Barras looked confused and raised the tempo of his Jalan-Lisa-Jalan watching. Lisa nodded and pulled the velvet-wrapped key from some pocket artfully concealed in her skirts. She handed it over without even a twinge of hesitation, which meant something to me. I think perhaps it’s not a key you can give to someone who isn’t your friend without at least some measure of regret.
‘Thank you.’ And I meant it. ‘Keep the feast warm for me.’ I slapped a hand to Barras’s shoulder, finding it hard to hate him any more. ‘I’ll come along later, if I can still walk when the Red Queen’s finished with me.’
‘What have you done?’
But I was already striding away. ‘Later!’
Grandmother’s court was not in session when I arrived beneath the great doors to her palace. Two lords, Grast and Gren, stood waiting on the steps along with a solid, dark-haired knight with an impressive moustache – Sir Roger, I thought. All three favoured me with dark looks. I don’t think they recognized me but I had bad blood with Lord Grast’s older brother, the duke, so I ignored the trio and went on up without a word.
Before the queen’s doors the same plumed giant who had admitted me on my return from the North – or perhaps his cousin – tilted his head down at me and said he would see my request for audience carried to my grandmother.
I sat in the shade of one of the great portico columns and waited, watching the elite guardsmen swelter in their fire-bronze on the sun-drenched steps. The courtyard before us lay wide and empty, as blank as my future. I wasn’t sure even what the night might bring. Could I really stand to watch Barras and Lisa’s reunion? I briefly considered calling in on my father, but Ballessa informed me that the cardinal had taken to his bed a week earlier. Ill, she said. Ill on wine I suspected…
The door behind me slammed and turning I saw Uncle Hertet pushing aside the guardsman although the man had already stepped sharply out of his way. Lord Grast and Lord Gren were quickly by his side as the heir-apparent, or as he was more commonly known: the heir-apparently-not, stormed toward the steps.
‘If she wasn’t my mother…’ Hertet smacked his fist into his palm. It might have looked menacing if he weren’t a rather paunchy man of modest build in his fifties, gone to grey. His mother I was sure could still put him over her knee and deliver the soundest of spankings. Not to mention fell him with a punch that would leave few teeth for his dotage. ‘This city needs a king, not a damned steward. And it needs a king who will stay here and do his duty by it, not swan off on some wild ex-pedition. These are troubled times, boys, troubled times. A queen who leaves her throne empty in troubled times is practically abdicating—’ My uncle spotted me lounging in the shade. ‘You! One of Reymond’s boys?’ He pointed a ringed finger my way as if being his brother’s son were an accusation.
‘I-’
‘Martus? Darin? Damned if I can tell you apart. All of you the same, and none of you like your father.’ Hertet went past me, flanked by the two lords with Sir Roger at his heels. ‘Still, what did Reymond expect ploughing such a foreign field? He wasn’t the only plough, that’s for sure.’ His voice carried back across the courtyard as he walked away, trailing off as the distance grew. ‘They can’t help it, these Indus girls…’
I found myself on my feet, having got there swiftly and without conscious decision. My hand had found the hilt of my knife. The tide of angry words rising to defend my mother’s honour had yet to leave my mouth only because they were still battling to organize a coherent sentence.
‘Prince Jalan.’
I looked up. The overly large guardsman loomed over me.
‘The queen will see you now.’
I shot a scowl at the retreating backs of Hertet and his cronies – one that in a just world would have lit them up like torches – and brushed myself down. You don’t keep the Red Queen waiting.
Four guardsmen escorted me into the empty throne room, gloomy despite the day blazing through high windows, striated by their bars. Lamps burned around the dais and Grandmother sat ensconced in Red March’s highest chair. Two of her advisors stood further back in the shadows, Marth, wide and solid, Willow, whip-thin and sour. Of the Silent Sister, no sign.
‘You’ve changed, Grandson.’ Grandmother’s regard could pin a man to the floor. I felt the weight of it settle on me. Even so I had time to be surprised by her acknowledgement of our relationship. ‘The boy who set out has not returned. Where did you lose him?’
‘Some wayside tavern, highness.’ In Hell was the true answer but no part of me wanted to talk about that.
