Ben shook his head. “You need me here. The machinations in Parliament, over this treaty with the King—”
“I need you more there. I can watch Parliament on my own, but I cannot keep one eye on Westminster and one on Hertfordshire. Henry Ireton has called a ‘General Council of the Army’ at St. Albans, and it has the potential to destroy everything. He hates the treaty like poison. His idea of peace is to see the King punished like any other man.”
The blood drained from Hipley’s face. “He goes that far?”
It was the logical extension of all that had gone before, yet it still had power to appall. Pym had undermined the foundations of sovereignty itself, until men like Ireton could look at the King and see a common criminal.
But not everyone felt that way, God be thanked. “You’re not the only one to flinch,” Antony said grimly. “General Cromwell is delaying in the North; I think he hesitates to oppose a fellow officer openly, but he would see us follow a different course. Fairfax argues against it as well. Those two are greatly loved in the Army, and without them, Ireton may achieve nothing—but I cannot afford to let him go unwatched.”
The truth was that they needed agents within the Army, men or disguised fae placed close enough to the generals and lower officers that they could supply both intelligence and action as needed. But the Army was beyond their reach: forged out of the disastrous chaos of Parliament’s early armies, it had become a finely honed weapon that crushed the Royalists at every turn. And between their common soldiers, who liked the Leveller arguments that they should rule England, and their fiercely Puritan officers, there had never been any good chance to position such agents. Antony had sat in Westminster through all those years of war, exerting what force he could in Parliament, but the sieges and battles, the capture of prisoners and the smuggling of information, had gone on in a hundred locations across the kingdom, miles away from the men who thought the power was still in their hands.
Until they reached this point. A General Council of the Army at St. Albans, and Henry Ireton their self-appointed champion, preparing to tear England’s wounds yet wider.
Scowling, Ben rose and moved a few steps away, pausing with his back to Antony. At last the intelligencer asked, “Will the treaty conclude in time?”
The question every man in Parliament would give his fortune to answer. They had already extended the deadline for the negotiations once. England wanted peace; it wanted an end to the chaos and upheaval caused by the disruption of government and the forced quartering of soldiers and the lack of uniformity in religion.
Some of England did. But not all.
“We stand at a precipice,” Antony said, just loudly enough for Ben to hear. “The King is poised to retake all he had, making no concessions he cannot squirm out of once power is his again. Those who sue for peace tie hope over their eyes like a blindfold, telling themselves he can be trusted. But our alternative is the Army, and the Levellers, and Independency in religion. We know it; our treaty commissioners know it. Charles knows it, and so he sits in his prison on the Isle of Wight and waits.”
Ben turned back, his hands curled at his sides, not quite fists. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Antony offered him a baring of teeth that might stand in for a smile. “Whether or not it concludes in time depends on what Ireton and the Army do. Get to St. Albans—tell me what you find there—and I will answer your question then.”
THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: November 20, 1648
The greater presence chamber had never been Lune’s favorite part of the Onyx Hall, being too grand, too chill—too full of the memory of Invidiana. For formal state occasions, however, she could not avoid it. Anything less would be an insult to the dignitaries who gathered for this ceremony.
So she sat upon her silver throne, and a selection of her courtiers waited in bright array across the black-and-white pietre dura floor. Eochu Airt stood to one side, in the full splendor of what passed for court dress among the Irish, with gold torcs banding his neck and arms.
He made a poisonously polite nod to the empty seat next to hers on the dais. “I see your Prince could not be here today.”
Lune pressed her lips together. Antony’s reply to her messenger had been brusque to the point of rudeness: he was at Westminster, and could not leave. The General Council of the Army had presented a Remonstrance to the Commons, a listing of their grievances, like the one the Commons had once presented to the King. Lune did not know their demands; her messenger had not tarried, but come back with stinging ears to relay Antony’s words. He did say, though, that the Remonstrance had already been two hours in the reading, and showed no signs of ending soon.
Antony’s refusal vexed her, but perhaps it was just as well. “He sends his regrets, my lord, and wishes you all good speed.”
A snort answered that. “At Parliament, I see. Voting again to gut my land and hang it out to dry?”
Her ladies whispered behind their fans. Only their eyes showed, glinting like jewels in the masks they had adopted and elaborated from mortal fashion; even Lune could not read their expressions from that alone. “My lord ambassador, nothing happens in isolation. Lord Antony wishes the Army disbanded as much as you do. With the soldiers owed arrears of pay, however, and fearing reprisals for their wartime actions, setting them loose would threaten stability here.”
“And so he votes to send them to Ireland. Where England sends all of its refuse.”
Now it was not lips but teeth she was pressing together. “Had the mortals of your land not risen in rebellion—”
“Had they not done so, we would not now have a free Ireland!”
“You will not have it for long.” Try as she might to be angry with Eochu Airt, in truth, Lune felt sadness; the Irish, mortal and fae alike, were so blinded by success and the hope it brought that they did not see the hammer poised above them.
She tried to find the words to make at least this one sidhe see. “Had they settled with Charles during the war, they might have won something.” And brought the King to victory in the bargain. “But the Vatican’s ambassador encouraged them to overreach, and now, wanting the whole of their freedom, they will instead lose the whole. Their Catholic Confederation will survive only so long as England’s attention is divided. Once we have peace here, someone—Charles or Parliament—will crush them.”
“With the very Army your Prince voted to send. Just as he voted to save Strafford’s life.”
Against Lune’s wishes, in both cases. If she could have persuaded the Prince to vote against sending regiments across, it might have gone some way to healing that injury. But Antony—understandably, damn him—was more concerned with England’s well-being than Ireland’s. In the end the proposal had failed by a single vote… but not his.
“The hammer has not yet fallen upon you,” Lune said, doing what little she could to mollify the sidhe. “I will do everything in my power to stay it.”
Whatever response Eochu Airt might have made, he swallowed it when the great doors at the other end of the chamber swung open. Lune’s Lord Herald spoke in a voice that echoed from the high ceiling. “From the Court of Temair in Ireland, the ambassador of Nuada Ard-Rí, Lady Feidelm of the Far-Seeing Eye!”
An imposing sidhe woman appeared in the opening. Her green silk tunic, clasped at the shoulders with silver and gold, was stiff with red-gold embroidery; her cloak, thrown back, revealed strong white shoulders. The branch she held, however, was mere silver, compared to Eochu Airt’s gold. She knelt briefly, then rose and advanced until she came to the foot of the dais, where she knelt again.