by Peter McLean
‘Brother,’ I said, returning his hug as best I could as he all but lifted me off my feet.
I thought of Konrad and his sister, and guessed that few Queen’s Men ever received so enthusiastic a welcome from their siblings. All the same, I knew Jochan was still not of sound mind and never had been, even before the war. According to my aunt neither had I, but after what our da had done to the pair of us I supposed that was hardly surprising. He was clearly better than he had been, though, and I would take that and be thankful for it.
‘How are you?’ I asked him when he finally put me down. ‘I trust Hanne and the baby are well?’
‘Aye, aye,’ he assured me. ‘Hanne’s a good lass, keeps my house and that. Good cook, too. And the baby’s not such a baby no more. We named her Enaid, did I ever tell you that?’
I smiled. He hadn’t, but it didn’t surprise me. As the younger, Jochan had always been more of our aunt’s boy than me after she took us in. He had only had eight years to him then, after all. After Ma died. After I killed Da. I didn’t want to think of that then, though.
‘That’s a fine name,’ I said, and clapped him on the arm. ‘Will you drink with me, brother?’
‘Is Our Lady death’s face?’ he asked, and laughed at his own joke. ‘Aye, what do you think?’
I tossed Hari a silver penny for a bottle of brandy, and retreated to a quiet table with it and my brother. I needn’t have paid if I hadn’t wanted to, of course, not in the Tanner’s Arms, but I wanted to make my new status as plain as I could. I wasn’t even a Pious Man any more, not really, but this lot would continue to think of me that way unless I showed them otherwise, and as I have written, I didn’t want to do anything to undermine Anne’s position as their new boss.
I sat down opposite Jochan and poured for us both, and raised my glass to him.
‘To family,’ I said.
‘Family,’ he replied, and he clinked his glass against mine then tipped its contents down his throat in a single swallow.
I almost didn’t dare ask, but I knew I had to.
‘How’s Cutter?’ I said.
Jochan’s face softened in a way I didn’t think I had ever seen it do before.
‘Yoseph’s well enough,’ he said, after a pause. ‘He doesn’t come out much any more, not that he ever really did, but he’s well set up in the house on Slaughterhouse Narrow. He wears a patch, in public, and the scars give him a certain menace, I suppose. He’s still working. The sort of customers he gets at that boarding-house have seen worse than burns before, and in the other type of work no one ever fucking sees him coming anyway. Billy and Mina saved his life, Tomas, after what that Skanian cunt did to him. I’ll never forget that.’
‘And you and he are still . . .’
Jochan met my stare for a moment, then he poured himself another brandy and slammed it down in one swallow.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Aye, Tomas, we are. Do you have a fucking problem with that?’
I shook my head.
‘Not in the slightest,’ I said. ‘Our Lady doesn’t much care who we lie with, so long as both are willing. There’s Hanne, though.’
Jochan nodded slowly, and I think my acceptance took some of the tension out of his shoulders. It hadn’t been uncommon in the war for a man to lie down with a comrade or a camp follower between the tents, when they got the opportunity. Not all such couplings had been between men and women, and no one thought much of it. When you truly didn’t expect to live to see the next dawn, who could honestly give a shit about who someone else chose to fuck? Our Lady certainly had better things to worry about, and so had most of us.
‘Aye, there is,’ he allowed. ‘She’s a good lass, Tomas, but I married her because I got her in the family way and I felt obliged. I like her well enough but I can’t rightly say that I love her. She pretends not to know about Yoseph and me and I pretend not to know that she does, and it seems to work in its way. She doesn’t want for anything, and I don’t beat her or anything like that.’
‘No,’ I said, and put a hand on his arm. ‘No, brother, I never thought for a moment that you did.’
Jochan was a violent man, I knew that, violent and unpredictable, but after our shared childhood I knew that he held wife-beaters in the same contempt that I did. His reaction to what Grieg had done that night in Chandler’s Narrow was enough to reassure me of that.
My brother was a good man, in his way, and I loved him in mine.
