Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,35
Always. And I never waver. “You’re the head of Holyrood,” I grit out, “and if anyone’s opinion should be slapped on a banner across the Palace’s entrance for all to see, it’s yours.”
“We knew it would come to this.” My brother snatches open one of the upper kitchen cabinets and pulls out a lowball glass then seems to think better of it. With the tumbler returned to the shelf, he nabs a bottle of whisky off the top of the refrigerator. “The night that the king was murdered, you called it.”
“Revolution was too strong of a word.”
Tipping the Glenlivet 15 toward me, the lines of Guy’s face draw tight. “Call it whatever the hell you want, it’s all the same in the end.” He cracks the bottle’s cap, the aluminum top clutched in one hand. “The country knows what they’re after: Queen Margaret out of Buckingham Palace on her pert little ass. Dead, preferably, but I’m sure they’ll take her broken crown however they can get it.”
First Princess Evangeline, then the king. The possibility of three dead royals in the span of twenty-five years wouldn’t be an accident; it’s a statement. One that I’m not entirely sure Holyrood has the resources to tackle. We’re good at what we do, the entire lot of us. We have our fingers dipped in every pot; men stationed in every corner of the country; and better technology than even Britain’s military, thanks to Damien. Holyrood is a well-oiled machine dedicated to a single-minded purpose: protecting the Crown.
But I have no delusions.
When an entire population is hell-bent on tearing a queen from her place on the throne, it doesn’t matter how good we are at keeping her tucked away. Unless Queen Margaret is willing to take drastic action, she’s stuck in a palace surrounded by her enemies.
The inevitable is staring us dead in the eye and waving a bloody white flag of surrender to boot.
“She’s going to end up dead.”
Instead of replying, Guy takes a heavy swig of whisky. His throat works, his knuckles turning white around the bottle’s neck. “What she needs is to get out of the City.”
“She won’t.”
“She will if she knows what’s good for her.” My brother sets the Glenlivet down, rotating the amber bottle so that its label faces him. He traces a finger over the raised font, his other hand planted firmly on the laminate counter. “Æthelred II fled,” he says after a moment, never peering up from the whisky, “in 1013. The King of the Danes had just invaded England.”
Before Pa died, Guy spent years reading books about English monarchs. He stole them from the local libraries, never to be returned, and devoured them while holed up in the room he shared with me and Damien. Used to stay up all night with his nose glued to the musty pages. Whereas words have always been the bane of my existence, they were once Guy’s anchor to reality. He read and he debated and he shoved God-knows-how-many trivia points down my throat during those early years—before we fled to Paris, before Mum died from a sickness we couldn’t cure, before he learned that using one’s fists is ultimately more effective in achieving a desired outcome.
Still, I’ll never forget when he asked me how we could even begin to serve the royal family today when we knew nothing of all the dead kings and queens who came before them.
I didn’t have an answer for him then, back in that tiny flat in Whitechapel with its thin walls and shit space heaters and ancient floors that always whined beneath our feet. All those stolen books never made their way across the channel to France with us, but it seems my brother has forgotten nothing of what he once believed in so fiercely.
Now, I only stay silent as he taps his thumb against the glass bottle.
“They called him Æthelred the Unready. Not a weak king, just an ill-advised one. But he planned—once the Danes took over, Æthelred plotted and he waited. Less than a year later, the Dane King was dead and Æthelred saw a glimmer of opportunity.” My brother’s mouth curves, like he’s imagining the long-forgotten battle from centuries ago playing out before him now. “He came in on the Thames. Danes lined London Bridge with spears, prepared to fight till the death. But Æthelred’s soldiers were bloody brilliant. They pulled the roofs off the houses that they passed, then used them as shields when they came in on the river.”