The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,70

some air.

“So. A married woman.” The sight of her father soon cleared her spinning head. He sat in his wheeled chair on the terrace, deep-lined face tipped back, gazing at the stars. “They say it’s the proudest day of a father’s life.”

“They say all sorts of nonsense.” His opinion had meant everything to her once, but she found right now she hardly cared. She was eager to shrug off the wreckage of her past life like a snake sheds its skin and sweep away smiling towards her bright new future.

“There is no guide to being a parent, Savine.” He turned his head slowly to look at her, eyes bright in the darkness. “Especially if your parents did as poor a job as mine and your mother’s did. You reel from one mess to another and chart the only course you can see at the time. We meant to tell you the truth, but… when is the right moment to share a thing like that? We preferred the pretence. We did not… want to hurt you.”

She gave a bitter snort. “Then congratulations on your spectacular failure.”

“Hardly my first. One day, I hope you will see that we always tried to act in your best interests.”

“You could have warned me.”

“Not to bed the crown prince? Hardly advice someone of your talents should need.” Perhaps he had a point there. “Besides, we agreed long ago that I would give you some privacy. How was I to know you would become involved with the one man who was off limits?”

“From what my mother tells me, it does rather run in the family.”

A silence, and she saw the side of his face twitch in the warm light from the party, and he reached up and wiped a streak of wet from his leaking left eye. “Well. A life without regrets is not a life at all. It is in the past now. I know I cast a long shadow, Savine. I am glad you are ready to step out from under it. Just… be careful.”

“Aren’t I always?”

“You will move in different circles now. As the Lady Governor of Angland, no less.”

“I’m used to hard decisions.” It felt as if her life had been one after another.

“You are used to business. This is politics. The way things are going… well, take care. And promise me one thing.” He beckoned her close to whisper. “Have nothing to do with Bayaz. Not with him, not with any magus. Take no favours from him, owe no debts to him, make no deals with him. Do not please him. Do not displease him. Do everything possible to escape his notice altogether. Promise me.”

“All right,” she said, frowning. “I promise.” If she was to have a statue on the Kingsway, she supposed she would have to win it for herself.

“Good. Good.” Her father winced as he settled into his chair, drunken applause in the background as a dance came to its end. “The time may soon come when I cannot protect you any more.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?”

“Believe it or not, I’ve been trying.” He frowned over the rooftops towards the dome of the Lords’ Round, the great black shape soaring high into the night sky, a grand replacement for the one destroyed the year Savine was born. “Sometimes,” he murmured, “the only way to improve something is to destroy it, so it can be rebuilt better. Sometimes, to change the world, we must first burn it down.”

Savine raised one brow. “Valbeck may be better in the years to come. But being there while it burned was far from pleasant.”

“The emperor’s prisons were far from pleasant.” He licked at his empty gums with a faint sucking. “But I emerged a better man. Being your father… is the thing I am proudest of. It’s the only thing I’m proud of.”

“And you’re not even my father.”

She wanted to strike some spark of anger from him. But all he did was slowly nod, a trace of a smile as he looked up at the stars, bright in the clear sky. “That should tell you what I think of everything else I’ve done.” Beyond the windows, the band struck up a jaunty reel, one of her mother’s favourites, people clapping and stamping and laughing in time. “Could you wheel me back in?”

She thought about wheeling him off into the flower beds. But in the end, she took the handles of his chair and turned it about, that one wheel slightly squeaking. “I can do