by Peter McLean
‘I inherited my father’s seat and fortune, and my brother’s betrothed. Yes, I am well aware of that, thank you, Lady Ailsa.’
Krathzgrad had been where my aunt had fought in her war, if I remembered it right. I had heard tales of it at her knee as a child, many of them no doubt grown very tall indeed in the telling. Of course, our noble Prince Regent would have been too young to fight then, but I hadn’t known that both his father and his elder brother had gone to the grey lands in Aunt Enaid’s war. Perhaps sometimes the nobility really did lead from the front of the charge. Or they had in those days, anyway; I had seen little enough of it at Abingon, to be sure.
‘A political marriage,’ Ailsa went on. ‘You learned to love her, I have no doubt.’
‘Of course I did,’ the prince snapped. ‘Her Majesty my wife was the love of my life.’
I looked at the bleak expression in his eyes, and somehow I doubted that she had been anything of the sort. Still, that was none of my business, of course.
‘Well, there we are, then,’ Ailsa said.
The Prince Regent ignored her and turned a hard eye on Vogel.
‘No more bullshit,’ he said, and I was surprised by his bluntness. Perhaps he had finally grown a spine after all, I thought, and I wondered how wise that was. ‘That utter shit with Lan Drunov and the cannon. No more of that. Stop bloody indulging her, Vogel. She’s not well, you know she isn’t, and you encouraging her excesses is only making her worse. No more, I mean it.’
Vogel gave him a look.
‘Public displays of power are an important tool of statecraft,’ he said. ‘A statesman would understand that. I wonder where we might find one of those, in these troubled times? Ailsa, any suggestions?’
‘There is First Councillor Lan Letskov, sir,’ she said. ‘He is perhaps not as pliable as we might like, but all the same we have a degree of influence over him.’
You know very well he thinks he’s in love with you.
I swallowed, and tried not to think about that. Why the fuck the notion bothered me I had no idea, but it did all the same.
‘Quite,’ Vogel said, and the venom in his voice was unmistakable. ‘No one is irreplaceable. Highness.’
That made me fucking sit up straight. Listening to Vogel’s words it was plain that the Prince Regent’s life was under threat, and as I thought back to the confession he had said to me in the spring it became clear why.
He knew too much.
He knew just how unwell the Princess Crown Royal was, and worse than that, he didn’t seem to want to help us hide it. Vogel was telling him just how thin the ice under his feet was. Suddenly I understood all too well.
Removing the Grand Duke and bringing his son to the capital hadn’t been anything to do with the succession or his supposed difficultness, I realised, but about the regency itself. If anything should happen to the Prince Regent then the Grand Duke, the queen’s own cousin, would have been the obvious replacement, and Vogel didn’t want that to happen. Not one little bit he didn’t, so the duke tragically passed away and his young son assumed his title, lands and fortune but, being even younger than the princess, could never become regent.
The prince’s days were numbered, that was what Lord Vogel had been telling me even then. Only now was I hearing him, and that shamed me. With hindsight he had been telling me loud and fucking clear at the time. I wondered if I would ever fully adjust to this life, to become a Queen’s Man in thought and instinct as well as simply murderous deed. I wondered if I was truly capable of it.
I couldn’t honestly have said which I wanted the answer to be.
‘Your words skirt treachery, Lord Vogel,’ the prince said.
‘My words,’ Vogel said, ‘are intended to batter some sense into your head. Someone needs to rule the country. Someone needs to show leadership. If you are not capable of being that person, then I will find someone else. Is that absolutely clear, Highness?’
‘No,’ the prince said, and he drew himself up to his full height. His magnificent waxed moustache quivered as his upper lip shook with anger. ‘Enough, Vogel! Enough! No one is irreplaceable, as you just said. I am the regent of the Rose Throne, and that makes me the commanding officer in chief of the army. I will raze the house of law to the ground if you cross me one more time!’
He was spitting fury now, his face crimson with a rage I would never have believed him capable of.
