Priest of Gallows

by Peter McLean

  I thought about the Princess Crown Royal, and what might happen when she came into her crown.

  Stronger than Mina, even. It really didn’t bear thinking about one little bit.

  I could only hope that whatever the Queen’s Men were drugging her with, they had a fucking lot of it.

  Chapter 17

  A month passed in Dannsburg, and I began to notice a pattern to what we were doing. Lord Vogel signed the arrest warrants seemingly at random, rooting out corruption here and sedition there, but I came to see that there was nothing random about it at all.

  The matter of the queen’s death was done with now, I had thought, that first time I went to the palace with Ailsa.

  I had been wrong about that.

  Of course, I had written to Jochan shortly after we took up lodgings at the Bountiful Harvest, to let him know where I was. That week his first report arrived by messenger from Ellinburg.

  Tomas,

  I hope city life is treating you well, that you’re behaving yourself and haven’t ended up fucking a duchess or anything daft. All in Ellinburg shocked to hear the news of the queen’s death, which reached us last week. Schulz led a memorial service at the Great Temple, but few attended from our streets. Abingon is too raw a wound, I think, for many to mourn the woman who sent us there.

  Enaid is doing well. She’s had to break some heads but no more than expected, and the peace holds as well as such things ever do. The nights grow easier. Hanne and the baby are well, and Yoseph too. We make a strange family, but it seems to work. I feel easier in myself, and the terrors come less often.

  Return safe, brother.

  Jochan

  I looked at the letter for a long time, picturing Jochan and Hanne and Cutter sitting down to dinner together as a family, although I had no idea if they actually did or not. It was unconventional, certainly, but if it was helping to bring my tormented brother some peace from the battle shock then that was well and good, to my mind. I penned a brief reply assuring him that I was well, and left it at that. I had work to do.

  Anne and me were busy to begin with, but the second week after I received my knighthood, another Queen’s Man arrived in the city. He had come from Drathburg. He was a short, sandy-haired, unassuming fellow by the name of Konrad. I didn’t know him, but he soon proved that he knew how the work was done.

  We were in the council offices of the palace that afternoon, Bloody Anne and Konrad and me. None of us knew our way around that part of the vast building, but Ailsa had drawn me a roughly sketched map which I had to keep checking as we walked down corridor after corridor. The guards ignored us, knowing who we were by then and no doubt being able to guess what we were about.

  I could hear raised voices from behind a door, and once more I checked the map in my hand. This was the room we wanted. I held up a hand to tell the others to be still, and tucked the map back into my pouch. I put one hand on the hilt of Remorse and reached out and opened the door with the other.

  A man and a woman were sitting on opposite sides of a wide desk, having a heated argument. The man looked up as the door opened.

  ‘I said we weren’t to be disturbed,’ he snapped, before he realised that I wasn’t whoever he had expected me to be.

  ‘That’s very unfortunate,’ I said, and I took the Queen’s Warrant out of my pouch and showed it to him.

  He went white.

  The woman was staring at me over her shoulder now, and her eyes widened when she saw what was in my hand.

  ‘Oh gods,’ she whispered.

  ‘We might as well be,’ Konrad said as he stepped into the room after me and closed the door behind him, leaving Bloody Anne to watch the corridor and see that we weren’t interrupted.

  ‘Konrad?’ she faltered, taking him in for the first time. ‘I . . . I thought you were in Drathburg.’

  ‘I was,’ he said. ‘I came back. This is Tomas.’

  ‘What do you want?’ the man demanded.

  ‘You, to come with us,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve done nothing,’ the woman said, ignoring me and addressing Konrad, who she seemed to know. ‘I’m a loyal subject of the crown, you of all people know that!’

  ‘No one said you weren’t,’ I said. ‘We just want you to come with us.’

  ‘Konrad?’

  ‘A loyal subject of the crown wouldn’t question an order given under the Queen’s Warrant now, would she?’ he said. ‘Get up.’

  The woman rose unsteadily to her feet and I could see she was pure terrified.

