“You and your investors in the coal, iron and copper mines of Angland are making great profits,” said Savine. “I know because Selest dan Heugen never stops boasting about it.”
“We have had… some success.”
“I delight in it. But while you have been thriving, others have suffered. My husband has been obliged to fight a costly war against enemies who would do us all harm, and the demands of the Crown never cease. Angland has been most welcoming to you and your partners. Not to mention all manner of mill owners, landowners, builders and innovators. It is time to spread the burden.”
Arinhorm delicately cleared his throat. “Your Grace, these are our mines. They were made successful through my hard work and my investors’ risk.”
“I understand the principle, I have done a little investing myself. Of course you own the mines. Apart from the ones I own, which are failing for lack of your new pumps. You own the mines, you own the ore mined from them, no one would deny it.”
“We are not pirates!” threw out Zuri, with a grin that might have sat quite well on a pirate.
“But you do not own the rivers and roads that carry that ore to the sea, nor the docks on which that ore is loaded for transport to Midderland. Those belong to my husband.” Savine opened her eyes very wide, as though the realisation had but that moment dawned. “Why—I suppose that means they belong to me?”
Zuri fluttered her lashes, all innocence. “So much to take care of.”
Arinhorm was looking more and more uncomfortable. “We pay towards their upkeep.”
“Token amounts, as we both know,” said Savine. “We have gone over the books, Master Arinhorm. I get the feeling that the worthy old gentlemen who have been in charge of Angland’s government do not fully understand the books. But we do. And we see all kinds of ways to make things more… equitable. Ways for the industries of the province to contribute to the common good.”
“And if I refuse?”
Savine shrugged. “I suppose you can always fly your ore across the Circle Sea.”
Arinhorm was moving from discomfort to anger. Savine rather enjoyed seeing it. “We will simply cut off supply! In no time, the foundries of Midderland will be clamouring at you to turn the tap back on.”
“By all means let your ore rot in your warehouses, but then of course the price of ore will rocket, and I imagine my failing mines will not be failing very much longer.” Savine spread her arms comfortably across the back of the chaise. “So you see, whichever door you open, Savine’s in first. In business, Master Arinhorm, you must be realistic.”
Zuri pressed one hand to her breast. “You have to be realistic.”
“Here is our suggestion. You will pay duties for every ton of ore moved over every mile of my husband’s province. You will also sign over to him a one-tenth interest in all your concerns.”
“But… you acknowledged they’re our mines!”
“Of course.” Zuri nodded earnestly. “And, by my calculations, nine-tenths of them still will be.”
“This is robbery!” he spluttered at her.
“I said we are not pirates. Robbery is a much broader category. But the heading in my book is for…” She ran her finger down the page and tapped neatly at an entry. “Patriotic contributions.”
“There,” said Savine. “Doesn’t that sound better? Something we can all take pride in. You will also fit your pumps to my mines at your own expense. Then we can allow you to operate.”
“Allow…?” Arinhorm stared at her, open-mouthed.
“Allow, Your Grace,” corrected Zuri, with impeccable timing. Savine had heard it said that it is best to beat opponents fairly, but she much preferred beating them with the deck stacked wildly in her favour.
“It has been a great regret,” she said, “that I let your scheme slip through my fingers simply because I find you personally detestable. I am so pleased we got the opportunity to do business together in the end.”
“I will go to your husband!” snarled Arinhorm.
“You will go to the Young Lion… to complain about his wife?” Savine gave Zuri a pitying look.
Zuri gave one back. “I imagine a man would be lucky to come away from that interview with his teeth.”
“I have friends on the Open Council!” snapped Arinhorm.
“I have dozens of them,” said Savine with a sigh. “That’s how I know how little good they do.”
“I will go to the Closed—”
“Let me spare you the wasted effort. The Closed Council want revenue, and they have asked my husband to find it, so he has asked me to find it. I am doing so, with the enthusiastic endorsement of everyone who counts. Speak to your investors, by all means, but my honest advice is to pay up before you make me squeeze harder. You’d be amazed at how powerful my grip has become since I married the Lord Governor. I would hate to accidently crush someone completely but…”
“It could happen,” murmured Zuri.
