‘And for boys, it seems,’ I said.
‘No,’ she snapped. ‘Boys should not shine. That is why yours interested me so much. Why does he shine?’
Because he’s got the cunning in him, I wanted to say, but I could already see how unwise that would be. Because he’s a witch or possessed by a devil, and oh, by the way, so are you. No, no, that really wouldn’t have been anything I would call fucking wise at all.
‘I don’t know, Highness,’ I said. ‘Priest I may be, but that is a question for mystics, and I’m not that. He just . . . does.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and nodded slowly as though I had disclosed some great philosophical revelation to her. ‘Sometimes things just are. Mother was, and now she is not, but my doctors just are. If I break one, another will appear and there will still be a doctor because doctors just are. Yes. Some things just . . . are.’
She sank into a chair, and her chin slowly drooped against her chest. Billy looked at me, and I shrugged. The princess made a noise, a half-formed word, perhaps, but I had no idea what, if anything, she was trying to say.
She seemed to be getting sleepier by the moment, and I thought perhaps she was entering into the next cycle of the drugged rhythm of her life. Was she ever truly herself, I wondered, between the timed cocktails of stimulants and narcotics she was being force-fed? For a moment I felt pity for this sad, insane little girl, until I remembered the tales of her maids and the horrific burns some of them had supposedly suffered at her blistered hands.
Beauty is pain, and pain is beauty.
She had told me that once, I remembered.
I am only trying to make them pretty.
Oh gods.
Chapter 48
We left the palace as soon after that as I could manage to get us away. I waited until my carriage was rolling, then turned and looked at Billy on the bench beside me.
‘What did you make of that, then?’ I asked him.
‘She’s very ill, Papa,’ Billy said.
‘How do you mean, lad?’
‘She’s not healthy, in mind or body. There’s something about her that’s just not quite right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it isn’t right. She’s got the cunning in her, like I said, and she’s very, very strong, but it’s . . . wrong. I don’t know. It’s wrong. It’s like . . . I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know.’
‘Take your time, son,’ I said, as the carriage rumbled through the gates of the side entrance to the palace and onto the streets of Dannsburg, taking us back towards the Bountiful Harvest. ‘Explain it to me like I know nothing at all about the cunning, because in all honesty I don’t.’
‘We shine,’ Billy said. ‘I told you that. All cunning folk shine, if only to each other. It’s something inside us, something that’s part of us. Something we just do. But the princess, it’s more like . . . I don’t know. It’s more like something she is. There’s too much of her, if that makes sense. It’s hard to put into words, but she’s wrong. She shouldn’t be like that. After . . . after the fight, in Ellinburg, when Mina and me stole the strength of that Skanian magician, we got a bit like that. You remember when I told you there wouldn’t be any more magicians but there was one, and Cutter lost his face over it? It was that. I was . . . I was wrong, for a while. Me and Mina both were. We still are, a bit. Like there’s too much of us, if that makes sense. It’s all right, but it’s . . . I don’t know. Hard to control, sometimes. When I made the lights for the princess I wanted to fill the room with them. I wanted to fill the whole city with them. And I could have done, I think, if I’d let myself. It’s too much!’
He put his head in his hands, clutching his skull as though it was about to burst.
‘It’s all right, lad,’ I said, and gently pried one of his hands away from his head and held it the way Anne did with me when the battle shock came down on me.
I didn’t really know what else to do. Billy looked like he had battle shock right then, and I supposed that having too much of the cunning in you could do that to anyone. He had been in the war as well, I had to remind myself, even young as he had been then. Billy had been the half-feral orphan we had found in the ruins of Messia, starving and desperate, who had begged to join our regiment and go on to Abingon with us. It was no wonder he wasn’t quite right in the head, but then none of us really were. Nobody would be, after what we had been through.
Billy squeezed my hand for a moment then turned and looked at me.
‘I’m glad they’re drugging her,’ he said. ‘Don’t let them stop. Please, Papa, don’t ever let them stop.’
*
I took Billy back to the Bountiful Harvest and sent him up to his room to rest, and for once he did what he was told and went to bed. I think his encounter with the Princess Crown Royal had left him more drained and disturbed than he would ever have admitted, and when I walked past his door half an hour later after having a wash and changing my clothes, I heard his soft snores floating out into the corridor from inside. Billy slept lightly and seldom, and it was testament to how exhausted he was that he was obviously sound asleep in broad daylight with the inn alive and clattering and
