The Queen of the Tearling (44 page)

“What happened on the border tonight?”

“Tonight is nothing. There is no time here.”

The Queen pursed her lips and tried again. “Arlen Thorne was bringing a clandestine shipment of Tear across the border. Did something happen?”

“He failed.” There was no emotion in its voice, no human tone at all. “There will be no shipment.”

“How did he fail? Was the girl there?”

“The Tear heir holds both jewels now.”

The Queen's stomach dropped unpleasantly, and she looked down at the hearth, considering various choices. All of them led to the same place. “I must invade the Tearling and kill the girl.”

“You will not invade the Tearling.”

“I have no choice. I have to kill her before she learns to use them.”

The black mass in front of the Queen trembled suddenly, like a door frame struck by a heavy blow. A spear of flame shot from the fire, crossing the hearth to bury itself in the skin of her right hip. She cried out and fell backward, rolling against the carpet until the flames were extinguished. Her hip had burned black, and it squalled in agony when she tried to sit up. She lay on the floor, panting.

When she looked up, the black mass in the air was gone. Instead, a man towered above her, handsome beyond words. His pure black hair swept back from a perfect patrician face, gaunt cheekbones offset by a thick, full-lipped mouth. A beautiful man, but the Queen wasn't fooled by that beauty anymore. Red eyes glittered coldly down at her.

“As high as I set you, I can bring you low,” the dark thing informed her steadily. “I have lived longer even than you, Mort Queen. I see the beginning and the end. You will not harm the Tear heir.”

“Will I fail?” She couldn't imagine it; the Tearling had no steel and a lounging army with a geriatric commander. Even the girl couldn't change that. “Will an invasion fail?”

“You will not invade the Tearling,” the dark thing repeated.

“What am I to do?” she asked in desperation. “My army is restless. The people are restless.”

“Your problems are not mine, Mort Queen. Your problems are merely motes of dust in my sight. Now give me my price.”

Shaking, the Queen pointed toward the bed. She didn't dare disobey the thing above her, but without new slaves, the situation would continue to worsen. She thought of her recurring dream, which came every night now: the man in grey, the necklace, the girl, the firestorm behind her. The real reason for her insomnia had become painfully obvious; she was afraid to sleep.

Behind her, she heard a slithering noise, the low hiss of the thing's breath. She curled up tightly on the floor, cradling her injured hip, and wrapped an arm around her head, trying not to listen. But it was no good. A gurgling sound came from the direction of the bed, and then the slave boy screamed, his high, unbroken voice echoing around the walls of the chamber. The Queen tightened her arms around her head, tensing the muscles of her ears until there was only a thick roaring inside her eardrums. She stayed that way, eyes and ears shut tightly, until it seemed that hours must have passed, that it must be done.

She rolled over, opened her eyes, and screamed. The dark thing was right above her, its face inches from her own, its red gaze staring down at her. Its full lips were smeared with blood.

“I sense your disobedience, Mort Queen. Even now, I can taste it in my mouth. But betrayal has a price; I know that better than anyone. Harm the Tear heir, and you will feel
my
wrath, darker than your darkest dream. Do you wish that?”

The Queen shook her head frantically. Her nipples were rock-hard now, almost aching, and she moaned as the thing slithered off her, licking the last of the blood from its lips. The fire went out, plunging the room into darkness.

The Queen rolled to her other side. Grasping the oak foot of her bed, she began the slow process of hauling herself to her feet. Her hip shrieked as she made it into a squat. She explored the deep, angry welt with her fingers . . . a bad burn, one that would scar. A surgeon could fix it, but use of a surgeon would also prove that she could still be injured. No, the Queen realized, she would have to live with the scar.

Crossing the room by touch, she fumbled around at her desk. There was a candle on her bedside table, but she couldn't bear to go over there in the dark. Something brushed her hand and the Queen gave a small squeal of fright. But it was only a spider, scuttling along in its own alien doings. Her other hand closed on the unmistakable shape of a candle and she lit it, gasping with relief. Her chambers were empty. She was alone.

The Queen wiped sweat from her forehead and cheeks; the rest of her naked body was damp as well. But her legs moved as though driven, propelling her to stand beside the bed. Taking a deep breath, she looked down at the boy.