Arinhorm wobbled to his feet, but he had nothing to say. Savine had made sure of that. All he could do was turn on his heel and stalk from the room.
“Oh, and Arinhorm?”
He looked back in the doorway, fists, teeth and no doubt arsehole clenched. “Your Grace?” he managed to hiss.
“When you see her, do pass on my regards to Selest dan Heugen.”
The door clicked shut and Savine settled comfortably back again. She realised she had not thought about Valbeck all day.
“Is it wrong of me to have enjoyed that one?” asked Zuri, checking the watch then marking another tick down in her ledger.
“We must take our pleasures where we can. Who’s next?”
A Little Public Hanging
“I hate bloody hangings,” grunted Orso.
“Distasteful but necessary.” His mother spoke in Styrian, of course, testing the limits of the human skeleton for regal bearing and surveying the swarming humanity in front of the gibbet like a swan forced to preside over crows. “Like so much of life.”
Orso watched the hooded executioners test their machinery, oil the lever, tug at the noose. “A little more than distasteful, don’t you think?”
“Deliver a last-minute pardon, then. Be Orso the Clement.”
“Technically possible. Politically unthinkable.” Orso looked towards the banks of seating reserved for the nobles and found more than a few of the sparse attendees glaring angrily back. At least Lady Wetterlant had stayed away. No doubt entirely consumed with plotting her revenge. “The nobles would hate me no less,” he observed. In the great pen where the commoners were crowded, by contrast, there was a carnival atmosphere: drinking, whooping, happy children up on their fathers’ shoulders. They loved seeing anyone killed, of course, but the public execution of a member of the Open Council was a dream come true. “The commoners would hate me far more. And I’d look a wavering weakling to boot.”
“If it cannot be helped then stop complaining. Be Orso the Stoic.”
He slumped ever more sourly into his gilded chair. “I doomed us to this when I looked for a compromise. When I tried to do the right thing.”
The Queen Dowager issued a frustrated tutting of her tongue. “Please, Orso, you are not the tragic lead in some overwrought play. You are a king. You have no business talking about the right thing.”
“Orso the Pragmatist is beginning to see that very clearly.”
There was a ripple of noise. Hooting, booing, insults. A wave went through the crowd as they pressed towards the barriers, grim-faced soldiers of the King’s Own holding them back.
Wetterlant was led up the steps to the scaffold, hands tied behind him.
He had changed again. His hair had grown back to an ugly fuzz, face gaunt and eyes sunken in dark rings. No trace of arrogance. The reality of his situation must finally have impressed itself upon him. Orso had trusted Isher and ended up looking a fool. Wetterlant had trusted Isher and it would cost him his life. The crowd jeered louder as he was dragged into the shadow of the gibbet, his wide eyes rolling up towards it
.
“I almost feel sorry for the poor bastard,” muttered Orso.
His mother displayed no more emotion at the spectacle than a marble bust might have. “If you hate hangings so much, why even attend?”
“It’s the king’s justice. How would it look if the king couldn’t be bothered to see it done?”
“Your father was just the same. Never so happy as when he was miserable.”
Orso slumped further yet. “I never doubted I’d be a terrible king, but I never thought I’d be my father’s son so— ah!”
She gripped his wrist with a sudden strength, immaculately manicured nails digging into him. “You are my son, too! So smile. And contemplate your revenge.”
“Fedor dan Wetterlant!” bellowed the Inquisitor in charge. The noise dropped back to an ugly murmur, peppered with yells and jokes. “You have been found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Have you anything to say?”
Wetterlant blinked stupidly at the nobles. At the commoners. At Orso and his mother. He took a shuffling step forward. “I…” He swallowed. “I—”
Something spattered against his shoulder. A thrown egg, maybe. As if that was a signal there was another surge through the crowd. Soldiers shoved people angrily away from the barrier. The noise was redoubled. More thrown rubbish bounced across the scaffold. Wetterlant tried to shout something but his voice was lost.
