The Queen of the Tearling (23 page)

“How do I know you can bring her back?”

“I can,” Thorne replied. “And I will.”

Another spasm punched Javel in the stomach, and he doubled over, trying to compress his midsection into the smallest ball possible. It didn't stop the pain, didn't even come close. Eventually, little by little, the spasm lessened, the fist in his belly unclenching, and when Javel looked up, he found Thorne watching him with a clinical detachment. “You should trust me, Javel. I don't break my word.”

Javel considered this statement, one hand on his stomach in preparation for the next assault. The city was full of information about Thorne, some true and some apocryphal. Javel had heard plenty of stories that could curdle the blood, but he had never heard that Thorne had broken his word.

Beside Thorne, the albino began to breathe in quick, shallow pants, almost as though she were approaching hyperventilation. Her eyes were closed as though in ecstasy. She reached up and began to tweak her own nipple, lightly and tenderly, through the thin fabric of her pink shirt.

“Calm yourself, Bren,” Thorne murmured. “Our business here is almost concluded.”

The woman subsided, placing her hand back in her lap. Javel's flesh crawled. “What do you want?”

Thorne nodded in approval. “I need to get something inside the Keep. I want a man on the Keep Gate to conveniently fail to ask difficult questions.”

“When?”

“When I say.”

Javel stared at Thorne, understanding dawning in his mind. “You're going to kill the Queen.”

Thorne merely looked at Javel, that cold gaze never wavering. Javel thought of the vision he had seen on the Keep Lawn: the tall woman, older and hardened, with the crown on her head. The Queen
had
been crowned, Javel knew, two days ago; Vil, who always got information first, told them that the Regent had tried to ambush her during the coronation itself, but had failed. When Javel rode through the streets at dusk, he'd passed through the usual cacophony of vendors closing up shop, yelling and gossiping and trading news, and heard them call her the True Queen. Javel didn't know the phrase, but there was no mistaking the sentiment: it was the name for the tall, grave woman he'd seen on the Keep Lawn, the one who didn't exist yet.

But she could
, Javel thought.
Someday she could.
And although he hadn't been to church, hadn't even believed in God since the day Allie had vanished into Mortmesne, he suddenly felt damnation hanging over his head, damnation and history like two hands waiting to grab him and squeeze. The men who'd assassinated Jonathan the Good had never been caught, but theirs were the blackest pages in the history of the Tearling. Whoever they were, Javel had no doubt that they had been damned for their crimes. But he couldn't articulate any of these fears to Thorne. He could only say, “She's the Queen. You can't kill the Queen.”

“There's no proof that she's the actual Queen, Javel. She's only a girl with a burn scar and a necklace.”

But Thorne's eyes shifted away, and in a sudden flash of intuition, Javel knew: Thorne had seen that tall, regal woman on the Keep Lawn too. He'd seen her, and the sight had scared him so badly that he'd conceived this course. Thorne had never seemed so much like a spider as he did at that moment; he'd crept out from a corner to repair his web, and soon he would scuttle back into his dark crack to scheme, to wait with an endless, malevolent patience for some helpless thing caught and thrashing.

Javel looked around the pub, seeing it with fresh eyes: the dirt that had grimed into the floorboards; the cheap tallow that dripped from the torches to harden on the walls; the whore who smiled desperately at every man who walked in. Most of all, the smell of beer and whiskey mingled, a mist so pervasive that it might as well precipitate out of the air. Javel loved that smell, and hated it, and he knew somehow that the love/hate tangle in his mind was the reason Thorne had chosen him. Javel was weak, and his weakness probably smelled just as good to Thorne as whiskey did to Javel.

This is the dark crack
, Javel finally realized.
This right here.

He doubled over again; some small animal had awakened inside his stomach, shredding pink meat with jagged claws and teeth like needles. He was walking a tightrope; the distance was short, but below him lay infinite darkness. And what would he see on the way down?

“What if your plan fails?” he gasped. “What guarantee do I have?”

