Foul Tide's Turning (30 page)

Jacob watched the treacherous guild courier scurry away. ‘You wouldn’t recognize the truth if it spat in your eye.’

‘But I’ll know it when the Vandian brings it to me.’

Jacob shook the bars, as though fury alone could twist them out of place. ‘You had better put a bullet in my head right here. Because I’m going to come for you, Marcus. It doesn’t matter how many sell-swords like Nix you surround yourself with, how many Vandian allies you buy with our people’s blood. None of them will save you when I come for your filthy carcass. I’ll make you suffer. I swear it by the saints and my murdered wife and my last living son. Life in the Burn as the lowliest trodden-down serf soldier crawling through the mud will be a paradise you’ll beg me for before your pain’s done.’

The usurper raised his hands mockingly towards the cell. ‘Charity, charity, Father.
Please
. What a wasted opportunity.’ Marcus strode off, turning back just before he exited the corridor. ‘You’re standing in the way of progress, and so it’s only right that progress should take everything from you. The pretender, his rebels and his lost cause. Your son. Your home. Your last pathetic secrets, and finally your life, too. He is all yours, Sergeant Nix, just as soon as the Vandian has loosened his tongue.’

Nix leant in towards the bars and looked Jacob straight in the eyes. ‘I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, myself, for old time’s sake. Shit on progress. It’ll be like being back in the Burn, two old comrades with a white hot fire to toast your hide on. You remember what I did to your friend Wiggins, don’t you? How loudly he screamed as I warmed his old bones.’

‘I haven’t forgotten,’ said Jacob.
I haven’t forgotten a thing
.

Leyla Holten found King Marcus in front of an orchard on the eastern side of the palace gardens. She stepped off a gravel pathway flanked by expensive bronze monuments to Weyland’s previous monarchs. An octahedron-shaped wooden pavilion stood between the trees and a lake with a serene view over a double-arched bridge, a gentle slope with well-tended green banks on either side, the structure built to accommodate a band to play for the pleasure of king and court. Today it featured a rather different kind of entertainment. A man was bound to a chair on the oak platform, while the king pecked at his lunch from inside the cover of a canvas pavilion, fires burning in braziers to either side of him. It was no normal seat placed on the bandstand, though. It held a condemned man, while an officer slowly tightened a silk scarf around his neck using a poorly oiled crank wheel.

‘You remember Captain Purdell, my dear?’ said the king, indicating the officer gradually twisting the crank.

Leyla nodded. ‘Of course. I have the captain to thank for bringing me your instructions to return to Arcadia.’

‘Yes, the good captain has proved himself highly useful. This entertainment is partly to reward him for his labours. He is like one of my hunting hounds. He needs a little blood every now and then to keep him prepared for the actual hunt.’

‘I can’t see any blood yet,’ noted Leyla, stepping close to the warmth of the brazier.

‘Wait until the end,’ said the king. ‘You will not be disappointed. Unlike your king, who
is
. It would have been far better if you had returned bearing the Vandian emperor’s missing granddaughter.’

Leyla felt a bristle of indignation but did not rise to it. This had always been the king’s way. To undermine her achievements and confidence. He did it with all of his subordinates. Marcus clearly felt it was the way to get the most out of people – like squeezing a fruit for the last few drops of juice.

‘I brought you the people who took the brat hostage,’ said Leyla. She nodded towards the prisoner moaning in the garrotte chair as the silk tightened around his neck. ‘I’m sure they can be induced to cooperate.’

‘Oh, our friend here hasn’t come to lunch to be tickled into providing us with information,’ said King Marcus. ‘This is Harland Stanbury, retired colonel of the royal guard.’

‘I thought you needed every officer with experience to crush the rebellion?’ said Leyla, curiously. ‘God knows, there are enough factory owners and aristocrats joining your army who are hard pressed to distinguish a rifle from a riding whip.’

‘I need officers I can rely on,’ said Marcus. ‘Loyalty above all else. Not a quality I can accuse Colonel Stanbury here of. He’s been on the run for quite a while, until he was found by a recruiting party. And Stanbury knows he disappointed me. Betrayed me, if I am to be brutally honest. He was one of the royal guardsmen who set the charges that brought the avalanche down on my brother and his family. For which I made him a colonel and gave him a very generous settlement. But it transpired that the colonel’s workmanship was rather shoddy. He only did
half
the job he had been paid for.’

