Herbie Brennan - Ruler of the Realm

He shrugged again, staring at his feet, and said, ‘So talk.’

‘Do you think I might sit down?’ Anais asked lightly. She gave a little smile.

‘Nowhere to sit,’ Henry muttered. Which was true enough. The only chair in his room – an ancient sagging armchair – was so buried under junk it was scarcely visible.

‘I could sit beside you on the bed.’ Anais tilted her head to one side quizzically.

‘I don’t want you sitting beside me on the bed!’ Henry snapped. He suddenly felt furiously angry and fought to control it.

The smile disappeared. Anais said, ‘All right, I’ll stand. And I’ll talk. At least until you feel like it. I mostly wanted to say I’m sorry.’

It was the last thing he expected. He was so startled his anger disappeared and he actually looked at her.

She licked her lips and went on, ‘Henry, I know how difficult this must be for you -’

‘No, you don’t,’ Henry said quickly, his anger flaring again. ‘No you bloody, bloody don’t!’ He looked down at his feet again. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to cry.

‘No, I don’t,’ Anais agreed. Part of the trouble was she looked so pretty. And so young. And she was so nice. That was the real problem. He wanted to hate her. He really, really wanted to hate her and she was so nice he just couldn’t. Nicer than his mother, that was for sure. He couldn’t imagine what Anais saw in her.

‘Of course, I don’t,’ Anais was saying. ‘But I do know you must be feeling awful. I wish you weren’t, but there’s not much I can do about that. But, Henry, running away isn’t the answer.’

‘I didn’t run away,’ Henry said. ‘I just stayed over at Charlie’s.’ He glared at her defiantly. ‘I’ve done it before.’

‘Henry,’ Anais said patiently, ‘you didn’t stay at Charlie’s. It was the first place we checked. She said you wanted to stay, but they had cousins or something and there wasn’t a spare bed. She was worried about you too.’

Bet she was, Henry thought. He’d just told her he’d been seeing fairies. What he hated was the way Anais said we as if she and Mum were an item. Which they were, of course, but he didn’t need to have his nose rubbed in it.

‘Did you call Dad?’ he asked.

Anais blinked. ‘Not right away,’ she admitted reluctantly.

‘Why not?’ Henry demanded. ‘Didn’t you even think I might be staying with him?’

Anais said, ‘But you weren’t?’

‘No, I wasn’t, but that’s not the point. The point is you all got so worried and none of you, not Mum, not you, thought the first thing you should do was ring up Dad. Well, did you?’

Now Anais was looking down at her feet. ‘No.’ She looked up suddenly. ‘That was wrong. You’re right, Henry: that was very wrong. But sometimes people just… do the wrong things. We were worried. We didn’t know what had happened. You were gone for three days and we were frantic. Your mother loves you, Henry. I love you -’

‘Don’t you say you -’ Henry began furiously, then stopped. ‘I wasn’t away for three days.’

Anais moved across and sat beside him on the bed anyway. She looked into his eyes and reached over to take both his hands. ‘Yes, you were, Henry. That’s the whole point. We were out of our minds with worry – everybody was. Charlotte said you walked her home and then went off to go home yourself. She thought you caught the last bus. But that was Tuesday. Today’s Saturday.’

‘Today’s not Saturday,’ Henry whispered. For no reason he was suddenly feeling afraid.

‘What was it?’ Anais asked him quietly. ‘Were you doing drugs?’

‘I wasn’t doing drugs!’ Henry hissed. ‘I’ve never done drugs!’ He couldn’t have been away three days. It was just last night he’d missed the bus. Just last night.

There was something wrong. Not just confusion. Henry blinked several times and shook his head to clear it. He felt as if he really had been doing drugs. Something was happening to reality. The whole room was swimming around him. He looked at his hands to try to steady himself. They were clasped in Anais’s small, well-groomed hands with bright red varnish on her nails. But his hands in her hands were disappearing.

Henry watched with horrified fascination. His hands were crumbling into tiny sparkles like a special effect. He felt a growing nausea. He raised his eyes to look at Anais’s face. It was fading to white. And suddenly Henry was fading too.

He thought he must be dying.

The Imperial Suite was spacious and luxurious and Blue hated it. The chairs were too large, the bed was too soft, the tapestries were too rich.

The memories were too painful.

Everything reminded her of her father. She kept thinking she could catch a hint of his smell, the sound of his movements. Once, in the night, she thought she heard the low gurgle of his laughter.

She could see the bloodstain on the carpet, even though the servants had scrubbed out every particle, then, at her insistence, replaced the floor covering completely. But tradition dictated the replacement was the same colour and pattern and the bloodstain was still there, spreading liquidly in her mind.

The Queen must live in the Imperial Suite: that was tradition too. But she needed to think. How could she be expected to think when she saw her father everywhere she turned? She had to get away.

On impulse she triggered the secret panel Comma discovered during the few days he played at being Emperor. It opened on to a passageway that had offered an emergency escape to Emperors down the generations. In the old days they’d been fleeing for their lives. She was running from a ghost. Blue stepped inside and the panel closed behind her.

The passageway emerged on the edge of the Imperial Island beside the broad sweep of the river. It was growing dark now and she sat on some rocks watching the lights come on across the city. Closer to hand, torchlit traffic was milling over Loman Bridge. There were tens of thousands of her subjects out there and she’d never felt so alone. A wrong decision could leave so many of them dead. What was she going to do? What was the right thing to do?

A large patch of moss slipped off the rock beside her and splatted on the ground with an audible thump. ‘Damn!’ it muttered crossly.

Blue was on her feet in an instant, one hand scrabbling in the folds of her dress for the lethal little stimlus she kept as her last line of defence. It was stupid, stupid, stupid not to have alerted the guards where she was going, but she still wasn’t accustomed to being Queen.

‘Is that you, Blue?’

She strained her eyes in the half-light. The voice was terribly familiar. ‘Flapwazzle?’ She blinked. ‘Flapwazzle?’

‘I cannot tell a lie,’ Flapwazzle said truthfully. He began to undulate across the ground towards her.

For some reason the burdens of State responsibility fell away and she felt a small bubble of delight welling in her stomach. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘Gathering the omron.’ It was something endolgs did at sunset. Blue had never really understood it. Flapwazzle said, ‘When I was full, I fell asleep. Didn’t think I’d find you here. Or anybody, really.’

Her problems came flooding back. ‘I was trying to make up my mind about something.’

She thought he might ask her what – and wasn’t sure she could tell him – but he only said, ‘Must be tricky being Queen.’

It was almost funny. That was the very word for it – tricky. Not one of her courtiers or advisors would have used it, but that was the word exactly. For the first time in days she actually grinned.

‘That’s it, Flapwazzle. As tricky as it gets.’ How did you decide what your uncle was up to? Tricky. How did you choose between war and peace? Tricky.