The Queen of the Tearling (45 page)

“What does it matter, at this late date?”

“It matters.”

“Two years ago.”

“What the hell were you thinking?” Mace roared, unable to contain himself. “A Queen's Guard with a drug habit? Where did you suppose that would end?”

“Here.”

“You're a dead man.”

“I've been dead since the invasion, sir. It's only the past few years I've begun to rot.”

“What a load of shit.”

“You've no idea what I've lost.”

“We've all lost something, you self-pitying ass.” Cold fury laced Mace's voice. “But we're Queen's Guards. We don't sell our honor. We don't abandon our vows.”

He turned to Kelsea. “This is best handled out here, Lady, among ourselves. Give us permission to finish him.”

“Not yet. Elston, are you getting tired?”

“Are you kidding, Lady? I could hold this faithless bastard all day.” Elston flexed his arms, causing Mhurn to groan and struggle. There was an audible snap as one of his ribs broke.

“Enough.”

Elston subsided. Kibb had finished tying Mhurn's hands and feet, and now Mhurn merely dangled from Elston's arms like a bound doll, his blond hair hanging limply in his face. Kelsea suddenly recalled something he had said that night out in the Reddick Forest: that the crimes of soldiers came from two sources—situation or leadership. The other prisoner, the Gate Guard, had picked up an axe in the last extremity and tried to right his wrong, but Mhurn had not. His was a difficult situation, to be sure, but was Kelsea's leadership also to blame? From Mace, she knew that Mhurn was a gifted swordsman, not quite of Pen's caliber, but impressive. He was also one of the most levelheaded of the guards, the one Mace trusted when something needed to be done tactfully. It was a terrible loss of a valuable man, and try as she might, Kelsea could feel no anger, only sorrow and the certainty that this tragedy could have been avoided somehow, that she had missed something crucial along the way.

“Coryn, do you know how to inject him with that stuff?”

“I've injected men with antibiotics before, Lady, but I know little of morphia. I might as easily kill him.”

“Well, that's neither here nor there now. Give him a decent dose.”

“Lady!” Mace barked. “He doesn't deserve that!”

“My decision, Lazarus.”

Kelsea watched with covert interest as Coryn went to work, lighting a small flame and heating the white powder in one of his medical tins. As it liquefied, the morphine collapsed into itself like a tiny building. But when Coryn had filled one of his syringes, Kelsea turned away, unable to watch him give Mhurn the injection.

“All done, Lady.”

Turning back, she marked the hard angles of Mhurn's face, softened now, and the hazy look in those cold, beautiful eyes. His entire body appeared to have gone limp. How could a drug work so quickly?

“What happened to you in the Mort invasion, Mhurn?”

“You heard me tell it, Majesty.”

“I've heard two versions now, Mhurn, and neither was complete. What happened to
you
?”

Mhurn stared dreamily over her shoulder. When he spoke, his voice had a disconnected quality that made Kelsea's stomach clench. “We lived in Concord, Lady, on the shores of the Crithe. Our village was isolated; we didn't even know the Mort were coming until a warning rider came through. But then we could see the shadow on the horizon . . . the smoke from their fires . . . the vultures that followed them in the sky. We fled our village, but we weren't quick enough. My daughter was sick, my wife had never learned to ride, and at any rate we had only one horse. They caught us halfway between the Crithe and the Caddell. My wife was bad, Lady, but Alma, my daughter . . . she was taken by Ducarte himself, dragged along in the train of the Mort army for miles. I found her body months later, in the piles of dead left by the Mort after they withdrew from the Keep Lawn. She was covered with bruises . . . worse than bruises. I see her always, Lady. Except when I'm on the needle . . . that's the only time I'm blind.

“So you're wrong, sir,” he continued, turning to Mace, “if you think I care how I die, or when.”

“You never told us any of that,” Mace snapped back.

“Can you blame me?”

“Carroll would never have taken you into the Guard if he'd known you were so fucked in the head.”

Kelsea had heard enough. She reached down and pulled out her knife, the knife that Barty had given her so long ago. Barty had been a Queen's Guard once; would he have wanted this?

