In Ashes Lie (23 page)

Despite her command, the heavy oaken door swung open, admitting Lord Valentin Aspell and Sir Prigurd Nellt. They both went to their knees immediately, and her Lord Keeper said, “Your Grace, I most humbly beg your forgiveness for this disturbance.”

“You shall not have it,” she snapped, dashing wetness from her cheeks before it could be seen. “We wish to be left alone.”

“Madam, it concerns the safety of your realm.”

It might have been a leash, pulling tight about her neck. Lune’s body jerked, caught between a desire to strike him, and an impulse to flee. To go somewhere they could not find her and burden her with such news.

But duty was a bridle she had put on herself; she could not cast it off. Digging her nails into her palms, Lune said, “Tell me.”

Aspell visibly inhaled with relief. “An Islington lubberkin has brought word from an oak man north of the City. There were fae in his grove last night—foreigners. Perhaps as many as a dozen.”

Chilling as the words were, they concentrated her mind wonderfully. “The Scots.”

“I do not think so, madam. The oak man said they wore red armor.”

“
All
of them?”

“Yes, madam.”

Faerie knights painted and lacquered their armor, but according to their own tastes—usually. Red armor, in a group, pointed unerringly to one source. “Knights of the Red Branch,” Lune whispered.

Not Scots, but Irish. Ulstermen. The elite of King Conchobar’s warriors, as the Onyx Guard were of Lune’s. Ulster—the place to which Eochu Airt had returned so suddenly, not long ago. She doubted the two were unconnected.

But what purpose did they aim at? Lune’s eyes had been so firmly fixed on Scotland, she’d given Ireland little thought of late. Could it be—

Her heart leapt for one brief, foolish instant.
Could it be they come to rescue the King?

Charles had been willing to promise the mortal Irish many things, in order to gain their aid in war. How much more might he give, in gratitude for his liberation?

But common sense asserted its leaden weight, reminding her of the obstacles that blocked the Red Branch, even as they blocked her. And surely Conchobar knew as well as she how little the King’s promises could be trusted. And—

And you have put the hounds in front of their prey, running madly off to nowhere.
She had no reason to believe their intentions good, and more than enough caution to fear otherwise.

Aspell and Prigurd waited silently, breathing more easily now that she had not lashed out in anger. Strangely, her misery had subsided; it waited for her, too, but could not compete with the thoughts now racing through her mind.
I must try to discover what the Red Branch intends in London—and in the meanwhile, prepare for the worst.
“Lord Valentin,” she said. “Bid Lady Feidelm attend me in my privy chamber. Do not, however, say anything to her of the oak man’s message. Sir Prigurd—” The giant twitched, head still down. “Make certain that all entrances are under guard, by knights you can trust. If the Red Branch plans some assault or infiltration of our realm, we shall defend if necessary. But do not offer battle first. We may yet settle this peaceably.”

Peace was unlikely when the Ulster fae came in secret, not informing Temair’s ambassadress of their approach. But Conchobar was not Nicneven, and Lune would avoid having two such enemies if she could.

Sunday was a day of rest; Monday and Tuesday were more of the same mockery as before. Bradshaw, it seemed, could not bring himself to believe that Charles would cling so stubbornly to his position, refusing, as always, to plead. Time and again they removed him forcibly from the hall, and with every repetition it proved the King’s point more: that their only authority lay in force of arms.

Antony’s words to Soame proved prophetic. On Wednesday the High Court summoned witnesses to testify before a committee, enumerating all the King’s sins, and the following day their statements were made public—but in the Painted Chamber, where the Commission met to debate, not in Westminster Hall. They could not conduct the trial
as
a trial. The King had barred that door.

Kate did not go with Antony to hear the session in the Painted Chamber.
I should never have given her access to the printing press,
he thought ruefully; in a few short months she had become a more prolific author of pamphlets than ever he was. London seemed snowed under by the competing publications, many of them openly against the trial. Yet it was still nothing more than words, and they held no more force than the ink used to print them.

