Beneath the Keep

by Erika Johansen

  “To get you out of here, of course.”

  “Even you can’t do that.”

  “Of course I can. But I mean to clean house first.”

  “House?” Niya asked, confused. Her head hurt.

  “Nothing to bother you, Niya. Lie back down. Take a rest.”

  The old Niya would not have obeyed such an order, not even from the Fetch . . . but she was tired. So very tired. She lay down on the floor and closed her eyes, liking the feel of the cool stone against her bruised face.

  “Jailor?” the Fetch called, his voice once again overlaid with the rich, satisfied tones of the career priest.

  “Yes, Father?” Kreb nearly broke his neck opening the door.

  “This poor creature has finally found God’s grace, and agreed to confess her crimes. I suggest you fetch your master.”

  “Oh . . . oh! Yes, Father! I will wake him immediately!”

  Kreb hurried away, and Niya heard the Fetch reseat himself in his chair. She wanted to look at him, but her eyelids were as heavy as anvils. She dozed in and out, for a period that seemed endless. She dreamed in this period . . . many dreams, and strange, full of sounds: a muffled scream, gagging. She was standing on a high hilltop, looking down at a river, and behind her a man begged for his life. A voice rang across the hilltop . . . a man’s voice, but no man she had ever heard before. His words seemed almost part of the wind.

  Niya.

  “Niya.”

  A key rattled in the lock, jerking her awake, and then the Fetch was bending over her.

  “Thank God. I thought you were dead.”

  “No.” Niya coughed; her throat was dry, drier than she could ever remember. The Fetch handed her a dipper of water, and she drank deep, finishing the entire thing. “Not dead.”

  But you will be, her mind whispered, and now, suddenly, Niya remembered what had happened, what had brought her down here, what had kept her mouth shut as Culp beat her and burned her and even tore her hair out, taking piece after piece of scalp with it. She remembered everything, the crying baby in her arms and the tall, sorrowful woman on the throne . . . both of them one and the same.

  “Help me up.”

  Outside her cell, Kreb lay sprawled on the ground, his throat cut. Culp lay nearby; Niya could not tell what had happened to him, save that he had no features anymore. The floor was sticky with blood.

  “Thank you,” she told the Fetch, meaning it with all her heart. “Now give me Kreb’s knife.”

  “What?”

  “I slew them. Give me Kreb’s knife. That way, if someone should happen to come in here before you get clear of the Keep, it was only me who killed them, after you left. No one would suspect a priest, and you must leave here alive.”

  The Fetch stared at her for a long moment. Niya took pleasure in his careful scrutiny; even now, he did not mistake her words for nonsense or the distracted ravings of a lesser woman.

  “Niya? What is it?”

  “I’m going nowhere. My head feels strange. I can’t stand up. I can’t leave here, but you can . . . and you must.”

  “Why?”

  Niya told him. Toward the end, her tale began to blur together, but the Fetch listened carefully, not interrupting. She wished that he had been there with her, had heard the grave woman in the crown, seen the outline of the better world. If he had only seen, then he could not doubt.

  “Enough,” he told her at last. “Enough. I understand. The girl must be watched, and guarded. But you need not have worried; I already have Howell on it.”

  “Already? Why?”

  “Niya, who would you say fathered that child?”

  “Gareth.”

  “Gareth, yes. Gareth, who had the sight. William Tear’s sight.”

  Niya stared at him for a long moment, trying to think clearly, to ward off the waves of exhaustion.

  “You think she has Tear blood.”

  “I think Gareth did. As for the girl, we’ll have to see.”

  Tear blood. That meant something, but Niya could not come up with it, could not see the larger picture.

  I’ll think on it later, she decided. After I sleep.

  “Get the knife,” she told him. “Hurry up. I don’t know when the guard shift changes.”

  The Fetch hesitated, and Niya raised her palms, a bit exasperated now. “What are they going to do? Kill me twice?”

  But still he did not go, and now Niya finally understood.

