“His Resplendence has further instructed us to wish your August Majesty a long and happy reign,” explained the translator, “and many heirs, that your line may continue undiminished in glory.” Jezal forced his smile a tooth wider, and inclined his head. “I bid you good evening!”
The Osprian ambassador bowed with a theatrical flourish, sweeping off his enormous hat, its multicoloured feathers thrashing with enthusiasm. Then he shuffled backwards, still bent over, across the gleaming floor. He somehow made it out into the corridor without pitching over on his back, and the great doors, festooned with gold leaf, were smoothly shut upon him.
Jezal snatched the crown from his head and tossed it onto the cushion beside the throne, rubbing at the chafe marks round his sweaty scalp with one hand while he tugged his embroidered collar open with the other. Nothing helped. He still felt dizzy, weak, oppressively hot.
Hoff was already ingratiating himself onto Jezal’s left side. “That was the last of the ambassadors, your Majesty. Tomorrow will be occupied by the nobility of Midderland. They are eager to pay homage—”
“Lots of homage and little help, I’ll be bound!”
Hoff managed a chuckle of suffocating falseness. “Ha, ha, ha, your Majesty. They have sought audiences from dawn, and we would not wish to offend them by—”
“Damn it!” hissed Jezal, jumping up and shaking his legs in a vain effort to unstick his trousers from his sweaty backside. He jerked his crimson sash over his head and flung it away, tore his gilded frock coat open and tried to rip it off, but in the end he got his hand caught in one cuff and had to turn the bloody thing inside out before he could finally get free of it.
“Damn it!” He hurled it down on the marble dais with half a mind to stamp it to rags. Then he remembered himself. Hoff had taken a cautious step back, and was frowning as if he had discovered his fine new mansion was afflicted with a terrible case of rot. The assorted servants, pages, and Knights, both Herald and of the Body, were all staring studiously ahead, doing their best to imitate statues. Over in the dark corner of the room, Bayaz was standing. His eyes were sunk in shadow, but his face was stony grim.
Jezal blushed like a naughty schoolboy called to account, and pressed one hand over his eyes, “A terribly trying day…” He hurried down the steps of the dais and out of the audience chamber with his head down. The blaring of a belated and slightly off-key fanfare pursued him down the hallway. So, unfortunately, did the First of the Magi.
“That was not gracious,” said Bayaz. “Rare rages render a man frightening. Common ones render him ridiculous.”
“I apologise,” growled Jezal through gritted teeth. “The crown is a mighty burden.”
“A mighty burden and a mighty honour both. We had a discussion, as I recall, about your striving to be worthy of it.” The Magus left a significant pause. “Perhaps you might strive harder.”
Jezal rubbed at his aching temples. “I just need a moment to myself is all. Just a moment.”
“Take all the time you need. But we have business in the morning, your Majesty, business we cannot avoid. The nobility of Midderland will not wait to congratulate you. I will see you at dawn, brimful with energy and enthusiasm, I am sure.”
“Yes, yes!” Jezal snapped over his shoulder. “Brimful!”
He burst out into a small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by a shadowy colonnade, and stood still in the cool evening. He shook himself, squeezed his eyes shut, let his head tip back and took a long, slow breath. A minute alone. He wondered if, aside from pissing or sleeping, it was the first he had been permitted since that day of madness in the Lords’ Round.
He was the victim, or perhaps the beneficiary, of the most almighty blunder. Somehow, everyone had mistaken him for a king, when he was very clearly a selfish, clueless idiot who had scarcely in his life thought more than a day ahead. Every time someone called him, “your Majesty” he felt more of a fraud, and with each moment that passed he was more guiltily surprised not to have been found out.
He wandered across the perfect lawn, giving vent to a long, self-pitying sigh. It caught in his throat. There was a Knight of the Body beside a doorway opposite, standing to attention so rigidly that Jezal had hardly noticed him. He cursed under his breath. Could he not be left alone for five minutes together? He frowned as he walked closer. The man seemed somehow familiar. A great big fellow with a shaved head and a noticeable lack of neck…
“Bremer dan Gorst!”
“Your Majesty,” said Gorst, his armour rattling as he clashed his meaty fist against his polished breastplate.
“It is a pleasure to see you!” Jezal had disliked the man from the first moment he had laid eyes on him, and being bludgeoned round a fencing circle by him, whether Jezal had won in the end or no, had not improved his opinion of the neckless brute. Now, however, anything resembling a familiar face was like a glass of water in the desert. Jezal actually found himself reaching out and squeezing the man’s heavy hand as though they were old friends, and had to make himself let go of it.
“Your Majesty does me too much honour.”
“Please, you need not call me that! How did you come to be part of the household? I thought that you served with Lord Brock’s guard?”
“That post did not suit me,” said Gorst in his strangely high, piping voice. “I was lucky enough to find a place with the Knights of the Body some months ago, your Maj—” He cut himself off.
An idea slunk into Jezal’s head. He looked over his shoulder, but there was no one else nearby. The garden was still as a graveyard, its shadowy arcades as quiet as crypts. “Bremer… I may call you Bremer, may I?”
“I suppose that my king may call me whatever he wishes.”
“I wonder… could I ask you for a favour?”
Gorst blinked. “Your Majesty has only to ask.”
Jezal spun around as he heard the door open. Gorst stepped out into the colonnade with the soft jingle of armour. A cloaked and hooded figure followed him, silently. The old excitement was still there as she pushed back her hood and a chink of light from a window above crept across the lower part of her face. He could see the bright curve of her cheek, one side of her mouth, the outline of a nostril, the gleam of her eyes in the shadows, and that was all.
“Thank you, Gorst,” said Jezal. “You may leave us.” The big man thumped his chest and backed through the archway, pulling the door to behind him. Hardly the first time they had met in secret, of course, but things were different now. He wondered if it would end with kisses and soft words between them, or if it would simply end. The start was far from promising.
“Your August Majesty,” said Ardee with the very heaviest of irony. “What a towering honour. Should I grovel on my face? Or do I curtsey?”
However hard her words, the sound of her voice still made the breath catch in his throat. “Curtsey?” he managed to say. “Do you even know how?”
“In truth, not really. I have not had the training for polite society, and now the lack of it quite crushes me.” She stepped forward, frowning into the darkened garden. “When I was a girl, in my wildest flights of fancy, I used to dream of being invited to the palace, a guest of the king himself. We would eat fine cakes, and drink fine wine, and talk fine talk of important things, deep into the night.” Ardee pressed her hands to her chest and fluttered her eyelashes. “Thank you for making the pitiful dreams of one poor wretch come true, if only for the briefest moment. The other beggars will never believe me when I tell them!”