In Ashes Lie (12 page)

To catch that messenger, they would have to keep Cerenel here. Exchanging a quick glance with Antony, Lune said, “No. I have no doubt that your orders began with this Lord of Shadows. To stop him, we must learn more of him, and that can only be done in Fife. Tell Nicneven I was suspicious of you, or that my favor has moved on; tell her whatever you wish. But you
will
go back.”

Tears jeweled Cerenel’s lashes, that he was too proud to shed. “Madam,” he whispered, from where he knelt before her, “this is my
home
.”

“Then help us preserve it,” Lune said. “Find us this Lord of Shadows.”

“They’ve overstepped,” Antony said, angry satisfaction tinging his words. “It nearly came to blows in the Commons, when they first proposed to print the Grand Remonstrance. Bad enough to present to the King a list of grievances long enough to pass for the fifth gospel of the Bible, but publishing it for all to read...”

He did not exaggerate. The days when Parliament debated issues quietly and members dozed on their benches were long past; scarcely a man there had not drawn his sword in the end. It needed no faerie interference to spark their anger—assuming a fae could get within twenty feet of those godly zealots—their own bad blood was enough. They could pass motions to deal with the tumults outside their chamber, but what of those within?

Yet that victory, the public declaration of the Commons’ war against its own sovereign, had misfired exactly as Antony hoped. Printed just before Christmas, the Grand Remonstrance—God be thanked—had put loyalist mobs in the street, fighting the Puritans and Levellers and other fanatic malcontents who supported Parliament’s leaders. Pym and his friends had become drunk on their own power and ideals, and would reap the consequences.

Not before time, either. Ireland was in open rebellion, fighting to throw off the English yoke entirely. And Eochu Airt, furious at Antony’s reversal of position on Strafford, showed no willingness to halt the bloodshed. It was time for England to put its own house in order, and stop this internal fighting that threatened to gut all its strength.

But Ben Hipley did not seem to share his cheerful outlook. “I fear the King is about to lose what goodwill he has earned.”

“What? How?”

The ancient stones of the Guildhall echoed their every word to the would-be eavesdropper, and with City sentiment having swung fiercely to the Puritan, Antony had cause to fear it. He should have known Ben did not bear good news, though; the spymaster would not have come to him here unless the cause was urgent.

Hipley stepped in closer and lowered his voice. “Pym and the others have attacked the King’s advisers, and met with success. Now they aim their bolts at the Queen.”

Henrietta Maria. Hardly popular in England, for she was both French and Catholic, the latter a constant source of discord. “But to strike at her—that will only turn people even more against them. We may not love her, but who would see her dragged through the mud, as Strafford was?”

“The King would not,” Hipley said. “He’s sent Sir Edward Herbert to the Lords this morning, to impeach Lord Mandeville, and five from the Commons. Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hesilrige, and Strode.”

Antony’s heart stopped. “Will the Lords—”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. But you should get to Westminster.”

He got to Westminster, for all the good it did. Pym already knew what was coming. The King’s creatures should have moved for the immediate imprisonment of the accused men, but they let the moment slip. Antony, who might have done it for them, was not prepared; he arrived only just in time to hear the impeachment read. And so nothing came of it, not yet, save a meaningless resolution that the Commons would consider the matter.

Whatever happens now,
he thought on his way back to Westminster late the following morning,
the damage has been done. If you threaten your enemies, you must follow through, and win. The King has done neither.

Only after the noon recess did he realize the disaster was not yet complete.

The sergeant-at-arms threw wide the doors of the chapel and bellowed in a loud voice, “The King!”

A hideous silence fell. Browne had been reporting on a delegation sent to the Inns of Court; he trailed off midsentence and stood staring. Lenthall gaped from the Speaker’s chair. Antony, in the midst of scribbling a note, sat paralyzed as ink dripped and blotted his page.

