The Queen of the Tearling (34 page)

Laughter echoed from multiple directions.

“These men who follow you to swear allegiance to the Mort bitch?” the Fetch called from his invisible vantage. “I'd sooner allow a pack of rogue dogs to live. Cowards and traitors, all of you!”

He broke into song again.

The Queen concealed now reappears,

The knife is thrown, the girl struck down,

Still she rises, eighteen long years,

Our Queen, and we care not which crown.

“They're singing it in every corner of the city!” the Fetch shouted, anger biting through the mockery now. “Who will ever compose a ballad for you, Thomas Raleigh? Who will extol your greatness?”

Tears filled Thomas's eyes, but in front of his men he didn't dare dash them away. He suddenly understood why, despite so many opportunities, the Fetch had never killed him before. The Fetch had been waiting for the girl, waiting for her to come out of hiding.

“I won't beg!” Thomas cried.

“I've heard you beg enough.”

On Thomas's left, Keever went down with a horrible gurgling sound, a knife protruding from his throat. Arvis and Cowell crumpled next, pierced with arrows in their chests and heads. Thomas looked up and saw a monstrous black shape against the trees, descending on him from above. He shrieked in terror, but his voice cut off as the thing landed on him, knocking him from his horse. He hit his head, hard, on the ground and lay momentarily stunned, rocks digging into his back, the air full of his stallion's outraged scream, hooves tearing away through the woods.

When he opened his eyes, he was looking up at the Fetch, who perched like a giant bat on his chest, pinning him to the ground. The Fetch wore the same mask he donned each time he entered the Keep: a harlequin, designed for masquerades. Such masks could be bought at many shops in the city, but Thomas had never seen the like of this one anywhere else: the red-smudged mouth drawn up into a sneer and the eyes deep-socketed in black. Once, Thomas had woken deep within the womb of his quilts to find that face leaning over him, and he'd wet himself like a baby. The Fetch had waltzed out of his chamber and disappeared from the Keep like smoke, and Thomas had been so ashamed that he had never told anyone about the incident. It was almost possible to believe the Fetch an illusion until he inevitably reappeared, utterly substantial, always wearing his dreadful mask.

“Well, false prince?” The Fetch grabbed Thomas by the shoulders and shook him as a dog would a bone, slamming his head repeatedly against the ground. Thomas felt his teeth rattle. “No bribes to offer, Thomas? And where's your puppeteer? Hasn't she sorcery enough to get you out of this?”

Thomas remained mute. He had tried to argue with the Fetch before and found that he only made himself more vulnerable. The man was devilishly clever with words, and Thomas had thanked God more than once that the Fetch was forced to remain anonymous. As a public orator, he would have been devastating.

Then again, if he were a public orator, we could've taken and killed him long ago.

“The Census Bureau is in shambles,” the Fetch whispered silkily. “They may construct new cages, but no one will forget what became of the old. If the girl lives, she'll undo much of your harm.”

Thomas shook his head. “The Red Queen is coming. She'll level the kingdom before the girl can accomplish anything.”

The Fetch leaned closer, until he was only inches away. “The Mort bitch never cared for you, you know.”

“I know,” Thomas replied, and then clamped his mouth shut, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time at the source of the Fetch's information. His raids on Tear nobles had caused endless trouble, for the Fetch always seemed to know how taxes had been paid, where the money was stored, when the delivery would depart. Angry nobles came to the Keep to demand redress and Thomas had been forced to pay out large bribes in lieu of security, which made him even more despised with the peasantry. And where were those nobles now? Snug in their own castles while he was evicted from his, stuck in the forest with this blood-mad lunatic.

“Did you throw the knife?”

“What?”

The Fetch slapped him across the face. “Did you throw the knife at the girl?”

“No! Not me.”

“Who?”

“I don't know! It was Thorne's plan. Some agent.”

“What agent?”

“I don't know. My men were only to provide the diversion, I swear!”

The Fetch pressed both thumbs against Thomas's eyes and ground down until Thomas shrieked helplessly, but the sound vanished into the pouring rain without so much as an echo.

“What agent, Thomas?” the Fetch asked relentlessly. His thumbs jammed down harder and Thomas felt his left eye fill with hot liquid. “I'll begin cutting you next. Don't even kid yourself that I won't. A Mort agent?”

