I looked at her for a long moment, then I shook my head.
‘No,’ I said at last. ‘No, I can’t have that. I know you want to, Rosie, and I understand why, but we can’t do that.’
‘You’ve got the Queen’s Warrant,’ she spat at me. ‘You can do fucking anything.’
‘Aye, I can,’ I had to agree, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I should. Would Heinrich have done that?’
‘Don’t you use his name against me,’ Rosie said, but I could see the doubt in her eyes.
‘He wouldn’t have, Rosie, and you know he wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘The power of the Queen’s Warrant is to be used sparingly, and only when it’s needed. All the Queen’s Men know that. Would burning a market town truly change the minds of country folk on a matter most of them don’t even understand? Of course it fucking wouldn’t, and Heinrich would have seen that as well as I do. We’d end up blade to blade with our own countrymen, and for what?’
‘For my life,’ Rosie said quietly. ‘For my and Anne’s right to live our fucking lives.’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I know, Rosie. I know, but it’s not something that’s in my power to change. We’ll be back in Dannsburg soon enough.’
‘So that’s it, is it? We’re allowed to exist in the cities, but woe fucking betide us if we venture outside them?’
‘That’s not . . .’ I started, but perhaps it was. Perhaps that was what the world was like for Rosie and Anne, Cutter and my brother and all those like them. I had to admit that I really didn’t know, and for the best of me I couldn’t see my way to ever understanding something I was so far away from. ‘I don’t know, Rosie. Our Lady doesn’t much care who anyone lies with, so long as both are willing, but they hold to other gods out in the countryside. The Harvest Maiden, mostly.’
‘The Harvest Maiden is a goddess of fertility and love,’ Rosie said. ‘Doesn’t say nowhere in the scriptures love between who and who.’
I could only shrug. Anne’s village had held to her Stone Father, who I didn’t know, and apparently He had very much cared about such things. To my mind that only meant He had too much time on His hands and couldn’t be much of a god worth knowing, but what would I know? I was an unwilling army priest of the fucking death goddess, for Our Lady’s sake, and pastoral ministry wasn’t really one of my skills.
‘You know she loves you,’ I said.
Anne’s eyes opened then, and she smiled at Rosie across the carriage in a way that said she had been awake for the last few minutes at least.
‘I do,’ she said.
*
Little enough else happened on our journey home, until the night Billy burned the inn down. Lady’s sake, I could have done without that.
We had only been a few days’ travel from Dannsburg at that point, so close I was already making plans for my return and how the fuck I was going to explain the Dowager Duchess to Lord Vogel. Billy and Marcus, the young Grand Duke of Varnburg, were firm friends by then. I could tell that Marcus, starved of the company of his peers throughout his sheltered aristocratic upbringing, looked up to Billy. Billy was five years his senior, and he had been a soldier after a fashion. He had fought in a war, anyway, and in the way of young lads he had told Marcus all about that in the tedium of the carriage rides and the dull evenings in roadside inns. He boasted of it, of course he did, and had made a performance of showing the lad the evil little knives he carried, and how to hold them the way Cutter had taught him. He had barely fifteen years to him, so far as anyone knew, and I remembered well enough what I had been like at that age. Billy was young for his age too, as I have written, and I could see he soaked up the young duke’s adoration.
Oh, aye, Marcus looked up to Billy and Billy loved every moment of it, and I could understand that. What I couldn’t understand was what the fuck had gone through Billy’s head the night he took it upon himself to show Marcus the cunning.
The two lads had been up in Marcus’ room in the inn, and perhaps Billy had had more beer than he was accustomed to. Most of us were drinking in the common room and the Dowager Duchess had retired to her bed complaining of one of her frequent headaches that were a transparent excuse not to mix with the rest of us. That was well and good, as I hardly craved her company any more than she did mine.
All was well until the screaming started, and the smell of smoke began to fill the common room. By the time everyone was up off their arses and moving, it was too late. The top floor of the inn was ablaze, the fire well into the thatch and nothing to be done about it by then but run. The lads came pounding down the stairs safe and well, if sooty, thank Our Lady, and the duchess and her maids were hot on their heels as the burning rafters began to fall in above their heads.
We spent an uncomfortable night
