The Queen of the Tearling (5 page)

The guards had set up bedrolls around the fire, but none of them appeared to have seen any use yet. The air was heavy with an unpleasant, yeasty smell that Kelsea deduced must be beer, although there had never been any alcohol at the cottage. Carlin wouldn't allow it.

Only Carroll and Mace stood when she approached. They appeared to be sober, but the rest of the Guard simply regarded her unblinkingly. Elston, she saw, had fallen asleep with his head on a thick oak log.

“Did you need something, Lady?” Carroll asked.

Kelsea wanted to shriek at them, to let out two pent-up hours' worth of sleeplessness. But then she looked around at their reddened faces and thought better of it. Carlin said that it was easier to reason with a toddler than with a drunk. Besides, drunken people in books often disclosed secrets. Perhaps Kelsea could actually get them to talk to her.

She tucked her cloak beneath herself and sat down between Elston and Pen. “I want to know what happens when we reach New London.”

Pen turned a bleary gaze toward her. “What happens?”

“Will my uncle try to kill me when we get to the Keep?”

They all stared at her for a moment, until Mace finally answered, “Probably.”

“Your uncle couldn't kill anybody,” Coryn muttered. “I'd be more worried about the Caden.”

“We don't
know
they're behind us,” the red-bearded man argued.

“We don't know anything,” Carroll announced in a shut-up voice, and turned back to Kelsea. “Lady, wouldn't you rather simply trust us to protect you?”

“Your mother always did,” added the red-bearded man.

Kelsea narrowed her eyes. “What's your name?”

“Dyer, Lady.”

“Well, Dyer, you're not dealing with my mother. You're dealing with me.”

Dyer blinked owlishly in the dim light. After a moment, he murmured, “I meant no offense, Lady.”

She nodded and turned back to Carroll. “I was asking what happens when we get there.”

“I doubt we'll actually have to fight our way into the Keep, Lady. We'll bring you in in high daylight; the city will be crowded this weekend, and the Regent isn't brave enough to kill you in front of the wide world. But they'll come for you in the Keep, without doubt.”

“Who is they?”

Mace spoke up. “Your uncle isn't the only one who wants you dead, Lady. The Red Queen has everything to gain by keeping the Regent on the throne.”

“Isn't the castle inside the Keep secure?”

“There's no castle. The Keep's enormous, but it's a single structure: your castle.”

Kelsea blushed. “I didn't know that. No one told me much about the Keep.”

“What the hell were you learning all these years?” asked Dyer.

Carroll chuckled. “You know Barty. He was a great medic, but not much of a details man. Not unless he was talking about his precious plants.”

Kelsea didn't want to hear about other people's experiences with Barty. She cut Dyer off before he could reply and asked, “What about our pursuers?”

Carroll shrugged. “Caden, probably, with a little Mort assistance. The hawks we've spotted may be merely hawks, but I think not. Your uncle isn't above taking help from the Mort.”

“Of course not,” slurred Elston, sitting up from his log and wiping drool from the corner of his mouth. “Surprised the Regent doesn't use his own women as shields.”

“I thought the Tearling was poor,” Kelsea interrupted. “What would my uncle give in return for such an alliance? Lumber?”

The guards glanced at each other, and Kelsea felt them unite against her in silence, as plainly as if they'd had a conversation.

“Lady,” Carroll said apologetically, “many of us spent our lives guarding your mother. We don't cease to protect her just because she's dead.”

“I was never in Queen Elyssa's Guard,” Pen ventured. “Couldn't I—”

“Pen, you're a Queen's Guard.”

Pen shut up.

Kelsea looked around the circle. “Do all of you know who my father is?”

They stared back at her in mute rebellion. Kelsea felt her temper begin to rise, and bit down hard on the inside of her right cheek, an old reflex. Carlin had cautioned her many times that a wild temper was something a ruler couldn't afford, so Kelsea had learned to control her temper around Carlin, and Carlin had fallen for it. But Barty had known better. He was the one who'd suggested Kelsea bite down on something. Pain counteracted the anger, at least temporarily, sent it somewhere else. But the frustration didn't go anywhere. It was like being back in the schoolroom with Carlin. These men knew so many things, and they wouldn't tell her a single one. “Well, then, what can you tell me about the Red Queen?”