He had been bled. Even by candlelight, she could see the pallor beneath his dark skin. The thing always used the cut she'd made; the first few times, she'd asked her pages to check the bodies for other incisions, but eventually she stopped. It wasn't anything she wanted to know. The boy's spine was arched nearly to breaking, one arm pulled so far from its socket that it hung limp and twisted behind him on the scarlet bedspread. His mouth was wide, frozen in a scream. His eyes were empty sockets, drained even of blood, viscous holes that stared past the Queen at nothing.

What do they see?
she wondered. Certainly not the same pretty face the dark thing put on for her. All of them looked like this; there were subtle variations, but it was always the same. If not for the eyes, she might have thought the boy dead from pure fright.

Now her stomach began to churn, bile climbing up the back of her throat. The Queen turned and ran for the bathroom, one hand clamped across her mouth, her eyes wide and hunted.

She nearly made it.

Chapter 13

Awakening

In comparing the Glynn Queen to the Red Queen, we find few similarities. They were very different rulers, and we now know that they were motivated by very different goals. I should note that both queens displayed iron will, a shared ability to take the quickest route to what needed to be done. Yet history also gives us ample demonstration that the Glynn Queen, unlike the Red Queen, often tempered her judgments with pity. Indeed, many historians find this to be the crucial difference between the two . . .

—P
ROFESSOR
J
ESSICA
F
ENN, LECTURE TRANSCRIPT
, U
NIVERSITY OF THE
T
EARLING
, 458 M
ARCH

L
ady.”

Something cool swiped her forehead, and Kelsea turned her head, trying to ignore it. Mace had awakened her out of . . . nothing. No dream she could remember, only a sleep as cool and dark and endless as she'd ever had in her life, thousands of miles traveled in unfathomable waters. Her own Crossing, and she had no urge to return.

“Lady.”

Mace's voice was tight with anxiety. She should wake up and let him know she was all right. But the darkness was so warm. It was like being wrapped in velvet.

“She's breathing too slowly. We should get her to a doctor.”

“What doctor could help her now?”

“I just thought—”

“They don't train doctors in magic, Pen, only healers, and most of them are frauds anyway. We just have to wait.”

Kelsea could hear each of them breathing above her, Mace heavy and Pen shallow. Her senses had sharpened; emerging from the depths one layer at a time, she could hear a man singing softly and the whinny of a horse some distance away.

“Did she bring the flood, sir?”

“God knows, Pen.”

“Did the old Queen ever do anything like that?”

“Elyssa?” Mace began to laugh. “Christ, I watched Elyssa wear both jewels for years, and their most extraordinary feat was getting stuck in her dress. We were in the middle of a reception for the Cadarese, and it took us thirty minutes to untangle the damned things with her modesty intact.”

“I think the Queen brought the flood. I think it took everything out of her.”

“She's breathing, Pen. She's alive. Let's not look beyond that.”

“Then why doesn't she wake?”

Pen's voice was filled with something close to grief, and Kelsea realized that it was time now, that she couldn't make them wait any longer. Breaking through the dark warmth in her head, she opened her eyes. Once again she found herself in a blue tent; time might almost have doubled back to that morning when she'd woken and seen the Fetch sitting there.

“Ah, thank Christ,” Mace muttered above her. Kelsea's eyes were drawn first to a bright red patch at his shoulder. His uniform was torn and stained with blood. Pen, kneeling beside him, had no visible wounds, but Kelsea still found Pen the graver case; his eyes were circled dark, the rest of his face ghost-white.

Both of them reached to help her sit up, Pen for her hands and Mace behind her back. Kelsea expected to have a headache, but as she sat up, she found instead that her head felt wonderfully clear, miles wide. She reached up and found both necklaces, still around her neck.

“Don't worry; we didn't dare touch them,” Mace told her dryly.

“I hardly dare touch them.”

“How do you feel, Lady?”

“Good. Too good. How long did I sleep?”

“A day and a half.”

“Are you both all right?”

“We're fine, Lady.”

She pointed to Mace's wounded shoulder. “I see someone finally got through your guard.”

“There were three of them, Lady, and one was switch-handed. If Venner finds out, I'll never hear the end of it.”

“What about the women?”

Mace and Pen looked at each other uncomfortably.

“Speak up!”

“Three lost,” Mace replied gruffly.

“But you saved twenty-two, Majesty,” Pen added, throwing Mace a dark look that, mercifully, he missed. “Twenty-two women. They're fine, and so are the others. They're on their way home.”

