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.Gwen was on the roof just in time to see him leap into the air and head towards London.Even for a skilled magician, it would be a very long flight.For a long moment, she waited on the roof, unsure of what to do.No one had given her any orders, yet she had a feeling that Master Thomas would have wanted her to stay in Oxford, out of immediate danger.And yet.She leapt into the air and followed Master Thomas, holding well back from her tutor.The darkness enveloped her as she rose into the sky, following him towards London.They would be almost invisible from the ground.Wherever he was going, whatever he was doing, she wanted to know what it was.She was sure that it was nothing good.Chapter Thirty-EightI suppose you wouldn’t,” the King said.“You never doubted anything.”“Your government is at an end,” Jack said, ignoring the gibe.He was finally in a position to dictate terms to the King, the Monarch of Great Britain and her Empire.“Your people have risen up and overthrown you.Your aristocrats will no longer exploit the common people for their advantage, while leaving their victims scrabbling in the dirt.”The King smiled.“You mean like you acted, before you discovered that your life was a lie?”Jack’s eyes flashed fire.“I could kill you right now,” he snapped.Lightning danced over his hands.“I could behead you and stick your head on a pike in front of the tower.”“Of course you could,” the King said.He didn’t seem worried by the threat.“And someone in the Line of Succession would be acclaimed King and the country would go on.These aren’t the days when losing a monarch meant the end of everything.The government will carry on without me.”Jack had to smile.“And that prospect doesn’t bother you?”For a moment, he saw tiredness in the King’s face.“While my father was alive, I woke up every day unsure if I was Prince Regent or not,” he said.“He had days when he was the man I remember from my childhood and days when his mind was clearly gone, when he wanted me to marry a rosebush or to form a marriage alliance with the Tsar in Russia.The pressure of the Throne destroyed my father’s life.If I had my life all over again, I’d want to be someone happy and distant and small.”“Really?” Jack asked.“I think you’ll find that happiness and powerlessness don’t go together in the modern world.”“Maybe not,” the King agreed.“Lord Owen.I want to be like him.Spend my days happily pottering through libraries, researching ancient history while allowing the world to pass me by.You thought of me as an absolute ruler, but in truth I have less choice than you might think.I didn’t choose my wife.”“You settled for abandoning her instead,” Jack pointed out, tartly.“How many mistresses have you had?”“Too many and too few,” the King said.He looked up at Jack, sharply.“And how do you explain the women in the farms you.mated with while you worked for the Crown?”Jack winced, inwardly.“I had sex with them, yes,” he confessed.“I didn’t know what they were or what I was.”The King snorted.“Of course you knew what they were,” he said.“They were women who were helpless to resist you, who simply couldn’t say no.You have no sense of natural justice at all; your revolution is built on a lie.You’re the man who couldn’t face up to what he was without allowing it to warp him into a monster.Do you even know the names of the men and women who died on the airship you brought down in the Thames?”“There’s no such thing as natural justice,” Jack said, quietly.The King was right, no matter how much he wanted to deny it.“There’s only what we make for ourselves.”“And you have made a new world for yourself,” the King said.“What will you do with it, I wonder?”He smiled.“You’ve taken the city,” he added, “but you will find governing to be much harder than you think.What will you do for money if you abolish half the taxes, or if you force the businesses to pay better wages instead of using the profits to pay the government, or if you abandon the sugar colonies in the Caribbean? Who will feed the country if you abandon the new farming technology in England? What will you do when the colonies start revolting? And who will serve in the Royal Navy if you remove the country’s natural leaders?”“We will find answers to those problems,” Jack said, mildly.The King snorted, louder.“People have been trying to find solutions to those problems since the days of Alexander the Great,” he said.“There are countless texts on the subject of what makes a good monarch, or an ideal system of government.No one has ever produced a permanent solution – and no one ever will.Whatever system you devise, there will always be winners and losers
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