Allus’s guards had stepped away too. Their charge was dead, his heart would realize it in short order. They had nothing to gain by coming against me now. It had ended for them the moment I slit their boss’s throat.
I pushed Allus away from me. He staggered back, pulsing crimson from his neck wound, fetching up against the wooden barricade. I followed and shoved him, two hands rammed hard into his chest. He went heels over head, plummeting backward across the barrier. I peered after him. “Is the bear big enough for you?” Shouted at a volume that would reach the whole crowd, though Maeres himself was beyond hearing.
I spun around and picked up my coffer. I could see some of Allus’s flunkies slipping away through various exits. The bookkeeper was clutching a wound in his side and the three sacks had vanished. Scuffles had broken out further back in the crowd. Half a dozen of the Terrif brothers’ guards were closing in on me.
“He’s dead!” I roared it at them. “I’m a fucking prince of the realm. Are you going to touch me?” I stalked past the first of them, paying him no heed. “Thought not!” I walked on, letting the onlookers part before me.
Just before the entrance I turned back. Several bloody fights were in progress and the richer elements had already started to flee the scene.
I used my royal shout to be heard. “My grandmother’s troops will be burning the poppies by nightfall. Death warrants will be issued for Allus’s captains. I expect to see Alber Marks’s head on a spike by morning, Cutter John’s too, and there will be leniency for any man who helped put them there.”
I turned and left, exiting the main doors, with some of the lords who had wondered about my identity now sprinting ahead into the street, many others crowding behind me. I heard the mutter then, for the first time. “Red Prince.” And looking down at myself as I stepped into the light of day I saw that few parts of me weren’t crimson with Maeres Allus’s lifeblood.
I walked twenty paces and leaned against one of the great buttresses that support the slaughterhouse walls, forehead to the stonework, cool in the shade. I saw my knife cut Allus’s throat, again and again. On the third time I vomited until I was empty. At last I walked away, weak and shaking, wiping my mouth.
“Give him what he wants,” Jorg had said. “Then take what you want. Nobody is more vulnerable than in their moment of victory, and you know that whatever you do this man will never let you go while he lives.”
I walked away, coffer heavy in my arms, still a coward. Neither the old Jalan, nor the one who left Vermillion a year ago. Perhaps a little of each—still a coward, but when you’ve looked at your old life with eyes that have seen Hell you discover a new perspective and realize that you can only be pushed so far.
EIGHT
I walked to the palace. Three times city guards stopped me, concerned at the gore dripping from my finery.
“I’m Prince Jalan. A man tried to rob me. He won’t try again.” I said the same thing three times and passed on.
I met more soldiers than guards, units of them moving rapidly and offering me no more than curious glances. At last I came to the Errik Gate through which heroes enter the palace, and took instead the postern gate just as I had on my return from the North. The sub-captain on duty recognized me and admitted me without fuss once he’d established the blood wasn’t mine.
On the far side of the wall the palace waited, unchanged, baking in the late Vermillion summer. “What’s going on in the city?” I asked the sub-captain as I emerged. “Soldiers everywhere.” It had been like this before we moved out for the Scorron border. That had been war in earnest and there hadn’t been as many troops in the streets.
“It’s a campaign against Slov, my prince.”
“Why?” I cared little enough for politics but I was pretty sure Slov hadn’t offered Red March even a hint of aggression in my lifetime. I seemed to remember half their royal family were honoured guests of the March, hostages against the good behaviour of the current regime— though quite how much the current Slov royals would care about people they hadn’t seen in decades I didn’t know. “What have they done?”
The man wrinkled his brow as if the act might produce an answer. “They’re the enemy, sire.”
“By definition if we’re attacking them. But why are they the enemy?”
Again the frown, but this time relaxing into a smile as he remembered the fact he’d been hunting. “Harbouring a person of interest.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Prince Jalan.”