The Inquisitor gave a grimace of distaste, then nodded to one of the executioners and he thrust the hood over Wetterlant’s head from behind. His shrieks were quickly cut off as the noose was dragged tight.
“Let him speak!” roared someone from the nobles’ enclosure. “Let him—”
Something hit one of the executioners in the face and he stumbled back, catching the lever with his elbow. The trapdoor fell open but Wetterlant wasn’t quite in position. He gave a muffled cry as one of his legs dropped, but his other foot stayed on the scaffold and he ended up halfway through, twisting and jerking with his knee trapped under his chin and the rope almost but not quite taut.
The crowd gave half a great cheer to see him drop, then half a great boo to see he hadn’t quite dropped, then laughter and taunts and more food flung while the Inquisitor bellowed at the executioners to no effect.
Orso’s mother closed her eyes, delicately pressed her middle finger to her forehead and swore softly in Styrian. Orso could only stare. This was his reign so far. When he finally decided to hang a man he hadn’t wanted to hang in the first place, he couldn’t even manage it without the whole business descending into farce. He jumped to his feet in a sudden rage. “For the Fates’ sakes, just get it done!”
But Wetterlant was wedged in the trapdoor and the executioners had no solution. One of them wrestled pointlessly with the lever, the other had the prisoner under the arms, trying to drag him out, another was kicking at the one leg still wedged above the trapdoor, trying to shove it through. Meanwhile, he was making a high-pitched squealing, the rope not quite tight around his neck and the front of his hood wildly flapping with his desperate breath.
One of the nobles from the Open Council—Barezin, maybe—was on his feet and roaring his outrage but was entirely inaudible over the screeching commoners, who were pelting the scaffold with rotten food. There was a shriek, followed by another surge through the crowd but wilder, arms flailing. A fight breaking out and quickly spreading.
People were throwing things at the nobles’ enclosure now. Not only fruit but coins. Stones. Orso heard a bottle shatter. He saw someone stumbling from their seat with blood on their face.
With a final vicious kick, one of the executioners managed to free Wetterlant’s leg and he vanished beneath the platform, the rope snapping taut. There was a half-hearted whoop in some quarters, but it hardly registered above the mounting chaos in the square. One could almost have described it as a riot now, a seething mass of flailing bodies with soldiers straining at the periphery, people scrambling for safety in every direction.
He thought he heard someone shout, “The Breakers!”
A missile thudded against the sun-stitched cloth of gold that hung behind Orso. He felt wet in his hair and jerked away, shocked. A bleeding head wound might have offered some romance, but he rather suspected it was rotten fruit.
Orso’s mother pushed her chin even higher, as though daring them with a bigger target. “Are they throwing things at us?”
He distinctly heard a shout of, “Down with King Orso!” but had no idea where it came from. It could have been commoner or noble. He would hardly have blamed his mother if she had chosen that moment to come out against him.
He definitely heard a scream of, “Fuck the Young Lamb!” Black-clothed Practicals were shoving through the press, laying about them with sticks and fists, dragging struggling figures from the chaos. Orso saw a group of men break through the line of soldiers and go sprawling at the foot of the scaffold, punching and wrestling. Gorst loomed up, shielding Orso and his mother with his armoured body.
“Your Majesties,” he squeaked. “Time to depart.”
Orso wearily nodded. “Damn it, but I hate hangings.”
Old Ways, Proper Ways
Rikke sat with her boots off on her father’s bench as the War Chiefs came in, trimming her toenails. Isern sat on the floor to her left with her spear across her knees, Shivers stood on her right with his thumbs in his sword-belt. By the dead, she was glad they were there. No better pair in the Circle of the World to have on your flanks, and both good and ready for their part in what was coming.
