‘The Princess Crown Royal is an independent young woman,’ Ailsa said. ‘Headstrong, as girls that age often are. We can but pray to the gods that your son retains her favour.’
Pray to the Queen’s Men that you retain our favour, she was saying. That message was plain enough.
The Queen’s Men all but ruled Dannsburg in those days, and from the look on the Dowager Duchess’ face I could see that she knew it too. She nodded slowly, and raised her untouched glass of wine to Ailsa.
‘I do so pray,’ she was forced to say.
Chapter 34
The next morning saw me in the Prince Regent’s private chambers with Ailsa and Lord Vogel. The atmosphere in the formal drawing room was strained, to speak lightly of it.
‘I don’t like it, Vogel,’ the prince said, stalking back and forth in front of the fireplace while the four guards stationed against the walls looked on impassively.
I still wasn’t sure that he had grasped that they weren’t there for his protection, but ours. Not protection from him, as such, as he was about as threatening as a drunken weasel, but from who he might see and what he might say to them. It had been them who had prevented the elder Grand Duke of Varnburg from visiting him during his period of official house arrest, after all. He was still under tacit house arrest even now, I supposed, although I doubted he was possessed of enough imagination to grasp that either.
‘What is it that you don’t like, Highness?’ Vogel asked.
I could sense the thin veneer of respect covering the razorblades of his personality, and wondered just how thin it had grown.
‘He’s nearly three years her junior, and only a grand duke of our own country. Couldn’t we at least have managed a crown prince, secured a foreign alliance somewhere?’
‘No,’ Vogel said coldly. ‘We couldn’t. Your daughter is . . . not easily sold.’
‘Sold?’ the Prince Regent shouted, and he rounded on Vogel with a look of fury on his face. ‘No one is selling my daughter!’
‘Oh, don’t be so naïve,’ Vogel said. ‘What exactly do you think a political marriage is? Your daughter either marries upwards, to a crown prince destined to be a king who will take her as his queen in some foreign land where you will probably never see her again and quite possibly end up at war with her in a few years’ time, or she marries down to a duke who will become her prince consort when she assumes her mother’s throne in her own right. The line of waiting foreign crown princes is vanishingly short to the point of non-existence. We only have Varnburg because he is barely ten years old and his mother is desperate to hold onto her seat, but his duchy is exceptionally wealthy. Be thankful, Highness, that we have this. It will play well to the populace, at least, and do the royal treasury a world of good that it sorely needs.’
‘Young love,’ I said, Billy and Mina in my mind as I thought aloud. ‘It always plays well. Everyone likes the ideal of it. A princess and a grand duke, betrothed as children, rising to rule the nation together. It’s like something from the stories, from the theatre. The people will accept it. The people will love it, in truth.’
‘Absolutely,’ Vogel said.
‘Highness,’ Ailsa said, and she smiled in that way she had that always seemed to get through to him. ‘You were the son of the Grand Duke of Drathburg, as I recall. The second son. When your father and elder brother both fell at Krathzgrad . . . yes, well. You became the heir. You inherited everything.’
‘I inherited my father’s seat and fortune, and my brother’s betrothed. Yes, I am well aware of that, thank you, Lady Ailsa.’
Krathzgrad had been where my aunt had fought in her war, if I remembered it right. I had heard tales of it at her knee as a child, many of them no doubt grown very tall indeed in the telling. Of course, our noble Prince Regent would have been too young to fight then, but I hadn’t known that both his father and his elder brother had gone to the grey lands in Aunt Enaid’s war. Perhaps sometimes the nobility really did lead from the front of the charge. Or they had in those days, anyway; I had seen little enough of it at Abingon, to be sure.
‘A political marriage,’ Ailsa went on. ‘You learned to love her, I have no doubt.’
‘Of course I did,’ the prince snapped. ‘Her Majesty my wife was the love of my life.’
I looked at the bleak expression in his eyes, and somehow I doubted that she had been anything of the sort. Still, that was none of my business, of course.
‘Well, there we are, then,’ Ailsa said.
The Prince Regent ignored her and turned a hard eye on Vogel.
‘No more bullshit,’ he said, and I was surprised by his bluntness. Perhaps he had finally grown a spine after all, I thought, and I wondered how wise that was. ‘That utter shit with Lan Drunov and the cannon. No more of that. Stop bloody indulging her, Vogel. She’s not well, you know she isn’t, and you encouraging her excesses is only making her worse. No more, I mean it.’
Vogel gave him a look.
‘Public displays of power are an important tool of statecraft,’ he said. ‘A statesman would understand that. I wonder where we might find one of those, in these troubled times? Ailsa, any suggestions?’
‘There is First Councillor Lan Letskov, sir,’ she said. ‘He is perhaps not as pliable as we might like, but all the same we have a degree of influence over him.’
You know very well he thinks he’s in love with you.
I swallowed, and tried not to think about that. Why the fuck the notion bothered me I had no idea, but it did all the same.
‘Quite,’ Vogel said, and the venom in