  So she should be.

  Do what your father says or the Queen’s Men will come and take you away.

  I wondered if anyone had said that to her when she was a child, as my ma had to me. If so, I wondered if she had ever thought it might actually happen one day. Her voice was educated, her clothes fashionable and obviously expensive. I very much doubted that she had thought anything of the sort could ever happen to her.

  ‘I loved the queen and I love our Prince Regent,’ the woman said, defiant now as she met Konrad’s stare, ‘but I cannot love the Queen’s Men. They took my brother away from me!’

  Perhaps I had been wrong, then. Perhaps she had good reason to fear the Queen’s Men. She was a loyal subject of the crown, so she said, and in truth I had no reason to doubt her words. But perhaps she thought less well of the house of law, and of the Queen’s Men.

  These days, that was a dangerous opinion to hold.

  *

  ‘She seemed to know you, that council woman,’ I said to Konrad once we were back in the house of law with brandies in our hands. ‘Lady Dennan, I mean.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ Konrad said. ‘She would do. I’m the brother she spoke of.’

  ‘You what?’

  He shrugged. ‘She’s my sister. I haven’t seen her in fifteen years. She took a seat on the governing council and I took the Queen’s Warrant and a posting to Drathburg. We foreswear all family ties when we take the oath, as you well know.’

  I hadn’t known that, still not having been formally sworn into the Queen’s Men myself. That would have to wait until the one from Varnburg finally arrived, apparently, not that I much cared. It would keep. Still, Ailsa had retained a relationship with her own parents, albeit a strained one, so perhaps it didn’t matter as much as all that. Perhaps it was one of those things you were made to swear but not truly expected to believe in, one of those things people like Konrad could use as an excuse for their behaviour when it suited them. The oath of loyalty to the crown that us conscript soldiers had been made to swear after we had been unwillingly forced into the army had worked much like that. I looked at Konrad, and I thought that was probably the case. I have to allow, I already disliked him even then.

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  Not half an hour past I had watched this man I was having a drink with send his own sister down to the cells.

  I swallowed brandy and tried not to think about it. The fellow we had arrested with her had been difficult, until eventually I’d had to have Bloody Anne march him out of the palace with his arm twisted to breaking point behind his back and the tip of one of her daggers pressed into the base of his spine. I had no idea who he was – the arrest warrant had been for Lady Dennan, and for anyone she’d had with her. Perhaps he was innocent, I wouldn’t know.

  By that point I knew it really didn’t matter one way or the other.

  Vogel was purging the palace, that much had become clear to me. Although nobody had come out and actually said as much, it didn’t take a great degree of cleverness to see what was happening.

  Lady Lan Delanov’s confession and subsequent trial had been enough to exonerate the Prince Regent and the Princess Crown Royal, and therefore ensure the succession, but that was all. Vogel had taken the opportunity to have a couple of highly placed nuisances removed while he was about it, but he hadn’t stopped there.

  Now anyone who had ever so much as breathed a word against the throne or its servants was being gradually removed on one pretext
or another. So too, I thought, was everyone who appeared to be close to the Prince Regent. New faces filled their roles, loyal faces, and that loyalty was first and foremost to the house of law.

  That was well and good, I supposed, but I couldn’t see how it was the most important thing we should be doing. Not by a long way.

  I looked over Konrad’s shoulder at Bloody Anne, who was busy pouring herself another drink from one of the bottles on the side table. We were in what I could only think of as the sergeant’s mess, although the Queen’s Men had no notion of rank. Those who carried the warrant seemed to have the social standing of colonels, from what I could tell of how Dannsburg society worked, but the facilities here were more suited to common soldiers than high-ranking officers. Lord Vogel didn’t believe in luxury or comfort. Not unless he was using it to lure the unwary into a trap, anyway, as he had at the dinner party he had thrown the previous year where Lord Lan Andronikov had disappeared.

  ‘I’ll have another with you,’ I said, to get Anne’s attention.

