Walter had not heard of the assassination attempt until much later, when he was looking for William. It was only then, that he heard of his lord’s arrest. He stood before the lord’s chancellery, asking to be let in while Massouric shadowmen sifted through his possessions. The callousness with which they tipped the dressers and let the drawers slide out drew his attention, if the clunky noise of the drawers on the stone floor did not.

‘What do you happen to be looking for?’ Richard asked him, having approached Walter so stealthily that he had no idea he had not been alone, or for how long he had been observed.

Walter turned with suspicion. ‘I am looking for Lord Astwick,’ he said.

Richard sniffed audibly. ‘I was thinking you would say that. I can help you with just about anything else, but not with Lord Astwick. ’

‘Why?’ he asked simply.

‘Why?’ Richard repeated. ‘If I were you, I’d await the statement. Nobody in these halls will tell you straight, that is our policy right now. Maybe it is time that you take a long, hard look at your loyalties, Walter, whatever they are. I won’t say much more than that.’

Walter’s heart was beating wildly in his chest. He swallowed the stale moisture of his mouth, attempting to swallow along some of the complicity that Richard had pushed on him.

‘Whatever’s going on, I know nothing about it,’ he said, crossing his arms. ‘I hope you know that.’

‘There’s nothing I know,’ Richard said somewhat prophetically. ‘That’s, in fact, all I know.’

He started feeling anger bubble up into his face. Richard’s disinterested face said it all. There was no point in keeping up the pretence — Richard had his mind already made up.

‘I should be going,’ Walter spat. ‘Good day to you, Lord Richard.’

‘And to you, Sir Walter,’ Richard said calmly, his eyes on Walter until he was out of sight.

----------------------------------------

Instead of seeking logic in Richard, where he would likely not find it even if they discussed an eternity, he instead sought Katherine in her chamber. It was halfway the morning and yet she had not shown her face that day yet.

When he found her chamber and entered, his eyes had to adjust to the darkness. The blinds were closed, and no torches were lit, casting the whole room in an eerie darkness only softened slightly by the bit of rogue daylight coming in through the cracks through the heavy velvet curtains.

Due to her translucence, he could make out the shape of her arms and neck peeking out from underneath the sheets.

‘How did you get past the guards?’ Katherine croaked from her bed.

Walter sniffed. ‘They know who I am.’

‘Do they, now?’ she wondered.

His heart sank. After Richard, now Katherine… he still had no idea what he had done. ‘Can I… come closer?’ he asked.

‘Fine,’ she said, almost hesitantly. ‘If you tell me why you’ve come.’

‘Why do I come at all?’ Walter asked. ‘To see you, of course. What’s the matter with everyone today? And what’s happened to Lord William?’

Coming closer to Katherine, he could see how weary she looked, how her eyes were lined in tired sunken darkness, how thin and frail her time resting had made her. She looked partly feral.

‘Come sit with me,’ she said instead, stretching out her arm.

He could not help but oblige.

Once in her arms, he returned to that safe haven of her magnificence, enveloped by the thoughts only of how well Katherine promised to take care of him. ‘What happened?’ he pushed.

Katherine sighed deeply and lay her face into his hair. ‘Someone tried to kill me this morning, Walter?’ she cooed. ‘Hadn’t you heard?’

‘No…’ he admitted.

He felt her hot breath as she huffed into the side of his face. ‘Some lunatic with one of the old advisers’ cloak pins. They think your master was responsible for the spread of those. Richard saw one in Bourrac but I didn’t think much of it. I thought, we’d just change the pin and be done with it. I trusted your master. I’m afraid that was a mistake.’

She softly raked her fingers through his hair as he remained quiet as his world crumbled down. Both of their worlds had crumbled that day, and neither of them was feeling militant enough to defend themselves against the terror.

‘Any order I’ve ever had from Lord William is to protect you,’ he said eventually. ‘Let that be clear. If unorthodox sometimes, he cares very much about you.’

‘Is that so?’ she wondered. She squeezed her eyes shut. ‘I’m afraid if you defend him, you’ll be the baby to go out with the bathwater. I don’t like the thought of that one bit, so I’d reconsider your loyalties.’

‘Richard said something along those lines,’ Walter said, carefully repositioning himself so he faced her. ‘Am I in trouble?’

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Only when she opened her eyes again, he saw that she had been holding back tears. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Depends on how much you’ll talk these coming days. Not to me, but to Richard. I’m afraid I can’t whisk you out of this mess like magic. I can’t be sure how much of this mess was made by you. I’m not even supposed to receive you these coming days.’

He feared her emotions. He was used to her placid, cheerful, mischievous, lustful, but not distraught. It resembled a frightening storm more than a weeping young woman.

‘You’re the queen,’ he said feebly. ‘You decide who you receive.’

She looked at him with a glare as dead as the glassy glimpse on a decapitated head, and lifted her head off of his curls. ‘Go,’ she said.

‘Katherine…’ he pleaded, but Katherine sat up in an instant and raised her hand to the door.

‘GO!’ she hollered.

Frightened, he jumped upright and struggled to his feet, fearing she would ask him to be arrested before he could even make the door. He hurried the few steps it took to pass through the portal, and once he looked back to close the door, he saw she had once again collapsed in her bed. His heart was beating madly, and he knew he would have to make a grave confession.

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‘Sorry, Master Freyza,’ said Katherine as she stepped across the hallway towards the door of her chancery, key in hand. ‘I was occupied.’

Freyza stood petrified and alone by the door. He had heard already. He has come to accommodate the tiny chance she would honour their appointment too — but harboured no idle hope of her presence. He noticed her poise.

‘Your Majesty,’ he began. ‘I imagined our meeting was off due to this morning’s happenings.’

