‘You don’t have to come, Anne,’ I said. ‘It’s not been so very long since we came back, after all. You must be neck-deep in Pious Men business, and I know you’re worried about the magicians. I know that and I respect it and I support it. But I need Rosie, and she works for me. She does have to come.’
‘Then so do I,’ Anne said, and she didn’t hesitate for a single second.
The look Rosie gave her then was pure love. It melted my heart to see it and I wished I could have left them both behind in Ellinburg to just be, but I truly did need Rosie with me. She kept my secrets very well, and I didn’t see how any Queen’s Man could operate in Dannsburg without a good secretary. Rosie was superb at what she did, and she still understood the city and how it worked far better than I did.
‘I’m with you, boss,’ Oliver said, and Emil nodded his assent.
Those two were little more than hired muscle, but they had both been with me a good while now and had proved their loyalty numerous times. In my old life I would have been thinking it was time to make them up to the table as Pious Men, but that was done. They were mine now, part of my crew in the Queen’s Men, and Anne wasn’t having them any more than she was having Fat Luka back.
I assumed she grasped that, but I wouldn’t have been prepared to bet gold on it. Luka had worked for the Queen’s Men long before he had been a Pious Man, I had learned, but I didn’t think Anne knew that. Either way, my mind was made up on the matter and I was keeping him.
I nodded at them, and felt pleased with the crew I had surrounded myself with.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Anne, you’ve the rest of today to settle your affairs. You’ll have to put my aunt back in charge, for all that she won’t like it, but give her my apologies and tell her it’s an order and she’s doing it anyway. We ride at first light tomorrow, and you’ll pack warm clothes for the road if you’re wise.’
Once they were gone I called Billy into the drawing room and told him that I was going away again.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Mina told me. She knows things, sometimes.’
I swallowed, and looked at him. I loved Billy but I still wasn’t easy with the cunning under my roof.
‘Aye, well,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to come this time, lad. You can stay here with your woman, and all is well.’
‘No,’ Billy said, in that way he had about him when his mind was made up. ‘I’ll be coming too.’
‘I thought perhaps you’d want to stay here, with Mina?’
‘I do,’ Billy confessed, ‘but she says it’s important. When Mina says a thing is important then it is.’
I sighed and crossed to the cupboard to pour myself a brandy, and I turned and looked at the lad. His eyes really were too bright, shining like gems set in the skull that his tight, drawn face so closely resembled.
‘Aye, son,’ I had to say. ‘If that’s what you want, then you can come.’
‘It isn’t,’ he said. ‘It isn’t what I want at all. But Mina says it’s important, so I’ll do it. For her.’
I supposed there wasn’t much I could say to that.
*
The ride back to Dannsburg was cold and miserable, and it took us ten frozen days in the worsening snows, but we made it in the end. We had left the bulk of our newly acquired things at the Bountiful Harvest when we returned to Ellinburg so at least everyone had clean, dry clothes waiting for them to change into once we were back in our rooms and had bathed and generally thawed ourselves out. I gave the innkeeper another couple of gold crowns to top my account up, but I knew by then that he would never kick us out or re-rent our rooms, however long I might be away. I had just about bought his inn, by then, and I considered it coin well spent.
Luka had been both pleased and surprised to see us, and that alone told me that he hadn’t known about Vogel’s letter.
‘Didn’t think I’d see you before the spring, boss,’ he said.
‘Aye, well,’ I said, as we shared brandy in the common room that evening, seated before a blazing fire that was slowly beginning to warm me up again at last. I thought I had forgotten what it felt like to be warm, on the road. ‘The Old Man has an “opportunity” for me, apparently.’
‘That doesn’t sound good,’ Luka said, and I couldn’t help but smile.
We were both remembering life in the army, I knew, and what an ‘opportunity’ had meant then too. Never volunteer for anything, that was the first rule of being a soldier who wanted to stay alive, and ‘opportunities’ were seldom good.
‘Can’t see I’ve any choice,’ I said, and Luka nodded sympathetically.
‘Remember at Messia, when the captain told us he had an opportunity for someone to win a medal for a daring night scouting mission?’ Luka asked me. ‘Fuck wanting a medal, but still. “Petrik, you just volunteered,” he said. Never fucking saw Petrik again, did we?’
‘No,’ I said quietly, although that wasn’t strictly true.
I had seen Petrik again, the next