“You have no guarantees,” Thorne replied. “But you needn't worry. Only a fool keeps all of his eggs in one basket. I have many baskets. If one idea fails, we move to another, and eventually we succeed.”

Thorne reached into his shirt and pulled out a vial of amber-colored liquid. He offered it to Javel, who grabbed for it, only to close his fingers on empty air.

“I'd estimate you have only a minute, maybe two, before this won't help you. So, Gate Guard, I have only one question: can you do the math?”

I can't win
, Javel thought, clutching his stomach. There was a dark, sneaking comfort in the knowledge. Because once you couldn't win, it wasn't your fault, no matter what course you chose.

 

T
he shipment was late.

The Queen of Mortmesne had not been able to forget this fact, not today, not yesterday, not the day before. She tried to concentrate as her Auctioneer gave her the figures from last month's auction. February had been good; the crown had cleared well over fifty thousand marks. Typically, when the shipment came in, the Queen cherry-picked the best merchandise, either for her own use or to give as gifts. But most of the slaves went at auction, to Mort nobles or wealthy entrepreneurs who would resell the slaves for higher prices in the northern cities and outlying towns. The auction always produced a good profit, but February's high sales were not enough to distract the Queen from the nagging sense of disruption, the feeling that a problem was developing just out of her reach. The girl had turned nineteen, she had not been found, and now the shipment was late. What did that mean?

Without a doubt, the Tear Regent had botched things. He had allowed Elyssa to smuggle the girl into exile in the first place (although even the Queen herself hadn't foreseen that particular move . . . who would have thought Elyssa had even an ounce of guile?). But after eighteen years, the girl should have been found. At the Queen's urging, the Regent had finally hired the Caden several months ago, but she'd known somehow that it was already too late.

“That's all, Majesty.” Broussard, her Auctioneer, tucked his papers away into his case.

“Good.”

Broussard remained standing below, his case clutched in both hands.

“Yes?”

“Any word on the new shipment, Majesty?”

Even her own people wouldn't allow her to forget.

“When I know, you'll know, Broussard. Go prepare for your auction. And remember to weed out the vermin this time.”

Broussard colored, his jaw clenching beneath his beard. He was good at his job, with an instinctive ability to monetize flesh. Years ago, when the auction had still been a novelty, the Queen had enjoyed sitting on a low balcony on the tenth of every month, watching Broussard wring the last possible profit from each pound of humanity. It satisfied something deep inside her, to see the Tear go on the block. But there had been one month, some four or five years ago, when one of Broussard's handlers had been lax in the delousing process, and soon the Palais and several noble homes were crawling with lice. The Queen had kept the whole mess from going public by offering a free slave to each offended party, taking the loss from Broussard's pay. The lice had been bad, but in retrospect, she was glad the incident had happened. It was good to have a failure to dangle in front of Broussard at moments like this, moments when he forgot that he was only a flesh peddler, and that without the Queen there would be no auction at all.

Broussard left, holding his case as though it were his only child, and the Queen was pleased to see the stiff, offended set of his shoulders. But it didn't still the whispering of her mind, the quiet question that had been nagging at her for days now:
where was the shipment?
Four days in good weather, five days in bad. It had never come any later than the fifth of the month. Now it was March 6. If there had been a problem, either the Regent or Thorne should have informed her by now. The Queen pressed one palm to her forehead, feeling the beginning of a headache developing behind her temples. Her physiology had progressed so far that she hardly ever got sick anymore. The only exception was the headaches, which came from nowhere, had no medical cause, and disappeared just as quickly.

What if the shipment doesn't come at all?

She jumped in her seat, as though someone had pinched her through her dress. The flow of human traffic had become a crucial part of the Mort economy, as regular and expected as the tides. Callae and Cadare sent slaves as well, but even their combined tribute didn't equal half of the Tear shipment. Affordable slaves kept her factories running, her nobles happy, her treasury full. Any snag in the process created a loss.

