The Queen of Blood

by Sarah Beth Durst

  She clutched the back of his neck, tangled her fingers in his hair, and pulled him closer, her lips tasting his. She arched as he kissed her neck.

  “Please, my queen, do not let more die.”

  “I will not,” she promised.

  HE LEFT HER BED LATER, HER SKIN SOFT WITH KISSES, AND SHE watched him dress in his green armor and listened to him address the guards as he left. He had to see to her safety, he said. He would be assuming control of her guard as the first step in his promise to always be beside her, and there were several people he had to speak to in order to ensure her safety.

  Wrapping a blanket around herself, Fara slipped out of bed. She crossed to the balcony and opened the shade, only a few inches, to look out on the revelry. There was still music, so many different kinds of music, each piling on top of the next until it blurred into sheer joyous noise. She let the curtain fall shut, and she dressed in a red gown, one that made her feel like old-fashioned royalty. She twisted her hair into braids and coiled it on top of her head, and then she added jewels—priceless necklaces clasped around her throat, and earrings. She then laid her crown on top of her head.

  When she felt every inch a queen, she glided out of her chamber. She nodded to her guards and climbed the stairs to the Queen’s Tower.

  She hadn’t been to the top of this spire in nearly a year, but the palace caretakers kept even the stairs so clean that they glimmered. One of her predecessors had created this tower, a single spire so high it overlooked all of Aratay, or at least it felt that way. The top cleared the canopy. As she climbed, she looked out the window at the branches that thinned as she went higher and then at the tops of the trees. From above, the green looked like a sea, undulating. Sunlight spread across it, trying to pierce the canopy and, in places, failing.

  The tower was a tiny room, a circle with nothing in it except murals painted on the walls around the many windows. Above, the ceiling was glass to see the stars at night.

  Come. Fara sent the command spiraling.

  Leaning on one of the windowsills, she let the wind blow on her face. Ven didn’t understand that it wasn’t about glory. It was about the needs of Aratay. Her people needed both growth and protection, the kind only she could provide. Ven didn’t understand the danger posed by other lands as well. His concerns were purely insular, but she had to be aware of what was going on beyond her borders. Of the upstart in the mountains. Of the forays into Aratay.

  Of the incredibly ambitious Queen Merecot of Semo.

  But the girl’s ambition was nothing to Fara’s. Her own ambition to keep her people safe would always trump all else. If necessary, Fara would make more sacrifices, and she wouldn’t hesitate.

  I’ll do whatever it takes to keep my land and my people safe.

  If that meant making a bargain, she’d do it. And if it meant breaking a bargain . . . well, she’d do that too.

  Ven was right in one thing: the bargains were escalating. She couldn’t allow that to continue. The owl spirit had to be reminded who was queen. Fara controlled her, all of them, and the spirit could not be allowed to continue dictating terms. Breaking this bargain would serve two purposes: asserting her dominance and appeasing Ven.

  Because the other choice was killing Ven, and she did not want to do that. Selfishness, perhaps, but she wanted him beside her.

  The sun was above the horizon of green, near the mountains. It rimmed the mountains in gold, as if their snowcapped peaks were halos. Birds flew above and filled the air with their cries and calls, a music that was echoed, dimly, by the drums below. The celebration would go on into the evening and then the night, petering out with the dawn. Her people did like to celebrate. Let them, she thought. They were celebrating hope.

  That was the miraculous thing about Champion Ven. He made her feel hope. He made her believe she still had choices.

  She saw the owl spirit flying over the canopy. Her toes ruffled the tops of the leaves. Her head was low, and her wings out wide. Steeling herself, Queen Fara straightened.

  The owl woman landed inside the tower and folded her wings. Before Fara could deliver her demands, the spirit spoke. “You have been betrayed.”

  The words felt like a chill wind, scattering her carefully planned speech. “Tell me.”

  “Your lover’s protégée lured me to the academy of your old teachers who profess to love you. I was attacked by the heirs, working together, working against you. I only escaped after waking to lax captors. My queen, they wanted my confession to use against you. They know of our bargains. They seek to use that knowledge against you, to destroy you, to take your throne for themselves.”