“She's a witch,” the handsome blond guard announced flatly. It was the first time Kelsea had heard him speak. The fire highlighted his face, chiseled and symmetrical. His eyes were a pure, wintry blue.
Had
her mother chosen them for their looks? Kelsea shied away from the thought. She had a very specific idea of what her mother should have been like, an idea created in her earliest days and then woven, embellished, each year she remained trapped in the cottage. Her mother was a beautiful, kind woman, warm and reachable where Carlin was cold and distant. Her mother never withheld. Her mother would be coming for her someday, to take her away from the cottage and its endless routines of learning and practicing and preparation in a grand rescue. It was just taking a bit longer than expected.

When Kelsea was seven, Carlin sat her down in the library one day and told her that her mother was long dead. This put an end to the dreams of escape, but it didn't stop Kelsea from constructing new and more elaborate fantasies: Queen Elyssa had been a great queen, beloved by all of her people, a hero who made sure that the poor were fed and the sick doctored. Queen Elyssa sat on her throne and dispensed justice to those who couldn't seek justice for themselves. When she died, they carried her body in a parade through the streets of the city while the people wept and a battalion of the Tear army clashed its swords in salute. Kelsea had honed and polished this vision until she could invoke it at any moment. It dulled her own fear of being Queen, to think that when she returned to the city at nineteen to take the throne, they would give her a parade also, and Kelsea would ride to the Keep surrounded by cheers and weeping, waving benevolently the whole way.

Now, looking around at the group of men around the campfire, Kelsea felt a trickle of unease. What did she really know about her mother, the Queen? What could she really know, when Carlin had always refused to say?

“Come on, Mhurn,” Dyer replied to the blond man, shaking his head. “No one ever proved that the Red Queen's actually a witch.”

Mhurn glared at him. “She
is
a witch. Doesn't matter whether she's got the powers or not. Anyone who lived through the Mort invasion knows she's a witch.”

“What about the Mort invasion?” Kelsea asked, interested. Carlin had never explained the invasion or its causes very well. Twenty years ago the Mort had entered the Tearling, carved their way through the country, and reached the very walls of the Keep. And then . . . nothing. The invasion was over. Whatever had happened, Carlin skipped right over it in each history lesson.

Mhurn ignored Carroll, who had begun to scowl at him, and continued, “Lady, I have a friend who went through the Battle of the Crithe. The Red Queen sent three legions of Mort army into the Tearling and gave them free rein en route to New London. The Crithe was wholesale slaughter. Tear villagers armed with wooden clubs fought Mort soldiers armed with iron and steel, and when the men were dead every female between five and eighty—”

“Mhurn,” Carroll murmured. “Remember who you're talk-
ing to.”

Elston spoke up unexpectedly. “I've been watching her all day, sir. Believe me, she's a tough little thing.”

Kelsea nearly smiled, but the impulse dried up quickly as Mhurn continued, staring at the fire as though hypnotized. “My friend fled his village with his family as the Mort army approached. He tried to cross the Crithe and make for the villages in the north, but he wasn't fast enough, and unfortunately for him, he had a young and pretty wife. She died before his eyes, with the tenth Mort soldier still inside her.”

“Christ, Mhurn!” Dyer got up and staggered off toward the edge of the camp.

“Where are you going?” Carroll called.

“Where do you think? I've got to take a piss.”

Kelsea suspected that Mhurn had told his tale merely to shock her, and so she kept her face still. But the moment their attention was diverted from her, she swallowed hard, tasting something sour in the back of her throat. Mhurn's story was very different from reading about unrestricted warfare in a book.

Mhurn looked around the campfire, his blond head lowered aggressively. “Anyone else think this is information the new queen shouldn't have?”

“I only question your timing, you ass,” Carroll replied softly. “There'll be plenty of time for your tales once she gets on the throne.”

