He sensed eyes on his back, turned, and felt the chill of the wind penetrate more deeply into his bones. The slope behind him was covered with small children, white faces and dark eyes. Bare feet.
“God,” he murmured. The night seemed filled with phantoms, and he heard Jonathan Tear’s voice, centuries away but very close.
We won’t fail, Gav. How can we fail?
“We did fail,” the Fetch whispered. “Great God, we failed so badly.”
He turned and continued down the slope, too fast for caution, almost running now. Several times he nearly lost his balance, but he could not get down soon enough. As he reached the bottom of the slope, he broke into a sprint, tearing across the foothills toward the copse where he had tethered his horse.
On the hillside far above, the children waited silently, a still comber that covered the wide slope. They breathed steadily, a hoarse rattle that echoed against the rocks, but no plume of air was visible between their lips. Row Finn stood at their forefront, watching the tiny figure below. Once upon a time, Gavin had been the easiest man in the world to manipulate. Those days were long gone, as was Gavin himself, his real identity subsumed and steeped in the mythology of the man they called the Fetch. That man would be real trouble, but Row remained sanguine as he surveyed the pale ocean of children around him. They always did as they were told, and they were eternally, unrelentingly hungry. They waited only for his command.
“The crown,” he whispered, feeling a great excitement course through him, excitement he recognized from long ago: the hunt was beginning, and at the end there lay the promise of blood. He had waited almost three hundred years.
“Go.”
Book I
Chapter 1
The Regent
Examined in hindsight, the Glynn Regency was not really a regency at all. The role of a royal regent is simple: guard the throne and provide a barrier to usurpers in the rightful ruler’s absence. As a natural warrior, the Mace was uniquely suited for such a task, but the warrior’s exterior also concealed a shrewd political mind and, perhaps more surprisingly, a devoted belief in the Glynn Queen’s vision. In the wake of the abortive second Mort invasion, the Regent did not sit quietly, waiting for his mistress to return; rather, he bent all of his considerable talents toward her vision, her Tearling.
—The Early History of the Tearling, as told by Merwinian
For a brief period, Kelsea had made a practice of opening her eyes whenever the wagon hit a bump. It seemed as good a way as any to mark the passage of time, to watch the landscape change in small flashes. But now the rain had stopped, and the bright sunlight made her head ache. When the wagon jolted her awake again, from what seemed an endless nap, she worked to keep her eyes tightly closed, listening to the movement of horses all around her, the jingle of bridles and the clop of hooves.
“Not so much as a piece of silver,” a man on her left grumbled in Mort.
“We get a salary,” another man replied.
“Our salary’s tiny.”
“That’s true enough,” a third voice broke in. “My house needs a new roof. Our pittance won’t cover that.”
“Stop griping!”
“Well, what of you? Do you know why we’re going home empty-handed?”
“I’m a soldier. It’s not my job to know things.”
“I heard something,” the first voice muttered darkly. “I heard that all of the generals and their pet colonels, Ducarte on down, are getting their share.”
“What share? There’s no plunder!”
“They don’t need plunder. She’s going to pay them directly, from the treasury, and leave the rest of us hanging out here in the wind!”
“That can’t be true. Why would she pay them for nothing?”
“Who knows why the Crimson Lady does anything?”
“That’s enough of that! Do you want the lieutenant to hear?”
“But—”
“Shut up!”
Kelsea listened for another minute, but heard nothing more, and so she tipped her head back into the sun. Despite her persistent headache, the light felt good on her bruises, as though it were permeating her skin to heal the tissue beneath. She hadn’t been near a mirror in quite some time, but her nose and cheeks were still swollen to the touch, and she had a fairly good idea of how she looked.
We’ve come full circle, she thought, stifling a dark chuckle as the wagon hit another bump. I see Lily, I become Lily, and now I have her bruises to match.
