"Either that or she swallowed something very big and round."

"Christ!"

"Congratulations is what most people say."

"Well . . . that too." Me an uncle? My Micha? I felt a sudden need to sit down. "I've always thought I'd make a great uncle. Terrible. But great."

"You should come with me, Jalan. Recover from your ordeal and all that."

"Maybe." Watching Darin and Micha play happy families was not how I antic.i.p.ated spending my first few days back in civilization. "But right now I need to see Father."

"Back on your travels so soon, Jal?" Darin c.o.c.ked his head, puzzled.

"No . . . why?" He wasn't making sense.

"Father's in Roma. The pope summoned him for an audience and Grandmother said he had to go."

"h.e.l.l and fire." I had questions that wanted answers and I might have squeezed them out of Father more easily than elsewhere. "Well . . . look, I'm going to get cleaned up and-wait, you didn't throw out my clothes, did you?"

"Me?" Darin laughed. "Why would I go touching your peac.o.c.k feathers? It's all there as far as I know. Unless Ballessa took it upon herself to clear your rooms out. Father certainly won't have got around to giving any instructions. Anyhow, I'd best go. I'm late as it is." He motioned for his man to start hauling the chest again. "Visit us when you get the chance-and don't rile Martus, he's in a foul mood. Grandmother appointed Micha and Alain's elder brother, the new Lord DeVeer, to captain the infantry army that's been put together these past few months. And Martus had already decided the post was his. Then a few days ago some other calamity or indignity. I wasn't really paying attention . . . something about a huge bill from a merchant. Ollus I think the name was."

"Maeres Allus?"

"Could be." Darin turned at the doorway. "Good to see you alive, little brother." A wave of his hand and he was off and gone. I stood, watching, until the carriage took them from sight. He hadn't even asked where I'd been . . .

Alphons kept his gaze front and centre at the door. The less ancient guard, Double, a dark fellow with bags beneath his eyes, watched me with undisguised curiosity. I let the insolence slip. It was good to see that at least one person found the returned adventurer fascinating.

TWENTY.

With Father gone to Roma, Darin shacked up in his country retreat with my sweet little Micha, and Martus on the warpath over being presented with my posthumous gambling debts, I had no immediate family to regale with the saga of my accidental exile.

In the hope that Martus might actually pay Maeres what I owed before he discovered I wasn't dead I kept a low profile in the house. I reinstalled myself in my rooms and called a couple of the housemaids to scrub my back and incidentals while I had a much needed bath. The water soon turned black, so I had Mary go heat up some more while Jayne helped me select an outfit for court. All in all it had proved a disappointing homecoming so far and even the maids didn't seem as pleased to see me as they should be. I gave Jayne a little squeeze and you'd think she was a princess for all the offence she took! And that set me thinking about the last princess I met, the striking Katherine ap Scorron, owner of a particularly tempting behind and a vicious left knee. Memory of how she'd deployed that left knee put me right off my game and I sent Jayne off back to her duties, telling her I'd manage to dress myself.

Nothing felt quite right, as if the palace were another man's boots I'd pulled on by mistake. I went to the Gla.s.s Chamber, a room where some previous cardinal had gathered a collection of gla.s.sware from the sunken cities of Venice and Atlantis, all displayed in tall cabinets. I'd avoided the room for years since the incident with the egg fight where somehow Martus and Darin escaped scot free and conspired to have me take the blame. Now, though, I paced among the old cabinets and their forgotten contents gleaming in all the colours between red and violet, led on by some old memory and the taste of blood.

Crouching in a corner, I pulled away a piece of loose skirting board, and there, glowing in a small hole in the plaster sat the rune-set cone of orichalc.u.m that had fallen from Mother's hand as Edris Dean killed her. When they released me from the care of the surgeon and his nurses, and when at last I had my first opportunity to be alone, I went to the Star Room, retrieved the cone from beneath the couch where it had been kicked, and came here to hide it. The thought that Garyus might want it back never troubled me, and he never asked after it-perhaps because to do so would mean accusing me or my mother of theft. I had hidden it away, and pushed all thought of the murder from my mind: the cone, its hiding place, the whole terrible business. Until Kara's blood magic woke those memories.

"Mine." I s.n.a.t.c.hed the thing up, cold in my fist. The light pulsed through my hand, making the flesh rosy and the bones of my fingers into dark bars. I wrapped it in a handkerchief and thrust it deep into a pocket.