  “You came to kill me. So I couldn’t tell them where she is.”

  The Fetch clearly had some thought of lying, for he did not reply right away. And then he paid her the highest compliment he had ever paid her in all of their long association, answering her with a nod.

  “Well, you can kill me if you wish, but there’s no need. I will die soon, one way or another. And I will not break.”

  The Fetch said nothing, merely looked at her. Niya thought there might be tears in his eyes, but she couldn’t be sure. At long last he nodded, and went to get Kreb’s knife. Niya leaned back against the wall again, feeling a headache begin its battering work against her temples.

  I will die soon, she repeated to herself. But even that inevitability did not seem real.

  “Here,” the Fetch said, handing her the knife. Niya took it with her good hand, searching for a pocket . . . but of course the shapeless shift had none. She clutched the knife, looking up at the Fetch. Miraculously, there was not a spot of blood on his white robes; she supposed he must have taken them off at some point, then put them back on.

  Niya.

  She jerked awake; she had fallen asleep again . . . only for a moment, but long enough to once again hear that voice. Whose voice could it be?

  “Thank you,” she told the Fetch again, nudging Culp’s body through the bars with her foot. “This is a great kindness. Now you should leave.”

  “I need not go yet.”

  But it was time. The Fetch knew it as well as she did. He backed away, straightening his robes, then turned to leave the cell. But Niya’s question stopped him.

  “Why did we fail?”

  The Fetch stood silent for a long moment. Niya sensed that she had truly upset him, though she had not intended to.

  “We didn’t fail, Niya. We simply didn’t win. History rules, not us. If we’re lucky, we get an occasional star to guide us . . . but we didn’t. Not this time.”

  “Do you think we’ll ever reach it?” Niya asked sleepily. “The better world?”

  “I don’t know,” the Fetch admitted, keeping his back to her. “William Tear’s better world required the Crossing, and that was an extraordinary event, one never duplicated. To get there again . . . it will take another extraordinary event.”

  “Keep her safe,” Niya murmured. “Promise me.”

  “I will. You have my word.”

  Niya smiled. Relief seemed to bathe her, cool balm against her wounded heart. The Fetch opened the door, and she asked one last question . . . the question she had never asked him before.

  “Who are you, really? Beneath the mask?”

  The Fetch’s shoulders rose and fell beneath the white robes. When he turned back, he looked not twenty or twenty-five but ancient, his face fallen into sagging lines of sorrow, like a man who had already burned through the best of his life.

  “No one of importance, Niya. Only a man who must repair the gap. Sleep now.”

  She did.

  * * *

  The soldiers came in not long after . . . before the blood on the floor had dried, anyway. Niya woke when they began shouting at each other. They had locked her cell, and they did not dare to come inside; there were only two of them, and Niya still had a knife, after all. Finally, they decided to go upstairs and ask for guidance. Guidance did not take long; within perhaps thirty minutes, they came back again, and this time ther
e were five of them.

  “It’s your lucky day, lassie,” the soldier in charge said. “No time to train up a new interrogator, and the Princess Regent is tired of extending you hospitality. You’re for the axe.”

  Niya nodded, a small smile creasing her face. If she hadn’t been so tired, she might have whooped for joy, perhaps even cut a few capers.

  I can sleep, she thought. At last and finally, I can sleep.

  But though she was determined not to be afraid, all of her fine resolve left her as they ascended the stairs.

  The smell hit her first, even before they had reached the first floor. It was like nothing Niya had ever smelled in her life: a meaty smell, half rotten. It got stronger as they exited the dungeons and approached the drawbridge, and then stronger still, until Niya felt that she would never be hungry again. The soldiers, too, were unwell; several of them looked decidedly ill, and all of them covered their mouths and noses.

  Why the axe? she wondered suddenly. The scaffold on the Keep Lawn had taken so many Blue Horizon lives; why not Niya’s as well? Then they moved out onto the drawbridge, and the view stopped Niya dead.

