Prince of Fools (The Red Queen's War) (2 page)

T
h
e palace at Vermillion is a sprawling affair of walled compounds, exquisite gardens, satellite mansions for extended family, and finally the Inner Palace, the great stone confection that has for generations housed the kings of Red March. The whole thing is garnished with marble statuary teased into startlingly lifelike forms by the artistry of Milano masons, and a dedicated man could probably scrape enough gold leaf off the walls to make himself slightly richer than Croesus. My grandmother hates it with a passion. She’d be happier behind granite barricades a hundred feet thick and spiked with the heads of her enemies.

Even the most decadent of palaces can’t be entered without some protocol, though. I slipped in via the Surgeons’ Gate, flipping a silver crown to the guard.

“Got you out early again, Melchar.” I make a point of knowing the guards’ names. They still think of me as the hero of Aral Pass and it’s helpful to have the gatekeepers on side when your life dangles from as large a web of lies as mine does.

“Aye, Prince Jal. Them’s as works best works hardest, they do say.”

“So true.” I had no idea what he’d said but my fake laugh is even better than my real one, and nine-tenths of being popular is the ability to jolly the menials along. “I’d get one of those lazy bastards to take a turn.” I nodded towards the lantern glow bleeding past the crack of the guardhouse door and strolled on through the gates as Melchar drew them open.

Once inside, I made a straight line for the Roma Hall. As the queen’s third son, Father got invested in the Roma Hall, a palatial Vatican edifice constructed by the pope’s own craftsmen for Cardinal Paracheck way back whenever. Grandmother has little enough time for Jesu and his cross, though she’ll say the words at celebrations and look to mean them. She has far less time for Roma, and none at all for the pope that sits there now—the Holy Cow, she calls her.

As Father’s third son I get bugger-all. A chamber in Roma Hall, an unwanted commission in the Army of the North, one that didn’t even swing me a cavalry rank since the northern borders are too damn hilly for horse. Scorron deploy cavalry on the borders, but Grandmother declared their pigheadedness a failing the Red March should exploit rather than a foolishness we should continue to follow. Women and war don’t mix. I’ve said it before. I should have been breaking hearts on a white charger, armoured for tourney. But no, that old witch had me crawling around the peaks trying not to get murdered by Scorron peasants.

I entered the Hall—really a collection of halls, staterooms, a ballroom, kitchens, stables, and a second floor with endless bedchambers—by the west port, a service door meant for scullions and such. Fat Ned sat at guard, his halberd against the wall.

“Ned!”

“Master Jal!” He woke with a start and came perilously close to tipping the chair over backwards.

“As you were.” I gave him a wink and went by. Fat Ned kept a tight lip and my excursions were safe with him. He’d known me since I was a little monster bullying the smaller princes and princesses and toadying to the ones big enough to clout me. He’d been fat back in those days. The flesh hung off him now as the reaper closed in for the final swing, but the name stuck. There’s power in a name. “Prince” has served me very well—something to hide behind when trouble comes, and “Jalan” carries echoes of King Jalan of the Red March, Fist of the Emperor back when we had one. A title and a name like Jalan carry an aura with them, enough to give me the benefit of the doubt—and there was never a doubt I needed that.

I nearly made it back to my room.

“Jalan Kendeth!”

I stopped two steps from the balcony that led to my chambers, toe poised for the next step, boots in my hand. I said nothing. Sometimes the bishop would just bellow my name when he discovered random mischief. In fairness I was normally the root cause. This time, however, he was looking directly at me.

“I see you right there, Jalan Kendeth, footsteps black with sin as you creep back to your lair. Get down here!”

I turned with an apologetic grin. Churchmen like you to be sorry and often it doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about. In this case I was sorry for being caught.

“And the best of mornings to you, Your Excellency.” I put the boots behind my back and swaggered down towards him as if it had been my plan all along.

“His Eminence directs me to present your brothers and yourself at the throne room by second bell.” Bishop James scowled at me, cheeks grey with stubble as if he too had been turfed out of bed at an unreasonable hour, though perhaps not by Lisa DeVeer’s shapely foot.

“Father directed that?” He’d said nothing at table the previous night, and the cardinal was not one to rise before noon whatever the good book had to say about sloth. They call it a deadly sin, but in my experience lust will get you into more trouble and sloth’s only a sin when you’re being chased.

“The message came from the queen.” The bishop’s scowl deepened. He liked to attribute all commands to Father as the church’s highest, albeit least enthusiastic, representative in Red March. Grandmother once said she’d been tempted to set the cardinal’s hat on the nearest donkey, but Father had been closer and promised to be more easily led. “Martus and Darin have already left.”

