That made me fucking sit up straight. Listening to Vogel’s words it was plain that the Prince Regent’s life was under threat, and as I thought back to the confession he had said to me in the spring it became clear why.
He knew too much.
He knew just how unwell the Princess Crown Royal was, and worse than that, he didn’t seem to want to help us hide it. Vogel was telling him just how thin the ice under his feet was. Suddenly I understood all too well.
Removing the Grand Duke and bringing his son to the capital hadn’t been anything to do with the succession or his supposed difficultness, I realised, but about the regency itself. If anything should happen to the Prince Regent then the Grand Duke, the queen’s own cousin, would have been the obvious replacement, and Vogel didn’t want that to happen. Not one little bit he didn’t, so the duke tragically passed away and his young son assumed his title, lands and fortune but, being even younger than the princess, could never become regent.
The prince’s days were numbered, that was what Lord Vogel had been telling me even then. Only now was I hearing him, and that shamed me. With hindsight he had been telling me loud and fucking clear at the time. I wondered if I would ever fully adjust to this life, to become a Queen’s Man in thought and instinct as well as simply murderous deed. I wondered if I was truly capable of it.
I couldn’t honestly have said which I wanted the answer to be.
‘Your words skirt treachery, Lord Vogel,’ the prince said.
‘My words,’ Vogel said, ‘are intended to batter some sense into your head. Someone needs to rule the country. Someone needs to show leadership. If you are not capable of being that person, then I will find someone else. Is that absolutely clear, Highness?’
‘No,’ the prince said, and he drew himself up to his full height. His magnificent waxed moustache quivered as his upper lip shook with anger. ‘Enough, Vogel! Enough! No one is irreplaceable, as you just said. I am the regent of the Rose Throne, and that makes me the commanding officer in chief of the army. I will raze the house of law to the ground if you cross me one more time!’
He was spitting fury now, his face crimson with a rage I would never have believed him capable of.
Lord Vogel looked at the Prince Regent for a long time, and I could almost feel the temperature in the room dropping. No one spoke to the Provost Marshal like that.
No one.
Not princes, not warlords.
Not kings.
Fucking no one.
‘As you say, Highness,’ Vogel said, his voice as soft as silk.
I could feel it in my bones, and from the look on her face I could see that Ailsa felt it too.
This was not going to end well.
*
It didn’t.
It didn’t end well at all. Bloody Anne woke me early the next morning, and this time she had neither small beer nor black bread in her hands when she pushed her way into my bedroom.
‘Get up,’ she said, with no preamble whatsoever. ‘Rosie needs you in the office.’
My office was still the private dining room of the Bountiful Harvest, of course. By then I could have commandeered office space in the house of law itself the same as Iagin and Konrad did, but I didn’t want to. Ailsa didn’t keep an office there either, I had noticed, preferring to run her operation from her own home. From what I had seen of the Queen’s Men, there was a lot to be said for keeping one’s own business separate from the central hub as much as possible. We all ran our own crews, after all, and that autonomy was part of our strength.
‘What is it?’ I asked her as I struggled out of bed and into my clothes.
I had to stand and take a piss into the pot before I was any use to anyone, but despite what I had thought before, there was no real embarrassment to that in what sounded like an actual emergency. We might not be in the army any more but we were both soldiers, when all was said and done, and soldiers think little of such things. I could hear the continuing sound of the riots outside the windows of the inn, supporters of the house of magicians and the house of law still going at each other in the dawn hours.
‘I think it’s something to do with the Prince Regent,’ Anne said as I laced my britches and turned to face her.
‘What about him?’ I asked.
Anne’s scar twisted as she sucked her teeth before she responded.
‘Go talk to Rosie,’ she said. ‘I don’t rightly know, and I don’t want to. This is Queen’s Men business, and I’m not that.’
No, she wasn’t. Bloody Anne was my chief enforcer, but I would never make her a Queen’s Man. I loved her as a brother, in my way, and I would never do that to her.
I wouldn’t do that to anyone I cared about, for all that Ailsa had done it to me.
I finished getting dressed and buckled the Weeping Women around my waist over my coat then hurried downstairs to the private dining room. Rosie was waiting for me in her accustomed seat at my left hand at the head of the table, a mountain of papers in front of her.
‘What is it?’ I asked her.
‘Get to the palace,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Right now. Vogel’s orders.’
I was on a hastily saddled horse ten minutes later, and broke into a canter down the wide mall that led up to the palace gates as people scattered in our wake. Fuck not using the main gate; Ailsa’s side entrance would have added a quarter of an hour to my journey and this quite plainly wouldn’t wait. There was a building on fire not a quarter of a mile away,
