The flute player dropped his instrument and looked up at us with panic on his face. He was a lad of maybe sixteen, and he was no guardsman.
Fuck!
‘Where’s the other one?’ I demanded.
There were supposed to be six of them, and this musical prick wasn’t supposed to be there at all. The lad pointed at a door, his hand shaking in sheer terror.
‘Privy,’ he whispered.
I nodded and crossed the room, and booted the privy door open.
The fellow was sitting on the wooden bench with his britches round his ankles, half passed out and half taking a shit. He looked up at me in utter confusion, obviously struggling to focus his eyes.
‘Gimme a fuckin’ minute, pal, I’m nearly done,’ he said, his voice thick with drink.
‘You’re done,’ I said.
I stabbed him where he sat, Mercy going into his guts so hard he finished his shit in a long, stinking rush. He slumped sideways on the bench in a spreading pool of blood.
That was done, then. I left him lying there and went back into the mess hall.
‘Let the bard live,’ I told Anne, but she had already knifed him.
That was how the crown’s justice was done.
Chapter 9
It all got done that same night.
The cart that Rosie had arranged for me turned up a few minutes after we finished the killing. I dismissed the door guard and let Rosie’s quiet boys file past me into the barracks. Ten hard-looking lads with bundles of cloth under their arms walked silently past us, and I turned to watch them go. I wondered who they were and where she had found them, and whether this was another favour I owed Iagin. It didn’t matter, I realised. Rosie knew how to get things done in Dannsburg, and that was all that was important.
Anne showed the lads into the mess hall and after a while they started to leave again, dragging wet things wrapped in blankets between them. I thought that somewhere south of the river, in that part of the city where the rich folk didn’t go, someone’s pigs would be eating well for the next few days. Seven bodies disappeared into the night on that cart, and no one said a fucking word about it.
That was what the Queen’s Warrant could do.
By the morning all the death warrants had been filled, and once more me and Ailsa and Iagin were called to Vogel’s office in the house of law.
‘Have the Prince Consort and Princess Crown Royal released from their apartments,’ he said. ‘Make sure they understand what has happened, and what must happen next. The queen died suddenly this morning. This afternoon the news of her death is to be made public, and the Prince Consort immediately announced as regent until the princess comes of age. There will be no unrest. See to that.’
We nodded, and assured the Provost Marshal that there would indeed be no unrest. What else could we do?
How the fuck the three of us were supposed to ensure there was no unrest across a city the size of Dannsburg I had no idea, but it seemed that wasn’t going to become my problem.
‘Iagin will see to the populace,’ Ailsa told me as we walked together through the corridors of the house of law. ‘This sort of thing is the whole point of Grachyev’s organisation.’
I thought about that for a moment, and nodded. Mr Grachyev dealt in taverns and inns, tailors’ shops and bath houses and brothels, all the places where folk gathered and gossiped. If word needed to be spread, those were the places to spread it from. That word would be about the Prince Consort’s noble character and his exemplary leadership, I had no doubt, and about what a wonderful regent he would make.
That’s what I would have done, anyway, and I couldn’t think Iagin would go about it any different. A large part of leadership is reassurance and telling people what they need to hear, after all. Even more so, when you’re trying to deceive them.
‘That’s good,’ I said.
‘Oh, don’t look so glum, Tomas,’ Ailsa said. ‘You did well last night.’
‘I murdered six men who’d done nothing to me,’ I snapped. ‘Seven, including that lad who shouldn’t even have been there.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ she said. ‘You executed six traitors and you made the realm a safer place by doing so. You did your job.’
‘And the lad? Who did he betray?’
Ailsa stopped and looked at me.
‘You’re a soldier, Tomas. Do you honestly think that no civilians were killed while our cannon were smashing Abingon to rubble? Do you think no innocent people died of starvation during the siege, or of plague or the bloody flux? You were there, you know better than that.’
I sighed. She was right, of course she was. I remembered the horrors we had seen when the walls of Abingon finally came down and we forced our way onto the streets of the city. I remembered the starving children, the burned and the maimed. Even now, if I close my eyes I can still see the beggars with bodies so twisted by plague they hardly looked human any more. I will never forget Abingon, and the things that I saw there, and the things that I did.
Such things happen in war, but that didn’t mean I had to like it. That didn’t mean it was right.
‘Aye, well,’ I said. ‘Those—’
‘Are the times we live in, yes, quite. Enough of that now, Tomas. Lord Vogel’s orders are to be obeyed, not questioned. You need to remember that at all times.’
That felt like a warning, to me, and a little bit closer to a threat than I was comfortable with.
Everyone is watched by someone, even me.
Ailsa had told me that herself, what seemed like a long time ago. I was a Queen’s Man now and the Queen’s Men were above the law, but we most definitely were not above Lord Vogel’s justice. I didn’t know what would