I stood, but kept my place, staring sightless into the corner. I say Kara's magic, because it was her spell that brought those dead recollections back to life, her work that disturbed their peace and set them playing over and over upon the inside of my skull like some monstrous shadow play . . . but the key had started it. Truly it had been Loki's key that unlocked all this-against advice I'd used the key and opened a door onto the past that I couldn't close. I wondered then just how hard it might be to close the door Snorri had it in mind to open.

I replaced the skirting board and for the next hour paced the corridors of the Roma Hall. Sleep did not come easy that night.

I needed to speak to someone who might understand what had happened to me. I considered going to Garyus but seeking advice from a man who hadn't left his room in sixty years and had never been outside the palace walls seemed foolish. Besides, the power lay with his sisters. After half a day reflecting on the matter I decided to confront the non-silent one. I strapped on my dress sword before going. The door guard would take if off me but Grandmother would notice the scabbard and she liked to see her sp.a.w.n go armed.

The walk to the Inner Palace was nearly long enough to erode my store of courage to the point where I turned back. Another hundred yards or so would have done it, but instead I found myself climbing the steps to the grand doors.

Ten of the queen's personal guard flanked the topmost steps, enduring the heat in their half-plate. The knight at the door towered over me, made taller by his high helm and crimson plume. "Prince Jalan." He bowed his head a fraction.

I waited for the "but you're dead," ready to be irritated, and found myself disappointed when it didn't come. "I wish to see my grandmother." She always held a noon court on Sunday after church. I'd gone to the Roma ma.s.s hoping to see her there, but she must have attended her private chapel, or skipped the whole tedious business as I normally do. Bishop James had conducted the ma.s.s at the Hall and offered thanks for the return of a lost sheep to the fold. I would have preferred "conquering lion to the pride" but at least it made my return official and meant Maeres couldn't have me quietly murdered.

"Court is in session, my prince." And the knight struck the door for admittance, stepping aside to let me past.

The Red Queen's court is unlike others in the region. King Yollar of Rhone holds a sumptuous court where aristocrats gather in their hundreds to slight and bicker and display the latest fashions. In our protectorate of Adora the duke hosts philosophers and musicians in his halls, with lords and ladies attending from across his realm to hear them. In Cantanlona the earl is famed for debauched court parties that last for a week and more, draining the towns around his capital of wine. Grandmother's court is more dour. A businesslike affair where fools are suffered only briefly and the sparkle of a new gown is seldom seen, there being no audience for such.

"Prince Jalan Kendeth." The court officer, Mantal Drews announced me, clad in the same sombre greys he wore the day I left.

The dozen or so attendees turned my way, heavily outnumbered by the royal guard hulking around the margins in their fire-bronze mail. These latter spared me not a glance. No surprise showed on the faces pointed in my direction, not even a whisper of it muttered behind fans-news travels fast in the palace. The word would have rippled out through guards and servants overnight, confirmed that morning by the highborn who saw me at the service.

The queen herself did not look up, her attention occupied by a fellow in a purple robe too heavy for the season, hunkered before the throne and making some or other impa.s.sioned plea. Two of Grandmother's sour old retainers flanked her, one a bony stick of a woman and the other a stout, grey-haired matron in her fifties, both in drab black shawls. I glanced around for the Silent Sister but saw no sign of her.

Gathering my resolve, I strode into the midst of the throne room, old anxieties queuing at my shoulder. I did my best to present the mask that had served me so well for so long: bluff Prince Jal, hero of the pa.s.s, a devil-may-care man's man. I lie as well with my expression and body language as I do with my tongue and like to think I carry off the deception rather nicely. The courtiers, or rather I should call them today's supplicants, for none of the aristocracy kept at court past the completion of their business, gave me s.p.a.ce. I recognized a few of them: minor lords, the Baron of Strombol down from the shadow of the Scorron Aups, a gem merchant from Norrow whose daughter I'd known rather well for a night or two . . . the usual.

"And there he is!" The man before the throne concluded his pet.i.tion by raising his voice past the point of decorum and pointing his finger directly at me.

"You have me at a disadvantage, sir." I offered him a tolerant smile, pretty sure we'd not met before, though something about him looked familiar.

