‘I think you are very close to heresy, my dear. What are you doing?’ asked the Queen. ‘I do not like this place.’
‘Testing a small suspicion, my Queen.’ Almspend frowned and drew a short invocation in letters of fire – but they paled immediately and flickered, and she had trouble speaking the words.
Trouble saying them – but speak them she did.
The stone flared, and for a moment the words, carved more than two thousand years before, were visible even where the chisel had destroyed them.
‘This is not for the Green Man,’ Almspend said, her voice suddenly hoarse. ‘This is for a darker entity entirely.’
The two women read the name, and the Queen put her hand to her throat – then raised it, and poured raw sunlight on the stone. It seemed to grow blacker. The Queen grew taller – her skin took on a remarkable bronze hue, and her hair suddenly seemed to be made of raw metal.
Becca Almspend took a step back. ‘Desiderata! Stop!’
The Queen was almost as tall as the corridor. The stone was as black as night and the very ground rumbled.
The stone made a pop like overheated stone.
Almspend turned her head, and the Queen was her normal self.
‘What was that?’ Rebecca asked.
‘Something that the Archbishop should have seen to long ago. A tunnel that needed to be closed.’ The Queen put her hand to her head. ‘I have been reckless.’ She was trembling, and Almspend put her shoulder under the taller woman’s armpit and supported her.
‘Come – there’s a bench in the store room,’ she said.
The Queen went, but she shook her head. ‘I no longer want to know. I think I know the answer, and I can’t – face it.’
Almspend, to whom history was like a law, shook her head. ‘What’s past is past. Whatever the King did, it was done before he met you.’
The Queen nodded. She was obviously unconvinced. But she sank onto the bench after Almspend opened her own hermetical wards and the great iron-bound door.
Almspend set a mage light, and then a second. The first trip, they’d only made a hasty catalogue of the papers. The librarian in Rebecca Almspend made her take time to neaten each pile, and riffle through them, sorting paper and parchment scrolls by date and author – Harmodius, Harmodius, Plangere – her fingers skimmed over them. The Queen’s colour improved and her head came up.
‘Ah! I have found Plangere’s papers for sixty-four forty-two.’ Almspend smiled. ‘That wasn’t so hard – I think he was better organised than old Harmodius.’
‘I never knew how much I would miss Harmodius,’ said the Queen. ‘I miss him now.’ The Queen stood. ‘Becca, I was reckless just now, and I am nearly drained. Let us get above ground, to the light, before something evil comes.’
‘The Wild?’ Almspend said, her guards coming up.
‘Older and far more wicked.’ The Queen raised her own wards. ‘Come!’
Almspend swept all of Plangere’s private notes for the year into an ancient willow basket and nodded. ‘After you, my lady.’
The shadows in the corridor were deep. Too deep. It was as if light itself had begun to leach away from the edges of the tunnel, despite the cressets they’d lit as they advanced.
‘There’s something nasty here,’ the Queen said. ‘Mother Mary, stand by me.’
She raised her hand and it again glowed a soft gold. The shadows retreated.
‘What’s happening?’ asked Almspend.
The Queen shook her head. ‘I have no idea,’ she said, and the two of them passed rapidly down the corridor, pursued only by fear. Yet something whispered in the darkness and, behind them, the cressets guttered out without their quenching them. The darkness behind them became absolute – and began to close on them.
The Queen turned and stood her ground. ‘Fiat lux!’ she called.
The light she called blazed around her like a rallied army.
Almspend put her left hand on the Queen’s right and gave her every scrap of potentia she could muster. With her own right, she raised her strongest shield and held it in opposition to the onrushing darkness.
It came like the fall of night – and whatever it was slammed into the workings of the two women and folded them, compacted them, collapsed some, evaded others—
But it did not overwhelm them. It was slowed, and the very slowing of its apparently implacable rush fuelled their resistance. They spoke no words and thought no thoughts, their wills locked together as only two friends of the heart could be locked, and the warm gold light of the Queen’s power rolled, earthy and fresh as sunlight on a summer’s day, into the darkness, where it was swallowed, but not without result.