Mace's jaw dropped as she straightened. “Lady, any of us would gladly do this for you! You don't have to—”

“Of course I do, Lazarus. This is a traitor to the Crown. I'm the Crown.”

Mhurn looked up, his dilated pupils gradually focusing on her knife, and he smiled hazily. “They don't understand, Lady, but I do. You've done me a kindness, and now you mean to do me an honor as well.”

Kelsea's eyes filled with tears. She looked up at Elston, seeing his huge form as a blur. “Hold him steady, Elston. I won't be able to do this twice.”

“Done, Lady.”

Kelsea dashed the tears away, grabbed a handful of Mhurn's blond hair, and yanked his head upright. She spotted his carotid artery, pulsing gently at the corner of his throat. Barty always said to avoid the carotid, if possible; an imprecise cut would end up covering the cutter in blood. She gripped her knife tightly, suddenly sure that this was what Barty would have wanted: for her to do a clean job. She placed the edge of the blade flat against the right side of Mhurn's throat, then drew it across in a quick, sharp movement. Warm crimson spurted over her knife hand but Kelsea ignored it, holding Mhurn's head up long enough to see the widening red smile, the blood beginning to sheet down his throat. His blue eyes stared dreamily into hers for another minute, then she let go of his hair and backed away, watching his head sink slowly toward his chest.

“That's well done, Majesty,” Venner remarked. “A good, clean slice.”

Kelsea sat down on the ground, crying now, and leaned her head on her crossed arms.

“Leave her alone for a minute,” Mace ordered roughly. “Put him on the fire. Coryn, you take charge of the rest of that crap in the pouch; maybe Arliss can make something of it when we get home.”

They all moved away then, except for one guard who sat down beside her. Pen.

“Lady,” he murmured. “It's time to go.”

Kelsea nodded, but it seemed she couldn't stop crying; the tears continued to leak out no matter how she worked to get control. Her breath came in thick, asthmatic gasps. After a moment she felt Pen's hand on hers, gently wiping away the blood.

“Pen!”

Pen's hand vanished.

“Get her up! We've stayed too long already!”

Pen's reached beneath Kelsea's arm, his touch impersonal now, and lifted her from the ground. He held her up as she stumbled along, heading for the pile of boulders where the horses waited inside their makeshift paddock. When she reached Dyer, who was holding her horse, she climbed up automatically, wiping her face on her sleeve.

“Can we go, Lady?”

Kelsea turned to stare behind them, toward the eastern end of the pass. She could see nothing beyond; the rise was too steep. There was no time, but she had the sudden urge to tiptoe up to the edge of the slope, to peek over and behold Mortmesne, this land she'd seen only in dreams. But they were all waiting for her. She wiped the last tears from her cheeks. Mhurn's face was in her mind, but she clenched the reins in her fist and wiped that image clean as well. “All right. Let's go home.”

 

O
nce they got out of the Argive, they made good time. The pass itself was sticky with mud, but as soon as they started downhill, the land quickly became dry as a bone. It had only rained over the pass. From time to time, Kelsea reached up and clutched the sapphires beneath her shirt. She could feel nothing from them today, but she wasn't deceived; they wouldn't stay quiet for long. She thought of the nausea she'd felt on the outward journey, the way her mind had been forced forward. The dying sensation when she tried to take one of them off.

What will they do to me?

From their vantage in the foothills, they could see the dark train of the caravan, perhaps half a day's ride ahead, snaking its way across the grasslands. Mace had questioned the villagers well into the night while Kelsea slept, eliciting several interesting facts. Thorne had raided a total of twelve villages along the shores of the Crithe, villages where the men went off together each spring to trade goods in New London. Thorne's men had come the very night after the men had departed, setting fires to create confusion before they broke into houses and grabbed women and children.

Kelsea felt a chill steal down her spine, remembering that bitterly cold morning in the village, the screams of the woman as she lost her sons. She had no urge to intercept the caravan, but she worried about all of those women and children, alone without guard. It seemed important to keep them within sight.

And what could you do if they were attacked, you and your fifteen guards?
her mind jeered.

I could do a lot
, Kelsea replied darkly, remembering the vast blue light, the voltage that had flared inside her.
I could do plenty.

