Free The Second Empire by Paul Kearney Page A

fart. She’ll find it easy to manage him, and he’ll wield the most clout.”
    “Bravo, sire. He’s the leading candidate.”
    “I knew Jemilla was ambitious, but I underrated her.”
    “A formidable woman,” Golophin agreed.
    “When is the vote?”
    “This afternoon, at the sixth hour.”
    “Then it would seem I do not have much time. Golophin, call for a valet. I must have decent clothes. And a bath.”
    The old wizard approached his King and set a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Are you sure you are up to this, lad? Even if Urbino is voted the regency today, all you have to do is make an appearance at any time and he’ll have to give it up. It might be better if you rested a while.”
    “No. Thousands of my people died to put me back on the throne. I’ll not let one scheming bitch and her dried-up puppet take it from me. Get some servants in here, Golophin. And I want to speak to Rovero and Mercado. We shall have a little military daemonstration this afternoon, I think. Time to put these bastard conspirators in their place.”
    Golophin bowed deeply. “At once, sire. Let me locate a couple of the more discreet palace servants. If we can keep your recovery quiet until this afternoon, then the impact will be all the greater.” He left noiselessly.
    Abeleyn sagged. “Give me a hand here, Isolla. Damn things weigh a ton.”
    She helped him arrange the wooden legs on the bed. He seemed to find it hard to keep his eyes off them.
    “I never felt it,” he said quietly. “Not a thing. Strange, that. A man has half his body ripped away and it does not even register. I can feel them now, though. They itch and smart like flesh and blood. Lord God, Isolla, what are you marrying?”
    She hugged him close. It seemed amazingly natural to do so. “I am marrying a King, my lord. A very great King.”
    He gripped her hand until the blood fled from it, his head bent into her shoulder. When he spoke again his voice was thick and harsh, too loud.
    “Where are those damn valets? The service has gone to hell in this place.”
     
    A BRUSIO had once been home to a quarter of a million people. A fifth of the population had died in the storming of the city, and tens of thousands more had packed up their belongings and left the capital for good. In addition, the trade which was the lifeblood of the port had been reduced to a tithe of its former volume, and men were still working by the thousand to clear the battered wharves, repair bombarded warehouses and demolish those structures too broken to be restored. A wide swathe of the Lower City had been reduced to a charred wasteland, and in this desolation thousands more were encamped like squatters under makeshift shelters.
    But in the Upper City the damage was less, and here, where the nobility of Hebrion had their town houses and the Guilds of the city their halls, the only evidence of the recent fighting lay in the cannonballs which still pocked some structures like black carbuncles, and the shallow craters in the cobbled streets which had been filled with gravel.
    And here, on the summit of one of the twin hills which topped Abrusio, the old Inceptine monastery and abbey glowered down on the port-city. Within the huge refectory of the Inceptine Order, the surviving aristocracy of Hebrion were assembled in all their finery to vote upon the very future of the kingdom.
     
    T HERE had been a scurry of last-minute deals and agreements, of course, men shuffling and intriguing frantically to be part of the new order that was approaching. But by and large it had gone precisely as Jemilla had planned. Today Duke Urbino of Imerdon would be appointed regent of Hebrion, and the lady Jemilla would be publicly proclaimed as the mother of the crippled King’s heir. She would be queen in everything but name. What would Richard Hawkwood have made of that? she wondered, as the nobles convened before her in their maddening, leisurely fashion, and Urbino’s face, for once wreathed in