Lord Vogel looked at the Prince Regent for a long time, and I could almost feel the temperature in the room dropping. No one spoke to the Provost Marshal like that.
No one.
Not princes, not warlords.
Not kings.
Fucking no one.
‘As you say, Highness,’ Vogel said, his voice as soft as silk.
I could feel it in my bones, and from the look on her face I could see that Ailsa felt it too.
This was not going to end well.
*
It didn’t.
It didn’t end well at all. Bloody Anne woke me early the next morning, and this time she had neither small beer nor black bread in her hands when she pushed her way into my bedroom.
‘Get up,’ she said, with no preamble whatsoever. ‘Rosie needs you in the office.’
My office was still the private dining room of the Bountiful Harvest, of course. By then I could have commandeered office space in the house of law itself the same as Iagin and Konrad did, but I didn’t want to. Ailsa didn’t keep an office there either, I had noticed, preferring to run her operation from her own home. From what I had seen of the Queen’s Men, there was a lot to be said for keeping one’s own business separate from the central hub as much as possible. We all ran our own crews, after all, and that autonomy was part of our strength.
‘What is it?’ I asked her as I struggled out of bed and into my clothes.
I had to stand and take a piss into the pot before I was any use to anyone, but despite what I had thought before, there was no real embarrassment to that in what sounded like an actual emergency. We might not be in the army any more but we were both soldiers, when all was said and done, and soldiers think little of such things. I could hear the continuing sound of the riots outside the windows of the inn, supporters of the house of magicians and the house of law still going at each other in the dawn hours.
‘I think it’s something to do with the Prince Regent,’ Anne said as I laced my britches and turned to face her.
‘What about him?’ I asked.
Anne’s scar twisted as she sucked her teeth before she responded.
‘Go talk to Rosie,’ she said. ‘I don’t rightly know, and I don’t want to. This is Queen’s Men business, and I’m not that.’
No, she wasn’t. Bloody Anne was my chief enforcer, but I would never make her a Queen’s Man. I loved her as a brother, in my way, and I would never do that to her.
I wouldn’t do that to anyone I cared about, for all that Ailsa had done it to me.
I finished getting dressed and buckled the Weeping Women around my waist over my coat then hurried downstairs to the private dining room. Rosie was waiting for me in her accustomed seat at my left hand at the head of the table, a mountain of papers in front of her.
‘What is it?’ I asked her.
‘Get to the palace,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Right now. Vogel’s orders.’
I was on a hastily saddled horse ten minutes later, and broke into a canter down the wide mall that led up to the palace gates as people scattered in our wake. Fuck not using the main gate; Ailsa’s side entrance would have added a quarter of an hour to my journey and this quite plainly wouldn’t wait. There was a building on fire not a quarter of a mile away, and in the distance I could hear the sound of the City Guard clashing with the supporters of the house of magicians.
‘I’m Sir Tomas,’ I said to the gate guards. ‘Ailsa is expecting me.’
I was inside a moment later, and no questions were asked. I left my horse with a waiting groom and headed in through the d
oor I had been taken through on the night the queen’s death was announced. There was a liveried attendant there quite plainly waiting for me, and she led me through the labyrinth of passages and stairs to the royal apartments.
Ailsa was waiting for me outside the Prince Regent’s drawing room.
‘What is it?’ I asked her.
‘He took his own life last night,’ she said.
‘You fucking what?’
She pushed the door open, and I saw what she meant. His Royal Highness Prince Wilhelm was hanging from a rope tied around the chains of one of the chandeliers, and there was an overturned table on the floor that he had apparently jumped off. His face was purple, and it was plain to see that he had soiled his white cavalry britches in his death throes. There was no dignity there, no heroic taking of poison or falling on his sword like some hero from one of the great tragedies at the theatre. The Prince Regent had jumped off a table and shat himself, and that would forever be his legacy.
I could almost feel the ground shifting under my feet. It was too fucking early in the morning to deal with this, but it seemed that I would have to.
