‘Highness,’ the boy said, repeating words obviously much rehearsed under his mother’s critical eye. ‘You are every bit as beautiful as I had been told.’
‘It hurts,’ she said, quietly but unfortunately still loud enough to be heard by the whole room. ‘Beauty is pain, Your Grace, and pain is beauty.’
Little Marcus looked up at his mother in obvious confusion.
They were off-script already, and the poor lad clearly had no idea what to say in response to that.
‘Such is the curse of womanhood,’ Ailsa said smoothly. ‘One becomes accustomed to it, Highness, in time. All ladies do.’
‘Yes, precisely,’ the duchess said, but I could see her looking murder at Ailsa for all of that.
The Prince Regent cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable with this women’s talk that he couldn’t possibly understand.
‘Come, young Marcus,’ he said, ‘walk with me. If you wish to court my daughter we should get to know each other, what? Tell me, do you enjoy country pursuits? When I was your age I had a magnificent falcon which . . .’
They passed out of my hearing. I couldn’t imagine the poor lad wished anything less than to court the Princess Crown Royal, but at his mother’s urging he allowed himself to be swept off by the Prince Regent and two of the tutors.
‘The tutors are ours,’ Vogel murmured at my side. ‘He won’t say anything too stupid.’
‘Such as, “Don’t fucking do it, you idiot child”,’ Iagin whispered, and I almost snorted brandy out of my nose. I didn’t think Vogel had heard him.
I fucking hoped he hadn’t, anyway.
There was definitely something going on, even then.
There are factions, Tomas.
I put that from my mind and returned my attention to Ailsa. She was talking to the duchess, obviously treating her as a social equal. That was interesting in itself, that the inexplicably knighted daughter of an immigrant Alarian merchant of no noble heritage whatsoever should be so accepted by a grand duchess, but again this spoke of how the hierarchy worked in Dannsburg. There was the aristocracy, yes, with all its traditions of peerage and titles and orders of succession.
And then there were the Queen’s Men.
It’s a thing that has to be understood, a thing that I have written of before, that we don’t officially exist. The Queen’s Men are a fiction, a fairy tale to frighten little children with. Do what your father says or the Queen’s Men will take you away.
Except we’re not. We are very real indeed, and everyone who matters in Dannsburg knows that. The Dowager Duchess of Varnburg knew that very well indeed, I could tell.
Soldiers will come from Dannsburg.
I could see then that she knew exactly who Ailsa was, and what game she was playing. She knew the rules, I think, did the duchess, and she knew how the game was played.
‘Talk to her,’ Vogel murmured in my ear. ‘Nothing threatening. Just remind her that you are here too.’
‘Aye, sir,’ I had to reply, and I made my way through the crowd towards them with a fresh brandy in my hand and Billy clinging to my side.
Ailsa saw me coming and welcomed me with a smile that I wish I could have believed.
‘Your Grace, may I present my husband, Sir Tomas, and our son,’ she said, as she reached out and took Billy’s hand in hers.
The Dowager Duchess looked at me and Billy like one might look at a dog that had just shat on her finest Alarian carpet.
‘We’ve met,’ she said coldly.
I gave her a short bow, the bow one gave to a social equal. I was beginning to learn how to play this game, and may Our Lady forgive me for that. That would have been a staggering insult from anyone else of my social standing, a mere knight, but I knew I could get away with it, and truth be told, I revelled in that knowledge. She knew that I carried the warrant, and that changed everything. I had shown her that in the Sea Keep, and there was nothing she could do about it, however much it humiliated her.
The fact that I was a mere knight still made my head spin. I was the son of a bricklayer from the Stink in Ellinburg, for Our Lady’s sake. Knighthood was not something that would ordinarily have ever been remotely within my grasp, and yet now I was important enough to insult the Grand Duchess of Varnburg and get away with it?
Look at me, Ma. What do you think of this?
She would have boxed my ears and no mistake. Deliberately humiliating a grand lady? Oh, I knew very well what my ma would have thought of that and it wouldn’t have been anything good, but I had my reasons.
‘Lady Varnburg,’ I said. ‘I trust you and your men have settled well into the city?’
I haven’t forgotten your fifty guardsmen, that was what I was telling her. She knew too that it was in my power to summon enough of the army to exterminate her fifty guardsmen in a single night should I choose to do so. The Queen’s Men are not to be taken lightly, and it is our duty to remind the aristocracy of that every chance we get. The equilibrium is a delicate thing, after all, and we must always make sure the scales weigh on our side. All the same, that had been ill done of me and I knew it, but sometimes that was how things worked. That was how the nation managed its balance of power, and I had come to understand that.
‘Well enough, Sir Tomas,’ she said. ‘Dannsburg is much as I remember it, but it will be forever the city where my beloved husband died.’
‘Aye, my condolences for your loss once again,’ I said. ‘Although, all being well, it may also become the city in which your son becomes the Prince Consort of the Rose Throne.’
‘Mmmm,’ she said, and looked pointedly from me to Ailsa and back again. ‘And
