Red Queen (34 page)

Cal and Maven bid everyone good-bye, doing their duty despite the organized chaos. The airships wait not far off, the whir of their engines audible even inside. I want to see the great machines up close, but moving would mean braving the crowd and I can’t stomach the stares of the grief-stricken. All together, twelve died last night, but I refuse to learn their names. I can’t have them weighing on me, not when I need my wits more than ever.

When I can’t watch any longer, my feet take me where they will, wandering through now familiar passages. Chambers close as I pass, being shut up for the season, until the court returns.
I won’t
, I know. Servants pull white sheets over the furniture and paintings and statues, until the whole place looks haunted by ghosts.

It’s not long before I find myself standing in the doorway of Julian’s old classroom and the sight shocks me. The stacks of books, the desk, even the maps are gone. The room looks larger, but feels smaller. It once held whole worlds, but now holds only dust and crumpled paper. My eyes linger on the wall where the huge map used to be. Once I couldn’t understand it; now I remember it like an old friend.

Norta, the Lakelands, Piedmont, the Prairie, Tiraxes, Montfort, Ciron, and all the disputed lands in between.
Other countries, other peoples, all torn along the lines of blood just like us.
If we change, will they? Or will they try to destroy us too?

“I hope you’ll remember your lessons.” Julian’s voice draws me out of my thoughts, back to the empty room. He stands behind me, following my gaze to the map wall. “I’m sorry I couldn’t teach you more.”

“We’ll have plenty of time for Lessons in Archeon.”

His smile is bittersweet and almost painful to look at. With a jolt I realize I can feel cameras watching us for the very first time. “Julian?”

“The archivists in Delphie have offered me a position restoring some old texts.” The lie is as plain as the nose on his face. “Seems they’ve been digging through the Wash and came on some storage bunkers. Mountains to go through, apparently.”

“You’ll like that very much.” My voice catches in my throat.
You knew he would have to leave. You forced him into this last night, when you put his life in danger for Kilorn’s.
“Will you visit, when you can?”

“Yes, of course.” Another lie. Elara will figure out his role soon enough and then he’ll be on the run. It only makes sense to get a head start. “I’ve gotten you something.”

I’d rather have Julian than any gift, but I try to look thankful anyways. “Is it good advice?”

He shakes his head, smiling. “You’ll see when you get to the capital.” Then he stretches out his arms, beckoning to me. “I have to go, so send me off properly.”

Hugging him is like hugging my father or the brothers I’ll never see again. I don’t want to let him go but the danger is too great for him to stay and we both know it.

“Thank you, Mare,” he whispers in my ear. “You remind me so much of her.” I don’t need to ask to know he’s talking about Coriane, about the sister he lost so long ago. “I’ll miss you, little lightning girl.”

Right now, the nickname doesn’t sound so bad.

I don’t have the strength to marvel at the boat, driven through the water by electric engines. Black, silver, and red flags flap from every pole, marking this as the king’s ship. When I was a girl, I use to wonder why the king laid claim to our color. It was just so beneath him. Now I realize the flags are red like his flame, like the destruction—and the people—he controls.

“The Sentinels from last night have been
reassigned
,” Maven mutters as we walk along a deck.

Reassigned
is just a fancy word for
punished
. Remembering Pig-Eyes and the way he looked at me, I’m not sorry at all. “Where did they go?”

“The front, of course. They’ll be attached to some rabble group, to captain injured, incapable, or bad-tempered soldiers. Those are usually the first to be sent in a trench push.” By the shadows behind his eyes, I can tell Maven knows this firsthand.

“The first to die.”

He nods solemnly.

“And Lucas? I haven’t seen him since yesterday—”

“He’s all right. Traveling with House Samos, regrouping with family. The shooting has everyone on their heels, even the High Houses.”

Relief washes over me, as well as sadness. I miss Lucas already, but it’s good to know he’s safe and far from Elara’s prying.

Maven bites his lip, looking subdued. “But not for long. Answers are coming.”

“What do you mean?”

“They found blood down in the cells. Red blood.”

My gunshot wound is gone, but the memory of the pain has not faded. “So?”