The Queen suddenly found herself missing Liriane. Like all of the Queen's servants, Liriane had aged while the Queen remained young, and several years ago she'd been laid in her grave. Liriane's had been the true sight, an ability to see not only the future but the present and past as well. She would have been able to see what had happened in the Tear. Try as the Queen might to convince herself otherwise, she couldn't escape a nagging suspicion that whatever had gone wrong must have something to do with the girl. Unless they'd killed her en route, she would have reached the Keep by now. Had Thorne managed to take care of it yet? The Regent was incompetence personified, but Thorne was quite the opposite. If Thorne failed, what was the next step? To haul out the treaty and go to war? The Queen had never wanted to invade the Tearling in the first place. Holding a foreign territory took money, equipment, trouble. The shipment was cleaner, an elegant solution.

Still, she realized, it might not be the worst thing in the world to mobilize her army. Her soldiers hadn't had to go to war since the last Tear invasion. There were no threats on the Mort border. There hadn't even been any fighting since the Exiled had hatched their conspiracy. Even on its worst day, her army was still more than a match for the Tear's, but it wasn't beyond possibility that they had grown soft during the caesura. It might be good to get them into shape now. Just in case. But at the thought, her headache seemed to double in amplitude, a steady incoming tide against the walls of her skull.

Some sort of commotion had begun brewing outside her audience chamber. The Queen looked up and saw Beryll, her chamberlain, striding off toward the great doors. He would handle it. Now that Liriane was dead, Beryll was her oldest and most trusted servant, so attuned to her wishes that the Queen rarely even had to interest herself in the everyday doings of the castle anymore. She looked down at her watch and decided to retire to her room. An early dinner, and then she would have one of her slaves. The tall one she'd taken from the last Tear delivery, a muscular man with thick black hair and beard and the look of a blacksmith. Only in the Tearling did men grow so tall.

The Queen signaled Eve, one of her pages, and whispered for her to remove the man to her chamber after the performance. Eve listened with as bright an expression as she could muster, which the Queen appreciated. Her pages hated this duty; the men weren't always cooperative. Eve would drug him and feed him a constrictive, and then the Queen could have him hard enough to escape the dream. The drug wasn't necessary anymore, of course; by now the Queen's transformation had progressed so far that she wasn't even sure she
could
be hurt. But she had never told her pages, and today she was glad. With a headache coming on, she wanted the man pliant. She swept out of the audience chamber, through her private entrance behind the throne and down a long hallway to her apartments.

The hallway was lined with guards, all of whom kept their eyes prudently on the ground. At the sight of them, some of the Queen's ebullience faded. The Regent's last report had informed her that most of Elyssa's guards had departed the castle to search for the girl. Carroll, the Mace, Elston . . . these were names the Queen knew, men she had learned to take into consideration. If she had found the Mace before Elyssa had, things might have been so different. The Tear sapphires had disappeared, seemingly into thin air, a development that reeked of the Mace's guile. If only the Queen had been able to get hold of the jewels before Elyssa died! She probably wouldn't even have headaches anymore, much less need medicine.

But now everything would be righted. She would have the sapphires, and when the shipment came, she could probably even charge the Regent a hefty late fee. He would whine and complain, but he would pay, and the thought of his white, upset face made the Queen smile as she took off her clothes, anticipating the slave's arrival. Her pages were very quick; she had been in her apartments for no more than five minutes when the knock came on her door.

“Come!” she snapped, annoyed to find that her headache was worsening. The kitchen might create a powder for her to take, but the powder would delay sleep long after the slave had ceased to perform, and sleep was at a premium these days.

The door opened. She turned to see Beryll, and began to ask him for a headache powder. But the request caught in her throat. Beryll's face was white, his eyes socketed with deep fear. He clutched a scroll of paper in one shaking hand.

“Lady,” he quavered.

Chapter 8

The Queen's Wing

It's easy to forget that a monarchy is more than just the monarch. The successful reign is a complex animal, with countless individual pieces working in concert. Looking closely at the Glynn Queen, we find many moving parts, but one cannot overestimate the importance of Lazarus of the Mace, the Queen's Captain of Guard and Chief Assassin. Remove him, and the entire structure collapses.

