Ailsa shot me a stricken look. She was obviously also praying all would be well, but after what I had told her Billy had said, I don’t think either of us really believed it even then.
‘The enemy,’ the princess pronounced, and now she was leaning forward with both hands gripping the ornate stone balustrade in front of her, ‘the subhuman filth of the Skanian animals will be crushed beneath the might of the Rose Throne’s cannon!’
‘Er . . .’ Iagin said. ‘Oh gods, she’s going her own way.’
‘My lord,’ Ailsa said.
‘I know,’ Vogel said, his mouth set in a hard, grim line.
‘Fire will rain from the sky upon them. I command it!’ the princess bellowed, and her voice carried far further across the hushed parade ground than any of us would have believed possible.
Her voice seemed to boom like thunder, a voice that couldn’t possibly have come from a twelve-year-old throat. A voice not even a sergeant like Bloody Anne could have carried. It was like listening to a living goddess. I could only imagine the uncontrolled cunning coursing through her young veins, boosting that voice into the roar that came from her savagely twisted lips. Overhead, storm clouds began to gather. A truly horrible thought struck me just then.
She shouldn’t be like that, Billy had told me. She’s wrong.
‘Am I not your queen? Cannot I command the fire and the lightning, if I but order it?’
There’s too much of her, Billy had said. She shouldn’t be like that. When Mina and me stole the strength of that Skanian magician, we got a bit like that.
I remembered how exhausted Billy had been after barely an hour in her company. The princess had had no training in the cunning whatsoever, but she obviously had considerable natural talent. What if stealing another magician’s strength was just something she was able to do?
She’s very, very strong.
She could have been stealing the strength of her royal mother for years, and not even known it. All that power, bottled up inside her with nowhere to go.
‘My lord, she hasn’t been medicated for—’
‘I said, I know,’ Vogel snarled, and Ailsa fell silent.
‘What the fuck do we do?’ Iagin asked.
‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do, unless you want to be the one who shoots our future queen in the back,’ Ailsa said quietly.
‘I am pain! I am suffering!’ the princess raged, and all along the tall buildings that lined the mall, windows shattered and blew in before the force of her inhuman voice.
The skies darkened overhead and thunder rolled in the distance.
‘I am your queen!’
The first bolt of lightning slammed down from the sky into the packed crowd, tearing people apart before our horrified eyes.
‘They will die!’ she howled, and a grand building collapsed in a huge cloud of choking dust. ‘All shall worship me, or die screaming!’
It was dark as dusk now as the heavens boiled with the force of her uncontrolled rage. The Princess Crown Royal was a cunning woman the like of which I had never even heard tell, and Billy wasn’t there to help us. I looked at her, and in honesty I was glad of that. I didn’t think even Billy and Mina between them could have stood against her in that moment, in the apotheosis of her madness.
‘Maggots!’ she shrieked. ‘Cowards! Throw yourselves at the enemy guns! Stop their barrels with your bodies if need be! Fight for your country, for your queen!’
The princess raised her hands, and in that awful moment all I could see was Mina. A blonde girl in her teen years, spitting obscenities and tearing men limb from limb with the cunning.
‘Get down!’ I yelled, battlefield instinct taking over my senses, and I threw myself at Ailsa and bore her to the carpet as Vogel and Iagin hastily took cover at my sudden word of command.
Our Lady be merciful, if anything happened to Ailsa I would never be able to live with myself. The tall glass windows exploded, hurling razor shards of broken glass across the room. I raised myself up enough to see out of the shattered hole where the windows had been a moment before.
Fire blazed from the princess’ hands, washing across the parade ground with a ferocity I had never seen from Billy even when he had burned the Stables. People were dying in their hundreds down there, and the panic in the packed space only led to more deaths as people trampled each other underfoot in their terrified stampede to get away from the horror their queen-in-waiting had become.
She raised her hands once more and lightning slashed from her fingers, lancing into the crowd and taking lives wherever it hit.
‘Defy me and perish!’ she screamed. ‘I am pain! I am—’
She stuttered, took a shuddering step forward and for a moment I thought someone had shot her after all. She looked . . . I don’t rightly know how to describe it. She looked bright.
Something . . . I don’t know. I don’t understand the cunning, or magic, or witchcraft, or whatever the fuck you want to call it. I’ve seen enough of it to know that I fear it, but I don’t understand it and I’m not sure I ever want to.
She turned to face us then, in that last awful moment, and I will never forget what I saw. There was light pouring out of her, out of her eyes and her mouth and even her fucking nostrils, blinding white lightning firelight like stars and cannon fire and . . . I don’t know how to explain it.
She shone. She shone so bright even I could see it.
I don’t know. I don’t know what I saw, and I think I was the only one looking. Ailsa still had her face pressed to the floor under me, and Vogel was behind an overturned table,
