The Queen of the Tearling (18 page)

“Where's the companion jewel?” her uncle asked.

“That's not your concern, Uncle. I have the jewel I was sent away with, and that's the proof required.”

He waved a hand. “Of course, of course. The brand?”

Kelsea smiled, baring her teeth, as she pulled up the sleeve of her dress and turned her forearm to the light. The burn scar didn't look as ugly in torchlight, but it was clear all the same: someone had laid a white-hot knife against her forearm. For a moment, Kelsea could almost picture the scene: the dark room, the fire, the outraged screams of a baby who had just felt real pain for the first time in her life.

Who did this to me?
she wondered.
Who would have been able to do it?

At the sight of the scar, the Regent seemed to relax, relief settling over his shoulders. Kelsea was amazed at how easily she could read him. Was it because they were related? More likely it was merely that her uncle was fairly simple, greed and gluttony rolled together. He didn't like uncertainty, even when it worked to his advantage.

“My identity is true,” Kelsea announced. “I will be crowned now. Where's the priest?”

“Here, Lady,” a thin voice quavered behind her. Kelsea turned to see a tall, gaunt man of perhaps sixty approaching from the nearest pillar. He wore a loose white robe with no decoration, the uniform clothing of an ordained priest who hadn't advanced in the hierarchy. His face was that of an ascetic, drawn and pale, and his hair and eyebrows were likewise a faded, colorless blond, as though life had leached the very pigment from him. He shuffled forward with nervous, uncertain steps.

“Well done, Lazarus,” Kelsea murmured.

The priest halted some ten feet from Kelsea's guard and bowed. “Lady, I'm Father Tyler. It will be my honor to administer your coronation. Where is the crown, please?”

“Ah,” the Regent replied, “that has been a difficulty. Before her death, my sister hid the crown for safekeeping. We haven't been able to locate it.”

“Of course you haven't,” Kelsea replied, fuming inside. She should have expected some cheap nonsense like this. The crown was a symbolic instrument, but it was an important one all the same, so important that Kelsea had never heard of anyone becoming a monarch without some overdone piece of jewelry placed on his head. Her uncle probably
had
made an extraordinary effort to find the crown, so that he could wear it himself. If he hadn't found the thing, it was unlikely to be found.

The priest appeared to be near tears. He looked back and forth between Kelsea and the Regent, wringing his hands. “Well, it's difficult, Your Highness. I . . . I don't see how I can perform the ceremony without a crown.”

The crowd was beginning to shift restlessly. Kelsea heard the strange susurration of innumerable voices murmuring in an enormous room. On impulse, she craned her neck over the priest and scanned the throng. The woman she was seeking wasn't difficult to find; her spiraled hair towered at least a foot over those around her. “Lazarus. The woman with the hideous hair. I want her tiara.”

Mace peered into the crowd, his face bewildered. “What's a tiara?”

“The silver thing in her hair. Didn't you ever read fairy tales?”

Mace snapped his fingers. “Coryn. Tell Lady Andrews the Crown will reimburse her.”

Coryn went swiftly down the steps, and Kelsea turned back to the priest. “Will that do, Father, until the true crown can be found?”

Father Tyler nodded, his Adam's apple working nervously. It occurred to Kelsea that for all the priests knew, she could have been raised to the Church's teachings, could even be truly devout. As the priest took another cautious step forward, Kelsea broadened her smile in slow degrees until it felt genuine. “We're honored by your presence, Father.”

“The honor is mine, Lady,” the priest replied, but Kelsea sensed a broad vein of anxiety beneath his placid expression. Did he fear the wrath of his superiors? Carlin's warnings about the power of the Arvath resurfaced in Kelsea's mind, and she watched the pale man with distrust.

“How dare you!” a woman shouted, the words followed by the clear crack of a slap. Kelsea peered between Elston and Dyer and saw that there was quite a tussle going on; as the crowd shifted, she caught a quick glimpse of Coryn, his hands buried in a nest of thick, dark hair. Then he disappeared again.