“What of the Guard?”

“We lost Tom, Lady.” Mace wiped his forehead with one palm. It was a commonplace gesture, but very expressive in Mace's case; Kelsea thought it was the closest he would let himself come to grief. But she hadn't known Tom well, so she wouldn't shed tears.

“What else?”

“It only stopped raining early this morning, Lady. We were waiting for you to wake up, but I had to make some decisions.”

“Your decisions are usually acceptable, Lazarus.”

“I sent the caravan back. There were a couple of children left motherless, but a woman from their village said that she would look after them.”

Kelsea grabbed his arm, clutching just beneath the elbow. “Is he all right?”

Pen's brow furrowed, but Mace gave her an irritated look; he knew exactly who she meant. She braced herself, anticipating a lecture, but Mace was a good man; he took a deep breath and let it out in a slow sigh. “He's fine, Lady. They all left yesterday, shortly after dawn.”

Kelsea's heart sank, but that was nothing Mace needed to know, so she stretched, eliciting several satisfying cracks in her back. As she pushed herself to her feet, she caught the two guards giving each other a hard glance.

“What?”

“There are things to deal with outside, Majesty.”

“Fine. Let's go.”

Weather could change everything. They'd camped in Thorne's spot, right at the base of the valley that formed the Argive. The entire pass was washed in sunlight, and Kelsea saw that the ravine that had seemed so forbidding at night was actually extraordinarily beautiful, a stark, spare beauty built of bare land and white rock. The walls of the pass gleamed like marble above Kelsea's head.

Her guard was seated around the remains of Thorne's campfire, but upon her approach they stood up, and to her surprise, all of them bowed, even Dyer. Kelsea's black army uniform was streaked and stained with mud, and her hair was undoubtedly a fright, but they didn't seem to care about that. They stood waiting, and after a moment Kelsea realized they weren't waiting for orders from Mace. They were waiting for her.

“Where are the cages? The caravan?”

“I sent it back the way it came, Lady. The prisoners couldn't walk all the way home and most of the mules survived, so we busted off the tops of the cages and turned them into rolling wagons so they could ride comfortably. They should be well into the Almont by now, heading home.”

Kelsea nodded, finding this a good solution. Splintered pieces of the roofs and bars still littered the bottom of the pass. At the far side of the ravine, a line of smoke curled into the air. “What's on fire over there?”

“Tom, Lady,” Mace replied, his voice tight. “No family, and it's what he would have wanted. No ceremony.”

Kelsea looked around at the group, marking a second man missing. “Where's Fell?”

“I sent him back to New London, Lady, with several women who looked like they could use a shopping trip in the big city.”

“That's tasteful, Lazarus. They could have died, and you sent them back to spread propaganda.”

“It is what it is, Lady. And Fell needed to get indoors anyway; he took some sort of lung illness from the wet.”

“Is anyone else injured?”

“Only Elston's pride, Lady,” Kibb piped up.

Elston gave his friend a ferocious glare and then looked down at his feet. “Forgive me, Majesty. I failed to take Arlen Thorne. He got away clean.”

“You're forgiven, Elston. Thorne's a tough mark.”

Bitter laughter erupted from the ground. Looking through several sets of legs, Kelsea saw a man, bound at the wrists, sitting beside the campfire.

“Who's that?”

“Stand, you!” Dyer growled, prodding the prisoner with his foot. The man rose wearily, as though he had a ton of granite between his shoulders. Kelsea's brow quirked, something rippling in her memory. The prisoner wasn't old, perhaps thirty or thirty-five, but his hair was already mostly grey. He looked at her with vacant apathy.

“Javel, Lady. A Gate Guard, and the only survivor who didn't escape. He didn't try to run.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do with him?”

“He's a traitor, Lady,” Dyer told her. “He's already confessed to opening the Keep Gate for the Graham heir.”

“On Thorne's orders?”

“So he says, Lady.”

“How did you extract that information?”

“
Extract?
Christ, Lady, we didn't have to do a thing. He would've screamed it in the town square if he could.”

Kelsea turned back to the prisoner. In spite of the sun's warmth, a nasty shiver went down her spine. This man looked just as Carroll had looked in the clearing: all hope gone, and something inside him already dead. “How did a Gate Guard get mixed up with Thorne?”

Mace shrugged. “His wife was shipped six years ago. I'm guessing Thorne offered to get her back.”

