She had no eyelids.
‘In Our Lady’s name,’ Fat Luka whispered beside me, and I could only agree with him about that.
Ilse had done the gods only knew what to her hand and taken her eyelids. Lady Lan Delanov bore the marks of harsh questioning indeed. Very harsh. I wondered how brightly lit her cell had been kept, and how many days it had been since the poor woman last slept.
It’s always easier to break their minds than their bodies, Tomas.
The guards led her to the chair and helped her to sit, and then stepped away and took up position against the walls.
I swallowed sour spit and looked away.
Lord Vogel’s face was completely impassive, and his soulless gaze held no hint of emotion when he spoke.
‘Introduce yourself to the court.’
The woman’s voice was cracked and faint, but audible in the utter silence of the courtroom.
‘The Lady Olena Lan Delanov, my Lord Chief Judiciar. Lady-in-Waiting to Her Majesty the Queen.’
The clerk’s pen scratched across the page as he recorded every word that was spoken. He kept his eyes down on his book, I noticed, and avoided looking at Lady Lan Delanov.
‘Do you swear upon the names of the almighty gods of the temple to speak only the truth, and the whole truth, and to hold nothing back?’
‘I do so swear.’
She’s been coached in every word, I thought, but by then I supposed it no longer mattered. Whether or not she was truly guilty or just so broken by torture that she would have said anything to make it stop no longer mattered. The outcome of this trial was a foregone conclusion. There could only be one reason we were there at all.
‘Are you, Lady Lan Delanov, complicit in the murder of Her Majesty the Queen?’
‘I am, my lord.’
I heard someone gasp, and a mutter of condemnation from someone else.
‘Traitor,’ someone whispered.
‘Silence!’ barked the attendant with the staff.
Vogel continued as though she had not spoken.
‘Did you, Lady Lan Delanov, Lady-in-Waiting to Her Majesty, act alone in this grievous and shameful matter of assassination and regicide? Did you with your own hand murder our noble queen?’
‘No, my lord.’
Here it comes, I thought.
‘And will you now name for the court those accomplices with whom you worked? Will you name those who opened the gates and unlocked the doors, and those who were paid to look the other way?’
‘I will, my lord.’
Here come the death warrants.
She named fifteen people in all.
Six of the Palace Guard, three footmen, four maids, the Prince Consort’s personal secretary, and the head of the royal bodyguard. The clerk of the court dutifully recorded the names in his book. Those last two were interesting, I thought, being so much higher placed than the others.
‘And what of the royal family themselves?’ Vogel asked. ‘Were the Prince Consort or the Princess Crown Royal involved in this matter in any way?’
‘Absolutely not, my lord. Their hands are clean.’
And thus so simply was order restored, and the direct line of the succession preserved. This was also, I thought, a fucking good way of getting rid of difficult but important people.
‘And on whose behalf did you act, Lady Lan Delanov? Whose hand held the blade?’
‘I . . . I do not know his name, my lord,’ she said. ‘A foreign man. A northerner.’
‘And from which country did this foreign assassin come?’
Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.
‘From Skania.’
Aye, well, that at least made sense enough. I had known that ridiculous fucking palace would be impossible to defend, and it seemed I had been right about that. All it had taken was an assassin with a big bag of gold, and the brains to work out which of the queen’s household could be moved by coin. I could have done that myself.
‘This court has heard the confession of Lady Lan Delanov, and recorded the names of her accomplices. The matter is now concluded,’ Vogel said. ‘Take her away.’
We do not have executions here, not for traitors, Ailsa had told me once. There are no heroic ends, no ritual or grandeur to it. We make no martyrs and we leave nothing for others to aspire to, nothing to be emulated. They just disappear, and are forgotten.
I didn’t think anyone would ever see Lady Lan Delanov again. Given what Ilse had done to her, perhaps that was almost a kindness.
The woman was led away between the same two guards who had brought her in, and the attendant once more banged on the floor with her staff. We all rose and bowed as Lord Vogel left the room, and that was it.
I thought of the second houseman of the royal privy chamber, his arm filleted and filled with shit to make his blood run black with rot. He must surely have died screaming and raving by now, in the hellish depths of the house of law.
It seemed he had been innocent.
*
By the time we were summoned to Vogel’s office later that morning, Ailsa and Iagin and me, the death warrants had already been signed.
Ailsa received those for the Prince Consort’s personal secretary and the head of the royal bodyguard, as I supposed was only wise. She was the aristocrat who was placed highly within the palace, after all. Iagin, the man of the people, took the warrants for the footmen and the maids, and I, the soldier, got the six guardsmen. There was always a reason behind Lord Vogel’s actions, even in such a small matter as this. That much was plain to see.
‘Get it done quickly,’ he said, and with that we were dismissed.
I followed Iagin back down the corridor to his office and cleared my throat.
‘You want something, Tomas?’ he asked.
‘Can I have a word?’
He nodded and waved me in.
‘You ain’t done this before, have you?’ he said, as I closed the door behind me.
‘Not exactly this, no,’ I had to admit. ‘What’s the form
