‘Suppose,’ he said, and he held his hand out for it. ‘I can try, anyway.’
I fished in my pouch and produced the now slightly creased pasteboard that was painted with the image of a fallen man with ten long blades buried in his back.
‘Here,’ I said, and passed it to him. ‘What do you make of that, then?’
‘The Ten of Swords, Papa?’ Billy asked me. ‘The Ten of Swords means back-stabbing and treachery. It means defeat and betrayal, ruin and endings and loss. Is that what we’re here for?’
‘I hope not, lad,’ I said. ‘I really fucking hope not.’
I sighed, and looked at the boy. He had been sitting up in his bed when I came in, his book and his quill and ink beside him on the night table next to the burning lamp, and he didn’t look like he had slept at all. He was showing little interest in his formal schooling, so his tutor had told me, but at the cunning he worked tirelessly. His face was thin and drawn, his eyes overly bright in the shadowed hollows that surrounded them. He really didn’t look well at all.
‘Are you all right, Billy?’ I asked him.
He looked down at his blankets for a long moment without speaking.
‘I miss Mina,’ he said at last.
‘I know, son,’ I said. ‘It’s a hard thing, to be separated from someone you . . . well. There it is.’
‘Love, Da,’ he said, and he met my eyes. ‘The word is love. It won’t kill you to say it.’
It was like Billy could see into my soul, sometimes, and I still wasn’t comfortable with that. Not at all I wasn’t.
‘Aye, you’re right. Someone you love, then.’
‘Like you love Mama,’ he said.
That was the voice of Billy the Seer, Billy who was always right when he said a thing. I swallowed, and for a moment I felt cold down to my boots. Did I love Ailsa, truly? Was that what he was telling me?
Fool.
Of course I didn’t, not after what she had done. Forcing me into the service of the crown, bombing the Wheels and killing hundreds of innocent people in the process, deserting me when my usefulness to her was over but I needed her the most. How could I love her after that? I had sobered up a bit since I left the Horn of Plenty, and I knew that was a fool’s thinking.
Aye, that’s exactly what it was.
Fucking, fucking fool.
I held Billy’s gaze for a moment, then I had to look away.
My eyes were stinging with tears and I didn’t want him to see them.
*
Drink always makes me maudlin. I know that from long experience, and I had to allow I’d had a fair bit to drink at the Horn of Plenty that night.
All the same, when I woke late the next morning my thoughts were still of Ailsa. We were close, in our way. We had never been physically intimate as man and wife, no, but we understood each other and we respected each other, and when the pressures of business weren’t in the way, I liked to think that we enjoyed each other’s company. I enjoyed her company, I knew that much anyway. She had done things that had hurt me, aye, but then I had once tried to fucking strangle her so I reckoned we were even on that score.
I lay there in my bed for a long time, staring at the beams that crossed the low ceiling of my room and thinking about Ailsa while I waited for my brandy headache to abate. Eventually there was a knock on the door, and a moment later Bloody Anne came into my room with a mug of small beer in one hand and a plate bearing black bread and salt pork in the other.
‘It’s time you got up,’ she said. ‘There’s work to do.’
I pinched the bridge of my nose between finger and thumb, and sat up in my blankets.
‘What work?’
Anne put my breakfast down on the low table beside the bed, and I grunted my thanks. I wanted a piss before I did anything else, but I wasn’t doing that in front of her if I could help it. We weren’t in the army any more.
‘What do you think?’ she growled. ‘There’s another warrant come from the house of law for you, Tomas. More arrests, more deaths. It’s what we do now, apparently.’
With that she turned and stalked out of the room, and closed the door behind her.
Anne wasn’t easy with what we were doing here, I knew. She had made that plain enough, and I understood it, but all the same it saddened me to see that look on her face. Like she felt she didn’t know me any more. Was I so very changed from how I had been in the war, when we had become firm friends?
I thought on what I had seen the evening before. I had watched a man be blown apart on the whim of a mad princess, and I had taken it in my stride as simply part of my job. Perhaps I had changed some, at that.
I got up and had a piss and a wash, then sat down to my breakfast.
I found I could take no joy in it.
Eventually I got dressed and went downstairs to find Rosie waiting for me in my office. She was sitting at the table with a mug of small beer at her elbow, going through a pile of papers.
‘What’s the lay of things?’ I asked her. ‘Anne said there’s work.’
‘Aye, there is,’ Rosie said. ‘This came for you.’
She passed me a document, and I recognised Vogel’s spidery signature at the bottom before I even looked at the rest of it. Rosie had already opened the sealed letter, of course, but I found that I was
