“What gate?”
The Queen’s mouth turned down. “There’s wild magic in Bloodstone. It all comes from that damned volcano. I swear, I have brought refugee after refugee here from Bloodstone for interviews and experiments, I have interrogated and chemically analyzed every criminal who has ever been anywhere near the place, and I still don’t understand a single thing about that volcano—it’s maddening, Tanya, and I won’t take it anymore! I won’t, I refuse!”
Tanya instinctively leaned away, blown back by the unfamiliar venom in the Queen’s voice, the rage in her eyes.
The Queen seemed to catch herself and sat back, training her eyes on the floor. In a moment, she looked back up, her face returned to its normal placid self.
“The Gate,” she continued, her voice as even as if the outburst had never happened, “decides whom to admit. You must be explicitly invited by someone the Gate has already accepted, or it must sense something about you.”
Tanya rolled her eyes. She hated magic. Well, she hated it when other people did it. “What must it sense?” she asked warily.
“As I said, I’m not entirely certain. It seems to admit children always—”
“We are not sending a child into that place.”
“And criminals,” the Queen continued. “It admits criminals.”
Tanya was taken aback. “Oh,” she said, thinking. “Could you . . . I don’t know, trick it? Steal my shoe, or something? Or have Sir Lurch do it?”
“Tanya. I’m the Queen. By definition, nothing I do is criminal. And if I order Sir Lurch to do something, then he is merely following my orders, and that is not a crime either. I have thought of this before.” Suddenly she looked straight at Tanya and her kaleidoscope eyes started to spin.
Tanya hated when they did that.
The Queen blinked and her eyes went flat again. But she was still staring at Tanya, in a way the tavern maid didn’t like.
“What?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
The Queen smiled. “You’re a criminal, Tanya,” she said. “You stole a tiara, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Hang on, I was ordered to do that,” Tanya protested.
“Not by me. And my word is law, not ‘the Tomcat’s,’ or whatever ridiculous name he goes by. And you voluntarily evaded capture by the corps. No one asked you to do that—that was on your own initiative, and with the aid of a stolen item at that!” She looked at Tanya critically. “Add in the blood magic—which, and I’m not sure you’re aware of this, is actually illegal—and I think the Gate will let you in.”
Tanya stood up and paced the room.
“Say the Gate does let me in,” she said, still pacing. “What am I supposed to do then? How am I going to find out where the sludge is coming from, let alone who’s controlling it? I’m assuming they don’t hand you a map of criminal enterprise upon arrival. That’s all supposing that there even is someone behind it and it’s not some sort of more than usually creepy natural phenomena. And say I do, somehow, find out any of this—what do I do then? Arrest them? Me?”
The Queen shrugged. “I don’t see why you couldn’t. You’ll have the quill with you—of course you will, Tanya. I don’t like it, but that quill would be useless to me without you now that you’ve mucked about with your blood. You could simply wrap the perpetrators in bars of iron and transport them via air to the Glacier. And I won’t send you alone. As far as how you’ll go about finding out the origin of the black matter . . . you’re resourceful, Tanya. You’ll figure it out.” She started giggling. “Maybe you’ll get a job as a tavern wench! Gather gossip over beer pitchers or whatever it is you did for all those years.”
Tanya felt as if she had been slapped. “Maybe I’ll do that,” she retorted. “Maybe I’ll decide to wrap whichever corpsmen you send in iron instead of the manipulators, and just stay in Bloodstone.” The Queen collapsed backward, overcome with laughter. Tanya had to raise her voice to be overheard. “The Tomcat said there was a decent tavern—maybe if he’s still there I can get a recommendation.”
The Queen, still chuckling a little, began to compose herself. “Oh, don’t be insulted, for the Sky’s sake, Tanya,” she told her. “You know I think that work was simply wasted on you—that’s all I found amusing.” She sighed contentedly, the last of the laughter leaving her body. She picked up her coffee cup. “You didn’t tell me the Tomcat was based in Bloodstone.”
Tanya sat back down, dejected. “He’s not,” she said. “He had particular business there. Something to do with the tiara I stole, actually.”
The Queen froze midsip. She spat the coffee back in the mug and set it down.
“The Tomcat’s caravan went to Bloodstone when, exactly?”
“Immediately after the heist. They were packing up when I ran away.”
The Queen nodded. “Which duchess did you steal it from?”
“I . . . don’t know actually,” answered Tanya, surprised. “They never said and I never asked. Whichever one lives on the edge of the White.”
The Queen stood abruptly. She walked around in a perfect circle, her fists clenched tightly at her side. Then, she picked up her coffee mug, examined it closely, and smashed it, hard, against the table, sending daggers of porcelain hurtling across the room.
Tanya deftly ducked. “Your Majesty!” she cried. “Luckily, that’s not the first time someone has smashed a mug in my face, but Lady of Cups! What are you doing?”
The Queen, in fact, was calmly sitting back down. “I was venting my feelings,” she explained. “It’s something I need to do on the rare occasion on which I discover that I have made an error.”
“You smash something every time you make a mistake?” asked Tanya, dropping to her knees to gather the shards. “How do you have any dishware left?”
