‘Thought you’d want to see it, boss,’ Beast said quietly beside me, and all I could do was nod.
‘It’s incredible,’ Anne said quietly, and on instinct I reached out and took her hand.
She squeezed my fingers in her callused palm for a moment, and I knew we were feeling the same emotions. After how we had both grown up – in different places and different ways, perhaps, but with no happier an outcome – after all we had been through together in Messia and in Abingon, the sea was a revelation.
It was cleansing, somehow. Awe-inspiring. Wondrous.
It went on forever, stretching out to the distant curve of the horizon where the sky met the endless water in a haze of silver light. The waves rushed in, rolling curls of foam chasing each other one after another after another like it would never end, like the very edge of the world.
‘What’s out there, Papa?’ Billy asked me.
‘I have no idea,’ I said, and I smiled at him. ‘Sea monsters, perhaps. Strange lands, stranger gods. It could be anything, lad.’
‘Skania is out there, beyond the horizon,’ Rosie said.
I gave her a look. Aye, she was right, of course she was, but couldn’t she let me have this one moment of wonder with my son? No, no, of course she couldn’t. We were Queen’s Men, and wonder is a luxury not permitted to us. We deal in facts and suspicions, not wonder and joy. There is no place for joy in the Queen’s Men.
‘Aye,’ I said, and I swallowed the bitterness in my heart with the salt tang of the air. ‘We’ve work to do.’
Anne let go of my hand at once, and I felt the loss of her touch as keenly as a pang of guilt. That moment was over, just another thing the Queen’s Men had taken away from me. I turned to Beast.
‘I need to find the Grand Duke,’ I said. ‘His son, I mean. The heir. His boy.’
I was babbling, I realised, falling over my words in a fast-failing attempt to keep from weeping. My first sight of the sea had affected me in a way I hadn’t expected. To have that wonder taken away from me so soon had hurt, and I won’t lie about that. I could have stood there for hours just watching it, but life isn’t always what we want it to be and my cold devil knew that better than most. That devil hardened my heart now and I turned my back on the magnificent vista and looked up into the city itself, at the stout stone buildings and the distant spire of their Great Temple of All Gods.
‘Well, sir,’ Beast said, ‘I know I told you I knew the city, and I do, but I ain’t the sort to have mixed with dukes. I know where to get good food, where to find a bed without too many lice in the mattress, and which taverns don’t water their beer, but I’ve never found no duke’s son before.’
‘The Sea Keep,’ Rosie said at once, and pointed up across the wide esplanade where we were standing to the heights of a great square stone building that was flying the royal standard. ‘That’s where he’ll be, Tomas.’
The huge red and white banner snapped and cracked in the wind, so obvious I felt something of a fool for not having noticed it myself. The majesty of the sea had stolen my senses, I am ashamed to admit, and diverted my attention away from the real things that mattered in the real world. Joy has no place in the life of a Queen’s Man, I should have realised that by then. I stamped on my emotions with all the ruthlessness I could muster and gave Rosie a nod.
‘Aye,’ I said, ‘of course. Come on, then, let’s get this done.’
We made our way through streets that thronged with people of all colours and creeds, surrounded by conversations in a dozen languages that I didn’t know. I saw dusky Alarians, blond Skanians, and men and women darker of skin than Black Billy was. From Varnburg our country mostly exported wool and broadcloth, leather goods and wine and brandy, and we imported silk and salt and lamp oil, spices and hemp and tea, along with iron to meet the growing demands of our foundries. That much at least I had learned from the books in the library of the governor’s hall back in Ellinburg. There were merchants in the streets from perhaps as many as twenty countries I didn’t even know the names of, if not more.
I am not an educated man, and although my brief time in school had at least taught me how to read and write and figure simple accounts, I knew little of history and nothing at all of geography, and that shamed me now. I resolved then that when I had the time, if I ever had the time, I would remedy that. I thought of the great library in Dannsburg, and the university, and all the knowledge they must contain. I thought I might enrol Billy there as a student, when he was older. As the son of a wealthy knight he had no need of a trade, of course, and would live the life of a gentleman, but to my mind a gentleman should know certain things. I didn’t, and I wouldn’t have my son carry that same shame. No, I would see him educated one way or another. All the
