In Ashes Lie (39 page)

Spasm ended, Antony forced himself upright. “I am perfectly—” He choked on the last word and nearly started coughing again. If a soldier had ridden by and poleaxed Henry in passing, Antony’s son could not have looked more stunned. “Father?”

The boy sounded disbelieving, as well he might. Antony was dressed to blend in with the apprentices; the Court of Aldermen would need to believe they were telling the truth when they promised the Army they had nothing to do with the riot. Henry’s face settled into sardonic lines. “I didn’t know you fought for the good old cause.”

Antony almost laughed. Good old cause? Henry was scarcely old enough to remember the days when that phrase had been coined, and he was hardly an Army man, to talk of fighting for it. “The Commonwealth? Not hardly—nor the Rump, neither. I’d fight for my seat in Parliament back, if I thought it might do any good. But since it will not, I side with your apprentice friends: our soldier-masters should at least arrange a new and free election.”

What possessed him to say it, he did not know. Even supposing he wanted to break their tradition of never discussing politics, the entrance to Leadenhall was hardly the place to do it. But Henry had caught him off guard.

Predictably, his son’s expression turned mutinous. “Of course you wish your old place. You and your friends would vote for the restoration of the monarchy before the opening prayers were done.”

Henry had no sense of discretion—but then neither did he, it seemed. They were far too public. Antony took his son by the arm and dragged him, protesting, around the corner of the market, into a narrow alley reeking of piss. After years of skulking about London, hiding from Vidar and Cromwell alike, he knew all the hidden byways.

“Do not speak so openly,” he growled at his eldest, voice echoing off the overhanging jetties of the houses. “Unless you wish me disbarred from the aldermen again, and perhaps imprisoned.”

“You’ve created that danger yourself,” Henry said, jerking free. “Why, Father? I once thought you too wise to have a romantic view of the past, yet you cling to it more with every passing year.”

“Romance?” This time, Antony
did
laugh. “Say rather ‘cold-eyed practicality.’ A body cannot live without its head.”

Henry scowled, at the words or the laughter, perhaps both. “It has lived so far. And what if that head be diseased? For the love of God—
you
remember that man of blood.”

More Army phrases from his son’s lips. Did Henry realize how much he parroted them? Antony doubted it. Henry was a Commonwealth man, to the bone. He hated the Army, but did not see how it was the only force propping up the Rump—and then only when it chose. “I remember a great deal more than King Charles. At least in those days, we knew the tools in our hands; we knew the ways in which King, Lords, and Commons could be made to balance one another. If at times we failed, at least the ground we fought on was familiar.”

How old had Henry been, when Charles fled London? Not even breeched. He did not remember a world in which that pattern held true. He had never known a King on the throne.

Nor did he wish to, by the contempt on his face. “So you would hold fast to what you know, for fear of anything different.”

“If the men peddling difference had any plan,” Antony said, answering contempt with contempt, “I might see it differently. But ask yourself: when was the last time you heard someone argue for a republic,
and
provide a notion of how to create it? I do not mean some Utopian dream of government; I mean a practical, practicable scheme for getting from here to there.”

Hotheaded Henry might be, but he had a brain. He opened his mouth, but when he found no answer inside, shut it again. The Commonwealthsmen kept believing that success lay simply in finding the right design for England’s government; they did not see the obstacles along the way. So long as that was true, they would only tear the realm down again and again, and never build anything stable in its place.

“Give us time,” Henry said at last.

Antony shook his head. “There
is
no more time. The hunt for that dream has let in a wolf worse than the one killed ten years ago. Do you know the Protectorate sold Englishmen into slavery in Barbados? Do you know how many men have been imprisoned without proper trials?
I
do not; God Himself might not be able to count them.”

“But the monarchy—”

“Is what the people want.”

“Then the people are
fools,
” Henry cried, full of young fury. “Blind, damnable fools, who do not see what they are asking for!”