  “I don’t believe you.” But it made an awful kind of sense. Ven had told his student. She had told others. He had broken his promise before ever making it. She thought of how he’d left. Perhaps he went to speak to them, to tell them he’d successfully blackmailed her, that they now controlled her, that she would dance to their tune. He might not even realize what he had done, that he’d placed her under the control of everyone who knew, of the heirs who sooner or later would think they would make a better queen than she.

  “About this, I would not lie.”

  Fara looked out over the trees. Ven would try to protect her, she believed. He was a lousy liar, too caught up in honor and integrity to do what truly had to be done, but the heirs . . . She thought of Daleina, his heir. She would do what she thought needed to be done, and Ven’s protection would mean nothing. He wouldn’t be able to keep Fara safe against the heirs, especially one he’d trained himself, especially if they were united against her. No, as before, as always, Fara was alone, and she had to protect herself. She’d been naïve to think, even for a moment, that she could do otherwise.

  With a heavy heart, she let go of her plan to cancel the bargain, let go of her belief in Ven, and let go of the hope that things could be different. “I would like to propose a new bargain.”

  The owl spirit hissed. “You must not let them live.”

  Fara nodded. “You will protect me. You and your spirits must swear to keep me alive. I must remain queen. And in exchange, you may kill them.”

  “Them?”

  “Aratay must be kept safe. I must live. I must be queen.”

  Her owl eyes were bright, as if she’d spotted prey on the forest floor. “You said ‘them.’ How many of your heirs may we kill?”

  “All, of course. Swear it.”

  The owl woman sliced the palm of her hand. “I swear it.”

  Cradling the spirit’s hand, Queen Fara drank her blood.

  CHAPTER 27

  The owl woman watched the queen die.

  She felt her hunger roar inside her: free, free, free! She wanted to rend flesh, taste blood, tear apart the humans who marred her perfect world. Rid them from the world like the scourge that they were. They did not belong. They must be removed.

  But even as she felt her bloodlust rise, beautifully unfettered, she wanted to stop it. All her plans! All the years! All the promises! She’d found the perfect vessel. She’d groomed her. Coaxed her. Cajoled her. Trained her to suit their needs. The owl woman played the long game—and this death was not a move that fit her plan.

  She felt rage rise up to meet her hunger, and she fell on the body of the queen. Her fingernails clawed the queen’s motionless flesh. Her sharp beak rent her throat. She sliced her until her red dress was stained with blood. And then she flew from the window with a shriek that echoed over the forests, a shriek that drowned the screams from below.

  DALEINA HEARD A SCREAM. DROPPING THE TEACUP, SHE JUMPED to her feet, and the porcelain shattered on the floor. Another scream, and the office shook as if the tree itself shuddered. Headmistress Hanna crossed to the window and clasped her hands behind her back. “So, it begins.”

  No! It’s too soon! They were supposed to have time, to plan how to protect people, to prepare without alarming anyone. To reach their families. “You mean—”

  “Go. Join the others and make them understand:
the queen is dead.”

  Daleina ran. She burst out of the headmistress’s office and halted at the top of the stairs. Below, a hundred spirits whipped in a spiral, a tornado of shimmering bodies, tearing torches from the walls, ripping apart the stairs. She couldn’t go down, not into that maelstrom. Instead, she ran up toward the bells.

  She passed the bell ringer, a caretaker boy no more than twelve. Dead.

  Grabbing the rope that was tucked against the spire, she shimmied up it to the bells. She’d never been this close to them: two dozen silver bells. She climbed to the bell ringer’s hammer and gripped it. Below, the howls, cries, and screams rose up the funnel, and she felt as if she’d been plunged back into her ten-year-old body, hearing everyone around her die.

  Not this time, she thought, and swung the hammer at the largest bell.

  Three tolls.

  Everyone knew that ring, the three deepest tolls. She waited, and then hit them again. Once, twice, three times. From across the forest, she heard three drumbeats. Low, rolling, thrumming across the trees, cutting through the screams.

  Every heir.

  Every candidate.

  Every student.

  Every hedgewitch.