Kelsea had been captive for ten days: six spent tied to a pole in a Mort tent, and then the last four chained in this wagon. Armor-clad men on horseback surrounded her, precluding any thought of escape, but the horsemen weren’t Kelsea’s real problem right now. The problem sat on the far side of the wagon, staring at her, his eyes narrow slits against the sun.
Kelsea had no idea where the Mort had found this man. He was not old, no more than Pen’s age perhaps, with a meticulously groomed beard that wrapped like a strap beneath his chin. He didn’t have the bearing of a head jailor; in fact, Kelsea was beginning to wonder whether he had any official capacity at all. Was it possible that someone had simply tossed him the keys to Kelsea’s bonds and put him in charge? The more she considered it, the more she was sure that this was exactly what had happened. She had not had even a glimpse of the Red Queen since that morning in the tent. The entire operation had a distinctly improvised feeling.
“How are you, pretty?” the jailor asked.
She ignored him, though something seemed to shudder in her stomach. He called her “pretty,” but Kelsea didn’t know whether it was a personal comment or not. She was pretty now, Lily in duplicate, but she would have given anything to have her old face back, though she didn’t know if being plain would have allowed her to escape this man’s attentions. After their third day in the tent, he had administered a thorough, careful beating to her face and upper body. Kelsea didn’t know what had set him off, or even whether he was angry; his face remained empty, void of expression, the entire time.
If I had my sapphires, she thought, staring back at him, refusing to drop her eyes lest he view such behavior as weakness. Weakness encouraged him. Kelsea had spent many hours of this journey fantasizing about what she would do if she ever got her sapphires back. Her short life as queen had comprised many forms of violence, but the threat presented by the jailor was entirely new: violence that seemed to come from nowhere, to accomplish nothing. The very senselessness of it made her despair, and this, too, reminded her of Lily. One night, perhaps a week ago, she had dreamed of Lily, of the Crossing, a bright and gaudy nightmare of fire and raging ocean and pink dawn. But Lily’s life was encapsulated somehow in the sapphires, and they were lost to Kelsea, and now she wondered, almost viciously, why in hell she’d had to go through that, to see so much. She had Lily’s face now, Lily’s hair, Lily’s memories. But what purpose did it all serve, if she couldn’t see the end of the story? Row Finn had told her that she was a Tear, but she didn’t know what that was worth without the jewels. Even Lady Andrews’s tiara was gone now, lost in the camp. Everything of her old life had been left behind.
For good reason.
True. It was important to keep the Tear before her now. Her death must lie somewhere at the end of this journey—she wasn’t even sure why she was alive now—but she left behind a free kingdom, headed by a good man. Her mind conjured an image of Mace, grim and unsmiling, and for a moment she missed him so badly that tears threatened to spill from beneath her closed lids. She fought the impulse, knowing that the man who sat across the wagon would take pleasure in her distress. She was sure that one of the reasons he had beaten her so badly was that she had refused to cry.
Lazarus, she thought, trying to alleviate her dismal mood. Mace sat on her throne now, and although he did not see the world precisely as Kelsea did, he would be a good ruler, fair and decent. But still Kelsea felt a subtle agony, growing with each mile traveled. She had never been outside her kingdom, not once in her life.
She didn’t know why she was still alive, but she was almost certainly going to Mortmesne to die.
Something slid along her calf, making her jump. Her jailor had reached across the floor of the wagon and was stroking her leg with one finger. Kelsea could not be more revolted if she had found a tick burrowing into her skin. The jailor was grinning again, his eyebrows lifted as he waited for a response.
I am already dead, Kelsea reminded herself. On paper, she had been a dead woman walking for months. There was great freedom in the thought, and that freedom allowed her to draw her legs inward, as if to curl up in the corner of the wagon, and then, at the last moment, to arch her back and kick her jailor in the face.
Down he went, landing sideways with a thump. The riders around them exploded in laughter, most of it unkind; Kelsea sensed that her jailor was not very popular with the infantry, but that fact would not help her here. She tucked her legs beneath her and brought her chained hands forward, ready to fight as best she was able. The jailor sat up, blood trickling from one of his nostrils, but he seemed not to notice it, didn’t even bother to wipe it away as it worked its way down toward his upper lip.
