The Queen's Secret

by Jessica Day George

  “If you are implying that I’m a traitor to the Crown …,” Anthea began hotly.

  But then she stopped and put her hand on Bluebell’s neck. She was more loyal to her horses than the Crown, if the Crown meant King Gareth. And that made her want to shout from the rooftops of Travertine that the horses didn’t cause the Dag.

  Jilly and now Finn were headed toward them, sparing Anthea the need to finish.

  “What’s going on?” Finn asked with false casualness. “The horses are getting stirred up.”

  “We are going to help Dr. Rosemary and her colleagues take samples from the horses,” Anthea said with as much confidence as she could muster. She saw Jilly’s eyes widen, and her cousin’s mouth opened, but Anthea kept going. “And when they find a cure for the Dag, we are going to deliver it personally, first to Travertine, and then to the rest of Coronam!”

  9

  LETTERS AND MAPS

  Anthea wanted the horses to ride up, triumphant, into Travertine Palace Square with saddlebags full of a cure for the Dag, but that was not to be. At least not yet. Though they had taken samples from all the horses, and carefully marked which horses had been away from the farm and which had sick riders, science was a slow, meticulous process, as Dr. Rosemary testily informed Anthea a week later.

  “But we can still help,” Anthea yelled through Uncle Andrew’s door.

  There was some coughing, and then a shuffling and dragging sound. Crouched outside Andrew’s door, Anthea sat back on her haunches, but Jilly moved closer. Finn, who had been standing over them looking disapproving, finally sat down cross-legged between the girls.

  “How?” Uncle Andrew said.

  He was apparently sitting just on the other side of his door. Anthea tried to edge away from the crack under the door without making it too obvious. Jilly, sensibly, did too.

  “We’ve gotten almost no mail from the south,” Anthea told him. “Not like I’m expecting much.” She did her best not to sound bitter. “But I did send a letter to Uncle Daniel and Aunt Deirdre, asking if they were all right, and haven’t gotten a response. The queen says that she has checked on them, and they are all right, or were, but that the regular mail service has been mostly suspended.”

  “Most deliveries have stopped,” Finn said. “And the trains are running very irregularly.”

  “But we’re not,” Jilly said, eyes gleaming. “We could set up relay stations and pass things along. Mail. Eggs. Other goods.”

  “We’re not strapping huge cans of milk to the horses,” Finn said.

  “Let’s start with the mail,” Uncle Andrew said. He coughed. “It’s regulated by the Crown.” Another cough, longer this time.

  “Anthea and I have both written to the queen already,” Jilly said.

  “Sorry,” Anthea immediately added.

  After last year’s debacle when she had nearly caused a war (or so it seemed to her) by hiding her correspondence from her uncle, she had tried to be more forthcoming about such things. But she also didn’t really like showing her letters to everyone on the farm before she got “permission” to send them.

  “No, no, that’s fine,” Andrew said. “Has she any news of interest?”

  “Lots of people are sick,” Jilly supplied.

  “And she doesn’t write very often, which I find worrisome,” Anthea put in. “She says she’s not ill, but …”

  They all sat in silence for a minute. There was some quiet coughing from the other side of the door. Then they heard footsteps coming up the stairs. Anthea assumed it was one of the maids or Caillin MacRennie, and continued to fiddle with the horseshoe charm around her neck. She had braided together some hairs from Florian’s, Leonidas’s, and Bluebell’s tails, as was traditional in Leana, but it was scratchy and she was starting to think that putting the charm back on the silver chain Finn had given her might be more comfortable. All of a sudden, Jilly kicked Anthea’s ankle.

  “Ouch! Why did you—”

  It wasn’t Caillin MacRennie or one of the maids who had come upstairs. It was Dr. Rosemary.

  “Captain Thornley,” Dr. Rosemary called through the door. “It’s Dolly Rosemary.”