—
The Tearling as a Military Nation
, C
ALLOW THE
M
ARTYR

U
pon waking, Kelsea was pleased to find that all of the decorative pillows had been removed from her mother's bed.
Her
bed; it was all hers now, and that thought brought her less pleasure. Her back was a mess of bandaging. When she ran a hand through her hair, it came away slicked with oil. She'd been asleep for some time. Mace wasn't in the corner armchair, and there was no one else in the room.

It took a few minutes for Kelsea to raise herself to a sitting position; she felt no bleeding on her shoulder, but the wound pulled with every movement of her torso. Someone, undoubtedly Andalie, had placed a pitcher of water on the small table beside her bed, along with an empty glass. Kelsea drank and splashed some on her face. Andalie must have washed the blood from Kelsea as well, for which she was grateful. She thought of the man she'd killed, and was relieved to feel nothing.

She hauled herself to her feet and walked around the room, testing the wound. In her circuit, she discovered that a long rope now hung on the far side of her bed; it stretched to the ceiling, where it threaded through several hooks and then disappeared through a small opening carved in the antechamber wall. Kelsea smiled, tugging gently on the rope, and heard the muted sounds of a bell.

Mace opened the door. Seeing her standing beside the bed, he nodded in approval. “Good. The doctor said you were to stay in bed for at least another day, but I knew he was coddling you.”

“What doctor?” She'd assumed that Mace had patched her wounds.

“The doctor I got for the sick baby. I dislike doctors, but he's a competent man, and it's likely due to him that you haven't taken infection. He said your shoulder will heal slowly, but clean.”

“Another scar.” Kelsea rubbed her neck gingerly. “Soon I'll be a bundle of them. How's the baby?”

“She fares better. The doctor gave the mother some medicine that seems to have quieted the baby's stomach, though it cost the damned moon and stars. She'll likely need more later.”

“I hope you paid him well.”

“Very well, Lady. But we can't use him forever, nor the other doctor I know. Neither is trustworthy.”

“Then what do we do?”

“I don't know yet.” Mace rubbed his forehead with his thumb. “I'm thinking on it.”

“How are the guards who were injured?”

“They're fine. A couple will need to limit their duties for a time.”

“I want to see them.”

“I wouldn't, Lady.”

“Why not?”

“A Queen's Guard is a very proud creature. The men who took wounds won't want you to notice.”

“Me?” Kelsea asked, puzzled. “I don't even know how to hold a sword.”

“That's not how we think, Lady. We just want to do our jobs well.”

“Well, what am I to do? Pretend they weren't even injured?”

“Yes.”

Kelsea shook her head. “Barty always used to say there were three things men were stupid about: their beer, their cocks, and their pride.”

“That sounds like Barty.”

“I thought pride was the one he might be wrong about.”

“It's not.”

“Speaking of pride, who threw the knife?”

Mace's jaw clenched. “I apologize, Lady. It was my failure of security, and I take full responsibility. I thought we had you sufficiently covered.”

Kelsea didn't know what to say. Mace was looking very hard at the ground, his lined face twisted up as though he were waiting for a lash to fall on his shoulders. Being caught off guard was intolerable to him. He'd told her that he'd never been a child, but Kelsea had her doubts; this particular effect looked like the result of some fairly harsh parenting. Kelsea wondered if she looked just as pained when she didn't know the answer. Mace's voice echoed in her head again: she was his employer, not his confessor. “You're working on finding out, I trust?”

“I am.”

“Then let's move on.”

Mace looked up, visibly relieved. “Typically, the first thing a new ruler would do is hold an audience, but I'd like to put that off for a week or two, Lady. You're in no shape, and there's plenty to do here.”

Kelsea picked up her tiara from the gaudy vanity table and considered it thoughtfully. It was a beautiful piece of jewelry, but flimsy, too feminine for her taste. “We need to find the real crown.”

“That'll be difficult. Your mother set Carroll the task of hiding it, and believe me, he was clever that way.”

