The Red Queen left her chair with remarkable speed for an old woman. Standing on the dais with the spars of her collar fanning out above her head she towered over me. Even toe to toe in our stockinged feet she would have overtopped me, and few men can say the same.
“You’ve done well, Jalan.” She hadn’t a mouth for smiles but she showed her teeth in a reasonable approxi-mation. She stepped down and was before me in three paces. “Very well indeed.”
I noticed her hand in the space between us, held out, palm up. The same hand I had seen wrapped around a crimson sword in my dreams of Ameroth. “I . . . uh . . . don’t have it now.” I took a quick step back, sweat running down my neck all of a sudden.
“What?” As short and cold a word as I ever heard uttered.
“I—it’s not . . .”
“You left it somewhere?” Her eyebrows lifted a remarkable distance. “There’s no safe place—” She glanced about and waved at the guardsmen around the walls, all hand to hilt. “Quick, all of you. Get to the Roma Hall and escort Prince Jalan back with the—”
“I gave it to Greatuncle Garyus,” I said. “Your highness.”
Grandmother raised both arms, one to each side, palms out, and every man in the throne room stopped moving, guards halfway to me now frozen in their tracks. “What?” I swear she could stab someone to death with that word.
I clenched my teeth and gathered my courage. “I gave it to my greatuncle.”
“Why would you do that?” She took hold of my jacket, gathering two handfuls of the cloth, one just below each shoulder. “To.” She hauled me closer. Far too close. “Me?”
We stood eyeball to eyeball now. Oddly—worryingly—that same red tide that had risen in me when standing before Maeres Allus in the Blood Holes rose in me now, curling my lip in a half-snarl. “I lost his ships. I gambled them away.” Spoken too loudly. No highness. No apology. “I owed it to him.”
I had gone from Lisa and Barras to the east spire above the Poor Palace and climbed the long stair. I’d told the old man of my failure and sat with bowed head for his judgment. Instead of raging he had struggled a little more upright against his pillows and said, “I hear you have a salt-mine.”
“I have the option to buy the Crptipa mine from Silas Marn for ten thousand in crown gold. I am debt free and have two thousand to my name.”
“So a man offering you eight thousand more might ask a high price?”
“Yes.”
I left the tower room with a note for eight thousand and an agreement that Garyus would own two-thirds of the mine. As I left I set a black velvet package at the foot of his bed.
“It’s Loki’s key, Greatuncle Garyus. Don’t touch it. It’s made of lies.”
I left then, though he called for me to come back. I ran down the stairs faster than any sensible man would, feeling something new, or at least something I’d not felt for a very long time. Feeling good.
“I’m paying the price for your failings!” The Red Queen thrust me before her and I staggered back as she advanced. “Your duty is to the throne! Your debts are not my concern.” A roar now, her anger loose.
My own anger leapt from my throat before I could cage it. “I was paying your debts, Grandmother!” I halted my retreat. “I gave the key to Garyus. You took his throne. And you.” I pointed without looking to the place where the Silent Sister stood. I could sense her now, like a needle in my flesh. “And you took his strength. I have given him something neither of you can take. You can ask and he may allow because he loves this land and its peoples, but you can’t take. When you put a cripple in a high tower the message is clear enough. A hundred and seven steps are hardly an invitation to the man to join the world! I have put him at the centre of it.” I exhaled and my shoulders went down, the anger gone from me, quicker than it came.
The Red Queen towered before me, sucking in her breath to roar again. But the roar never came. Something in her expression softened, just the smallest bit. “Go,” she said. “We will speak of this another time.” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand, and I turned for the door, willing myself not to run.
I saw the Silent Sister, standing where I had pointed. Rags and skin and glinting eyes. What she thought of the matter I couldn’t tell. She remained as unreadable as algebra.
NINE
I returned to Roma Hall to find my brother Martus in a foul mood, waiting to pounce. “There you are. Where the hell did you vanish off to?” He strode out of an antechamber off the entrance hall.
“I had business with—”
“Well it doesn’t matter. Glad to see you’ve cleaned up. You’re lucky you weren’t shot as a ghoul.”
“A ghoul?”
“Yes, a damn ghoul. You don’t know what’s going on? Where the hell have you been? Under a rock?”
“Well yes, for some of the time. But more recently, Marsail, the Corsair Isles, the Liban desert, and Hell. So what is going on?”
“Trouble! That’s what. Grandmother’s marching the Army of the South off to Slov on some ill-conceived campaign. She doesn’t even care about Slov—it’s some damn witch she’s after. Claims the Slov dukes are harbouring the woman. A whole army! For one woman . . . And the worst of it is my command’s being left here.”
“Yes, that is the worst of it.” I made to walk by. I had an empty stomach and a sudden desire to fill it with something delicious.
“That damn Gregori DeVeer.” Martus stuck a hand out and caught my shoulder, arresting my escape. “His army of foot-sloggers are forming up as the vanguard. He’ll come back a blasted hero. I know it. He’ll be acting this campaign out around the dining table at the officers’ mess for years, lining the grapes up: ‘The Slov line held the ridge’, pushing the cherries in: ‘Our Red March infantry column attacked from the west . . .’. God damn it. And that old woman’s leaving me here to babysit the city.”
“Well. It would be nice if you could keep it in one piece.” I scratched my belly. “But does it really take . . . how many are you?”
“Two thousand men.”
“Two thousand men!” I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. “What are you supposed to be protecting us from? This is Vermillion! Nobody is going to attack us.”
“I just told you what, idiot!”
“You didn’t say—Wait, ghouls?”
“Ghouls, rag-a-maul, corpse-men. We’ve seen them all in the city over the past couple of months. Nothing the guard can’t handle, but it’s made people jumpy. They’re scared enough even with the Army of the South crowding the streets.”
“Well . . . better safe than sorry, I guess. I shall sleep better in someone else’s bed knowing that you’re patrolling the walls, brother.” And with that I turned and set off sharp enough to escape any restraining hand that might come my way.
Much as I wanted to leave matters of state to those who matter I found myself unable to shake off Martus’s complaints. Not that I cared about his lost chances for glory—but I was worried by the idea that Grandmother was leading the army off into what seemed a fairly arbitrary war just as Vermillion was starting to see actual evidence of the kinds of dangers she’d been warning us about for years. The unanswered questions led me back up Garyus’s stairs. I doubted the Red Queen would be particularly forthcoming, especially after our last meeting, and frankly I didn’t know anyone else in Red March who might have both the information I was after and the inclination to share it with me.
The old man was where I left him, hunched over a book. “Books!” I breezed in. “Nobody ever put anything good in a book.”
“Grand-nephew.” Garyus set the offending item to one side. “Explain the Slov thing to me.” There didn’t seem to be any point beating about the bush. I wanted my mind set at ease so I could go and get drunk in good company. “She’s starting a war . . . for what? Why now?” Garyus smiled, a crooked thing. “I’m not my sister’s keeper.”
“But you know.”
He shrugged. “Some of it.”
“There are ghouls in the city. Other . . . things, too. The Dead King has turned his eyes this way. Why would she rush off to fight foreigners hundreds of miles away?”