  The Keep Lawn had turned black.

  Burned, Niya thought numbly. The grass had burned in all directions, east to west, from the moat to the Great Boulevard. Niya could not see even a hint of green, and when she looked up to the top of the lawn, she saw that the facings of several buildings on the boulevard had blackened as well. Some areas of the lawn were still smoking, and it took Niya only a few steps beyond the drawbridge to realize that she was walking not on crisped grass, but charred flesh. She no longer felt tired, but wide awake, as though she had been slapped. Whatever had happened here had been terrible, so terrible that even the Fetch could not tell her the truth.

  The scaffold was gone as well, probably burned to the ground. Niya had seen too many friends die there in the past months to mourn its loss, but as the soldiers led her forward and she glimpsed the squat black block with its protruding cup, her skin began to crawl. There was such an unrelenting implacability about that shape, somehow exacerbated by the fact that Niya’s hands were bound behind her.

  I should have done it myself, she thought, shivering in the early-morning air. I should have slit my own wrists in my cell, while I still had the chance.

  There were no crowds on the lawn today; the smell alone was surely enough to keep even the most hardened gawkers away. Only two figures stood beside the block: a priest and a headsman, hooded in black. Both of them had clearly just been roused from sleep, for the priest’s robes were wrinkled, and the headsman leaned tiredly on his axe. The axe had been used for someone else, Niya saw, and recently. Bits of flesh still caked the blade. Many good men and women had died out here in the past months; the smell was horrendous, and the axe was worse, but Niya tried to comfort herself with the thought that those shreds of flesh were perhaps the remnants of someone she had known, shared community with, admired. She was Blue Horizon, and the Blue Horizon took care of each other, even in death.

  The priest—a real priest, this one—began to read from his Bible. Niya didn’t listen. She had meant to keep her eyes closed, but she found that she could not help looking behind her, up at the stone facade of the Keep. Were they watching? Elyssa, Thorne, the witch, the Guard . . . had any of them come to see her die? Niya looked out over the blackened lawn again, trying to understand, to decrypt what had happened . . . but thinking made her head hurt. She wondered where Mace was, whether he had cleared the Creche, the city walls. Perhaps he and Kelsea had perished in the tunnels. Perhaps it had all been for nothing.

  No, she thought fiercely. I don’t believe that. They had played and lost, as the Fetch had said, but even loss was not permanent. Niya would not see the better world, but it did not follow that there would be none. It was the great gift of humanity, after all: to hold to hope, even when all torches went out.

  After what seemed eons, the priest finally stopped babbling about God and closed his book. The soldiers took Niya’s arms, shoving her roughly to her knees and bending her over the block, and Niya suddenly realized that a crowd had gathered to watch her die . . . a huge crowd, so many that she could not count them all. She craned her neck, straining to glimpse their faces, as the soldiers pinned her back and the headsman moved to stand beside the block.

  I know them, Niya thought, staring at the crowd. And then, a moment later: Great God, I know all of them! There was Gareth, there Amelia, there Dylan, there old Maeve, there Lila and Marco . . . even Danny the Prince, who had died years before, killed during his first raid in the Gut. All of them were here, yes, but now Niya’s attention was caught by a single man: a stranger, standing at the forefront of the crowd. She could not see his face clearly, and that was odd, for all of the other faces were so clear to her . . . so clear, and so well-loved. The sun was about to break the horizon, and the morning was bright and cold, but still she could not see the stranger’s face.

  Niya.

  “May you repent your treason and your sins,” the priest intoned behind her, “and in such repentance find God’s forgiveness. His everlasting kingdom.”

  That brought Niya back, enough to allow her to snarl at the priest, “I don’t need your kingdom, old man, or your God. I am Blue Horizon. There’s a better world out there, so close we can almost touch it.”