‘Iagin is already spreading the word,’ Ailsa said. ‘A terrible tragedy and a great loss, no doubt brought about by malign magics in the face of which our great nation must come together in unity.’
Malign magics.
He couldn’t have done.
Oh gods.
I thought then of the witch card Sabine had given me, the Ten of Swords, and what Billy had said it meant.
The Ten of Swords means back-stabbing and treachery. It means defeat and betrayal, ruin and endings and loss.
Oh gods.
Oh, by Our Lady. He just couldn’t have done.
But he had. He very clearly had, overturned table or not. There was no other plausible explanation for it. Treachery indeed.
Lord Vogel had disappeared the fucking Prince Regent.
I wondered whose hands had tied the noose and forced his head into it, and I thought of Konrad.
Oh, fucking, fucking, fuck!
Chapter 35
Once, when I had about seven or eight years to me, my da had taken me and Jochan to see a travelling menagerie that had set up camp near the racetrack outside Ellinburg. That had been where I had seen the lioness that Ailsa so reminded me of. I remembered something else I had seen there too. On one of the wagons, there had been a cage full of wild, hairy, almost-men. Apes, I think the menagerie’s barkers had called them, but unlike the lions, I had never seen one depicted in heraldry and I hadn’t really been sure what they were. I remembered how the barkers had baited them, poking them with long goads through the bars of their cage until they screamed and beat their chests and hurled their own shit at each other and the laughing crowd gathered beyond the bars.
I had never seen a public meeting of the governing council before, but it very much put me in mind of those creatures in the menagerie.
It was a tiresome affair even in these extraordinary times, although there were things of interest to note. First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov, presiding head of the council, seemed to me like a man under siege. For all that he was supposedly the foremost voice, Vogel had replaced so many of his underlings with sycophants loyal only to the house of law that he was outvoted and shouted down at every turn.
‘But I must assume the role of regent at once,’ he said. ‘Someone has to run the country since our Prince Wilhelm’s unfortunate suicide, after all, and although he is the rightful next in line of succession, the Grand Duke is a child of ten years. The Lady Ailsa will support me, and she is not without influence in the house of law.’
You know very well that he thinks he’s in love with you.
‘No, she won’t!’ someone hooted. ‘She’s Vogel’s creature to the core. You’re on your own, Lan Letskov.’
Jeers followed, and I have to admit I felt sorry for the man. I knew how it felt, after all, to think Ailsa loved you.
Fool, fool.
‘Why should it be you, First Councillor Lan Letskov?’ a dark-haired woman demanded. ‘Heading a council and leading a nation are very different things.’
She was right about that, I had to allow, but I also knew she was on our payroll. The governing council was least two-thirds in the pay of the house of law by then, and First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov was struggling.
He was struggling very badly indeed, if that council meeting I witnessed was anything to go by. They weren’t literally flinging their shit at him but they might as well have been, by that point.
‘I have been presiding head of this council for nine years,’ Lan Letskov protested. ‘If I know anything—’
‘If you knew anything, the fucking queen would still be alive, and her fool of a husband beside her,’ a florid-faced man cut in. ‘You have presided over a disaster, Lan Letskov.’
‘Events have taken a downward turn, I agree,’ he began, before he was shouted down in a chorus of boos and derision.
I looked sideways along the public gallery of the grand council hall where I sat as an anonymous civilian. There were barely a score of citizens there, among benches built to seat a hundred or more, but none of them looked happy with what they were seeing.
‘A downward turn? Spare me, Lan Letskov, I swear my stays have split from laughter,’ the dark-haired woman said.
She wasn’t laughing. Councillor Markova, I remembered, that was her name. She was one of Vogel’s personal agents, a strongly built woman with not yet forty years to her but with a face that brooked no nonsense.
‘That’s a bloody euphemism and a half,’ the red-faced man said. ‘Events have taken a fucking face-first dive into the shithouse and you know it, Lan Letskov.’
