Don’t lose that! Harmodius said.
Nor was that the limit of the Duke’s odd behaviour.
He made some odd stops. He spent so much time in a street of apothecaries and alchemists that the rest of the company moved on and began selecting fabrics for Kaitlin’s dress, a subject on which, it turned out, every knight had an opinion. But when Kaitlin and her sisters had found a shop they liked, they went in with Mag the seamstress and Lis the laundress and didn’t emerge until the Duke was long returned from the alchemists. He bought scarlet wool for the company, and brocades for others; velvet for a purse, and a few other pieces.
Quite late in the day, Father Arnaud watched him. ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked.
The Duke turned to Father Arnaud. ‘May I refresh your clothes, Father?’ He met the priest’s eye easily enough. ‘I’ve been better. But I’m hoping to – rid myself of a malady.’
Arnaud was leaning against an ancient column that helped to support a booth that sold nothing but silk gauze. He nodded. ‘If you offer me charity, you gain in honour; if you mean to make me look better as an adornment of your power – well, you still gain, I suspect.’ He smiled. ‘Either way, I’d very much appreciate a new cloak.’
The Duke reached down and lifted the hem of his chaplain’s cloak. ‘It’s good cloth, but something lifted the black dye-’ Indeed, the whole lower half of the cloak was dun brown instead of the deep, rich black of the order.
‘Giant shit,’ the priest said carefully.
The Duke’s eyebrows shot up.
The priest leaned in. ‘I have letters for you. I assume you are spending all this money to a purpose?’
The Duke managed a thin-lipped smile. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Arnaud shrugged. ‘I know you aren’t used to having a chaplain, but I have this task as a penance and I mean to do it.’ He leaned forward. ‘What malady?’
The Duke’s eyebrows shot up further and he furrowed his brow a moment, as if listening to someone. Then he shrugged. ‘I might like having someone to bounce things off,’ he said. ‘As long as you aren’t too talkative.’ Kaitlin and Michael had their heads together and were as pretty as a picture of two saints. ‘Will you marry them?’
‘Saint Michael, it would be a sin not to wed them. Of course I will.’ The priest smiled.
‘We’re spending money to show what nice, rich mercenaries we are. We need to win these people over, and lately I’ve been losing.’ The Duke smiled at Sauce, who was waving a beautiful piece of scarlet velvet.
‘Are you expecting to be attacked?’ the priest asked. He was losing track of the number of conversational threads that his new employer could weave at one time.
‘Only six people knew where we were going after the Patriarch,’ the Duke said. ‘If one of them has turned, I’ll know it in an hour.’
‘You are the only soldier I know who doesn’t swear,’ Father Arnaud said.
‘Is that a sin? God and I have our own arrangement.’ The Duke’s smile was cold as ice. ‘My company needs a chaplain. I do not happen to need a confessor.’
Father Arnaud leaned close. ‘But you like a challenge,’ he said.
‘I do,’ said the Duke.
‘Me, too,’ said the priest.
They made it back to the palace without being attacked, having spent a staggering sum on jewels, another on gloves, and yet more on cloth. Even the pages had new daggers. The Duke insisted on taking them back to the square of armourers so that they could all see the model for his new breast and back, in the new Etruscan style.
The priest rode with Ser Alison. She’d craved a blessing from him as soon as he joined them, identifying herself as one of the few truly devout knights in the company, not so much by her words but actions.
‘I haven’t seen him so happy in a long time,’ she said to the priest. ‘It’s a little scary.’
Father Arnaud nodded. ‘I met him the day after the siege was lifted – in the stable. He didn’t seem this dark.’ The priest looked at the woman in armour. ‘You’ve had your hand on your sword this last half an hour. Do you know something I should know?’
Ser Alison laughed her full-throated laugh. ‘See the leather bag under my right leg?’ she said. ‘Full of gold coin. Sixty thousand florins, give or take.’
Father Arnaud paused, and then whistled. ‘Sweet gentle Jesus and all the saints. That’s what he did at the jewellers.’
Sauce grinned as the guard called out their challenge and the Duke answered. ‘You’re quick, Father. You’ll fit right in.’
They rode into the palace with all their purchases, and all their friends, intact. The group of Academy students had swelled as they went, picking up anyone they knew, and many of them returned to the Outer Court of the palace. By ancient tradition, students at the Academy were allowed in the Outer Court. The Duke broached a cask of wine and served them himself, to the scandal of the Ordinaries, and later that night there was dancing in front of the stables. Nordikans, Scholae, and the company mingled with their camp women, their wives, and their whores and a hundred Academy students.
The Princess Irene leaned against a window seat set in the walls of the Old Library, watching the Outer Court. Eventually, her ladies found her, and Lady Maria came and bowed.
‘My lady,’ she said carefully.
‘Why can’t I put on a plain dress, go down and dance?’ she asked.
Lady Maria sighed. ‘Because an assassin would put a dagger in your back before you crossed the yard.’
‘He’s right there – like a beacon. Look at him!’ The Princess Irene pointed at a figure in a scarlet doublet and hose. As she pointed, he leaped a bonfire and whirled in the air.
Lady Maria sighed again. ‘Yes – he is very flamboyant.’ Not for the first time, she cursed her son’s choice of leaders. The man was too intelligent and too charismatic by far.
Mercenaries had made themselves emperors before. And one of the easiest paths lay between the thighs of a princess.
‘I will go,’ Irene said.
Lady Maria balanced her options, as she always did. Any lover would supplant her instantly; that was a game she’d played herself. For an elderly matron to hold the position of favourite was rare, and in this case, an artefact of events.
She was bound to lose her position. But it mattered enormously to whom she lost it.
In addition, the threat of assassination was not an idle one. Two of the princess’s ladies had been killed in just a week.
‘If I promise to find you an occasion to attend and dance informally, will you restrain yourself tonight and go to bed, Majesty?’ She tried to remember what it was like to be so young. The princess had skin like ivory, breasts as high as the branches of an oak, eyes without a single mark of age. Her entire being yearned for the Outer Court – for fire, and dance. And for a man.
But Irene was a warrior, in her way. She had already made difficult choices and lived with the consequences. And she’d been tutored well in the ways of the ancients. She stood straight and faced her favourite. ‘Very well, Maria,’ she said, so quietly that it was almost a whisper.
Half an hour before midnight the gate watch rang the alarm bell on the orders of the Megas Ducas. In a twinkling, the entire garrison formed on the square – drunk or sober, armed or stripped for dancing. Most of the Nordikans were half-naked and their muscles gleamed in the dark, while the Scholae looked like the courtiers that many of them were. The company were in all the colours of the rainbow – most of them in drab everyday clothes, a few nearly naked. They had been wrestling.
Two archers rolled a cask to the middle of the Outer Court. The Academy students were standing in a huddle by the stables, unsure what to do, and they were reassured when the Megas Ducas himself – in stripped-down scarlet – walked by and winked at them.
Then he leaped up on the barrel.
‘I thought it was time we all got to know each other,’ he said in good Archaic. Most of the soldiers laughed.