Paved with Good Intentions

Book 5: War for the Rose Throne

by Peter McLean

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

Eline is a mother, a wife, and a survivor. But her life is about to change dramatically. Following an act of horrific - if righteous - vengeance, Eline is blackmailed into the service of the Queen's Men. She knows it will be a hard life of violence and fear. But Eline will do what it takes to survive, and to protect her children . . . and if she's lucky, she won't die in the process.

But the Queen's Men aren't just asking her to risk herself. They're asking her to risk everything she knows and loves. And if she fails . . . civil war and the deaths of everyone she loves will be just the beginning.

A stand-alone novel set in the world of the War for the Rose Throne, perfect for fans of Joe Abercrombie and Alex Marshall, featuring an incredible and unforgettable female anti-hero.

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 288

Sample

Why hope to be happy? That’s a fool’s errand. Only hope to survive.

That’s all Our Lady offers, or so they say at temple.

‘Can you believe this horseshit?’ spat Caromir, brandishing the news sheet in his fist.

‘What is it this time?’ Eline asked with a weary sigh as she turned from the fire to face her husband. ‘Every day it’s something. Every morning you rage at the sheets, and more days than not it’s reason enough to drink when you could be working.’

Oh, he had been handsome once, had her Caromir. Handsome with his thick moustache and thicker muscles. Now his chest drooped with flab, and his moustache was grey and stiff with neglect and flaking skin, and ‘once’ was long, long ago.

‘That bastard of a councillor,’ Caromir continued. ‘He’s only gone and made himself the fucking Prince Regent! The whole country’s going to the whores, I tell you!’

Eline sighed again. She couldn’t care less who the Prince Regent was. She had never set eyes on the last one, nor the queen he had replaced. Someone was in charge, that was all that really mattered. Someone was always in charge, that was just how it worked. She had always been far too concerned about how to put food on the table for her children and herself and her excuse of a husband to care who it was.

Of course, she had married young. She’d been only fifteen when Caromir had come swaggering home from his turn in the army with thirty years to him, his corporal’s stripes gleaming on his sleeve and a medal on his chest. He had been so dashing, then. Now he was fifty to her thirty-five, and their children were grown and gone. Her precious boy was signed up in the army just like his father, and her daughter off in service to be some lady’s maid. The age of majority was thirteen, after all, and past that their mistakes were their own to make.

‘It’s a fucking disgrace,’ he snarled, still raging at the paper in his hand.

Caromir had been enough to turn a young girl’s head and no mistake, then. He’d been young to have joined up, too young in truth with only ten years to him at the time, but then after victory at Krathzgrad a lot of lads had lied about their ages to join up and win their honour and earn the respect of their peers and a bit of coin. He had his twenty years’ service now, and his pension. All the same, it had taken all Eline’s wits and wiles to keep their heads above water on his meagre income. She was no fool, unlike her brutal oaf of a husband, but it could be done if you cultivated friendships with the right people. Just about, anyway. At least he’d mustered out before the carnage at Messia and Abingon, but that, too, had been long, long ago.

‘Oh well,’ she said.

That, as it turned out, as it so often turned out, was exactly the wrong thing to say. Caromir reared up to his feet from behind their roughly made kitchen table and raised his hand. He raised his hand to her as he had done so many times before, and something changed.

Something changed for Eline right then; Eline who had been knocked to the flagstones by that hand times beyond counting. That had been her married life.

Beaten.

Battered.

Bloodied.

But unbroken.

The dam that had held back the tide of rage for so, so long finally shattered. Eline screamed, but not in fear. She was done with fearing Caromir. She was done with him.

Her good kitchen knife was right there, right by her own hand, and as he swung for her she grabbed it up and shoved it through his neck.

Enough, she remembered thinking, long after it was over. She had little memory of the event itself, only the rush of hot wetness, and the sense of overwhelming relief.

Rid of him. She was rid of him at last.

Amid all the drama, the fear and the shock and the fury of it all, she had never noticed the little urchin girl staring in through the kitchen window.

*

The Guard caught up with her after a while, of course. Drathburg was not the capital, and it could have been worse, but there was still the City Guard and there were still Queen’s Men.

A Queen’s Man, anyway, and if perhaps he was the only one in the city then it wouldn’t have mattered. In Dannsburg she would probably already have been hanged, after Jottie next door ratted her out to the Guard, but here it was different. Jottie of all people, who she had used to babysit for and who had minded her own children in her turn. Eline had thought better of her than that. Friendships made out of mutual need, she was forced to admit, probably didn’t mean much when one of you didn’t need the other anymore. The Guard still had a gaol in Drathburg, of course, and the gallows, but she wasn’t there. Instead she was in the back room of a nondescript house talking to the fat man who had come and quietly taken her away.

