Perhaps the archmagus spoke the truth, but that was none of my affair.
‘I’m not here to discuss house politics, Archmagus,’ I said. ‘Just so long as you and your learned colleagues all remember what you saw. I wouldn’t like for Billy and me to have to come back and remind anyone.’
‘Spare me your threats,’ he said, and I could hear the bitterness in his voice. ‘I heard you. Accident, young girl distraught with grief, so on and so forth. It makes no difference, does it? The public will have already heard your story, and there’s no advantage to anyone trying to gainsay it.’
‘Exactly that,’ I said. ‘I’m glad we understand each other, Archmagus.’
‘Oh, I understand you, Tomas,’ he said. ‘Whether you understand the manner of man you’re working for is another matter.’
‘I serve the crown,’ I said.
‘And how does it serve the crown to seek to prevent learning?’ the archmagus shot back at me. ‘How would it serve the crown to abolish the house of magicians?’
‘It wouldn’t,’ I said honestly, and thought perhaps it might be time to smooth the waters between us. ‘No one is looking to do that, Archmagus. Without the alchemy of your magicians to make blasting powder, where would we be if it were ever to come to war again?’
He blinked at me, and I thought perhaps I had surprised him there.
‘I . . . hadn’t realised you grasped that,’ he said.
I had only had a short time as governor of Ellinburg and in the end I hadn’t managed to read many of the books in the governor’s library, but I had made sure that the treatise on the house of magicians was one of the first I took down from the dusty shelves. No magicians, no blasting powder. I grasped that well enough.
‘I read it,’ I said. ‘In a book. I serve who I serve, Archmagus, but I am not an ignorant thug, whatever you may think.’
‘I see that you are not,’ Reiter said.
I understood that, so obviously Vogel must have done too. No, he wasn’t looking to do away with the magicians entirely but I would have bet gold he was looking to control them, as he did everything else. They had far too much power and autonomy for Vogel’s liking, and that displeased him, and displeasing Lord Vogel was very, very unhealthy.
I wondered if the archmagus grasped that?
*
Iagin was waiting for me when we got back to the Bountiful Harvest.
‘How did it go with our learned friends?’ he asked me.
I shrugged. ‘They’ll do what they’re told.’
He gave Billy a sidelong glance, and nodded.
‘I’m sure they will.’
Don’t bring your insane pet magician to any more meetings, Iagin had told me once. I thought Billy gave him the fear, and that was good. I liked Iagin well enough, but I still wasn’t sure how much I could trust him. I thought on the words Archmagus Nikolai Reiter had said to me, and decided to keep them to myself.
I thought I understood what sort of man Vogel was, but perhaps I was wrong. The devil himself in the service of the crown, I had thought him. He had shown me nothing to change my mind about that, but perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps there was something I was missing, but I knew Iagin wasn’t the right person to have that conversation with.
I didn’t think anyone was.
Sometimes a leader has to keep his own counsel and no other. The captain had taught me that, back in the war, and he had been right then and he was right now.
‘What brings you here, anyway?’ I asked him. ‘Won’t Grachyev be getting lonely?’
Iagin snorted. ‘That prancing idiot thinks I’m visiting my sick mother,’ he said. ‘He’s so deep into his mummer’s show of being a gangster he even treated me to a speech about how important family is. Honestly, Tomas, I know you really were a gangster back in Ellinburg but tell me you weren’t as much of a prick as he is.’
‘No, not as such,’ I said.
‘Didn’t think so. Anyway, here it is. The Old Man wants you sworn in properly once a couple of the others come home, and that means you have to get knighted first.’
‘Aye, I know,’ I said. ‘When?’
‘That’s the thing,’ Iagin said. ‘He wants it done day after tomorrow.’
‘Gods, really? What state is . . . our mutual friend in?’
‘She’s drugged up to the eyeballs, according to Ailsa, but she reckons it’ll be all right. There ain’t a lot to it really. It just has to be done, and more important, it has to be seen to be done and by the right people, then all will be well.’
I thought of how the Princess Crown Royal had been the previous day, and wondered whether I truly wanted her holding a sword near my neck. Lord Vogel wanted it done, though, and Lord Vogel got what he wanted. That was a fundamental fact of life, in Dannsburg.
‘Aye, well, if the Old Man wants it doing then there it is,’ I said. ‘What am I supposed to wear?’
‘Who cares? Something decent, obviously, but beyond that it doesn’t matter. It’s a civil knighthood not a martial one. No one will expect you in a dress uniform.’
I was glad about that. Conscript soldiers didn’t get dress uniforms, and my priest’s robes were both tatty and in a chest in my bedroom in Ellinburg, hundreds of miles away.
‘Well and good,’ I said. ‘Can I bring Billy and Anne?’
Iagin shrugged. ‘Can’t see why not. The more folk that see it done the better, in truth.’
‘Aye,’ I said.
I wanted Billy there, and not just for protection this time.
I was going to be knighted.
Me, a bricklayer’s son from the Stink, was going to be knighted by the Princess Crown Royal. Never mind that she was drugged out of her mind and quite possibly insane, nor that it was only a formality so that
