But there were no attacks on the fledgling mint, and the coins began to flow.
Almost as soon as the new coins appeared – sacks of them – in the trade squares, they changed the nature of commerce. They were solid. They were heavy.
They had an excellent silver content.
The King couldn’t share Master Ailwin’s triumph as he neither understood it nor, really, respected it. But he did notice the change in the faces of his interior councillors, and he was delighted to hear them vote him the funds to carry on his tournament for the first of May.
If the new Bishop of Lorica listened with a sour face and referred to the whole exercise as ‘usury’, the King could afford to ignore him.
But if the King was victorious in Cheapside, he was less sanguine about the palace. And the months after Christmas passed in petty defeats for the Queen as her belly grew rounder and her King grew more indifferent. Galahad d’Acre was arrested and thrown in the tower – although no one seemed to actually suspect him of the murder of Lady Emota. Another of the King’s squires simply vanished. Some said he’d been murdered, others that he had gone home to his father’s estates, afraid for his life and reputation.
The pace of the slanders increased, and the Queen began to seriously suspect that she might have a rival – that the King might have taken a mistress. Such things were done, and it was her duty to ignore such behaviour.
It was not in her character to accept a rival. Nor to accept the staging of a passion play about the whore of Babylon, performed under her window, and loud with the laughter of Jean de Vrailly. And the King. And the Sieur de Rohan, whose hired Etruscan players said the unsayable and sang the unsingable with panache.
Lady Almspend spent her days practising small acts of hermeticism and reading the old King’s papers – and those of his hermetical master and several of his other ministers. She declared her reading fascinating, and took copious notes while her royal mistress paced up and down in her solar and Diota cleaned and tidied uselessly.
Eight weeks into the New Year, Desiderata sat down at her writing table – covered in Rebecca’s stacks of musty documents and crisp, new notes – and took a sheet of new vellum, idly wondering how many sheep died for her correspondence.
Dear Renaud she wrote. Her brother, hundreds of leagues to the south, in L’Occitan.
She looked at those words, and considered every argument she had made when she had accepted the King of Alba’s proposal of marriage. And his replies. His anger. His desire for conflict.
Calling to Renaud for help would be an irrevocable action.
She stared at the words on the parchment, imagining her worthy brother raising his knights and leading them north. Imagining his western mountains unguarded against the Wyrms and Wyverns and worse things that infested them.
Imagining him fighting her husband.
She chewed on the end of her stylus.
‘You’ll have ink in your mouth, and then what will people say?’ Diota asked.
‘My belly is as big as a house, woman. No one will look at me anyway.’ Desiderata didn’t like being pregnant. Things hurt, the morning sickness was oppressive, her bladder was always full and, worst of all, she had lost the regard of the knights of court. They didn’t look at her. The whispers were bad enough. But the loss of that worship was like torture.
She considered the tournament. The subject made her tired. It had been her idea in the first place, and now-
Now the King’s mistress might be the Queen of Love. And she would merely be the Queen. The very heavily pregnant Queen whose husband suspected her of an unspeakable betrayal, and seemed disposed to laugh it off.
She was just framing the thought that she could invite her brother for the tournament when one of Rebecca’s dusty parchments caught her eye.
She ran her eyes along the Gothic script automatically. Even without Rebecca’s skills, she’d begun to be able to pick up on the hands of the various major players. This was the infamous traitor Plangere.
Her eye caught on the word ‘rape’.
She choked at what she read, and closed her eyes and her mouth filled with bile.
She bent over as far as she comfortably could and rested her head on her writing table.
The door to her solar opened, and she heard Almspend’s light steps and her intake of breath. ‘Oh,’ she said.
The Queen made herself sit up.
Rebecca’s deep eyes were drawn with concern. ‘I’m a fool,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t meant to leave that out.’
The Queen stared at her.
‘I couldn’t bear to destroy it, because it is history,’ Almspend said.
‘My husband,’ the Queen said. She had trouble drawing a breath. ‘My husband,’ she said again.
‘Madam – it was many years ago. He has doubtless done his penance and made his peace with God.’ Almspend held her hands tightly.
But the Queen’s world – her very ideas of who she was and who the King was – was collapsing like dams under the force of mountain torrents in springtime. She tried to breathe.
‘The King my husband,’ she croaked. Her fingers found the parchment. ‘Raped his sister. She cursed him for it. Oh, my God, my God.’
Almspend took the document, and smoothed it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t King yet,’ she added. ‘He was quite young.’ She looked at her Queen and tried a different tack. ‘It’s only what Plangere writes, and he was a traitor.’ She looked at the date on the note.
The Queen put her hand to her chest and sat back. She struggled to pull in a breath. Her hands grew cold. She felt her baby kick, and she cried out, and Almspend put her hand on the Queen’s head.
The Queen looked at her, eyes wide as the realisation hit – the moment at Lissen Carrak when- And she cried out again, as if in pain.
‘Of course!’ she said. ‘The Red Knight is his son.’
The Imperial Army – as the Red Knight styled their force – arrived on the plains of Viotia as the last snow melted in the shadowy corners of the neatly walled fields. But the frozen ground was still hard as iron, and rang under their horses’ hooves.
They swept into the rich lands a day ahead of the enemy, and marched north and west on the ancient stone road.
Eavey – or ‘Eves’ as the soldiers called it – opened her gates for them. It was not quite the miracle it seemed; the near sack of Amphipolis had grown in the telling. And the Emperor was there in person this time, beautifully dressed in crimson and purple silk over fur. He wore a small gold crown over a magnificent fur hat.
The people came out to cheer him when the gates were open and it was clear that the soldiers were not going to punish them.
The Red Knight went directly to the Ducal residence – one of Andronicus’s lodgings, a magnificent forty-room castle with a Great Hall and marvellous woodwork. And ancient sculptures. The chamberlain admitted him, and he quartered the army in the castle.
He summoned Father Arnaud.
The priest came.
The Megas Ducas was sitting with the Emperor, who was dining while the Red Knight served him. Father Arnaud waited patiently to be called forward, as he had studied the Morean etiquette and had some idea what he might be in for.
The Emperor ate as if no one was watching him, and talked – politely – to Count Zac, who poured his wine, and Ser Giorgios, who held his napkin, and to Harald Derkensun, who stood with an axe on his shoulder. There were servants – actual servants – and for each of them there was a gentleman of the Scholae, who watched them the way cats watch mice.
The Red Knight turned and caught Father Arnaud’s eye and winked.
Father Arnaud was shocked, but also pleased.