‘I couldn’t do it,’ croaked the prisoner, shaking his chair. ‘When I found them alive in the snow. For the love of the saints, they were only children.’

‘So instead you handed the three princes to the skels to sell as slaves,’ said Marcus, ‘which was as good as a death sentence. You didn’t want their blood on your hands. If there’re two things I cannot abide in a man, it is squeamishness and hypocrisy. One sin by itself I can stand, but both? Too much.’

‘Two of the princes died,’ begged the prisoner, ‘only Prince Owen who survived. And I did for your brother and the old queen.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Marcus. ‘Centuries ago, the crime for treason was to be hung, drawn and quartered. Severed heads were spiked on the bridge for courtiers to see as they arrived at the palace. Seeing as only
one
out of my three nephews is still alive, I’ll spare you the drawn and quartered portion of your punishment.’

‘I didn’t know he’d come back alive,’ pleaded Stanbury, his voice cracking. Or was that his throat? ‘How could I have known?’

King Marcus waved wearily at Thomas Purdell who began turning the crank again. ‘Yes, yes, imagine my surprise, also.’

The guardsman’s desperate pleas became a strangled gargling, his frantic words punctuated by a choked hacking. King Marcus offered up a woven basket filled with warm chicken legs towards Leyla. She demurred. ‘We might not have the snow they do up north, but it’s still a little cold to eat outside.’

‘Have you never seen a man garrotted?’ said the king. ‘They splutter and spit blood everywhere. The dining room has some very expensive carpets and we’d never get the blood stains out.’

‘It’s not as if you would have to clean it yourself, my darling,’ said Leyla.

‘I would still have to walk on it.’

Leyla shrugged. She had forgotten how fastidious the king could be. When she had been kept as a mistress in apartments not far from the palace, Marcus had always insisted she dispose of any dresses she had worn during their love-making, going out quickly to purchase new ones – in case a worn dress became contaminated with the vapours and pollution of the capital’s mills in-between their trysts. She hadn’t minded spending the king’s vast fortune, of course, even though indulging his hypochondria quickly grew tedious. Benner Landor might be a common-born bore, but at least he tolerated a little rural dirt on a girl.

‘I have done everything you asked of me,’ said Leyla. ‘Married that old fool up in Hawkland Park. Kept my eyes and ears open. Used Nocks as your dagger in the north; sifted the returned slaves’ dull stories of misery in Vandia for useful intelligence; helped your agents search for Lady Cassandra and goaded Jacob Carnehan and his son into coming down to Arcadia. When will it be
my
turn, Marcus? My time to be with you again?’

‘You’ve done very well out of your intriguing for me,
Lady
Landor,’ said the king, ‘and you may yet do even better.’

‘I have kept my side of the arrangement,’ said Leyla. ‘If I had wanted to be a mere lady, I could have married any number of titled suitors in the south.’

‘You have done what was needed, that I agree. And I still have need for your artifice,’ said King Marcus. ‘More people for you to coax into doing their duty. Benner Landor and his daughter have a further part to play in my plans.’

Leyla bent down to stroke the king’s hair. ‘And do you have a part to play in mine?’

‘This war will change everything,’ said Marcus. ‘The powers I will claim to win it will allow me to do whatever I need to, to give us the nation we truly deserve. Nobody will dare to speak against the new order. I will only have to speak for it to be considered law.’

‘You will make me your wife, as you promised,’ wheedled Leyla.

‘Of course I will,’ said Marcus. ‘Although you should expect a little company. The Vandian way seems to have much to recommend it. Every one of our children will rule as grandly as kings and queens in our land. And when our acres are all taken, we shall turn our attentions to our neighbours in the league and add their strength to our own.’

Leyla’s gaze frosted. She didn’t tolerate competition. Her rivals had suffered a rather statistically-unlikely series of fatal accidents.

Marcus laughed as he saw the look in her eyes. ‘I’m told that in Vandia, the role of mistress-keeper of the imperial harem is one of the most powerful positions in the imperium. All those well-born ladies grovelling and bribing and ingratiating their way into the keeper’s good graces, so that they may give birth to heirs with imperial titles. Can you think of anyone suitable for such a high station in Weyland?’