The darkness pushed past Almspend’s strongest shield, and her right hand vanished in icy cold – and her will was not shattered. She stood her ground, and continued to work, deep in the labyrinths of her white marble palace.
The Queen sighed, and offered her embrace to the darkness.
And it fled.
The two women stood trembling with spirit and suppressed fear for a long set of heartbeats, fast or slow.
‘Oh, Blessed Virgin! Becca – your poor hand.’ said the Queen.
Almspend’s hand was dead white, and the place where the darkness had been turned – the borderline of their victory – was marked as if by sunburn.
Becca Almspend looked at her hand – and knew the name of the malevolence from the stone.
Ash.
Edmund had delivered three shipments of cast bronze tubes, and the odd bells. Apparently they were satisfactory, as he had been abundantly paid. He’d begun to do mint work with his master, and then, on a Thursday evening while he was at mass, thugs attacked the shop, killed two apprentices, and burned his shed. A gang of apprentices had driven them off, killing two.
One of the two was a Galle.
It was odd that out of all the sheds in the yard they might have burned, destroying his had the least effect – he’d made the little bronze gonnes and his apprentices were now working directly for the master in Shed One, setting up the dies to make the new coinage.
He found Master Pye in the yard, crouched over a dead apprentice, a boy only ten years old.
‘Damn Random for running off to the city when we need him here,’ he said. Edmund understood his words, but little of his sense.
And the next day, when a Hoek merchant – one of the richest men in the west, or so men said – came to their forge, all the apprentices rushed about like servants to bring wine and candied fruit. The man wore black head to toe, with gold buttons, gold eyelets, and a gold order of knighthood. He sat, still wearing his black hat, and leaned on the golden hilt of his sword in the master’s office. Edmund entered carrying wine, and Master Pye nodded and extended a hand to him. ‘Stay,’ he said.
The Hoek merchant bowed in his seat. ‘I am Ser Anton Van Der Coent. I have come to see if perhaps my alliance and yours might arrive at an accommodation.’ He smiled with assurance.
Master Pye looked frowsy and ill-tended next to the groomed perfection of the Hoek merchant prince. ‘I have no truck with politics, messire, and I have a shop to run and a great many commissions under way. And you may know that we had troubles yesterday – two apprentices killed.’ Master Pye leaned back, his watery eyes apparently unfocused.
‘Ah, I am very sorry to hear of such a thing. The law in Harndon is not what it once was,’ said Ser Anton. ‘Such incidents are an insult to the majesty of the realm, and a terrible pity.’
Master Pye’s watery eyes seemed to transform. Edmund had seen it in the near darkness of the forge, but never over a tray of sweetmeats. ‘Do you know something of them?’ he asked sharply.
‘I?’ asked Ser Anton. ‘Honestly, messire – I could be offended by such a suggestion. What would I have to do with such things?’
Edmund thought he sounded smug.
‘At any rate, Ser Anton, I have nothing to do with any combine.’ Master Pye nodded. ‘So I must wish you a good day.’
Ser Anton smiled. ‘Are you not the new master of the King’s mint?’ he asked.
Master Pye cocked his head to one side. ‘Ahhh,’ he said. ‘So that’s what this is about.’
‘I’m prepared to offer you an order for seventy full suits of your plate and four hundred helmets,’ Ser Anton said. He took a wax tablet – a beautiful thing, all figured in black enamel and gold – from his belt pouch and flipped it open. ‘I estimate that you would take a little over a year to fill the order even with an expanded shop. I have customers waiting for the order – so I’d pay a premium for immediate work.’ He nodded.
Master Pye scratched behind his ear. ‘You’re talking a hundred thousand florins,’ he said. ‘A fortune.’
Ser Anton smiled. ‘So I am,’ he said. He leaned forward. ‘I would even undertake to guarantee that there would be no further interruptions of your shop’s work.’
Master Pye was nodding along. ‘Of course, I’d have to give up the mint,’ he said.
Ser Anton nodded. ‘So we understand each other.’
Master Pye nodded again. ‘I understand you perfectly. Get out of my shop, before I kill you with my own hands.’