  She looked up at me and nodded, a small nod that said she knew I wanted to talk but not in front of Konrad. Bloody Anne and me knew each other so well it was like we could read each other’s minds, sometimes. We couldn’t, of course – neither of us knew anything of the cunning, nor much wanted to – but at times like that it almost felt like it.

  ‘I need to see the Old Man,’ Konrad said, and I thought perhaps he had taken the hint.

  He put his glass down and left the room, leaving the two of us alone together.

  ‘Lady’s sake, Tomas,’ Anne said, once the door was closed behind him. ‘Who is that cunt?’

  I shrugged. ‘A Queen’s Man,’ I said.

  ‘He arrested his own sister.’

  ‘Aye, apparently so.’

  ‘And is that what you want, Tomas? To be part of this, to be someone like him?’

  I sighed and took the drink she offered me.

  ‘It’s what I’ve got, Anne,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a war to prevent, and this is the only way I’ll ever have power enough to stand a chance of doing it.’

  ‘What if it was your brother, Tomas?’ she asked, and her eyes were hard as they met mine. ‘What if they ordered you to arrest Jochan?’

  ‘You know I’d never fucking do that,’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t,’ I snapped at her. ‘My loyalty is to family first and it always will be, whatever oath they make me swear. And what about you, Bloody Anne?’

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Your Rosie,’ I said, and I could feel myself getting angry with her now even though I didn’t want to. ‘Your woman. She worked for the Queen’s Men long before either of us knew her. What if I fell out of Vogel’s favour? What if your Rosie came to you one night and said, “We have to arrest Tomas,” what would you do then?’

  Anne studied me for a long moment, then she drained her glass and turned away.

  ‘Oi,’ I said. ‘I want an answer to that.’

  ‘Tomas,’ Anne said, her back still turned to me. ‘Don’t do this.’

  ‘Don’t do what, ask awkward questions you don’t want to think about the answers to?’

  ‘Fuck your questions,’ Anne growled. ‘Don’t do this. The Queen’s Men, I mean. Just . . . just don’t.’

  ‘Bit fucking late for that,’ I said. ‘This is what I am, now.’

  ‘Aye,’ Anne said. ‘It looks like it is.’

  Chapter 18

  Arguing with Bloody Anne had left a sour taste in my mouth, and I hadn’t wanted to go back to the Bountiful Harvest that night. Anne was my conscience in a way, as I have written before, and her words had discomforted me more than I truly wanted to admit to myself. When I left the house of law I went out into the city instead, alone. That would have been unthinkable in Ellinburg, where I had been the city governor, of course, but here it was different.

  It was dark by then but still the streets of Dannsburg had more City Guard on them than I had ever seen before, and crime was virtually non-existent. North of the river it was, anyway, and no one seemed to much care what happened south of it. I pulled my cloak around me and walked, lost in thought. I remember casting a baleful glance at the closed doors of a Skanian merchant’s premises as I passed, but that was all.

  I was so deep in my thoughts I almost walked into a detachment of four of the Guard before I even saw them.

  Stupid, I told myself, but it was done by then. Their corporal looked at me with hard eyes.

  ‘You’re out late,’ he said.

  That wasn’t a crime in itself, not yet, but I thought it might not be much longer before it became one.

  ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You don’t sound like Dannsburg,’ he said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘The east,’ I said. ‘Ellinburg.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And why’s that, then? What are you doing here? No, don’t tell me. I think I’d better take you to the guardroom. You can explain yourself to the custody sergeant.’

  I opened the Queen’s Warrant, and I held it up so all of them could see it.

  ‘I really don’t think you did,’ I said. ‘Your custody sergeant won’t want to see me, I assure you.’

  The corporal visibly paled in the light of the lamp that hung from the wall above his head. He snapped to attention and saluted me, and his startled men did the same.

  ‘I . . . I’m sorry, sir,’ he stammered. ‘I didn’t know you.’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t,’ I said. ‘No one does. That’s how this works, Corporal. That’s the whole point.’

