I ducked as the brandy glass flew past my ear to shatter against the wall behind me.
‘How could you?’ my aunt demanded. ‘How do you fucking dare show your face in Ellinburg again?’
My aunt’s single eye was weeping, I realised, and that was a thing I had never seen before in my life. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
I had made my aunt cry, and I didn’t think she was capable of it.
‘Auntie,’ I said, and found myself faltering. I knew I had to be very, very fucking careful how I put this. ‘I’ve been . . . not kicked out of the Queen’s Men, or I’d be dead and in an unmarked grave somewhere outside the walls of Dannsburg, but I’m certainly in disfavour at the moment. There are things going on . . . I can’t talk about a lot of it. I’m sorry and I truly mean that, but I have to ask you to believe me on the strength of our family ties.’
I was quoting Sasura, of course, but sadly family ties don’t work quite the same way in Ellinburg as they do in Alaria. That had been exactly the wrong thing to say, and I knew it the moment the words left my mouth.
‘You talk to me of family ties?’ Aunt Enaid asked softly, and for the first time since I was a small boy I feared her in that moment. ‘You devil-possessed monster, Tomas Piety, you dare to talk to me of “family ties” when I know fucking well you killed my own brother? Oh, yes, and don’t you dare look at me like that. I know. I’ve always known. I took you and your brother in because you were blood and he was an innocent, but I’ve always known that you murdered your da, you little shit!’
The dam broke inside me, the dam that had held back the pain for twenty-five years and more. I broke, and I broke hard. The floodwaters of repressed misery almost sent me to my knees.
‘And do you know why?’ I roared at her, on my feet and leaning over the desk to shout in her face and fuck the servants, gossip. This had been a long time coming, I think, looking back on it, and something inside me just shattered in that moment. ‘Do you fucking know why your evil cunt of a brother needed killing? Do you know what he did to me, and to Jochan? Because if you did, old woman, if you did and you kept your peace about it, I swear to Our Lady I will fucking kill you where you sit!’
I can’t.
I can’t recount my conversation with my aunt after that. I wrote it down once before, what Da did to me and to Jochan, and I’m not doing it again. I just fucking can’t.
Suffice it to say that the conversation ended with us both in tears. Of course she hadn’t fucking known, and it had been so cruelly wrong of me to even think that she might have done and let him get away with it. I hoped she would forgive me for that, in time.
‘I’m so, so sorry, Tomas,’ she said, when she was done sobbing into my shoulder.
We had our arms around each other in a comforting hug, and I couldn’t even remember the last time that had happened.
If it ever had.
‘Aye,’ I said at last. ‘So am I.’
*
My aunt’s visit hit me hard, and I won’t lie about that. We had finally cleared the air between us, I suppose that was something, but all the same she had reopened old wounds once more. The pain of what Da had done would never leave me, I knew that, and it would never leave Jochan either. She stayed for a while after we both had ourselves under control again, and we got drunk together and talked of happier things, of her war and mine. Even war was happier than the memories of what had happened in that house.
‘I remember this one cunt I served under,’ Enaid said as she knocked back another brandy from the fresh glass I had brought her to replace the one she had thrown at my head and broken. ‘Captain Vogel, his name was, and he was a nasty piece of work. Tortured the enemy prisoners on the slightest pretext, and we all knew he did it for fucking fun. I was only a corporal, mind, but this bastard missed no one. I’ll always remember him.’
I sat very still, my brandy forgotten in my hand.
‘You were at Krathzgrad, weren’t you?’ I asked her, although I knew she had been. ‘Was that there, when you knew him?’
Aunt Enaid frowned at me. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘How in the world did you know that?’
‘Do you remember the Grand Duke of Drathburg, and his son? They both fell at Krathzgrad, so I’ve heard.’
‘The duke was our general,’