Elston was shaking, and when Kelsea looked up, she found him red with bottled-up laughter. He wasn't the only one; all around her, Kelsea heard quiet snickers. Mhurn, standing just behind her on the left, was openly giggling, and it had brought some color to his pallid face. Even Mace had clamped his jaw shut tight, though his lips continued to twitch. Kelsea had never seen Mace laugh, but after a moment, his mouth relaxed and he resumed scanning the gallery.

Coryn finally emerged from the crowd, tiara in hand. He looked like he'd been through a raspberry thicket; one side of his face bore a long, ugly scratch, the other was bright red, and his shirtsleeve was torn. Behind him, Kelsea could see the noblewoman progressing with sorry dignity toward the door, her elaborate hairstyle in tatters.

“Well, you've lost Lady Andrews,” Pen murmured.

“I didn't need her,” Kelsea replied, her temples throbbing with sudden anger. “I don't need anyone with hair like that.”

Coryn handed the tiara to the priest and took his place at the front of Kelsea's guard.

“Let's do this as fast as possible, Father,” Kelsea announced. “I'd hate to endanger your life any further.”

The words had the desired effect; Father Tyler paled and darted a wary glance over his shoulder. Kelsea felt a moment's pity, wondering how often he was allowed to leave the Arvath. Carlin had told her that some priests, particularly those who joined young, lived their entire lives in the white tower, only leaving in a box.

The company of guards shifted now, allowing Kelsea to kneel at the foot of the dais, facing the throne. The stone floor was cold and jagged, digging into her kneecaps, and she wondered how long she would have to kneel. Her guard closed in around her, half of them facing the Regent and his guards, half directing their attention into the crowd. Father Tyler moved as close as Coryn would allow him, some five feet away.

Mhurn stood just behind her right shoulder, Mace beside him. When Kelsea twisted around to peer up at Mace, she saw that he had his sword raised in one hand, his mace in the other. The ball of the mace was still crusted with dried blood. Mace's expression was one of dangerous serenity: a man so casual and comfortable with death that he begged it to come forward and make its presence known. But the rest of the guards were so on edge that half of them drew their swords when a woman in the crowd sneezed.

Kelsea's sapphire began to burn against her skin, and she fought the urge to look down at her chest. The jewel had flared into an inferno on the Keep Lawn, but when Kelsea inspected her skin this morning, there hadn't even been the faintest hint of a mark. She had many questions about the sapphire, but the strength it provided seemed more important than her questions, more important than wonder. If she looked down, she knew she would see the jewel gleaming against her chest, a bright, healthy blue of warning. Something was going to happen here.

Father Tyler began to mutter in tones so low that Kelsea didn't think the audience could hear him. He appeared to be settling in for some kind of soliloquy on the grace of God and His relationship to the monarchy. Kelsea ceased to pay attention. She peeked over her shoulder, but no one was moving in the crowd. Near the back, almost hidden beside one of the pillars, she glimpsed Arlen Thorne's unmistakably skeletal body in its tight blue uniform. He looked like a praying mantis leaning against the wall. A businessman, by Mace's account, but that made him even more dangerous. When Thorne noticed Kelsea watching him, he turned away.

The priest produced an aged Bible from the folds of his robe and began to read something about the ascendancy of King David. Kelsea clamped her jaws shut over a yawn. She had read the Bible from cover to cover; it had some good stories, and King David was one of the most compelling. But stories were only stories. Still, Kelsea couldn't help but admire the ancient Bible in the priest's hands, its pages as delicate as the priest himself.

Father Tyler came within two feet of Kelsea, one hand clutching the crown. She felt her guard edge up on their toes, heard the dry rasp of a sword being drawn to her right. The priest looked over her shoulder and flinched—the expression on Mace's face must be dreadful—then lost his place in his book and looked down for a moment, fumbling.

Several things happened all at once. A man shouted behind her, and Kelsea felt a knifing pain in her left shoulder. Mace shoved her flat to the floor and crouched above her, shielding her with his body. A woman screamed in the audience, an entire world away.

Swords clashed all around them. Kelsea scrabbled beneath the cover of Mace's frame, trying to get her knife from her boot. Exploring with her free hand, she found a knife handle protruding just above her shoulder blade. When her fingers brushed it, a bolt of pain arrowed all the way down to her toes.