Aye, I loved my brother.
Chapter 41
The next day I received a letter from Fat Luka. It couldn’t have been written more than a day or two after we left Dannsburg, by my estimation. He had no scribe or secretary to write his letters for him in the way that I had had Rosie, and I struggled to decipher his childish, barely schooled writing.
Boss,
Found Lady Lan Yetrov like you wanted. Rich widow now, something at the university. Patron? Don’t know what that means. She pays for stuff, and they all love her there. Deep in with magicians so she’s keeping her fucking head down right now. Will try and get a sit-down with her when things calm down a bit. Pitched battle between City Guard and Guard of the Magi yesterday after the princess’ betrothal was announced. Think the City Guard got the better of it but it was close, and hard to call. Iagin is spinning yarns all across the city about the magicians’ treachery. Don’t like the look of the weather.
Luka
The fool wrote so much in plain that I could only thank Our Lady that the letter hadn’t been intercepted on the road, but I had to remind myself that Fat Luka wasn’t a Queen’s Man or even an educated man. He was clever, though.
I took his letter through to my study, and sat down behind my desk to pen a reply.
Luka,
I fear the weather in Dannsburg is worsening and will continue to do so. Save the Lady for the summer, and don’t trouble her now. If the winter storms in the city become severe enough to cause concern for your safety, I advise you and your friend to forge out onto the West Road, however bad the conditions appear. Spend the gold I left you, shelter in a village if you need to until the road opens and you are able to return home.
Do not, my dear friend, disappear in that city.
Tomas
The fucking last thing I wanted at the moment was Luka associating with a known patron of the university, and therefore by association an ally of the house of magicians. For one thing he was my friend, and I didn’t want to see him hauled down to the cells and Ilse, but for another I really, really didn’t want Vogel finding out I had asked Luka to make contact with the Lady Lan Yetrov.
That, I thought, wouldn’t have been good for anyone’s health.
I sealed the letter and rang a bell to summon a footman to fetch a houseboy and give him a silver mark to pay a messenger to ride it to Dannsburg, all the while frustrated that there wasn’t some centralised way to send letters between cities. A wagon full of sacks of mail would have been a great deal more cost effective than messengers riding a two-week round trip to deliver a single letter, but then I supposed that while so many people still couldn’t read and write there was no demand for it. Perhaps the university could change that. Perhaps one day we could have a university in every city, even in Ellinburg, but I supposed that was a thought for another day.
I sat back behind my desk and stared up at the ceiling, trying to imagine the Lady Lan Yetrov as a patron of the university. I had always suspected she was a lot more intelligent than was suggested by the vapid society front she had presented in her abusive husband’s presence, no doubt at his insistence, but still I had never suspected her passions leaned towards academia. Music or the arts, perhaps, but this was a surprise, nonetheless.
I was still gazing up at my moulded plaster ceiling rose when a footman rapped on the study door.
‘My lord, your—’ he began, before he was shoved aside by a familiar figure leaning heavily on a stick.
‘Aunt,’ she said, and closed the door in his face.
‘Aun
tie,’ I said, and rose to give Aunt Enaid the short bow of familial respect.
‘Oh, fuck off with your knighthood and your Dannsburg airs and graces, Tomas Piety,’ she said, and lowered herself into one of the chairs across from my desk without waiting to be asked. ‘What the living holy fuck do you think you’re doing?’
Ah, yes, my aunt was here to see me and no mistake.
‘In what way, Auntie?’ I asked, as I sat once more.
She may have had well over sixty years to her but all the same I was grateful for the expanse of oak between us. My aunt had been good with a mace during her war, and I could still remember the switchings she had dealt out in my youth. She might be fat now but she was still strong with it, and there was no doubt about that.
I rose once more and crossed to the cupboard, where I poured glasses of brandy for us both. She said nothing as I put hers before her and retreated behind my desk with mine. And ‘retreated’ was how it felt, as well. This woman had been almost my mother since I’d had only twelve years to me, and although she wasn’t my ma I felt I owed her a similar level of respect.
