“Diamonds for God,” she murmured to the three corpses at her feet. “Diamonds and gold, while the rest of the kingdom starves. But we are the Blue Horizon, and we don’t fear your God. In fact, we’re coming for his head.”
Chapter 5
CUTTING TIES
Seen in the light of our times, the tenancy system of the early Tear centuries was a horror. Nobles set the quota for each harvest, independent of conditions or circumstance, doled out a subsistence portion to the tenants, and took the rest to sell for profit. Nobles’ bailiffs—and now that history has progressed, we can call these bailiffs what they actually were: overseers—had the power of life and death over the tenant farmer, his house, and his family; a tenant’s output was what the bailiff said it was, and rape was a routine perquisite of the job. There was no court of appeal, no independent arbiter to whom the tenant could complain, save the monarch, or the noble himself. Needless to say, complaints were few.
—Out of Famine: The Almont Uprising, Alla Benedict
Aislinn was tired, so tired that she felt her arms would fall off if she tried to lift the basket of strawberries. But lift it she did, hoisting it carefully onto one shoulder as though it were filled with precious stones. In a normal June, they would be buried in strawberries as far as the eye could see, but this year most of the plants lay limp and wilted, crushed into the ground. There had been no rain for months, and what berries had grown in the patch had a wrinkled, desiccated look. But they were berries, all the same. It had taken Aislinn the better part of an hour to find enough to fill the basket, and she was determined that her family should get every ounce of credit for the haul.
She lugged the basket around the edge of the plot in which her brothers and sisters remained scattered, picking. The Martin family’s share of Lady Andrews’s acreage covered three enormous plots: one of strawberries, one of corn, and one of potatoes. As soon as strawberry season ended, they would turn their attention to the corn, though that looked none too healthy either, lopsided and ungainly. The husks themselves looked fine, but when you stripped the green away, the kernels were invariably sickly and shriveled, not yellow but a dyspeptic-looking ochre. Aislinn’s mother was deep in the cornfield, working on one of the stalks. Picking off locusts, most likely. Aislinn waved, but her mother did not wave back, too intent on her task.
They are so tired, Aislinn thought. She knew that Mum and Da had been skipping dinner lately, quietly portioning out their shares to each child. The sight of them, forking pieces over to the plate of whichever child was talking, made Aislinn burn inside. Lady Andrews, the noblewoman who owned their plots, lived on the eastern end of the acreage, in a castle so high that its shadow fell over the strawberries in the morning. Lady Andrews was never hungry, nor were any of her bailiffs. The lady wore velvet dresses sewn with jewels. Sometimes, when she came down to inspect the tenants, a servant came with her, a man whose sole job appeared to be holding a sun cover over Lady Andrews’s head. Aislinn might be only fifteen, but she knew right from wrong, and when she looked out over the vast Andrews acreage and saw all of them, hundreds of tenants, hunched over in the fields—sometimes by lamplight, long after dusk had fallen—she burned.
This cannot be all of our lives, she thought. This cannot be everything we have to aspire to. There must be something else. Something better. The Blue Horizon always said so, whenever they visited the acreage. They always came disguised, as performers or traveling merchants, in order to slip past the bailiffs, but Aislinn recognized their message in all of its guises. They were sincere, the Blue Horizon people, and even Aislinn had been charmed by the picture they painted: a world without the distinctions of wealth or class, a world where everyone was equal. Aislinn liked the idea well enough in theory, but she was not gullible enough to believe that the Blue Horizon knew how to get there. They brought food and clothing, sometimes even medicine, but a few brief questions easily elicited the fact that their better world was as distant as the moon.
Father Moran called the Blue Horizon heretics and terrorists; a good part of his Sunday sermon was always devoted to the topic, carefully sandwiched in between the constant lectures on industry and godliness and knowing one’s place. The sermons were dull as dirt, but Aislinn didn’t mind Sunday mornings; it was the only time she got to take a nap. Father Moran would have called her a sinner, but Father Moran was not above bedding the wives of the acreage in exchange for absolution. The Church was no better than any of them; in fact, it was worse, precisely because it claimed to be better. Aislinn didn’t know why the Church and the Blue Horizon fought so bitterly; both were selling dreams in bottles, after all. The last time the Blue Horizon came through, they had brought new stories as well as food, tales of a magical queen who would lift the drought and redistribute the land. The better world was at hand, the young man had claimed, and Queen Elyssa would be the gate. Aislinn’s younger siblings listened to these stories with open mouths, but Aislinn had outgrown fairy tales. There would be no better world, no magical ending. This was all life was: endless, backbreaking work, for which one collected a reward of slow starvation. Aislinn had no quarrel with the Blue Horizon, but as far as she was concerned, they could take their True Queen and stuff her out back.
She had reached the large, rickety wagon at the far end of the cornfield. This wagon was shared, placed every day in the rough center of four families’ acres: the Pearces, the Martins, the Vines, and the Grahams. As soon as it filled up, one of the fathers—they rotated the duty—would hitch up the horse and drive the wagon over to the storehouse for delivery to the bailiffs. This required some trust, as there was nothing to stop any one man from claiming another family’s output as his own. But so far as Aislinn could tell, there had been no thievery, and in their small group of families, she saw an interdependency born of desperation. Starvation hung in the air over all of them, a constant shadow. No one dared to fuck anyone else over, for once that door was opened, it could never be closed again. Whatever small amount of honor they retained would be gone.
