The Queen of the Tearling (2 page)

Kelsea picked up her night pack and shrugged it onto her shoulders, looking out the window to the tenth horse. “There's so much I don't know.”

“You know what you need to,” Barty replied. “Do you have your knife?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it about you always. And be careful what you eat and where it comes from.”

Kelsea put her arms around him. Despite Barty's girth, his body was shaking with fatigue, and Kelsea realized suddenly how tired he'd become, how completely her education had taxed energy that Barty should have conserved for growing old. His thick arms tightened about her for a moment, and then he pulled away, his blue eyes fierce. “You've never killed anyone, Kel, and that's well and good, but from this day onward, you're hunted, understand? You have to behave so.”

Kelsea expected Carlin to contradict Barty, Carlin who always said that force was for fools. But Carlin nodded in agreement. “I've raised you to be a thinking queen, Kelsea, and so you will be. But you've entered a time when survival must trump all else. These men will have an honest charge to see that you get back to the Keep safely. After that, Barty's lessons may help you more than mine.”

She left her post by the window and placed a gentle hand on Kelsea's back, making her jump. Carlin rarely touched anyone. The most she seemed capable of was a pat on the back, and those occasions were like rain in the desert. “But don't allow reliance on weapons to impair your mind, Kelsea. Your wits have always been sound; see that you don't lose them along the way. It's easy to do so when you pick up a sword.”

A mailed fist thudded against the front door.

“Your Highness?” Carroll called. “Daylight fails.”

Barty and Carlin stepped back, and Barty picked up the last piece of Kelsea's baggage. They both looked terribly old. Kelsea didn't want to leave them here, these two people who'd raised her and taught her everything she knew. The irrational side of her mind briefly considered dropping her luggage and simply bolting out the back door, a bright and tempting fantasy that lasted two seconds before it faded.

“When will it be safe to send you a message?” she asked. “When can you come out of hiding?”

Barty and Carlin looked at each other, a quick glance that struck Kelsea as furtive. It was Barty who finally replied. “Not for a while, Kel. You see—”

“You will have other things to worry about,” Carlin broke in sharply. “Think about your people, about fixing this kingdom. It may be a long while before you see us again.”

“Carlin—”

“It's time to go.”

The soldiers had remounted their horses; as Kelsea emerged from the cottage, they stared down at her, one or two of them with outright contempt. The soldier with the mace, Lazarus, wasn't looking at her at all but staring off into the distance. Kelsea began to load her baggage onto the horse, a roan mare that seemed somewhat gentler than Barty's stallion.

“I assume you can ride, Your Highness?” asked the soldier holding her reins. He made the word
highness
sound like an infection, and Kelsea snatched the reins from him. “Yes, I ride.”

She switched the reins from hand to hand as she put on her green winter cloak and buttoned it closed, then mounted her horse and looked down at Barty, trying to overcome an awful premonition of finality. He was grown old before his time, but there was no reason he shouldn't live for a number of years yet. And premonitions often came to nothing. According to Barty, the Mort Queen's own seer had predicted that Kelsea wouldn't reach her nineteenth birthday, and yet here she was.

She gave Barty what she hoped was a brave smile. “I'll send for you soon.”

He nodded, his own smile bright and forced. Carlin had turned so white that Kelsea thought she might faint dead away, but instead she stepped forward and reached out a hand. This gesture was so unexpected that Kelsea stared at the hand for a moment before she realized that she was supposed to take it. In all her years in the cottage, Carlin had never held her hand.

“In time, you'll see,” Carlin told her, clenching her hand tightly. “You'll see why all of this was necessary. Beware the past, Kelsea. Be a steward.”

Even now, Carlin wouldn't speak plainly. Kelsea had always known that she wasn't the child Carlin would have chosen to train, that she'd disappointed Carlin with her ungovernable temper, her lax commitment to the enormous responsibility lying on her shoulders. Kelsea tugged her hand away, then glanced at Barty and felt her irritation vanish. He was crying openly now, tracks of tears glinting on his face. Kelsea felt her own eyes wanting to water again, but she took the reins and turned the horse toward Carroll. “We can go now, Captain.”