“I don't know!” Thomas cried, sobbing. “Thorne wouldn't tell me.”

“That's right, Thomas, and do you know why? Because he knew you'd fuck it all up.”

“It wasn't my fault!”

“You'd better think of something useful to tell me.”

“Thorne has a backup plan!”

“I know of Thorne's backup plan, you miserable shit. I knew of it before he conceived it himself.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Information, Thomas. Information about the Red Queen. You slept with her, this entire kingdom knows it. You must know something useful.”

Thomas's eyes popped open. He tried to keep his face expressionless, but it clearly betrayed him, for the Fetch leaned forward again, his eyes gleaming behind the mask, so close that Thomas could smell horses and smoke and something else, a cloying scent that he felt he should recognize.

Fifteen years ago, he was in bed with her, the air still reeking of sex, and he had asked her what she wanted with him. Even back then, he hadn't been able to deceive himself that she cared about him. She fucked automatically, impersonally; he'd gotten better mechanics from mid-priced whores in the Gut. And yet he couldn't be free of her; she'd grown like a disease in his mind.

“Tell me something useful, and I will end your life without pain, Thomas. I swear it.”

“Who is the father?” the Red Queen asked. When she turned to him in the dark, her eyes were glowing, a bright vulpine red. Thomas had reared back, scrambling to get out of bed, and she laughed, that deep bedroom chuckle that got him hard all on its own.

His eyes ached; he could see nothing but a haze of red from the left. The burning in his thighs was worse. But physical pain paled in comparison to the wave of self-loathing that swept him. The Fetch would have the information; it wouldn't even take very long.

“What d'you want to know for?” he asked thickly. She could do that, make him feel as drunk as though he'd put away eight pints of ale. “Elyssa's dead. What could it possibly matter now?”

“It doesn't,” she replied with a smile. And Thomas, who could never tell what she was thinking, nevertheless saw that it did matter, that it mattered a great deal. She wanted to know, badly, and she knew that he had the answer. It was the only leverage he had ever held, and he had never deceived himself. If he told her, she might kill him.

“I don't know,” he replied.

The light in her eyes faded then, and suddenly she was just a beautiful woman in bed with him, grabbing at his cock as though it were a toy. He had kept the one secret, but all other bulwarks had fallen; she'd stretched out before him and he'd agreed to find and murder Elyssa's daughter, his niece. He even remembered entering her and gasping, “Fuck you,” to a different queen, one who'd been laid in her grave years before. But the Red Queen understood. She always understood, and she had given him what he needed.

“Well, Thomas?”

Thomas looked up at the Fetch, seeing him through a wash of tears. Time stretched years back and years forward, but nothing that came afterward ever had the power to wash away what came before. This order of things seemed monstrously unfair, even now when Thomas knew that he had only moments left. He gathered the remaining pieces of his courage. “If you take off the mask, I'll tell you everything I know about her.”

The Fetch turned and took a quick survey of the action behind him. Squinting, his good eye blurry with moisture, Thomas saw that all three of his men were dead. Keever was the worst; he'd fallen with his throat gashed wide open, and now lay in a pool of his own blood, staring without sight.

Three men, masked and dressed in black, were crouched in the copse. They watched Thomas with a predatory, waiting quality, like dogs that had brought something to bay. But still he feared them less than he did their master. The Fetch was intelligent, diabolically so, and intelligent people devised intelligent cruelties. That was where the Red Queen had always excelled.

When he looked back up at the Fetch, the mask was gone, the man's face plain in the dying light. Thomas dashed the tears from his right eye and stared for a long minute, his mind blank. “But you're dead.”

“Only on the inside.”

“Is it magic?”

“The darkest kind, false prince. Now speak.”

Thomas spoke. The words came slowly at first, caught in his throat, but then they became easier. The Fetch listened carefully, even sympathetically, asking occasional questions, and soon it seemed perfectly rational for the two of them to be sitting here together, telling tales while the night fell. Thomas told the Fetch the entire story, the story he had never told to anyone, each word easier than the last. Telling the truth was what a Queen's Guard would do, he realized, and that seemed so much the crux of the matter that he found himself repeating important points carefully, desperate to make the Fetch understand. He told all that he could remember, and when there was no more, he stopped.

