“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.
THREE
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.