The Queen of the Tearling (42 page)

“Later, Pen.”

Kelsea expected Mace to begin a lecture of some kind, about running away, about the Fetch, about recklessness in general. But he didn't. She could see the gleam of his drawn sword, and another shine of metal that she assumed was his mace. But the gleam was blue, not moonlight. Kelsea looked down and realized that her two jewels were now glowing so brightly that she could see both of them through the fabric of her uniform. She clasped them in her right hand, trying to block the light. Whatever had begun in her chest was steadily progressing now; her heart was hammering away much too fast, and her veins felt as though they'd been pumped full of fire. She was waiting for something terrible to happen, something she couldn't see.

Of course
, she realized suddenly.
I only kept the second necklace in my pocket before. I never put it on.

She closed her eyes and there it was again: a skyline, full of tall buildings, dozens of them, even taller than the Keep. Madness seemed to be there, beckoning, a city of madness that existed only in her head. More screaming came from the center of the battle, bringing Kelsea back to herself. She opened her eyes to merciful darkness, saw Pen peering around the edge of the boulder.

“They've lit the fire again.”

“Fools,” Mace muttered. “Wellmer will pick them off easily.”

Kelsea peeked around Pen. Light glowed against the sky several hundred feet away, right in the center of the campsite. Her jewel was trying to drive her forward, somehow, but she had promised Mace and she willed it to be silent. The screaming from the center of the pass continued, and Kelsea's pulse ratcheted higher, recognizing that this was the terrible thing, the thing she'd been waiting for. She suddenly pinpointed the source of her anxiety. “That's a woman's voice.”

Pen moved a few more feet out from the boulder, and even in the dim glow of the distant fire, Kelsea saw his face turn white. “Christ.”

“What is it?”

“Women.” His voice sounded as though it came through water. “They've lit a cage of women.”

Before she had time to think, Kelsea was running.

“Lady! Damn it!” Mace's shouts seemed very far away. Women's screams echoed off the walls of the pass, seeming to fill the night from horizon to horizon. The two sapphires bounced free of her uniform, ablaze now, and Kelsea found that she could see everything, each boulder and blade of grass limned in blue. She'd never been much of a runner, but the jewels were giving her strength and she ran fast, faster than she ever had in her life, sprinting toward the brightening bloom of the fire.

 

J
avel didn't know what had happened. He'd gone to find a torch for Thorne, hardly aware of what he was doing. His mind was still full of Allie, wondering what would happen to her if they failed. He sensed that Thorne's men were losing the battle. They hadn't gotten the fire out quickly enough, and the archers must have done great damage from the hillside because he couldn't move a foot without tripping over a body. More horsemen had arrived while he was searching for the torch; the sound seemed to push Thorne into a panic, so Javel knew they were not part of the plan. They were going to lose the fight, and then what would become of Allie?

Finally Javel found a discarded torch lying on the far side of the fire pit and returned to Thorne, who took the torch without thanks and moved away out of earshot.

Good riddance
, Javel thought darkly. But once Thorne disappeared, he didn't know what to do. He was a Gate Guard, not a soldier, and this wasn't the Gut, with its comfort of walls and cramped streets. Javel had always hated nature. The walls of the pass were tall, ghostly boundaries on the world. He didn't want to move, and though he could hear fighting all around him, he recoiled from the idea of engaging an enemy he couldn't see. His experience with combat had been limited to the repulsion of two or three gate crashers, lunatics who showed up intending to fight their way into the Keep. He'd never killed a man before.

Am I a coward?

The prisoners had found their voices again once the attack started, and now they screamed for help, a slaughterhouse sound that made him want to clap his hands to his ears. He thought of trying to get the pregnant woman out, but he could see nothing, and he was afraid. He thought of Keller, of the young girls who filled the caravans. Several had been raped; Javel could no longer deny it now, even to himself. One of them, surely no more than twelve, had done nothing but sob brokenly all the way from Haymarket. Javel thought of those drunken nights in the Gut, nights when he'd idly contemplated finding child traffickers, bringing them to justice, doing heroic things. But morning always came, sunlight and hangovers ruining his best plans. This was different, Javel realized. This was dark work; there was no morning here. And so much could be accomplished in the dark.

