The sooner Kelsea got out of this wagon, the better. She was not in control during her fugues; both Mace and Pen had told her so. She twisted to lie on her back, feeling slivers of wood dig into her cloak. If only she could reach out to them, to William and Jonathan Tear, tell them of the storm-filled future, change history instead of just watching it play out—
A skull appeared over her head.
Kelsea bolted upright, clapping a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp, and saw that the skull had actually been hung high in the air, mounted on a pike in between streetlamps. A few traces of flesh still dangled from its jawbone. The eye sockets were crusted with blood, long since aged black. She lost sight of the skull as the light from the streetlamp faded away behind them, but then another streetlamp appeared, and shortly afterward, another skull. This one was very old; wind and time had eaten away at the jawbone and the smooth curvature around the nose.
Well, there was at least one question answered. She was on the Pike Road.
As quietly as she could, Kelsea stood up in the wagon, holding her chains so that they would not rattle and wake her jailor. Dawn was coming quickly now, the eastern horizon lined with pink, but the land below was a vast darkness, broken only by their current road, which was lined with pikes and streetlamps. They were heading on a slight downhill slope, but in the distance, Kelsea could see that the road inclined sharply toward an enormous barrier: a wall, tall and well fortified, a black bulwark against the lightening sky. Above the wall, Kelsea saw the silhouettes of many buildings and, towering over all, a vast structure, tipped with spikes and oblongs that Kelsea identified as turrets.
Demesne, she thought, feeling something knot together in her stomach. Once it had been Evanston, the capital of New Europe, the city on a plateau, built brick by brick by settlers. But now it seemed like something out of a nightmare.
Kelsea sat back down in the bed of the wagon, keeping an eye on her jailor, who was beginning to stir, and wrapped herself up in her cloak. She tried to summon courage, but that well seemed to have dried up. She was in the middle of her own Crossing now, but this voyage was nothing like William Tear’s.
This was a journey into a dark land.
When Ducarte walked through the door, the Queen knew it was bad. She had waited days for this report, trying to be patient—though it ran directly counter to her nature—understanding that it would take Ducarte some time to assess the situation. She had only sent him home from the border two weeks before. After the scene with the girl, Ducarte was no more use as a commander, for it seemed he could barely keep himself together. He jumped at loud noises, and sometimes the Queen had to speak his name two or three times to get his attention. She had hoped that a return to his old duties, the position that he had created and made his own, might bring him back to himself. But as soon as Ducarte entered her throne room, she saw that nothing had changed. If anything, he seemed worse than ever. Whatever the girl had done to him, she had done it well . . . perhaps even permanently. And without Ducarte, the Queen’s position became even weaker than before.
She was facing a revolt. Despite her best efforts, word had leaked out that she was gone, and the rebel leader, Levieux, had laid siege to Cite Marche. None of the overgrown prats to whom she had delegated responsibility had made even the slightest headway in stopping this Levieux, or even in discovering his identity. Her army had finally returned from the Tearling, but slowly, even more slowly than on the outgoing journey, and in this lack of speed, the Queen sensed treachery. Before she departed, she had given explicit orders to Ducarte’s replacement, General Vine, that any man caught looting in the Tear be hung from the nearest tree. But General Vine was not a man to make an army tremble. Only fear of the Queen herself was keeping her soldiers in line now, and she sensed that fear steadily eroding. Her colonels and generals were loyal, for they knew they would be compensated for their share of plunder upon their return. But the rest of the army . . . damn it, she needed Ducarte now! How could he go and fall apart when she could least afford to lose him?
But the Queen allowed none of this rancor to show on her face. Even half of Ducarte’s old competence, she reminded herself, was better than most men could boast. Behind him came two lieutenants, both of whom knew enough to take station behind Ducarte and stay quiet, their eyes cast respectfully to the floor.
“What news, Benin?”
Ducarte tossed his cloak away and collapsed into a nearby chair. Another disturbing sign. Ducarte had never liked to sit before; now he seemed to be constantly looking for the nearest support.
“Cite Marche is in chaos, Majesty. Last week, a mob broke into the Crown warehouses and removed everything, food and glass and steel and arms. The soldiers who were supposed to be on duty have disappeared. Mayor Givene has disappeared, and without him, no one has the authority to mobilize the city militia.”
“I have the authority.”
