The Great Ellini (Book One of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Three: The Queen of Hearts

Gradually, by asking lots of light, indirect questions and shrugging a great deal, he began to build up a picture of what had happened between Ellini and Robin. He knew some of it already, but he didn't know how it had started.

The upper levels of the palace, beyond the kitchens and the armoury where Jack spent all his time, were filled with ballrooms and state bedrooms, the inhabitants wearing evening-dress at all hours, and pining for the decadence of Versailles before the Revolution. Myrrha, Robin's wife, was one of these glittering, skinny, sharp-toothed socialites.

She sat at the card-tables and held court, summoning and dismissing people with a wave of her fan, shuffling the cards as though she couldn't bear to be idle.

It was a very shabby deck, he saw, when she dismissed her cronies and summoned him. It was as if she'd worn it down it with her ceaseless shuffling. The Queen of Hearts had a corner missing.

When he sat down opposite her, she spread the cards into a kind of arch and then swept them up again, as if she was waving at him.

"Your highness," she said, inclining her head.

Jack dipped his head slightly lower, as he had been taught. "Your grace."

She was half-smiling, as if she thought the ceremony just as ridiculous as he did, but she wasn't going to be the first one to laugh.

"My husband says you are very promising."

Jack gaped at her. "He's never said that to me."

"Well, he wouldn't. He likes you, though. Don't be fooled by the death-threats."

She shuffled the cards again—briskly, as if she had a purpose in mind—but she didn't speak. There was something petulant about her energy. It put him in mind of a little girl desperately trying to convince her parents that she wasn't tired.

"Has he trained many people?" Jack asked.

"A fair few," she said, tapping the deck expertly against the table.

"What about the girl in the kitchens?"

Her mouth turned up at the corners. "Shall we stop pretending you don't know her name?"

Jack smiled, unabashed. "I thought you might not, since she's so far beneath you."

"I know all her names," said Myrrha tonelessly. "What do you want to know about her?"

He shrugged, though he suspected he had passed the point of seeming casual.

"Whether Robin ever trained her?"

"I suppose he did, in a way. He—" She paused and tightened her lips. "—became enamoured of her when she was very young."

"How young?"

"Sixteen. She was surrounded by friends and family and moral guardians, so it wasn't easy for him to be alone with her. She was sewn into a respectable community, and Robin lacked the patience to unpick the stitches one by one."

Myrrha put down the ace of hearts, stark and red and gruesome in the candlelight.

"What did he do?" asked Jack.

"He tore it all up."

The ace of hearts just lay there, suggesting things to his imagination. And Myrrha was frowning up at the ceiling, as if trying to recall some tricky point of grammar.

"He killed her parents, her sister, a few friends and acquaintances, her priest, her cat—numerically speaking, not more than fifteen people." But she laid down two tens, for no apparent reason, on the tabletop. "Knowing him as you do, all this can hardly surprise you."