Eline wondered why that was.

‘Killed your husband, then,’ the fat man said, and it wasn’t a question. His words didn’t sound like they had any judgement in them either; a simple statement of fact, not like he cared much one way or the other. He was perhaps forty years of age, and she supposed that made him a veteran of Abingon. ‘I looked at the scene, and the body, after my little spy came to tell me what she’d seen through your kitchen window. No defence wounds. Clean work, that.’

My little spy. So it had been some child agent of the Queen’s Men who had told the fat man, then. Not Jottie or her daughter as she had originally supposed, although they had obviously sold her out to the Guard in the first place. The Queen’s Men had eyes and ears everywhere, that was well known enough, but left to the Guard she would simply have hanged for murder, of course, and not be sitting here now.

‘So I’ll hang, then,’ Eline said, resigned.

He had already shown her the Queen’s Warrant that he carried, the thick piece of folded leather that contained the seal of the royal arms, a white-gold rose set upon a golden crown. She knew what that meant. Judge, jury, executioner. The Queen’s Men were above the law, the absolute authority of the Crown’s justice. The only question she had left was why she was getting his personal attention in what should have been a simple matter for the Guard.

‘Don’t have to,’ he said.

Eline blinked.

‘How do you mean?’

The fat man’s face creased into a smile.

‘I want a thing doing,’ he said, ‘and I want it doing quiet, like. Cleanly, you might say.’

‘Oh?’

‘There’s a woman who killed a man,’ he said. ‘She’s a madam, runs the poshest stew in the city. It’s expensive and guarded by as many thugs as I’ve got guardsmen, just about. There’s no taking her by assault, not easy anyway and definitely not quiet. So here’s the thing. You’ve what, thirty years to you?’

Eline, who was older than that but looked good for it and knew she did, nodded.

‘About that,’ she said cautiously, wondering where he was going with this.

He looked at her for a long moment, and she wondered if she was fooling him after all.

‘Aye. So you sign on as a tart. I can arrange the paperwork and the bawd’s knot to say you’re licensed. I’ve got a very good forger. You do the work, and when you get the chance you kill her for me.’

Eline’s face fell.

He wanted her to be a whore? To sell her body, for coin?

Ma used to dance for money, but she had been very strict on this point: Dancing is all it is. She had made that very clear. Never sell your body, Eline. There’s no greater sin in the eyes of the gods. You’ll save yourself for your husband or damn yourself, so you will.

Eline, who had been very young then, hadn’t really understood her words at the time. She only had one body, as far as she was concerned, and if she sold it where was she supposed to live?

Much later, after they had settled in Drathburg, she came to finally understand what Ma had meant. She saw the working girls, the scrubs standing on the street corners with their skirts hitched high and the glaze of the poppy in their eyes and she resolved that no, she would never do that.

But then of course she had met and married Caromir and that had ended how it had, and now it seemed she was going to have to do it anyway. She had saved herself for her husband, as Ma had wanted, and look how that had turned out.

Could this really be any worse?

‘Why?’

‘She’s wanted for murder,’ he said. ‘She killed a man, after all.’

‘I killed my husband, you fucking well know that,’ Eline snapped. ‘Now I get a job and she gets the end of a knife, how’s that justice?’

‘I’m not concerned with justice,’ the fat man said with a cold smile. ‘I am concerned with the law, and the will of the Crown. Different thing altogether.’

‘How do you work that out?’

‘You killed your husband, but I didn’t care about him. Sounds like he needed killing, from what your neighbours have told my little birds, so no fucking loss there. Her though, she killed a duke. That . . . that I do have to care about. Dannsburg says so.’

Dannsburg.

Even the name of the capital city made Eline shiver in fear. Everyone knew about Dannsburg, or thought they did anyway.

‘Why do I have to care?’ Eline shot back. ‘I’m not a murderess.’

‘Overlooking the fact that you obviously are,’ the fat man said, ‘you’ll hang if you refuse me. But maybe you don’t care about that either, after what you did. There’s your boy, though. Thirteen and a man grown, past his age of majority and signed up in the army like a good lad should be. He’s in basic training right now, in fact. Dangerous, that is. Can be, anyway. A lot of lads have accidents in training. Fatal ones.’

