The Wheel of Osheim

Much as I wanted to leave matters of state to those who matter I found myself unable to shake off Martus’s complaints. Not that I cared about his lost chances for glory—but I was worried by the idea that Grandmother was leading the army off into what seemed a fairly arbitrary war just as Vermillion was starting to see actual evidence of the kinds of dangers she’d been warning us about for years. The unanswered questions led me back up Garyus’s stairs. I doubted the Red Queen would be particularly forthcoming, especially after our last meeting, and frankly I didn’t know anyone else in Red March who might have both the information I was after and the inclination to share it with me.

The old man was where I left him, hunched over a book. “Books!” I breezed in. “Nobody ever put anything good in a book.”

“Grand-nephew.” Garyus set the offending item to one side. “Explain the Slov thing to me.” There didn’t seem to be any point beating about the bush. I wanted my mind set at ease so I could go and get drunk in good company. “She’s starting a war . . . for what? Why now?” Garyus smiled, a crooked thing. “I’m not my sister’s keeper.”

“But you know.”

He shrugged. “Some of it.”

“There are ghouls in the city. Other . . . things, too. The Dead King has turned his eyes this way. Why would she rush off to fight foreigners hundreds of miles away?”

“What turned the Dead King’s eyes this way?” Garyus asked.

Not wanting to say that I had done it I said nothing. Though to be fair Martus’s report indicated that the dead had been stirring within our walls for some while and I had only just returned.

“The Lady Blue steers the Dead King,” Garyus answered for me.

“And why—”

“Alica says our time is running out, and fast. She says that the troubles in Vermillion are to distract her, to keep her here. The true danger lies in not stopping the Lady Blue. The Wheel of Osheim is still turning . . . how long remains to us is unclear, but if the Lady Blue is left unchecked to keep pushing it then the last of our days will run through our fingers so quickly that even ancients like me will have to worry.”

“So it truly is a whole army, a whole war, just to kill one woman?”

“Sometimes that’s what it takes . . .”

I came to my father’s chambers also without knowing why. To learn more about his mother’s war was the excuse that had led me there, but the Red Queen would rather share her plans with her court jester—if she had one—than Reymond Kendeth.

I knocked at his bedchamber and a maid opened the door. I didn’t note which maid. The figure in the bed held my gaze, hunched in upon himself in the gloom, his form picked out only here and there where the daylight found a slit in his blinds.

The maid closed the door behind her as she left.

I stood, feeling like a child again, lost for words. The place smelled of sour wine, musty neglect, sickness, and sorrow. “Father.”

He raised his head. He looked old. Balding, greying, flesh sunken about his bones, an unhealthy glitter in his eyes. “My son.”

The cardinal called everyone “my son.” A hundred dusty sermons crowded in on me—all the times when I’d wanted a father not a cleric, all those times since Mother died when I’d wanted the man she’d seen in him—for arranged or not she wasn’t one to have given herself to a man she felt no respect or appreciation for.

“My son?” he repeated, a thickness in his voice. Drunk again.

The reason I’d come escaped me and I turned to go.

“Jalan.”

I turned back. “So you recognize me.”

He smiled—a weak thing, part grimace. “I do. But you’ve changed, boy. Grown. I thought at first you were your brother . . . but I couldn’t tell which. You’ve both of them in you.”

“Well, if you’re just going to insult me . . .” In truth I knew it to be a compliment, the Darin part anyway. Perhaps the Martus part. Martus was at least brave, if little else.

“We—” He coughed and hugged his chest. “I’ve been a poor—”

“Father?”

“I was going to say cardinal. But I have been a poor father too. I’ve no excuses, Jalan. It was a betrayal of your mother. My weakness . . . the world sweeps along so fast and the easiest paths are . . . easiest.” He sagged.

“You’re drunk.” Though that was hardly a judgment I could wield against anyone. We didn’t talk like this, ever. Very drunk. “You should sleep.” I didn’t want his mawkish apologies, forgotten within a day. I couldn’t look at him without distaste—though what part of that was just the fear that I looked into a mirror and saw myself old, I couldn’t say. I wanted . . . I wanted that things had been different . . . I saw him from the other side of Mother’s death now. Snorri had done that for me—shown me how a husband’s grief can cut down even the biggest of men. I wished he hadn’t shown me—it was easy to hate Father, understanding him just made me sad.