The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“No.” For reasons wholly beyond explanation the word stuck in my throat, my mouth trembled and tears filled my eyes.

“Yes.” Darin turned me around and folded his arms about me. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to press the foolishness back where it came from. He released me and with an arm around my shoulders he steered me out into the day.

The cardinal died in his bedroom, alone. He looked small in the wideness of that bed, sunken, old before his time. If he’d been drinking then the maids had removed the evidence and tidied him up.

He’d gone into a decline following his trip to Roma. The pope’s scolding was a thing to behold by all accounts, and accompanying Reymond Kendeth back to Vermillion, along with a heavy burden of shame, came the pope’s own man, Archbishop Larrin, whose only job appeared to be making my father do his. Some men thrive on old age, others feel the world narrow around them and see no point in the path before them. A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us—a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.

The funeral took place three days later, Father’s corpse under guard until then while the most pious of the faith filed past to honour the office if not the man. We gathered in the Black Courtyard, a sizeable rectangle between the Poor Palace and the Marsail keep, generally used for exercising horses but traditionally reserved for gathering with the coffin before the slow walk to the cemetery, or the church, depending on the deceased’s station in life. Today, under a sullen and blustery sky, there was to be a cremation. Split logs of rosewood and magnolia, selected for fragrance, had been stacked into a pyre taller than a mounted man. Father’s coffin lay perched atop the wooden mountain, polished, gleaming, chased with silver, a heavy silver cross placed upon the lid.

The entire palace turned out. This was the Red Queen’s youngest son, the highest cleric in the land. In the tiered seating for the royals Garyus’s palanquin sat highest, with Martus, Darin and me in the row beneath, our cousins arrayed before us one row lower. Father’s elder brother, Uncle Parrus, remained in his holdings in the east. The message hadn’t had time to reach him, let alone allowed time for him to return, and in any event with Grandmother’s thrust into Slov it would hardly be the time for the grandest lord in the east to abandon his castle on the border.

I had reports demanding my attention—disturbances in the outer city that morning—but I couldn’t begrudge Father his due. Somehow, after Mother’s death we never had anything to say to each other. I should have fixed that. You always think there’s going to be time. Put things off. And then suddenly there’s no time left at all.

“Here he comes.” Darin to my left, nodding down at the courtyard. A crowd of the aristocracy emerged from the Adam Arch, chattering brightly despite their sombre blacks and greys.

“Grandmother’s only been gone ten days and he thinks he owns the place.” Martus on Darin’s far side.

I could make out my father’s eldest brother, my Uncle Hertet, at the centre of the crowd, not because of his height—which was modest—but by virtue of the shirt of brilliant yellow-and-green silk showing through the wide gap in his mourning robe, all of it stretched to contain an ample belly. His entourage swept before him, the phoney court he maintained as practice for when the throne would supposedly be his. To watch him you might imagine that he considered his mother gone for good—not merely on campaign but to her grave.

Hertet’s sons, Johnath and Roland, peeled off to the lowest row to sit beside our other cousins along with the lords and barons. Their father, sweating in his finery despite the cool breeze, lumbered up the timber steps to the highest tier where he wedged himself alongside Garyus’s palanquin. The heir-apparently-not gave no hint of a bow nor acknowledged his uncle’s presence in any way other than that forced on him by having to squeeze in beside the curtained box.

“Hurry it along.” Hertet raised his voice behind us. I turned to see him brushing a hand up through the damp straggles of his grey hair, plastering them back over his forehead. With sagging jowls and bloodshot eyes he looked a far more likely candidate for the reaper’s scythe than my father ever had. “Reymond kept me waiting long enough in life with those damned masses of his. Let’s not have him waste any more of our time.”