“As a warning to other noblemen.”
Heugen leaned in close. “He may’ve inherited his mother’s mercy along with his father’s brains.”
Barezin’s eager whisper could scarcely contain his amusement. “He certainly got her weakness for the ladies!”
“By the dead,” breathed Leo. He found neither the Queen Dowager’s preferences nor the king’s brutality a laughing matter.
Isher shook his well-groomed white head. “At this rate, not even the best of us will be safe.”
“It’s the best who are in the most danger,” said Heugen.
Barezin grunted agreement. “Wetterlant hasn’t a bloody chance. Bet you they present no evidence at all.”
“But… why?” asked Leo, struggling to find a position on the hard bench where his leg didn’t nag at him.
“Wetterlant has no heir,” said Isher, “so his estates will be forfeit and the Crown will sweep them up. You’ll see.”
Leo stared in disbelief at the chamber’s stained-glass windows. The proudest moments of Union history. Harod the Great bringing the three kingdoms of Midderland together. Arnault the Just throwing off tyranny. Casamir the Steadfast taking law to the lawless in Angland. The Open Council lifting King Jezal to the throne, uniting behind him to defeat the Gurkish. The noble heritage his father once loved to talk of. Could the corruption really have spread so deep?
“They wouldn’t dare,” he breathed. “In front of the whole Open Council?”
“You’d be a bold man to bet on what Old Sticks wouldn’t dare,” said Isher as the announcer struck his staff upon the tiles for order.
“My lords and ladies, you are commanded to kneel at the approach of His Imperial Highness…”
The announcer’s voice echoed through the gilded doors and into the stuffy darkness of the anteroom, and Orso hooked a finger inside his stiff collar and tried to get some air in. His regalia was bloody stifling, in more ways than one.
“… the King of Angland, Starikland and Midderland, the Protector of Westport and Uffrith…”
Orso twisted the considerable weight of the crown this way and that. Given the hours the royal jewellers had spent measuring his skull, one might have hoped they could have made the damn thing fit. Perhaps his head was simply the wrong shape for a crown. No doubt there were plenty who thought so.
“… His August Majesty, Orso the First, High King of the Union!”
The vast doors were heaved open, the crack of light down the middle gradually widening. Orso set his shoulders in what he hoped was a regal bearing, plastered on a smile, realised that was utterly inappropriate to the occasion, swapped it for a solemn frown and stepped through.
It was far from his first visit to the Lords’ Round, of course. He remembered being mildly bored when his father had shown it to him as a building site, rather impressed when his father had shown it to him largely completed, then exceedingly bored when his father had presided over the first meeting of the Open Council there.
But Orso had never seen it from this angle—the way an actor might a theatre. An ill-prepared understudy, in his case, suddenly called on to face an audience of hostile critics. The curved benches brimmed with lords and proxies, all weighty furs and weighty frowns and weighty chains of office. The original Lords’ Round, the one Bayaz destroyed, had boasted only the one public gallery. The architects of the replacement had clearly felt a speaker might not be sufficiently overawed, so they had added another above. Both were now crammed to the rails with brightly dressed onlookers, frothing with anticipation at the delicious prospect of a stranger’s downfall.
There could easily have been a thousand in attendance. There could easily have been more. All kneeling or sunk into curtsies at his approach, of course. But the aristocracy of the Union could kneel and radiate contempt simultaneously. They had centuries of practice at it.
“Bloody hell,” he murmured under his breath. He could have sworn that by some acoustic sorcery, it was carried about the entire vast chamber and echoed back to his ear as he shuffled across that lonely expanse of tiles to the High Table, dragging a mighty weight of cloth of gold cloak behind him.
Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell…
He flinched as he felt hands reaching around his neck, but it was only Gorst, unfastening the golden clasp and whisking the royal vestment away, while one of his legion of footmen did the same with the crown. Orso wasn’t even sure he knew the man’s name. He wasn’t even sure he had a name.
Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell…
Orso cleared his throat as he sank into the great gilded chair, had a momentary panic as he wondered whether he should have been sitting somewhere else, then reminded himself that, however improbable it felt, he was king. He always got the biggest chair.
“All rise!” bellowed the announcer, making him startle.
There was a rustling wave through the crescents of benches as lords took their seats, a muttering and whispering and grumbling as they discussed the forthcoming business. Clerks dumped monstrous ledgers at either end of the table and heaved them thumping open. High Justice Bruckel took his seat on one side of Orso. Arch Lector Glokta was wheeled into place on the other and gave the great collection of lords and their proxies a suspicious glare.
“What’s Isher doing over there?” he murmured.
As one of the foremost of Midderland’s old nobility, he should have been sitting in the middle of the front row, but instead he had shifted to the right, beside the representatives from Angland, whispering in the ear of an unhappy-looking Leo dan Brock.
Bruckel raised his straggling brows. “Isher and Brock? Intimate friends?”
“Or close conspirators.” Glokta nodded to the announcer, who lifted his staff and struck it on the tiles, filling the hall with crashing echoes.
“I call this meeting of the Open Council of the Union…” The announcer let it hang there as the noise gradually faded into weighty silence. “To order!”
“Good morning, my lords and ladies!” Orso gave a smile that felt more like the accused trying to ingratiate himself with the judge than the judge himself. “It is my honour to preside over this meeting. We have only one item of business today—”
“Your Majesty, if I may?”
“The Open Council recognises Fedor dan Isher!” thundered the announcer.
An instant interruption was the last thing Orso wanted, but he had to start as he meant to continue, generous and easy-tempered. Perhaps this was all part of Isher’s plan to bring monarch and nobility together, after all. “Of course, Lord Isher, proceed.”
Isher pranced from his bench onto the tiled floor like a man stepping from his favourite chair to give his fire a poke, the echoes of his highly polished boots snapping in the vast domed space above.
“Before we turn to today’s… sorry work, I hope my esteemed colleagues of the Open Council can join me for a moment in some happier business.”
Glokta leaned towards Orso to mutter, “Here’s a bastard who loves the sound of his own voice.”
“I wish to congratulate one of the most celebrated of our number, His Grace Leonault dan Brock, the Lord Governor—and, if I may say, the undoubted saviour—of Angland… on his forthcoming marriage!”