“I was only playing,” he said, his voice petulant. “Doesn’t pretty like games?”
Kelsea didn’t reply. The rapid changes in mood had been her earliest indication that he wasn’t right in the head. There were no patterns of behavior that she could anticipate. Anger, confusion, amusement . . . each time, he reacted differently. The man had noticed his nosebleed now, and he wiped the blood away with one hand, smearing it on the wagon floor.
“Pretty should behave herself,” he scolded, his tone that of a tutor with a wayward pupil. “I’m the man who cares for her now.”
Kelsea curled up in the corner of the wagon. Again she thought, ruefully, of her sapphires, and with a blink of surprise, she realized that she actually meant to survive this journey somehow. The jailor was only one in a series of obstacles to be overcome. In the end, she meant to go home.
The Red Queen will never allow that to happen.
Then why is she taking me back to Demesne?
To kill you. She probably means to put your head in the place of honor on the Pike Road.
But this seemed too easy to Kelsea. The Red Queen was a direct woman. If she wanted Kelsea dead, Kelsea’s body would be rotting on the banks of Caddell. There must be something the Red Queen wanted from her, and if so, she might yet go home.
Home. This time it was not the land she thought of, but people. Lazarus. Pen. The Fetch. Andalie. Arliss. Elston. Kibb. Coryn. Dyer. Galen. Wellmer. Father Tyler. For a moment Kelsea could see them all, as though they were gathered around her. Then the image was gone, and there was only glaring sunlight in her eyes, making her head ache. Not a vision, only her mind, trying to free itself. There would be no more magic, not anymore; the reality was this dusty wagon, rolling inexorably onward, taking her away from her home.
The Mace never sat on the throne.
Sometimes Aisa thought he might. It had already become a joke among the Guard: the way the Mace would climb the dais with his purposeful stride . . . and then seat himself on the top step, hulking arms resting on his knees. If it had been a long day, he might condescend to use the battered armchair nearby, but the throne itself remained vacant, an empty monolith of gleaming silver at the apex of the room, reminding them all of the Queen’s absence. Aisa was sure that this was exactly what the Mace intended.
Today, the Mace had ignored the dais altogether, electing instead to sit at the head of the Queen’s dining table. Aisa stood just behind his chair. Several people were standing; even the enormous table would not hold them all. Aisa judged little threat of violence here, but she had a hand on her knife, all the same. She rarely let go of it, even when she slept. On the first night after the bridge—Aisa’s mental life now seemed to be divided into Before and After the Bridge—the Mace had given her her own room, right on the periphery of the Guard quarters. Though Aisa was fond of her siblings, she was relieved to be free of them. That part of her life, the old part, the family part, seemed to cleave away when she worked with the Guard. There was no space for it. Aisa felt safe in her new room, safer than she had ever felt, but sometimes she would still wake in the mornings and find her knife in her hand.
Arliss sat beside the Mace, one of his foul cigarettes jutting from his teeth, shuffling the stack of papers in front of him. Arliss lived by facts and figures, but Aisa didn’t know what good his records would do him here. The problem of the Queen could not be solved on paper.
Next to Arliss was General Hall, accompanied by his aide, Colonel Blaser. Both men were still dressed in full armor, for they had just come in from the front. For the past week, the last remnants of the Tear army had trailed the vast Mort war train as it crossed the Caddell and began a slow but steady progress eastward, across the Almont. As impossible as it seemed, the Mort were withdrawing, packing up their siege equipment and heading home.
But why?
No one knew. The Tear army had been decimated, and New London’s defenses were paper-thin; Elston said that the Mort could have torn right through them. The army was keeping a close eye on the invaders, in case of a trick, but by now even the Mace seemed convinced that the withdrawal was real. The Mort were leaving. There was no sense in it, but it was happening, all the same. General Hall said that the Mort soldiers weren’t even looting on their way home.