I shrugged. “They arrived before me too.” I’d yet to forgive my elder brothers that slight. I stopped, out of arm’s reach as the bishop loved nothing better than to slap the sin out of a wayward prince, and turned to go upstairs. “I’ll get dressed.”

“You’ll go now! It’s almost second bell and your preening never takes less than an hour.”

As much as I would have liked to dispute the old fool, he happened to be right and I knew better than to be late for the Red Queen. I suppressed a sneer and hurried past him. I had on what I’d worn for my midnight escapades and whilst it was stylish enough, the slashed velvets hadn’t fared too well during my escape. Still, it would have to serve. Grandmother would rather see her spawn battle-armoured and dripping blood in any event, so a touch of mud here and there might earn me some approval.

I
came late to the throne room with the second bell’s echoes dying before I reached the bronze doors, huge out-of-place things stolen from some still-grander palace by one of my distant and bloody-handed relatives. The guards eyed me as if I might be bird crap that had sailed uninvited through a high window to splat before them.

“Prince Jalan.” I rolled my hands to chivvy them along. “You may have heard of me? I
am
invited.”

Without commentary the largest of them, a giant in fire-bronze mail and crimson-plumed helm, hauled the left door wide enough to admit me. My campaign to befriend every guard in the palace had never penetrated as far as Grandmother’s picked men; they thought too much of themselves for that. Also they were too well paid to be impressed by my largesse, and perhaps forewarned against me in any case.

I crept in unannounced and hurried across the echoing expanse of marble. I’ve never liked the throne room. Not for the arching grandness of it, or the history set in grim-faced stone and staring at us from every wall, but because the place has no escape routes. Guards, guards, and more guards, along with the scrutiny of that awful old woman who claims to be my grandmother.

I made my way towards my nine siblings and cousins. It seemed this was to be an audience exclusively for the royal grandchildren: the nine junior princes and singular princess of Red March. By rights I should have been tenth in line to the throne after my two uncles, their sons, and my father and elder brothers, but the old witch who’d kept that particular seat warm these past forty years had different ideas about succession. Cousin Serah, still a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, and containing not an ounce of whatever it is that makes a princess, was the apple of the Red Queen’s eye. I won’t lie, Serah had more than several ounces of whatever it is that lets a woman steal the sense from a man, and accordingly I would gladly have ignored the common views on what cousins should and shouldn’t get up to. Indeed I’d tried to ignore them several times, but Serah had a vicious right hook and a knack for kicking the tenderest of spots that a man owns. She’d come today wearing some kind of riding suit in fawn and suede that looked better suited to the hunt than to court. But damn, she looked good.

I brushed past her and elbowed my way in between my brothers near the front of the group. I’m a decent-sized fellow, tall enough to give men pause, but I don’t normally care to stand by Martus and Darin. They make me look small and, with nothing to set us apart, all with the same dark-gold hair and hazel eyes, I get referred to as “the little one.” That I don’t like. On this occasion, though, I was prepared to be overlooked. It wasn’t just being in the throne room that made me nervous. Nor even because of Grandmother’s pointed disapproval. It was the blind-eye woman. She scares the hell out of me.

I first saw her when they brought me before the throne on my fifth birthday, my name day, flanked by Martus and Darin in their church finest, Father in his cardinal’s hat, sober despite the sun having passed its zenith, my mother in silks and pearls, a clutch of churchmen and court ladies forming the periphery. The Red Queen sat forwards in her great chair booming out something about her grandfather’s grandfather, Jalan, the Fist of the Emperor, but it passed me by—I’d seen
her
. An ancient woman, so old it turned my stomach to look at her. She crouched in the shadow of the throne, hunched up so she’d be hidden away if you looked from the other side. She had a face like paper that had been soaked then left to dry, her lips a greyish line, cheekbones sharp. Clad in rags and tatters, she had no place in that throne room, at odds with the finery, the fire-bronzed guards and the glittering retinue come to see my name set in place upon me. There was no motion in the crone; she could almost have been a trick of the light, a discarded cloak, an illusion of lines and shade.

“. . . Jalan?” The Red Queen stopped her litany with a question.

I had answered with silence, tearing my gaze from the creature at her side.

“Well?” Grandmother narrowed her regard to a sharp point that held me.

Still I had nothing. Martus had elbowed me hard enough to make my ribs creak. It hadn’t helped. I wanted to look back at the old woman. Was she still there? Had she moved the moment my eyes left her? I imagined how she’d move. Quick like a spider. My stomach made a tight knot of itself.