  ‘Sir.’

  I put the warrant back in my pouch and I looked at him for a long moment, and I knew I was putting the fear of Our Lady into him. That was good. I held his gaze until he swallowed and looked away. I knew he was thinking of the house of law, and what he had no doubt heard was inside it. Whatever the rumours said, I would have bet good coin it wasn’t half as bad as the truth.

  ‘On your way,’ I said at last, and the guardsmen all but fled.

  I stood under the lamp for a moment and took a slow breath.

  Is that what you want, Tomas? To be part of this?

  I had to allow that perhaps it was.

  Respect, power, authority. Those are the levers that move me.

  *

  I walked for a long time, and I didn’t know where I was going until I was nearly there.

  Ailsa’s house was much like the one I had in Ellinburg, although larger and set back from the street with walls around it. There were guards on the gates even at this hour, but I recognised Brandt from the time I had spent living there the previous year. He was the boss of her household guard, and he was attached to the Queen’s Men himself. Of course, he recognised me too.

  If he was surprised to see me arrive on foot and not in a carriage or ahorse he had sense enough not to mention it, and that was wise of him.

  ‘Evening, sir,’ he said as I approached the gates, but he didn’t open them.

  ‘Is she in?’ I asked him.

  Brandt’s eyes narrowed as he looked at me.

  ‘I wasn’t told to expect visitors,’ he said.

  ‘That’s because I’m not expected,’ I said.

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘I’m her husband.’

  I was, at that, not that it meant much any more.

  If it had ever meant anything.

  ‘Sir,’ he had to say, and he opened the gate and let me through into the grounds of the house.

  I gave him a nod, and one of the others escorted me to the front door, where he rang a bell to summon a footman.

  ‘A visitor for her ladyship,’ the guard said.

  The footman’s eyes widened as he too obviously recognised me, although I didn’t recall his face.

  ‘Mr Piety,’ he said, and gave me a short bow.

  ‘It’s Sir Tomas, now,’ I corrected him.

  ‘My apologies, m’lord.’

  He ushe
red me into the house and showed me across the hall to the drawing room, although I knew the way. I had lived in that house for the best part of six months, after all.

  The footman opened the drawing room door and uttered a discreet cough.

  ‘Sir Tomas, ma’am,’ he said.

  Ailsa looked up from her seat beside the fire, a hoop of embroidery in her hands and the lamp on the table beside her burning bright. Her lady’s maid was seated on a low stool at her feet. It was a different girl, I noticed, but then I had never learned the last one’s name anyway.

  ‘Hello, Tomas,’ she said, and if she was surprised to see me, her face gave nothing away. ‘Won’t you come in?’

  ‘My thanks,’ I said, feeling something of a fool.

  I had no idea what I thought I was doing there. Ailsa was my wife in name only, I knew that, and I had no real right to be in her house.

  ‘Oh, sit down,’ she said. ‘You know where the brandy is, if you want one. Leave us, Tilly.’

  I did want one. I waited for Ailsa’s maid to leave the room, then poured myself a glass and took a chair across from her. I sat staring into the amber spirit, not meeting her eyes. She worked at her embroidery in silence, giving me the time I needed to put my words in order. Her needle moved through the fabric that was stretched over her hoop, stitch after stitch after stitch.

  ‘What are we doing, Ailsa?’ I asked, eventually. I had to be careful here, I knew. Anything I said to her could and probably would make its way to Vogel’s ears. ‘Someone sent that assassin. Why are we still arresting our own people in our own city, when we should be worrying about the Skanians? We should be worrying about preventing a war we can’t win!’

  Ailsa put her embroidery down in her lap and looked at me.

  ‘The house of law is capable of doing more than one thing at once, Tomas,’ she said. ‘The part that you and Konrad are doing is to ensure security in the city, and especially in the palace. If there was one assassin there could be another, and we cannot allow any threat to the princess.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I said. ‘Lady Dennan, though, Konrad’s sister. What the fuck is she supposed to have done?’