Nameless Queen

by Rebecca McLaughlin

  I realize my whole body is tense, and I try to relax, turning to a Legal woman in a nearby cot.

  She has a wound on her head that’s been patched with white cloth, but it’s in dire need of sutures.

  On closer inspection, I realize that her clothes aren’t just dirtied from the fire—they’re dark and drab from months of wear and stains. The woman isn’t a Legal. She’s Nameless. Panic wells through me, and I move closer to her as if I can hide her from everyone in the room.

  “If you’ll give my patient some room,” Dr. Rhana says as she edges past me to check on the woman.

  “But, I—she…” I bite my tongue.

  Dr. Rhana rolls one of her shoulders in annoyance. “If you have a problem with any of my patients, I can call the Royal Guard to come explain to you that…” Her eyes catch on the tattoo peeking out from under my bandages.

  “Oh,” she says in a small voice. Then, with more strength: “Oh. It’s you. You’re you.”

  “When I’m not being someone else, yeah,” I say. “I was worried when I saw she was…” I point at the dark, moth-eaten cloth of the woman’s sleeve. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “She’ll be fine. She was in a lot of pain, so she’s sleeping now. I heard what you did during the fires, saving that family and helping put out the blazes. Thank you. I’m Dr. Andris. Rhana Andris. Just Rhana, really.”

  Rhana is maybe in her thirties, and she’s vastly outpaced anything I’ve ever accomplished. There’s an awkward moment as she realizes I don’t have a name to offer in return.

  “I call myself Coin,” I say.

  She touches her hand to her opposite shoulder and gives a polite bow.

  “Will you send word to me when she wakes?” I ask. “I want to make sure she gets out of here safely.”

  Rhana nods knowingly. “I’ll notify you when she is healthy enough to go home.”

  Rhana returns to her patients, and she doesn’t even know the mistake she made. This woman doesn’t have a home. Not really. None of the Nameless do.

  I turn around, searching for Hat again, but instead I see Esther standing at the bedside of a man three cots away.

  I think about the fires. Esther was strong and brave—rushing toward the house before it collapsed. But there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on as she goes from cot to cot, comforting people. I approach her.

  “You knew there were people in that house before it collapsed,” I say. It’s possible she saw them through a window or heard them, but as I study her face, she hardly reacts. She’s about to lie to me.

  “Were there?” Esther says. “I guess we won’t know until they get through the wreckage.” She shakes her head clear of the gruesome thoughts, and her aura is like damp soot and ash.

  “I considered at first that you staged the fires,” I say, “that maybe you wanted to be the hero who saved people, and the city would push for you to get the crown. I considered the same about Belrosa. But you knew there were people in that house. How did you know? It doesn’t make sense. And what have you been doing to the patients here? I’ve been watching you put people to sleep. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Esther leans in close as if she’s about to share a secret. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m administering a sedative, obviously.” She picks up a syringe from the metal tray.

  “Then go ahead and do it,” I say.

  She holds it uncertainly.

  “You’re a good liar,” I say, “but not a good grifter. You didn’t guess there were people in that house. You knew there were, didn’t you? And if you’re not administering a sedative, you’re doing something else to make these people fall asleep. Something magical.” Before I can stop myself, I grab on to her left arm just below her shoulder. She winces and withdraws, but I keep my grip.

  I level a dead-set glare at her. “Are you going to pretend that’s a bruise from the fires, or am I going to have to reveal your tattoo here for everyone to see?”

  I sense the defeat and frustration in her aura, and I can’t tell whether she’s angry or angrily impressed. I’m right. She has a tattoo like mine.

  “I know you’re doing something,” I say. “What is it?”

  Esther pulls me aside, although in a room filled with injured people and clutter, there’s not a lot of privacy. She absently picks up a gray jacket from the chair and folds it. “We can talk about it, or I can show you now, and we can save some people from terrible pain today.” Her voice is low and forceful. “Do you have a preference?”

  I didn’t expect her retort to be so biting, and I let go of her arm. I have a million questions screaming in my head. She has a tattoo. She has abilities, like me. How? Why? Is she the queen of another city?

  Esther whispers, “You know that you can make other people hallucinate, right?”

  “Yes.” Is her tattoo a fake? Or is mine? Maybe I’m just a cheap forgery.

  “Well,” she says, “it started off small for you. You could make people see things that weren’t there or not see things that were there. At the execution, you demonstrated that you could cause auditory hallucinations too. You can make people hear things. Then, at the fires, how did you get those people out of the house?”

  I take a moment to center myself. My immediate thought is that the tattoo on my arm is meant for Esther and that it fractured onto me. But I don’t even understand how that would happen or if it’s possible. All I know is that I am, myself, impossible—so any explanation is possible.

  I reply, “I made it so they couldn’t see the fire or smoke. Then I made it so they couldn’t feel the heat. It’s what got us out of there.”

  She nods. “The hallucinations are much more than just visual. You can make people see things, feel things, and hear things. Or you can take it all away. That’s part of what I’m doing here. All these people who are hurt and the ones who are dying, I’m trying to take away their pain, to make it easier for them. Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

  I take stock of the Legal man on the bed. His broken leg has been splinted and wrapped in bandages. She places her hand on his arm. He’s sleeping fitfully, but as soon as Esther touches his skin, he calms down.

