Perhaps I did care, in my way. Perhaps I was just broken from what my da had done to me, and to Jochan, and from what the war had done to us both. Perhaps I was hiding my wounds behind a wall of callousness, I really couldn’t have said. That was a philosophical question, I supposed, and in those days I had a vanishingly small interest in philosophy.
I poured myself another brandy and tried not to think about it.
*
The bomb went off outside the Bountiful Harvest shortly after dawn.
I was barely out of bed, still standing shaving at the nightstand in my smallclothes when the flashstone’s percussive blast blew out the ground floor front windows of the inn. I got into my clothes as quickly as I ever had for any army drill I could remember, and reached the top of the stairs with Remorse and Mercy buckled over my untucked shirt just in time to meet Bloody Anne coming the other way down the corridor.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, before she could ask.
She was already in full leather and mail, and that put me to shame. The woman was a born soldier.
‘What is it, Da?’ Billy asked, sticking his head out of his door as Anne thundered past.
‘Fucking terrorists,’ Anne growled as she shouldered past me and charged down the stairs.
‘Nothing, lad,’ I said at the same time. ‘Go back in your room and keep your head down.’
I shot a look over my shoulder in time to see Rosie standing in her shift in their bedroom doorway, a loaded crossbow in her hands.
‘I’ll cover the street from our window,’ she said.
I nodded my thanks and followed Anne at a run.
The common room of the inn was full of smoke, the floor littered with broken glass from the shattered windows that crunched beneath my boots as I ran across it towards the charred hole where the door had been. No one was injured that I could see, but the day was young and the place had been empty at that hour anyway. This attack hadn’t been intended to hurt people so much as to send a message. Anne kicked the blackened wreckage of the front door aside and stormed out into the street with her blades in her hands, and I followed with Remorse drawn.
There was no one in sight.
No one at all. Curfew didn’t lift for the best part of an hour yet, and the streets were deserted. Whoever had lit the fuse of that flashstone was long gone.
‘Fuck,’ Anne growled, and spat on the cobbles to show what she thought of that.
I lowered Remorse and ran my free hand over my face, pinching the last of the sleep from my weary eyes.
‘A warning,’ I said. ‘The house of magicians knows who we are, and now they know where we’re staying too.’
I looked up, and saw Rosie leaning out of her and Anne’s open bedroom window with the crossbow held tight to her shoulder.
‘Stand down,’ I called up to her, and Anne nodded to tell her all was well.
We met the innkeeper on our way back inside. He was only half dressed, white-faced and quivering, his hands visibly shaking as he surveyed the damage to his common room.
‘What happened, Sir Tomas?’ he asked me.
‘A terror attack,’ I said, and it spoke of the situation in Dannsburg in those days that he just nodded, accepting the facts of it without further question. ‘Nobody hurt, no real harm done. I’ll pay for the damage. Take it out of my account.’
It had happened because of me, so that seemed only fair to my mind. I could always claim it back from the house of law, after all. Vogel paid extremely well, and he had even deeper pockets when it came to operational expenses.
‘My . . . my thanks, Sir Tomas,’ the man said.
He swallowed and scurried behind the bar to pour himself a no doubt much-needed brandy, which he swallowed in a single gulp. After a moment to recover himself he poured again for Anne and me. We took them and drank with thanks, for all that it was barely past dawn.
All was well.
Was it fuck. The house of magicians knew I was a Queen’s Man, of course they did, but now it seemed they had found out where I lived, and more than that, they had finally found the balls to act on that information and send me a message.
We can hurt you, if we want to, that message had said.
Well, fuck you very much.
I could hurt them too.
And I intended to.
*
By noon I was in the house of law, and I was having an argument with the master of munitions. The house of law had a truly terrifying stockpile of explosives, and it wasn’t like I wanted to requisition the lot, after all. Just enough.
Just enough to make my fucking point.
Fat Luka had already told me where the archmagus Nikolai Reiter lived. Of course he knew, because he was Luka. Knowing things like that was what Luka was for.
These fuckers had let off a bomb outside the inn where I slept. Where my son slept.
I wasn’t having that.
I was not having that one little fucking bit, as the house of law’s master of munitions was gradually beginning to grasp. He was a heavyset man in the late autumn of his life, and at some point his left arm had been taken off at the elbow. I wondered if he had lost it in battle, in Aunt Enaid’s war, perhaps, or had simply blown it off in an accident with one of his own creations. The more he defied me, the less I cared what life had done to him.
‘You need Lord Vogel’s signature,’ he said for the sixth time. ‘I’m not giving you military explosives just because someone spoiled your bloody breakfast.’
I lost my patience at that. I leaned over the desk in front of him, glaring at him in the midday sunlight