“At your command, Lady.”

He shook the reins and started down the path. “All of you, in kite, square around the Queen,” he called back over his shoulder. “We ride until sunset.”

Queen
. There was the word again. Kelsea tried to think of herself as a queen and simply couldn't. She set her pace to match the guards', resolutely not looking back. She turned around only once, just before they rounded the bend, and found Barty and Carlin still standing in the cottage doorway, watching her go, like an old woodsman couple in some tale long forgotten. Then the trees hid them from view.

Kelsea's mare was apparently a sturdy one, for she took the uneven terrain surefootedly. Barty's stallion had always had problems in the woods; Barty said that his horse was an aristocrat, that anything less than an open straightaway was beneath him. But even on the stallion, Kelsea had never ventured more than a few miles from the cottage. Those were Carlin's orders. Whenever Kelsea spoke longingly of the things she knew were out there in the wider world, Carlin would impress upon her the necessity of secrecy, the importance of the queenship she would inherit. Carlin had no patience with Kelsea's fear of failure. Carlin didn't want to hear about doubts. Kelsea's job was to learn, to be content without other children, other people, without the wider world.

Once, when she was thirteen, Kelsea had ridden Barty's stallion into the woods as usual and gotten lost, finding herself in unfamiliar forest. She didn't know the trees or the two streams she'd passed. She'd ended up riding in circles, and was about to give up and cry when she looked toward the horizon and saw smoke from a chimney, some hundred feet away.

Moving closer, she found a cottage, poorer than Barty's and Carlin's, made of wood instead of stone. In front of the cottage had been two little boys, a few years younger than Kelsea, playing a make-believe game of swords, and she had watched them for a very long time, sensing something she'd never considered before: an entirely different upbringing from her own. Until that moment, she had somehow thought that all children had the same life. The boys' clothes were ragged, but they both wore comfortable-looking shirts with short sleeves that ended at the bicep. Kelsea could only wear high-necked shirts with tight, long sleeves, so that no chance passersby would ever get a look at her arm or the necklace she wasn't allowed to remove. She listened to the two boys' chatter and found that they could barely speak proper Tear; no one had sat them down every morning and drilled them on grammar. It was the middle of the afternoon, but they weren't in school.

“You's Mort, Emmett. I's Tear!” the older boy proclaimed proudly.

“I's not Mort! Mort's short!” the littler one shouted. “Mum said you supposed to make me Tear sometime!”

“Fine. You's Tear, but I's using magic!”

After watching the two boys for a while, Kelsea marked the real difference, the one that commanded her attention: these children had each other. She was only fifty yards away, but the companionship between the two boys made her feel as distant as the moon. The distance was only compounded when their mother, a round woman with none of Carlin's stately grace, came outside to gather them up for dinner.

“Ew! Martin! Come wash up!”

“No!” the little one replied. “We ain't done.”

Picking up a stick from the bundle on the ground, the mother jumped into the middle of their game, battling them both while the boys giggled and shrieked. Finally, the mother pulled each child up and then held them both close to her body as they walked inside together, a continuous walking hug. The dusk was deepening, and although Kelsea knew she should try to find her way home, she couldn't tear herself away from the scene. Carlin didn't show affection, not even to Barty, and the best Kelsea could hope to earn was a smile. She was the heir to the Tear throne, yes, and Carlin had told her many times what a great and important honor that was. But on the long ride home, Kelsea couldn't shake the feeling that these two children had more than she did.

When she finally found her way home, she had missed dinner. Barty and Carlin were both worried; Barty had yelled a bit, but behind the yelling Kelsea could see relief in his face, and he'd given her a hug before sending her up to her room. Carlin had merely stared at Kelsea before informing her that her library privileges were rescinded for the week and that night Kelsea had lain in bed, frozen in the revelation that she had been utterly, monstrously cheated. Before that day, Kelsea had thought of Carlin as her foster mother, if not the real thing. But now she understood that she had no mother at all, only a cold old woman who demanded, then withheld.