“Do you accept the charge I have laid upon you, child?” Grandmother asked, attempting kindness.

My glance flickered back to the hag. Still there, exactly the same, her face half-turned from me, fixed on Grandmother. I hadn’t noticed her eye at first, but now it drew me. One of the cats at the Hall had an eye like that. Milky. Pearly almost. Blind, my nurse called it. But to me it seemed to see more than the other eye.

“What’s wrong with the boy? Is he simple?” Grandmother’s displeasure had rippled through the court, silencing their murmurs.

I couldn’t look away. I stood there sweating. Barely able to keep from wetting myself. Too scared to speak, too scared even to lie. Too scared to do anything but sweat and keep my eyes on that old woman.

When she moved, I nearly screamed and ran. Instead just a squeak escaped me. “Don-don’t you see her?”

She stole into motion. So slow at first you had to measure her against the background to be sure it wasn’t imagination. Then speeding up, smooth and sure. She turned that awful face towards me, one eye dark, the other milk and pearl. It had felt hot, suddenly, as if all the great hearths had roared into life with one scorching voice, sparked into fury on a fine summer’s day, the flames leaping from iron grates as if they wanted nothing more than to be amongst us.

She was tall. I saw that now, hunched but tall. And thin, like a bone.

“Don’t you see her?” My words rising to a shriek, I pointed and she stepped towards me, a white hand reaching.

“Who?” Darin beside me, nine years under his belt and too old for such foolishness.

I had no voice to answer him. The blind-eye woman had laid her hand of paper and bones over mine. She smiled at me, an ugly twisting of her face, like worms writhing over each other. She smiled, and I fell.

I fell into a hot, blind place. They tell me I had a fit, convulsions. A “lepsy,” the chirurgeon said to Father the next day, a chronic condition, but I’ve never had it again, not in nearly twenty years. All I know is that I fell, and I don’t think I’ve stopped falling since.

Grandmother had lost patience and set my name upon me as I jerked and twitched on the floor. “Bring him back when his voice breaks,” she said.

And that was it for eight years. I came back to the throne room aged thirteen, to be presented to Grandmother before the Saturnalia feast in the hard winter of 89. On that occasion, and all others since, I’ve followed everyone else’s example and pretended not to see the blind-eye woman. Perhaps they really don’t see her, because Martus and Darin are too dumb to act and poor liars at that, and yet their eyes never so much as flicker when they look her way. Maybe I’m the only one to see her when she taps her fingers on the Red Queen’s shoulder. It’s hard not to look when you know you shouldn’t. Like a woman’s cleavage, breasts squeezed together and lifted for inspection, and yet a prince is supposed not to notice, not to drop his gaze. I try harder with the blind-eye woman and for the most part I manage it—though Grandmother’s given me an odd look from time to time.

In any event, on this particular morning, sweating in the clothes I wore the night before and with half the DeVeers’ garden to decorate them, I didn’t mind in the least being wedged between my hulking brothers and being “the little one,” easy to overlook. Frankly, the attention of either the Red Queen or her silent sister were things I could do without.

We stood for another ten minutes, unspeaking in the main, some princes yawning, others shifting weight from one foot to the other or casting sour glances my way. I do try to keep my misadventures from polluting the calm waters of the palace. It’s ill advised to shit where you eat, and besides, it’s hard to hide behind one’s rank when the offended party is also a prince. Even so, over the course of the years, I’d given my cousins few reasons to love me.

At last the Red Queen came in, without fanfare but flanked by guards. The relief was momentary—the blind-eye woman followed in her wake, and although I turned away quicker than quick, she saw me looking. The queen settled herself into her royal seat and the guardsmen arrayed themselves around the walls. A single chamberlain—Mantal Drews, I think—stood ill at ease between the royal progeny and our sovereign, and once more the hall returned to silence.

I watched Grandmother and, with some effort, kept my gaze from sliding towards the white and shrivelled hand resting behind her head on the throne’s shoulder. Over the years I’d heard many rumours about Grandmother’s secret counsellor, an old and half-mad woman kept hidden away—the Silent Sister, they called her. It seemed, though, that I stood alone in knowing that she waited at the Red Queen’s side each day. Other people’s eyes seemed to avoid her just as I always wished mine would.

The Red Queen cleared her throat. In taverns across Vermillion they tell it that my grandmother was once a handsome woman, though monstrous tall with it. A heartbreaker who attracted suit from all corners of the Broken Empire and even beyond. To my eye she had a brutal face, raw-boned, her skin tight as if scorched, but still showing wrinkles as crumpled parchment will. She had to have seventy years on her, but no one would have called her more than fifty. Her hair dark and without a hint of grey, still showing deepest red where the light caught it. Handsome or not, though, her eyes would turn any man’s bowels to water. Flinty chips of dispassion. And no crown for the warrior queen, oh no. She sat near-swallowed by a robe of blacks and scarlets, just the thinnest circlet of gold to keep her locks in place, scraped back across her head.

