The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  “The price of treachery in my Tearling! Mark and remember it!”

  Thorne’s neck snapped. He gave a final gagging cough and seemed to seize, his spine arching. Then he was gone. Kelsea felt him go, like leaves in a wind, but the wild darkness inside her didn’t diminish. Instead, it pushed harder, demanding that she find another traitor, more blood. Kelsea drove it back, sensing that here was a seductive thing, to be carefully controlled. She looked down at Thorne’s corpse, at the muddy mark of her boot on his neck. The darkness in her mind faded to white, then disappeared.

  “To the Queen!” a woman’s voice shouted.

  “To the Queen!”

  Kelsea looked up and saw cups upraised all across the crowd. They had come prepared to celebrate when the deed was done. She had given the crowd what they wanted, what they needed . . . but still Kelsea hesitated, a trickle of anxiety fermenting in her belly now.

  Who did those things? The queen of spades? Or me?

  Mace placed a cup in her hand, and Kelsea suddenly understood that the drinking was a ritual. She raised the cup to the crowd, wondering if there were any specific words she was supposed to say. No; she was the Queen. She could make up her own words, her own ritual, and they would trump everything that had come before.

  “The health of my people!” she shouted. “The health of the Tearling!”

  The crowd roared the final words back to her and then drank. Kelsea took a sip and realized that although Mace had come prepared, he was no fool; the liquid in her cup was only water. But it tasted sweet somehow, and Kelsea drained it. When she turned to give the cup back, she found Mace still holding the noose in his other hand. Although his face was blank, Kelsea sensed disapproval beneath.

  “Well, Lazarus?”

  “You’ve changed, Lady. I never thought to see you bow to the will of the mob.”

  Kelsea flushed. The realization that Mace could still do that, make her feel ashamed with a single cutting remark, was unwelcome. “I bow to no one.”

  “That I can well believe.”

  Mace turned away, and Kelsea grabbed his arm, desperate to make him understand. “I haven’t changed, Lazarus. I’ve grown older, that’s all. I’m still me.”

  “No, Lady.” Mace sighed, and the sigh seemed to pass through Kelsea, a breath of doom on cold wings. “Tell yourself whatever pleasing stories you want, but you’re not the girl we took from the cottage. You’ve become someone else.”

  Chapter 10

  Father Tyler

  Always, we think we know what courage means. If I were called upon, we say, I would answer the call. I would not hesitate. Until the moment is upon us, and then we realize that the demands of true courage are very different from what we had envisioned, long ago on that bright morning when we felt brave.

  —Father Tyler’s Collected Sermons, FROM THE ARVATH ARCHIVE

  The Arvath staircase was made of solid stone, bleached white stone that had been mined from the rocks around Crossing’s End. But with each step, Tyler became more careful, tormented by an irrational certainty that the stone staircase would squeak beneath his feet. He climbed slowly, dragging his broken leg.

  Occasionally he passed one of his brothers going down the staircase, and they gave him only the most cursory glance before moving on. Tyler’s position as Keep Priest gave him latitude, made it plausible that he might be invited up to the Holy Father’s private quarters so late at night. But Tyler had to count the landings in order to know where he was. He had never climbed so high in the Arvath. He did not know whether he would be coming back down.

  When he reached the ninth floor, he darted away from the staircase, concealing himself in a recess that stood across the hall. The opulence of his surroundings made Tyler dizzy, for the decor on this level was a far cry from the plain stone walls and handwoven rugs that graced the brothers’ quarters downstairs. Gold and silver shone in the torchlight: candlestands, tables, statuary. The floors were Cadarese marble. The walls were draped with red and purple velvet.

  The hallway continued for perhaps fifty feet before it turned left toward the Holy Father’s private quarters. There was no one in sight, but Tyler knew that around the corner he would surely find guards and acolytes, at least several of them, near the Holy Father’s door. It was just after two o’clock in the morning. If Tyler was lucky, the Holy Father would be sleeping, but it seemed too much to hope for that his guards and servants should do the same. Even on tiptoe, Tyler’s shoes made a scuffling sound that seemed deafening in the cavernous hallway.