First came Red Hat, then Oxel, then Hardbread. Rikke beckoned ’em forward, friendly as she could. Men used to smile at her a lot. But the old warriors had that nervous air folk tended to have around her since she lost one eye and had the runes pricked around the other. Like if they turned their back on her she might bite their arses.
“Sorry to keep you boys waiting,” she said, though few men had ever looked less like boys, there was scarcely one dark hair on the three.
“Well,” grunted Oxel as their Named Men crowded silent and suspicious into the hall behind, “join the Union or join the North. It’s a big choice to make.”
“And up till now it’s been little choices for me.” Rikke tossed her scissors down and crossed her legs. “What song to sing or how short to trim my toenails or which eye to have pricked out o’ my head.”
Hardbread winced at that. “You’ve made a choice now, though, have you?”
“I was hoping for a vision to show me the way!” And Rikke raised one arm high to point at the rafters. Then she slumped back on her bench. “Trouble with visions, though, they’re like those little goats the hillmen keep. Stubborn shits, they are. There’s just no rushing ’em.”
Oxel frowned over at Red Hat and Red Hat frowned back, and behind them their warriors copied their chiefs, as warriors are prone to do. It was an awful lot of frowns for that one room to hold.
“But then I realised!” Rikke sprang up on her bare feet on the bench, making ’em all jump. “This is the North! Who needs the Long Eye? We’ve got ways of settling questions up here.”
“Proper ways,” croaked Shivers, red stone glinting on his finger as he shifted his thumbs around the worn buckle of his sword-belt.
“Old ways,” sang Isern-i-Phail, and she spat chagga juice and wiped her lip.
“Time-tested traditions!” Rikke wagged a finger at the old men like they’d strayed from the pasture and she was there to play shepherd. “My father always used to say, you want things right, you have to put ’em right yourself. No better way to settle a difference of opinion…” And she made a ring with her finger and thumb and peered at ’em through it with the one eye that still could. “Than in the Circle!”
There was no instant enthusiasm from the three old War Chiefs. Hardbread was light on enthusiasm, instant or otherwise, and for the other two, a fight to the death is a notion that usually takes some working up to.
“The Circle?” Red Hat rested a hand on the po
mmel of his sword, and the Named Men filled the hall to the rafters with a nervy murmur.
“It’s a bit like a square, but with no corners,” said Rikke. “You can step inside and settle this man to man. Ideas can contend! Then rather’n a war and all our strength wasted, we can march into the future arm in arm. For whatever my say’s worth, I’ll throw it behind the winner. Hardbread? You happy to do the same?”
Hardbread looked the opposite of happy. “I’d rather find some path that don’t need any more blood spilled—”
“So’d we all. But up here in the North, most paths worth taking turn out at least a little bloody.”
No one disagreed with that. How could they? Hardbread wearily sagged. “I reckon. If neither o’ you twain back down.”
Neither of the two old warriors looked like backing down a hair. A grey hair, obviously. Red Hat puffed up his chest and shifted his fist from his sword’s pommel to its grip with a warlike rattle. “Guess we’d better pick a time and a place—”
Isern whipped back a big canvas sheet and sent straw scattering. Underneath was the Circle she’d marked out that morning, five strides across on the floor of the hall.
She showed the gap in her teeth as she grinned. “No time like now, my beauties!”
“No place like here,” croaked Shivers.
“You’re eager to get it settled, and you’re right to be eager.” Rikke turned her left eye towards the old men, who looked less eager than ever, and opened it very wide. “It’s not just me needs to know Uffrith’s future.”
Isern leaned down and flicked the pommel of Oxel’s sword with her fingernail. “You’ve both come armed, so do we need all that pother with the choosing of the weapons? Or can we get straight to the bloodshed?”
Oxel stretched up his chin and scratched at the white beard on his neck. Plain he wasn’t much enjoying this sudden rush into death’s cold embrace but could see no way to stop it, either. A War Chief’s fame is all built on fighting, after all. Backing down from a fight could be the end of him. “We can get straight to it,” he growled, and drew his sword.
The Trouble with Peace Page 24