An hour later I stepped from the Roma Hall, fresh and clean, wearing my old clothes and my old smile. I doubted there’d be much to mark me from the Jalan who sneaked back from the DeVeer mansion at dawn on the day of the opera, though it felt like half a lifetime ago.
Walking away from my old home I felt a curious sensation of being watched. Not the adoration or curiosity a returning hero might expect but a crawling sensation on the back of my neck, as if I were the object of a close and cold scrutiny. Feeling distinctly uncomfortable, I picked up my pace and crossed the courtyard with a brisk stride.
I went to the palace. Not Grandmother’s main doors, but to the guest wing, up the stairs to the Great Jon’s suite. The guards at the ground floor informed me Barras still occupied the rooms, presumably now the headquarters for the search for his misplaced wife.
Knocking on the door I found my heart pounding harder than it had in the Blood Holes in the moment I realized I had murder on my mind.
“Good afternoon, sir.” A short doorman, immaculately groomed, offered me his bow. “Who may I say is calling?”
“Jalan?” Lisa’s voice calling from somewhere off the reception hall. She came running, holding her skirts at both hips to keep from tripping. Barras nearly as fast behind her, pale, dark lines beneath both eyes.
“Jalan . . .” Lisa pulled up short of throwing herself into my arms, hands going to her face as if I were still wearing all the gore I arrived at the palace with. “Are you . . .” She studied my face, leaving me wondering if perhaps I had changed rather more than I suspected.
“Jal!” Barras showed no such hesitation and threw himself into my arms with no pretence at a manly hug. “Jal! Thank you, Jal! Thank you!”
“Steady on!” I waited for a loosening of his grip then slipped free. “The bad news is you owe me two camels—” I caught Lisa’s look of outrage. “Three! Three camels. Good ones!”
“Same old Jal!” Barras laughed, punching my shoulder.
“No, really. I’m not jo—”
“Thank you!” And he was back to the hugging.
When I finally untangled myself it seemed as if the moment to ask for my camels’ worth had passed. Barras stood, running his hands back across the short brown shock of his hair and looking in happy amazement from me to Lisa and back again. “We have to celebrate . . . A feast!”
“I’ve been on the road too long to turn down a feast.” I held up a hand to forestall him. “But right now I have an urgent meeting with our monarch.” I looked to Lisa, lovely in her powders and jewels now, though I liked her looks just as much out in the wilds. “Do you have the package I gave you for safe-keeping?”
Barras looked confused and raised the tempo of his Jalan-Lisa-Jalan watching. Lisa nodded and pulled the velvet-wrapped key from some pocket artfully concealed in her skirts. She handed it over without even a twinge of hesitation, which meant something to me. I think perhaps it’s not a key you can give to someone who isn’t your friend without at least some measure of regret.
“Thank you.” And I meant it. “Keep the feast warm for me.” I slapped a hand to Barras’s shoulder, finding it hard to hate him any more. “I’ll come along later, if I can still walk when the Red Queen’s finished with me.”
“What have you done?”
But I was already striding away. “Later!”
Grandmother’s court was not in session when I arrived beneath the great doors to her palace. Two lords, Grast and Gren, stood waiting on the steps along with a solid, dark-haired knight with an impressive moustache—Sir Roger, I thought. All three favoured me with dark looks. I don’t think they recognized me but I had bad blood with Lord Grast’s older brother, the duke, so I ignored the trio and went on up without a word.
Before the queen’s doors the same plumed giant who had admitted me on my return from the North—or perhaps his cousin—tilted his head down at me and said he would see my request for audience carried to my grandmother.
I sat in the shade of one of the great portico columns and waited, watching the elite guardsmen swelter in their fire-bronze on the sundrenched steps. The courtyard before us lay wide and empty, as blank as my future. I wasn’t sure even what the night might bring. Could I really stand to watch Barras and Lisa’s reunion? I briefly considered calling in on my father, but Ballessa informed me that the cardinal had taken to his bed a week earlier. Ill, she said. Ill on wine I suspected . . .
The door behind me slammed and turning I saw Uncle Hertet pushing aside the guardsman although the man had already stepped sharply out of his way. Lord Grast and Lord Gren were quickly by his side as the heir-apparent, or as he was more commonly known: the heir-apparentlynot, stormed toward the steps.
“If she wasn’t my mother . . .” Hertet smacked his fist into his palm. It might have looked menacing if he weren’t a rather paunchy man of modest build in his fifties, gone to grey. His mother I was sure could still put him over her knee and deliver the soundest of spankings. Not to mention fell him with a punch that would leave few teeth for his dotage. “This city needs a king, not a damned steward. And it needs a king who will stay here and do his duty by it, not swan off on some wild ex-pedition. These are troubled times, boys, troubled times. A queen who leaves her throne empty in troubled times is practically abdicating—” My uncle spotted me lounging in the shade. “You! One of Reymond’s boys?” He pointed a ringed finger my way as if being his brother’s son were an accusation.
“I-”
“Martus? Darin? Damned if I can tell you apart. All of you the same, and none of you like your father.” Hertet went past me, flanked by the two lords with Sir Roger at his heels. “Still, what did Reymond expect ploughing such a foreign field? He wasn’t the only plough, that’s for sure.” His voice carried back across the courtyard as he walked away, trailing off as the distance grew. “They can’t help it, these Indus girls . . .”
I found myself on my feet, having got there swiftly and without conscious decision. My hand had found the hilt of my knife. The tide of angry words rising to defend my mother’s honour had yet to leave my mouth only because they were still battling to organize a coherent sentence.
“Prince Jalan.”
I looked up. The overly large guardsman loomed over me. “The queen will see you now.”
I shot a scowl at the retreating backs of Hertet and his cronies—one that in a just world would have lit them up like torches—and brushed myself down. You don’t keep the Red Queen waiting.
Four guardsmen escorted me into the empty throne room, gloomy despite the day blazing through high windows, striated by their bars. Lamps burned around the dais and Grandmother sat ensconced in Red March’s highest chair. Two of her advisors stood further back in the shadows, Marth, wide and solid, Willow, whip-thin and sour. Of the Silent Sister, no sign.
“You’ve changed, Grandson.” Grandmother’s regard could pin a man to the floor. I felt the weight of it settle on me. Even so I had time to be surprised by her acknowledgement of our relationship. “The boy who set out has not returned. Where did you lose him?”
“Some wayside tavern, highness.” In Hell was the true answer but no part of me wanted to talk about that.
“And you have something to report, Jalan? I’m sure you didn’t request an audience before the throne without good cause. Your northern friends eluded my soldiers. Perhaps you encountered them again on your travels?”
I glanced left and right, seeking the Silent Sister. Did Grandmother already know exactly what I’d been up to from the moment I left the city? Had my great-aunt’s silence revealed it as prophecy before the march of days turned it into my personal history?
“I found them. I recovered the key. I returned it to Vermillion.”