“Don’t be silly, Tanya, it doesn’t always have to be a dish. And, anyway, it’s only happened seventeen times—eighteen, including today.”
Tanya stopped and gave the Queen a withering look. “You’ve only made eighteen mistakes. In your life.”
The Queen shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, yes. And my concern is the only concern that matters.”
Tanya continued her cleaning. “What a luxurious life you do lead,” she said dryly.
The Queen was silent for a moment. “I could, you know,” she said.
Tanya stood and cast about the room for a dustpan. “Could what?” she asked distractedly.
“I could live a luxurious life.” Tanya stopped and looked at the Queen, curious at the tone in her voice—almost wistful.
“I was never supposed to actually rule, you know,” she said, her eyes whirring. “I was a child for a long time. I was a girl for, I swear, even longer. They didn’t think they would have to deal with a woman. That’s the point of the suitors, you know; that’s always been the point of the suitors, for every Queen of Lode in memory. It was meant to distract me.” She looked at Tanya and smiled wanly. “It worked very well for my mother, you see.”
“Your mother?” Tanya suddenly realized that she had never contemplated the fact that the Queen must have had parents, and that they were gone.
Just like hers.
“Yes. My mother was never very studious. She was good at wearing dresses and waving and sitting imperiously at the head of the council room, and that’s all the Council wanted from the Queen. At least that’s what I’ve gathered—I never met her. And she loved the suitor tests. She loved my father, too, I suppose. I’m told he was very handsome and not particularly bright, so they were likely very well matched. They died when I was six months old—boating accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
The Queen looked up at her, surprised. “Why? I told you I never knew them. Why would it make me sad that they died?”
“It’s just what people say, Your Majesty.”
The Queen shook her head. “I’ve never understood that custom,” she said. “Why would people apologize for something they didn’t do?
&nb
sp; “I was never like my mother,” she continued after a brief silence. “While I was very little, the Council could do what they liked, especially when they kept me distracted with experts, tutors, books—they thought I was busy enough, engaged enough, that I didn’t notice that I wasn’t being the Queen. That I wouldn’t notice because I was still so little, for so long. They thought I wouldn’t figure it out, but I did. And I fixed it. I only forgot one thing.” She shook her head, and when she spoke again, her voice was back to normal. “Never mind,” she said. “I had a lot on my plate.”
Tanya had never been so close to shaking royalty before. “What did you figure out?” she asked. “What did the Council do?”
The Queen didn’t bother to look at her, let alone answer the question. Tanya swallowed a sigh. The Queen did that from time to time. The best thing to do was to ask a different question, one she was interested in answering.
Tanya asked, “Why is blood magic illegal?”
That got the Queen’s attention. “Blood magic is illegal because it is both unpredictable and irrevocable.”
“What do you mean irrevocable?”
“I mean, Tanya, that even if the actual magical working is reversed—say, a reanimation or a binding, such as you have managed with the quill—the blood is poisoned. Usually this matters little because the person whose blood was used is dead. That’s another reason it’s illegal: It’s very rare to have blood magic without murder. You are a very unusual case. No one who is both well informed and rational performs blood magic using their own blood. To do so is to expose oneself to enormous risk and not just of blood poisoning—which to be clear, is almost impossible to treat. The manifestations are so different depending on the blood used, that no one has developed any methods to treat it, not even me. And that’s only half the danger.”
“What’s the other half?”
The Queen leaned forward. “Blood magic upsets a balance in the aether. The first people to use aetheric manipulation as we know it today came to it through blood magic. Blood and magic together create a conduit through the aether; all that it takes to access that conduit and follow it back to its source is, again, blood and magic. Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Blood calls to blood’?”
Tanya thought she had. “I always thought that had to do with family; some kind of ‘loyalty-between-nobility’ thing.”
The Queen uttered a short laugh. “No. It’s referring to blood magic. Skilled practitioners of blood magic—very dangerous people—if they find another blood user’s conduit through the aether, can track that power, commandeer it, even, if they’re good enough. You’re awfully exposed, Tanya.”
Tanya stared at her. “And you’ve let me keep doing it?”
The Queen lifted her eyebrows. “Of course I have! Even if the donor is dead, it is extremely dangerous to reverse blood magic! The energy released is practically impossible to control. Why would I put us in such danger? And why would I risk my reign?” The Queen lifted her hood and headed for the cage.
But Tanya’s strategy worked. The Queen’s tongue loosened by something that interested her, she answered the earlier question, though Tanya scarcely cared anymore. “One thing the Council did was give various magical artifacts they didn’t want lying about the Glacier to random aristocracy as gifts,” said the Queen, twisting the bars in the opening combination. “My mother had such a wealth of highly born, unimaginative, and uncurious friends, it was quite easy to pass these artifacts off as mere sentimental trinkets. I have spent many years collecting these items in secret. I missed one.”
The cage opened and the Queen stepped in.
“The tiara concentrates and amplifies aetherical energy,” she said, the cage sliding shut. “Whatever it is that volcano does, that tiara is increasing its power by a factor of three hundred, at least. We don’t have any time to waste.”
The Queen slipped out of sight. Tanya sat down heavily on her bed, sinking deep into the cushioned layers of her mattress.