Two days later Kelsea broke Carlin's boundary again, on purpose this time, intending to find the cottage in the woods again. But halfway there, she gave up and turned around. Disobedience wasn't satisfying, it was terrifying; she seemed to feel Carlin's eyes on the back of her neck. Kelsea had never broken the boundary line again, so there was no wider world. All of her experience came from the woods around the cottage, and she knew every inch of them by the time she was ten. Now, as the troop of guards moved into distant woods with Kelsea in their center, she smiled secretly and turned her attention to this country that she had never seen.

They were riding south through the deepest heart of the Reddick Forest, which covered hundreds of square miles on the northwestern part of the country. Tearling oak was everywhere, some of the trees fifty or sixty feet tall, forming a canopy of green that overspread their heads. There was some low underbrush too, unfamiliar to Kelsea. The branches looked like creeproot, which had antihistamine properties and was good for making poultices. But these leaves were longer, green and curling, with a reddish tinge that warned of poison oak. Kelsea tried to avoid putting her mare though the foliage, but in some places it couldn't be helped; the thicket was deepening as the land sloped downhill. They were now far from the path, but as they rode over a crackling golden carpet of discarded oak leaves, Kelsea felt as though the entire world must be able to hear their passage.

The guards ranged themselves around her in a diamond, remaining equidistant even with the changes of speed demanded by the shifting terrain. Lazarus, the guard with the mace, was somewhere behind her, out of sight. On her right was the distrustful guard with the red beard; Kelsea watched him with covert interest as they rode. Red hair was a recessive gene, and in the three centuries since the Crossing, it had bred slowly and steadily out of the population. Carlin had told Kelsea that some women, and even some men, liked to dye their hair red, since the rare commodity was always valuable. But after about an hour of sneaking looks at the guard, Kelsea became certain that she was looking at a true head of red hair. No dye was that good. The man wore a small gold crucifix that bounced and glimmered as he rode, and this too gave Kelsea pause. The crucifix was the symbol of God's Church, and Carlin had told her many times that the Church and its priests weren't to be trusted.

Behind the redhead was a blond man, so extraordinarily good-looking that Kelsea was forced to sneak several looks at him, even though he was far too old for her, well over forty. He had a face like those of the painted angels in Carlin's books of pre-Crossing art. But he also looked tired, his eyes ringed with hollows that suggested he hadn't slept in some time. Somehow, these touches of exhaustion only made him better-looking. He turned and caught her staring and Kelsea snapped her head forward, blood flaming in her cheeks.

On her left was a tall guard with dark hair and enormous shoulders. He looked like the sort of man you would threaten someone with. Ahead of him was a much shorter man, almost slight, with light brown hair. Kelsea watched this guard closely, for he looked nearer to her age, perhaps not even thirty yet. She tried to listen for his name, but whenever the two guards spoke, it was in low tones that Kelsea was clearly not meant to hear.

Carroll, the leader, rode at the head of the diamond. All Kelsea could see of him was his grey cloak. Occasionally he would bark out an order, and the entire company would make an incremental change in direction. He rode confidently, not seeking anyone's guidance, and Kelsea trusted him to get her where she was to go. This ability to command was probably a necessary quality in a guard captain; Carroll was a man she would need if she was to survive. But how could she win the loyalty of any of these men? They probably thought her weak. Perhaps they thought all women so.

A hawk screamed somewhere above them, and Kelsea pulled her hood down over her forehead. Hawks were beautiful creatures, and good food as well, but Barty had told her that in Mortmesne, and even on the Tear border, hawks were trained as weapons of assassination. He'd mentioned it in passing, a bit of trivia, but it was something Kelsea had never forgotten.

“South, lads!” Carroll shouted, and the company angled again. The sun was sinking rapidly below the horizon, the wind icy with oncoming night. Kelsea hoped they would stop soon, but she would freeze in her saddle before she complained. Loyalty began with respect.

“No ruler has ever held power for long without the respect of the governed,” Carlin had told her countless times. “Rulers who attempt to control an unwilling populace govern nothing, and often find their heads atop a pike to boot.”