The Fetch straightened and called out, “Bring an axe!”

Thomas clutched the Fetch's arm. “Won't you forgive me?”

“I will not, Thomas. I'll keep my word, and that's all.”

Thomas closed his eyes.
Mortmesne, Mortmesne, burning bright
, he thought inexplicably. The Fetch would take his head, and Thomas found that he didn't begrudge him. Thomas thought of the Red Queen, the first time he'd ever seen her, a moment of such mixed terror and longing that it still had the power to freeze his heart. Then he thought of the girl, dragging herself from the floor with the knife in her back. Perhaps she could do it, extricate them all from the quagmire they'd created. Stranger things had happened in the history of the Tearling. Perhaps she was even the True Queen. Perhaps

Chapter 11

The Apostate

God's Church was a strange marriage of the hierarchy of pre-Crossing Catholicism and the beliefs of a particular sect of Protestantism that emerged in the early aftermath of the Landing. This sect was less concerned with the moral salvation of souls than with the biological salvation of the human race, a salvation viewed as God's great plan in raising the New World out of the sea.

This strange mixture of disparate elements was both a marriage of necessity and a harbinger of things to come. God's Church became a realist's religion, its interpretation of the gospels riddled with pragmatic holes, the influence of the pre-Crossing Bible limited to what would serve. Ecclesiastical discontent was inevitable; many priests, faced with the increasingly brutal political realities of theology in the Tearling, needed only the slightest touch and they were ready to topple.

—
Religious Dimensions of the Tearling: An Essay
, F
ATHER
A
NSELM

W
hen Father Tyler entered the audience chamber, Kelsea's first impression was that he carried a great burden. The priest she remembered had been timid, not saturnine. He still moved cautiously, but now his shoulders sagged. This weight on him was new.

“Father,” she greeted him. Father Tyler looked up toward the throne, his blue eyes flickering to meet hers and then darting away. Years of Carlin's tutelage had prepared Kelsea to find all priests either bombasts or zealots, but Father Tyler seemed neither. She wondered about his function in the Church. With such a quiet demeanor, he couldn't be a ceremonial priest. There were weak priests, certainly; Carlin had covered that territory extensively. But only a fool mistook caution for weakness.

“You're welcome here, Father. Please.” She indicated the chair on her left.

Father Tyler hesitated, and no wonder; Mace was stationed behind the proffered chair. The priest approached as toward a chopping block, his white robe trailing behind him up the steps to the dais. He sat down without meeting Mace's eyes, but when he finally turned to Kelsea, his gaze was clear and direct.

More afraid of Mace than of me
, Kelsea thought ruefully. Well, he wasn't the only one.

“Majesty,” the priest opened, in a voice as thin as paper. “The Church, and the Holy Father in particular, send greetings and wishes for Your Majesty's health.”

Kelsea nodded, keeping her expression pleasant. Mace had informed her that the Holy Father had entertained many Tear nobles in the Arvath over the past week. Mace had great respect for the guile of the Holy Father, and so Kelsea did not underestimate it either; the question was whether that guile extended to this junior priest, who stared at her expectantly.

Everyone is waiting for something from me
, Kelsea thought tiredly. Her shoulder, which hadn't troubled her for at least several days, gave an answering throb. “Daylight runs, Father. What can I do for you?”

“The Church wishes to consult you about the matter of your Keep Priest, Majesty.”

“I understood that a Keep Priest was a discretionary matter.”

“Yes, well . . .” Father Tyler glanced around, as though looking for his next words on the floor. “The Holy Father requests a report on what your discretion has dictated.”

“Which priest would they give me?”

His face twitched, betraying anxiety. “That matter hasn't been decided yet, Majesty.”

“Of course it has, Father, or you wouldn't be here.” Kelsea smiled. “You're no card player.”

Father Tyler gave a surprised huff of laughter. “I've never played cards in my life.”

“Are you close to the Holy Father?”

“I've met him personally twice, Lady.”

“In the past two weeks, I'll wager. What are you really doing here, Father?”

“Just what I said, Majesty. I've come to consult you about appointment of your Keep Priest.”

“And who would you recommend?”

“Me.” The priest stared at her defiantly, his eyes full of a bitterness that seemed entirely impersonal. “I present myself and my spiritual knowledge for Your Majesty's service.”