  “How did you do that?” I ask.

  “I found one of his happy memories, and I guided him there. Now he’s asleep. It helps that the entire time, I was sharing soothing feelings. It’s like being sung to sleep by a lullaby.”

  My jaw stiffens, and I study the bandage on the man’s leg.

  “Oh,” she says in a small voice. “You probably never had…?”

  “I didn’t,” I cut in sharply, but then I continue in a softer voice: “I learned one once, though. Heard it through an open window near the South Residences. And for a while, when I was on my own, I sang it to myself. I know that sounds…incredibly sad.” I force a laugh.

  “No, no,” Esther says. “I’m sorry.” She sounds more than sympathetic—almost guilty.

  I wipe my palms on my pants, feeling uncomfortable and vulnerable.

  “Tell me how this is possible?” I ask. “Tell me how any of this is possible.” My eyes fall to her arm, where—somehow, impossibly—she has a tattoo hiding beneath her sleeve.

  Esther bows her head. “Of course.”

  She leads me to King Fallow’s sleeping quarters. A black silk curtain covers the door as a sign of mourning. Esther pulls it aside, opens the door, and enters the room in one swift movement, holding the curtain for me.

  This is where King Fallow died, where he spoke my name. The crown faded from his skin and appeared on mine. This room holds the moment when I became queen. The emptiness of the room waits to swallow me.

  The wooden floors are rich mahogany, and the walls are alternate panels of the same dark wood and green wallpaper. A row of wardrobes ends at a vanity table and mirror, and the bed is covered by a
black sheet. There are a few bookshelves and a writing desk.

  Esther sits on the edge of the bed, but I find it difficult to approach.

  I know he died here. That’s not the problem. I’ve lived in alleys where men and women gasped through illness and died where they fell. Death doesn’t bother me.

  It’s difficult because this place doesn’t belong to me, not in the way it belonged to him. I don’t have a hoard of clothes to pile into the wardrobes, or the ability to read the books on the shelves, or the patience to stare at myself in a mirror without seeing a stiff frown contort my features.

  When I finally sit on the edge of the bed, Esther removes her ash-stained jacket and brushes away the charcoal smudges on her skin. A black, sharp-angled crown encircles her upper arm—identical to mine in every way.

  I reach out a finger and trace the pattern. As soon as I touch her skin, a memory pushes its way into my thoughts. I see a flash of green and feel the cold touch of metal before I pull away.

  Esther gives a me a sympathetic pout. “I know. It’s difficult.” She slips off her blue-heeled shoes and walks up to the head of the bed. The silk sheet crumples with her weight. She points to a framed piece of old paper on the wall.

  “This is the treaty,” Esther says, placing a hand on the edge of the gilded frame. “Have you seen it before?”

  “There’s one on the wall of the guest sleeping quarters,” I say. The columns of text and scribbled signatures are familiar and yet still foreign to me.

  “That’s a copy,” Esther says. “This is one of the originals.”

  “If there are multiple originals,” I say, “doesn’t that make them all copies?”

  “No. When the treaties were drawn up over two hundred years ago, they wrote out the whole thing fourteen times. One original for each city.”

  “That sounds incredibly boring,” I say. “Can you please explain how that connects to the fact that you and I both have the crown tattoo? Because I’m not seeing the connection, and I’d really like to.”

  “Do you know about the old history of magic?” Esther asks.

  “I know about the broken five-pin tumbler lock on the baker’s rear entrance,” I counter.

  She glares, and I huff.

  “Did you know that magic existed before these tattoos did?” She points to her arm and then mine.

  “Hasn’t magic always been a weird crown tattoo on your arm?” I ask. “Isn’t that why sovereigns wear crowns on their heads?”

  “Nice thought,” she says, “but the history of magic is older than the idea of the crown. Maybe this is a better question: What is magic?”

  “If I wanted to get asked questions I don’t know the answer to,” I say, “I’d wait until my next etiquette lesson.”

  “It’s a rhetorical question that I’m about to answer,” Esther says impatiently.

  “If it’s rhetorical, can you answer it?” I muse.

  Esther’s nostrils flare. “You’re being difficult, and it’s making this conversation harder.”

  I hold up a hand to indicate that I’ll try to show some restraint.

  “Magic is what lets us read people’s memories, sense their auras, and make them see and feel things.”

  “The tattoo, right?” I say.

  “That’s what we like people to believe,” she says. “But magic is much more complicated than that. A long time ago, magic was an object, or really it was a substance. It had this very hard-to-pronounce name, with a silent k, I think? Kvaight? I don’t know. Putting aside the particulars, magic was this substance. The abilities of the sovereigns in the fourteen cities are different, but all of them come from the same thing: that magical substance. Magic used to be wild. It wasn’t tied to any place or person like it is now. It was dangerous, and it was the cause of most wars in the previous thousand years.”

  “What happened?” I ask. “Just because people were using it doesn’t mean it was bad, right?”

