Joe Abercrombie - Last Argument of Kings

“No,” said Jezal.

Bayaz fixed him with a brooding stare. “Your Majesty?”

But Jezal refused to be overawed. It had been becoming clear for some time that if he allowed the Magus to rule him on every issue then he would never escape from under his boot. He might have seen Bayaz make a man explode with a thought, but he was hardly likely to do it to the King of the Union before his own Closed Council. Not with the Gurkish breathing down all their necks.

“I do not intend to give up the greater part of my capital to the Union’s oldest enemy without giving battle. We will defend Casamir’s Wall, and fight for every stride of ground.”

Varuz glanced across at Hoff, and the Chamberlain raised his eyebrows by the tiniest fraction. “Er… of course, your Majesty. Every stride.” There was an uncomfortable silence, the displeasure of the First of the Magi hanging over the group as heavily as the storm clouds hung over the city.

“Does my Inquisition have anything to contribute?” croaked Jezal, doing his best to mount a diversion.

Sult’s eyes darted coldly up to his. “Of course, your Majesty. The Gurkish love of intrigue is well known. We have no doubt that there are already spies within the walls of Adua. Perhaps within the Agriont itself. All citizens of Kantic origin are now being interned. My Inquisitors are working day and night in the House of Questions. Several spies have already confessed.”

Marovia snorted. “So we are expected to suppose that the Gurkish love of intrigue does not extend to the hiring of white-skinned agents?”

“We are at war!” hissed Sult, giving the High Justice a deadly glare. “The very sovereignty of our nation is at risk! This is no time for your blather about freedom, Marovia!”

“On the contrary, this is precisely the time!”

The two old men bickered on, straining everyone’s frayed nerves to breaking point. Bayaz, meanwhile, had sunk back into his chair and folded his arms, watching Jezal with an expression of calm consideration which was, if anything, even more fearsome than his frown. Jezal felt the worry weighing ever heavier upon him. However you looked at things, he was teetering on the verge of having the briefest and most disastrous reign in Union history.

“I am sorry that I had to send for your Majesty,” piped Gorst, in his girlish little voice.

“Of course, of course.” The clicking of Jezal’s polished boot-heels echoed angrily around them.

“There is only so much that I can do.”

“Of course.”

Jezal shoved open the double doors with both hands. Terez sat bolt upright in the midst of the gilded chamber beyond, glaring at him down her nose in that manner with which he had become so infuriatingly familiar. As though he were an insect in her salad. Several Styrian ladies looked up, and then back to their tasks. Chests and boxes cluttered the room, clothes were being neatly packed within. Every impression was given that the Queen of the Union was planning to leave the capital, and without so much as informing her husband.

Jezal ground his already aching teeth. He was tormented by a disloyal Closed Council, a disloyal Open Council, and a disloyal populace. The poisonous disloyalty of his wife was almost too much to bear. “What the hell is this?”

“I and my ladies can hardly assist you in your war with the Emperor.” Terez turned her flawless head smoothly away from him. “We are returning to Talins.”

“Impossible!” hissed Jezal. “A Gurkish army of many thousands is bearing down upon the city! My people are fleeing Adua in droves and those that remain are a whisker from sliding into outright panic! Your leaving now would send entirely the wrong message! I cannot allow it!”

“Her Majesty is in no way involved!” snapped the Countess Shalere, gliding across the polished floor towards him.

As though Jezal had not enough to worry about with the Queen herself, he was now obliged to bandy words with her companions. “You forget yourself,” he snarled at her.

“It is you who forgets!” She took a step towards him, her face twisted. “You forget that you are a bastard son, and a scarred one at—”

The back of Jezal’s hand cracked sharply into her sneering mouth and sent her reeling back with an ungainly gurgle. She tripped over her dress and collapsed on the floor, one shoe flying from her flailing foot and off into the corner of the room.

“I am a King, and in my own palace. I refuse to be spoken to in this manner by a glorified lady’s maid.” The voice came out, flat, cold, and frighteningly commanding. It scarcely sounded like his own, but who else’s could it be? He was the only man in the room. “I see that I have been far too generous with you, and that you have mistaken my generosity for weakness.” The eleven ladies stared at him, and at their fallen comrade, crumpled on the ground with one hand to her bloody mouth. “If any of your witches should desire to depart these troubled shores, I will arrange passage for them, and even pull an oar myself with a light heart. But you, your Majesty, will be going nowhere.”

Terez had leaped up from her seat and was glowering at him, body rigid. “You heartless brute—” she began to hiss.

“We may both wholeheartedly wish it were otherwise!” he roared over her, “but we are married! The time to raise objections to my parentage, or my person, or to any other facet of our situation, was before you became Queen of the Union! Despise me all you wish, Terez, but you… go… nowhere.” And Jezal swept the dumbstruck ladies with a baleful glare, turned on his polished heel and stalked from the airy salon.

Damn it but his hand hurt.

Dawn was coming, a grey rumour, the faintest touch of brightness around the solemn outline of the walls of Carleon. The stars had all faded into a stony sky, but the moon still hung there, just above the tree-tops, seeming almost close enough to try an arrow at.

West had not closed his eyes all night, and had passed into that strange realm of twitchy, dreamlike wakefulness that comes beyond exhaustion. Some time in the silent darkness, after all the orders had been given, he had sat by the light of a single lamp to write a letter to his sister. To vomit up excuses. To demand forgiveness. He had sat, he could not have said for how long, with the pen over the paper, but the words had simply not come. He had wanted to say all that he felt, but when it came to it, he felt nothing. The warm taverns of Adua, cards in the sunny courtyard. Ardee’s one-sided smile. It all seemed a thousand years ago.

The Northmen were already busy, clipping at the grass in the shadow of the walls, the clicking of their shears a strange echo of the gardeners in the Agriont, shaving a circle a dozen strides across down to the roots. The ground, he supposed, on which the duel would take place. The ground where, in no more than an hour or two, the fate of the North would be decided. Very much like a fencing circle, except that it might soon be sprayed with blood.

“A barbaric custom,” muttered Jalenhorm, his thoughts evidently taking a similar course.

“Really?” growled Pike. “I was just now thinking what a civilised one it is.”

“Civilised? Two men butchering each other before a crowd?”

“Better than a whole crowd butchering each other. A problem solved with only one man killed? That’s a war ended well, to my mind.”

Jalenhorm shivered and blew into his cupped hands. “Still. A lot to hang on two men fighting one another. What if Ninefingers loses?”

“Then I suppose that Bethod will go free,” said West, unhappily.

“But he invaded the Union! He caused the deaths of thousands! He deserves to be punished!”