On Saturday the High Court convened again, to pass sentence on the unrepentant King.

Antony saw Lady Fairfax slip into the gallery, masked once again, with a friend at her side. The declaration made against disturbances on the second day did not seem to have deterred her. When Bradshaw claimed once again to speak in the name of the people of England, she cried out once more: “Not half, not a
quarter
of the people of England. Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!”

“Down!” Antony snapped to Kate, almost before he registered the sudden move of the soldiers; half the gallery quailed as the Army men brought their muskets to bear. Half-crouching himself, he forced his way to the speaker’s side. “Lady Fairfax—”

She snarled a curse that never should have fouled the mouth of a lady, and desperate, he took her by the arm. “They
will
shoot!”

Lady Fairfax went with him, but not willingly. Outside, she lifted her chin and insisted, “I care not for their guns—but I would not endanger those around me.”

“I would your husband had your principles and courage,” Antony said, meeting her eyes, blazing like fire in her mask. “Had England more like you, she would rest far easier at night.”

The lady’s mouth wavered. “My husband is a good man.”

But rendered powerless by forces that had escaped all control. The Army no longer answered to him. Antony had no comfort to offer Lady Fairfax, and none for himself.

Back inside, he found confusion. The Commissioners were filing out, in less order than was their custom, and the people were muttering amongst themselves. “What’s going on?”

Tom shrugged. “The King requested a hearing before the Lords and Commons. Claimed he had something that might bring peace. Bradshaw refused it, and then the Commissioners began arguing; Cromwell himself went after the man who started it. Didn’t hear what they said, though. And now Bradshaw has called for a withdrawal.”

It lasted half an hour—an uneasy span of time. Antony had some experience of Oliver Cromwell in the Commons; the man was good at intimidation. And while he had not joined Ireton in purging the House, once Cromwell agreed to participate in this trial, his support had been steadfast. Whatever objection his fellow Commissioner might have raised, Antony doubted it would survive the confrontation now going on in private.

He was right. When the assembly returned, Tom muttered that the dissenter was missing, and Bradshaw denied Charles’s request for the hearing.

His address to the prisoner went on interminably, through a thicket of legal arguments and historical examples, most of which Antony could have dismantled in a heartbeat. Only one thing Bradshaw said struck him.

“There is a contract and a bargain made between a King and his people,” the red-robed Commissioner said. “The one tie, the one bond, is the bond of protection that is due from the sovereign; the other is the bond of subjection that is due from the subject. Sir, if this bond be once broken, farewell sovereignty!”

Such a world once existed,
Antony thought sadly.
But it is broken indeed.

Charles tried to interrupt, to respond, to answer the charges Bradshaw laid. After three painful days of his attacks, though, Bradshaw was not going to repeat the mistake of letting the King gain any footing. Rushing through his final points, he declared the prisoner guilty, and a clerk rose to read the sentence from a paper already prepared.

“The said Charles Stuart, as a tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public enemy, shall be put to death, by the severing of his head from his body.”

In a solemn wave, the Commissioners rose, silently declaring their assent.

The words fell into Antony’s heart like drops of lead.
Not deposition. Not imprisonment.

They will execute him.

From his seat on the floor of the hall, the King of England said mildly, “Will you hear me a word, sir?”

But Bradshaw would not. Sentenced to death, Charles was already dead, in the eyes of the law. A dead man could not speak. Heartsick, Antony saw the growing dismay on the King’s face as he realized his miscalculation. He had not understood; he had expected to have one more chance—not to change his sentence, but to give one last statement. His voice rose, higher and more desperate, as the guards closed around him like an iron gauntlet, as the Commissioners ignored his cries.

Grim in this, his ignominious defeat, Charles had his final word. “I am not suffered for to speak: expect what justice other people will have.”