‘In what way,’ she mused, as she did when she was working up to delivering the sort of bollocking that could have come from the very gods themselves. ‘Let me think about that for a moment, Tomas Piety. You take the crown’s gold in secret. You allow the Pious Men to become an instrument of the Queen’s Men. You get my Brak crippled. You take the Queen’s Warrant and you fucking become a Queen’s Man. Then you go a step further and you overthrow the governor, and you spend the blood of Stink men and women to do it. You become the fucking governor of Ellinburg yourself. At least you have the brains to put Anne in charge of the Pious Men, I’ll give you that much, but little enough else. You lead a charge of the City Guard against your own people, working people, and some of them from our own streets. Then, mercifully, you fuck off to Dannsburg to go play Queen’s Man in the royal court, but you take Anne with you so she has to put me in charge. I’m too fucking old for this, Tomas, but I do my best and at least she didn’t give it to that Cooper bitch, who would never have given it back again afterwards. You chose well enough there with Anne, I’ll allow, and that I can forgive, but I can’t forgive this: You. Fucking. Came. Back!’
I ducked as the brandy glass flew past my ear to shatter against the wall behind me.
‘How could you?’ my aunt demanded. ‘How do you fucking dare show your face in Ellinburg again?’
My aunt’s single eye was weeping, I realised, and that was a thing I had never seen before in my life. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
I had made my aunt cry, and I didn’t think she was capable of it.
‘Auntie,’ I said, and found myself faltering. I knew I had to be very, very fucking careful how I put this. ‘I’ve been . . . not kicked out of the Queen’s Men, or I’d be dead and in an unmarked grave somewhere outside the walls of Dannsburg, but I’m certainly in disfavour at the moment. There are things going on . . . I can’t talk about a lot of it. I’m sorry and I truly mean that, but I have to ask you to believe me on the strength of our family ties.’
I was quoting Sasura, of course, but sadly family ties don’t work quite the same way in Ellinburg as they do in Alaria. That had been exactly the wrong thing to say, and I knew it the moment the words left my mouth.
‘You talk to me of family ties?’ Aunt Enaid asked softly, and for the first time since I was a small boy I feared her in that moment. ‘You devil-possessed monster, Tomas Piety, you dare to talk to me of “family ties” when I know fucking well you killed my own brother? Oh, yes, and don’t you dare look at me like that. I know. I’ve always known. I took you and your brother in because you were blood and he was an innocent, but I’ve always known that you murdered your da, you little shit!’
The dam broke inside me, the dam that had held back the pain for twenty-five years and more. I broke, and I broke hard. The floodwaters of repressed misery almost sent me to my knees.
‘And do you know why?’ I roared at her, on my feet and leaning over the desk to shout in her face and fuck the servants, gossip. This had been a long time coming, I think, looking back on it, and something inside me just shattered in that moment. ‘Do you fucking know why your evil cunt of a brother needed killing? Do you know what he did to me, and to Jochan? Because if you did, old woman, if you did and you kept your peace about it, I swear to Our Lady I will fucking kill you where you sit!’
I can’t.
I can’t recount my conversation with my aunt after that. I wrote it down once before, what Da did to me and to Jochan, and I’m not doing it again. I just fucking can’t.
Suffice it to say that the conversation ended with us both in tears. Of course she hadn’t fucking known, and it had been so cruelly wrong of me to even think that she might have done and let him get away with it. I hoped she would forgive me for that, in time.
‘I’m so, so sorry, Tomas,’ she said, when she was done sobbing into my shoulder.
We had our arms around each other in a comforting hug, and I couldn’t even remember the last time that had happened.
If it ever had.
‘Aye,’ I said at last. ‘So am I.’
*
My aunt’s visit hit me hard, and I won’t lie about that. We had finally cleared the air between us, I suppose that was something, but all the same she had reopened old wounds once more. The pain of what Da had done would never leave me, I knew that, and it would never leave Jochan either. She stayed for a while after we both had ourselves under control again, and we got drunk together and talked of happier things, of her war and mine. Even war was happier than the memories of what had happened in that house.
