Aye, I was that now.
And I had work to do.
I pulled the rope beside the great doors of the barracks to ring the bell. A moment later a sliding hatch in the sally port opened to show me a lad’s eyes and a portion of his nose, dark with greasy blackheads.
‘What d’you want?’
I opened my pouch and took out the Queen’s Warrant, and I held it up for him to see. There was no need for words, not with that in my hand.
The key to every door in Dannsburg.
I heard bolts being thrown back, and a moment later the sally port opened to admit us.
The guardsman was even uglier than he had looked through the hatch, his face a riot of livid boils under his ill-fitting helmet. He couldn’t have had more than sixteen or seventeen years to him, I thought. The war wasn’t so very long ago, and the army was still recruiting hard to fill the huge gaps in its ranks left by the carnage of Abingon. A lot of soldiers and guardsmen were young now, probably too green to be of much use if it came to war again.
I didn’t want to think what would happen, if it came to war with Skania.
‘Sir?’ he asked, standing nervously to attention as I stepped into the stone hall with Anne behind me. ‘Ma’am? What . . . what do you need?’
‘You to shut up,’ I said. ‘I’m not here, you understand me? You never saw us.’
‘Sir,’ the lad said, and he had the sense to hold his peace after that.
‘There’s a cart coming,’ I told him. ‘Watch for it, and have the carter and his men wait. They’re with me.’
The guard saluted and turned back to his hatch, watching the street as though his life depended on it. He probably thought it did, at that.
I led Anne down an echoing stone hall, past two more youthful guardsmen who turned to watch us go by with confused looks on their faces. If I was the commandant of this place I’d have had the pair of them flogged for taking that little interest in strangers in their barracks, but that was a matter for another day. We were in now.
‘Where are we going?’ Anne whispered.
‘Mess hall three,’ I said, reciting what Ailsa had told me. ‘We’ve made sure they’re all together, I told you that.’
‘Fucking how?’
‘Ailsa arrested the head of the royal bodyguard this afternoon,’ I whispered. ‘It didn’t take her long to get his signature on some special orders. The family help each other out, Anne.’
‘Just like back home,’ she said.
‘Aye, it’s just like that.’
It was, as well. From what I had seen, the Queen’s Men worked exactly like the underworld gangs of Ellinburg did, and that wasn’t lost on me. Each Queen’s Man ran his or her own crew like an independent business, but we all answered to Lord Vogel as our overboss in the end and that meant we worked together when we needed to. It wasn’t how I had ever expected to find an arm of the crown operating, much less an order of the knighthood, but it was comfortingly familiar for all that. I wondered if that familiarity was part of why I had been chosen in the first place.
That aside, Ailsa had no doubt stuck a red-hot iron into the head of the royal bodyguard until he signed the orders that got my boys the night off and had them assigned a private mess hall all to themselves. Whatever she’d done, it had worked. Just another sweet little reward for their blind eyes and open doors on the night of the assassination, as far as they were concerned.
That was well and good but there were still six of them and two of us, and I hadn’t wanted to involve Emil and Oliver in this. No soldier I had ever met stayed sober in the face of free booze, though, so I’d sent Rosie instead with her bawd’s knot and a bag of silver and a kiss for the captain of the watch to ensure they would be shitfaced by the time we arrived.
Always cheat, always win.
The captain had told me that once, during the war, and it had been true then and it was true now.
‘Here we are,’ I said, stopping outside a stout wooden door.
Anne reached for the door handle, then paused. ‘Is there a plan, beyond “kill everyone”?’
‘No,’ I said.
She nodded and threw the door open, her crossbow swinging up from under her cloak in one fluid motion.
Inside the mess hall there was a man dancing an unsteady jig on a table to the sound of a flute being played very badly. Anne’s crossbow thumped by my ear, and the man flew backwards off the table with a bolt through his chest. Then I was through the door with the Weeping Women in my hands, and behind me Anne dropped her crossbow and drew her daggers.
I heard her kick the door shut behind us. By then I had crossed to the table and buried Remorse in the back of a man who was slumped face down across the wood with an empty brandy bottle by his hand. He gave a low groan as he died, but that was all. Two more lurched to their feet, swaying with shock and brandy, and Anne took one through the throat with a thrown dagger even as I thrust Mercy into the other’s guts.
A fifth hurled a bottle at Anne’s head and charged at her with a bellow of drunken fury, but she ducked the bottle and slammed him in the face with the back of her mailed forearm as he came on. Glass smashed on the floor, and Anne twisted her hips and rammed her other dagger into his groin. She wrenched it free in a spray of dark