Whoever had outfitted this room after she blood magicked herself into unconsciousness had done a beautiful job. There was copious light, soft places to sit everywhere you looked, and there were books—Tanya had discovered that she loved books, loved learning, and these were particularly lovely books. She brushed the one on her nightstand, a history of Lode bound in velvet and embroidered in gold.
Kind of like me, she thought, looking down at her tattoos still shining gold on her skin. They squiggled into new shapes every day as the quill changed the world, but they were always gold now.
Tanya did not want to go to Bloodstone. The Queen had told her that she would never have to do anything she didn’t want to ever again—unless by her command, Tanya remembered ruefully.
The Queen was always very specific. But the Queen would also never risk an asset, so she must believe Tanya would be safe.
And she’s right, thought Tanya. I am impervious to harm now. I can protect myself better than anyone in Lode. So why do I still feel so unsettled? Bloodstone was just a city—a terrible, terrifying city, but as the Queen said, Tanya had the quill. What else could she possibly need to feel in control?
Suddenly Tanya smiled.
After dressing, she made her way through the cloud and found the Queen at her desk, looking fresh as a snowflake in white and silver, signing a piece of paper for Sir Lurch.
“Tanya,” the Queen greeted her without looking up. “Perfect timing. I was just signing reassignment papers for your corps escort.”
“Cancel them. I want Greer and Darrow.”
The Queen looked up. “Sir Lurch, is that acceptable to you?” she asked.
“Whatever is acceptable to you, Your Majesty, is acceptable to me,” he answered slowly. “However, I don’t know that Greer or Darrow would be glad to receive such an assign—”
“Then it’s settled,” interrupted the Queen, smiling. “I’m glad you’ve given this some thought, Tanya. Is there anything else you require?”
“There is, as a matter of fact.”
“And what is that?”
Tanya smiled. “I require a horse.”
Chapter
22
Tanya was the first to arrive at the departure point, a desolate, deserted field about a league behind the armory. It was the first night the weather decided to turn truly cold. She was dressed in her new traveling coat, a long brown affair trimmed in green tweed that fit snuggly around her torso before flaring out flatteringly to her toes. She clutched the quill tightly in her fist, slightly muffling its glow—the only thing lighting her way.
It was important to get to Bloodstone quickly, the Queen had argued. The sludge had spread even farther in the past twenty-four hours. Tanya had to fly herself and her escorts there.
It was important that Tanya and her escorts be allowed to do their work when they got to Bloodstone, Sir Lurch had countered. It was possible that whoever was behind the illegal manipulations had some way of monitoring them, too, and it wouldn’t do to tip them off with a public light show originating from the Glacier.
This was the compromise Tanya, who didn’t want to go anyway, had brokered. She would fly there, but not when anyone was looking and not from the Glacier. She would land in the Tomcat’s abandoned camp, more for symmetry’s sake than any other reason.
And if her traveling companions didn’t like it, she thought, turning at the sound of hoofbeats, well, neither did she. It was just the best way.
“Miss me, horse?” she called cheerfully, having decided she absolutely refused to call the mare Gillian.
As the mare came into view, Tanya drew an irritated breath. “Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. “I never said I wanted you.”
Rollo jumped off Gillian’s back and started mumbling in the mare’s ear.
Tanya crossed her arms. “I apologize, my lord, but this is a classified mission. You can’t be here.”
Rollo turned and surveyed Tanya with disdain.
It was almost a shame, Tanya thought. In some ways
she and Rollo were quite similar: both organized, both resourceful, both determined, both in possession of a complicated relationship with a horse. In a different world, they might have been friends.
Unfortunately, in this one, after a solid month of stiff curtsies, curt nods, pointed comments, snipping, sniping, and eventually snapping, that potential had evaporated into the aether. In fact, Tanya was almost positive that there wasn’t a single human being who annoyed her more and was almost proud to imagine that he would say the same about her.
Rollo left the mare and stood in front of Tanya.
“If you get Gillian injured in any way,” he said tightly, “I promise you, there will be consequences.”
He exploded in a mass of feathers, disappearing high into the pitch black.
Tanya looked at the mare. “He thinks that frightened me, doesn’t he?”
The mare harrumphed grumpily, but trotted up to Tanya quickly enough and flicked her gently in the face with her mane—well, almost gently.
Greer and Darrow came next, both out of uniform for the first time that Tanya had ever seen. Greer was in a gray wool cap, brown pants, brown vest, and a black-and-gray checked shirt. Darrow was in a long, dark green hood that stretched over a silvery tunic of fine woven material and tight black trousers tucked into high black boots.
There was a clumsy darn on Greer’s left elbow and a tidy one on Darrow’s right shoulder, and Tanya realized with a start that these were the boys’ own clothes. This was how they had appeared before Rees recruited them.
Tanya started to greet them, but Greer didn’t give her a chance.
“Mistress Tanya,” he said, with a tight bow. “Honored to be included in your company.”
Tanya took a step back. “What? Mistress who?” She looked at Darrow, who shrugged, glancing at Greer with a strange mix of exasperation and worry.
Wench Page 23