 

N
o one would ever know the courage it took Tyler to drag himself to the Keep on his devil's errand. If he succeeded, he would become a loathsome creature, an agent of duplicity. If he failed, the Holy Father would have his revenge on Tyler's library. For years, the Church had turned a blind eye to the growing collection of secular books in Tyler's quarters. The senior priests thought his hobby odd but harmless. Ascetics had few enough pleasures, and no one had a burning interest in pre-Crossing history anyway. Upon Tyler's death, his room would be cleaned out and all of his books would belong to the Church. No harm done.

But if the question were put to him, Tyler would be forced to admit that he wasn't a true ascetic. His love of the things of this world was as strong as anyone's. Wine, food, women, Tyler had let them all go easily. But his books . . .

The Holy Father wasn't a stupid man, and neither was Cardinal Anders. Two days ago, Tyler had awakened from the most vivid yet of his nightmares, in which he failed in his errand and returned to the Arvath to find his room locked from the inside, smoke pouring from beneath the door. Tyler knew it was a dream, for he was wearing robes of grey, and no priest of God's Church wore grey. But the knowledge that he was dreaming didn't change the horror. Tyler clawed at the doorknob, then tried to break the door down, until both of his thin shoulders were battered and he was screaming. When he finally gave up, he turned and found Cardinal Anders behind him, holding a copy of the Bible, his red robes aflame. He held the Bible out to Tyler, intoning solemnly, “You are part of God's great work.”

For the past two days, Tyler had slept for only a few minutes at a time.

He thought that the Queen might burst out laughing when he finally got around to the real subject of his visit, but she didn't. She stared at him, and Tyler began to glimpse, if only dimly, how this girl could command such a fearsome character as the Mace. One could watch the Queen and almost see her thinking, a series of rapid and complex calculations. It made Tyler think of pre-Crossing computers, machines whose great value had essentially been the ability to do many things at once. He felt that hundreds of small variables went into the Queen's deliberation, and wondered what sort of variable he was.

“Accepted, with conditions.”

Tyler struggled to hide his surprise. “Yes?”

“The Keep chapel will be converted into a school.”

She watched him narrowly, clearly expecting an outburst, but Tyler said nothing. As far as he was concerned, God had never lived in that chapel. The Holy Father would rant and rave, but Tyler couldn't worry about that now. He was focused on the exact task he'd been given.

“You are not, at any time, to attempt to proselytize
me
,” the Queen continued. “I'll have none of it. I won't silence you when you speak to others, but I may debate you to the best of my ability. If you can tolerate my arguments, you're free to minister to or convert any other occupant of this Keep, not excepting the pigs and chickens.”

“You make sport of my religion, Lady,” replied Tyler, but his words were automatic, without rancor. He had long outgrown the period of his life when atheism could rouse his temper.

“I make sport of all things inconsistent, Father.”

Tyler's attention was drawn to the silver tiara on her head, the tiara that he had held in his hand. Again he was arrested by the revolving nature of history; it repeated itself in such extraordinary and unexpected ways. There had been another monarch, a pre-Crossing monarch, crowned amid bloodshed, never meant to ascend the throne. Where had it been . . . France? England?

The Holy Father won't care about the pre-Crossing
, his mind whispered, and Tyler shook himself from such thoughts. “If there's no chapel in the Keep, Majesty, and you yourself reject the word of God, what exactly am I to do here?”

“You're an academic, I'm told, Father. What is your area of expertise?”

“History.”

“Ah, good. That will be your use to me. I've read many works of history, but I've missed many also.”

Tyler blinked. “What works of history?”

“Works mostly of the pre-Crossing. I flatter myself that I have a good knowledge of pre-Crossing history, but I'm poorly informed about early Tear history, and particularly the Crossing itself.”

Tyler stuck on one piece of information. “What works of the pre-Crossing?”

The Queen smiled, slightly smug, the corners of her mouth tucking downward. “Come with me, Father.”

The Queen's wound must have been well on the way to healing, for she rose from the throne without assistance. Tyler made no sudden moves as he followed her down the steps, avoiding the guards who shifted themselves expertly to follow her progress and block him off. He could sense the Mace right behind him, and resolved not to turn around.