  Every woman with power was needed.

  Now.

  Wedging herself between branches, Daleina drew in a breath. She focused on everything she’d learned in order to shut out the world, the screams, the pain, the death, the destruction that the spirits were spreading . . . and then she reached out from inside, touching those spirits. She felt their rage wash over her. Rage and joy. She shuddered away from it, and then forced herself back into the swirling darkness, and felt her mind swept inside it.

  Choose.

  She heard the word echoed, as if from a dozen other voices. She joined her mind to those voices. Choose. A hundred voices. Choose. A thousand. Choose!

  And then . . .

  Everything stopped.

  She felt stillness. And silence.

  Climbing down from the bells, Daleina descended the stairs as far as she could before the steps ended—large chunks had been knocked from the wall. The bell ringer’s body was gone, vanished with the missing steps. Automatically, she reached out to the spirits, and it was like brushing her hand against moss. They were there, soft against her mental touch, but they didn’t move or respond. They wouldn’t, until it was time for them to choose.

  She found her own way down, climbing the academy as if it were a tree without ladders, until she reached the practice ring. There, the circle had been set up as a makeshift hospital. Hamon was overseeing everything, triaging the students, teachers, and caretakers based on the severity of their wounds. A few had sheets pulled over their faces. Caretaker Undu was lying on a pallet, her face pale and blood running down one arm. Linna knelt beside her, wrapping a bandage around the wound. Daleina’s eyes sought out her friends: Revi, Zie . . . there was Iondra, helping one of the younger caretakers, a girl in tears.

  Daleina joined the others, moving among the injured, helping with bandages, distributing herbs, rubbing on healing ointment. Again and again. There were few who had escaped with no wounds. Only when everyone had been tended to did she cross to the bodies covered in blankets.

  Caretaker Undu was seated beside them.

  “Who?” Daleina asked.

  The caretaker nodded at one. “Rubi. She was a first-year student, from midforest. She had a soft voice and liked to dance. Cook often said she ate her weight in potatoes but wouldn’t touch other vegetables.” She turned to another. “Sarir, ten years old, an orphan. He was our bell ringer. So shy but beginning to smile.” And the third. “A caretaker named Andare. He’d been here since he was a child, in the beginning as shy as Sarir had been. Thrown away by his parents as if he were trash, because they didn’t want another mouth to feed. He’d been found by a traveling tinker and, as much as we could ever glean, used as a shield to protect the tinker from spirits. We found him with his heart nearly cut out—the tinker had wanted to make a charm from it, the darker side of hedgewitchery. He’d had a hard childhood, but he’d made a good life for himself here.”

  Daleina put her hand over her heart, remembering the boy with the scar by his heart, the one with the sweet smile and sweeter kisses. “He was kind.”

  “Yes, he was.” Her voice was empty, and Daleina knew she was holding another grief inside her, the kind that would never leave, the kind that irrevocably changes you and your life. There were no words to fill that kind of emptiness. Daleina didn’t try. She placed her hand on Caretaker Undu’s shoulder and hoped she knew that Daleina was thinking of Mari too. Mari and the boy with sweet kisses and her cousin with the wonderful stories and her little friends who never had a chance to grow up. She thought of her family and prayed they’d stayed safe, that they’d hidden in their house, filled the crevices with charms, and stayed silent.

  There should have been time to warn them!

  She crossed to Hamon, who was packing up the extra bandages and salves. “I’m going to head into the capital,” he said. “Offer my help.”

  Daleina nodded. “My family . . .”

  He nodded. “I know. You have to be sure they’re safe.” He wasn’t meeting her eyes, didn’t look up from the bandages.

  She touched his shoulder lightly. “Hamon?”

  “Please, Daleina . . . I . . . Something terrible happened today.”

  She heard the words he didn’t say: We did something terrible today. “Keep moving,” she advised. “It helps if you’re busy.”

  He nodded and resumed packing. She watched him for a moment, knowing that she’d been right—everything had changed, and for a moment she mourned that too.

  Together, they’d killed a queen.

  And, in turn, had caused the deaths of how many more?

