Jane came in, and Abby ran to her at once, wrapping her in a fierce hug. As it turned out, no words were necessary, on either side.
After a while, things settled down enough that breakfast could be served. Jane sat at the head of the table, as always, with Winter on her right hand and Abby on her left. Winter caught Abby’s eye when Jane leaned forward to shout something, and they both smiled.
I wonder if she knows what happened. Probably not, Winter decided. Abby had said she’d only awoken the next day, in the cutter’s tents, where they told her that she’d been very lucky. A ricocheting ball had creased her forehead, but without enough force to shatter bone. Anyway, Winter thought, we only did what we had to.
A girl in a black armband came in, one of the sentries. She had a musket under her arm and wore a puzzled expression.
“Sir?” she said, looking at Winter. “There’s someone who wants to see you.”
“Who is it?” Winter said.
“I don’t know her,” the sentry said. “She said she heard that this is where they were keeping ‘Mad Jane’s Army’ and that she wanted to join up.”
“To join up?” Jane chuckled. “And they called me mad.”
“You can tell her,” Winter said gently, “that we’re not recruiting at present.”
“Yes, sir. Should I say the same thing to the others?”
“Others? What others?”
“There’s quite a few more saying the same thing,” the sentry said, glancing back toward the front door. “We’re trying to get them to form a queue.”
Winter met Jane’s eyes. One corner of Jane’s lip quirked, in her familiar, maddening smile.
RAESINIA
Raesinia had been expecting to return to her old rooms in the Prince’s Tower, but after the parade and the interminable audiences, the servants had conducted her to the royal apartments instead. It was impossible to fight the feeling that she was being taken to see her father, and she had a brief fantasy that he would be standing there when she opened the door, waiting to tell her that she’d passed an elaborately contrived test.
Or else his ghost, telling me that I’ve disappointed him with my failure and now he’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days. It was hard to say what he would have thought of recent events. She’d beaten Orlanko, fair enough, but much of the country was still beyond her grasp, and the Deputies-General was issuing orders in the name of the people.
God only knows what happens next. She had Janus, and that redressed the balance of power enough that she was no longer actually a prisoner, but now that the crisis had passed the deputies were clamoring that Janus was more of a threat to the government than a protection. She’d named him interim Minister of War as a stopgap solution, so he would still be around but with no official capacity to command troops. But that was a fig leaf, and both sides knew it. If Janus gave orders, the Colonials would obey, regardless of his official role, and so would many of the volunteers.
She ghosted through the anteroom, the presence chamber where her father had received important guests, the private dining room where he’d entertained his friends. There was very little of him left in the place. Some kings had worked hard to put their stamp on Ohnlei, but Farus VIII had been willing to let the unfathomable palace bureaucracy have its head. His rooms were richly furnished, but somehow anonymous, without a soul, a place where someone had stayed but not really lived, like the world’s most expensive hotel.
Liveried servants waited beside every doorway, bowing as she approached. Raesinia passed into the bedroom, told the footman inside to get out, and shut the door behind him.
At least the week’s interval had given them a chance to freshen the place up. When her father was well, Raesinia had met him in the outer chambers, so her only memories of this place were from when it had smelled of sickness and death. The sick-sweet stench of the doctor’s concoctions, the reek of the royal bedpan, and the too-strong perfume the servants sprayed to cover it up. Now it smelled of starch and fresh linen, and the four-posted bed was decked with a different canopy and set of covers than she remembered. Hell, I bet they had to burn the mattress.
Paintings stared down at her from the walls. There was her father’s favorite family portrait from when Dominic had been twelve and she herself had been an infant. Her mother, Elizabeth, a pale, dark-haired woman of whom Raesinia had no memory, stood holding the baby by her father’s side. The next portrait over was her grandfather, Farus VII, and on the other wall was one of the slender, sickly Farus VI. More women she didn’t recognize, great-aunts and great-great-aunts, clustered around the great golden-framed portraits of the kings.
How did Father sleep with all of them staring down at him? Raesinia shook her head. It’s a good thing I don’t sleep, I suppose.
She went to the bed and tossed herself into it, sinking deep into the feathery morass. Her dress wasn’t designed for lying down, and she could feel it tugging and pinching her skin, but the pain barely registered.
What happens next? She hadn’t really devoted any thought to it. For all that she’d worked and schemed to get here-because it was the right thing to do, because it was what her father would have wanted, because she couldn’t stand to let Orlanko win-now that she’d made it, she wasn’t at all sure what to do. If she let it, Ohnlei would devour her, sinking her days in mindless ritual and spectacle designed to give a sense of purpose to an essentially purposeless existence. Some of Vordan’s kings had delighted in it, and given themselves completely to the Court; others, like her father, had resisted, and applied themselves to the business of the state. Raesinia wanted to be one of the latter, but she didn’t know how to start, or whether they would let her.
It’s been a long day, is all. She couldn’t sleep, but there were other ways to rest the mind. A hot bath, a book, and out of this damned dress. Raesinia sat up, ready to call for the maids-she couldn’t even get out of the dress herself-and froze.
There was a figure in one dark corner of the room, away from the braziers. As Raesinia’s eyes fell on it, it bowed low.
“Your Majesty.” A familiar voice. Very familiar-
“Sothe!” Raesinia crossed the room at a run, heedless of her dress and her dignity. When she was nearly there, she tripped on a trailing flounce and stumbled forward, but Sothe caught her one-handed before she hit the floor. Raesinia threw her arms around the woman and hugged her tight.
“Your Majesty,” Sothe murmured, “please mind the arm.”
Raesinia blinked and let go. Looking more closely, she could see that one of Sothe’s arms was bound in a sling, and belatedly remembered the pistol ball the maidservant had taken in the shoulder during their escape from the Grays.
“Sorry!”
“It’s all right,” Sothe said, straightening her sleeves fastidiously and wincing slightly. “It’s healing, but slowly.”
“That’s good,” Raesinia said, then shook her head wildly. “But where have you been? I thought you were dead. When you didn’t come back after that night. .”