The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [2]
He smiled. “That’s from the Sacred Annals of Saint Merinero. Was he a heretic?”
The sacritor pursed his lips and fidgeted. “I read the Life of Merinero,” he said. “I don’t remember that.”
“The Life of Merinero is a paragraph in the Sahtii Bivii,” Roger said. “The Anal is a book of seven hundred pages.”
“Well, then I can hardly be expected—”
“Tell me. I’ve noticed you’ve a chapel for Mannad, Lir, and Netuno. How many sailors make their offerings there before going out to sea?”
“Few to none,” Praecum exploded. “They prefer their sea witches. For twenty years they’ve spurned—” He broke off, his face red, his eyes bugging halfway from their sockets.
“Truth?” Roger asked mildly.
“I have done what I thought best. What the saints wished of me.”
“So you have,” Roger replied. “And that clearly is neither here nor there as concerns the truth.”
“Then you have come to, to…” His eyes were watery, and he was trembling.
Roger rolled his eyes. “I don’t care about you, or this poor bastard’s wife, or whether every person you’ve hanged was innocent. The fact that you’re an ignorant butcher is the reason I’m here, but not for any of the reasons you fear.”
“Then why, for pity’s sake?”
“Wait, and I promise you will see.”
A bell later, his promise was kept.
They came from the south, as Harriot reckoned. There were around half a hundred of them, most in the dark orange tabards of the Royal Light Horse, riding boldly out of the forest and up to the gates of the castle. As they drew nearer, he saw that ten of them wore the full lord’s plate of knights. There was a single unarmored fellow appareled in the Vitellian manner, complete with broad-brimmed hat. Next to him was the most singular of the riders, a slight figure in a breastplate, with short red hair. At first he thought the person a page or squire, but then, to his delight, he realized who it actually was.
I was right, he thought, trying not to feel smug.
“It appears Queen Anne herself has come to pay you a visit,” he told the sacritor.
“Heresy,” the sacritor muttered. “There is no Queen Anne.”
“The Comven crowned her,” Harriot pointed out.
“The Church does not recognize her authority,” Praecum countered.
“I’ll enjoy hearing you tell her that,” Harriot replied. “You and your fifteen men.”
“Up there,” a clear feminine voice shouted. “Is one of you the sacritor of this attish?”
“I am,” Praecum replied.
From his vantage, Harriot couldn’t make out much about her features, but even so he felt a wintry chill, and her eyes seemed somehow dark.
“M—Majesty,” the sacritor said. “If you wait but a moment, I can offer you the humble hospitality of my poor attish.”
“No,” the woman replied. “Wait where you are. Send someone down to show us the way up.”
Praecum nodded nervously at one of his men, then began rubbing his hands nervously.
“That was a quick change of mind,” Harriot observed.
“As you said, we’re outnumbered.”
“Not if the saints are on our side,” Harriot replied.
“Do you mock me?”
“Not at all.”
The sacritor shook his head. “What can she want here?”
“You haven’t heard about Plinse, Nurthwys, and Saeham?”
“Towns in Newland. What about them?”
“You’ve really no better ear for news than that?”
“I have been quite occupied here, sir.”
“So it appears.”
“What do you mean?”
Harriot heard clattering on the stairs.
“I think you’ll find out in a moment,” he remarked. “Here they come.”
Harriot had never met Anne Dare, but he knew quite a bit about her. She was seventeen, the youngest daughter of the late William II. Reports by Praefec Hespero and others described her as selfish and willful, intelligent but uninterested in using her intelligence, least of all for politics, for which she had no inclination whatsoever. She had vanished from sight around a year earlier, only to turn up at the Coven Saint Dare, where she was being trained in the arts of the Dark Lady.
Now it seemed she took a great deal of interest in politics. Perhaps it was the slaughter of her sisters and