Not ever.
That put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day, and I slept poorly that night. I had no idea what the morning would bring beyond what little Ailsa had told me, so I hadn’t dared drink too much the evening before. Trying to sleep when you’re sober and have things on your mind is never easy, and I spent a restless night dreaming about solemn rituals and blood oaths and the way that Desh had died.
The next morning was overcast and grey, and the sky matched my mood. I shaved and got dressed, then ate a sullen breakfast that I didn’t want, alone in the private dining room of the inn.
Ailsa came to collect me herself, in her carriage with Brandt and three of her household guard around her. I was pleased to see her, in truth, and that morning I think I felt a little of what Desh must have felt on the day we swore him into the Pious Men. I was nervous, I realised, foolish as that may sound. A gang initiation was one thing, but what did formally joining the Queen’s Men entail?
I still had no idea.
‘It’s all right,’ Ailsa said quietly, once the carriage was underway. ‘It’s just an oath you have to swear, dressed up with some ritual and mummery in the name of tradition. I can’t tell you what, exactly, but there’s nothing to truly fear in it.’
‘Aye,’ I said, and took a breath to steady myself. ‘Tell me something, Ailsa. Do you know Sabine?’
‘The woman from Varnburg? No, not at all. Heinrich, my predecessor in Ellinburg, stood witness when I was initiated. I was only introduced to her yesterday.’
‘Iagin told me something about her, and I don’t know if it’s true or not.’
‘And what was that?’
I glanced at her. I had only brought the matter up to change the subject, but now I wondered if I should tell her or not. Ailsa was very close to Vogel, I knew, and she probably told him everything any one of us said in her hearing. That was the same way I’d had Fat Luka watch the other Pious Men for me, I realised suddenly, and tell me who had said what. Perhaps Vogel and me weren’t so very different in the way we did business after all. That was an interesting thought, but one for another time. Either way, I thought she needed to know.
‘Iagin said she’s the Old Man’s wife,’ I said at last.
Ailsa’s face stayed very still.
‘Did he, now?’
‘Aye,’ I said, and I wondered if perhaps I might have just made a mistake.
If I had got Iagin in the shit with Vogel then I would have to tell him, I realised, and risk losing the only one of the Queen’s Men I truly thought of as an ally. Apart from Ailsa herself, of course.
‘How extraordinary,’ Ailsa said. ‘It’s not impossible, I suppose. They’re of an age, give or take. You remember how he hosts dinners, I’m sure, and he’s never actually said that his wife was dead, for all that I had assumed she must be. Well, this is going to be interesting.’
‘Aye,’ I said again, and decided against telling her the other thing that Iagin had told me about Sabine.
If she had truly been Provost Marshal before Vogel then there had to be a good reason why she wasn’t any more, and I was absolutely certain the Old Man wouldn’t want anyone poking at that particular sore.
We passed the rest of the journey to the house of law in silence, but I could almost hear Ailsa’s mind working as she thought over what I had told her. I could only hope that hadn’t been foolish of me.
Chapter 21
Once we were within the house of law, Ailsa left me with a pair of stone-faced attendants. I watched her glide away down a corridor without a word or so much as a backwards glance, and could only assume that the mummery and ritual she had spoken of was about to begin.
The attendants took the Weeping Women from me, and I knew better than to protest. That done, a black silk hood was placed over my head and laced tight behind my neck. The thing made it difficult to breathe and impossible to see, and I gave thanks to Our Lady that I’d had the sense not to get drunk the previous night, however much I had wanted to. Being led down unfamiliar corridors in choking darkness was bad enough as it was, without enduring it with a brandy headache as well.
We went down a long stair, below ground but not into the reeking embrace of the cells. This was some other undercroft of the house of law, then, nowhere I had been before. Our footsteps echoed on stone in a way that told me the passage we walked down was narrow and low-ceilinged. I thought of the sappers’ tunnels at Abingon, and forced the memory away with all the ruthlessness I could muster.
Breathe, I thought. Just breathe.
Lady, but that was easier said than done.
Just breathe.
I’ve never cared for enclosed spaces, and after Abingon I cared for them a great deal less than I had done before. I could almost feel the rock above my head crumbling, showering grit on my shoulders with every muffled roar of the cannon. The memories loomed like pregnant horrors in the darkness, swollen with the ghosts of the dead. I thought I could hear the men’s picks working somewhere ahead of me, never knowing if at any moment we might break through into one of the enemy’s counter-tunnels and be forced to meet them knife to knife in the stifling darkness.
There just wasn’t enough fucking air to breathe, and the hood was