The wall behind Antony was filthy with coal smoke, but his doublet was of no consequence; he leaned against the surface and crossed his arms. “Then you must make a choice,” he said flatly. “A republic is guided by the will of its people, is it not? And the people want the world they had before. They may be fools, but if you stand by your principles, then you must support a new election and accept its consequences. Your only alternative is oligarchy, under the false name of republic.”

His declaration carried a certain necessary cruelty. Henry called the people of England blind, but so was he, in his own way. And Antony could not let his son blunder onward, ignorant of the tangled, bloody truth. Change was coming. Henry must be prepared.

The question was whether, having laid his own sympathies out so plainly, he had lost his eldest son.

Henry was floundering for words. Antony decided to play one final card. “General Monck is moving in support of Parliament. If the Army does not comply, there’s a good chance he will bring his troops down from Scotland and ensure a Parliament free from their control. Paradoxical, yes, that military force should free us from military force—but he is possibly the only honest leader the Army has. This much, I think, we can agree on: that a free Parliament must be England’s next step.”

The step after it might be indeed restoration of the monarchy. Antony hoped so. It was to that end that he and Lune worked now, not controlling, simply helping the people where they could. The same people Henry railed against just a moment ago. But principles won out over ideals; Henry nodded, reluctantly. The right of the people to elect their representatives was his paramount concern.

“Then come,” Antony said, reaching for his son. “This alley stinks, and I am hungry. We shall have supper together.”

A shiver ran down Lune’s body. She broke off what she was saying midword and closed her eyes, reaching for the source of that reaction. Something in the Onyx Hall...

No. Not in; above.

“Lord Valentin,” she said, and heard him murmur in reply. “Send someone into London. Find out what is happening at the gates.”

“Which gates, madam?”

Another shiver, like bones grinding in their sockets. “All of them.”

She opened her eyes to find Sir Peregrin regarding her with a strange mixture of reverence and disturbance. A faerie monarch was tied to her realm, but not until the retaking of the Onyx Hall had her subjects realized how far that went here. They seemed to fear she would drop the ceiling on them, next.

She could not do it without the Prince of the Stone; though she could sense things when she tried, the Hall only answered to its master and mistress in concert. But there was no profit in explaining that.

“Carry on,” she told the captain, as if the interruption had never happened.

He blinked, regathering the scattered threads of his thoughts. “We have found no sign of Vidar in England, madam. Your cousin Kings and Queens would not give him refuge after Invidiana’s downfall; they are no more likely to do so now.”

“And Ireland?”

Peregrin shrugged helplessly. “He is not in Temair, nor in Connacht, Lady Feidelm tells us. Leinster and Munster claim they do not harbor him, and I see no reason to doubt them.”

“And Ulster,” Lune sighed, “is not likely to answer if we ask.”

“No, madam.”

She brooded over the fan she held, trying to weigh her enemy’s mind. Would he flee to Ireland? Conchobar was disappointed with Vidar’s failure to control the English government, but the traitor lord was still a closer ally to Ulster than Lune would ever be. Then again, Conchobar was busy with his own troubles over the
Claíomh Solais.

Her heart told her Vidar was not in Ireland. No, he would crawl back to the same hole from which he had emerged to devil them before.

Fife
.

To which Cerenel had returned, after Lune released him from his vow. His brother Cunobel was there, living in relative peace, separate from all the squabbles between Nicneven and herself. Lune wished them well, with sorrow.
Cerenel is no resource I can call upon. Not anymore.

Which left her with no intelligence on Nicneven’s movements, and what Vidar might be planning.

Blind again. Have I won nothing for all my struggles?

Valentin Aspell returned, giving her some small relief from that question. “What of the treasury?” she asked him; as Lord Keeper, it was his province.

“There has never been a thorough inventory, madam,” he admitted. “What Vidar may have taken, we cannot tell; but we are finding a great deal we did not know we had.”

Vidar had once been Lord Keeper himself. He would know precisely what to take. “Anything that may hunt him?”

