Breathe, I thought. Just breathe.
Fat Luka had worked for the Queen’s Men a lot longer than I had, although I hadn’t known it at the time, but only in Ellinburg. I doubted he had ever seen anything like that before either.
I looked across the table and my gaze met Rosie’s, hard as nails.
Oh, she knew all right.
‘I met Ilse,’ I said to her.
‘Nice for you.’
‘No, it fucking wasn’t.’
Rosie just shrugged. She knew who I meant, I was sure of it. Rosie was Dannsburg born and deeper in the Queen’s Men than I had given her credit for, I would have bet gold on it right then.
I wondered if Bloody Anne truly understood what kind of woman she had fallen in love with, and the sort of people she worked for.
‘What do you mean, the royal family are under house arrest?’ Anne asked. ‘He can’t do that, can he?’
I showed her a thin smile.
No, she had no fucking idea, had she?
Chapter 6
Two days later Ailsa came to see me.
That surprised me, but I supposed it was only natural that she had heard I was back in the city. All the Queen’s Men were supposedly equal under Lord Vogel, but I wasn’t fooling myself on that score. In Dannsburg Ailsa was considerably better connected than I was, and there she had me at a great disadvantage.
I had her shown into the private dining room of the Bountiful Harvest, which I had claimed as my office by then. The innkeeper thought me a friend of Mr Grachyev, but it was Iagin who had given him my name, and me who had given him far too much gold. He might not know exactly who I was but he knew well enough that I was someone, and in Dannsburg that was good even if nothing else was.
‘Hello, Tomas,’ she said.
I raised my eyes from the papers on the table in front of me, and looked at her. She was truly beautiful, I thought, even though I knew paints and powders played a part in that. Paints and powders can make a woman look younger than her years, aye, but they can’t change the shape of her face or the expression in her eyes. I looked into Ailsa’s eyes then, and I smiled a cold smile.
This was my wife, the woman I had almost loved and perhaps still did. The woman who I had adopted a son with, and who had deserted us both without a second thought the moment Lord Vogel crooked his finger.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said.
She sat down across the table from me.
‘We work together, Tomas,’ she said. ‘I gave you the warrant myself. Please tell me you aren’t harbouring some petty resentment over the interruption of what was nothing more than a sham marriage to begin with.’
I swallowed the truth like bitter medicine.
‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘There was no love between us, I know that, but Billy took it hard. He’s young, Ailsa, young for his age, even, and no wonder after Messia. Too young to understand these things.’
I had arranged a tutor for Billy by then, much to his displeasure, so he was away at his studies. I knew how badly he wanted to see Ailsa, but I thought it was probably best that I see how things stood between us before I allowed that to happen.
‘Perhaps he is,’ she said. ‘But then perhaps he was too young to kill a house magus last year too. You let him do that, though, didn’t you? You let him go into battle against Skanian magicians. He wasn’t too young to kill for you, was he?’
She had me there, I had to allow.
‘Aye, well,’ I said. ‘We’re neither of us saints of the temple.’
‘No, we most certainly are not. This business of ours is ill-suited to saints.’
‘So I’ll ask you again, what are you doing here?’
‘You’re to be knighted before too much longer,’ she said. ‘It’s a requirement before you can be formally sworn into the Queen’s Men. Lord Vogel thought you would want to know.’
Just then I couldn’t have cared less about the knighthood. Ilse was a Queen’s Man so she must be a knight too, and to my mind that was no endorsement of the office. Still, I wasn’t going to give Ailsa the satisfaction of hearing me say so.
‘You run his errands now, do you?’ I said instead. ‘I’d thought you more than a simple messenger girl.’
Ailsa sighed, and looked down at her hands.
‘Is it too much for you to believe that I simply wanted to see you?’
‘Aye,’ I said, and all the bitterness of the past months rose up like vomit in the back of my throat. ‘It fucking well is.’
‘Yes, well,’ Ailsa said, and fell silent.
‘How can I be knighted, anyway?’ I asked, wanting to talk about almost anything other than her insulting pretence of having feelings. ‘Who’s going to do it, for one thing? We’ve no queen, and the princess is both a child and still under house arrest. We’ve no regent either, and no sign of one being announced. No one is actually running the fucking country!’
‘Don’t be silly, of course they are,’ Ailsa said. ‘That’s what the governing council are for, to run things day to day. Anyway, the situation will soon change, I think. I have been talking at length with one of the late queen’s ladies-in-waiting, a Lady Lan Delanov. Since the terrible things that have happened in the palace, she has come to think of me as her closest friend and confidante.’
I looked at her, at the lioness seated across the table from me, and I took her meaning.
‘This is the Lan Andronikov woman all over again, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Is this one a