“So whichever friend of yours had the misfortune to be wounded won’t be a secret much longer, if the bloodbase does its job.”

“Bloodbase?”

“The blood database. Any Red born within a hundred miles of civilization gets sampled at birth. Started out as a project to understand exactly what the difference is between us, but it ended up just another way to put a collar on your people. In the bigger cities, Reds don’t use ID cards, but blood tags. They’re sampled at every gate, coming and going. Tracked like animals.”

Briefly, I think of the old documents the king threw at me that day in the throne room. My name, my photograph, and a smear of blood were in there.

My blood. They have my blood.

“And they—they can figure out whose blood it is, just like that?”

“It takes some time, a week or so, but yes, that’s how it’s supposed to work.” His eyes fall to my shaking hands and he covers them with his own, letting warmth bleed into my suddenly cold skin. “Mare?”

“He shot me,” I whisper. “The Sentinel shot me. It’s my blood they found.”

And then his hands are just as cold as mine.

For all his clever ideas, Maven has nothing to say to this. He just stares, his breath coming in tiny, scared puffs. I know the look on his face; I wear it every time I’m forced to say good-bye to someone.

“It’s too bad we didn’t stay longer,” I murmur, looking out at the river. “I would have liked to die close to home.”

Another breeze sends a curtain of my hair across my face but Maven brushes it away and pulls me close with startling ferocity.

Oh.

His kiss is not at all like his brother’s. Maven is more desperate, surprising himself as much as me. He knows I’m sinking fast, a stone dropping through the river.
And he wants to drown with me.

“I will fix this,” he murmurs against my lips. I have never seen his eyes so bright and sharp. “I won’t let them hurt you. You have my word.”

Part of me wants to believe him. “Maven, you can’t fix everything.”

“You’re right,
I
can’t,” he replies, an edge to his voice. “But I can convince someone with more power than me.”

“Who?”

When the temperature around us rises, Maven pulls back, his jaw tense and clenched. The way his eyes flash, I half expect him to attack whoever interrupted us. I don’t turn around, mostly because I can’t feel my limbs. I’ve gone numb, though my lips still tingle with memory. What this means, I don’t know. What I feel, I can’t begin to understand.

“The queen requests your presence on the viewing deck.” Cal’s voice grinds like stone. He sounds almost angry, but his bronze eyes look sad, defeated even. “Passing the Stilts, Mare.”

Yes, the shoreline is already familiar to me. I know that mangled tree, that stretch of bank, and the echo of saws and falling trees is unmistakable.
This is home
. With great pain, I force myself away from the rail to face Cal, who seems to be having a silent conversation with his brother.

“Thank you, Cal,” I murmur, still trying to process Maven’s kiss and, of course, my own impending doom.

Cal walks away, his usually straight back bowed. Each footfall sends a pang of guilt through me, making me remember our dance and our own kiss.
I hurt everyone, especially myself.

Maven stares after his fleeing brother. “He does not like to lose. And”—he lowers his voice, now so close to me I can see the tiny flecks of silver in his eyes—“neither do I. I won’t lose you, Mare.
I won’t.
”

“You’ll never lose me.”

Another lie, and we both know it.

The viewing deck dominates the front of the ship, enclosed by glass stretching from side to side. Brown shapes take form on the riverbank, and the old hill with the arena appears out of the trees. We’re too far from the bank to see anyone properly, but I know my house in an instant. The old flag still flutters on the porch, still embroidered with three red stars. One has a black stripe through it, in honor of Shade.
Shade was executed. You’re supposed to rip a star off after that.
But they didn’t. They held on to him in their own little rebellion.

I want to point my home out to Maven, to tell him about the village. I’ve seen his life and now I want to show him mine. But the viewing deck is silent, all of us staring at the village as we come closer and closer.
The villagers don’t care about you
, I want to scream.
Only fools will stop to watch. Only the fools will waste a moment on you
.

As the boat continues on, I begin to think the whole village might be made of fools. All two thousand of them seem crowded onto the bank. Some stand ankle deep in the river. From this distance, they all look the same. Fading hair and worn clothes, blotchy skinned, tired, hungry—all the things I used to be.

