The Queen of the Tearling (20 page)

Food and paper littered the common room of the women's quarters. The cupboards had been left open, the drawers yanked from their chests, and clothing was strewn everywhere. How long had Coryn been at work in here? He must have come in early this morning, perhaps just after Thomas had gone to bed.

Pine let him in
, Thomas realized.
Pine sold me out.

Only Anne was in the women's quarters. She'd apparently gotten up while he was talking to Coryn, and now she was nearly dressed, her frizzy red curls pinned neatly on top of her head.

“Where are the others?” he asked.

Anne shrugged, reaching around behind herself and lacing up her own dress with quick, clever fingers. Thomas felt cheated: why had he been paying all those professional dressers? “What does that mean?”

“It means I haven't seen any of them.” Anne produced a trunk and began to pack.

“What are you doing?”

“Packing. But someone moved my jewelry.”

“It's gone,” Thomas replied slowly. “The Queen took it.” He sat down on the nearest sofa, staring at her. “What are you doing? None of you have anywhere else to go.”

“Of course we do.” She turned, and Thomas saw a hint of the same contempt in her eyes that he'd seen in Coryn's. A memory rippled in his mind, but he forced it away; he sensed that it was something from childhood, and very few things from childhood had been good.

“Where will you go?”

“To Lord Perkins.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? He made me an offer, months ago.”

The betrayal! Thomas played poker with Lord Perkins, invited him to dinner once a month. The man was old enough to be Anne's father.

“What sort of offer?”

“That's between me and him.”

“Is that where the rest of them went?”

“Not to Perkins.” A note of pride entered Anne's voice. “He only offered for me.”

“This is only temporary. A few months, and I'll be back on the throne. Then you can all come back.”

Anne stared at him as though he were a roach in the kitchen. Memory was thrashing its way to the surface now. Thomas fought it, but suddenly it was there: Queen Arla had looked at him in exactly the same way. Thomas and Elyssa had been schooled together, and learning had always been hard for both of them, but Elyssa had understood more, so she had continued to work with the governess while Thomas simply stopped after his twelfth year. For a while, Mum had tried to talk to him about politics, the state of the kingdom, dealings with Mortmesne. But Thomas had never been able to grasp the things that he was supposed to intuitively understand, and that look in Mum's eyes had grown stronger and stronger. Eventually the conversations stopped, and Thomas saw very little of Mum after that. He was allowed to do what he had always wanted to do in the first place: sleep all afternoon and go hellraising around the Gut at night. It had been years since anyone had dared to look at him with open contempt, but now here he was again, feeling just as small as he'd felt when he was young.

“You really don't understand, do you?” Anne asked. “She's set us free, Thomas. Maybe you'll be back on the throne, maybe not; I wouldn't know about that. But none of us will be back.”

“You weren't slaves! You had the best of everything! I treated you like noblewomen. You never had to work.”

Anne's eyebrows lifted higher, her face darkening, and now her voice nearly thundered. “Never had to work? Pine wakes me up at three in the morning and tells me you're ready for me. I go to your chamber and get to lick Petra's cunt for your pleasure.”

“I paid you,” the Regent whispered.

“You paid my
parents
. You paid my parents a tidy sum when I was fourteen years old and too young to know anything about anything.”

“I paid for your food, your clothing. Good clothing! And I gave you jewelry!”

Now she looked straight through him. He remembered this too; this was how Queen Arla the Just had looked at him for the last ten years of her life, and nothing he could say or do had ever caused her to see him again. He had turned invisible.

“You should leave the Tearling,” Anne remarked. “It's not safe for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Mace is her Captain of Guard, and you tried to have her killed. If I were you, I would leave the country.”

“This is
all temporary
.” Why could no one see this but him? The girl had already made enemies of both Thorne and Mortmesne. Thomas hated government, but even he'd read the Mort Treaty. The default clause would trigger in seven days. If the shipment failed to arrive in Demesne . . . he couldn't even imagine it. No one had ever seen the Red Queen in a rage, but in her silences one could feel the world beginning to end. A picture suddenly popped into Thomas's mind, eerie in its realism: the Keep, surrounded by Mort hawks wheeling and plunging around its many turrets, hunting, always hunting. “Her head will be hanging on the walls of Demesne by the end of the month.”