Into that silence came Charles. Sweeping his hat off with an elegant gesture, he advanced down the floor of the chapel, while around him the members of the Commons came to their feet in a ragged wave, snatching their own hats from their heads. Charles’s nephew trailed a pace behind him, their paired steps deliberate in the quiet.

The man behind Antony whispered, “Sweet swiving Jesus.”

“Mr. Speaker,” the King said, his tone mild, “I must for a time make bold with your chair.”

Lenthall staggered belatedly out of the way. Once arranged in his seat, Charles surveyed the chapel and its occupants with a curious eye. As well he might: no monarch of England had ever intruded on the deliberations of the Commons. They were—or had been—inviolate.

Charles had dressed with great splendor for his intrusion, in a doublet of well-tailored taffeta, a broad collar of finest lawn edged with point. They gave his body bulk, but not height, and he looked small in Lenthall’s chair.

But his presence was larger than he. “No person,” he said into the silence, “has privileges, when charged with treason. I am come among you to know if any of those so accused are in attendance.” He waited, but no one spoke. “Is Mr. Pym here?”

Not a soul breathed in reply.

Irritated, he turned to Lenthall. “Are any of those persons in the house, who stand accused of treason? Do you see them here? Show them to me!”

The Speaker lacked a spine of his own; he was a creature of the strongest authority about him. In that moment, he showed how truly the winds had changed. Swallowing convulsively, Lenthall fell to his knees. “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your Majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this is, to what your Majesty is pleased to demand of me.”

A few men gasped. A few more chuckled in malicious pleasure. Antony did neither. Having come late, he sat near the chapel entrance; now, hearing sounds in the lobby, he turned and looked into the gap between the benches. The Earl of Roxburgh lounged in the entrance, propping the doors open, so that Antony and anyone else who cared to could see what awaited them.

Armed men filled the lobby. Elegant courtiers, many of them the Queen’s men, but not a one of their number less than skilled in the use of the pistols they held. One met Antony’s gaze and grinned insolently, cocking his weapon and aiming it toward him—saying, clear and cold,
I wait only for the King’s word.

His blood ran with ice, and for the first time, it occurred to him to fear, not the dissolution of Parliament, but its massacre.

“ ’Tis no matter,” the King said, his light tone belying the venom that backed it. “I think my eyes are as good as another’s.”

He lifted his chin and scanned the ranks of standing men. Antony squeezed his own eyes shut. He did not have to look. A messenger had come for Pym not ten minutes before, after which he obtained leave for himself and the others to depart. Lenthall had not detained them, though the Commons agreed the day before that the accused members should present themselves to answer the charges. Only Strode had caused any delay, insisting he wished to stay for the confrontation. Pym and the others dragged him out of the chapel by his cloak.

The only thing worse than arresting members of Parliament was coming to arrest them, and failing.

“I see all my birds have flown,” Charles said at last. The satisfied grandeur with which he had entered was gone; in its place reigned discontented anger. “I cannot do what I came for.” And with a snarl, he rose from the Speaker’s chair and stormed from the House, followed by rising voices crying the offended privileges of Parliament.

Lune’s heavy skirts flared every time she reached the end of her pacing and pivoted to retrace her steps. The Onyx Hall was a goodly palace, with many chambers and galleries, entertainments aplenty to amuse her, but for all that it was a cage; she missed the sun and breeze on her face.

London was not safe, though. Mortal bread might shield her against the prayers and invocations of the Puritan mobs in its streets, but it would do nothing to save her from a rock to the head. The barricades of benches torn from taverns, put up by the apprentices before their Christmas holiday ended on Twelfth Night, had been cleared away, but in their place were the Trained Bands of London. They placed cannon on the corners and stretched chains across the streets, all in preparation for the attack they feared would come.

She dared not go above; she wished Antony would not. He had struggled since that abortive Parliament two years ago to maintain an impossible balance: fighting for moderation while never trusting the King, opposing Pym’s junto while never alienating them too obviously. They branded him a Straffordian for voting against the attainder, and could do worse. Members of Parliament had been ousted from their seats for their opposition. Some had been sent to the Tower.