Eline stared at him, and felt a sick knot clench in her stomach.

‘How—’

‘I’m a Queen’s Man,’ he said. ‘Assume I know everything, and you’ll never be caught in a lie. You don’t want to lie to me, Eline.’

‘No,’ she admitted, defeated. Her precious boy. ‘No, I won’t lie to you.’

She had never lied to Caromir either, not about anything that mattered at least, which meant anything he might find out about. Little things – things he was too stupid to notice, like where those coppers had gone when she had needed them to buy needles and thread to mend her son’s britches or buy her daughter the necessary things for her personal hygiene – yes. Those things she had lied about, and got away with. The thing about Eline was, she knew how far she could push her luck. With this man, she realised, that was not an inch. No, she was no fool and she knew exactly what sort of man she was looking at.

She nodded curtly.

‘That’s done then,’ he said.

He gave her a piece of paper with an address written on it in an untidy scrawl. The stew where she was to work, and eventually kill. The House of Silver Bells, apparently. How charming.

He also passed her five silver marks, more money than she had ever had all of her own in her entire life. Caromir’s army pension had been two marks a month, and she had seen precious little of that. Barely enough to feed them and her beloved children, in truth. Although when he came home stinking drunk on a Coinsday night and passed out in their bed she was quick enough to sweep up and hide whatever coin he had left, if any. Come Godsday morning she knew he would never remember how much he had drunk and how much he had spent the night before, so what matter if some of it went missing? He was never going to suspect and that was a big part of how she kept their poverty-stricken household together. Times were hard, and a wife had to do what was necessary to keep body and soul together for her family.

‘First month’s pay,’ he said. ‘You work for me now.’

Eline took the money and tucked it away in her pouch. She would not, it seemed, hang at dawn as she had expected when she had been arrested. She took a breath and prepared herself for her new life as a whore, and as a killer for the Queen’s Men.

She would protect her son, whatever it took. Nothing else mattered. She was a mother, after all. Keeping her children safe was what she was for. At any cost, and fuck the consequences. Her own mother had moved heaven and earth for her, and she would never forget that.

She was allowed to leave after that, to return home in the gathering dusk, although the house she had shared with Caromir no longer felt like a home to her. It hadn’t for a long time, in truth. After years of abuse in that house, of course it didn’t. She realised now as she let herself in that it had become only the place where she had murdered her husband.

Eline started to shake then, and had to sit down quickly. She leaned forward and pressed her face to the kitchen table as the tremors overcame her.

She had killed Caromir. Earlier, after her early morning flight from the house and eventual arrest and everything that had come after it, she didn’t think that had really sunk in until now. Arrested for murder.

I killed a man, she thought. I took a life.

It had been a long, long time since she had loved Caromir, if she ever really had, but this? Her vision was blurred, her hands shaking uncontrollably.

I killed a man.

She felt a bead of sweat break from her hairline and run down her face as she shook and shuddered at the table. To kill was something outside of her experience, until that morning. To take up a knife and ram it into a man’s neck, whoever he had been and whatever he had done to her, was just not something she did or had ever done before. She wondered how soldiers could do it over and over, how anyone could harden their hearts to stick a length of sharpened metal into a stranger’s guts and take their life away. At least she had had a reason, but them? She had no idea. And that was to be her son’s future?

I’m not a murderess.

You obviously are.

A sob escaped her. Not for Caromir, perhaps, but for what she had done. Had she damned herself, in the eyes of the gods? Eline wasn’t overly religious, but murder? She had committed murder, right there in that very room. The Guard had at least taken the body away and cleaned up the worst of the blood; she supposed that was something. One less chore for her to do. She had been forever clearing up behind Caromir, but cleaning a murder scene was somewhat beyond her experience.

A murder scene, that was what it was.

I killed a man.

She sucked in a breath, feeling as though her throat was closing up, feeling like there wasn’t enough air in the room. She lurched to her feet and hurled herself out of the back door and into the small yard behind the house where the shithouse was, sure she was about to vomit. The shithouse and its cesspit was shared by the four houses in her row, and Jottie was just coming out of it.

‘Why the fuck aren’t you in gaol?’ her shrew of a neighbour demanded, going wide-eyed with surprise.

Eline’s nausea turned to anger all at once as she glared at the other woman and took a step towards her.

‘They let me go,’ she said. ‘It was self-defence, which is something you need to learn right now, you rat.’