‘And you have something to report, Jalan? I’m sure you didn’t request an audience before the throne without good cause. Your northern friends eluded my soldiers. Perhaps you encountered them again on your travels?’
I glanced left and right, seeking the Silent Sister. Did Grandmother already know exactly what I’d been up to from the moment I left the city? Had my great-aunt’s silence revealed it as prophecy before the march of days turned it into my personal history?
‘I found them. I recovered the key. I returned it to Vermillion.’
The Red Queen left her chair with remarkable speed for an old woman. Standing on the dais with the spars of her collar fanning out above her head she towered over me. Even toe to toe in our stockinged feet she would have overtopped me, and few men can say the same.
‘You’ve done well, Jalan.’ She hadn’t a mouth for smiles but she showed her teeth in a reasonable approximation. She stepped down and was before me in three paces. ‘Very well indeed.’
I noticed her hand in the space between us, held out, palm up. The same hand I had seen wrapped around a crimson sword in my dreams of Ameroth. ‘I … uh … don’t have it now.’ I took a quick step back, sweat running down my neck all of a sudden.
‘What?’ As short and cold a word as I ever heard uttered.
‘I— it’s not…’
‘You left it somewhere?’ Her eyebrows lifted a remarkable distance. ‘There’s no safe place—’ She glanced about and waved at the guardsmen around the walls, all hand to hilt. ‘Quick, all of you. Get to the Roma Hall and escort Prince Jalan back with the—’
‘I gave it to Great-uncle Garyus,’ I said. ‘Your highness.’
Grandmother raised both arms, one to each side, palms out, and every man in the throne room stopped moving, guards halfway to me now frozen in their tracks. ‘What?’ I swear she could stab someone to death with that word.
I clenched my teeth and gathered my courage. ‘I gave it to my great-uncle.’
‘Why would you do that?’ She took hold of my jacket, gathering two handfuls of the cloth, one just below each shoulder. ‘To.’ She hauled me closer. Far too close. ‘Me?’
We stood eyeball to eyeball now. Oddly – worryingly – that same red tide that had risen in me when standing before Maeres Allus in the Blood Holes rose in me now, curling my lip in a half-snarl. ‘I lost his ships. I gambled them away.’ Spoken too loudly. No highness. No apology. ‘I owed it to him.’
I had gone from Lisa and Barras to the east spire above the Poor Palace and climbed the long stair. I’d told the old man of my failure and sat with bowed head for his judgment. Instead of raging he had struggled a little more upright against his pillows and said, ‘I hear you have a salt-mine.’
‘I have the option to buy the Crptipa mine from Silas Marn for ten thousand in crown gold. I am debt free and have two thousand to my name.’
‘So a man offering you eight thousand more might ask a high price?’
‘Yes.’
I left the tower room with a note for eight thousand and an agreement that Garyus would own two-thirds of the mine. As I left I set a black velvet package at the foot of his bed.
‘It’s Loki’s key, Great-uncle Garyus. Don’t touch it. It’s made of lies.’
I left then, though he called for me to come back. I ran down the stairs faster than any sensible man would, feeling something new, or at least something I’d not felt for a very long time. Feeli
ng good.
‘I’m paying the price for your failings!’ The Red Queen thrust me before her and I staggered back as she advanced. ‘Your duty is to the throne! Your debts are not my concern.’ A roar now, her anger loose.
My own anger leapt from my throat before I could cage it. ‘I was paying your debts, Grandmother!’ I halted my retreat. ‘I gave the key to Garyus. You took his throne. And you.’ I pointed without looking to the place where the Silent Sister stood. I could sense her now, like a needle in my flesh. ‘And you took his strength. I have given him something neither of you can take. You can ask and he may allow because he loves this land and its peoples, but you can’t take. When you put a cripple in a high tower the message is clear enough. A hundred and seven steps are hardly an invitation to the man to join the world! I have put him at the centre of it.’ I exhaled and my shoulders went down, the anger gone from me, quicker than it came.
