‘How did you find Her Highness’ demonstration, Tomas?’ she asked me, a smile playing across her thin lips as she regarded me over the rim of her wine glass.
We were standing beside the table that served as an open bar, and her pale fingers were wrapped around the stem of the glass in her hand in a way that drew attention to her long, black-lacquered nails.
‘Wasteful,’ I said, before I’d had time to think better of it. ‘I’ve never seen so expensive an execution.’
‘We don’t have executions here,’ she said, and I remembered Ailsa saying much the same thing to me once before. ‘Not for traitors, we don’t. The gallows are for street scum, for vagrants and murderers and petty thieves. People whose peers might be discouraged by such things, yes; those we hang in public. Political enemies, however, no. Martyrdom can be a powerful thing, Tomas, and we strongly discourage it. We prevent it, in fact. Those whose deaths might become a rallying flag to others never truly die, not really. They just disappear. And then there are the third type: the fools. Baron Lan Drunov was a fool, and he was given a fool’s death. An amusement, you might call it. Were you not entertained?’
I remembered the Lord Lan Yetrov and his bear pit, and his idea of what people found entertaining.
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
Sabine laughed then, and that surprised me.
‘I like you, Tomas,’ she said. ‘You are an honest man, and honest men are rare creatures indeed in the house of law. Come, sit with me.’
She’ll try to seduce you, Iagin had warned me. She always does.
‘Aye, if you want,’ I said, but I was wary as I followed her from the table with its bottles and glasses and over to the end of the room that was set with couches and chairs.
I took a chair, and she settled on a couch across from me. There was a low table between us, but still she felt too close for comfort. She kicked her feet up onto the fabric beside her, showing me the tall heels of her shoes and a flash of pale ankle below her black skirts.
Don’t even fucking think about it. She’s untouchable.
She was fucking alarming, as far as I was concerned, and I was thinking about anything but that. I don’t think I had ever missed Ailsa so much in my life as I did at that moment, but she was away with Vogel going over whatever plots they were putting together between them.
Mother Ruin.
Again I wondered where that name had come from. If I ever found out, I was sure I wouldn’t like the answer.
‘Would you like me to read your cards?’ she asked suddenly.
‘My what?’ I said.
‘Your cards, Tomas. Your future.’
She reached into the pouch she wore at her overly tight belt and withdrew a black velvet drawstring bag. Her long-nailed fingers dipped into it and pinched out a fat deck of cards.
Too fat a deck, to my mind. The packs that normal folk played their gambling games with held fifty or so cards, but hers looked to be eighty with ease. That could only mean one thing.
‘Witch cards,’ I whispered.
‘There’s no witchcraft in painted pasteboard, but call it what you will.’
‘You’re a cunning woman?’
She laughed at that, and tipped her glass of wine like blood into her mouth in one long smooth swallow. She set the glass down on the table in front of her and raised one finely shaped eyebrow.
‘And if I were?’
I shrugged. ‘There’s no shame in it. My own lad has the cunning in him, and his woman too. It’s a surprise, that’s all.’
‘Oh, Tomas,’ she said, and laughed again. ‘I’m no cunning woman, at least not in the way you mean it. Let me draw for you?’
‘If you want.’
She shuffled the pack of cards in her hands, her long nails clacking against the stiff pasteboard as she rapidly flicked five cards face down onto the table between us. She looked up into my eyes then, and reached out to turn the first card over.
It was the Ten of Swords, and the image on it depicted a man face down on the ground with ten long blades buried in his back.
‘Oh dear,’ she said.
The door opened then, and Iagin and Ailsa came in together. I glanced over, and caught the flash of alarm that crossed Iagin’s face before he smothered it.
‘Tomas, there you fucking are!’ he exclaimed, as though he had been searching high and low for me. He hadn’t been, of course, or the mess would have been the first place he would have looked. ‘Come on, I need you.’
‘Aye, well,’ I said, and got to my feet.
‘Take it,’ Sabine said, and she held the card out to me between her long-nailed finger and thumb. ‘Keep it with you, Tomas, and think on what it means.’
I blinked at her, but I took it to be polite if nothing else.
‘My thanks,’ I said, although I didn’t understand.
The picture on the card was grim enough, but what it meant beyond that was a mystery to me. If it meant anything at all, of course.
I tucked the card into my pouch and turned and followed Iagin out of the room. As the door closed behind us I could hear Ailsa speaking to Sabine, but my already bad ears were still deadened by the earlier detonation of the cannon and I couldn’t catch her words.
Once we were in the corridor, Iagin turned to me and blew out a breath that made his heavy moustache lift over his mouth for a moment.
‘Fucking blood, Tomas, don’t do that!’ he said.
‘Do what, talk to Sabine?’
‘Do anything to her, or with her, or even be in the same fucking