He sheathed his sword and pulled the knife from his belt, waiting. Gate Guards always stuck together, and a few minutes later Keller found him, as Javel had known he would.

“Not really our scene, is it, Javel?”

“No,” Javel agreed. “Never thought I'd long to be back on the gate in the middle of the night.” They stood quietly in the dark for a moment, Javel gathering his courage, feeling adrenaline flood his body. “Does that cage door look loose to you?”

“What door? I can't see anything.”

“Over there, to the left.”

The moment Keller turned, Javel snaked an arm around his neck. Keller was big, but Javel was quick, and he was able to draw his knife across Keller's throat and dance backward before Keller's hands found him. Keller gurgled, gasping for breath in the dark, then Javel heard a satisfying thump as his huge body collapsed to the ground. Javel's heart blazed with satisfaction, a great dawn breaking inside his mind and flooding his veins with courage. What should he do next?

He knew immediately: he would open the doors. He would open the doors of the cages, just as the Queen had done on the Keep Lawn that day, and let everyone out.

He stumbled toward the caravan, but tripped over another body. Men were still fighting all around him and the ground was littered with corpses. Thorne was right; they needed light.

Just as Javel thought this, he realized that he
could
see; a thin amber glow illuminated several pairs of fighters and the first few cages on either side of the horseshoe. Someone had lit a fire. Dwyne would be angry, but Javel felt only relief.

That was when the screaming started for real. A woman positively shrieked, her voice ascending in a terrible, eldritch wail that went on and on until Javel had to clap his hands over his ears. He sank to his knees, thinking:
Surely she must run out of breath.
And she might have, but he couldn't tell, because suddenly they were all screaming, an entire world of women crying out.

Javel turned, saw the fire, and realized what Thorne had done.

The fourth cage on the left was aflame at one end, the door already obliterated. Thorne stood perhaps ten feet away, torch in hand, staring at the fire, and Javel saw evil in those bright blue eyes, not malevolence but something much worse: an evil born of lack of self-awareness, an evil that didn't know it was evil and therefore could justify anything.

Evil that did the math.

The women in the cage shrieked as they crushed themselves against the far wall. But the fire was coming for them, inching its way across the floor of the cage. Two women had already caught fire; Javel could see them easily through the crude wooden bars. One was William and Jeffrey's mother. She was beating at the flames that had taken her skirt and screaming at the other women for help, but none of them noticed in their mad push to get away. The second woman was nothing but a blazing torch, a dark, writhing shape with arms that waved madly from inside the fire. While Javel watched, in a span of time that seemed endless, her arms sank to her sides and her body simply collapsed. She had no face anymore, only a blackened thing that burned madly, spreading flame along the cage floor.

The rest of the women continued to scream, a bloodcurdling cacophony that Javel knew he would hear in his head for the rest of his life. They screamed endlessly, and all of them seemed to have Allie's voice.

Javel lunged for the Baedencourt brothers' belongings, which lay on the other side of the dead campfire. Hugo Baedencourt always carried an axe; both brothers had been sent out on the first watch, but an axe was no use in combat. Javel tore through the sack of weapons, pushing aside swords and a bow before he came upon the axe, a strong, gleaming thing in his hands. It was too heavy for him, but he found that he could lift it, and once he reached the cage, he found that he could swing it as well. Jeffrey and William's mother was burning now, her hair and face on fire. Her dress had gone up first and Javel knew, in the part of the mind that remained cold and suspended in such situations, that the baby inside her was already dead. But even the flames couldn't stop the woman's iron voice. She screamed and screamed into the night.

Javel swung the first crushing blow against the bars. Wood splintered, but they held.

I'm not strong enough
.

