‘I’m Sir Tomas,’ I said to the gate guards. ‘Ailsa is expecting me.’
I was inside a moment later, and no questions were asked. I left my horse with a waiting groom and headed in through the door I had been taken through on the night the queen’s death was announced. There was a liveried attendant there quite plainly waiting for me, and she led me through the labyrinth of passages and stairs to the royal apartments.
Ailsa was waiting for me outside the Prince Regent’s drawing room.
‘What is it?’ I asked her.
‘He took his own life last night,’ she said.
‘You fucking what?’
She pushed the door open, and I saw what she meant. His Royal Highness Prince Wilhelm was hanging from a rope tied around the chains of one of the chandeliers, and there was an overturned table on the floor that he had apparently jumped off. His face was purple, and it was plain to see that he had soiled his white cavalry britches in his death throes. There was no dignity there, no heroic taking of poison or falling on his sword like some hero from one of the great tragedies at the theatre. The Prince Regent had jumped off a table and shat himself, and that would forever be his legacy.
I could almost feel the ground shifting under my feet. It was too fucking early in the morning to deal with this, but it seemed that I would have to.
‘Iagin is already spreading the word,’ Ailsa said. ‘A terrible tragedy and a great loss, no doubt brought about by malign magics in the face of which our great nation must come together in unity.’
Malign magics.
He couldn’t have done.
Oh gods.
I thought then of the witch card Sabine had given me, the Ten of Swords, and what Billy had said it meant.
The Ten of Swords means back-stabbing and treachery. It means defeat and betrayal, ruin and endings and loss.
Oh gods.
Oh, by Our Lady. He just couldn’t have done.
But he had. He very clearly had, overturned table or not. There was no other plausible explanation for it. Treachery indeed.
Lord Vogel had disappeared the fucking Prince Regent.
I wondered whose hands had tied the noose and forced his head into it, and I thought of Konrad.
Oh, fucking, fucking, fuck!
Chapter 35
Once, when I had about seven or eight years to me, my da had taken me and Jochan to see a travelling menagerie that had set up camp near the racetrack outside Ellinburg. That had been where I had seen the lioness that Ailsa so reminded me of. I remembered something else I had seen there too. On one of the wagons, there had been a cage full of wild, hairy, almost-men. Apes, I think the menagerie’s barkers had called them, but unlike the lions, I had never seen one depicted in heraldry and I hadn’t really been sure what they were. I remembered how the barkers had baited them, poking them with long goads through the bars of their cage until they screamed and beat their chests and hurled their own shit at each other and the laughing crowd gathered beyond the bars.
I had never seen a public meeting of the governing council before, but it very much put me in mind of those creatures in the menagerie.
It was a tiresome affair even in these extraordinary times, although there were things of interest to note. First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov, presiding head of the council, seemed to me like a man under siege. For all that he was supposedly the foremost voice, Vogel had replaced so many of his underlings with sycophants loyal only to the house of law that he was outvoted and shouted down at every turn.
‘But I must assume the role of regent at once,’ he said. ‘Someone has to run the country since our Prince Wilhelm’s unfortunate suicide, after all, and although he is the rightful next in line of succession, the Grand Duke is a child of ten years. The Lady Ailsa will support me, and she is not without influence in the house of law.’
You know very well that he thinks he’s in love with you.
‘No, she won’t!’ someone hooted. ‘She’s Vogel’s creature to the core. You’re on your own, Lan Letskov.’
Jeers followed, and I have to admit I felt sorry for the man. I knew how it felt, after all, to think Ailsa loved you.
Fool, fool.
‘Why should it be you, First Councillor Lan Letskov?’ a dark-haired woman demanded. ‘Heading a council and leading a nation are very different things.’
She was right about that, I had to allow, but I also knew she was on our payroll. The governing council was least two-thirds in the pay of the house of law by then, and First Councillor Aleksander Lan Letskov was struggling.
He was struggling very badly indeed, if that council meeting I witnessed was anything to go by. They weren’t literally flinging their shit at him but they might as well have been, by that point.
‘I have been presiding head of this council for nine years,’ Lan Letskov protested. ‘If I know anything—’
‘If you knew anything, the fucking queen would still be alive, and her fool of a husband beside her,’ a florid-faced man cut in. ‘You have presided over a disaster, Lan Letskov.’
‘Events have taken a downward turn, I agree,’ he began, before he was shouted down in a chorus of boos and derision.
I looked sideways along the public gallery of the grand council hall where I sat as an anonymous civilian. There were barely a score of citizens there, among benches built to seat a hundred or more, but none of them looked happy with what they were seeing.
‘A downward turn? Spare me, Lan Letskov, I swear my stays have split from laughter,’ the dark-haired woman said.
She wasn’t laughing. Councillor Markova, I remembered, that was her name. She was one of Vogel’s personal agents, a strongly
