‘Aye,’ I said, and hid my hands beneath the table as quickly as I could without making it too obvious. ‘Aye, I’m well, Luka.’
Breathe, I thought. Just breathe.
I wasn’t well, I knew that. I had been planning to kill four children that night, even if I hadn’t known it at the time. I wasn’t well at all. I don’t think I would ever have been able to forgive myself if I had gone through with my original mad plan of revenge against the house of magicians.
I was too deep in the Queen’s Men for my own health, I realised, but right then I couldn’t see my way clear of it.
‘Aye, that’s good,’ Luka said. ‘If you say so.’
He didn’t believe me, I could see that plain enough in his fleshy face, and he was fucking right not to.
I wasn’t all right, and the battle shock was only part of it. Everything was falling apart, I could see that plain as day.
Ailsa’s words came back to me again: Ill-informed and ignorant people are easier to suppress and control.
She had told me that when she forced the governorship of Ellinburg on me, and now the thought sent a shiver down my spine. I knew what Lord Vogel was doing. I remembered Sabine inciting the violence at the lynching I had witnessed, and I had no doubt at all that it had been on his orders. Vogel had instigated war against the house of magicians and the university and all the wealth of knowledge and learning that they stood for.
I could see what he was doing, and I didn’t like it one little fucking bit.
Chapter 39
The next afternoon saw me at Sasura’s house. Queensday afternoon was bright and sunny, if cold, and my carriage drew up at the gates of his estate with the light of the low winter sun stabbing through the windows and into my eyes. The guards on the gates exchanged hard looks with my footmen, and I couldn’t help thinking how much Dannsburg had changed since the previous year. The place had always been full of eyes and ears, suspicions and informers, but now it seemed everyone looked at everyone else with an open hostility and that was new.
The tensions between the house of law and house of magicians had the population at boiling point. Students of the university had been rioting in the streets just that morning, in solidarity with their colleagues at the house of magicians. The Guard had been sent in, I knew that much, but not what the outcome had been.
‘I’m Sir Tomas,’ I said to the man who came to the window of my carriage with his hand on the hilt of his sword. ‘I’m expected.’
He consulted a paper for a moment, then nodded.
‘That you are, sir,’ he allowed, and motioned to his men to open the gates.
Ailsa’s parents were simply retired merchants, so far as society was concerned anyway, and even their security was like this. None of their wealthy neighbours thought anything of it, of course, because theirs was even stricter. That was what Dannsburg had come to, in those days.
We were ushered through the gates into the grassy expanse at the front of the grand old house, and I left Oliver and Emil with the coachman and allowed myself to be escorted alone to the front door. The house was crawling with ivy and still had windows in the old style, the little leaded diamonds of glass in the casements. Here, perhaps alone in all of Dannsburg, I felt I was truly safe. A footman admitted me at the door and showed me down the hall to Sasura’s study.
The footman knocked, and opened the door at a muffled response from within.
‘Your guest, sir,’ he said.
I stepped past him into the comfortable room with its magnificent Alarian carpet, and I bowed low to my father-by-law as was only respectful. Sasura took two steps forward and swept me into an embrace as the footman closed the door behind me.
‘Tomas, it is good to see you,’ he said.
‘And you, Sasura,’ I replied, and I meant it.
Whatever differences there might be between Ailsa and me, her father was a man I had the greatest of respect for. He was Alarian, obviously, with some seventy or more years to him. His longish white hair was pulled back from his brow in a severe topknot, the way I remembered it, and his magnificent white beard and great curling moustache were still reassuringly the same. As ever he was dressed in the Dannsburg style, in a fine doublet and coat.
‘Brandy!’ he announced with a broad grin. ‘I know you are a man who enjoys brandy in the afternoon, a man after my own heart.’
‘My thanks,’ I said, and he opened the finely carved cupboard that contained a great number of glasses and bottles.
Brandy was my sasura’s passion, one he had allowed himself to indulge greatly since his retirement. He poured for us both, and took one of the comfortable chairs away from his imposing desk while waving me into another.
‘So,’ he said after he had taken a generous sip of his drink. ‘What can I do for you, my beloved son-by-law? I would be overjoyed to think this is purely a social call, but I feel I know you well enough by now that somehow I doubt that.’
‘Aye, well,’ I said, and I looked at him over my glass. ‘Not entirely, I have to allow. Tell me, Sasura, what do you know of the house of magicians and their power in Dannsburg?’
He drank again, and took his time before he answered.
‘I know they are greatly out of favour with the house of law. There is talk, albeit unsubstantiated to the best of my knowledge, that they somehow had something to do with the death of our beloved queen. That they are in league with the Skanian menace, no less. There have been riots in the streets, and there