She flashed her teeth in a grin. ‘Then may I ask why you are at the door to my cabinet?’

‘Well,’ he said hesitantly, ‘For the off chance that you may come after all. you hadn’t cancelled, and even though I would not be speaking to anyone after someone had just made an attempt on my life, much less a vague acquaintance from a strange land, it would be devastating to learn that you had been waiting for me in vain. That that was even a possibility.’

‘So you didn’t imagine our meeting was off the hook,’ she said as she pushed the door open. ‘You just thought I’d be too frail to make it.’

‘No such thing, Your Majesty,’ he said.

‘You imagined how I would feel, based on how you would feel, without accounting for the fact that we may not be alike at all,’ she said.

Despite her stern tone, there was an air of levity. Her chancery was empty, with not a guard in sight, though he had seen many walking the hallway and standing by many of the doors.

‘Something you ought to know about me, Master Freyza,’ she continued, ‘Is that my curiosity will always win from fear. Entice me with a strange offer, and you’ll find me visiting the ends of the earth to sate my curiosity. It may be one of the worst traits I’m willing to share with near strangers. Sit.’

Freyza sat down before he even had the opportunity to consider her words. It was a rather small oval table that Katherine kept in her chancery. It was obvious that she did not sit there often, and little work got done between these four walls.

‘You imagine I come with strange offers?’ he wondered.

Katherine sat down opposite him and raised her brows. ‘Well, it’s not often that someone dares to write me personally and not my advisers, then asks to arrange a meeting alone. That alone is a strange offer. You struck me as perhaps even over-diplomatic. Cautious and aware of what is expected of you. This was not expected of you. So what brings us here?’

‘Your Majesty…’ he began.

‘Please, pretend I’m the Duchess of Stansby. Lady Katherine.’

‘You are the Duchess of Stansby,’ Freyza said. ‘I needn’t pretend.’

‘Just the Duchess of Stansby, then,’ she said.

Stansby was a royal territory like she had implied, but bore a strange relationship to King Henri. The Duchess of Stansby, with no further name, was the pseudonym of one of Henri’s lovers, appearing in pamphlets and administrators’ registries. The identity of the Duchess was unknown to many, given that Stansby’s duchess was indeed the distant Queen Katherine, unlikely to require a pseudonym, but Freyza began to wonder if indeed it was Katherine behind the charade, finding small ways to turn a likely dull court life to something more thrilling.

‘Lady Katherine,’ he said, it feeling wrong in his mouth to look upon the Queen of Ilworth and address her as if they were old friends or as if she was far less prestigious than she was, ‘We have been made aware of the fact that your lead mines produce significant amounts of silver.’

Katherine blinked slowly and put her elbows on the table. ‘So you’re here to talk about metals again,’ she said.

‘I thought that it would—’

‘Alright, Master Freyza. I haven’t nearly been shot with an arquebus this morning to talk about something that hardly interests me. I heard you recently appointed a second-in-command who you bear no relation to. I’d imagine you’d want to place a member of your family in such a position. What’s the matter with that?’

‘I haven’t much family to give these positions to,’ he said. ‘Even if it worked in this way, which I can assure you, Your Majesty, Sbaian ambassadors are picked based on their capabilities, not their ties to other highly-placed Sbaians. Perhaps in a decade I’d wish to appoint my son Zahya, but at this point, he is six.’

She chuckled. ‘I’d imagine you’d have older children. Your son is just a year up from my daughter Johanna. We should attempt to remember this for when they’ll be of age. Introduce them. Only if Johanna will have been replaced as heiress, of course.’

‘The Sultan wishes him to be educated to make policies,’ Freyza said. ‘It appears unlike his entire paternal line, he won’t be at sea very much. Both a great development for the family name, and quite a shame for the legend of the family name.’

‘Hm,’ said Katherine. ‘And your wife? Does she come from a famous line of parliamentarians and lawyers, then?’

‘Oh, his mother hasn’t been my wife in a long time. To answer your question regardless — no. She is Baradran-blooded, from the Najan Isles, actually.’ Freyza uncomfortably scratched at the side of his finger.

Katherine briefly raised her brows. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘No need, Lady Katherine,’ he said. ‘I doubt that I would have moved here, had I still been tied to the country and my estate by marriage. Now, I am free to go where I wish to. It got me into this room, in a way.’

‘I think I, too, would’ve been somewhere quite different, had I married my daughter’s father,’ Katherine said with a smile. ‘Arguably I wouldn’t even be alive at all. Certainly I wouldn’t be sitting around the table with you — the whole reason I’m here is because of the match, of course.’

He turned his head to the door and smiled. ‘Quite the coincidence,’ he said.

She raised her brows. ‘You think?’ she asked. ‘I like to imagine that the alternative Sbaian ambassador and the alternative Queen of Massouron to be would also get along great.’

She wrinkled her nose in a smile, confident in the knowledge that she had shut him up sufficiently.

‘I’m sorry, did I say something, my lady?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You were unfortunate to have an appointment with me on the precise day that I learned one of my nearest men has betrayed me. I shouldn’t even tell you, but there’s no harm unless you’d know who it is. That remains between my men and I. I imagine you wished to pick my brain and shuffle some contracts out from the Baradrans and into Ilworth, but I’m afraid I don’t have the sufficient information at the top of my mind to do the latter, and when it comes to picking my brain, it’s quite occupied at this time.’

‘I say this with much gratitude,’ Freyza said, ‘It is an honour that you’d even come. Even if we just talked of our brood a bit and you took a few chances to make a fool out of me.’

Katherine stood up. ‘Not much is needed to make a fool out of you, Master Freyza. You do it so well yourself.’