"You'll get no advantage from me, Prince Jalan!" He looked to be about thirty, a solid fellow, shorter than me but wider, somewhat brutal in the cheekbones, and red-faced with anger. "I heard of your return and left my regiments immediately to discover the truth." He started to unbuckle his empty scabbard-which caused the guard to settle hands upon hilts. "I demand satisfaction. I demand it now." He threw his scabbard at my feet in the old way, making his challenge. "Fight me, and your reappearance can be a brief but swiftly corrected error on your obituary."

"Have a care, Lord Gregori." Grandmother from the throne, her voice low with warning.

The fellow swung round and offered a deep bow. "Meaning no disrespect, your majesty."

Fortunately I've had plenty of experience in avoiding duels and Grandmother had just handed me the key to exit this one.

"I don't pretend to know you, sirrah." I let mild outrage colour my tone. "But since you appear to know me then you will also understand that I am a prince of Red March, a man whom if ill fortune befell this royal house might one day have to carry the burden of the crown." I didn't mention quite how many other heirs would have to die to make that happen. "As a veteran of the Scorron campaigns my heart compels me to meet any challenge to my honour with cold steel." I saw him rise at that. "However, duty is a higher calling, and directs me to draw your attention to Gholloth's Edict of Year Six. No prince of the realm shall lower themselves to meet the challenge of mere aristocrats." I paraphrased the original and added in the "mere" to rub salt in the wound, but I knew my royal decrees in this area better than any lesson my tutors ever tried to teach me. In short he was beneath me-of insufficient rank to challenge a prince to combat.

For a moment I let him seethe, blood darkening his face until I thought he must either attack me or start bleeding from the eyes. I would have been happy to have him jump me and be cut down by the guard for his impudence, but sadly he drew a deep and shuddering breath before turning his back on me.

The pounding of my heart subsided to a point where I could hear myself talk and, now angry at being confronted in front of the court, I kicked his scabbard back at him.

"Your name, sir, and line!" I knew of no Lord Gregori.

He made a slow turn, empty hands flexing. "Lord DeVeer of Carnth, commander in chief of the Seventh Infantry. And you . . . prince, you deflowered my sister Lisa DeVeer, an act of unconscionable violation that drew my younger brother, Alain, to his death."

"Ah . . ." I understood where the familiarity came from. He had his brother's looks. The same overly hard skull too, no doubt. "Deflowered you say? Hardly, sir! They deflowered me if anything! I've never known sisters with such appet.i.te!"

Again Gregori seemed on the very edge of throwing himself upon me, his rage so hot it left him unable to form words-then suddenly he lowered his hands.

"They? They you say? They! Your own brother's wife . . . my little Micha?"

"No!" I yelped the word before regaining control. "No, don't be more of a fool than you have to be, Lord DeVeer. Sharal of course." A man shouldn't name names but there were only three sisters in question. I couldn't help looking away for a moment to picture the lovely Sharal, hair reaching her hips, tallest of the three, always wanting to be on top . . .

"Sharal . . ." He said it with a tone of satisfaction that drew my attention back to him. Of the reactions I expected, "pleased" was very far down the list.

I flicked my fingers at the man, shooing him toward the bronze doors. "If your business is complete, DeVeer . . ."

"Oh don't worry, Prince Jalan. My business is complete. I shall retire." He bowed to Grandmother. "With your permission, highness." And receiving the nod he bent to scoop up his scabbard-a nice piece of work decorated with plates of black iron. "I will however pause at the city home of Count Isen. You may know the man?"

I didn't grace him with a reply. Everyone knew of Count Isen, the reputation he'd cut for himself down south had spread even beyond Red March's borders. In the lands he held for the crown his private army hara.s.sed smugglers and even pursued pirates across the sea to the very sh.o.r.es of the Corsair Isles.

Gregori offered me a curt bow. "Sharal is now engaged to be married to the good count. I'm sure when he hears how you pressed your lechery upon my sister, leaving her no options for resistance, that he too will wish for satisfaction of his honour . . . and I think you'll find that when a count comes knocking you will no longer be able to hide behind the late King Gholloth's skirts."

Gregori made a final bow to the throne and strode out.

It was only Gregori's departure that led my eyes to the Silent Sister, standing in the deepest shadow to the left of the great bronze doors, bone-pale and wrapped in cloths that looked to have been applied wet and dried in place like a wrinkled second skin.

"So, Reymond's boy." My grandmother's voice turned me back to the throne. "Where have you been?"