Despite being armed with a beautiful sword and facing a small, hunched-over man with watery eyes, the Hoek flinched. ‘You wouldn’t dare. I can buy you—’
Pye barked his curious laugh. ‘You just found ye can’t buy me. Now get out of my shop.’
The man shrugged. He rose elegantly, and walked to the door like a great black and gold cat. ‘In the end, you know, you’d have been better this way,’ he said. But something about his smoothness was broken, for Edmund. Now he appeared vulgar.
When he was gone, Pye turned to Edmund. ‘Stop all work,’ he said. ‘All the boys, girls, everyone in the yard. But listen, Edmund—’
Edmund stopped at the door.
‘If I die suddenly, you keep the mint going. Understand?’ Master Pye looked more than a little mad.
But Edmund nodded.
There were almost forty of them in the yard, with shop servants, house servants, apprentices and journeymen together.
Master Pye stood before them on a small crate. ‘Listen up,’ he said.
Then he was silent, and looked at them.
‘We’re in a war,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to explain our war, because it’s like a fight in the dark, and without a flash of lightning we don’t even know who we’re fighting. We’re fighting for our King – that much for certain – but we’re not defending land, or keeping our churches free of the infidel. It’s hard to explain exactly what we’re doing.’
He looked at them, his mild eyes more curious than inflamed.
‘This kingdom endured a mighty blow this spring, from the Wild,’ he said. ‘And now – unless we have a few successes – it looks as if we’ll lose the fur trade, and that’s a blow. And men are trying to forge the King’s currency – which is like robbing the King – and that’s a blow, too.’ He shrugged. ‘We’re going to make new coins for the King. It may not seem to you lads and lasses like some gallant last stand on a stricken field under a silken flag – but by Christ’s blood, my young ones, it is. If we fail here, and God send we do not, if we fail at this, the King takes another blow. And eventually it will all fall apart, and we’ll have nothing.’ He stood very straight. ‘When the world goes to shit the great do well enough in their fancy armour and their strong castles. It’s we who suffer. The men in the middle. In cities and towns, making things and trading things. What do we eat? How do we defend ourselves?’ He pursed his lips. ‘When I was your age, I was sometimes known to say, “Fuck the King.”’
That got a guilty titter from the apprentices.
‘Aye – for a bit I was even a Jack.’
Hush.
‘But the Jacks haven’t given us anything, and the King gives us law. So we’re in a fight. For law. The law that keeps us and the commons in the game. Not slaves. Not serfs. Now – in the next month, we’re going to be attacked. I’m guessing, but it’s going to be rough. Maids attacked when they go to buy milk. Boys beaten on their way to the Abbey for letters. Fire in the yard.’ He looked around. ‘We’ll have to work all day and stand guard, too.’ He paused. ‘I pay the highest wages in Harndon, and I’ll add some hard-lying money. Who’s in?’
Everyone was in.
‘They’re brave today,’ Pye said to his journeyman. ‘Wait a week or two, when a few of them are dead, and then we’ll see.’
Two days later, thugs attacked a party of girls going to the well behind the Abbey at the end of their square. Lizz Person had her face slashed, and only the chance interruption of a knight of Saint Thomas bringing winter clothes to the poor at the church saved the girls from rape or slavery.
The young knight took wine with Edmund and Master Pye in the shop’s office.
‘Ser Ricar Irksbane,’ he said. His eyes twinkled.
Out in the yard, a dozen apprentices jostled each other to sharpen his sword.
‘We all owe you our thanks,’ Edmund said, as well as he could. The worst of being on the knife edge between adulthood and childhood was in dealing with mature adults, he’d found. So he stammered more than he wanted to, and his bow was clumsy.
Ser Ricar was young, bluff-faced, and had the largest nose that Edmund could remember seeing on a man. He looked like a caricature of Saint Nicolas – an armed Saint Nicolas with broad shoulders and thighs the size of most people’s waists.
The heavy young man drank two cups of wine while his sword was being sharpened, and beyond his name and some beaming smiles said nothing.
Master Pye laughed eventually. ‘Ser knight, are you perchance under a vow of silence?’