Stabbed
, she thought, dazed.
Mace didn't cover my back after all.

“Galen! The gallery! The gallery!” Mace roared. “Get up there and clear it out!” Then he was jerked away from Kelsea. She scrambled to her feet, knife in hand. All around her, men were fighting, three of them attempting to skewer Mace with long swords. Her uncle's men, the deep blue uniforms swirling around them as they fought.

A breath of air came from behind her and Kelsea whirled to find a sword coming for her neck. She ducked, slid under her attacker's arm, and shoved her knife upward between his ribs. Warm wetness splattered her face, and she closed her eyes, blinded by red. The dead man fell on top of her, crushing her to the ground with a pure, bright explosion of pain as the knife in her shoulder hit the floor. Kelsea's teeth clenched on a scream, but she shoved the man off, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. She ignored the blood trickling down her face, pulled her knife from her attacker's rib cage, and hauled herself to her feet. Her vision was clouded by red gauze that seemed to cover everything. Someone grabbed her uninjured shoulder and she sliced savagely at the hand.

“Me, Lady, me!”

“Lazarus,” she panted.

“Back to back.” Mace pushed her behind him, and Kelsea planted herself against his back, hunching forward to protect her shoulder as she faced the audience. To her surprise, none of the nobles appeared to have fled; they remained in orderly rows behind the pillars at the foot of the steps, and Kelsea wanted to shout at them. Why didn't they help? But many, the men in particular, weren't watching Kelsea. They were watching the fighting behind her, their eyes darting avidly between combatants.

Sport
, Kelsea realized, sickened. She held her knife up toward the crowd in as threatening a gesture as she could muster, longing for a sword, though she had no idea how to use one. The blade dripped crimson, slippery in her blood-coated hand. She remembered when Barty had given her that knife, on her tenth birthday, in a gold-painted box with a small silver key. The box must still be in her saddlebags, somewhere upstairs. She had finally used her knife on a man, and she wished she could tell Barty. A wave of darkness crashed across her vision.

Pen had stationed himself in front of her now, a sword in each hand. When one of the Regent's guards broke forward, trying to push through, Pen sidestepped him neatly and chopped off his arm at the biceps, burying a sword in his rib cage. The man screamed, a high, thin shrieking that seemed to go on and on as his severed arm landed several feet away on the flagstones. He dropped to the ground and Pen resumed his waiting posture, unfazed by the blood dripping down his sword arm. Mhurn joined him a moment later, his blond hair streaked with crimson and his face whiter than ever now, as if he were on the edge of fainting.

Two men appeared on her periphery and Kelsea swung that way, trying to tighten her grip on the slippery knife. But it was only Elston and Kibb, planting themselves on either side of her, their swords dripping blood. Kibb had taken a wound to the hand, a deep gash that looked like an animal bite, but otherwise they appeared unharmed. The clang of swords came more slowly now, the fighting dying down. When Kelsea looked out into the crowd, she saw that Arlen Thorne had disappeared. The priest, Father Tyler, was crouched against the nearest of the massive pillars, hugging his Bible to his chest, staring at a blue-clad corpse that lay bleeding at the foot of the dais. The priest looked as though he might faint, and in spite of her distrust, Kelsea felt a brief flash of pity for him. He didn't seem the sort who'd ever been strong, even as a young man, and he wasn't young.

He needs to recover
, another, colder voice snapped in her mind.
Quickly.
Kelsea, brought back to herself by the steel in that voice, nodded in agreement. It was extraordinary, how a coronation could mean so little and yet so much. Her legs gave way and she stumbled against Mace, hissing as pain dug into her back like a burrowing insect.

Women scream when they're hurt
, Barty's voice echoed in her head.
Men scream when they're dying.

I'm not going to scream, either way.

“Lazarus, you have to hold me up.”

Mace got an arm beneath hers and firmed it up, giving her something to lean on. “We need to get that knife out, Lady.”

“Not yet.”

“You're losing blood.”

“I'll lose more when the knife is pulled. First this.”

Mace inspected the wound in a cursory way. The color drained from his face.

“What?”

“Nothing, Lady.”

“What?”

“It's a grave wound. Sooner or later you're going to pass out.”