“You cannot go,” Antony said, his voice flat and weary. “You
cannot.
”

Lune’s ladies were utterly silent as they carried out the task of dressing their mistress. They were not all needed—not for the plain gown Lune had ordered them to clothe her in—but they all stayed, the better to radiate their disapproval in harmony with the Prince. “Your authority, Lord Antony, extends to mortal affairs—not those of fae. Where we choose to go is our own concern.”

She should not have addressed him so formally, but her own temper was frayed beyond any chance of courtesy. As was his own, no doubt. Antony said through his teeth, “I give no commands, madam. I merely advise you that to leave your realm and go into such danger is unwise in the extreme.”

“I was once accounted quite good at this,” she said with some asperity, trying to make light of it. “You need not fear I will be found out.”

“Good or not, you propose to expose yourself to that which is anathema to you, with
nothing
to gain for it!”

A spark of rage flared in her heart. Did he think her entirely motivated by gain? Incapable of concerns beyond the betterment of her court? Amadea entered the room, bearing a crystalline coffer, but recoiled from the glare Lune laid on her. Free for the moment from her attendants, Lune turned to face her consort.

“I promised,” she said, forming each word precisely, “to protect England. Instead I have let her fall into the hands of a militant faction who discard her well-being in pursuit of their own interests. And so today they will cut the head from her King—a
reigning monarch,
tried and put to death by his own subjects.” Words were insufficient to contain her horror. Kings and queens had died before—deposed, abdicated, murdered without warning—but never like this. Never while on their thrones, under pretense of law.

Disguising what she felt was impossible; instead she used it as a weapon, letting Antony see. “I will not let this pass unwitnessed.”

He argues to preserve this realm—out of fear that something may befall me, and so both realms will crumble into chaos together.
Robbed of his seat in Parliament, his position as alderman, his influence in his own world, Antony fought all the harder to preserve his other sovereign. She understood.

But I must do this.

At last Antony bowed his head. “Then come. The time grows short.”

Silence reigned over King Street. Here and there a tearful, murmured prayer rose from hesitant lips, but the hundreds of people packing the road, leaning out of windows, perching on the roof, waited in grim and unnatural silence.

The Italianate expanse of the Banqueting House formed the background of the scene, a classical limestone island in the midst of Tudor brick. Black cloth draped the railings of the platform in front, concealing from those in the street the low block at its center, and the staples hammered into the boards around it. Should it prove necessary, they would chain the King to his scaffold, like a dog.

Tower Hill and Tyburn were both too large and open, too difficult to control. A vast mob had gathered to gloat over Strafford’s death; the men who now held England’s reins could not risk a similar mob turning against them. The confines of Whitehall Palace could be controlled, with the Banqueting House marking one side of King Street, the Tilt-yard the other, and Holbein Gate capping the southern end. An artillery platform left over from the wars, wedged in the corner by the scaffold, kept black watch over the street, and mounted soldiers ringed the scaffold, armored and armed. They would kill Charles outside his monument to beauty, Inigo Jones’s elegant architecture and Rubens’s transcendent ceiling within: an added twist of the knife.

The spare, ascetic woman at Antony’s side showed her years in her gray hairs and the worn lines of her face, and a hint of stiffness in her joints betrayed the encroachment of age. Lune had not exaggerated; she counterfeited humanity so well, he could not have told her for a fae. The three who accompanied her were easier to identify: Sir Prigurd Nellt was the enormous fellow with shoulders as wide as an axe handle, and the other two served in the Onyx Guard. Even now, dressed as humble tradesmen, they stood like knights—and faerie knights at that. The sober, Puritan dress they all wore was a thin mask. But no one’s eye would be on them today.

Kate had called Antony monstrous for attending, as if the grisly spectacle were his reason. The truth was that he could not let Lune come alone.

It was easy to think the elfin woman careless, even heartless. Together they had played the game of politics for so long he had lost sight of the truth: that Lune
did
care, as deeply as he. And this day might even hurt her more, for her dedication to the monarchy was born in a time when the monarch deserved the love of her servants.