She’ll try to seduce you, Iagin had said. She always does.
I wondered what exactly had happened when Sabine came calling on the Grand Duchess of Varnburg, and decided that I really didn’t need to know.
After a moment the duchess reached out and took a sip from the tall glass of dark wine on the table in front of her.
Wine like blood, I thought. Mother Ruin.
‘You wish to take my son away from me,’ she said, her voice somehow becoming even colder. ‘I will not permit it. However, I am not a fool, Sir Tomas. I understand that if I eject you from the Sea Keep and send you home with your tail between your legs, soldiers will come from Dannsburg. If I have you murdered and your body dumped in the harbour, soldiers will come from Dannsburg. If you simply suffer some misfortune on the road home through no action of mine, soldiers will still come from Dannsburg. That is the reality of how the provinces are ruled from the capital. Very well, if it must be so then it shall. Marcus will go to court, but you will not take my son away from me. I am coming with you.’
I hadn’t been expecting that.
‘It’s a long way,’ I said.
‘I have carriages and coachmen,’ she responded.
‘The roads can be dangerous.’
‘I have guardsmen, as I may have mentioned. We will have an armed escort, as befits my son’s new status. A large one.’
I looked at the Dowager Duchess of Varnburg, and for the first time in a long while I felt like I might have met my match. She had a great deal in common with Ailsa, it suddenly occurred to me, although her dark hair was streaked with grey in a way that Ailsa would never have allowed and there was no paint or powder on her face, so far as I could tell. All the same, there was a singleness of purpose and an iron will about her that very strongly put me in mind of my lioness. This one was protecting her cub and no mistake, and I could see she was prepared to go to war to do it if she had to.
‘Aye,’ I said at last. ‘That’s fair.’
‘It was not a request, Sir Tomas,’ she said. ‘It was a statement of fact. I am coming with you.’
Well, that was something to look forward to.
Chapter 31
I was sad to leave Varnburg behind, and wished I could have spent more time there. I will never forget my first sight of the sea. That aside, the journey back to Dannsburg was a trial. The Dowager Duchess had brought fifty men of the Sea Guard with her, far more than I was comfortable with, but there was little enough that I could do about it. As Beast had said, the Queen’s Warrant had no magic to it and it worked only as long as everyone agreed that it did, and then in truth only when it was backed up by the power of the City Guard or the army.
Out here on these country roads, where there were no guardsmen and no witnesses, it worked purely on loyalty and fear of consequences. If the Dowager Duchess had ordered me murdered I would have died on that road, Billy or no Billy, and all the wrath of Lord Vogel and the army of Dannsburg wouldn’t have brought me back to life again after the fact. But as a Queen’s Man there would have been consequences to my death, brutal and bloody ones, and the duchess obviously understood that. Lord Vogel’s reach and power was well understood by the aristocracy, and no one had the appetite to test him. That was wise of them, and it certainly served my own primary interest of surviving the journey home. Even so, I don’t think either Beast or Bloody Anne slept more than three hours a night each for all the four weeks it took us to return to Dannsburg in the worsening weather. They took turns in standing guard over me every night, and I owed them both a great debt of gratitude for that.
It was a lesson to me, it has to be said, in just how much fear the Queen’s Men inspired that no one even attempted to kill me, for all that I knew they must want to.
Anne was dozing on the bench of our carriage beside me that afternoon as our coachman led us ponderously behind the ridiculously ornate conveyance of the Grand Duke, drawn by eight beautiful grey horses and flanked by mounted Sea Guard with tall spears held upright at their stirrups. Rain was falling outside again, threatening to turn into sleet at any moment and churn the road into mush beneath our wheels. The young Grand Duke and his mother stayed within their own coach, and I offered up a silent prayer of thanks to Our Lady for that. Billy had worked hard in the evenings to build a friendship with Marcus, as I had intended him to do, and he frequently rode in the Grand Duke’s carriage with the lad and his obviously disapproving mother. That she allowed it at all proved that Billy’s company was helping her son through his grief, and that was good.
‘We’re coming back to that town,’ Rosie said from the bench across from me, jolting me from my reverie. ‘Jordan’s Field, where Anne had her fight with that arsehole and his jokes about dead whores.’
We were, I realised. I was slightly surprised that she had remembered the name of the place, but of course she had. It seemed to me that Rosie never forgot anything. I nodded to her in understanding.
‘We’ve fifty armed men with us now,’ I said. ‘I don’t think we’ll have any trouble this time.’
‘Aye, I know,’ she said, and she looked up at me with a hard expression in her eyes. ‘I want to burn the place to the fucking ground.’
She had a passion about her
