He respectfully bowed his head. “I wouldn’t know how to do anything else.”

“But with more of…” And she flicked at the swags of gold braid festooning his uniform. “All this.”

“It has pleased the Lord and Lady Regent to appoint me interim Lord Chamberlain.”

Isern was giving him an approving look-over. “You can be lord o’ my interim whenever you please,” she said.

Rikke frowned at her. “I thought I said good behaviour? Should it be Lord Jurand, then?”

“Not to an old friend. I’m hardly the only one advanced in the world, after all.” Jurand looked towards the strange and varied peoples of the North clambering from the ship to stand gawping at the vast scale, crawling activity and choking smokiness of everything. Quite the entourage. Which was, of course, the idea. Merchants of Uffrith and Carleon, dressed in their best dyed cloth and keen to talk business. Named Men in feast-day cloaks. Chieftains of the High Valleys and the West Valleys and all the valleys in between. Hillmen and hillwomen, too, faces blue with tattoos. “Should it be Queen Rikke?”

“By the dead, no! Black Rikke will do.” She glanced at the soldiers on the quay, stiff and polished in big, dark uniforms on big, dark horses under big, dark banners. Must’ve been a hundred of ’em at the least. “Quite the welcome you’ve laid on.”

“The Lord Regent insisted we take no chances with your safety,” said Jurand, leading them across to a set of spare horses.

“Touched,” said Rikke. “I never feel so safe as when I’m surrounded by heavily armed strangers.” Took her a moment to mount up, as she wasn’t much happier on a horse than a ship. “Must confess I was a smidge worried Leo and Savine might not be all that pleased to see me.” Rikke nudged her mount close to Jurand and murmured out of the corner of her mouth. “I did betray ’em, after all. Just a bit.”

“Lady Savine has always had a cool head.”

“She could freeze milk with a whisper, that one.”

“And you’ll find Leo’s not so easily carried away as he used to be.”

“So all’s forgiven?”

Jurand’s smile didn’t totally convince. “They both want to look to the future.”

It wasn’t lost on Rikke that he’d come nowhere near answering the question.

The chimneys still puffed away, leaving a great grey stain across the sky. The streets still thronged with folk of every shape and size, cut and colour. That tower they called the House of the Maker still stuck up into the fog like a giant’s finger. The stones still throbbed with that endless unquiet, the snore of some slumbering demon, the rumble of unhappy men and machines.

But not everything was the same. They’d always liked a flag in the Union but since her last visit they’d gone mad with them. Buildings with great banners down the front. Suns painted twenty strides high on the sides of warehouses. Crossed hammers of Angland, too, with Leo’s golden lion. There were armed men at every gate and corner. King’s Own in red, but always shadowed by dark-clothed Anglanders. Rikke saw barricades down side streets, folk queueing up to be searched, soldiers rooting through wagons, flatbowmen frowning down from roofs.