  Jilly kicked Anthea’s ankle again, more subtly this time, but Anthea couldn’t look at her. She knew exactly what Jilly’s face would look like, and she couldn’t risk offending Dr. Rosemary by cracking a smile. Anthea had assumed that Rosemary was the scientist’s first name, and that calling her Dr. Rosemary was a sort of quaint familiarity on the part of her colleagues. Anthea would not in a million years have suspected that the scientist’s given name was Dolly.

  “Yes, Doctor?” Uncle Andrew called politely back through the door.

  “I need more samples,” Dr. Rosemary said. “We have to track the disease, gather it from people in different stages.”

  “You are welcome to collect samples from any of the riders,” Uncle Andrew said. “And you’ve taken samples from the horses already, correct?”

  “Yes, I’ve tested all the horses and the riders,” Dr. Rosemary said. “Now I want samples from farther afield.

  “I need people of different backgrounds, from different locations that were hit by the disease at different times. The farm is too homogeneous to give me all the information that I need. The only way to devise a cure is to take this disease apart and see all the pieces.”

  She looked down at the young people huddled on the floor. She clenched her fist, but not in a threatening way.

  “It’s almost … it’s like it’s on the tip of my tongue,” she said, mostly to them. “It’s maddening.”

  They all nodded. Anthea wasn’t even sure what she meant, and then thought of the first days at the farm, when the Way had just been heating up in her brain, and her memories of riding had still felt like dreams. It was a maddening feeling, to know something but not be able to understand it.

  “All right,” Uncle Andrew said, sounding more than a little baffled. “You … can do as you like, I can’t stop you.”

  “I want to use the brigade,” Dr. Rosemary said. “The horses will move faster than someone on foot, and can get into more places than the train. I heard the children talking about delivering mail. Could they not also bring me samples?”

  In the long silence that followed, the clock in the downstairs entry hall chimed the time loudly.

  “Dinner!” Jilly said brightly.

  “Even through the door I know you’re planning on going, Jillian,” her father said. “So I may as well give my permission.”

  “Hooray!” Jilly said. “Real work!”

  “Hooray,” Anthea said flatly. “We might all get the Dag.”

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Finn said. “And I don’t mean that in a threatening way,” he added.

  “Of course she doesn’t,” Uncle Andrew said. “Volunteers only, for something like this.

  “Yes, Jilly, I can feel you raising your hand to volunteer!” her father said, just as Jilly did indeed raise her hand.

  “Now, Finn,” he continued, “write a letter to the king. Tell him that we’re going to send teams of horses out. Not very many, because of the sick riders, but some. Ask him where they should go, but make sure it’s in line with what Dr. Rosemary wants. We can deliver letters and light packages, and take samples … or ask the local doctors for samples? Again, I’m sure Dr. Rosemary knows what she wants.”

  “Yes, sir,” Finn said.

  “Anthea?”

  “Yes?”

  “Queen Josephine,” he said, and didn’t need to explain.

  “Naturally,” she said.

  Anthea had already started a letter to the queen before they had gone to talk to Andrew through the door. Now she went back to her room and sat at her desk, staring at the paper for a long time. In a nest of mismatched socks on her windowsill, Arthur stirred drowsily and then went back to sleep. She resisted the urge to poke his round body with a pen and tried to concentrate on her letter.

  Dear Queen Josephine,
<
br />   I was very pleased to receive your letter. I am so relieved to know that you and the princesses are in good health. I am sure, as you say, that if I haven’t received a letter from my aunt and uncle in the Crownlands it is because of the unreliable postal service, but would appreciate any information about them you might have.

  I am in good health, and so is Jilly. Sadly, my uncle Andrew has contracted the Dag, but is still up and around within the confines of his room. We have just consulted with him about going south to help deliver the mail and do other errands.

  Errands? That sounded silly, like she was buying ribbons to decorate a new hat. Oh well, Uncle Andrew would be giving more details to the king, via Finn, so Anthea supposed it wasn’t all that important. What was important was that she answer the queen’s questions.

