The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,120

’em. Bruckel glanced sideways. Only look at Her Majesty. Magnificent figure of a woman. Magnificent example. All the hatred flung at her. Simply bounced off, like arrows off a gatehouse. But so lonely. Like a single white tower on a blasted heath. Few truly realised how… difficult her position had been. Regrettable business. But Bruckel knew. And admired her hugely. Would never say so. Would be a kind of betrayal to acknowledge it. But he knew it. And she knew he knew. Was that some comfort to her? Probably not.

Curnsbick was working up to the crescendo. Blah, blah, me, me, me, change the world. Bruckel sagged back into his chair. The world did not change. Not in the ways that mattered. He was presiding over another case later today. Millworkers dead of the white lung. Not to be confused with the black lung. That was the one the miners died of. Regrettable business. But there was nothing Bruckel could do. Not with the interests lined up on the other side. Towering interests. Terrible case.

“Carry us into the future, Master Curnsbick!” called His Majesty. Bruckel wondered if Orso would make a good king. Wondered if any change could be effected. It hardly seemed likely. Not with all the interests lined up. The biggest interests of all. Valint and Balk, of course. Look at that bastard Sulfur, already easing his hooks into the king. Hooks that would rip him apart, as they had ripped apart his father. Always the vultures, circling. But the world was the world. Bruckel’s hands were tied. They called him the high justice. But he was low, and there was no justice.

Curnsbick chopped down his arm with the greatest portentous self-satisfaction. Bruckel glanced sideways at Queen Terez, so endlessly impressive. He ventured the tiniest smile. She could not return it, of course. A regrettable—

“It will carry all of us…” screeched Curnsbick, a pygmy pretending to be a giant, the sort of man who passed for a hero in this petty age, “into the future!”

Terez restrained a snort of contempt. Whose future? The one she had longed for had been crushed long ago. How could her fragile hopes ever have held up the weight of her father’s smothering expectations, her husband’s well-meaning ignorance, his subjects’ mindless prejudice, the cripple Glokta’s unspeakable threats?

She had sent Shalere away. Even now, Terez felt the pain of tears at the thought of her face, her smile, her warmth, the way she sang, danced, kissed. Terez kept a bottle of her scent still. Among all the gaudy trash they heap upon a queen, the one thing that was truly precious to her. Just the faintest whiff of that perfume brought it all tumbling back. That mad, romantic girl who would have fought the world for love was still trapped somewhere in this stern old body. Terez felt the pain of tears, but she had trained her eyes not to weep. She had sent her true love to safety. One must take consolation in the small things, when one has nothing else. A nearly empty scent bottle, and a few sweet memories.

She took a deep breath, used it to force herself straighter. She lived now to hold up Orso’s hopes. To be his unflinching pillar. His dauntless shield against the barbs of the leering public. She had remade herself from stone and steel, an unbending, unsmiling, unfeeling sculpture of a woman, for his sake.

She could have played the game. She could have smiled, and lied, and struck deals. But her father had taught her that compromise was weakness, and weakness, death. Only far too late had she begun to wonder whether her father might not have been a giant, but a fool. Strange, how long a shadow one’s parents cast. All she wanted now was to see Orso married to some fearsomely sensible woman. A woman with a strong enough grip to squeeze him into the great man she knew he could be. Then, perhaps, she could finally stop squeezing herself. Take the trip to Styria. See Shalere again, one last time…

“Carry us into the future, Master Curnsbick!” shouted Orso, with that infinitely good-humoured smile Terez’s own mouth always longed to imitate.

High Justice Bruckel was looking at her, she realised, and with a deeply sad expression. Like a man watching a tragic play that, to his surprise, had struck some deep-buried nerve. As though he somehow guessed at the endless spring of sadness that welled inside her. As though—

There was a flash, Terez thought. A