“You’re not a man, boy, and your challenge is an insult to Sir Galen, not worthy of consideration.” He spoke through clenched teeth. I’d never seen him so angry. In fact, I’d never seen him angry.
“An insult? Maybe.” I felt a smile bubbling up and let it show. “But I am a man. I came of age three days ago, Father. I’m fit for marriage now. A valuable commodity. And I claim this fight as my Year Gift. Or would you turn your back on three centuries of Ancrath tradition and deny me my coming of age boon?”
The veins in his neck stood proud and his hands flexed as if hungry for a sword. I didn’t think it safe to count on his good will.
“If I die, the succession will be clear,” I said. “Your Scorron whore will give you a new son, and you’ll be rid of me. Gone for good, like Mother and William. And you won’t have to send dear old Father Gomst trawling the mire to prove it.” I took a moment to bow toward the Queen. “No offence, your majesty.”
“Galen!” Father’s voice was a roar. “Kill this devil, for he’s no son of mine!”
I ran then, crunching emerald leaves under hard leather. Sir Galen charged from the centre star, trailing his black sword behind him, shouting for my blood. He came fast enough, but the fight with Makin had taken some of his wind. I knocked an old woman from my path, she went down spitting teeth, pearls spilling from her broken necklace.
I won free of the courtiers and kept on running, angled away from Galen. He’d given up the shouting but I could hear him behind me, the thud of his boots and the rasp of his breath. He must have been a hand above six foot, but lighter armour and fresher wind made up for my shorter legs. As we ran, I pulled out my sword. There were charms enough in its edge to put a notch in that Turkman blade. I threw it away. I didn’t need the weight.
Little space remained to me. The left wall loomed just yards ahead, Galen moments behind.
I’d been aiming for one guardsman in particular, a younger fellow with fair sideburns and an open mouth. By the time he realized I wasn’t veering away, it was too late. I hit him with the vambrace over my right forearm. The blow hammered his head back against the wall and he slid down it with no further interest in the proceedings. I caught the crossbow in my left hand, turned, and shot Galen through the bridge of the nose.
The bolt barely made it through his skull. It’s one of the drawbacks in keeping them loaded, but still it should have been tightened only hours before. In any event, most of the Teuton’s brain left by the back of his head and he fell down very dead.
The silence would have been utter but for the whimpering of the old woman on the floor back by the dais. I looked back over the crowd of nobles, cut and bloody, at Galen lying with his arms flung out, at the sparkling ruins of the glass tree reaching toward the throne-room doors.
“Was the show to your liking, Father?” I asked. “I’ve heard that the court has been quiet in Sir Makin’s absence.”
And for the first time in my life I heard my father laugh. A chuckle at first, then louder, then a howling gale such that he had to hold his throne to stand.
21
“Get out.” Father’s laughing fit left him without warning, snuffed like a candle. He spoke into the silence. “Get out. I’ll talk to the boy now.” The boy, not “my son.” I didn’t miss that edge.
And they went. The high and the mighty, the lords and the ladies, the guards helping the injured, two of them dragging Galen’s corpse. Makin followed after Galen, crunch, crunch, crunch, across the broken glass, as if to make sure no life remained in him. Katherine let herself be led by a table knight. She stopped though, at the base of the dais, and gave me a look as if she’d just that moment seen me for what I was. I sketched her a mocking bow, a reflex, like reaching for a blade. It hurt to see the hatred on her face, pure and astonished, but sometimes a bit of pain’s just what we need: to cauterize the wound, burn out the infection. She saw me and I saw her, both of us stripped of pretence in that empty moment, newlyweds naked for their conjugals. I saw her for the same weakness I’d recognized when first we rode back into the green fields of Ancrath. That soft seduction of need and want, an equation of dependence that eases under the skin, so slow and sweet, only to lay a man open at the very time he most needs his strength. Oh, it hurt right enough, but I finished my bow and watched her back as they led her out.
The Queen went too, flanked by knights right and left, slightly awkward down the steps, a hint of a waddle. I could see the swell of her belly now, as she walked. My half-brother if Sageous’s prediction held true. Heir to the throne should I die. Just a swelling now, just a hint, but sometimes that’s all it takes. I recalled Brother Kane from the road, cut on the bicep when we took the village of Holt.
“’T’ain’t nothing, little Jorgy,” he’d said when I offered to heat a knife. “Some farm boy with a rusty hoe. It don’t go deep.”
“It’s swelling,” I told him. “Needs hot iron.” If it’s not too late already.
“Fuck that, not for some farm boy with a hoe,” Kane said.
He died hard, did Kane. Three days later and his arm lay as thick as my waist, weeping pus greener than snot, and with a stench so bad we left him screaming to die alone.
Just a swelling. I watched the Queen go.
Sageous stayed. His eyes kept returning to the shattered ruin of the tree. You’d have thought he’d lost his lover.
“Pagan, see to the Queen,” Father said. “She may need calming.”
A dismissal, plain and simple, but Sageous was too distracted to see it. He looked up from the glittering remains of the trunk I’d toppled. “Sire, I . . .”
“I . . .” This was new to Sageous, I could see that: he was used to control. “You should not be left unattended, Sire. The b—”
“It may not be safe.”
Wrong thing to say. I guessed the heathen had relied on his magics too long. If he’d truly learned my father’s mind, he’d know better than to suggest he needed protection from me.
“Out.”
Whatever else I might think of my dear father I always did admire his way with words.
The look Sageous gave me held more than hate. Where Katherine channelled a pure emotion the tattooed magician offered bewildering complexity. Oh, there was hate there, sure enough, but admiration too, respect maybe, and other flavours, all mixed in those mild brown eyes.
“Sire.” He bowed and started toward the doors.
We watched him in silence, watched him pace across the sparkling carpet of debris, spotted here with a discarded fan, there with a powdered wig. The doors closed behind him with a dull clang of bronze on bronze. A scar on the wall behind the throne caught my attention. I threw a hammer once, hard, and missed my target. It hit there. It seemed to be a day for old scars, old feelings.
“I want Gelleth,” Father said.
I had to admire his ability to wrong-foot me. I stood there armed with accusations, burdened with all my yesterdays, and he’d turned away from me, to the future.
“Gelleth hinges on the Castle Red,” I said. It was a test. That was just how we spoke. Every conversation a game of poker, every line a bet or a raise, a bluff or a call.
“Party tricks are well and good. You killed the Teuton. I didn’t think you had it in you. You scandalized my court—well, we both know what they are, and what they’re worth. But can you do it when it counts? Can you give me Gelleth?”
I met his stare. I didn’t inherit his blue eyes, I followed Mother in that department. There was a whole winter in those eyes of his, and nothing else. Even in Sageous’s placid gaze I could dig deeper and find a subtext, but Father’s eyes held nothing but a cold season. I think that was where the fear lay, in the lack of curiosity. I’ve seen
