The Queen of the Tearling (12 page)

Kelsea's eyes ran over the line of metal boxes again, assessing, and she felt everything inside her go cold, all at once.

Not boxes. Cages.

She gripped Mace's arm, heedless of the wounds that she knew lay beneath his cloak. When she spoke, her voice didn't entirely sound like her own. “Lazarus. You tell me what's going on here. Now.”

This time he finally met her eye, and his bleak expression was all the confirmation that Kelsea needed. “It's the shipment, Lady. Two hundred and fifty people, once a month, like clockwork.”

“Shipment to where?”

“To Mortmesne.”

Kelsea turned back to the lawn. Her mind seemed to have gone blank. The lines had begun moving now, slowly but surely, toward the tables down beside the moat. While Kelsea watched, one of the officials marched a woman away from the table, toward the cages. He stopped at the third cage and gestured to a man in a black uniform (the Tear army uniform, Kelsea realized faintly), who then pulled open a cleverly concealed door at the cage end. The woman marched meekly inside, and the soldier in black closed and locked the door.

“The Mort Treaty,” Kelsea murmured numbly. “This is how my mother made peace.”

“The Red Queen wanted tribute, Lady. The Tearling had nothing else to offer.”

A sharp pain arrowed through Kelsea's chest, and she pressed a clenched fist between her breasts. Peeking beneath her shirt, she saw that her sapphire was glowing, a bright and angry blue. She gathered the jewel in a handful of the cloth and found that the thing was scalding, deep heat that burned her palm through the cloth. The sapphire continued to burn her hand, but the pain was nothing compared to the burn inside her chest, which continued, deepening with each passing second until it began to change, moving toward something different. Not pain . . . something else. She didn't question the feeling, for she seemed to be beyond any capacity for wonder now, and could only stare mutely at the scene in front of her.

More officials were escorting people toward the cages. The crowd had backed up to allow them space, and Kelsea saw now that each cage had enormous wheels of wood. Tear soldiers had already begun to tether a team of mules to the cage at the far end of the Keep. Even from a distance, Kelsea could tell that the cages had seen hard use; several of the bars were visibly scarred, as if they'd been attacked.

Rescue attempts
, her mind murmured.
There must have been at least a few.
She suddenly remembered standing in front of the big picture window at the cottage as a child, crying about something—a skinned knee, perhaps, or a chore she hadn't wanted to do—staring at the forest, certain that this was the day when her mother would finally come. Kelsea couldn't have been more than three or four, but she remembered her certainty very well: her mother would come, she would hold Kelsea in her arms, and she would be nothing but good.

I was a fool.

“Why these people?” she asked Mace. “How do they choose them?”

“By lottery, Lady.”

“Lottery,” she repeated faintly. “I see.”

Family members had begun to gather around the cages now, speaking to people inside, holding hands, or merely loitering. Several of the black-clad soldiers had been stationed next to each cage, and they watched the crowd stonily, clearly anticipating the moment when a family member presented a threat. But the onlookers were passive, and to Kelsea that seemed the worst thing of all. They were beaten, her people. It was clear in the long, straight lines that stretched from the official table, the way families merely stood beside the cages, waiting for their loved ones to depart.

Kelsea's attention caught and held on the two cages nearest the table. These cages were shorter than the others, their steel bars set more tightly in their frames. Already, each cage held several small forms. Kelsea blinked and found that her eyes had filled with tears. They coursed slowly down her face until she tasted salt.

“Even children?” she asked Mace. “Why don't the parents just flee?”

“When one of the allotted runs, his entire family is forfeit in the next lottery. Look around you, Lady. These are large families. Often they must sacrifice the welfare of one child, thinking of the other eight.”

“This is my mother's system?”

“No. The architect of the lottery is down there.” Mace pointed toward the officials' table. “Arlen Thorne.”

“But my mother approved it?”

“She did.”

“She did,” Kelsea repeated faintly. The world tipped crazily in front of her and she dug her fingernails into her arm, drawing blood, until the haze disappeared. In its wake came fury, a terrible, cheated anger that threatened to overwhelm her. Elyssa the Benevolent, Elyssa the Peacemaker. Kelsea's mother, who had sold her people off wholesale.

