lector Glokta was wheeled into place on the other and gave the great collection of lords and their proxies a suspicious glare.
“What’s Isher doing over there?” he murmured.
As one of the foremost of Midderland’s old nobility, he should have been sitting in the middle of the front row, but instead he had shifted to the right, beside the representatives from Angland, whispering in the ear of an unhappy-looking Leo dan Brock.
Bruckel raised his straggling brows. “Isher and Brock? Intimate friends?”
“Or close conspirators.” Glokta nodded to the announcer, who lifted his staff and struck it on the tiles, filling the hall with crashing echoes.
“I call this meeting of the Open Council of the Union…” The announcer let it hang there as the noise gradually faded into weighty silence. “To order!”
“Good morning, my lords and ladies!” Orso g
ave a smile that felt more like the accused trying to ingratiate himself with the judge than the judge himself. “It is my honour to preside over this meeting. We have only one item of business today—”
“Your Majesty, if I may?”
“The Open Council recognises Fedor dan Isher!” thundered the announcer.
An instant interruption was the last thing Orso wanted, but he had to start as he meant to continue, generous and easy-tempered. Perhaps this was all part of Isher’s plan to bring monarch and nobility together, after all. “Of course, Lord Isher, proceed.”
Isher pranced from his bench onto the tiled floor like a man stepping from his favourite chair to give his fire a poke, the echoes of his highly polished boots snapping in the vast domed space above.
“Before we turn to today’s… sorry work, I hope my esteemed colleagues of the Open Council can join me for a moment in some happier business.”
Glokta leaned towards Orso to mutter, “Here’s a bastard who loves the sound of his own voice.”
“I wish to congratulate one of the most celebrated of our number, His Grace Leonault dan Brock, the Lord Governor—and, if I may say, the undoubted saviour—of Angland… on his forthcoming marriage!”
An excited muttering swept the Lords’ Round. There could be few more eligible bachelors in the Circle of the World, after all. Perhaps King Jappo mon Rogont Murcatto of Styria, although rumour had it he preferred swords to sheaths, as it were. Perhaps Orso himself, though his romantic reputation, admittedly, was less than glowing. But the dashing young Lord Governor of Angland would be right up there on the wishlist of any ambitious young heiress. It was a roster with which Orso, thanks to his mother’s constant quest for a bride, had more than a passing familiarity. He wondered absently which one of them had staged the coup.
“To none other…” Isher gestured towards the lower public gallery, lords twisting around on their benches to peer upwards. And there she was, sitting at the rail. There was no mistaking that poise, that elegance, that offhand pride. Orso could have sworn she was looking straight at him. But perhaps he was only desperate that she would. “Than Lady Savine dan Glokta!”
It was not like being stabbed in the heart. It was much more gradual. An odd shock, first. Some mistake, surely? Then, as the clapping began, a spreading realisation, cold as the grave. It was like having one great stone after another loaded upon his chest.
Her refusal had left no room for doubt, but Orso had not realised until that moment how hard he had been hoping. As a marooned sailor hopes for rescue. Now, even for a man as unrealistic as he was, hope was suddenly snuffed out.
The whole chamber was filled with thunderous applause. The high justice was leaning across him to congratulate the Arch Lector. Orso became aware he was clapping himself. A limp-wristed flapping that made almost no noise at all. Clapping at his own funeral. Down on the front row, lords had clustered around an awkward-looking Leo dan Brock to slap him on the back.
There was no excuse for it, he knew. They had been involved, once, on a casual basis. She had given him a great deal of money and he had come by a roundabout route to her rescue. He had somehow convinced himself that they loved each other and she had sharply disabused him of the notion. It really should have come as no great surprise that she had chosen someone else.
So why did he feel so utterly betrayed?
It was surely a triumph.
With one deft move, Savine had catapulted herself back to the very summit of the endlessly subsiding slag heap that was Union society. Those who had sneered at her with smug scorn, with self-righteous condescension, even with infuriating pity, those who had written her off as yesterday’s woman, all gaped at her now in stunned envy. Perhaps they would never kneel to her and whisper, “Your August Majesty,” but they would have no choice but to bow and say, “Your Grace.”
In the parlours of Adua, the ladies would wonder how Savine dan Glokta, well past her most marriageable age, had snared the Young Lion, and they would whisper the kind of unkind rumours one only whispers about people too important to ignore.
It was a triumph, and after the misfortunes, the reverses, not to mention the life-threatening horrors of the previous few months, it was one she sorely needed. She should have been revelling in the attention. Relishing the jealousy of her many enemies. Letting the world see just a hint of her self-satisfied smirk over her fan.