  Daleina left him to his task and his thoughts. She drifted from cot to cot, checking on the injured, trying to help, but in the end she drifted to the broken spiral stairs to join her friends. The heirs clumped together in silence.

  “It feels so empty,” Linna said, and hugged her arms.

  Zie scuffed at a broken stair with her foot. “I tried to call one. Felt like grabbing mist. They’re still there, but they’re . . . not, also.”

  “I don’t miss them,” Revi declared. “It’s like a holiday without them.”

  All of them looked at her.

  “Except for the death,” she amended.

  “Oh, Daleina . . . I heard about Andare!” Zie hugged her suddenly. “I’m so sorry. I know you weren’t still . . . but I know you . . .”

  Daleina hugged her back. She felt the weight of his death on her. If she hadn’t killed the queen, the spirits wouldn’t have been free to harm. He wouldn’t have died. His death was on her, as well as the girl and everyone who had been killed across all of Aratay.

  No, she told herself fiercely. I’m not the enemy. The spirits are. They were the ones who killed. She and the others had stopped them.

  “I wish we didn’t have to have the coronation. No queen, no spirits,” Revi said. “Imagine a life without them, without fear.”

  All of them were silent.

  “I need to visit my family,” Daleina said. “If Champion Ven returns . . .”

  Iondra clasped Daleina’s hand. “We’ll tell him where you are. Go to them. In seven days, we shall all meet again.” The coronation ceremony, by tradition, would happen in seven days, to give the people time to mourn and to give the heirs time to gather. Daleina embraced each of them and then jogged out of the academy.

  She whistled, not certain if Bayn would be nearby or even if he would want to come. A few seconds later, though, the wolf trotted out from the trees. Kneeling, Daleina wrapped her arms around the wolf’s neck. She buried her face in his fur and inhaled the musky scent. She wanted to cry but couldn’t—the tears wouldn’t flow. So she stood and headed away from the academy, away from the capital, with her wolf at her side.

  SHE SAW MORE DEATH ON HER JOURNEY TO HER FAM
ILY’S VILLAGE: mourners burying lost family members in the soft earth between the tree roots, people weeping openly as they sat by their houses. It felt as if a soft fog of sadness lay through the forest. People went through the motions of life: hurrying to gather food before it died on the vine, to hunt animals before the woodland creatures starved, to preserve what they had but couldn’t cook. Without spirits, nothing would grow, no rain would fall, and no fires would light. Until coronation, the only food was what hadn’t yet spoiled, and the only warmth was through clothes, blankets, and bodies. It was luck that it was summer. Daleina realized they hadn’t considered the season when they’d planned their regicide.

  She felt as though a fist were in her stomach, as if the world had tilted, the sun dimmed, as if her skin itched all over her body, as if nothing were right, not even the air. She hadn’t expected to feel this way. It had seemed like the only choice, the right choice. As Headmistress Hanna had said once to Merecot, a bad queen can be as dangerous as no queen. Queen Fara had been abusing her power and breaking her trust with her people. So why do I feel as though I broke something precious?

  She kept walking in the darkness, Bayn by her side. No wind blew, and the only sound was her footsteps on the fallen leaves and the rumble of her stomach as the night stretched on. The pack she’d taken from the academy had a few travelers’ crackers, as well as a water canteen. At dawn, she filled the canteen at a stream and dropped Hamon’s purifying herbs into it. She saw dead fish float by and scooped them out, cleaned them, and strung them on a stretch of fishing line that she attached to her pack. She couldn’t cook them, but she could bring them to her family to salt and preserve. As she traveled, she also gathered nuts and berries. It was strange, seeing the bushes, knowing they were, in essence, lifeless without the spirits—they wouldn’t create more leaves, their berries wouldn’t ripen. Left alone, they’d wither. Eventually, without the coronation, they’d die.

  Bayn hunted, and Daleina couldn’t tell if he was bringing down game easier or not—the wolf had never had problems hunting, and nothing should be hungry yet. But the birds seemed to be flying less than usual. Their songs seemed sadder. Everything felt stiller. Or maybe it was only Daleina’s mood, which she couldn’t seem to shake.