  I will grab my books and be gone, he repeated to himself. Only ten books; Tyler had already chosen them, so that he would not be tempted to exceed his capacity. He liked the historical significance of the number 10, the symmetry with the Crossing. Books were one of the few personal items William Tear had allowed his people, ten books apiece. If they tried to sneak other items aboard, he left them behind. It was only arcana, one of thousands of tiny pieces of information about the Crossing that Tyler had picked up during his lifetime. But he had never forgotten a single one.

  If I survive this, Tyler decided, I will write the first history of the Crossing. I’ll bind it myself, and present it to the Queen for printing.

  That was a good thing to tell himself, a grand dream. But the Queen’s ambition to create a printing press had come to naught so far. No one in the Tearling had any idea how to begin building such a thing. There was no mechanism for broad distribution of the written word.

  There will be.

  Tyler blinked. The voice was implacable. He believed it.

  Peering around the corner, he saw that fear had made him overly cautious. Only two men stood in front of the Holy Father’s door, and they were acolytes, not the well-armed guards who accompanied the Holy Father whenever he left the safety of the Arvath. If Brother Matthew had still been the Holy Father’s right hand, this would be much more difficult, but Brother Matthew had been executed Sunday past, and these two on the door appeared young and soft, perhaps not yet taken into the Holy Father’s confidence. They looked up sleepily as he approached.

  “Good evening, brothers. I must speak to His Holiness.”

  The acolytes exchanged nervous looks. One of them, a boy barely out of his teens with a catastrophic overbite, replied, “His Holiness is not receiving visitors this evening.”

  “The Holy Father told me that I was to come to him with this news immediately.”

  They shot each other another uncertain glance. Indecisive, these two, and poorly trained. It was another marked difference between Anders and the old Holy Father, who never let his people represent him to the world until they were as competent as himself.

  “Surely it can wait until morning?” the second youth asked. He was even younger than the first, still young enough for pimples to dot his face in small clusters.

  “It cannot,” Tyler answered firmly. “This is news of the most vital importance.”

  They turned away from him and held a huddled conference. Despite his anxiety, Tyler was amused to hear the two of them begin a game of rock, paper, and scissors to decide who would go in. After three tries, the young man with the overbite lost and slipped, white-faced, through the great double doors. The other acolyte did his best to appear professional while they waited, but he yawned continually, ruining the illusion. Tyler could only pity him, this boy growing up directly under Anders’s eye and tutelage. He could not imagine how the boy would conceive of his Church, his God.

  “I should check your bag,” the boy ventured after a few moments.

  Tyler held out his satchel and the acolyte peered inside, but all he saw was Tyler’s old Bible, a heavy hardcover given to him by Father Alan on his eighth birthday. The acolyte handed the satchel back, and Tyler replaced the strap over his head, settling the bag across his body. Sometime in the last few minutes, his fear had begun to ebb, leaving something electric in its wake. His heart seemed too big for his chest.

  The other acolyte’s head appeared from the doorway,
and Tyler could not mistake the look of relief on his face: Tyler was wanted. “Please come in.”

  He opened the door wide, and Tyler followed him into what was clearly a common room of some sort, an enormous chamber with high ceilings and thick rugs. Oil paintings covered the walls, and velvet sofas were scattered throughout the room. The acolyte did not look at any of these things, keeping his gaze straight ahead. But Tyler, who glanced around the room in curiosity, let out a startled gasp. To his right, a woman lay sprawled on a low sofa, completely naked, her limbs thrown every which way to conceal nothing. It was the first time in his life that Tyler had seen a woman’s bare breasts, and he turned away quickly, embarrassed both for her and for himself. But the woman seemed entirely oblivious of their presence, her eyes wide and unfocused.