‘I remember this one cunt I served under,’ Enaid said as she knocked back another brandy from the fresh glass I had brought her to replace the one she had thrown at my head and broken. ‘Captain Vogel, his name was, and he was a nasty piece of work. Tortured the enemy prisoners on the slightest pretext, and we all knew he did it for fucking fun. I was only a corporal, mind, but this bastard missed no one. I’ll always remember him.’
I sat very still, my brandy forgotten in my hand.
‘You were at Krathzgrad, weren’t you?’ I asked her, although I knew she had been. ‘Was that there, when you knew him?’
Aunt Enaid frowned at me. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘How in the world did you know that?’
‘Do you remember the Grand Duke of Drathburg, and his son? They both fell at Krathzgrad, so I’ve heard.’
‘The duke was our general,’ she said. ‘Never met him, of course. I was only a corporal, as I say, and I didn’t get to mix with the likes of him. His heir was a major; never met him either but by all accounts he was magnificent. He was betrothed to the future queen and set to rule the nation with her in due course. It was like something out of the stories. He was Captain Vogel’s commanding officer, if I remember it right.’
I was absolutely sure she remembered it right.
‘How did they die?’ I asked. ‘The duke and his son?’
‘The duke fell in battle,’ she said. ‘Heroic charge, leading from the front and all that. Got blown across the river and into Our Lady’s arms by a cannon for his trouble, and he’s a big part of why they don’t do that any more. The major’s death was a strange one, though. An enemy assassin got into his tent one night and slit his throat while he slept. We never did catch the bastard, and the whole camp was in mourning for a week. Imagine if he was still alive today, and ruling as the regent from the Prince Consort’s throne where he was supposed to have been? I’d wager the situation in Dannsburg wouldn’t be how you say it is now, Tomas, if he had ended up on the consort’s throne and not his halfwit little brother. Vogel got promoted into his position and that was the last I saw of the bastard, and well rid of him. Our next captain was called Royce, and he had been one of the sergeants before he was promoted. Decent old bugger, he was, liked to play dice and . . .’
But I
had stopped listening by then. Had this been going on for so long, in Vogel’s mind at least? Had he seen the opportunity in the duke’s death and murdered his son in his tent one night, to force the younger, weaker Wilhelm into inheriting his betrothal to the then-Princess Crown Royal, our late monarch?
Could anyone truly play a game so long, and see it through to conclusion over decades?
I honestly didn’t know, but I thought that if anyone could then that person was Dieter Vogel. Or Sabine. She would have been the Provost Marshal back then, of course.
Mother Ruin.
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my finger and thumb, and tried to keep my hands from shaking.
‘When was Krathzgrad, exactly?’ I asked her. ‘I know I should know this, but we didn’t really cover history in what little schooling I had.’
‘History?’ she snorted. ‘This was my life, lad. I’m still fucking here so how can my life be “history”? Anyway, not so very long ago. A little under forty years. Thirty-eight, maybe thirty-nine years ago. Just before you were born, in fact. Your da fought in that war too, did you know that?’
I hadn’t, and I didn’t care and I didn’t want to hear him mentioned any more that night, or ever again, for that matter. Whatever my da had done in Aunt Enaid’s war, whatever he had been through, none of it excused what he had done afterwards.
Nothing did.
That didn’t matter, though. Krathzgrad had been less than forty years ago. Vogel must have already been Sabine’s lover by then, from what Sasura had told me. He had already been a Queen’s Man, and yet had been serving at the front with the army and had been a direct subordinate of the man betrothed to the Princess Crown Royal. How very fucking convenient.
What in Our Lady’s name had I uncovered?
Chapter 42
A few weeks after my return to Ellinburg I was invited to the governor’s hall. Not summoned, mind, nor arrested, as Hauer had done whenever he wanted me.