The Red Queen towered before me, sucking in her breath to roar again. But the roar never came. Something in her expression softened, just the smallest bit. ‘Go,’ she said. ‘We will speak of this another time.’ She dismissed me with a wave of her hand, and I turned for the door, willing myself not to run.
I saw the Silent Sister, standing where I had pointed. Rags and skin and glinting eyes. What she thought of the matter I couldn’t tell. She remained as unreadable as algebra.
9
I returned to Roma Hall to find my brother Martus in a foul mood, waiting to pounce. ‘There you are. Where the hell did you vanish off to?’ He strode out of an antechamber off the entrance hall.
‘I had business with—’
‘Well it doesn’t matter. Glad to see you’ve cleaned up. You’re lucky you weren’t shot as a ghoul.’
‘A ghoul?’
‘Yes, a damn ghoul. You don’t know what’s going on? Where the hell have you been? Under a rock?’
‘Well yes, for some of the time. But more recently, Marsail, the Corsair Isles, the Liban desert, and Hell. So what is going on?’
‘Trouble! That’s what. Grandmother’s marching the Army of the South off to Slov on some ill-conceived campaign. She doesn’t even care about Slov – it’s some damn witch she’s after. Claims the Slov dukes are harbouring the woman. A whole army! For one woman … And the worst of it is my command’s being left here.’
‘Yes, that is the worst of it.’ I made to walk by. I had an empty stomach and a sudden desire to fill it with something delicious.
‘That damn Gregori DeVeer.’ Martus stuck a hand out and caught my shoulder, arresting my escape. ‘His army of foot-sloggers are forming up as the vanguard. He’ll come back a blasted hero. I know it. He’ll be acting this campaign out around the dining table at the officers’ mess for years, lining the grapes up: “The Slov line held the ridge”, pushing the cherries in: “Our Red March infantry column attacked from the west…”. God damn it. And that old woman’s leaving me here to babysit the city.’
‘Well. It would be nice if you could keep it in one piece.’ I scratched my belly. ‘But does it really take … how many are you?’
‘Two thousand men.’
‘Two thousand men!’ I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. ‘What are you supposed to be protecting us from? This is Vermillion! Nobody is going to attack us.’
‘I just told you what, idiot!’
‘You didn’t say— Wait, ghouls?’
‘Ghouls, rag-a-maul, corpse-men. We’ve seen them all in the city over the past couple of months. Nothing the guard can’t handle, but it’s made people jumpy. They’re scared enough even with the Army of the South crowding the streets.’
‘Well … better safe than sorry, I guess. I shall sleep better in someone else’s bed knowing that you’re patrolling the walls, brother.’ And with that I turned and set off sharp enough to escape any restraining hand that might come my way.
Much as I wanted to leave matters of state to those who matter I found myself unable to shake off Martus’s complaints. Not that I cared about his lost chances for glory – but I was worried by the idea that Grandmother was leading the army off into what seemed a fairly arbitrary war just as Vermillion was starting to see actual evidence of the kinds of dangers she’d been warning us about for years. The unanswered questions led me back up Garyus’s stairs. I doubted the Red Queen would be particularly forthcoming, especially after our last meeting, and frankly I didn’t know anyone else in Red March who might have both the information I was after and the inclination to share it with me.
The old man was where I left him, hunched over a book.
‘Books!’ I breezed in. ‘Nobody ever put anything good in a book.’
‘Grand-nephew.’ Garyus set the offending item to one side.
‘Explain the Slov thing to me.’ There didn’t seem to be any point beating about the bush. I wanted my mind set at ease so I could go and get drunk in good company. ‘She’s starting a war … for what? Why now?’
Garyus smiled, a crooked thing. ‘I’m not my sister’s keeper.’
‘But you know.’
He shrugged. ‘Some of it.’
‘There are ghouls in the city. Other … things, too. The Dead King has turned his eyes this way. Why would she rush off to fight foreigners hundreds of miles away?’
‘What turned the Dead King’s eyes this way?’ Garyus asked.
Not wanting to say that I had done it I said nothing. Though to be fair Martus’s report indicated that the dead had been stirring within our walls for some while and I had only just returned.
‘The Lady Blue steers the Dead King,’ Garyus answered for me.