“All's not lost, Lady,” Mace said unexpectedly, putting a hand on her arm. “I swear to you, you're nothing like her.”

Kelsea gritted her teeth. “You're right. I won't allow this to continue.”

“Lady, the Mort Treaty is specific. There is no appeals process, no outside arbiter. If a single shipment fails to arrive in Demesne on time, the Mort Queen has the right to invade this country and wreak terror. I lived through the last Mort invasion, Lady, and I assure you, Mhurn wasn't exaggerating the carnage. Before you take action, consider the consequences.”

Somewhere a woman had begun wailing, a high, eldritch shrieking that reminded Kelsea of a story Barty used to tell her as a child: the banshee, a terrible creature that summoned one to her death. The screams echoed over the crowd, and Kelsea finally pinpointed the source: a woman who was trying desperately to reach the first cage. Her husband was trying just as hard to drag her away, but he was heavyset and she was too quick for him, wriggling out of his grasp and pushing her way toward the enclosure. The husband buried a hand in her hair and simply yanked, pulling her from her feet. The woman went down to the ground in a pile, but a moment later she was up again, straining toward the cage.

The four soldiers on guard around the cage were visibly on edge; they watched the mother uneasily, not certain whether to get involved. Her voice was giving way, her shrieks fading to a bruised cawing like a crow's, and her strength also appeared to be giving out. While Kelsea watched, the husband finally won the battle and got a grip on her wool dress. He pulled her away to a safe distance from the cage, and the soldiers settled back into their formerly relaxed postures.

But the mother continued to croak brokenly, the sound audible even from Kelsea's distance. Husband and wife stood watching the cage, surrounded by several children. Kelsea's vision was blurred, and her hands were shaking on the reins. She sensed something terrible within her, not the girl hidden in the cottage: someone on fire, burning. The sapphire branded her chest. She wondered if it was possible for her own skin to break open, revealing another person entirely.

Mace touched her shoulder gently, and she spun around to him with wild eyes. He held out his sword. “Right or wrong, Lady, I see that you mean to take action. Hold this.”

Kelsea took the hilt in her hand, liking the heft of it, though the blade was too long for her build. “What about you?”

“I have many weapons, and we have friends here. The sword is for appearance only.”

“What friends?”

Slowly and casually, Mace raised an open palm into the air, clenched it into a fist, and dropped his arm again. Kelsea waited a moment, half expecting the sky to break open. She sensed some shifting in the crowd around her, but nothing distinct. Mace, however, seemed satisfied, and turned back to her. Kelsea looked at him for a moment, this man who'd guarded her life for days now, and said, “You were right, Lazarus. I see my own death, and exalt in it. But before I go, I'm going to cut a wide swath here, wide as God's Ocean. If you don't want to die with me, you should leave now.”

“Lady, your mother wasn't a good queen, but she wasn't evil. She was a weak queen. She would never have been able to walk straight into death. A fey streak carries enormous power, but be very certain that the havoc you wreak is for your people, not against your mother's memory. This is the difference between a queen and an angry child.”

Kelsea tried to focus on his words, the way she would have considered any problem set before her, but what popped into her mind instead were illustrations from Carlin's history books. People of deep brown skin, an old and infamous brutality that had darkened an age. Carlin had dwelled long on this period in history, and Kelsea had wondered more than once why it should be relevant. Behind her closed eyes, she saw stories and illustrations: people in chains. Men caught fleeing and roasted alive. Girls raped at so young an age that their wombs never recovered. Children stolen out of their mothers' arms and sold at auction. State-sponsored slavery.

In my kingdom.

Carlin had known, but she hadn't been allowed to tell. Yet she had done her job, almost too well, for now years of extraordinary cruelty flickered through Kelsea's mind in less than a second. “I will end this.”

“You're certain?” Mace asked.

“I'm certain.”

“Then I vow to guard you against death.”

Kelsea blinked. “You do?”

Mace nodded, resolve clear in his weathered face. “You have possibility in you, Lady. Carroll and I could both sense it. I have nothing to lose, and I would rather die attempting to eradicate a great evil, for I sense that's Your Majesty's purpose.”

Majesty.
The word seemed to ripple through her. “I haven't been crowned, Lazarus.”

“No matter, Lady. I see the queenship in you, and I never saw it in your mother, not one day of her life.”