Anne shrugged. “If you say so.”

She crossed the room and took another pile of dresses from the chest of drawers, then picked up a hairbrush from the floor, commonplace movements that dismissed Thomas. He saw the meaning of the open chests of drawers: they'd all abandoned him and taken the clothes!

Perhaps Anne was right. He could conceivably go to Mortmesne and beg the Red Queen for clemency. But she had tired of him long ago. She might just as easily decide to hand him over to an executioner. And how could he leave the Keep, even to make the journey? The Fetch was out there, the Fetch who seemed to know everything and anticipate everything. The stone bulwark was scant protection against him, for the Fetch could enter the Keep like a ghost, but it was better than nothing, better than being out in the open. If Thomas tried to make for the Mort border, the Fetch would find out, Thomas knew that as well as he knew his own name, and no matter how many guards he took with him, one night he would open his eyes and see that face above him, that dreadful mask.

If he even had any guards left. More than half of his force had been slaughtered in the attempt on the girl. No one had come to arrest Thomas yet, which had seemed an extraordinary stroke of good fortune; perhaps they thought his guards had hatched the plot on their own. But now, remembering the utter lack of concern in Coryn's voice, Thomas realized that maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe they knew and just didn't care.

Anne snapped the clasps on her trunk and went to check herself in the mirror. To Thomas, she looked somewhat bare without any jewelry, but she seemed pleased enough; after tucking one wild lock of hair back behind her ear, she smiled, grabbed hold of the trunk, and turned to him. Her eyes seemed to burn right through him, and Thomas wondered why he'd never noticed them before; they were a warm, brilliant blue.

“I never hit you,” he reminded her. “Not even one time.”

Anne smiled, a friendly grin that failed to conceal something unpleasant lurking at the corners of her mouth. “Clothing, jewelry, food, and gold, and you think you paid, Thomas. You didn't, not even close. But I think you will.”

 

F
ather Tyler finished the last bit of his chicken, then set his fork down with an unsteady hand. He was frightened. The summons had come just as he was sitting down to his lunch, a simple bit of fowl that had been boiled to blandness. Tyler had never had much taste for food anyway, but in the past two days he'd eaten as an act of utter mechanics, tasting only dust.

At first he was elated. He'd been a bit player in one of the great events of his time. There hadn't been many great events in Tyler's life. He'd grown up a farmer's son in the Almont Plain, one of seven children, and when he was eight years old, his father had given him to the local priest in place of tithing. Tyler never resented his father's decision, not even then; he had been one child among too many, and there was never enough to eat.

The parish priest, Father Alan, was a good man. He needed an assistant, for he suffered from severe gout. He taught Tyler how to read and gave him his first Bible. By the time Tyler was thirteen, he was helping Father Alan write his sermons. The parish congregation was not large, perhaps thirty families, but the Father couldn't get to them all. As his gout worsened, Tyler began to make the Father's rounds, visiting families and hearing their troubles. When those too old or sick to reach the church wanted to confess, Tyler took their confessions, even though he hadn't been ordained yet. He supposed it was technically a sin, but he also didn't think God would mind, particularly not for those who were dying.

When Father Alan was summoned to New London for promotion, he took Tyler with him, and Tyler finished his training in the Arvath and became ordained at the age of seventeen. He might have had his own parish, but his supervisors had already realized that Tyler was ill suited to minister to the public. He liked research more than people, liked to work with paper and ink, and so he became one of the Arvath's thirty bookkeepers, recording tithes and tributes from the surrounding parishes. It was relaxing work; once in a while a cardinal would attempt to pad his own lifestyle by hiding his parishes' income, and there would be some excitement for a month or so, but most of the time bookkeeping was a quiet job, leaving plenty of time to think and read.

Tyler stared at his books, spread over ten shelves of good Tearling oak that had cost most of one year's stipend. The first five books had come to him from a parishioner, a woman who'd died and left them to the Church with a small bequest. Cardinal Carlyle had taken the bequest and made it disappear, but he'd had no use for the books, so he dumped them on young Father Tyler's desk, saying, “You're her priest. Figure it out.”