He swallowed the thought and swung again, ignoring a rending tear in the muscle of his left shoulder. Allie was upon him, standing there looking at him affectionately, long before they were married, neither of them thinking of the lottery, of anything at all.

Stench had filled the air now, a gut-churning mixture of burning wool and charred skin. Javel was losing the race against the fire, he knew it, but he couldn't stop swinging the axe. Jeffrey and William's mother died somewhere in the middle of the race; one second she was screaming, the next she was not, and in one cold blink, Javel decided to kill Arlen Thorne. But Thorne was already gone; he'd thrown away his torch and fled into the darkness.

The women were still crushed against the far wall of the cage, but only those in back continued to scream now; smoke had overwhelmed the women closest to the fire and they could only cough wretchedly. Several had flames licking at their skirts. Javel's own eyes were watering, burning with smoke, and the skin on his arms felt as though it was beginning to bake. He ignored everything and swung again, feeling the axe bite cleanly through one of the bars. But only one. It was too late.

Allie I'm so sorry.

His skin was on fire. Javel dropped the axe and sank to his knees. He clapped his hands to his ears but he could still hear them screaming.

Then the world filled with blue light.

 

S
ome fifty feet from the burning cage, Kelsea became aware that several riders had moved to flank her as she ran. The Fetch's men, their faces masked in black, and they paced her, launching arrows as they went. She might have been hallucinating but she no longer cared. Nothing mattered now but the cages, the women. Her responsibility. She was the Queen of the Tearling.

Several of Thorne's men tried to approach her as she ran, their swords upraised and murder in their faces. But a series of blue flares enveloped them and took them down. Kelsea felt that the light wasn't coming from the jewels at all, but from inside her own head. She merely thought to kill them and they were gone. Her breath tore at her throat, but she couldn't slow down. The jewels pulled her onward toward the flames.

She skidded around the last boulder and baking heat hit her like a wall, pushing her back. Women had crowded mindlessly at one end of the flaming cage, but the fire had already reached them. A grey-haired man was down in front, attacking the bars with an axe, but he didn't appear to be making a dent.

Tearling oak
, Kelsea thought. The women were trapped. Worse yet, flames were already licking at the bars of the next cage; if they couldn't put out the fire, the entire caravan would go up. They needed water, but there was none for miles. Kelsea tightened her fists in despair, so that her nails bit into her palms, drawing blood. If someone had offered her a trade right now, her life for those people in the cage, she would have taken it easily and without fear, just as a mother would unthinkingly trade her life for her child's. But there was no one to trade with. All of Kelsea's good intentions had come to this in the end.

I would give everything if I could
, she thought, and knew in that second that it was true.

The two jewels exploded in blue light, and she felt current slam into her body, voltage coursing through every nerve. The force of it shoved her backward. She felt twice her own size, every hair on her body standing on end and her muscles straining against their own walls.

Her despair vanished.

The entire pass was illuminated now, washed in blue, each shadow brighter than the next. Kelsea could see everything, still and quiet and suspended. All around her were struggling figures, frozen in the light.

Wellmer up on the hillside to her left, perched on the edge of a boulder with an arrow nocked into his bow and his jaw clenched in concentration;

Elston, his eyes red with fire and murder, chasing Arlen Thorne along the rocky floor of the ravine;

Alain, back behind one of the cages with a knife in his hand, killing the wounded, his mouth open to shout;

the Fetch, down by the end of the caravan, wearing his horrible mask, fighting a big man in a red cloak;

the man who'd attacked the cages with his axe, on his knees now, weeping, his face consumed with agony, regret that spanned years;

but most of all, the women in the cage, standing right in the path of the flames.

It's better to die clean
.

Voltage poured through Kelsea, so much that her body couldn't hold it; it was as though she'd taken a bolt of lightning. If there was a God, he would feel like this, standing astride the world. But Kelsea was terrified, sensing that if she wanted to break the world in half she could do it, of course she could, but there was more here than she knew. Everything came with a price.