  She gives me a knowing look. “That’s exactly what the sovereigns said. There were a number of different territories, and when they finally sat down to do something about the problem of magic, there were fourteen of them. They decided magic was too dangerous to let it run wild. They wanted to contain it and protect people.”

  “And make it so they were the only ones with magic?” I say.

  “Yes,” Esther says, “unfortunately. But binding all of magic was complicated and intricate. It literally shaped the world we live in. I don’t know how they figured it out, but you notice how all of the cities have the same shape? Maybe you’ve noticed their arrangement across the continent. It wasn’t by accident.” She points to a map framed beside the vanity mirror.

  “Someone really liked hexagons?” I offer.

  “Yes, in fact,” Esther says. “When magic was bound, it came with very specific rules. They bound magic to black ink. With it, they wrote the fourteen treaties and created these ink tattoos. So the magic lives in these crowns on our arms, but it also lives in all fourteen treaties across the cities. It’s what binds magic to the cities and to the sovereigns! They spelled out the rules in the treaties, which is why we haven’t had a war since. And…it answers one of the biggest questions.” She trails off, unsure she wants to continue. Her aura is still, like a heavy window curtain.

  “What biggest question?” I ask, but even as I speak, I realize what it is.

  “Why magic doesn’t affect the Nameless,” Esther says.

  I stare at the treaty. I don’t understand a single scratch of the ink, but I recognize the difference between the lines of neat text in the center and the fourteen signatures that surround it.

  I run a finger along the edge of one of the names.

  “I don’t think it was their intention to create a divide,” Esther says, “but when they signed their names, they bound the magic tattoos to them as sovereigns, and they also bound it to every named citizen of the city. That’s why our abilities only affect named citizens. It’s why magic has to be passed on by the speaking of a name. It’s why when someone is exiled or born Nameless, they aren’t part of the city’s magic anymore.”

  I stare at every unrecognizable curve of the signatures. This treaty is the reason for everything I’ve never understood about the city and magic. Maybe even about myself. It’s why people like Belrosa would rather see us dead than in power.

  “But why do you and I both have the tattoo?” I ask. “And how can I have one if I don’t have a name? I don’t understand.”

  She bobs her head. “I can show you a memory I have of my father. Rather, you’ll be able to see it because of your abilities, and I think it’ll answer some of those questions. But it may also create some more.” She looks afraid. Ashamed, maybe. Almost sad.

  “I have the strangest feeling,” I say as I study the downward pinch of her lips, “that you’re about to break my heart.”

  She smiles sadly. “I hope that’s not true. But maybe.” She sits down on top of the pillows and puts out her hand, palm up. It makes me feel like a child, taking her hand like this, and I sink down to my knees beside her.

  “Are you sure?” I ask, my hand hovering above hers. I feel the heat radiating from it. “Whatever this is, I don’t want it to…hurt you? I guess? I’m worried it might, from the way you’re acting.”

  She offers a faint shrug. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”

  I place my hand over hers, and like lightning being drawn to metal, I am pulled sharply into her memory.

  It’s like a dull pressure against every inch of my body, and then I open my eyes and I’m sitting in a green fabric chair with the cool touch of fabric armrests against my skin. Or, Esther is. I am.

  I see the memory from her perspective as she squirms in the chair. She pushes a curvy wave of hair out of her face, and her hands are small and smooth. She’s young.

  Fa
llow sits on the edge of his bed, rolls up his sleeve, and shows Esther his crown tattoo.

  “You know this tattoo, miya?” Fallow says, and he pats his arm.

  Esther nods.

  “I want to tell you the story about what happened to this tattoo one generation ago,” he says. “My mother was a great queen, and she saw a future for Seriden that was grander than anything we’d seen before. When my brother and I were born—you know Uncle Charlie, right—we were twins. And my mother was clever. She gave us both the same name, and then when she died a few months later, she spoke our shared name. The crown tattoo was given to both of us. We both have the same name, Parson Rejoriak Fallow, but he went by Charles Hamish Fallow.”

  Esther nods again, but confusion and intrigue swirl through her like gusts of wind.

  “My parents were foolish,” Fallow says. “They wanted Charlie and me to be twin kings! But as we grew, Charlie didn’t want the throne and wasn’t suited for it. He wanted nothing more than to continue living a charmed life. When Charlie grew sick last year, we fought. I told him how disappointed I was that he hadn’t embraced his abilities and power. I called him a derelict for not wanting the throne.”

  Fallow’s eyes turn weary and sad. “I was angry we didn’t get to spend our lives ruling side by side. But having two crowns in one city is in violation of the treaties. We are weaker individually than the other sovereigns, but still stronger when combined. It’s an unnatural imbalance. If word got out, it would have caused war between us and the other cities.”

  Esther raises her hand to her father’s shoulder. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Your uncle,” Fallow starts. “Uncle Charlie.”

  “His real name is Uncle Parson,” Esther corrects.

  “Yes, dear,” Fallow says. “We think he’s going to pass tonight.”

  “Is he giving the tattoo to you?” Esther asks. “To make it whole again?”

  Fallow grimaces. “I wish it were that simple. He and I aren’t close. He spoke a name this morning, and he has sworn not to speak another before he dies.”