“Well, let's make sure to pay that hussy for this thing.”

Mace cleared his throat. “There's much to do today. Let's get Andalie in here to fix your appearance.”

“How rude.”

“Forgive me, Lady, but you've looked better.”

A thud came against the outer wall, the impact so hard that it rattled the hangings on Kelsea's bed. “What's going on out there?”

“Siege supplies.”

“
Siege?
Are we expecting one?”

“Today is March the sixth, Lady. There are only two days left until the treaty deadline.”

“I won't change my mind, Lazarus. That deadline means nothing to me.”

“I'm not sure you fully understand the consequences of your own actions, Lady.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I'm not sure you fully understand
me
, Lazarus. I know what I've loosed here. Who commands my army?”

“General Bermond, Lady.”

“Well, let's bring him here.”

“I've already sent for him. It might take him another few days to return; he's been on the southern border, inspecting garrisons, and he doesn't ride that well.”

“The general of my army doesn't ride well?”

“He's lame, Lady: a wound he took defending the Keep from an attempted coup ten years ago.”

“Oh,” Kelsea murmured, embarrassed.

“I warn you, Lady: Bermond will be difficult. Your mother always left him to his own judgment, and the Regent hasn't bothered him for years. He's gotten used to having his own way. He'll also loathe discussing military strategy with any woman, even a Queen.”

“Too bad. Where's the Mort Treaty?”

“Outside, waiting for your inspection. But I think you will have to reconcile yourself.”

“To what?”

“War,” Mace replied flatly. “You've effectively declared war on Mortmesne, Lady, and believe me, the Red Queen will be coming.”

“It's a gamble, Lazarus, I know.”

“Just remember, Lady: you're not the only one gambling. You're playing hazard with an entire kingdom. High dice, and you'd better be prepared to lose.”

He left to fetch Andalie, and Kelsea sat down on the bed, her stomach sinking. Mace was clearly beginning to understand her, for he'd thrust the sword right where it would have the most impact. She closed her eyes, and behind them she saw Mortmesne, a vast dark land in her imagination, awakened from long slumber, looming like a shadow over everything she wanted to build.

Carlin, what can I do?

But Carlin's voice had fallen silent in her mind, and there was no reply.

 

T
he Mort Treaty had been spread out on the large dining table that stood at one end of Kelsea's audience chamber. It was short for such a document, only several sheets of thick vellum that had browned slightly with age. Kelsea touched the sheets gingerly, fascinated to see her mother's initials, ER, scrawled messily in black at the bottom left of each page. On the right was a separate set of initials, scrawled in dark red ink: QM. The final page of the document contained two signatures: on one line, “Elyssa Raleigh,” the handwriting almost illegible, and on the other, “Queen of Mortmesne,” neatly written in the same bloodred ink.

She truly doesn't want anyone to know her real name
, Kelsea realized, her intuition flickering.
It's desperately important to her that no one finds out who she really is.
But why?

Kelsea was disappointed to find the language of the treaty as straightforward as Mace had claimed. The Tearling was obligated to provide three thousand slaves per year, divided into twelve equal shipments. At least five hundred of them needed to be children, at least two hundred of each gender. Why so many children? Mortmesne took a quota of slave children from Callae and Cadare as well, but children weren't much use for hard industrial labor or mining, and Mortmesne had few farms. Even if there were a disproportionately high number of pedophiles in the market, they couldn't go through children so quickly. Why so many?

The terse, mechanical language of the treaty provided her with no answers. If any individual shipment failed to reach Demesne by the eighth day of the month, the treaty granted Mortmesne the right to immediately enter the Tearling and satisfy its quota by right of capture. But, Kelsea noticed, the document placed no limits on the length of that entry, nor did it include any requirement of withdrawal when conditions were met. Reluctantly, she was forced to admit that Mace was right: by stopping the shipment, Kelsea had given the Red Queen an umbrella grant to invade. What had possessed her mother to sign such a one-sided document?