I looked up at her, a yard above me on the dais, and met her gaze. Alica sat there-the same girl from the Castle of Ameroth, who opened the siege with what she called the mercy killing of her youngest sister and ended it bathed in blood amid the ruin of her enemy-with a little help from her eldest sister of course. True, the pa.s.sage of five decades and more beneath the Red March sun had sunk her flesh about her bones, scorched her skin into tight wrinkles, but the same ruthless calculation lay behind her eyes. I would get nothing from her if she thought me weak. Nothing if she caught scent of my fear.

"Lost your tongue again, child?" Grandmother narrowed her eyes, thin lips thinning still further into a line of disapproval.

I swallowed and tried to remember every hurt I'd suffered since the night I left the city, each hardship, each unnecessary moment of terror.

"I've been where my great aunt sent me." I swung round to point at the Silent Sister by the entrance. She raised her brows at that and offered me a mirthless grin, her blind eye almost glowing in the shadows of her face.

"Hmmm." A rumble deep in the Red Queen's throat. "Out." She waved at the people behind me.

Lord, lady, merchant, or baron, they knew well enough not to protest or delay but shuffled out, meek beneath her stare.

The doors closed behind them, the clang like a funeral bell.

"You have good eyes, boy." She stared into the palm of her hand, resting it on the throne's arm.

I had spent a lifetime dreading the throne room, keen on every occasion I attended the place to be gone from it as soon as possible and with as little fuss as could be managed. But now, though every nerve clamoured for a chance to run, I had come of my own volition and provoked the Red Queen to private audience. I'd pointed out the Silent Sister and spoken her secret. Sweat poured off me, trickling down across my ribs, but I remembered how Mother had stood up to the old woman, and how she died an hour or two later, not through Grandmother's wrath, but through her failure.

"Yes. I have good eyes." I looked at her but she kept her gaze upon her palm as if reading something there among the lines. "Good enough to have watched you in the castle of Ameroth, with Ullamere."

The queen raised her eyebrows as if taken aback by my boldness, then snorted. "That story is sung in taverns across the land. They even sing it in Slov!"

"I saw you in the chamber beneath the keep," I said. "Among the best of your troops."

She shrugged. "The keep is all that stands. Any fool could tell you the survivors gathered there."

"I saw the machine and heard it speak. I saw the time-star burning blue."

She closed her hand into a fist. "And who showed you these things? Skilfar perhaps? Mirrored in ice?"

"I showed them to me. They are written in my blood." I turned to glance back at the old witch by the door. She hadn't moved but her smile had left her. "And I saw my sister die. She had all the magic you were hunting for in me . . . but the Lady Blue stole that chance from you. Edris Dean stole it. Why haven't you killed him for that? He works for the Dead King now . . . why don't you reach out and . . ." I made a twisting motion with my hands. "Why doesn't she?" I pointed to the Silent Sister, only to find her gone.

"Edris Dean still works for the Blue Lady," the queen said. "As do many others."

"But the Dead King-"

"The Dead King is like a forest fire-the Lady Blue encourages the flames this way or that for her own purposes. The Hundred think this war is being fought for Empire but those of us who stand behind it know there are greater things at stake."

I tried to consider larger stakes than the whole of Empire. And failed. I wasn't even interested in the empire, broken or unbroken. All I wanted was for the world to roll on its merry way just as it had been doing for my entire life, and to provide me with a careless middle age and comfortable dotage which I could continue to misspend just as I'd been misspending my youth. I didn't even want to be king of Red March despite my moaning. Just give me fifty thousand in gold, a mansion of my own, and some racehorses and I wouldn't bother anyone. I would graduate from a rich lecherous young man to a stinking-rich lecherous old man, with a pretty and accommodating young wife and perhaps a handful of blond sons to occupy some pretty and accommodating young nursemaids. And when age claimed me I'd climb into the bottle just like dear Papa. I had only one stain on the glowing imaginary horizon of my future . . .

"I want Edris Dean dead."

"The man is hard to find." The queen's face showed a hint of the murder she wore at Ameroth. "My sister cannot see him and his service to the Blue Lady has taken him far beyond our borders. Patience is the key. In the end your enemies always come to you."

I thought then of Snorri. The key was the key-Edris would come for that. And Snorri would kill him.

