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Chapter 51: Her Majesty the Queen

The light came in through a narrow window and laid itself across the wall in stripes the color of old wine.

There were only a few places left in the kingdom where you could still see the sun during the Months of the Demons, and the Port of Clear Water was one of them. Here the season’s cold was a rumor rather than a fact — a stiffening of the harbor wind, a thin rime on the dock lines before dawn. The Blacksail Fleet sat motionless in the harbor because the sailing season was closed, but that was the only concession the city made to winter. The streets were loud. The counting houses were lit. The port went on being a port, the way ports always did.

Garcia Wimbledon sat at a square table under the window with a letter in her hands and had been sitting there longer than Ryan would normally expect.

He had learned, in the years of serving her, that letters sorted themselves by length and by importance, and a letter of this length required perhaps three minutes of the 3rd Princess’s attention. Five, if it was complicated. She was on her seventh. He did not fidget. He did not speak. He stood at the proper distance and waited, and watched the late light move across her grey hair and do something warm and strange to it — almost gold, in this angle, which was not how it usually looked.

She set the letter down.

“My father is dead.”

Ryan had been standing correctly for seven minutes. He stood incorrectly for the next two seconds.

“What?”

Garcia looked at him. She did not repeat herself. This was a habit with her that Ryan had catalogued long ago: she said a thing once, as precisely as she could, and then waited for you to process it. Asking again was a confession of insufficient attention.

He did not ask again.

“How did he die?”

“The letter says Gerald killed him.” She folded the letter along its existing creases, precisely, as though she were restoring something to its proper state. “Gerald was caught before he could die cleanly. He was tried by the ministers, sentenced, and beheaded.”

Ryan’s mouth started to form a sentence about how sorry he was, which would have been the correct thing to say to anyone else, and stopped.

Garcia was the daughter of the king, the Governor of the Port of Clear Water, and the Commander of the Blacksail Fleet. She did not want for his condolences. He looked at her instead, and waited.

“That is not what happened,” she said.

“No. I didn’t think it was.”

“My first brother has many flaws, but suicide by assassination isn’t one of them. Gerald couldn’t organize a plan of this kind — not the positioning of the guards, not the selection and bribery, not any of it. He would need someone to arrange the ground for him, someone who had his trust.” She set her hands flat on the table, and Ryan noticed she was tapping one finger in a very small, very controlled rhythm. “Someone who had his trust, and who would then not hesitate to remove him.”

“Timothy.”

She said nothing — she didn’t need to.

“Your Highness.” Ryan felt his way through the logic carefully, the way you walk new ice. “Your 2nd brother’s position was already strong. He was the King’s favorite. He didn’t need—”

“He was afraid of the fleet.” Her voice had gone quiet in the particular way that meant something hot was moving underneath it. “He has eyes in this city, as I have eyes in Valencia. When he discovered the Blacksail Fleet’s size, it became simple arithmetic. Valencia’s land army cannot match us at sea. So he looked for a way to move before I could.” A brief pause. “He found Gerald, who had ambition and not enough sense to be suspicious of whoever was helping it along.”

Ryan did the arithmetic himself. The second prince had wanted an army — and with his father dead and his older brother executed for the killing, Timothy Wimbledon was now the first legitimate heir to the kingdom. He would move immediately for the crown. With the crown came the power to call up the vassals, to put the Duke of the Southern Territory into motion, to put pressure on the port from inland.

But if he moves that fast—

“He will be crowned quickly,” Ryan said.

“That is his intention. He will press the ministers while the court is still in shock. Once he is Wimbledon IV, he can mobilize the full machinery against me.” Garcia stood and moved to the window. The light caught her from the front now — she stood in it the way certain people stand in difficult weather, without flinching, simply present. “However. The Duke of the Southern Territory is Joe Kohl. An old fox. He has never moved faster than his own advantage required, and a king’s mourning period provides excellent cover for delay. He will summon his feudatories and assemble a proper show of force, and by the time he is actually prepared to move on this city, we will not be in it.”

Ryan considered this.

“We will be—”

“Eagle City.” Her back was to him, but he could hear the thing in her voice that came when she had already made the decision and was now only allowing the conversation to catch up. “Eagle City lies inland, almost undefended. We can reach Clear Spring by the Sanwan River tributary, then one day’s march to Eagle City. Once Eagle City falls, the entire Southern Territory is ours. When Timothy turns to find the Duke and discovers that the Duke is operating from territory I control—” she almost smiled; he could see the line of her jaw — “that will be a moment I would like to observe.”

“We sail tomorrow?”

“We sail tomorrow.”

The silence lasted long enough that Ryan heard the harbor wind against the glass. Somewhere below, a dock hand was calling out to someone, not urgently, the ordinary commerce of the port.

He thought about Ali Wimbledon. He had never met the king, not personally. He had only ever seen him at a distance, at the single court ceremony Garcia had brought him to four years ago — a large man with Garcia’s grey hair and none of her stillness, expansive and loud in the way of men who assume they will always have more room. He had not seemed, at that distance, like a man who could be killed by his favorite son.

But then few things seemed like what they were, at a distance.

“Your Highness.” Ryan chose his words as carefully as he ever had. “You said he was your father’s favorite. If he didn’t need to—if he already had everything positioned in his favor—”

Garcia turned.

The light fell across her face and showed him something that he would not describe to anyone, ever, for the rest of his time in her service. Something that moved through her expression and was gone before he was sure he had seen it. Her eyes, when they found his, were steady and solid as good moorings.

“He was afraid,” she said. “Afraid is reason enough.”

Ryan went to one knee. It was not a ceremonial gesture; it was something simpler than ceremony, the way an old soldier snaps to attention not because someone told him to but because some things require it.

“What do you need from me?”

“The Captain, first. Tell him we leave with the morning tide.” She turned back to the window and looked out at her fleet — the black sails furled and still, the masts making their slow forest against the winter sky. “My brother decided he could not wait five years. I will not make him wait any longer than necessary.” A pause. “When I have taken Eagle City, I will declare the Southern Territory’s independence.”

Ryan rose.

He looked at her — the grey hair going gold in the last of the day, the set of her shoulders, the particular quality of her stillness that was not stillness at all but compressed motion, a thing that had decided its direction and was waiting only for the moment to release. He had followed this woman from a minor court posting to the command of a fleet, not because she commanded him to, but because she was the only person he had ever served who made him believe that where she was going was worth going.

“Your Highness,” he said, and then stopped himself.

She looked back at him, and one corner of her mouth moved.

“Your Majesty,” he said instead.

Garcia Wimbledon turned back to the window.

Outside, the Blacksail Fleet rocked quietly in its harbor, and waited for morning.

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