Be fair
, a new voice cautioned in her mind. The voice was neither Carlin's nor Barty's; Kelsea couldn't identify it, and distrusted its pragmatism.
What would you have done, with the enemy at the very gates?

Again, Kelsea had no answer. She gathered the pages of the treaty together into a neat sheaf and straightened them, feeling sick. A new idea occurred to her, one that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago, but Kelsea had already found her mind trying to insulate itself from further disaster by imagining the worst. She turned to Mace. “Was my mother assassinated?”

“There were several attempts,” Mace replied indifferently, though Kelsea thought his indifference feigned. “She nearly died of nightshade poisoning when someone got it into her food. That was when she decided to send you away for fostering.”

“So she did send me away to protect me?”

Mace's brow furrowed. “Why else?”

“Never mind.” Kelsea looked back down at the table, the treaty in front of her. “There's no mention of a lottery in here.”

“The lottery is an internal matter. At first, your mother simply sent convicts and the mentally ill. But such people make poor slaves, and the arrangement didn't satisfy the Red Queen for long. The Census Bureau was your uncle's answer.”

“Is no one exempt?”

“Churchmen. But otherwise, no. Even the babies are taken; their names go into the lot as soon as they're weaned. They say the Red Queen uses them as gifts for barren families. For a while women got around it by nursing their children well beyond the weaning age, but Thorne's on to that trick. His people are in every village in the kingdom, and there's little they don't know.”

“Is he loyal to my uncle?”

“Thorne's a businessman, Lady. He'll go whichever way the wind is blowing.”

“And which way is it blowing now?”

“Toward Mortmesne.”

“We should keep an eye on him then.”

“I always have at least one eye on Arlen Thorne, Lady.”

“How did my mother actually die? Carlin would never tell me.”

“They say it was the poison, Lady. That it gradually weakened her heart until she died a few years later.”

“They say that. What do
you
say, Lazarus?”

He stared at her without expression. “I say nothing, Lady. That's why I'm a Queen's Guard.”

Frustrated, Kelsea spent the rest of the day inspecting the Queen's Wing and meeting various people. They began with her new cook: Milla, a blonde so petite that Kelsea didn't even want to think about how she'd borne her four-year-old son. Kelsea gathered that Milla had been doing something unpleasant to make ends meet; when told that her only job would be cooking, even for the twenty-odd people who now crowded the Queen's Wing, she became so violently happy that Kelsea had to tuck her own hands into the folds of her dress, terrified that the woman would try to kiss them.

The other woman who'd come in with them, Carlotta, was older and round-faced, with bright red cheeks. She seemed frightened, but after a few repeated questions admitted that she could sew passably well. Kelsea asked her for more black dresses, and Carlotta agreed that she could make them.

“Though I would do better if I took your measurements, Majesty,” she ventured, looking terrified at the very idea. Kelsea found the idea of being measured nearly as terrifying, but she nodded and smiled, trying to put the woman at ease.

She met several guards who hadn't been with them on their journey: Caelan, a thuggish-looking man whom everyone simply called Cae; and Tom and Wellmer, both archers. Wellmer seemed too young to be a Queen's Guard. He was doing his best to appear as stoic as the older men, but he was clearly fidgety; every few seconds he switched his weight between feet.

“How old is that boy?” Kelsea whispered to Mace.

“Wellmer? He's twenty.”

“What did you do, pick him from a nursery?”

“Most of us were barely teenagers when we were recruited, Lady. Don't worry about Wellmer. Give him a bow, and he could pick out your left eye from here, even in torchlight.”

Kelsea tried to reconcile this description with the nervous, white-faced boy in front of her, but gave up. After the guards went back to their posts, she followed Mace down the corridor to one of the first rooms, which had been hastily converted into a nursery. The room was a good choice; it was one of the few chambers with a window, so that light spilled in and made it seem brighter and cheerier than it really was. All of the furniture had been cleared to the walls, and the floor was littered with makeshift toys: dolls made of cloth and stuffed with straw that leaked from every patch, toy swords, and a wooden shopkeeper's stall shrunken to child size.