"Your sister-my great aunt . . ." It made me uncomfortable to state our relationship so plainly but I'd discovered on my journeys that knowledge-a thing I'd always avoided as a tedious obstacle to having fun-could prove handy in the business of staying alive. Since I had so little of it I decided to lay out what I had in the hopes Grandmother might fill in the gaps. If there's one thing I know about people, from fool to sage, it's that they have a hard time not showing that they know more than you do-and of course by doing so they close that gap a little. "My great aunt tried to kill me. In fact she killed hundreds of people . . . and she's done it before!" Suddenly out of nowhere I saw Ameral Contaph, his round face, his eyes narrow with suspicion. Just one of many palace functionaries and a pain in my royal a.r.s.e, but a man who I spoke to that day and who died in the fire. I saw him against a background of violet flames, lit by their glow. "Wait-Ameral Contaph . . . he wasn't . . ."

"Ullamere's grandson." The Red Queen inclined her head. "One of eight. The apple that fell furthest from the tree." She fixed her gaze upon me, eyes grave. I wondered if she knew quite how far I'd fallen from her tree . . . if we were talking apples then Jalan Kendeth had dropped from the Red Queen's boughs, rolled down a hill, into a stream, and been carried out to sea to beach on the sh.o.r.es of a whole other country.

"And the ma.s.s murder?" I got back to my point, glancing around for the Silent Sister once more, to find with a start that she now stood behind the throne, her seeing eye hard as a stone. I remembered how she looked that night in her rags, painting her curse on the walls of the opera house.

"This is a war that started before I was born, boy." Grandmother's voice came low and threatening. "It isn't about who wears what crown. It's not for the survival of a city, a country, a way of life, or an ideal. Troy burned for a pretty face. This is about more than that."

"Name it then! All this grand talk is very well, but what I saw were people burning." The words escaped me, unstoppable as a sneeze. I had no idea why I was goading the woman. All I really wanted was to be out of there, back to my old pursuits, working the Jalan charm on the ladies of Vermillion. And yet here I was criticizing the second most powerful woman in the world as if I were her tutor. I quickly started to apologize. "I-"

"Good to see you've grown, Jalan. Garyus said the north would make or break you." I swear I saw her lips twitch with the faintest suggestion of approval. "If we fail in this. If the change that the Builders set in motion is not arrested, or more likely reversed, if magic runs wild and the worlds crack open, each bleeding into the next . . . then everything is at stake. The rocks themselves will burn. There will be no countries, no people, no life. That's what the long war is about. That is what is at stake."

I drew a breath at that. "Even so . . ." I started, mind whirling. War is a game, games take two players, the other side have their own goals. "The Lady Blue and all those working for her . . . they're not looking to destroy the world. Or if they are then there's something in it for them. Everyone's got an angle."

The Red Queen looked over her shoulder at that, eye to eye with her elder sister. "Not completely stupid then."

The Silent Sister smiled, her teeth narrow, yellow, each set apart from the next. She extended her hand, reaching past the queen's shoulder, and I flinched, remembering her touch. Fingers uncurled and somehow in her palm lay a poppy, so red that for an instant I thought it a wound.

"Smoking the poppy is an addiction that steps around people's sense, a hunger that reduces proud men and clever women to crawling in the mire in search of more." The Red Queen took the flower from her sister's hand and in her fingers it became smoke, a crimson mist, lifting and fading. "Magic is a worse drug, its hooks sink deeper. And it is magic that fractures the world, magic that will drag us to our end. The world is broken-each enchantment tears the cracks a little wider."

"The Lady Blue wants to doom everyone because she can't bear to give up her spells?" Even as I asked it my tone changed from disbelief to credulity. The old wh.o.r.es on Mud Lane would sell more than their bodies for the coin to buy another hit of the resin Maeres squeezed from his poppies. They'd sell more than their souls if they had more to barter.

"In part," Grandmother agreed. "I doubt she could give up her power. But more than that, she believes there is a place for a self-selected few, beyond the conjunction of the spheres. The Lady Blue thinks that those steeped deeply enough in their magic will survive the end and find new forms in a new existence, just as some among the Builders survived their Day of a Thousand Suns. Perhaps she sees herself as the first G.o.d to be born into what will come. Her followers she views as an elite, chosen to found a very different world."

"And you . . . don't believe?" With a start I realized I'd been addressing her without formality all this time and added in a belated, "Your majesty."

"What I think would follow such an ending is of no matter," she said. "I have a duty to my people. I will not allow this to happen."

And in the end, whatever Alica Kendeth said about the stakes, here was a queen defending her lands, her cities, and those subject to her rule. "And the burnings? The whole d.a.m.n opera house?" I saw her eyes narrow and added, "Your majesty."