  The soldiers shoved her down again, pushing her face into the cup of ice-cold stone. Niya squinted, trying to see the stranger, but all she could see was his general outline: tall, taller than the rest. The sun broke the horizon, and the first rays gleamed off the top of his blond head.

  “May God have mercy on your soul.”

  The axe rose above her; Niya heard it clearly, the susurration of air, the headsman’s intake of breath as he hefted it high. But the fall seemed very long, so long that she had time to look up at them, all of them, her friends, her brothers and sisters; time to remember every word the True Queen had spoken in that vaulted room of stone; time to look out across the city and the Almont beyond, to the horizon of the Tearling, this kingdom to which Niya had given so much . . . in the end, everything. She even had time to examine the stranger, the faceless man who stood at the head of the crowd, and in the moment before the axe bit, Niya realized that she did know him, after all: a tall blond man with eyes so bright they seemed almost silver, and it was the eyes that Niya recognized, eyes that had looked across the void and seen the better world, the land beyond the Crossing. The world for all of them. Niya opened her mouth, wanting to speak to him, even just to call him by name . . . and then she realized that she didn’t need to, that he had heard her already. The axe met stone, a resounding crack that echoed across the vast length of the Keep Lawn, and the last thing Niya saw was the eastern horizon, that deep blue line that might hide anything at all, even a better world.

  Niya reached out and touched it.

  And at the End

  A SONG OF THE GUARD

  All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.

  —Francis of Assisi (pre-Crossing Ital.)

  It was nearly dawn and pouring rain when Mace dismounted and knocked on the door of the cottage. At his chest, the baby made a loud yowling noise, voicing her anger that the ride had stopped. He had rigged the sling to guard her from the rain, which had been falling steadily since they left New London, but it had also allowed him to ride much faster with both hands on the reins, and the girl had been delighted, making happy little sounds for much of their journey. Now Mace jiggled her a bit, to ward off the inevitable tantrum, and knocked again.

  Barty opened the door. He had clearly just woken; his eyes were rimmed with red, and he wore only trousers. He stared at Mace for a long, surprised moment, then spoke in a rusty wheeze of a voice.

  “Thought you’d have quit the Guard by now, lad. Gone back to your boxing, as it were.”

  “You knew as well?”

&
nbsp; “Think I’m stupid? Of course I knew. Carroll’s a young fool, but his heart is good. He’ll make a fine Captain, once he grows up a bit.” Barty’s expression sobered as he looked over Mace’s shoulder. “Where is Niya? Carroll told us she would be coming.”

  “She didn’t make it.”

  Barty raised his eyebrows, but Mace did not elaborate. After a long moment, Barty gestured toward the baby at his chest.

  “Is that her? Elyssa’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  Barty bit the inside of his cheek. “Can I hold her?”

  Mace handed the girl over, surprised to find himself a bit reluctant. In the three days they had been on the road, he had grown used to the small scrap: her scrunched-up face, her waving arms, the astonishing volume of her screams when Mace slowed his horse. Even changing nappies had not been so terrible as he had imagined.

  “Come in, lad, come in,” Barty told him. “You’re wet through.”

  Mace went inside, dropped his saddlebags, and pulled off his sopping cloak, hanging it on one of the pegs near the door.

  “Barty?”

  A woman had appeared in the hall. She was tall and forbidding, this woman, with hawklike eyes and whitening hair. Mace did not know her by sight, only by reputation, but all the same, he thought he could have picked her out of a crowd in the New London Circus: Lady Glynn, the tutor, who had brought fear to the entire Queen’s Wing in her day, who had lost her title when she redistributed her lands. Lady Glynn, whom everyone had believed dead.

  “Will you join us for breakfast, lad?” Barty asked.

  From the corner of his eye, Mace saw the old lady’s mouth pinch; she did not like him. Most people did not . . . and they would not, Mace thought. Those who had accepted him—Carroll, Niya, Arliss—were the exceptions, and there would not be many of them. Perhaps it was better so.

  “No,” he replied. “But I could use some food for the journey back.”