  “Please wait here,” the acolyte told him, and Tyler halted abruptly as the boy continued onward toward a large, arched doorway at the far end of the room. Left alone, Tyler was unable to stop staring at the woman on the sofa, at her breasts and the dark triangle between her thighs. Although he felt no lust—his age had moved him past that particular indignity—the sight of these things was fascinating. The woman had long, dark hair that fell in ribbons over the edge of the sofa, and she returned his gaze without shame. As Tyler’s eyes adjusted to the dim candlelight, he spied a syringe within the crease of her elbow, the head of a needle still buried deep in her arm. Having seen this, he could not help seeing other things: a vial of white powder, still uncapped, on the low table between them; a spoon, bent and twisted through long misuse; deep bruising that went halfway up the woman’s other arm. She was not young, this woman, but her body was still lithe, and to Tyler’s eye, the needle in her arm seemed a ruinous thing, a perversion of potential.

  “Who are you?” she asked Tyler, her voice wet and slurred. “Never seen you before.”

  “Tyler.”

  “You a priest?”

  “Yes.”

  She straightened a bit, propping herself on one elbow. Her gaze had sharpened slightly. “Never seen a naked woman before, eh?”

  “No,” Tyler replied, dropping his gaze to stare at the ground. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I don’t mind if they look.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Oh . . .” The woman looked off into the corner, her eyes turning vague again. “All of them. Other priests. The ones who visit. They never stop at looking.”

  Something turned over in Tyler’s stomach.

  “You won’t touch, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Want a hit?”

  “No, thank you.” Tyler pulled the ancient Bible from his bag, fingering the edges of the cover, touching the pages. It felt very solid in his hand. “What’s your name?”

  “Maya.”

  “Tyler! What brings you to me so late at night?”

  But the Holy Father already knew. His face radiated good humor. He wore a hastily tied robe of black silk, and his hair was mussed, but he made no attempt to repair his appearance, and Tyler remembered suddenly that there was a second woman here, that the Holy Father kept two. He had forgotten to include the women in his calculations, and their presence would make his enterprise more dangerous. For a moment Tyler considered begging off, lying to the Holy Father and then simply leaving the Arvath under the cover of night. But then, thinking of his books, he screwed up his courage, set his face in grim lines, and announced, “It’s done, Your Holiness.”

  “The Queen took the substance?”

  “Yes.”

  “So late?”

  “The Queen sleeps little these days, Your Holiness.”

  This, at least, was true. Tyler, who had spent several recent nights on his favorite sofa in the Queen’s library, had been awakened more than once by the Queen herself, touring her bookshelves, touching each book in turn. She wandered the wing, trailed doggedly by Pen Alcott, but always she came back to her library for solace. She and Tyler were alike that way, but whatever the Queen was looking for, she did not find it. Except for the times when she fell into her strange catatonic states—and thank God the Holy Father knew nothing of those—she seemed to sleep very little. “She took it in tea, perhaps an hour ago.”

  “Well, this is splendid news, Tyler!” The Holy Father clapped him on the back, and Tyler had to fight not to shrink away. Maya was staring at the two of them now, her eyes narrow and sharp.

  “My books, Your Holiness?”

  “Well, I think we’ll wait and make sure the deed is done, Tyler. You understand.” The Holy Father grinned, a predator’s grin that consumed his whole face.

  Tyler’s hands tightened on his Bible, but he nodded. “May I not even have a glimpse of my books, Your Holiness? I have missed them.”

  The Holy Father stared at him, a moment that seemed very long. “Certainly, Tyler. Come with me. They’re in my bedchamber.”

  From the corner of his eye, Tyler saw Maya’s mouth drop open in dismay. Her presence could wreck everything, but there was no turning back now. The moment the Holy Father turned away, Tyler swung the Bible with all of his strength, the way a woodsman would swing an axe. The heavy book connected solidly with the Holy Father’s head and knocked him sprawling, but the blow had not been enough; the Holy Father pushed himself to his hands and knees, drawing deep breath, preparing to shout.

  “Please, God,” Tyler breathed. He limped forward, raised the Bible, and brought it straight down on the back of the Holy Father’s head. The Holy Father dropped soundlessly to the rug, and this time he lay still.

  Tyler looked up and found Maya staring at him with wide eyes. He tucked the Bible back into his bag, raising his hands to show that he meant her no harm. “My books. He was lying, wasn’t he? They’re not here.”