With a grunt, Aislinn hoisted the basket of berries into the wagon, then walked over to say hello to Bertie, the mule. The drought had hit Bertie as hard as it had the rest of them; what grass grew in his tiny paddock was sparse and dry, and Aislinn could see each rib in the poor animal’s wasted sides. She clicked her tongue, hoping to lure him to the fence so that she could scratch his ears.
“What are you doing here, girlie?”
She whirled to find Fallon, one of the bailiffs, standing just behind her. He was a big man, as all bailiffs were, and he carried a knife at his belt. He grinned, revealing several missing teeth.
“Slacking off, are we? You’ll never meet the quota that way.”
“It’s not your business how we meet the quota.”
“You think you’ll meet it, do you?” Fallon asked. “Sure, and pigs will fly.”
“You’d know pigs,” Aislinn replied dismissively, turning back to Bertie. But the mule apparently liked Fallon no more than she did, for he turned, went back to the center of his paddock, and began to munch despondently at the sparse grass.
“Lady Andrews don’t like slackers.”
“How would you know?” Aislinn demanded. “Lady Andrews wouldn’t even let a filthy creature like you through the kitchen door.”
Fallon flushed, his eyes squinting down into ugly slits. It was not the first time he had bothered her; twice now, he had even come sniffing around the cottage, saying terrible things, things that made Aislinn ashamed . . . not for herself, but for her mother and father, who could do nothing but stand beside the old, patched stove, pretending they hadn’t heard.
“You should be nicer to me, girlie,” he growled. “Ain’t been no rain for months. The Crithe is drying up. A few more weeks of this, and my share of Her Ladyship’s cistern will be all that stands between your people and the salt death.”
“Maybe so. But I’d sooner fuck a goat.”
“Get yourself into line, girlie. Put up a good show when Her Ladyship comes by, and I might forget about this.”
Aislinn scrambled up and trotted away. Fury gnawed at her brain, but there was nothing to do about it. Lady Andrews was coming to inspect, and they were all expected to put on an industrious front and look happy, as though toiling in the fields fourteen hours a day were all a man could want. Aislinn kept a wary eye over her shoulder for Fallon, but he had disappeared into the cornfields to gather up the Vines and their children.
“Where have you been, girl?” her mother demanded as Aislinn came around the corn and into sight of the strawberry patch. “Her Ladyship is coming. Straighten your dress and get that corn silk out of your hair.”
Aislinn did so, but only to please her mother. The tenants could have been naked, for all Lady Andrews cared; all that mattered was how much produce they were able to mine from the ground. Aislinn’s mother went to each of her younger siblings in turn, straightening and tidying, and her father was busily combing his hair with his fingers. At moments like this, Aislinn felt utterly distant from her parents, as though they were unknown to her. She did love them, she supposed, but it was a love that seemed to wither each year, like the corn plants in the heat. This life, the work of the tenant, seemed almost designed to cut ties. Aislinn and her parents might have been no more than business associates, partners in an enterprise that was constantly failing.
The Vines, Grahams, and Pearces had joined them now, all of them standing at attention on the side of the path. Fallon stood beside them, removing his hat. Liam Graham crossed his eyes at Aislinn, but she ignored him; he was a pest. Little Willie Pearce still leaned on the crutch he had sported for the past week. Willie was six, and he had taken a bad cut to his leg with a scythe as they harvested the last of the winter wheat. The Pearces had washed the wound, but the leg had begun to plump almost immediately, and now it looked like a sausage above his socks. As Willie shifted impatiently, Aislinn spotted the streaks of green running up his calf.
That leg will have to come off, she thought grimly.
The horns grew louder, then louder still, and Lady Andrews and her retinue appeared. All of them were horsed on stallions, save the lady herself, who rode a fine mare, its mane strung with tinkling bells. Aislinn had admired those bells when she was younger, too young to understand that she would never have a horse of her own.
Lady Andrews slowed to a trot as she rode past all of them, her eyes seeming to note and mark each tenant in turn. But when she got to Aislinn, she stopped, drawing her horse back.
“This one,” Lady Andrews remarked. “This one has a very insolent look, which I do not like at all. Who is she?”
“Aislinn Martin, Lady,” Pryse, the bursar, replied, checking his book. “Fifteen years old.”
“I see,” Lady Andrews replied, staring at Aislinn. It was the first time she had ever singled out any member of their family for attention, but it was the wrong kind; Aislinn could almost feel her parents quaking beside her. She lifted her chin and gazed back at Lady Andrews, meeting her stare for stare.
“Check this family’s output very carefully, Pryse,” Lady Andrews finally said. “I wouldn’t think this little one above stealing.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
Aislinn did not know she had said it aloud until her mother gasped in horror. The rest of the assembled families gaped at her, even little Willie Pearce, who had been fidgeting steadily on his crutches.
