My glance flickered back to the hag. Still there, exactly the same, her face half-turned from me, fixed on Grandmother. I hadn’t noticed her eye at first, but now it drew me. One of the cats at the Hall had an eye like that. Milky. Pearly almost. Blind, my nurse called it. But to me it seemed to see more than the other eye.
‘What’s wrong with the boy? Is he simple?’ Grandmother’s displeasure had rippled through the court, silencing their murmurs.
I couldn’t look away. I stood there sweating. Barely able to keep from wetting myself. Too scared to speak, too scared even to lie. Too scared to do anything but sweat and keep my eyes on that old woman.
When she moved, I nearly screamed and ran. Instead just a squeak escaped me. ‘Don-don’t you see her?’
She stole into motion. So slow at first you had to measure her against the background to be sure it wasn’t imagination. Then speeding up, smooth and sure. She turned that awful face toward me, one eye dark, the other milk and pearl. It had felt hot, suddenly, as if all the great hearths had roared into life with one scorching voice, sparked into fury on a fine summer’s day, the flames leaping from iron grates as if they wanted nothing more than to be amongst us.
She was tall. I saw that now, hunched but tall. And thin, like a bone.
‘Don’t you see her?’ My words rising to a shriek, I pointed and she stepped toward me, a white hand reaching.
‘Who?’ Darin beside me, nine years under his belt and too old for such foolishness.
I had no voice to answer him. The blind-eye woman had laid her hand of paper and bones over mine. She smiled at me, an ugly twisting of her face, like worms writhing over each other. She smiled, and I fell.
I fell into a hot, blind place. They tell me I had a fit, convulsions. A ‘lepsy’, the chirurgeon said to Father the next day, a chronic condition, but I’ve never had it again, not in nearly twenty years. All I know is that I fell, and I don’t think I’ve stopped falling since.
Grandmother had lost patience and set my name upon me as I jerked and twitched on the floor. ‘Bring him back when his voice breaks,’ she said.
And that was it for eight years. I came back to the throne room aged thirteen, to be presented to Grandmother before the Saturnalia feast in the hard winter of 89. On that occasion, and all others since, I’ve followed everyone else’s example and pretended not to see the blind-eye woman. Perhaps they really don’t see her because Martus and Darin are too dumb to act and poor liars at that, and yet their eyes never so much as flicker when they look her way. Maybe I’m the only one to see her when she taps her fingers on the Red Queen’s shoulder. It’s hard not to look when you know you shouldn’t. Like a woman’s cleavage, breasts squeezed together and lifted for inspection, and yet a prince is supposed not to notice, not to drop his gaze. I try harder with the blind-eye woman and for the most part I manage it – though Grandmother’s given me an odd look from time to time.
In any event, on this particular morning, sweating in the clothes I wore the night before and with half the DeVeers’ garden to decorate them, I didn’t mind in the least being wedged between my hulking brothers and being ‘the little one’, easy to overlook. Frankly, the attention of either the Red Queen or her silent sister were things I could do without.
We stood for another ten minutes, unspeaking in the main, some princes yawning, others shifting weight from one foot to the other, or casting sour glances my way. I do try to keep my misadventures from polluting the calm waters of the palace. It’s ill advised to shit where you eat, and besides, it’s hard to hide behind one’s rank when the offended party is also a prince. Even so, over the course of the years, I’d given my cousins few reasons to love me.
At last the Red Queen came in, without fanfare but flanked by guards. The relief was momentary – the blind-eye woman followed in her wake, and although I turned away quicker than quick, she saw me looking. The queen settled herself into her royal seat and the guardsmen arrayed themselves around the walls. A single chamberlain – Mantal Drews, I think – stood ill at ease between the royal progeny and our sovereign, and once more the hall returned to silence.
I watched Grandmother and, with some effort, kept my gaze from sliding toward the white and shrivelled hand resting behind her head on the throne’s shoulder. Over the years I’d heard many rumours about Grandmother’s secret counsellor, an old and half-mad woman kept hidden away – the Silent Sister they called her. It seemed though that I stood alone in knowing that she waited at the Red Queen’s side each day. Other people’s eyes seemed to avoid her just as I always wished mine would.
The Red Queen cleared her throat. In taverns across Vermillion they tell it that my grandmother was once a handsome woman, though monstrous tall with it. A heartbreaker who attracted suit from all corners of the Broken Empire and even beyond. To my eye she had a brutal face, raw-boned, her skin tight as if scorched, but still showing wrinkles as crumpled parchment will. She had to have seventy years on her but no one would have called her more than fifty. Her hair dark and without a hint of grey, still showing deepest red where the light caught it. Handsome or not, though, her eyes would turn any man’s bowels to water. Flinty chips of dispassion. And no crown for the warrior queen, oh no. She sat near-swallowed by a robe of blacks and scarlets, just the thinnest circlet of gold to keep her locks in place, scraped back across her head.
‘My children’s children.’ Grandmother’s words came so thick with disappointment that you felt it reach out and try to throttle you. She shook her head, as if we were all of us an experiment in horse-breeding gone tragically astray. ‘And some of you whelping new princes and princesses of your own I hear.’
‘Yes w—’
‘Idle, numerous, and breeding sedition in your numbers.’ Grandmother rolled over Cousin Roland’s announcement before he could puff himself up. His smile died in that stupid beard of his, the one he grew to allow people at least the suspicion that he might have a chin. ‘Dark times are coming and this nation must be a fortress. The time for being children has passed. My blood runs in each of you, thin though it’s grown. And you will be soldiers in this coming war.’
Martus snorted at that, though quiet enough that it would be missed. Martus had been commissioned into the heavy horse, destined for knight-general, commander of Red March’s elite. The Red Queen in a fit of madness five years earlier had all but eliminated the force. Centuries of tradition, honour, and excellence ploughed under at the whim of an old woman. Now we were all to be soldiers running to battle on foot, digging ditches, endlessly practising mechanical tactics that any peasant could master and which set a prince no higher than a pot boy.
‘… greater foe. Time to put aside thoughts of empty conquest and draw in …’
I looked up from my disgust to find Grandmother still droning on about war. It’s not that I care overmuch about honour. All that chivalry nonsense loads a man down and any sensible fellow will ditch it the moment he needs to run – but it’s the look of the thing, the form of it. To be in one of the three horse corps, to earn your spurs and keep a trio of chargers at the city barracks … it had been the birthright of young nobles since time immemorial. Damnit, I wanted my commission. I wanted in at the officers’ mews, wanted to swap tall tales around the smoky tables at the Conarrf and ride along the Kings Way flying the colours of the Red Lance or Iron Hoof, with the long hair and bristling moustache of a cavalry man and a stallion between my legs. Tenth in line to a throne will get you into a not-insignificant number of bedchambers, but if a man dons the scarlet cloak of the Red March riders and wraps his legs around a destrier there are few ladies of quality who won’t open theirs when he flashes a smile at them.
At the corner of my vision the blind-eye woman moved, spoiling my daydream and putting all thoughts of riding, of either kind, from my head.
‘… burning all dead. Cremation is to be mandatory, for noble and commoner alike, and damn any dissent from Roma …’
That again. The old bird had been banging on about death rites for over a year now. As if men my age gave a fig for such things! She’d become