  “They took them out a week ago. Down to the basement.”

  This, more than anything else, told Tyler that the promise of a reward had been a lie. If he’d done the deed, the Holy Father would have . . . what? Killed him? Tyler considered the man on the ground for a moment—he was breathing, Tyler noticed gratefully—before he saw the clear path, the smart move: the Holy Father would have handed him over to the Mace.

  “Thank you, God,” Tyler breathed, “that I did not do it.”

  “You’re the Queen’s priest,” said Maya.

  “Yes.” Tyler edged toward the door, listening, but there was no noise from outside. Still, he should leave now, before the Holy Father regained consciousness, before the woman raised the alarm. He grasped the handle, but her voice stopped him.

  “Is the Queen good?”

  Tyler turned and saw that Maya’s eyes had filled with alarming need. He had seen similar desperation long ago, out in the country, when dying parishioners would ask a still-unordained Tyler to take their final confessions. For some strange reason of her own, Maya needed him to answer yes.

  “Yes, she’s good. She wants to make things better.”

  “Better for who?”

  “For everyone.”

  Maya stared at him for a moment longer, then scrambled up from the sofa. Tyler was no longer embarrassed by her nakedness; in fact, for a few moments he had forgotten all about it. Maya hurried over to the Holy Father’s prone body, reached beneath him, and pulled a chain over his head. On the chain was a small silver key.

  “I need to leave,” Tyler told her. He did not want to abandon her here, she was so terribly troubled, but he could not take her with him, even if she wished to flee. Adrenaline had departed, and was rapidly being replaced by the full realization of what he had done. His leg was even worse than he’d thought; going up the stairs had strained it badly. The journey downward would be terrible.

  “My mum was a pro, priest.”

  “What?”

  “A pro. A prostitute.” Maya crossed the room and crouched down in front of a glossy oak cabinet, her movements sure. Tyler barely recognized the languid addict of a few moments before. “Mum used to talk to us about the thing she would do someday, the one im
portant thing that would wipe out all the years before. You only got one moment, Mum said, and when it came, you had to jump, no matter the cost.”

  “I really need to—”

  “He tells us about the invasion. Soon the Mort will be at the walls, and there are too many to hold back. It will take a miracle.” The lock clicked, and Maya opened the cabinet, then looked up at him, her face suddenly shrewd. “But they say the Queen is full of miracles.”

  When she stood, she held a large wooden box that had been burnished within an inch of its life; the sides gleamed deep cherry in the torchlight. “You have to give it back to her. It’s wrong for him to keep it here.”

  “What is it?”

  She opened the lid, and Tyler stared at the Tear crown, which sat before him on a deep red cushion. Silver and sapphire glittered, sparkling reflections against the open lid of the box.

  “This is my moment, priest,” Maya told him, shoving the box into his hands. “Take it and go.”

  Tyler considered her for a moment, thinking again of the farmers he had known in his youth, dying in their huts, desperate to confess, and he wished that he could suspend time, even for an hour, to sit and talk to this woman who had never had anyone to listen. Her dark eyes were entirely clear now, and Tyler saw that they were beautiful, despite the lines that shrouded them like hoods.

  “Andy?” A woman’s voice drifted from beyond the darkened archway, sleepy and confused. “Andy? Where’d you get to?”

  “Go, priest,” Maya ordered. “I’ll try to hold her, but you have very little time.”

  Tyler hesitated a moment longer, then took the box and tucked it alongside the Bible in his satchel. For a moment, grief over his books threatened to overtake him, but he would not give it space, was ashamed to even feel it now. He had lost his library, but the woman before him was risking her life.

  “Go,” she told him again, and Tyler limped for the doors, opening one of them just wide enough to let himself through. His last glimpse of Maya was fleeting, a quick flash of her staring at the vial on the table before he shut the door behind him. The two acolytes leaned against the wall on either side, so casually that Tyler wondered if they had been eavesdropping. Overbite eyed him narrowly, then asked, “Does the Holy Father want us?”