‘And why—’
‘Alica says our time is running out, and fast. She says that the troubles in Vermillion are to distract her, to keep her here. The true danger lies in not stopping the Lady Blue. The Wheel of Osheim is still turning … how long remains to us is unclear, but if the Lady Blue is left unchecked to keep pushing it then the last of our days will run through our fingers so quickly that even ancients like me will have to worry.’
‘So it truly is a whole army, a whole war, just to kill one woman?’
‘Sometimes that’s what it takes…’
I came to my father’s chambers also without knowing why. To learn more about his mother’s war was the excuse that had led me there, but the Red Queen would rather share her plans with her court jester – if she had one – than Reymond Kendeth.
I knocked at his bedchamber and a maid opened the door. I didn’t note which maid. The figure in the bed held my gaze, hunched in upon himself in the gloom, his form picked out only here and there where the daylight found a slit in his blinds.
The maid closed the door behind her as she left.
I stood, feeling like a child again, lost for words. The place smelled of sour wine, musty neglect, sickness, and sorrow. ‘Father.’
He raised his head. He looked old. Balding, greying, flesh sunken about his bones, an unhealthy glitter in his eyes. ‘My son.’
The cardinal called everyone ‘my son’. A hundred dusty sermons crowded in on me – all the times when I’d wanted a father not a cleric, all those times since Mother died when I’d wanted the man she’d seen in him – for arranged or not she wasn’t one to have given herself to a man she felt no respect or appreciation for.
‘My son?’ he repeated, a thickness in his voice. Drunk again.
The reason I’d come escaped me and I turned to go.
‘Jalan.’
I turned back. ‘So you recognize me.’
He smiled – a weak thing, part grimace. ‘I do. But you’ve changed, boy. Grown. I thought at first you were your brother … but I couldn’t tell which. You’ve both of them in you.’
‘Well, if you’re just going to insult me…’ In truth I knew it to be a compliment, the Darin part anyway. Perhaps the Martus part. Martus was at least brave, if little else.
‘We—’ He coughed and hugged his chest. ‘I’ve been a poor—’
‘Father?’
/>
‘I was going to say cardinal. But I have been a poor father too. I’ve no excuses, Jalan. It was a betrayal of your mother. My weakness … the world sweeps along so fast and the easiest paths are … easiest.’ He sagged.
‘You’re drunk.’ Though that was hardly a judgment I could wield against anyone. We didn’t talk like this, ever. Very drunk. ‘You should sleep.’ I didn’t want his mawkish apologies, forgotten within a day. I couldn’t look at him without distaste – though what part of that was just the fear that I looked into a mirror and saw myself old, I couldn’t say. I wanted … I wanted that things had been different… I saw him from the other side of Mother’s death now. Snorri had done that for me – shown me how a husband’s grief can cut down even the biggest of men. I wished he hadn’t shown me – it was easy to hate Father, understanding him just made me sad.
‘We should … spend some time, talk, do whatever it—’ Another cough. ‘Whatever it is we’re supposed to do. My mother … well, you know her, she wasn’t so good at that part of things. I always said I’d do better. But when Nia died…’
‘You’re drunk,’ I told him, finding my throat tight. I went to the door, opened it. Somehow I couldn’t just leave – the words wouldn’t go with me, I had to leave them in the room. ‘When you’re better. We’ll talk then. Get drunk together, properly. Cardinal and son.’
Two days later the Red Queen led the Army of the South out of Vermillion, their columns ten thousand strong marching down the broad avenues of the Piatzo toward Victory Gate. Grandmother was astride a vast red stallion, her platemail gothic and enamelled in crimson as if she’d been freshly dipped in blood. I’d witnessed the Red Queen earning her name and had little doubt that she would soon be wearing a more practical armour and still be prepared to personally drench it in the real thing if need be. She paid the crowd no heed, her stare fixed on the tomorrows ahead. Her hair, rust and iron, scraped back beneath a circle of gold. A more scary old woman I’d yet to see – and I’d seen a few.
Behind the queen came the remnants of our once-proud cavalry, dropping a goodly tonnage of dung for the footmen to trudge through. Start as you mean to go on, I say.