All of this was good news, but the mood at this table was anything but ebullient. There had still been no word on the Queen. Her body had not been left behind when the Mort moved out. Maman said she was a prisoner, and the thought made Aisa’s blood boil. The first duty of a Queen’s Guard was to protect the ruler from harm, and even if the Queen wasn’t dead, she was still at the mercy of the Mort. Even Maman could not say what was happening to her in their camp.
On the other side of the Mace sat Pen, his face pale and drawn. Whatever agonies Aisa and the other guards endured over the Queen’s welfare, no one was suffering like Pen, who had been the Queen’s close guard . . . and more, Aisa thought. He was little use these days, for he seemed able to do nothing but mope and drink, and when someone called his name he would only look up in a slightly confused manner. Some part of Pen had been lost on the day the Queen broke the bridge, and although he sat next to the Mace, in the place of a close guard, his gaze remained fixed on the table, lost. Coryn, who sat beside him, was his usual alert self, so Aisa didn’t worry, but she wondered how much more slack Elston was going to extend to Pen. What would it take for someone to voice the truth: that Pen was no longer fit for the job?
“Let’s begin,” the Mace announced. “What news?”
General Hall cleared his throat. “I should give my report first, sir. There’s good reason.”
“Let’s have it, then. Where are the Mort?”
“They’re in the central Almont now, sir, nearing the end of the Crithe. They make at least five miles a day, closer to ten since the rain stopped.”
“Nothing left behind?”
Hall shook his head. “We have looked for traps. I believe the withdrawal is genuine.”
“Well, that’s something, at least.”
“Yes, but sir—”
“What about the displaced?” Arliss demanded. “Can we start sending them home?”
“I’m not sure it’s safe, certainly not right on the heels of the Mort war train.”
“Snow has already fallen in the northern Reddick, General. If we don’t harvest the crops soon, there’ll be nothing to reap.” Arliss paused to emit a plume of smoke. “We also have every problem an overcrowded city ever faced: sewage, water treatment, disease. The sooner we empty it out, the better. Maybe if you—”
“We’ve sighted the Queen.”
The entire table came to attention. Even Pen seemed to wake up.
“What are you waiting for?” the Mace barked. “Report!”
“We spotted her yesterday morning, out in the Crithe delta. She’s al
ive, but manacled, chained to a wagon. There’s no opportunity for her to run.”
“She broke the fucking New London Bridge in half!” Arliss snapped. “What chains could hold her to a wagon?”
Hall’s tone was cool. “We couldn’t get a perfectly clear look at her; the Mort cavalry is too thick. But I have a man named Llew who has the vision of a hawk. He’s fairly confident that the Queen no longer wears either of the Tear sapphires.”
“What is her condition?” Pen broke in.
Spots of color darkened Hall’s cheeks, and he turned to the Mace. “Maybe we should discuss—”
“You discuss it right now.” Pen’s voice had sunk very low. “Is she wounded?”
Hall looked helplessly at the Mace, who nodded.
“Yes. Her face is bruised up; even I could see it through the spyglass. She’s been beaten.”
Pen sank back into his chair. Aisa couldn’t see his face, but she didn’t need to. The slump of his shoulders said everything. The entire table sat in silence for a moment.
“She was upright in the wagon, at least,” Hall finally ventured. “Healthy enough to stand. I don’t think she has any broken bones.”
“Where is this wagon?” the Mace asked.
“Right in the center of the Mort cavalry.”
“No chance of a direct attack?”
“None. Even if my army weren’t reduced to a fraction, the Mort are taking no chances. At least a hundred feet of heavy horse surround her on all sides. They’re hustling her along the Mort Road, outdistancing the infantry. I can only assume they’re making straight for Demesne.”
“The Palais dungeons.” Pen rested his forehead on one hand. “How the hell do we get her out of there?”
“The Mort rebellion is poised to move down to Demesne,” the Mace reminded him. “Levieux’s people will be useful.”
“How do you know you can trust him?”
The Fate of the Tearling Page 2