But deep down, she was sure there was no danger out here anymore. Coryn had had the good sense to loose Thorne's horses; the few men who'd escaped would be stuck on foot, and it was a very long walk to anywhere. They'd found several of the horses already, grazing in the foothills, and Mace had been able to slip a rope around their necks. He'd given one of the extra horses to the Gate Guard, Javel, though Dyer had tied the man's legs to his saddle and now remained close behind him, watching him with a hawk's eye. Kelsea didn't think it was necessary. In her mind, she saw Javel hacking at the burning cage, his face bathed in soot.

There's something more to him
, she thought,
and Mace sees it too.

When they drew even with the caravan, still a thin shadow several miles to the north, Mace allowed the troop to slow down and keep pace. The sun had crossed a good part of the sky, and they'd covered more than half the distance back to the Crithe when Mace called a halt.

“What is it?”

“A rider,” he replied, staring toward the caravan. “Wellmer, get up here!”

It was indeed a single rider, galloping for all he was worth across the countryside from the north. He rode so fast that he left a cloud of dust behind him, despite the fact that the country was mostly grass.

Elston, Pen, and Mace drew together in a triangle around Kelsea, who felt her stomach tightening. What could have gone wrong now?

“He's Caden,” Pen murmured. “I see the cloak.”

“But only a messenger,” Mace remarked thoughtfully. “I'm going to guess we're in a lot of trouble for the death of Dwyne.”

“He's dead?” Kelsea asked.

Mace's eyes never left the rider. “Your friend killed him. But the Caden have no way of knowing that. They'll think it was us.”

“Well, they've tried to kill me before. I can't be in more trouble than I was already.”

“It's not like the Caden to send one man for anything, Lady. Let's err on the side of caution and just wait here.”

Kelsea scanned the country around them: wide stretches of grassland and wheat, with some patches of rock, all the way to the blue line of the Crithe. It seemed almost a different country now, but the change wasn't in the land; it was in Kelsea.

“Sir?” Wellmer rode up from the rear with his bow already in hand. “He's got a Caden cloak, all right, but he has a child with him.”

“What?”

“A small boy, maybe five or six years old.”

Mace frowned for a moment, thinking. Then his brow smoothed out and he smiled, that genuinely pleased smile that Kelsea saw so rarely. “Fortune, you happy bitch.”

“What is it?”

“Many of the Caden have bastards around the kingdom, Lady, but Caden aren't particularly suited for fatherhood. The more decent ones usually just give the woman a sum of money and leave.”

“Good for them.”

“You don't see affection very often,” Mace continued, as though Kelsea hadn't spoken, “but I've heard tell of a few Caden who try to live a secret life on the side, a normal life with a woman and family concealed. They're very careful about it, for it would be a fantastic piece of leverage. I think Thorne may have been stupid enough to snatch a Caden's child. Who is it, Wellmer?”

“I don't know all of them by sight yet, sir.”

“Describe him.”

“Sandy hair. A bruiser. He has a sword and short knife. And an ugly scar across his forehead.”

Elston, Pen, and Mace turned to stare at each other, and an entire conversation passed between them in the space of a few seconds.

“What?” Kelsea asked.

“Let's see what he does,” Mace told Elston, then turned to Pen. “You watch only the Queen's safety, understand? Nothing else.”

The Caden pulled his horse to a halt perhaps fifty yards away. Kelsea saw that he did indeed have a small child tucked in one arm; he lowered the boy carefully toward the ground before climbing down himself. “Who is he?”

“Merritt, Lady,” Mace replied. “The Caden don't have a single leader; they're too factional. But Merritt wields considerable power among them, even more than Dwyne.”

“If the child was a secret, there's probably a woman in one of those villages as well,” Elston cautioned. “We need to handle this carefully.”

“Agreed.”

Now Merritt took his horse's bridle in one hand, his son's hand in the other, and began to walk toward Kelsea, his movements slow and cautious. He was indeed blond and heavily built, towering over the child beside him. But there was clear affection between them; it was obvious in the way the man shrank his strides to match the boy's, the way the boy looked up at him every few moments, as though to be sure he was still there.