‘Councillor Lan Drashkov, I must caution you against your language!’ Lan Letskov scolded him. ‘This is a most formal place of government business, and twice now you have profaned it with your coarseness.’
‘Fuck off,’ Lan Drashkov said, to a gale of laughter from his fellow councillors and the public gallery alike.
He was one of Iagin’s, apparently, and that didn’t surprise me one little bit.
‘What is to be done, my fellow councillors?’ Councillor Markova said, standing and addressing the room with a stern gravitas that put both men to shame. ‘The country has no monarch, and now we have no regent either. I propose that perhaps a woman seated on the regent’s throne would be more in keeping with our national values, and—’
‘Oh, of course you fucking do!’ Lan Drashkov shouted. ‘Any chance to advance yourself, you’ll take, won’t you? What absolute horseshit! We need a man’s firm hand on the tiller. I myself—’
Shouting broke out between the other councillors as they all hurried to propose themselves for the most powerful seat of office in the country. Or what they thought was, anyway. The Lord Chief Judiciar, otherwise known as the Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men, effectively outranked everyone but the monarch themself, whether they knew it or not.
I suspected that a worrying majority of them did not. This was just chaos, fools vying for a power they could never truly have.
A country at war needs strong and stable leadership above all else, and if we didn’t have that then by Our Lady’s name we had to make it look like we did. I remembered thinking that, not so very long ago. A united and loyal governing council would go a long way to achieving that.
It seemed I had never been so wrong.
Most of those arguing in the council meeting were ours, of course. Arguing among themselves, strange as that may seem. They were sowing dissent and disorder to a tune of Vogel’s calling, I realised. It seemed that was what the Queen’s Men did now, and I wasn’t easy with it.
In the interim, so I was told, there was legal precedent for how to proceed. Why didn’t that fucking surprise me?
I left the council hall building shortly afterwards, when the council went into recess for what would no doubt be a very argumentative lunch. I had had enough of them by then, so I r
eturned to the house of law to find Ailsa and see the lay of things.
‘The statutes of law are very clear on the matter,’ she explained to me in the mess that afternoon, when I had finished telling her about the council meeting I had witnessed. ‘In the event of the rightful monarch being underage and there being no surviving eligible regent of royal descent, the power of authority automatically passes in the interim to the office of the Lord Chief Judiciar as the next most senior official in the land until the governing council pass a two-thirds majority vote on which of their number should assume the role. It’s not complicated really.’
No, I thought, it really isn’t, is it ? Except getting that mob to achieve a two-thirds majority vote on what to have for dinner would have been virtually impossible, never mind on which of their number to seat upon the regent’s throne.
‘What about the Dowager Grand Duchess?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t she count?’
‘No,’ Ailsa said. ‘She’s of foreign birth, and therefore completely ineligible. The law really is very clear indeed on this, Tomas.’
‘Aye,’ I had to say, for want of anything better. In the house of law there was always someone listening, whether you could see them or not. ‘Tell me, when was that law passed?’
‘Oh, perhaps three years ago,’ she said. ‘I don’t really know, offhand.’
Three years ago. Yes, I could believe that. I was starting to form a suspicion in my mind, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one little bit. Someone had thought this through in exacting detail, including how to keep the duchess out of the picture. Of course they fucking had.
‘Oh, don’t look so glum, Tomas,’ Ailsa said. ‘Normality will resume soon enough, I’m sure.’
‘I’m sure it will,’ I said, although I was no longer sure I knew what normality even looked like any more.
Nothing like it used to, I was sure. There had been another riot that morning, so Rosie had told me, another magician lynched. The Guard of the Magi were mobilised in force now, Konrad had reported in his daily dispatches to the Queen’s Men, forming patrols of their own who exchanged hard eyes with the City Guard wherever their paths crossed. There had been no violent clashes between them yet, but all agreed that they couldn’t be far away. Curfew was being very seriously discussed in that afternoon’s sitting of the governing council, and from what I had heard its implementation was almost a foregone conclusion. Martial law was coming to Dannsburg and it was coming fast.