And
angry.
Even from the boat, I can feel their anger. They don’t cheer or call out our names. No one waves. No one even smiles.

“What is this?” I breathe, expecting no one to answer.

But the queen does, with great relish. “Such a waste, parading down the river when no one will watch. It seems we’ve fixed that.”

Something tells me this is another mandatory event, like the fights, like the broadcasts. Officers tore sick elders from their beds and exhausted workers from the floor, forcing them to watch us.

A whip cracks somewhere on the bank, followed closely by a woman’s scream. “Stay in line!” echoes over the crowd. Their eyes never falter, staring straight ahead, so still that I can’t even see where the disruption was.
What happened to make them so lenient? What has already been done?

Tears prick at my eyes as I watch. There are more cracks and a few babies wail, but no one on the bank protests. Suddenly I’m at the edge of the deck, wanting to burst through the glass with every inch of myself.

“Going somewhere, Mareena?” Elara purrs from her place next to the king. She sips placidly at a drink, surveying me over the rim of her glass.

“Why are you doing this?”

Arms crossed over her magnificent gown, Evangeline eyes me with a sneer. “Why do you care?” But her words fall on deaf ears.

“They know what happened at the Hall, they might even agree with it, so they need to see that we aren’t defeated,” Cal murmurs, his eyes on the riverbank. He can’t even look at me, the coward. “We aren’t even bleeding.”

Another whip cracks and I flinch, almost feeling the lash on my skin. “Did you order them to be beaten as well?”

He doesn’t rise to my challenge, jaw firmly clenched shut. But when another villager cries out, protesting against the officers, he lets his eyes close.

“Stand back, Lady Titanos.” The king’s voice rumbles like faraway thunder, an order if there ever was one. I can almost feel his smug smile when I step away, moving back to Maven. “This is a Red village, you know that better than us all. They harbor these terrorists, feed them, protect them,
become
them. They are children who have done wrong. And they must learn.”

I open my mouth to argue, but the queen bares her teeth. “Perhaps you know of a few who should be made an example of?” she says calmly, gesturing to the shoreline.

The words die in my throat, chased away by her threat. “No, Your Majesty, I don’t.”

“Then stand back and be silent.” Then she grins. “For your time to speak will come.”

This is what they need me for. A moment like this, when the scales could tip out of their favor.
But I can’t protest. I can only do as she commands, and watch as my home fades out of sight. Forever.

The closer we get to the capital, the larger the villages become. Soon the landscape fades from lumber and farming communities to proper towns. They center around massive mills, with brick homes and dormitories to house the Red laborers. Like the other villages, their inhabitants stand in the streets to watch us pass. Officers bark, whips crack, and I never get used to it. I flinch every time.

Then the towns are replaced by sprawling estates and mansions, palaces like the Hall. Made of stone and glass and swirling marble, each one seems more magnificent than the last. Their lawns slope to the river, decorated with greenwarden gardens and beautiful fountains. The houses themselves look like the work of gods, each one a different kind of beautiful. But the windows are dark, the doors closed. Where the villages and towns were full of people, these seem devoid of life. Only the flags flying high, one over each structure, let me know someone lives there at all. Blue for House Osanos, silver for Samos, brown for Rhambos, and so on. Now I know the colors by heart, putting faces to each silent home.
I even killed the owners of a few.

“River Row,” Maven explains. “The country residences, should a lord or lady wish to escape the city.”

My gaze lingers on the Iral home, a columned wonder of black marble. Stone panthers guard the porch, snarling up at the sky. Even the statues put a chill in me, making me remember Ara Iral and her pressing questions.

“There’s no one here.”

“The houses are empty most of the year and no one would dare leave the city now, not with this Guard business.” He offers me a small, bitter smile. “They would rather hide behind their diamond walls and let my brother do their fighting for them.”

“If only no one had to fight at all.”

He shakes his head. “It does no good to dream.”

We watch in silence as River Row falls behind us and another forest rises up on the banks. The trees are strange, very tall with black bark and dark red leaves. It is deathly quiet, as no forest should be. Not even birdsong breaks the silence, and overhead, the sky darkens, but not from the waning afternoon light. Black clouds gather, hovering over the trees like a thick blanket.