The twinkling eyes blinked, and Ser Ricar rose and bowed.
Master Pye nodded. ‘Ser Ricar, have you by any chance been set to watch over us?’
Ser Ricar smiled into his wine, and just for a moment he looked a good deal sharper than he had a moment before. Then he looked the master in the eye and shrugged. And grinned like a village idiot.
Edmund walked him to the gate, and the knight nodded cordially to him and produced a slip of parchment from his belt purse. He pressed it into Edmund’s hands and smiled. Edmund noted that the young knight’s eyes were everywhere. They never stopped moving, now that the two of them were outside.
He saw the knight out into the street with his newly sharpened sword, and then he opened the parchment.
It said Be on your guard.
Edmund gave it to Master Pye, who nodded. ‘Bad times,’ he said. ‘The Queen’s handmaid is to be banished from court.’
Through the local girls employed in the Tower, all the neighbourhood knew how things went with the royals. Edmund sighed. ‘What can we do?’ he asked.
Master Pye all but snarled, ‘Nothing.’ Then he sat heavily. ‘I hate all this. I like metal. People are fools.’ He poured himself a cup of hippocras and splashed some into another cup for Edmund. ‘What men call politics is, to me, foolery. All this – why doesn’t the King banish the Galles? Why doesn’t he stand by his wife?’ He shrugged. ‘He’s my friend, but in this he’s a damn fool.’ He sighed again. ‘I’m writing out a note for Master Ailwin, and another for Ser Gerald Random. Talk to Random’s wife – she’s got all the sense in that house anyway. He’s hared off on some wild scheme, and she’ll know when he’s back. If the knights of Saint Thomas are standing with us, things are not as bad as they might be. But we need to pull together, or the Galles will take us all separately.
Blanche Gold curtsied to her Queen and held out a basket of clean and perfectly pressed linen. The Queen had a book of hours open on her lap and was sitting in the full, if thin, light of the winter sun as it blazed through the mullioned window of her private solar. Her hair was down, and it blazed like a bronze-brown sun around her.
‘Speak to Diota,’ the Queen said in a friendly voice. She knew Blanche – which was to say, she knew of the girl’s existence, knew she was pretty and trustworthy and
knew, too, that she had had some trouble at the hands of the Gallish squires. But the Queen didn’t speak directly to servants – she let Diota handle that.
So she sat, reading, for a whole minute while the pretty blond girl knelt in front of her.
‘Sweeting?’ the Queen murmured.
Blanche reached into her basket and handed the Queen a beautifully scented handkerchief. Folded within it was a note.
The Queen found that her hands were shaking. But she unfolded the stiff parchment and her heart rose in her breast. ‘Ahh. Thank you, child,’ the Queen breathed.
Blanche rose, her duty done, and slipped away. And an hour later, when a Gallish squire tried to pin her to a wall and get his hand down the front of her kirtle, she thought, we will bury you. She tried to put a knee in his groin but his wrestling master had covered that. So she settled for letting him put his hand into the top of her dress, and then rammed the index finger of her left hand into his nostril and ripped with her nail as her mother had taught her.
Then she slipped through his arms before the fountain of his blood could foul her nice gown.
She skipped a little as she went down the long palace corridors to the kitchens. A good day.
Lady Emota was afraid when two of the Gallish squires cornered her. And less than relieved when they parted and the Sieur de Rohan stepped between them.
‘Ah,’ he said with a bow. ‘The most beautiful of the Queen’s ladies.’
She blushed. ‘My lord is too gracious.’
‘I could not be too gracious to a flower such as you.’ He leaned over her, raised her hand and kissed it. ‘Is there by any chance some man at this court you detest, so that I can kill him and win your love?’
She fought off a smile. He was so insistent – she felt her heart beating twenty to the dozen. She knew the Queen hated him, but then, the Queen treated her as if she was none too bright and her own mother said the Queen was merely jealous of her looks.
‘My lord, I am too young to have such enemies. And I fear no one,’ she said. ‘But the respect of a knight such as yourself is – a worthy—’ She was trying to think of a pretty speech.