“My children’s children.” Grandmother’s words came so thick with disappointment that you felt it reach out and try to throttle you. She shook her head, as if we were all of us an experiment in horse breeding gone tragically astray. “And some of you whelping new princes and princesses of your own, I hear.”

“Yes, w—”

“Idle, numerous, and breeding sedition in your numbers.” Grandmother rolled over Cousin Roland’s announcement before he could puff himself up. His smile died in that stupid beard of his, the one he grew to allow people at least the suspicion that he might have a chin. “Dark times are coming and this nation must be a fortress. The time for being children has passed. My blood runs in each of you, thin though it’s grown. And you will be soldiers in this coming war.”

Martus snorted at that, though quiet enough that it would be missed. Martus had been commissioned into the heavy horse, destined for knight-general, commander of Red March’s elite. The Red Queen in a fit of madness five years earlier had all but eliminated the force. Centuries of tradition, honour, and excellence ploughed under at the whim of an old woman. Now we were all to be soldiers running to battle on foot, digging ditches, endlessly practising mechanical tactics that any peasant could master and that set a prince no higher than a potboy.

“. . . greater foe. Time to put aside thoughts of empty conquest and draw in . . .”

I looked up from my disgust to find Grandmother still droning on about war. It’s not that I care overmuch about honour. All that chivalry nonsense loads a man down and any sensible fellow will ditch it the moment he needs to run—but it’s the look of the thing, the form of it. To be in one of the three horse corps, to earn your spurs and keep a trio of chargers at the city barracks . . . it had been the birthright of young nobles since time immemorial. Damn it, I wanted my commission. I wanted in at the officers’ mews, wanted to swap tall tales around the smoky tables at the Conarrf and ride along the Kings Way flying the colours of the Red Lance or Iron Hoof, with the long hair and bristling moustache of a cavalryman and a stallion between my legs. Tenth in line to a throne will get you into a not-insignificant number of bedchambers, but if a man dons the scarlet cloak of the Red March riders and wraps his legs around a destrier, there are few ladies of quality who won’t open theirs when he flashes a smile at them.

At the corner of my vision the blind-eye woman moved, spoiling my daydream and putting all thoughts of riding, of either kind, from my head.

“. . . burning all dead. Cremation is to be mandatory, for noble and commoner alike, and damn any dissent from Roma . . .”

That again. The old bird had been banging on about death rites for over a year now. As if men my age gave a fig for such things! She’d become obsessed with sailors’ tales, ghost stories from the Drowned Isles, the ramblings of muddy drunkards from the Ken Marshes. Already men went chained into the ground—good iron wasted against superstition—and now chains weren’t enough? Bodies must be burned? Well, the church wouldn’t like it. It would put a crimp in their plans for Judgment Day and us all rising from the grave for a big grimy hug. But who cared? Really? I watched the early light slide across the walls high above me and tried to picture Lisa as I’d left her that morning, clad in brightness and shadow and nothing more.

The crash of the chamberlain’s staff on flagstones jerked my head back up. In fairness I’d had very little sleep the night before and a trying morning. If I hadn’t been caught a yard from my bedchamber door I would have been safely ensconced therein until well past noon, dreaming better versions of the daydream Grandmother kept interrupting.

“Bring in the witnesses!” The chamberlain had a voice that could make a death sentence boring.

Four guardsmen entered, flanking a Nuban warrior, scar-marked and tall, manacled wrist and ankle, the chains all threaded through an iron ring belted around his waist. That perked my interest. I misspent much of my youth gambling at the pit fights in the Latin Quarter, and I intended to misspend much of what life remained to me there too. I’ve always enjoyed a good fight and a healthy dose of bloodshed, as long as it’s not
me
being pummelled or
my
blood getting spilled. Gordo’s pits, or the Blood Holes down by Mercants, got you close enough to wipe the occasional splatter from the toe of your boot, and offered endless opportunity for betting. Of late I’d even entered men on my own ticket. Likely lads bought off the slave boats out of Maroc. None had lasted more than two bouts yet, but even losing can pay if you know where to place your wagers. In any event, the Nuban looked like a solid bet. Perhaps he might even be the ticket that could get Maeres Allus off my back and silence his tiresome demands for payment for brandy already consumed and for whores already fucked.