‘Thank you,’ I said.
Ailsa fussed with one of the papers on the pile beside her chair for a moment.
‘Actually, Tomas, as you’re here,’ she said, and to my astonishment she sounded slightly nervous. ‘My father is coming to visit for tea on Queensday afternoon, while my mother is out with her friends. Well, I say tea, but he’ll no doubt drink my brandy cupboard dry while he’s here. Anyway, I wondered . . . I wondered whether you would like to join us? You and Billy, I mean. He is Papa’s grandson, after all. I thought perhaps it would be nice if they met. Oh, I know I should have sent a proper invitation, but we are married, and—’
‘I’d love to,’ I said, and I meant it.
Oh Lady, but I loved her.
*
I rode back to the Bountiful Harvest an hour or so later, my carriage rattling along the cobbled streets. I was dozing on the padded bench in the back of the carriage, my thoughts a confused mixture of Ailsa and Billy and the princess, of Skanian invasion and young love, when my coachman brought us to a jolting stop that jarred me awake just as we were about to turn onto Coronation Avenue, one of the main roads that cut through the heart of Dannsburg.
‘What is it?’ I asked the coachman, leaning out of the window to call up to him on his box.
‘Unrest, sir,’ he said. ‘Stay inside!’
I could hear Oliver and Emil talking urgently to each other on the backboard of the carriage. A moment later the protest marched past down the main road we had been about to turn onto, a great mob of robed students and other supporters of the house of magicians, many of them waving wooden placards with slogans painted on them. They were too far away from me for me to be able to read their words, but I doubted they were anything that it was wise to be saying in Dannsburg in those days. Just being out on the streets in any sort of force, showing any sort of dissent, was deeply fucking unwise in itself. To be protesting on behalf of the house of magicians or the university was lunacy bordering on suicide, and yet there they were.
A moment later a trumpet sounded, and then it seemed that the very earth itself began to shake under us.
The cavalry charge swept down Coronation Avenue and smashed into the marching students like the very hammer of the Stormlord Himself. The onslaught of men and horses was unstoppable, a tidal wave of martial-red cavalry twill and horseflesh that bore men and women to the ground and crushed them beneath their hooves. Sabres flashed bright in the low sun of late afternoon, blood spraying across the windows and doors of the townhouses that lined the avenue as the army carried out their bloody butchery right there in the heart of our own capital city. I counted some twenty blue uniforms of the Sea Guard among their number, and it seemed that Lord Vogel and the Dowager Duchess of Varnburg had cemented their alliance in blood.
A great grey charger reared, her rider brandishing his sabre high like one of the huge statues on the Royal Mall, and I recognised Major Bakrylov as his horse came down on some poor unfortunate bastard and his sabre rose and fell, rose and fell.
Civil order was being returned to Dannsburg.
Chapter 49
We made it back to the Bountiful Harvest through the back streets in the end, my coachman navigating a path through the byways of Dannsburg that avoided the carnage taking place on Coronation Avenue.
‘What the fuck is going on out there?’ Anne demanded the moment I walked into the common room of the inn.
She was wearing her mail and leather, I noticed, and had obviously been ready to go out and wade into the chaos if she needed to.
‘It’s all right, Anne,’ I told her, although I was no longer remotely sure that it was. ‘The army has been sent in to restore order on the streets, that’s all.’
‘That’s all ?’ Anne echoed. ‘The fucking army, Tomas?’
‘Those are the times we live in,’ I said.
‘Sir Tomas,’ the innkeeper said, looking pale and sweaty with understandable nerves. It wasn’t so very long since someone had bombed his establishment, after all. ‘What should we do?’
‘Have your boys lock the doors and the stable gates, and pour me a brandy,’ I said. ‘I dare say Anne will take one too.’
‘I will, at that,’ she said. ‘Lady’s sake, Tomas, what the fuck is going on?’
‘Dannsburg is going face-first into the shithouse, that’s what’s going on,’ I said quietly. ‘The Skanians murdered our queen, and no one seems to give a fuck about it when they can fight among themselves instead.’
‘I don’t think that’s quite true any more,’ Anne said. ‘I’ve seen anti-Skanian graffiti on the walls recently, a lot of it. I’ve heard talk too, about how they can’t be allowed to get away with the queen’s murder. About war, maybe.’
Of course she had. We had started that talk, and maybe it was agents of the Queen’s Men writing on walls as well. It honestly wouldn’t have surprised me at that point. I swallowed brandy and didn’t reply.
‘What are we going to do, Tomas?’ she asked.
‘Our jobs,’ I said.
*
And that was what we did, but in truth I’m not sure my heart was in the work. I was, it came to me, waiting for Queensday to come around. I had told Billy that he was going to meet Ailsa’s father, his new grandfather, and he was almost bursting with excitement and impatience. If I’m completely honest, I didn’t feel much different myself.
Thankfully we only had three days to wait, and in truth Anne and Rosie and Beast took care of most of the work between them anyway. Come Queensday afternoon our carriage took Billy and me to Ailsa’s house. At least
