I was sitting behind the huge desk in my study, the same study where Governor Hauer had received me before I had him arrested and dragged screaming to Dannsburg.
The messenger stood stiffly upright in front of me, her posture alone enough to tell me that she had been a soldier once.
‘A letter, my lord Governor,’ she said. ‘Most urgent.’
She passed me the folded paper then returned to her rigid stance.
I turned the letter over in my hand and glanced at the seal. It bore the arms of the house of law, not the mark of the royal warrant. I broke the stiff red wax and scanned the words on the page.
Nephew,
I have hard news.
Mother is dead, by the hand unloved.
Tell only those who know and serve the family, and no other. You will be relieved of your position within weeks, sooner if the roads are kind, and then you must ride. Bring those of your people closest to the family and return home with all haste.
Your uncle,
V.
I blinked at the letter and read it again, taking a moment to sift the meaning from the carefully phrased words. For one heart-stopping moment I thought he was talking about Ailsa.
Letters such as this were never written in plain, in case they fell into the wrong hands on the road. ‘The family’ meant the Queen’s Men, of course, and by those closest he meant my chiefs of staff. But he called himself uncle and me his nephew, so Mother was . . .
In Our Lady’s name, he means the queen!
The queen was dead, and by assassination. Of all the things the letter might have said, that had been the one I was least expecting.
I took a drink to cover my shock, then looked up at the messenger.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.
‘Caelyn, my lord Governor.’
‘And do you know what this letter says, Caelyn?’
‘No, m’lord,’ she said. ‘Only that it comes with great haste from the Lord Chief Judiciar himself.’
No, it fucking doesn’t, I thought. This came straight from the Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men, and for all that they were one and the same man, they wore very different faces indeed.
I sighed and held the letter to the flame of my desk lamp, thinking as I watched the paper slowly blacken and curl between my fingers. I wondered how many versions of that letter had been written, and where else they had been sent. To Drathburg in the west I was sure, perhaps as far as Varnburg or even away across the sea. Who knew how far the reach of the Queen’s Men extended? Nobody, I suspected, except Vogel himself.
The more the news sank in the less it surprised me.
Lady’s sake, I’d as good as known this was going to happen. I remembered my visit to the Royal Palace of Dannsburg, and how I’d thought then that the place was ridiculous and would be impossible to defend.
I put that thought aside for the time being, and offered the messenger a seat and a drink. She was all but swaying on her heels, and I wondered how long it had been since she last slept or ate.
Vogel’s letter had been dated not four days ago, and Dannsburg was a good week’s ride at a sane pace. When news was desperate it wasn’t unknown for a messenger to set out with four or more horses and simply ride them to destruction one after another, changing mounts and acquiring more along the road when each lamed or dropped dead beneath her.
Caelyn sank into the offered seat with a grateful sigh, and I poured brandy for her from the decanter on the side table.
‘I’ll pen a reply for the morning but you’re to spend the night here before you ride back,’ I told her. ‘The response is not half so urgent as the news was.’
‘Thank you, m’lord,’ she said, and the relief on her face was plain to see.
I wasn’t sure she could have made it back to Dannsburg again at the same pace, however many horses she took with her, but if I had ordered it I knew she would have tried.
She was a soldier, after all, and I thought that we would be needing those soon.
All of them we could fucking get.
Chapter 2
I rang the bell on my desk to summon a footman, and told him to put Caelyn in a guest room for the night and see to it that she got a bath and a hot meal, and a good breakfast in the morning. Once he had led her out of the study I sat back in my chair and looked at the charred ashes of Vogel’s letter where they lay strewn across the polished wood of the desk.
When I first opened the letter I’d thought Vogel was talking about Ailsa, and that had scared me more than I would have expected. The cold rage had finally died within me sometime after I forgave Mina, but I was still a long way from being able to see past what Ailsa had done. And yet, when I read those words, a dread had gripped my heart until I realised the truth. I wondered why that was.
Still, those were thoughts for another day. There were more pressing things to think on that night.
The queen was dead.
I sipped my brandy and let that sink in.
The Princess Crown Royal was heir to the throne, I knew that much. I had seen her once, very briefly, at a court reception in Dannsburg the previous year. She’d had eleven years to her at the time, I remembered Ailsa telling me, and although I didn’t know when her nameday was she couldn’t have reached her age of legal majority yet. She would still take the throne, of course, but the law said she couldn’t be crowned or rule in her own right until she had thirteen years to her. That meant a regent, then.
Had the queen had a husband? I realised I had no idea, and there my ignorance