She watched Valentin’s face sharply as he formed an expression of regret. Aspell had been in the company of the late Sir Leslic, but more, she believed, out of a desire to protect his own political influence than because he had any alliance with Nicneven and Vidar. He had drifted away during the exile, rather than stay under Vidar’s rule. But he was greedy, and ambitious; Lune wondered, as he denied having found any such enchantment, whether he would tell her the truth.

I should have councillors I can trust.

But she could not afford to replace him. Lune listened to his account of the things he had found, then made arrangements with Sir Peregrin to hear pleas from other traitors who were tired of their cells. “But not until I may arrange a joint audience with Lord Antony,” she said, remembering at the last moment that the Prince wished to be a part of it.

The captain of the Onyx Guard nodded, and then her usher opened the door to the privy chamber where they sat. “Your Majesty, the mara Angrisla.”

“I sent her above,” Valentin said, and Lune gestured for the usher to show her in.

The nightmare’s narrow, slitted eyes were uncommonly wide as she knelt. “What have you discovered?” Lune asked.

“Your Grace—those soldiers are in the streets. The new ones, from Scotland.”

“General Monck’s regiments.” Largely English, as their general was, but everyone thought of them as the Scottish troops, as that was where they had marched from. The news of his advance south had been threat enough to put the Rump back into session just after Christmas, but after a mere six days in London, it seemed Monck’s men were already interfering.
They are, after all, part of the Army. Did I expect otherwise?

Angrisla nodded at the name. “They say Parliament has ordered them to unhinge and destroy the gates.”

“What?” Lune startled in her chair. London had long since grown past its defenses; during the war, Parliamentary forces had dug a great ditch some distance out, in recognition of the wall’s uselessness. To destroy the gates, though, meant rendering the City incapable of even the slightest resistance.

Which must be why they had ordered it. People wanted a Parliament, but they were tired of the Rump. In the City especially, they were not well disposed toward England’s illegitimate masters, and had thrown up chains at the gates to announce their discord.

She was surprised that Monck would agree to cripple them thus; as a rule, he seemed honestly concerned with defending the liberties of the people, and not merely mouthing the words. But she was more concerned with its effect on the Onyx Hall—

Lune’s breath stopped. Could it be Vidar? It did not take a clever mind to know the City wall was part of the faerie palace, since the Hall did not extend beyond that boundary. And Monck had marched down from Scotland. Lune pressed her fingertips into her eyes, striving to sense any weakening in the enchantments.

“Madam?” Sir Peregrin asked quietly.

Lune sighed.
Or perhaps Monck simply is obedient to the Parliament he restored. Not everything has a faerie cause. And I could easily drive myself mad, looking for one
.

She lowered her hands and found everyone watching her. Whatever Angrisla had said in response to her startled cry, she had not heard a word of it. The Onyx Hall was not crumbling around her ears, though, and showed no sign of doing so anytime soon. They were opening the gates, nothing more. That would not destroy the palace.

Still, she would ask Antony about Monck’s decision. If there
was
some hidden influence there, she would like to know about it.

“Thank you,” she said to Angrisla, and made herself smile. “The news startled me, nothing more. Carry on, my lords; we have business to conclude.”

So this is the man in whose hands England now rests.

George Monck did not look remarkable enough for the burden of fate that lay upon him. The general of the Army’s regiments in Scotland dressed as a soldier, and his fleshy face was stolid as he listened to Thomas Alleyn, the Lord Mayor of London, belabor the obvious. “Given the recent unsettlements of the City, you understand, the people are most uncertain as to your intent—the soldiers gathering in Finsbury Fields—”

Monck bore it with patience, but eventually held up one hand. “Lord Mayor, I assure you, my intentions are as they have always been: to protect the liberties of the people. I’ve sent a letter this morning to Parliament, requesting them to issue with all possible speed writs to fill the vacancies in the House. By this, I hope to dispel the impression that they intend their sitting to be perpetual.”