‘That’s a bloody euphemism and a half,’ the red-faced man said. ‘Events have taken a fucking face-first dive into the shithouse and you know it, Lan Letskov.’
‘Councillor Lan Drashkov, I must caution you against your language!’ Lan Letskov scolded him. ‘This is a most formal place of government business, and twice now you have profaned it with your coarseness.’
‘Fuck off,’ Lan Drashkov said, to a gale of laughter from his fellow councillors and the public gallery alike.
He was one of Iagin’s, apparently, and that didn’t surprise me one little bit.
‘What is to be done, my fellow councillors?’ Councillor Markova said, standing and addressing the room with a stern gravitas that put both men to shame. ‘The country has no monarch, and now we have no regent either. I propose that perhaps a woman seated on the regent’s throne would be more in keeping with our national values, and—’
‘Oh, of course you fucking do!’ Lan Drashkov shouted. ‘Any chance to advance yourself, you’ll take, won’t you? What absolute horseshit! We need a man’s firm hand on the tiller. I myself—’
Shouting broke out between the other councillors as they all hurried to propose themselves for the most powerful seat of office in the country. Or what they thought was, anyway. The Lord Chief Judiciar, otherwise known as the Provost Marshal of the Queen’s Men, effectively outranked everyone but the monarch themself, whether they knew it or not.
I suspected that a worrying majority of them did not. This was just chaos, fools vying for a power they could never truly have.
A country at war needs strong and stable leadership above all else, and if we didn’t have that then by Our Lady’s name we had to make it look like we did. I remembered thinking that, not so very long ago. A united and loyal governing council would go a long way to achieving that.
It seemed I had never been so wrong.
Most of those arguing in the council meeting were ours, of course. Arguing among themselves, strange as that may seem. They were sowing dissent and disorder to a tune of Vogel’s calling, I realised. It seemed that was what the Queen’s Men did now, and I wasn’t easy with it.
In the interim, so I was told, there was legal precedent for how to proceed. Why didn’t that fucking surprise me?
I left the council hall building shortly afterwards, when the council went into recess for what would no doubt be a very argumentative lunch. I had had enough of them by then, so I returned to the house of law to find Ailsa and see the lay of things.
‘The statutes of law are very clear on the matter,’ she explained to me in the mess that afternoon, when I had finished telling her about the council meeting I had witnessed. ‘In the event of the rightful monarch being underage and there being no surviving eligible regent of royal descent, the power of authority automatically passes in the interim to the office of the Lord Chief Judiciar as the next most senior official in the land until the governing council pass a two-thirds majority vote on which of their number should assume the role. It’s not complicated really.’
No, I thought, it really isn’t, is it ? Except getting that mob to achieve a two-thirds majority vote on what to have for dinner would have been virtually impossible, never mind on which of their number to seat upon the regent’s throne.
‘What about the Dowager Grand Duchess?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t she count?’
‘No,’ Ailsa said. ‘She’s of foreign birth, and therefore completely ineligible. The law really is very clear indeed on this, Tomas.’
‘Aye,’ I had to say, for want of anything better. In the house of law there was always someone listening, whether you could see them or not. ‘Tell me, when was that law passed?’
‘Oh, perhaps three years ago,’ she said. ‘I don’t really know, offhand.’
Three years ago. Yes, I could believe that. I was starting to form a suspicion in my mind, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one little bit. Someone had thought this through in exacting detail, including how to keep the duchess out of the picture. Of course they fucking had.
‘Oh, don’t look so glum, Tomas,’ Ailsa said. ‘Normality will resume soon enough, I’m sure.’
‘I’m sure it will,’ I said, although I was no longer sure I knew what normality even looked like any more.
Nothing like it used to, I was sure. There had been another riot that morning, so Rosie had told me, another magician lynched. The Guard of the Magi were mobilised in force now, Konrad had reported in his daily dispatches to the Queen’s Men, forming patrols of their own who exchanged hard eyes with the City Guard wherever their paths crossed. There had been no violent clashes between them yet, but all agreed that they couldn’t be far away. Curfew was being very seriously discussed in that afternoon’s sitting of the governing council, and from what I had heard its implementation was almost a foregone conclusion. Martial law was coming to Dannsburg and it was coming fast.
Vogel had made his move, and it had worked. I only hoped he could do what needed to be done to halt the Skanian threat before it came to the exchange of cannon between us, but at what cost to liberty?
*
I attended court the next morning, on Rosie’s advice, and I found that Ailsa and Iagin and Konrad were there ahead of me. We congregated together, in an oasis of space in the busy throne room.
The throne room was full almost to capacity, as was only to be expected given the recent tragic news. No one wore mourning clothes for the Prince Regent, I noticed, but then of course he was officially a suicide and that wasn’t a thing to be mourned. Suicides weren’t something to grieve over, in Our Lady’s eyes, as