Kelsea looked away, moved to fresh tears. She had won a guard. Only one, but he was the most important. She wiped her leaking eyes and tightened her grip on the sword. “If I shout, will they hear me?”

“Let me do the shouting, Lady, since you don't have a proper herald yet. You'll have their full attention in a moment. Keep your hand on that sword, and don't move any closer to the Keep. I see no archers, but they may be there, all the same.”

Kelsea nodded firmly, though inwardly she groaned. She was a mess. The simple, clean gown that the Fetch had given her was now streaked with mud, the hem of her pants torn. Pen's armor was twice as heavy as it had been that morning. Her long, unwashed hair fell from its pins to dangle in dark brown clumps around her face, and sweat poured down her forehead, stinging her eyes. She remembered her childhood dream of entering the city on a white pony with a crown on her head. Today she looked nothing like a queen.

The mother in front of the children's cage had begun weeping again, oblivious to the small children who looked fearfully up at her. Kelsea cursed herself.
Who cares about your hair, you fool? Look what's been done here.

“What are those cages made of, Lazarus?”

“Mort iron.”

“But the wheels and undercarriage are wood.”

“Tearling oak, Lady. What are you getting at?”

Staring down at the table full of blue-clad officials in front of the Keep, Kelsea took a deep breath. This was her last moment to be anonymous. Everything was about to change. “The cages. After we empty them, we're going to set them on fire.”

 

J
avel was fighting sleep. Guarding the Keep Gate was not a challenging job. It had been at least eighteen months since anyone had tried to rush the gate, and that attempt had been halfhearted, a drunk who stumbled up at two in the morning with a grievance over his taxes. Nothing had happened, and nothing was going to happen. That was the life of a Gate Guard.

Besides being sleepy, Javel was miserable. He had never enjoyed his job, but he positively loathed it during the shipment. The crowd as a whole didn't present a security problem; they stood around like cows waiting for the slaughter. But there was always some incident at the children's cages, which were closest to the gate, and today was no exception. Javel had breathed a sigh of relief when they finally got the woman quieted down. There was always a parent like that, usually a mother, and only Keller, true dyed-in-the-wool sadist that he was, enjoyed hearing a woman scream. For the rest of the Gate Guard, the shipment was bad duty. Even if another guard was willing to trade, it took two regular shifts to balance it out.

The second problem was that the shipment brought two troops of the Tear army onto the Keep Lawn. The army thought Gate Guard was a soft option, a refuge for those who weren't skilled enough or brave enough to be soldiers. It wasn't always true; across the drawbridge, directly in front of Javel, stood Vil, who'd received two commendations from Queen Elyssa after the Mort invasion and been rewarded with command of the gate. But they weren't all Vil, and the Tear army never let them forget it. Even now, when Javel cut his eyes to the left, he could see two of the soldiers snickering, and he was certain they were laughing at him.

The worst thing about the shipment was that it reminded him of Allie. Most of the time he didn't think about Allie, and when he did start to think of her, he could find the nearest bottle of whiskey and put an end to that. But he couldn't drink on duty; even if Vil wasn't on watch, the other guards wouldn't tolerate it. There wasn't much loyalty in the Gate Guard, but there was plenty of solidarity, a solidarity based on the understanding that none of them was perfect. They all looked the other way for Ethan's incessant gambling, Marco's illiteracy, and even Keller's habit of roughing up the whores down in the Gut. But none of those problems impaired their job performance. If Javel wanted to drink, he had to wait until he was off duty.

Fortunately, the sun was beginning to set and the cages were almost full. The priest from the Arvath had risen from his place at the table, and now he stood beside the first cage, his white robes rippling in the late-afternoon wind. Javel didn't recognize this official, a great, thick fellow with jowls that hung down almost to his neck. Piety was good, so the saying went, but it was especially good with everything else. Javel loathed the sight of the priest, this man who never had to face the lottery. Perhaps he had even joined God's Church for that reason; many men did. Javel remembered the day the Regent had granted the Church exemption; there had been an outcry. The lottery was an indiscriminate predator; it took everyone it could get its hands on. It was indiscriminate, but it was fair, and God's Church only took men. Yes, there had been an outcry, but like all outcries, it soon quieted.