She suspected her birth was the first and last time she had been allowed to keep her father waiting, and that he probably wouldn’t have waited so patiently, probably wouldn’t have endured the wait at all, if he’d known that a girl was going to appear at the end of it.
The births of Boris and Harold were recorded in the book too, in greater detail—the joy of the king was described over several sentences!—but that was understandable: Boris was first in line to the throne, Harold second. Catherine, in theory, was third, though the king so much detested the idea of a woman ruling his kingdom that her mother had once told her it would be a close-run thing as to whether he would prefer Brigant be ruled by the sons of his hated brother Thelonius’s than by her. Thelonius’s boys had recently died, however; their deaths were also recorded in the Family Record, along with the observation that, following the young princes’ demise, “Calidor was one step nearer to being returned to the rule of its true king, Aloysius.”
It was strange to think that the future of nations depended as much on the health of royal children as on success in war. The deaths of Prince Thelonius’s sons proved how quickly fortunes could change. After defeating his brother’s invasion, Thelonius seemed to have secured his dynasty forever, but now the future of Calidor was uncertain. Equally, an illness for Harold and an accident for Boris, and Catherine would be the rightful heir to both Brigant and Calidor.
Of course her marriage to Prince Tzsayn would make that inheritance much less likely. Once she was married she would no longer be considered a Brigantine. Her loyalty would be to her husband and Pitoria. It seemed impossible that the lords of Brigant or Calidor would ever accept a foreigner as their ruler. Perhaps that was another reason her father was so keen on this marriage, because it was a way of removing her potential, tiny though it was, to ever challenge for the Brigantine throne?
Her mother had told Catherine many times that her father was a king but also a man. He didn’t understand women and thought of them as quite different from himself. “He believes women are weak, lesser. Don’t ever appear to be stupid—you are his daughter after all—but you must never seem to know more than him or your brothers, or know better than them.”
Advice Catherine had disregarded in their last audience, she thought ruefully, letting the pages of the Family Record fall back into place. They had made her suffer for it, and yet . . . she had survived.
She carried the book back to its shelf and took down an equally large tome: The Accounts of the Royal Household. Again her mother’s voice echoed in Catherine’s head: “It is one of the duties of a queen to know the incomings and outgoings of the court.”
Catherine had mostly found bookkeeping extraordinarily dull, but there was one section marked for the recording of the costs involved in arranging her marriage—and Catherine had been drawn to this since she’d first found it. There she could see in pounds, shillings, and pence the price at which her father valued her. And it was not an inconsiderable sum.
Over the last year there had been many payments for visits, deputations, and gifts. The first gift to Prince Tzsayn from her father—A stallion, black, fifteen hands, four years old, excellent gait—had cost him little, as it had been bred in the royal stables, but he’d valued it as a reduction in stock value of thirty pounds. Catherine wondered if she, also bred in the king’s household, would be recorded similarly. A girl, mousy, small, nearly seventeen years old, prone to willfulness. Reduction in stock value: fifty pounds and ten shillings.
But the horse was a mere trifle compared to the costs for the visits of her father’s representatives to Pitoria “to assess the suitability of a match”—hundreds of pounds spent on chartering ships and preparing gifts for Pitorian nobles. Then visitors were invited back to Brigant and hundreds more had been spent on lavish entertainment, food, and wine. Her father had been exceptionally busy and extravagant, especially given how dire Brigant’s finances were.
Catherine flicked back to the income and expenses section. It was grim reading. The monthly income from taxes was consistent but small, while the returns from the gold mines had dwindled to almost nothing. After the war had emptied his coffers, her father had increased the mining in the north, and there had been some extra income initially, but now the gold too was depleted. Meanwhile, the expenses covered pages and pages: wages of staff, the never-ending food bills, items from Cloths: 6 pence to 2 barrels red wine: 5 pounds and 7 shillings.
Catherine closed the book, letting the pages riffle through her fingers. As she did so, she glimpsed another page of writing. It was at the back, a few pages on from the wedding costs section. It was entitled “Fielding.” Where had she heard that name before?
There were only three entries, the first dated from the previous autumn:
Wexman—Uniforms: 60 pounds
Wright—Tents, tools: 32 pounds
Southgate—Smoke: 200 pounds
Catherine stared at the entries. The cost of uniforms and tents was nothing unusual, but two hundred pounds for smoke was both a huge sum and a very strange item. Could it mean demon smoke?
When Catherine had been reading about Pitoria, trying to prepare herself for her marriage, one of her books had mentioned demon smoke, which was rarely seen in Brigant. The book claimed it was the blood of strange creatures that supposedly inhabited the barren plateau north of Pitoria. In Tornia, the capital, she had read, there were illegal smoke dens, where people went to inhale the smoke and lose days of their lives to “the pleasure of the demon breath.” But why her father would want smoke she didn’t know. He hated even wine and beer, saying it made men weak and stupid. She couldn’t see smoke appealing to him any more than drink. How much smoke did you get for two hundred pounds? It was a vast sum. Surely it couldn’t really be the blood of some magical creature?
And now Catherine remembered. Fielding was the place where Sir Oswald Pence had been killed and where Lady Anne had been captured. She had read that in the account of the arrest when she’d been trying to learn about executions.
So Lady Anne and Sir Oswald had been to this place. Had they seen the tents, the uniforms, and the smoke?
That’s when Catherine remembered something else. She got up in excitement and rushed deeper into the shelves of the library. She knew the book she needed: an old favorite that had first introduced her to the language of signs. She found the book and flicked through it quickly.
The sign that Lady Anne had made at her execution was a kiss with her right hand paired with a fist in her left, though it was a poor fist, her first two fingers extended because of her broken fingers. Well, Catherine had assumed it was because her hands were broken. But what if that wasn’t it? What if she had been saying something else?
Catherine found the page:
Kiss
A commonly used sign, now made with either left or right hand. Strictly, however, made with the left hand, it means “kiss,” while made with the right it means “breath.”
When “breath” is paired with a horizontal flat palm it means “life,” and with a vertical flat palm it means “air.” When paired with a closed fist it means “smoke.” Paired with a closed fist with fingers one and two held straight it means “demon smoke.”
AMBROSE
FIELDING, BRIGANT
AMBROSE WOKE to the sound of arguing.
“We can’t kill him. We just have to wait for the captain. He’ll know what to do.”
“He’ll tell us to kill him.”
“We’re supposed to be showing the captain that we can organize ourselves and be disciplined. For all we know, this is a test. It’d be just like him to send someone in.”
At that the others went quiet. Then one said, “Probably one of his best men.”
Another boy laughed. “It would be funny if we did kill him then.”
“Hilarious, Frank. Hilarious.”
“So what do we do with him?”