  I have no wish to cause problems for Dr. Rosemary and her cohorts, but since you asked, I must tell you that I have had little to nothing to do with them since their arrival. They rarely speak to any of us, and they have not expressed any interest in the horses until recently, when Dr. Rosemary asked to take samples of them. She confessed that she had planned to take samples all along, without asking permission or seeking help from the riders. I find this very worrisome. What if they had attempted to take a blood sample from Constantine? He might have killed someone!

  Otherwise, I think that they are doing a fine job: we have had only one death so far. It was a hard blow for us, and especially for his horse, Augustus, but we are very lucky that more of us have not succumbed.

  Anthea had to pause for a moment. That one death had been rough. Reynolds, a gentle soul of few words, had been laid to rest the day before, and even the most hardened of the riders had wept. But more distressing was that his horse, Augustus, was still inconsolable. He had had to be heavily restrained and there was talk of sedating him, out of fear that he would hurt himself. How long he would grieve no one was sure. Most riders had died of old age, since they rarely left the farm, and the horses had quietly passed of grief at the same time.

  Dr. Rosemary and her people are hard at work on a cure, and taking excellent care of those of the riders who are sick. They have had no cause to deal with the horses, because horses do not get the Dag! That is the best news we have had in some weeks. The horses cannot have caused the disease, because they seem to be immune to it. They cannot spread it, either. We are hoping that this will help people trust horses more, when they see that they are not the cause of the sickness, and that they can be useful!

  Dr. Rosemary has proposed that along with delivering messages, we help to gather samples for further study. I am happy that she at last begins to realize our worth, but not pleased at the thought of exposing our riders to more sickness.

  All the best wishes to you and your daughters,

  Anthea

  Anthea quickly sealed the letter into an envelope, stamping the wax with a horseshoe-shaped seal Uncle Andrew had given her for her birthday. She wanted to make sure that she didn’t change her mind and go back and start crossing things out and obsessing over every line. She adored the queen, but she was still the queen. As it was, Anthea knew she would spend the next several days worrying about how childish “all the best wishes” sounded, or if she should have put her full name underneath.

  She addressed the letter, and let herself be pleased with how much her handwriting had improved just in the last year. It was one thing for her old headmistress, Miss Miniver, to tell them to imagine they were writing a letter to the queen, but quite another to know that your letter was actually going to be read by the actual queen. It had done wonders for her handwriting, and Jilly’s, though Jilly would never admit it.

  But now she had to post the letter, or talk about who was going to post the letter, and that meant an even more frightening task. Before they had even gone up to Andrew’s room, Finn had come to her room to present his plan in greater detail. Jilly was with him, but, as Finn said quite bluntly, her vote didn’t count.

  As soon as he told Anthea why he needed her vote, she understood why Jilly didn’t count. She felt much the same way as Jilly, but was a bit more clearheaded about it. Also, she was flattered that Finn had even asked her, since he didn’t have to. He was, after all, the King of Leana, though it was only at the farm that they all deferred to him. As far as the Crown was concerned, he was a courier like the girls. As far as the Crown was concerned, the Horse Brigade was entirely under the direction of Captain Andrew Thornley and his two lieutenants: Caillin MacRennie and Jack Perkins.

  And Perkins was the problem.

  It wasn’t that Anthea hated Perkins. It wasn’t even that Perkins hated Anthea. It was that Perkins hated everyone, and everything, but horses. As little use as he had for other human beings, he especially seemed to have no use for Coronam, and Rose Maidens, and the Crown, and didn’t even try to hide his disdain.

  With Andrew sick and quarantined, Caillin MacRennie in charge of the entire farm, and Finn too young to be officially in charge, Perkins was the man they had to see. Perkins would need to help them make arrangements and organize routes and riders, supplies and jobs. They knew he would do it, for the good of the brigade. But he definitely wouldn’t like some of the details.

  “This is beyond foolish,” Perkins informed Finn, after they had laid out their plans.

  “Here now,” Caillin MacRennie countered. “I think it’s grand.”

  Finn had met Anthea and Jilly at the doorway to the dining room, which Caillin MacRennie and Perkins used as an office now. Finn spread out the map and began marking the places in ink where they had tried to establish camps before the Dag, and the places he thought they needed camps with a pencil.

