Enaid is doing well. She’s had to break some heads but no more than expected, and the peace holds as well as such things ever do. The nights grow easier. Hanne and the baby are well, and Yoseph too. We make a strange family, but it seems to work. I feel easier in myself, and the terrors come less often.
Return safe, brother.
Jochan
I looked at the letter for a long time, picturing Jochan and Hanne and Cutter sitting down to dinner together as a family, although I had no idea if they actually did or not. It was unconventional, certainly, but if it was helping to bring my tormented brother some peace from the battle shock then that was well and good, to my mind. I penned a brief reply assuring him that I was well, and left it at that. I had work to do.
Anne and me were busy to begin with, but the second week after I received my knighthood, another Queen’s Man arrived in the city. He had come from Drathburg. He was a short, sandy-haired, unassuming fellow by the name of Konrad. I didn’t know him, but he soon proved that he knew how the work was done.
We were in the council offices of the palace that afternoon, Bloody Anne and Konrad and me. None of us knew our way around that part of the vast building, but Ailsa had drawn me a roughly sketched map which I had to keep checking as we walked down corridor after corridor. The guards ignored us, knowing who we were by then and no doubt being able to guess what we were about.
I could hear raised voices from behind a door, and once more I checked the map in my hand. This was the room we wanted. I held up a hand to tell the others to be still, and tucked the map back into my pouch. I put one hand on the hilt of Remorse and reached out and opened the door with the other.
A man and a woman were sitting on opposite sides of a wide desk, having a heated argument. The man looked up as the door opened.
‘I said we weren’t to be disturbed,’ he snapped, before he realised that I wasn’t whoever he had expected me to be.
‘That’s very unfortunate,’ I said, and I took the Queen’s Warrant out of my pouch and showed it to him.
He went white.
The woman was staring at me over her shoulder now, and her eyes widened when she saw what was in my hand.
‘Oh gods,’ she whispered.
‘We might as well be,’ Konrad said as he stepped into the room after me and closed the door behind him, leaving Bloody Anne to watch the corridor and see that we weren’t interrupted.
‘Konrad?’ she faltered, taking him in for the first time. ‘I . . . I thought you were in Drathburg.’
‘I was,’ he said. ‘I came back. This is Tomas.’
‘What do you want?’ the man demanded.
‘You, to come with us,’ I said.
‘We’ve done nothing,’ the woman said, ignoring me and addressing Konrad, who she seemed to know. ‘I’m a loyal subject of the crown, you of all people know that!’
‘No one said you weren’t,’ I said. ‘We just want you to come with us.’
‘Konrad?’
‘A loyal subject of the crown wouldn’t question an order given under the Queen’s Warrant now, would she?’ he said. ‘Get up.’
The woman rose unsteadily to her feet and I could see she was pure terrified.
So she should be.
Do what your father says or the Queen’s Men will come and take you away.
I wondered if anyone had said that to her when she was a child, as my ma had to me. If so, I wondered if she had ever thought it might actually happen one day. Her voice was educated, her clothes fashionable and obviously expensive. I very much doubted that she had thought anything of the sort could ever happen to her.
‘I loved the queen and I love our Prince Regent,’ the woman said, defiant now as she met Konrad’s stare, ‘but I cannot love the Queen’s Men. They took my brother away from me!’
Perhaps I had been wrong, then. Perhaps she had good reason to fear the Queen’s Men. She was a loyal subject of the crown, so she said, and in truth I had no reason to doubt her words. But perhaps she thought less well of the house of law, and of the Queen’s Men.
These days, that was a dangerous opinion to hold.
*
‘She seemed to know you, that council woman,’ I said to Konrad once we were back in the house of law with brandies in our hands. ‘Lady Dennan, I mean.’
‘Mmmm,’ Konrad said. ‘She would do. I’m the brother she spoke of.’
‘You what?’
He shrugged. ‘She’s my sister. I haven’t seen her in fifteen years. She took a seat on the governing council and I took the Queen’s Warrant and a posting to Drathburg. We foreswear all family ties when we take the oath, as you well know.’
I hadn’t known that, still not having been formally sworn into the Queen’s Men myself. That would have to wait until the one from Varnburg finally arrived, apparently, not that I much cared. It would keep. Still, Ailsa had retained a relationship with her own parents, albeit a strained one, so perhaps it didn’t matter as much as all that. Perhaps it was one of those things you were made to swear but not truly expected to believe in, one of those things people like Konrad could use as an excuse for their behaviour when it suited them. The oath of loyalty to the crown that us conscript soldiers