But Antony sat even now in the Guildhall with the House of Commons, which had exiled itself from Westminster for its own safety. At his request, she had sent out a few of her more reliable goblins, and learned the five treasonous members were hiding in Coleman Street, but what good did that do? The King could not strike them now. He had already suffered the failure he could not afford, and outraged the populace beyond endurance.

And Lune, who had vowed to protect England from such troubles, could only wait for a message: the name and nature of the Lord of Shadows, who fed this violence against the King on Nicneven’s behalf.

The flapping of wings halted her pacing. A falcon arrowed through the open latticework of the chamber wall and perched on the back of a chair. It shook its wings, then again, and with the third shake stretched upward and down until a sharp-faced powrie stood gripping the chair in his bony fingers. Where he had gotten the falcon cloak from, Lune never asked; it was not the common raiment of goblinkind. But it made him useful.

He had no cap to take off, no clothing save the cloak, which he swept around himself as he knelt. Lune offered her hand perfunctorily, bade him rise, and said, “What word?”

Orgat was no Onyx Courtier; his home was a disused peel tower along the Border. But the Goodemeades knew him from their time in the North, ages ago, and they had contracted him to bear messages from Cerenel. She was grateful now for her decision to leave Valentin Aspell out of those plans; he was too much in company with the Ascendants, these days.

“Got it here,” the powrie said, and began rooting around in the feathers of his cloak with one hand, the other clutching it in front of his groin for a modicum of decency. “Nimble little bastard—hope you can make sense of it, yer Grace—come
on,
now—ah! Didn’t even squish him.”

The spy triumphantly produced something small and wiggling. That Cerenel would not send a written message, or even a verbal one, Lune expected; it was not safe. But—“A spider?”

“Told me to fetch it meself,” Orgat said. “From me tower, he is. That there’s a cupboard spider, as we call them. Was real particular that it had to be a male.” He dropped it in the hand Lune reflexively held up; she shuddered as its legs scrabbled against her skin. “Careful with him, now. Supposed to be alive, too.”

A spider. A living, male cupboard spider, from Orgat’s peel tower.

This was the message Cerenel had sent her.

Find me this Lord of Shadows.

She knew someone, once, who called to mind images of spiders. Her heartless, twisted predecessor, the Queen of the Onyx Court. Invidiana.

But Invidiana was dead.

A living,
male
spider.

Lune whispered, “Ifarren Vidar.”

Drumbeats echoed off the warehouses that lined the north bank of the Thames, overmastered only by the shouts of the crowd. The Trained Bands kept order, but in good cheer; they were not there to prevent violence—for there was none—but to keep the masses from overrunning the group that stood on the wharf.

The barge was drawn up to its moorings and steadied by the same lightermen who the day before had marched in the streets, offering their lives in defense of Parliament. Now they offered their hands to the five men who waited to board.

John Pym stood in the cold air, his eyes raised to God, his prayer of thanksgiving drowned out by the noise of the onlookers. Then he stepped aboard, followed by Hampden, Holles, Hesilrige, and Strode. No more concealment for them: they waved to their supporters, and received cheers and prayers in return.

The rest of the House of Commons made their way onto the barge. Antony placed himself in the middle, a false smile on his face. At this moment, of all moments, he could not afford to show his horror at the news.

The King was fled. For the royal family to retire to Hampton Court was common enough; for them to depart in the night, with no warning to the palace that they were coming, was not. But it was only an admission of the obvious: that Charles’s attempt to take the leaders of Parliament under arrest had irrevocably lost him the goodwill of his City.

London had feared attack, and prepared itself for such. Instead it won, without a fight.

Casting off the ropes, the lightermen put the barge to the river. They made slow progress up the Thames, surrounded on all sides by gaily decorated vessels, packed to their gunwales with celebrating men. From the Strand, Antony could hear the Trained Bands, paralleling their journey with drums and song, and the mocking calls they made as they passed the deserted Palace of Whitehall.