Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Thank you.” And I meant it. “Keep the feast warm for me.” I slapped a hand to Barras’s shoulder, finding it hard to hate him any more. “I’ll come along later, if I can still walk when the Red Queen’s finished with me.”

“What have you done?”

But I was already striding away. “Later!”

Grandmother’s court was not in session when I arrived beneath the great doors to her palace. Two lords, Grast and Gren, stood waiting on the steps along with a solid, dark-haired knight with an impressive moustache-Sir Roger, I thought. All three favoured me with dark looks. I don’t think they recognized me but I had bad blood with Lord Grast’s older brother, the duke, so I ignored the trio and went on up without a word.

Before the queen’s doors the same plumed giant who had admitted me on my return from the North-or perhaps his cousin-tilted his head down at me and said he would see my request for audience carried to my grandmother.

I sat in the shade of one of the great portico columns and waited, watching the elite guardsmen swelter in their fire-bronze on the sundrenched steps. The courtyard before us lay wide and empty, as blank as my future. I wasn’t sure even what the night might bring. Could I really stand to watch Barras and Lisa’s reunion? I briefly considered calling in on my father, but Ballessa informed me that the cardinal had taken to his bed a week earlier. Ill, she said. Ill on wine I suspected . . .

The door behind me slammed and turning I saw Uncle Hertet pushing aside the guardsman although the man had already stepped sharply out of his way. Lord Grast and Lord Gren were quickly by his side as the heir-apparent, or as he was more commonly known: the heir-apparentlynot, stormed toward the steps.

“If she wasn’t my mother . . .” Hertet smacked his fist into his palm. It might have looked menacing if he weren’t a rather paunchy man of modest build in his fifties, gone to grey. His mother I was sure could still put him over her knee and deliver the soundest of spankings. Not to mention fell him with a punch that would leave few teeth for his dotage. “This city needs a king, not a damned steward. And it needs a king who will stay here and do his duty by it, not swan off on some wild ex-pedition. These are troubled times, boys, troubled times. A queen who leaves her throne empty in troubled times is practically abdicating-” My uncle spotted me lounging in the shade. “You! One of Reymond’s boys?” He pointed a ringed finger my way as if being his brother’s son were an accusation.

“I-”

“Martus? Darin? Damned if I can tell you apart. All of you the same, and none of you like your father.” Hertet went past me, flanked by the two lords with Sir Roger at his heels. “Still, what did Reymond expect ploughing such a foreign field? He wasn’t the only plough, that’s for sure.” His voice carried back across the courtyard as he walked away, trailing off as the distance grew. “They can’t help it, these Indus girls . . .”

I found myself on my feet, having got there swiftly and without conscious decision. My hand had found the hilt of my knife. The tide of angry words rising to defend my mother’s honour had yet to leave my mouth only because they were still battling to organize a coherent sentence.

“Prince Jalan.”

I looked up. The overly large guardsman loomed over me. “The queen will see you now.”

I shot a scowl at the retreating backs of Hertet and his cronies-one that in a just world would have lit them up like torches-and brushed myself down. You don’t keep the Red Queen waiting.

Four guardsmen escorted me into the empty throne room, gloomy despite the day blazing through high windows, striated by their bars. Lamps burned around the dais and Grandmother sat ensconced in Red March’s highest chair. Two of her advisors stood further back in the shadows, Marth, wide and solid, Willow, whip-thin and sour. Of the Silent Sister, no sign.

“You’ve changed, Grandson.” Grandmother’s regard could pin a man to the floor. I felt the weight of it settle on me. Even so I had time to be surprised by her acknowledgement of our relationship. “The boy who set out has not returned. Where did you lose him?”

“Some wayside tavern, highness.” In Hell was the true answer but no part of me wanted to talk about that.

“And you have something to report, Jalan? I’m sure you didn’t request an audience before the throne without good cause. Your northern friends eluded my soldiers. Perhaps you encountered them again on your travels?”

I glanced left and right, seeking the Silent Sister. Did Grandmother already know exactly what I’d been up to from the moment I left the city? Had my great-aunt’s silence revealed it as prophecy before the march of days turned it into my personal history?

“I found them. I recovered the key. I returned it to Vermillion.”

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 Great-uncle 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, Great-uncle 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.