“If she gets there.” Mhurn had located his mug and now he took a great gulp, swallowing convulsively. His eyes were bloodshot, and he looked so tired that Kelsea wondered if he should stop drinking, but could think of no way to suggest it. “Rape and murder went on in every village in their path, Lady, in a straight line through the country, all the way from the Argive to the walls of New London. They even slaughtered the babies. A Mort general named Ducarte went from the Almont Plain to the walls of New London with a Tear baby's corpse strapped to his shield.”

Kelsea wanted to ask what had happened at the walls of New London, for that was where Carlin's tales always stopped. But she agreed with Carroll: Mhurn needed to be reined in. Besides, she wasn't sure she could handle any more first-person history. “What's your point?”

“My point is that soldiers,
most
soldiers, aren't born wanting to act that way. They aren't even trained to act that way. War crimes come from one of two sources, situation or leadership. It wasn't the situation; the Mort army went through the Tearling like a knife through warm butter. It was a holiday for them. Brutality and massacre happened because that's what the Red Queen
wanted
to happen. The last census found over two million people in the Tearling, and I'm not sure they know how precarious their position is. But, Lady, I thought that
you
should know.”

Kelsea swallowed, then asked, “What happened to your friend?”

“They stabbed him in the gut and left him to bleed to death when they moved on. They did a poor job, and he survived. But the Mort army took his ten-year-old daughter in their train. He never saw her alive again.”

Dyer came sauntering back from the trees and plopped down on his bedroll. Kelsea stared into the fire, remembering one morning at her desk in Carlin's library. Carlin showed her an old map of the border between the Tearling and New Europe, a ragged line that ran down the eastern end of the Reddick Forest and the Almont Plain. Carlin was a great admirer of New Europe. Even in the early wake of the Crossing, when borders were barely drawn and the southern New World was a battlefield for warlords, New Europe had been a thriving representative democracy with nearly universal participation in elections. But the Red Queen had changed many things; now New Europe was Mortmesne, and democracy had vanished.

“What does the Red Queen want, then?” Kelsea had asked Carlin. She had no interest in maps and wanted to wrap up the lesson.

“What conquerors always want, Kelsea: everything, with no end in sight.”

Carlin's tone had left Kelsea with a certainty: Carlin, who feared nothing, feared the Red Queen. Queen's Guards were supposed to fear nothing as well, but as Kelsea looked around now, she saw a different story in their faces. She strove for a lighter tone. “Well, then, I'd best not let the Red Queen invade again.”

Dyer snorted. “Precious little you could do, Lady, if she took it into her head.”

Carroll clapped his hands. “Now that we've had our bedtime story from Mhurn, it's time to sleep. And if any of you want a good-night kiss from Elston, let him know.”

Elston chortled into his mug and then spread his huge arms. “Aye, for all who enjoy the tough love.”

Kelsea stood up, tightening her cloak. “Won't you all be hung over in the morning?”

“Probably,” muttered the dark-haired guard named Kibb.

“Is it really a good idea for so many of you to be drunk on this journey?”

Carroll snorted. “Lazarus and I are the real Guard, Lady. These other seven are window dressing.”

All of them burst out laughing, and Kelsea, feeling excluded again, turned and wandered back toward her tent. None of the men followed her, and she wondered whether anyone would guard the tent tonight. But when she turned around, Mace was right behind her, his tall silhouette unmistakable even in the dark.

“How do you do that?”

He shrugged. “It's a gift.”

Kelsea ducked into her tent and fastened the flap. Stretching out on her bedding, she tucked a hand beneath her cheek. She had put on a bravura front by the campfire, but now she was shivering, first in her chest and then spreading to the rest of her body. According to Carlin, Mortmesne loomed large over its neighbors. The Red Queen demanded control, and she had it. If the Regent had truly allied with her, she even had control of the Tearling.

A hacking cough came from the direction of the campfire, but this time Kelsea didn't find the noise irritating. Digging inside her cloak, she took out the second necklace and squeezed it tightly in one hand, her own sapphire in the other. Staring at the apex of the tent, she thought of women raped and babies on the points of swords, and sleep didn't come for a very long time.