Her blow was so quick Jottie didn’t have time to react, and Eline’s fist cracked into her jaw and sent the other woman sprawling in the dirt. Eline stood over her, shaking again and trying not to cry. Yes, they had minded each other’s children. Yes, she had counted the woman something along the lines of a friend, but friends didn’t snitch to the fucking Guard. She cradled her throbbing fist in her other hand and fought back the urge to start kicking. The need to hurt was almost overwhelming. The need to hurt someone else, anyone else, to take her own pain away.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I killed a man.

You obviously are.

Eline fought it down. She’d had disagreements with some of the other children a time or two back on the wagons, physical ones, but her mother had taught her when to walk away from a fight.

If they’re on the floor, you’re done, her mother had told her. Time to leave it there, Eline.

‘You fucking bitch,’ Jottie spat as she got to her feet, rubbing her jaw. ‘I wasn’t to know, was I? Lots of husbands have heavy hands, I didn’t know he was trying to fucking kill you.’

That was just the story the fat man had given her, of course, but Eline realised then that Caromir had been killing her for years. It had been self-defence, in a way. No wife should have to put up with what she had been through. All the same, she had taken a human life and that wasn’t an easy thing to make your peace with.

Especially now she was expected to do it again.

A messenger came to the house at dawn and rapped on the door while Eline was lighting the fire in the kitchen hearth. There had been a little bacon left in the meat safe, put aside for Caromir’s breakfast. Normally she would have contented herself with bread with a smear of butter and a little sage, but he was gone now, and it would have been a shame to waste it.

Oh yes, he was gone now.

She had spent an uneasy night alone in their bed, part missing the warmth of his body but mostly grateful for the absence of his rough hands, his slurred speech, his endless drunken snoring. She would take cold blankets over those things any night of the week, but all the same she had found sleep hard to reach.

I killed a man.

In the cold light of the next day she still couldn’t fully believe it had happened, or that she had been arrested for murder and then taken away by a Queen’s Man who apparently had a job for her in exchange for her life. For her son’s life. To whore herself and shame her mother’s name, and to kill again. The thought was so abhorrent that Eline had to admit had it only been her own life at stake she would probably have chosen the gallows and been done with it, but her son?

I murdered my husband.

Her two children were the only good things to have come out of her miserable marriage. She couldn’t, she would not, endanger them. As a mother her focus, her purpose, her whole reason for existing, was to protect her children. That was what she was for.

If that meant working for the Queen’s Men then so be it.

She looked at the raw bacon and the still-cold pan and sighed, and went to open the door.

There was a woman there, little more than a girl really, with perhaps eighteen or nineteen years to her, but she wore the bawd’s knot on her left shoulder bold as brass. The intricately tied yellow cord stood out against her otherwise demure grey kirtle, fit to tell the whole world who and what she was. A whore, and not just some common street scrub. The bawd’s knot was granted by city ordinance and that meant she was licensed, and at least in theory clean and better trained than some back-alley tart. She was dark-skinned and dark-haired and dark-eyed, and those things indicated she was Alarian.

Alaria was away across the seas to the east, Eline knew that, where the precious silk and tea and the forbidden poppy resin came from. Silk and tea were expensive and poppy resin illegal and worth even more than tea was. Merchants who sailed the Tea Winds made good coin indeed, and in the process had brought thousands of Alarian immigrants into the country over the previous fifty or so years. The Poppy Winds, those were called by many, and that meant something else entirely. The same trade routes, yes, but different cargoes, different destinations. Poppy resin was a major problem in the cities. It had followed the soldiers home from their wars, where it had been used to relieve the pain of the grievously wounded. Then men had realised that smoking poppy resin when you weren’t half dead from wounds made you feel good. Eventually they discovered that once you start smoking poppy resin, you can’t stop.

Then there had been trouble, but that was no fault of this girl’s.

Many immigrants were second or even third generation now, as this one perhaps was, born here and knowing little to nothing of their own land. Some had done very well for themselves, others less so. It seemed this girl had fared less well than others, if she wore the knot.

‘You’re Eline,’ the girl said, and it wasn’t a question. ‘He sent me. You’ll let me in, if you’re wise.’

Eline just nodded and stood aside to let the girl into her house.

‘Aye,’ she said, for want of anything better.

‘I’m Nama,’ the girl said as the door shut behind her. ‘I work for the madam. At the Silver Bells, where you’re to work.’

‘And you also work for him, obviously,’ Eline said. ‘As apparently I do too, now. Do you know who he is?’

