What would people have thought, if they could have seen their new Lord and Lady Regent, the pilots of the nation, staggering about a prison cell, wrestling over a scrap of paper?

She felt a powerful urge to kick his iron leg away, bring him down, pin his good arm and start punching. But that would have solved nothing. She let him twist the document from her fist and leave her standing, flushed and breathing hard. She let him think he had won. That was what he wanted, after all. More than ever.

He pulled the paper open, eyes flickering over the writing. “What the hell’s this?”

“A letter of charter,” said Jurand, plucking it from his fingers and handing him his cane, every bit the faithful valet. The two of them were always together these days. Hard to believe that Savine had needed to beg Leo to bring him back. “The Duke Rogont. A Styrian vessel.”

“You’d hand him to the Styrians?” Leo looked at her in shocked disappointment. “You’d make a weapon of him, for our enemies to use against us?”

Savine drew herself up again. “I am starting to think your enemies and mine are not at all the same.”

“We’ll discuss this later,” snapped Leo, turning his back on her. “Get men to the docks!” And he limped out, tap, scrape, squeak.

Jurand gave Savine that pained look again. “What have you done, Your Highness?” And he followed Leo.

“That’s it!” Glaward reined his horse in hard and swung from the saddle with an ease that made Leo deeply jealous. “The Duke Rogont!”

It was an ugly tub, low in the water, a few scraps of gilt still clinging to the unlikely bosom of its figurehead but her face reduced to a pitted mass by years of sea wind. She was about to get underway, men crawling in the rigging, a shabby-looking sailor dragging at the knots of a mooring line.

“This ship is forbidden to leave the harbour!” roared Leo, gritting his teeth as he slithered from his saddle.

The sailor squeaked out a lot of scared-sounding Styrian as Glaward wrestled him down onto his face. More well-armed Anglanders were clattering up, dismounting, pulling out weapons.

Leo limped down the long wharf, iron foot clonking on the boards, waving them past with his cane, Jurand loading his flatbow as he followed. “Get on board! Find Orso! Bring him to me!”

They clattered towards the Duke Rogont’s gangplank, half-hidden among a mass of boxes and barrels. The leading man looked sideways, took a whooping breath, then flew from the wharf and tumbled flailing into the sea. Leo winced as he skittered to an ungainly halt.

Someone had burst from among the crates and rammed the man with his shoulder. Now he turned towards Leo, blocking the narrow jetty with his body. A very big body, with a noticeable lack of neck.

Bremer dan Gorst.

The king’s bodyguard pulled a final buckle tight on his unmarked breastplate and stood, swords at his sides, a bright buckler on his left arm. “I am afraid I cannot allow it,” he said in that ridiculous squeak.