Tyler had been twenty-three. He'd read the Bible through many times, but secular books were a novelty, so he opened one and began reading, idly at first, then turning one page after another with the amazed, fortunate feeling of a man who finds money on the ground. He had become an academic that day, though he wouldn't know it for many years.

He could no longer delay the inevitable. Tyler left his small room and shuffled down the hallway. He had suffered from arthritis in his left hip for some seven or eight years now, but his slow gait was less the effect of pain than of reluctance. He was a good bookkeeper, and life in the Arvath had been a comfortable, inexorable march of time . . . until four days ago, when everything changed.

He'd conducted the coronation in a state of near terror, wondering what perverse twist of fate had guided the Mace to his door. Tyler was a devout priest, an ascetic, a believer in the great work of God that had brought humanity through the Crossing. But he was no performer. He'd stopped giving sermons decades before, and each year he retreated further into the world of books, of the past. He would have been the Holy Father's last choice to perform the crowning, but the Mace had knocked on his door and Tyler had gone.

I am part of God's great work
. The thought darted in from nowhere and disappeared with the same blinding speed. He knew the history of the Tearling monarchs in detail. The great socialist vision of William Tear had eroded after the Landing, dying in increments until it ended in bloody disaster with the assassination of Jonathan Tear. The Raleigh line had taken over the throne, but the Raleighs were not the Tears, never had been. By now they had become as fatuous and sickened as any royal line of pre-Crossing Europe. Too much intermarriage and too little education. Too little understanding of humanity's tendency to repeat its own mistakes, over and over again. But Tyler knew that history was everything. The future was only the disasters of the past, waiting to happen anew.

At the time of the crowning, he hadn't yet heard the story of what had happened on the Keep Lawn; the price for his seclusion and study was a woeful ignorance of current events. But in the days since, his brother priests had refused to leave him alone. They knocked on his door constantly, ostensibly for clarification of some point of theology or history, but none would leave without hearing some version of the Queen's crowning. In return, they told Tyler of the freeing of the allotted, and the burning of the cages.

This morning Father Wyde had come in, fresh from handing out bread to the beggars who lined the steps of the Arvath. According to Wyde, the beggars were calling her the True Queen. Tyler knew the term: it was a female variant on the pre-Crossing Arthurian legend, the Queen who would save the land from terrible peril and usher in a golden age. The True Queen was a fairy tale, a balm for childless mothers. Yet Tyler's heart had leaped at Wyde's words, and he'd been forced to look out the window to conceal eyes suddenly bright with tears.

I am part of God's great work.

He didn't know what to say to the Holy Father. The Queen had refused to swear allegiance to God's Church, and even Tyler knew the importance of that vow. The Regent, despite a complete lack of personal morality, had remained firmly under the Holy Father's control, donating vast sums of money to the Church and allowing construction of a private chapel inside the Keep. Should an itinerant friar come along, preaching the ancient beliefs of Luther to an ever more enthusiastic audience, the friar would disappear and never be heard from again. No one spoke of these things, but Tyler was a perceptive man, and he knew the sickness of his church. Over the years he had chosen seclusion, loving God with his whole heart, intending to die quietly someday in the small room, surrounded by his books. But now he'd been inexplicably drawn into the great events of the world.

Tyler's heart thumped in the narrow cage of his chest as he trudged up the enormous marble staircase toward the Holy Father's audience room. He was getting old, yes, but he was also frightened. His private conversation with the Holy Father had been limited to a few words of congratulation upon Tyler's ordination. How long ago had that been? Some fifty years gone. The Holy Father had aged, just as Tyler had, and was now nearing his hundredth year. Even in the Tearling, where the wealthy lived long, the Holy Father's life span was impressive. But illness plagued him: pneumonia, fevers, and some sort of digestive ailment that reportedly prohibited him from eating meat. However, his mind had remained sharp as his body dwindled, and he'd managed the Regent so adroitly that the Arvath now had a steeple of pure gold, a luxury unheard of since the pre-Crossing. Even the Cadarese, with their enormous supply of underground riches, didn't confer so much wealth upon their temples.