‘Not rightly, no,’ Nama admitted. ‘An important man, though. A man with money. Sometimes he pays me to do things that don’t involve lying on my back or sucking cocks, and I’m all in favour of that. Easier money than whoring, innit? Today he paid me to bring you this, and teach you how to tie it.’

She reached into her pouch, pulled out a length of stout yellow cord and passed it to Eline.

‘For the bawd’s knot,’ Eline said.

‘Aye,’ Nama agreed. ‘We all wear the knot, at the house. Madame doesn’t take on anyone unlicensed. Here, there’s this too. Paperwork that says you’re licensed.’

She handed Eline a folded paper sealed with an ornate sigil impressed into red wax, the mark of the city council of Drathburg. It seemed the fat man hadn’t been misleading her about the quality of his forger.

‘Thank you,’ Eline said, as she took the paperwork and tucked it carefully into her pouch.

‘You ain’t though, are you?’

Eline blinked at the girl and wondered briefly how she could plausibly deny it before she realised that she simply couldn’t. More to the point she wondered how much she could trust her, then decided she would just have to, to an extent at least. She didn’t have anybody else, after all.

‘Not as such, no,’ she confessed. ‘I’ve been married though, I’ll get by.’

‘You know how to fuck, is that what you’re saying?’ Nama said, and laughed. ‘There’s more to it than that, lady. You’ve got to make them feel special. Got to make them believe you enjoyed it, even though you didn’t, and did you ever bother with that with your husband?’

Eline smiled, and found herself warming to the Alarian girl.

‘Not as such,’ she said again, and this time they laughed together. ‘I’ve got a bit of bacon ready to go on, if you’re hungry. Not a lot, but I’ll share if you want some.’

It was still very early, after all, and she couldn’t imagine the girl had breakfasted yet.

‘Kind of you,’ Nama said, and followed her into the kitchen.

Eline put the pan over the fire with a knob of butter in and pushed the bacon about with a wooden spoon until it started to sizzle. They would be working together, she had realised, and she thought it would be no bad thing to have a friend in the house. Especially if she could establish herself early as the older woman and therefore the senior partner in their friendship, if not their profession. Always be the older and wiser woman and that would serve you well. It was always good to have a friend, she knew that from experience. Especially a younger one who maybe looked up to you. There had been Nettie at the market, the fishmonger’s daughter, who Eline had befriended. Her fish had then been that little bit cheaper than everyone else’s, and even a little bit made a difference when the purse strings were as tight as hers had always had to be. Nettie had been a good girl, but then Nettie had died in childbirth with her first baby and that had been the end of their friendship and of cheap fish. Such was the world, in those days.

‘There’s bread on the side and platters in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘Off you go.’

It was like she was talking to her own daughter, before she had left home and gone to make her own way in the world in service. Nama just nodded and went to cut the bread, which was in all honesty a bit stale by now but not mouldy yet, and Eline knew it would probably be all right with the bacon fat on it to soften it up.

‘You’ve been married, you said,’ Nama said. ‘What happened?’

‘He died,’ Eline said shortly, and that gave her pause. Aye, he had died, that was truth enough. She remembered her knife plunging into his neck, the fountain of blood. She forced her hands not to start shaking. ‘I’m a widow now, with a need to make my way in the world. Our friend got me a job, that’s all.’

‘Aye, we’ve all that need,’ Nama agreed. ‘You miss him?’

‘No,’ Eline said shortly, and the Alarian girl laughed.

‘I’ve heard that one before, from some of the others,’ she said. ‘Might be you will, once you’ve been working a few months.’

‘I very much doubt it,’ Eline said, and something in her voice made Nama look at her.

‘He wasn’t good to you, then?’

‘No.’

She snorted back snot and left it at that, still trying to stop her hand from shaking as she turned the bacon over.

‘Right, right,’ Nama said. ‘I’ve heard that before, too. Married life ain’t always what it’s cracked up to be, is it?’

‘No,’ Eline said again, desperately looking for a way to change the subject. ‘How’s the whoring life?’

‘Shit,’ Nama snapped at her. ‘But then you’d know that if you were licensed and experienced like your papers say you are, wouldn’t you?’

Eline sighed. She supposed she would, at that.

‘Nama, look . . .’

‘I know,’ the girl interrupted. ‘It’s a put-up job. Something he’s cooked up, for whatever reason. I know how he is. Thinks he’s clever but he ain’t really, not without direct orders anyway. You do realise you’ll actually have to do it, don’t you? This isn’t a mummers’ show or however he’s sold it to you. Fuck knows why he. . .