The Queen walked in a purposeful way that many would describe as mannish. No one had taught her the graceful little steps that Tyler had observed in women born ladies. The Queen moved in great strides, so great that Tyler, whose arthritic hip never really quieted these days, was hard-pressed to keep up. He sensed again that he was in the middle of something extraordinary, and didn't know whether to thank God or not.

Pen Alcott walked a few feet ahead of Tyler, right on the Queen's heels, his hand on his sword. Tyler had assumed that the Mace would be her close guard; no doubt the whole kingdom had thought so. But the Mace had other business several days ago, in the south of the kingdom. News of the fire that destroyed the southern Graham stronghold had run like quicksilver through the Arvath. The Grahams were generous donors, and the senior Lord Graham was one of the Holy Father's old friends. The Holy Father had made it clear that Tyler should call the Mace and his mistress to account.

Later,
Tyler thought.
For now, the exact task I was given.

The Queen led Tyler down a long corridor behind the throne, a corridor with at least thirty doors. It was a servant's wing, Tyler realized with astonishment. Could anyone, even a queen, need that many servants?

Only a few of the doors were guarded. When the Queen approached one of them, the guard opened the door and then stood aside. Tyler found himself in a small chamber that was nearly empty, save for a desk and a few armchairs and sofas. It seemed an odd use of space. But then he halted just inside the threshold, dumbfounded.

The far wall was covered with books, beautiful leather-bound volumes in the rich hues that had been used before the Crossing: red, blue, and most astonishing of all, purple. Tyler had never seen purple leather, hadn't even known it was possible. Whatever the dye was, the formula had been lost.

At a gesture of invitation from the Queen, Tyler ventured closer, assessing the quality of the books with a collector's eye. His own collection was much smaller; many of his volumes were as ancient as these, but most were bound in cloth or paper, and required great care and constant treatment with fixatives to keep them from falling to pieces. Someone had taken equally conscientious care of these books. Their leather bindings appeared to be intact. There had to be well over a thousand, but Tyler noted—with some satisfaction—that he had many titles that the Queen's collection was lacking. His fingers itched to touch the books, but he didn't dare without her permission.

“You may, Father.” When he looked up, he found her watching him with clear amusement, her mouth curled as if at a private joke. “I told you that you were no card player.”

Tyler turned eagerly to the shelf. Several authors' names immediately leaped out at him. He took down a Tuchman book and opened it gently, grinning with delight. Most of his own books had been treated with an imperfect fixative, leaving their pages wrinkled and discolored. This book's pages were crisp yet soft, nearly white. There were also several inset pages of photographs, and these he perused closely, almost unaware that he was speaking at the same time. “I have several Tuchman books, but this one I've never seen. What's the subject?”

“Several eras of pre-Crossing history,” the Queen replied, “used to illustrate the fact that folly inherently pervades government.”

Despite his fascination with the book, something in the Queen's tone made Tyler close the cover. Turning, he found her staring at her books with utter devotion, like a lover. Or a priest.

“The Tearling is in crisis, Father.”

Tyler nodded.

“The Arvath gave its blessing to the lottery.”

Tyler nodded again, his face coloring. The shipment had rolled right past the Arvath for years, and even from his small window, Tyler had always been able to hear the tide of misery below. Father Wyde said that sometimes the families followed the shipment for miles; rumor had it that one family had even walked behind the cages all the way to the foothills of Mount Willingham. As far as Tyler knew, Father Timpany had given the Regent absolution for his sins with the sanction of the Holy Father. It was so much easier for Tyler to ignore these matters in his room, with his mind wrapped in his studies, his bookkeeping. But here, with the Queen staring at him, her expression demanding explanation, the things Tyler knew deep down couldn't be so easily dismissed.

“So what do you think?” the Queen asked. “Have I pursued folly since taking the throne?”

The question seemed academic, but Tyler understood that it wasn't. It hit him suddenly that the Queen was only nineteen years old, and that she had cheated death for years. And yet her first act upon arrival had been to poke a stick at a hornets' nest.

Why, she's frightened
, he realized. He would never have considered the possibility, but of course she would be. He could see that she had already taken responsibility for her actions, that consequences already sat on her shoulders. Tyler wanted to say something reassuring but found that he couldn't, for he didn't know her. “I can't speak to political salvation, Majesty. I'm a spiritual adviser.”