“Shut your mouth, you bitch!” Fallon roared from the end of the line. But Lady Andrews raised a hand.
“Hold my reins.”
One of her retainers took hold of them, and Lady Andrews swung herself to the ground. She was a pretty woman, just leaving youth. Aislinn had never seen her so closely before. There was a Lord Andrews, supposedly stashed somewhere in the castle, but Aislinn had never seen him either. There was a running joke among the tenants that Lord Andrews was actually made of straw.
Across the path, Liam Graham was subtly shaking his head at Aislinn, telling her to keep her mouth shut. As the lady approached her, Aislinn took a deep breath but held her chin up.
“You need a lesson in manners, child,” Lady Andrews remarked softly. She was smiling, but her eyes were cold. “I could give it to you myself, certainly . . . but I don’t fancy the lice. Fallon!”
“Yes, Lady?”
“Take the girl back to her hovel. You have the night. The rest of her family will remain out here until morning; just reward for raising a brat with a smart mouth.”
These words had not even penetrated when Fallon seized her by the hair and yanked her backward. As they passed her family, Aislinn saw that her mother and father wore identical looks of horror, but neither of them said anything. They had six younger children to think about, and in their silence, Aislinn understood, then and forever, that she was alone. Fallon gave her hair another sharp jerk, and she squealed, resisting him, digging her heels in, but the soil was too dry to provide any stopping power. Slowly, inexorably, he was pulling her toward the cottage.
“Let this be a reminder to all of you,” Lady Andrews’s voice rang out behind her. “You are tenants. It’s of no concern to me how aggrieved you feel, only whether you produce my quota. Think on this little bitch the next time any of you wants to open his mouth.”
Aislinn tried to dart sideways, to tug free, and then winced as strands of hair pulled from her head. Behind her, she could see Mr. and Mrs. Vine looking carefully away. Had Aislinn just been thinking, a few minutes before, that they all trusted each other? But the Vines had children of their own. They could not afford to get involved.
They cut our ties, Aislinn thought again. Threat; exhaustion; violence; they cut our ties deliberately, but if only we could all come together, just once, all of us at the same time. . . .
But even this thought faded as Fallon threw her through the doorway. Aislinn landed, sprawling, on the hard-packed dirt floor of the cottage, and a sizable puff of dust rose into the air around her, causing her to cough. Fallon was advancing now through the open doorway, little more than a hulking silhouette against the sunlight. He outweighed her by at least five stone. The world was not a fair place; Aislinn had accepted that fact long before she could walk. But fair or no, this should not be the choice a woman faced: to give in and live, or fight and die. Fallon grasped her ankle, and it was then that Aislinn saw the poker, lying half out of the fireplace. Someone, probably her sister Lita, who was lame and could not work in the fields for long, had been stoking the fire in preparation for dinner, and there was a good blaze going. The poker’s tip glowed a bright and cheerful red; Aislinn stared at it as though hypnotized.
“Come here, girlie,” Fallon whispered, tugging her leg, pulling her toward him. “You be nice, now—”
But he got no further, for Aislinn had already grabbed the poker and swung it around, bashing him in the face.
The screaming was terrible, so terrible that it brought Aislinn’s parents and the rest of the tenants running across the field. But by the time they got there, the deed was already done: Fallon lying on the floor, covered with burn marks and large, round wounds where Aislinn had stabbed him with the poker. Eventually word was sent to Lady Andrews’s castle, and the search was begun. But Aislinn had already disappeared, fled into the open Almont, knowing that there was no other option, that they would kill her if they found her.
She spent that first night in a cornfield, picking locusts from her hair, shivering though the night was hot, and when she rose the next morning, hungry and thirsty, she knew that the best course of action was to flee farther. She had no water, but she could follow the remaining trickle of the Cri
the, work her way toward the central Almont, and perhaps find a new village, distant enough from Lady Andrews’s acreage that she would not be known. This seemed a decent enough plan . . . until Aislinn thought of Fallon’s stupid grin, his grasping hands, of Lady Andrews tapping her chest with the crop.
That was when she knew that she wasn’t going anywhere.
Chapter 6
THE EMPRESS
For a supposedly Christian nation, the Tearling has evinced a stunning ability to accept the presence of magic. Seers, ghosts, even street magicians coexist happily alongside God and the Devil, and people who cross themselves will also live by prophecy. This is a contradiction of confounding proportions, but this historian believes that it can be explained by a single defining event: the Crossing.
No one but William Tear has ever understood how the Crossing itself was accomplished, how two thousand men and women departed America that was and ended up on a shore that existed on no map. The little information available to us suggests that the mechanism of the journey was a closely guarded secret, even among Tear’s inner circle. But explanation is not necessary for belief. More than three centuries on, that single voyage continues to hold the popular imagination, far more tightly than the Bible ever will.
—The Glynn Queen and the Rise of Atheism in the Tearling: A Treatise, Father Tyler
Highness, we shouldn’t be here,” Barty said. He spoke in a low, urgent voice, as though he had not already made this remark some ten or twelve times. “Your mother will surely hear of it.”
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