  “Beyond foolish. Suicidal,” Perkins restated.

  “Now, now, think on it,” Caillin MacRennie said. “We can make drops and pickups without having to touch or speak to another soul. Dr. Rosemary will give us sample boxes with instructions for the local docs, and we won’t have to come within twenty feet of the sick.

  “It will help us show the people down there in the south our worth.”

  “We shouldn’t have to show them our worth,” Perkins said hotly.

  “No, we shouldn’t,” Anthea agreed.

  Finn and Jilly turned on her in surprise. She had barely managed to speak in Perkins’s presence before, and certainly never agreed with him. Perkins’s eyes flickered and then narrowed.

  “We shouldn’t have to, but nonetheless we need to,” Anthea continued. “We need to show people that horses aren’t sickly, and that we aren’t planning on using them to overthrow the Crown.”

  “We shouldn’t have to,” Perkins began again, his pale but not unpleasant features darkening with rage.

  “But we do,” Caillin MacRennie said. “And so we will.”

  “We haven’t even gotten to the bad part yet,” Jilly said out of the corner of her mouth.

  Anthea put a hand over her eyes. Finn let out a bark of laughter.

  “What bad part?” Perkins demanded.

  “With so many of the men sick …,” Finn began, but Perkins had a look of dawning horror on his face before he could finish. “We need as many able-bodied riders—”

  “You want to send these little girls south of the Wall to represent us to the south?”

  Anthea couldn’t decide what part of that sentence was the most insulting, or even what Perkins was trying to say. Did he think they were too young? Too flighty? Too female? Or that the south was too dangerous for them? She decided the whole question offended her.

  Jilly clearly felt the same way.

  She began to swell like a rare fish that Anthea had once seen at an aquarium in Travertine. Only the fish had been slightly less red in color.

  Finn put a hand on Jilly’s arm and stopped her. Anthea felt a little pang of jealousy. If she were more prone to loud ranting, she supposed Finn might be holding her arm now.

  “Are you forgetting, Perkins, that these little girls are the ones who took a small herd of horses south, a
lone, to make peace with King Gareth and forge an alliance with Queen Josephine?”

  Perkins’s mouth made a fine line. He shook his head.

  “And while I know that you dislike the idea of having to have an alliance with the Coronami,” Finn said, and Perkins’s mouth tightened, “I want you to remember two things: one being that you know very well that the Coronami Crown rules this land whether we like it or not, and two is that if anyone has a reason to complain about that fact, that person should be me.”

  Even Perkins didn’t have a quick reply to that.

  Anthea tried and failed to not notice that Finn had let go of Jilly’s arm as soon as he started speaking. She also tried, and succeeded, in sounding supportive without being condescending or gloating toward Perkins as she told Finn, “Jilly and I are ready. We’ll go straight to Travertine.”

  “This is a disaster,” Perkins said.

  10

  THE THEOS

  “Everybody line up,” Anthea shouted. “You get one saddlebag of food for yourself, one saddlebag to fill with personal belongings, a bedroll, and two nets of fodder.”

  “Yes, miss!”

  Several of the men shouted it in unison. One of them grumbled, and one of them just turned away to get the things without looking at her. Anthea told herself she didn’t care. She didn’t need to remind them. They wouldn’t forget their food or the fodder for the horses. But it was her job to see off “her” riders, and she would do it whether they liked it or not.

  While the men went along the large table set up with supplies and filled their saddlebag with sandwiches, cookies, and packets of dried fruit, Anthea turned her attention to the horses. This was the part of her job that she liked. This was the part that the men respected her for as well.

  The horses that were about to leave for the south were saddled and bridled and waiting by the nearest fence, right across from the Big House. Anthea moved between the first two stallions and laid a hand on each of their necks. All the men going had the Way, but few of the men had as strong a bond with their horses as she had with Florian. Each of the men would have charge of two horses, but in some cases they had not worked with the second horse before, and that was why Finn had asked Anthea to speak to the horses before they left.