Now, that is honey for the toast.
Leyla Holten immediately saw the possibilities; particularly the humiliation of every noble-blooded, wealthy heiress in the capital and court who had snubbed her as another common mare in the king’s stable of mistresses. Given the king’s appetite for variety, it was guaranteed that theirs could never be an exclusive relationship. Better that she gain immense power through directing his lusts, rather than be run ragged trying to stop his ardour lighting on someone who could entirely displace her. Landing the king was one piece of work, keeping him interested was entirely another. With such a position, she could keep herself in favour indefinitely. She would be safe from poverty for as long as she lived. Perhaps the mores of distant Vandia were superior, after all? ‘Of course, my love, I already have a husband, with a child for him on the way,’ said Leyla.

‘War is a wicked business,’ Marcus smiled. ‘It claims many husbands, especially when the husband in question has been commissioned as an officer by royal warrant. And as for your little bastard, after the rebellion is crushed, there’ll be a harvest of youthful missing soldiery left as worm-food under the battlefield’s churn; with legions of northern widows only too glad to take on a bawling little responsibility to help them forget their pain. It would hardly be the first whelp you’ve farmed away, would it?’

Leyla rubbed her swollen body, as if just the act could wipe away her painful weight. The saints knew, she would just be pleased to get rid of
it
from her and onto a wet-nurse. Slowing her down, making her stay in the vicinity of comfortable plumbing. And how could she wheedle men to do her bidding when she resembled a whale dragging her belly down the street? No, the end of this particular ‘favour’ for the king couldn’t come too soon.

‘But,’ added Marcus, ‘a ruler’s favour is not lightly given, it must be indulged …’

Leyla smiled, her happiness not conjured for artifice’s sake this time. So, the king’s lust for her even stretched into her present condition.
Reassuring
. Well, Marcus was a connoisseur of novelty, and this wasn’t something readily available in any bawdy house. Courtesans in her unhappy condition were usually tossed out on their ear. Luckily, she knew exactly how to please the king. Leyla bent down, hitched up her skirt and offered herself to Marcus, watching the prisoner’s dreary death throes in front of her with as much detachment as if a cow was being milked in a field. Life and death. Two sides of the same coin. The trick was in making sure the coin toss always landed in your favour.

‘Have you washed this morning?’ demanded King Marcus.

‘Come closer and find out,’ she laughed.

Soon, the final croaking shudders of the dying guardsman weren’t the only moans drifting across the palace gardens.

Willow waved at her maid and the woman immediately had the carriage halted in the middle of the street. Willow flung open the door, stumbled outside to be sick across the pebbles. Four weeks into her pregnancy and the terrible nausea seemed to rise every afternoon in heavy waves before returning twice as bad during the evening. Breakfast was the only meal she could face and keep down. At least she could handle that solitary meal with a clear head. Since Willow’s condition had made itself known, the viscount’s servants had not dared use sedatives to keep her manageable, for fear of poisoning the nobleman’s firstborn inside her womb. And Willow’s pregnancy had the additional benefit that Wallingbeck’s foul attentions had drifted away from her and back onto the capital’s courtesans. But the servants at Belinus Hall watched her even more closely now. She had only been able to make one attempt to flee her despicable so-called husband, during a night of patriotic music performances at Arcadia’s concert hall, and the staff hadn’t even felt they could beat her when they caught her trying to slip out, disguised in a silk shawl she had stolen from another private box.

‘You make such a damnable noise when you’re sick,’ said Leyla Holten, sticking her head out of the open door. ‘It’s unladylike and really quite disagreeable.’

Willow glared back at the carriage. Her stepmother was as swollen as a whale, only weeks from giving birth. Perhaps Holten felt the need for company in her misery. That would be one explanation for the unwanted marriage slipped like chains around Willow’s neck – beyond Holten’s need to expel the previous brood from the Landor nest. ‘Then you should have left me to throw up in my bedroom.’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Holten, her eyes flashing with dark mischief. ‘I have a couple of highly congenial surprises planned for you this afternoon.’

‘Keep them,’ said Willow.