But she did not care at all for the manner of the announcement. She had supposed that her engagement would be a matter of supreme indifference to Orso, but the intensity of the look he had given her told a different story. She wished she could somehow have let him know about it sooner. And she could not have trusted the self-appointed announcer less. Lord Isher was entirely too pleased with himself, too friendly with her husband-to-be and too willing to share the glory of his wedding with them. As he smiled up towards her and gave a flourishing bow, she did not reckon him a man to give anything away.
That and, a few chairs further down the gallery, Lady Wetterlant was glaring at her with unconcealed hatred. Clearly, it was not a happy day for everyone.
But it was a triumph. Savine would be damned if she did not at least look like she was enjoying it.
So she ignored Lady Wetterlant, simpered at the envious crowds with girlish innocence, blew a kiss down to her embarrassed husband-to-be and wondered what the hell that snake Isher was up to.
“Are you sure about this, Your Majesty?” murmured Glokta. “We could postpone.”
“Delay,” offered Bruckel, from the other side. “Always popular.”
As the good wishes for the marriage of the year faded, Orso did his best to tear his thoughts away from Savine and back to the pressing business at hand—three hundred or so of the most powerful and privileged noblemen in the land, accustomed to seeing the king and his Closed Council as their adversaries.
If Isher had filled the Lords’ Round with friends, they were hiding their warm feelings towards him remarkably well. But if he postponed now, he would look a coward and a ditherer. He would confirm all the worst things they said about him. All the worst things he thought about himself.
“It’s all arranged,” he grunted. Wetterlant would confess and beg for clemency, and Orso would offer a life sentence and look merciful as well as authoritative. Old enmities would be put aside and the Union could take a collective step towards a better politics, just as Isher had promised. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Bring in the accused!” barked Glokta.
A side door was flung open with an echoing bang. There was a rustling as lords and proxies twisted to see, people in both public galleries leaning out dangerously far in their eagerness to glimpse the prisoner. The hall fell quiet. There was a scraping, tapping, clinking sound, and Fedor dan Wetterlant emerged from the darkness.
At first, Orso barely recognised the man. He had abandoned his fine clothes and dressed in penitent’s sackcloth. He had shaved off his curls and looked wan and hungry. One side of his face was badly bruised, scattered with fresh scabs. He wore only the lightest of chains, but he walked so as to make them rattle as loudly as possible. The pampered fop Orso had met in the House of Questions had transformed into an abused martyr. There was a collective gasp at the sight of him, then a shriek of rage from the public gallery. Looking up, Orso saw Lady Wetterlant standing at the rail, white with fury. There was a gradually increasing grumble from the lords and an ever-more-excited murmur from the onlookers as her son shuffled out before them.
“What the shit?” hissed Orso through gritted teeth.
“What did I tell you?” whispered Isher in Leo’s ear. “Next, one of the old leeches will offer a false confession as though that closes the case. You’ll see what passes for the king’s justice these days.”
“Your Majesty!” someone shouted from near the back. “I most strongly protest!”
“This man has been tortured!”
“To treat a member of the Open Council in this manner…”
The
announcer struck his staff for order but couldn’t stem the mounting anger as Wetterlant was herded out onto the floor before the High Table.
Heugen shook his fist towards Glokta. “Your Eminence, I am disgusted!”
“To disgusting people I readily confess,” drawled the Arch Lector, “but any fool can see I did not torture this man. He looks far too pleased with himself.”
“Why is no one doing anything?” muttered Leo, gripping his throbbing thigh as he sat forward.
“Order, my lords! Order!” bellowed the announcer. If the atmosphere had been hostile when Orso arrived, it was rapidly swinging towards outright rebellion. He had an unpleasant sensation that the wheels were already coming off his plan as it careered down a steep slope at high speed, and by no means towards a better politics. But he could hardly disembark now.
High Justice Bruckel sat forward, clearing his throat. “Fedor dan Wetterlant! You stand accused. Most serious crimes.” The wattle beneath his chin wobbled as he fired off phrases, the clerks’ pens scratching desperately as they struggled to record them for posterity. “As a member of the Open Council. You have requested and now receive. In the sight of your peers. The king’s justice. How do you plead?”
Wetterlant swallowed. Orso caught him glance up towards his mother. She gave him the faintest nod in return, her jaw clenched. A reassurance, perhaps. A nudge in the right direction. An urging to make the agreed-upon confession and take his agreed-upon punishment and—
“I am innocent!” shrieked Wetterlant in ringing tones. A collective gasp from the public gallery. “I have been dreadfully wronged! Fearfully abused! I am innocent of all charges!”
The hall erupted more angrily than ever.
“That fucker,” hissed Orso as he stared at Wetterlant. “That fucker.” He looked to his supposed new best friend in the Open Council, but Isher had brows raised and palms helplessly spread, as if to say, I’m as astonished as anyone.
The Trouble with Peace Page 15