14

AMBROSE CLOSED THE DOOR WITH A WORRIED GLANCE OUT ONTO Theodor’s still-placid street. “The Fourth Regiment has already been assembled, and Father gave the order to use violence if it was warranted.”

“What?” I gasped. “No, this can’t be right.” Niko had promised that the people wouldn’t rise up until we’d been given a chance to address their concerns through the bill.

Before Ambrose could answer, the report of rifles echoed through the stone corridors of the city. Faint but clear, shattering the evening quiet.

“Shit,” Theodor said, rushing toward the door and shouting to the servants for a carriage. “Ambrose, where was Father? Palace or Stone Castle?”

“He’s at the Stone Castle, but Theodor, honestly. What are you going to do?” Ambrose countered. “It’s going to be over before you even get down the street. Riflemen and soldiers with bayonets, against a riot? It will be a rout.” The reports of gunfire and shouting peppered the conversation, distant voices raised in support of Ambrose’s argument.

Theodor paused. “That’s true enough. But it’s what comes next that I worry about,” he answered. “I need to talk to Father.”

Ambrose sighed. “I don’t know that it will do any good. He’s like a cuckold husband with the conservative nobles playing the role of tyrant wife. He knows the danger of ignoring the common people, but it’s not enough to jar him out of a lifetime of playing upper-crust politics, where the nobles with the most money and influence have the power.”

“Maybe this did the trick,” Theodor argued. He plucked his hat from the chair beside the door. “At the very least, someone needs to be there to counterbalance whatever draconian suggestions Pommerly and the other old bats are probably making regarding punitive measures for those caught.”

He was out of the door before Ambrose could answer. I found I didn’t have anything to say in any case. “What do we do now?” I wondered out loud. Already the gunfire had ceased. Fears that the bill was dead before it could be voted on, that someone I knew was lying bleeding in the square, that this was only the start of a true civil war all ran together.

“I’m going to follow that idiot brother of mine to the Stone Castle and see if there’s anything we can do.” Ambrose sighed. “It’s probably not safe to send you home alone. I’ll take you. Unless you’d rather stay here?” I shook my head. Ambrose’s legal training gave him the dry, deductive rationale of a barrister, which was strangely comforting in a moment like this one.

We took his carriage toward the center of the city. The streets were clear, but knots of people crowded in doorways and corners, under the eaves of side-street taverns. We skirted Fountain Square, but I could see past a unit of the Fourth Regiment onto the cobblestones beyond. I saw blood.

“I wish—” I clamped my mouth shut. It didn’t do any good to voice it out loud, that I wished there was something I could do. There wasn’t, not here, not now. I would only be in the way of the medical corps, the regimental surgeons and nurses surely already setting up a makeshift hospital in the Stone Castle or the cathedral. If only I had time to sew charms into their bandages, or embed one of Theodor’s musically summoned charms into the linen strips. Of course there wasn’t time for sewing, and Theodor was busy wrestling with the politics of a potentially disastrous blow to the Reform Bill.

Ambrose didn’t wait for me to open the door of my row house—the modest, quiet home I had shared with Kristos. It wouldn’t be mine much longer; the lease expired in several months and then I wouldn’t have an inconspicuous home of my own. Everyone knew where the Prince of Westland lived. I fumbled with my key.

“Sophie.”

I whirled. Niko beckoned from the slim alley between my building and the next set of row houses over. The eaves overhung the dirt path, casting thick shadows, and I could have walked by him a dozen times without seeing him.

“What are you—”

“Over here,” he ordered. I bristled at his tone, commanding me like an officer barks at a private, but I slipped my key back into my pocket and followed him into the alley. His shoes and the hems of his trousers were spattered with mud, and I thought I saw streaks of blood on his dark brown linen coat.

“How many hurt? Dead?” I managed to ask. My most pressing fear—how bad had it been?

“They didn’t even get to use their bayonets,” he said, as though this would placate me.

“So they only shot my neighbors, they didn’t gore them to death.” I gripped his arm in mine. His sleeve had blood on it. “How many, Niko?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe twenty, thirty hit, maybe more. Look, the soldiers entered Fountain Square from the Stone Castle, fired in ranks a few times, and the rioters scattered. It was a damn good thing for the soldiers that the rioters hadn’t had time to properly assemble with weapons, that’s all. It would have been a brawl.” He pursed his lips, as though calculating their odds.

“Would that have been preferable?” I almost shouted. Niko shot me a sharp look, and I lowered my voice. “A brawl? Hand-to-hand fighting in the square?”

“No, of course not, I’m just saying—this wasn’t exactly planned.”

“Then explain how it happened.”

“Explain what? A crowd-size temper tantrum I didn’t orchestrate or condone? Sweet hell, Sophie. You’d blame me for the mosquitoes if you could.”

“Then what,” I forced through tense lips, “happened today?”

“They’re impatient,” Niko said. “Yesterday’s debates didn’t go so well. Folks gathered to talk in the taverns, they got heated, they started moving from tavern to tavern and eventually into the streets; the crowd gained momentum.” He shrugged. “It just—snowballed. These things do that, you know.”

“Why?” I held up my hand to his exasperated retort. “I mean, why now? The vote is coming. Reform is coming.”

“Yeah, well, their patience is getting thin. And there was an amendment to the bill recently, remember?”

“Yes, they removed the anti-conscription provision—mercies, Niko, they didn’t riot over that?”

“They sure as hell did. I tried to stop it but this got out of hand, quickly. They don’t trust a governing body that keeps taking things away from them!”

“It was…” My breath shook. “The anti-conscription provision was a bargaining chip. We knew that piece would probably fail, but having something less vital to be able to remove—Niko, it’s invaluable to the process.”

“You set that part up to fail? You meant to remove it?” I thought, for a brief moment, Niko might actually hit me. “You’re a worse snake than I thought.”

“It’s politics, Niko! It’s negotiation. There has to be something you’re willing to give up—”

“What is the nobility willing to give up?”

I fell silent for a long, uncomfortable moment and made him wait for me to speak. “Plenty of them aren’t willing to give anything up and we have to be able to vote them down.”

“Do you trust them?”

“What?”

“The nobles. Once this vote is done, say it passes—you trust that they aren’t going to go back on this?”

The fight I’d had with Theodor echoed in memory, recalling words so similar to Niko’s but spoken by me. I took a shaking breath. “Yes. We have to. There’s no other way forward.”

“You were born down here with the rest of us rats,” Niko retorted. “You can play pampered palace pet all you want, but you know better. You know that their game is rigged. They hold all the power. They can give it or withhold it and all we can do is—what?” He snorted. “Riot until there’s none of us left. And we will. You know that.”

I ached, from the soles of my feet to my throbbing head, but deeper than that, in my soul. For Galitha, for the common people, for a nation ready to tear itself apart. “Legal reform will work. It has to. You know that, or you wouldn’t have asked me to help you.”

He sighed, the lines around his eyes showing plainer than before the Midwinter Revolt. “Yeah, sure. I did. Call me a hopeless optimist.”

“That,” I assured him, “is something I have never called you, nor will I.”