Kelsea's memory was tugging harder now, and she moved closer, signaling to Coryn and Dyer to back off. The prisoner was clearly no threat to anyone; indeed, he looked like he wanted to do nothing more than fall down dead where he stood.

“He's a traitor, Lady,” Dyer repeated. “There's only one fate for a traitor.”

Kelsea nodded, knowing this was true. But out of the blur of that night, which now seemed centuries ago, her mind suddenly dug up a vivid picture: this man, an axe in his hand, swinging wildly at the bars of the cage. She waited for a moment, listening, waiting for Carlin to speak up, to tell her what to do. But there was nothing. She hadn't heard Carlin's voice in a long time. She considered the prisoner for a moment longer, then turned to Dyer. “Take him back to the Keep and put him in a cell.”

“He's a traitor, Majesty! Make an example of him, and the next bastard Thorne asks will think twice!”

“No,” Kelsea replied firmly. Her sapphires gave a light throb, the first thing she'd felt from them since waking. “Take him back, and go easy on him. He won't try to flee.”

Dyer's jaw clenched for a moment, but then he nodded. “Lady.”

Kelsea had expected Mace to disagree, but he remained oddly silent. “Can we go now?”

“A moment more, Lady.” Mace held out an arm, watching while Dyer led Javel away, behind a boulder. “We've business to settle here. Business of the Guard.”

Elston and Kibb leaped across the grass and laid hold of Mhurn, who'd already begun to bolt at Mace's words. Elston lifted him bodily off the ground, letting him struggle against the air, while Kibb began to bind his legs.

“What—”

“Our traitor, Lady.”

Kelsea's mouth dropped open. “Are you certain?”

“Quite certain, Lady.” Mace picked up a saddlebag from the ground and dug through its contents until he produced a leather pouch, carefully rolled and sealed, the way one would pack diamonds or other valuables. Unrolling the pouch, he rifled through it and held one hand out for her inspection. “See here.”

Kelsea moved closer, peering at the substance in his palm. It was a fine white powder, almost like flour. “Opium?”

“Not just opium, Lady,” Coryn remarked from the campfire. “High-grade morphiate. Someone took a lot of care to cook this stuff. We found needles as well.”

Kelsea whirled around, horrified. “
Heroin?
”

“Not quite, Majesty. Not even the Cadarese have been able to synthesize heroin. But they will one day, I have no doubt.”

Kelsea closed her eyes, rubbing her temples. When William Tear had sailed from America to create his kingdom on a hill, he'd managed to eradicate narcotics for a brief time. But the drug trade had clawed its way back; humanity would never stop wanting to ride that particular carousel. Heroin . . . it was the worst development Kelsea could imagine.

“How did you find out?”

“Arliss. He and Thorne compete in several markets. Not an ounce of narcotic moves through New London without going through Thorne's backyard, Lady. It's the easiest thing in the world, to suborn an addict by cutting off his supply.”

“You had no idea of his addiction?”

“If I had, Lady, he would have been gone.”

Kelsea turned and approached Mhurn, who still dangled within Elston's massive arms while Kibb bound his wrists.

“Well, Mhurn, anything to say?”

“Nothing, Majesty.” He refused to meet her gaze. “Nothing to excuse.”

Kelsea stared at him, this man who'd smuggled an assassin into the Queen's Wing, who'd stuck a knife in her back, and found herself remembering that night by the campfire, the tears in his eyes during the ugly scene with Lady Andrews. Carlin had no sympathy for addicts; an addict, she'd told Kelsea, was innately and strategically weak, since his addiction could always be used to break him. Carlin's voice might have fallen silent in Kelsea's mind, but she still knew what Carlin would say: Mhurn was a traitor, and he deserved execution.

Barty had been more lenient about such failings. Once, he'd explained to Kelsea that addiction was like having a crack in your life. “It's a deep crack, and deadly, Kel, but you can build guards around it. You can put up a fence.”

Staring at Mhurn now, Kelsea felt no anger, only pity. It would be nearly impossible to conceal such an addiction, since Mace saw everything. Mhurn must have been in constant withdrawal almost every day of his life.

“Do you confess to treachery, Mhurn?”

“Yes.”

Kelsea looked around and saw that the rest of the Guard had closed in around them, their gazes cold. She turned back to Mhurn, anxious to forestall them, to prolong his life. “When did you become addicted?”