“Of course, Majesty. I didn’t mean—”
“Get the militia out there and find my property.”
“That might be a problem, Majesty. We’ve caught a few people with glass or steel, but only a piece or two at a time. That rebel bastard, Levieux, has already distributed all of the goods, and he seems to have done it citywide. The food is probably gone already, and we’d have to arrest half the populace to take back the rest.”
“He stole only to give it away?”
“Apparently, Majesty.”
The Queen remained still, but inside her muscles were jumping, galvanized by fury. It was not enough that she had expended a vast fortune to mount an invasion that had netted her nothing. Now she had to come home to this!
“When you find Givene, I want him hung from the walls of Cite Marche.”
“Yes, Majesty.” Ducarte hesitated for a moment, then asked, “His head?”
“His whole body!” she shouted. “His whole body, Benin! Alive! Once the crows have their way, we’ll see how good a rebel he is!”
“Yes, Majesty,” Ducarte repeated dully, and the Queen had to restrain the urge to leap from her throne and slap him. There had been a day once, almost twenty years ago now, when Ducarte had taken a traitor from Callae and skinned the man alive, working slowly and methodically, impervious to the man’s screams, shaving flesh with his knife as a sculptor would shave clay. The old Ducarte would not have needed clarification. The old Ducarte would simply have understood. The Queen took a deep breath, feeling everything tip precariously inside her.
“What of Demesne?”
“At this moment, Demesne seems relatively calm, Majesty. But I’ll wager not for long.”
“Why not?”
“I sent several of my agents out into the countryside, Majesty, to assess the likelihood of a slave revolt. They found little to worry about from that quarter.”
The Queen nodded. The penalties for runaway slaves had always been sufficiently severe to create an effective deterrent. “But?”
“There is a curious migration under way, Majesty. The villages of the Glace-Vert have been abandoned. People are taking their livestock and whatever valuables they can carry and moving southward. Many of them are already crammed into Cite Marche.”
“Why?”
“My people were too spread out to conduct proper interrogations, Majesty. This is only the word they were able to pick up from voluntary statements. There is an old superstition in the Fairwitch—” Ducarte paused and coughed lightly. “A creature that supposedly stalks the mountains and foothills, seeking young prey—”
“The Orphan,” the Queen murmured.
“Majesty?”
“Nothing. I know this superstition, Benin; it is older than I am. What has changed?”
“There are new reports, Majesty, of villages assaulted by not one, but an army of such things. My agent in Devin’s Copse found blood and bones on the floors of the empty houses. My people have found eight villages so abandoned. Two of my agents have gone missing themselves, more than a week overdue.”
“What is the alt
ernate explanation?” the Queen asked. But her tone was hollow, for it was an empty question. The dark thing was on the hunt. She could tell Ducarte so, but then he would ask for an explanation, and what story would she tell?
Once, long ago, a frightened young girl fled from a village in the Glace-Vert. She was already in exile, and she had gone north to hide. But she found no comfort in the villages of the Glace-Vert, only abuse, so much so that she chose to starve in the mountains instead. She was prepared to die, but one night she saw a flicker of flame—
“Again, I had no resources to interrogate these people, but I tell you, Majesty, they believed what they were saying. Something is at bloody work in the north, and if it continues to move south, the entire country will be knocking at our door for asylum.”
The Queen leaned back against her throne, a pulse drumming unpleasantly in her temples. Two weeks before, she had woken from a nightmare, the most terrible nightmare of her life, in which the dark thing, not phantom but solid, no longer bound by fire, chased her up and down the corridors of her castle, the length of the new world . . .
Free, she realized. Call it the dark thing, call it the Orphan—and those poor hunted villagers out in the Fairwitch certainly needed to call it something, to name the reason their children sometimes disappeared without a trace—but it was out now, free to roam . . . and would it be coming in this direction? Was there even any doubt?
Evie!
The voice rang inside her head, but the Queen pushed it away, staring sadly at her oldest and most faithful ally. Ducarte leaned forward now, resting his crossed arms on his knees and staring at the ground. He was not sixty yet, but he looked like an old man, worn and exhausted. The old General Ducarte, the Chief of Internal Security whose name had made her entire kingdom tremble, that man was dead, and the Queen mourned him. Ducarte had put down the Callaen rebellion, had helped to transmute the Queen’s grasp on Mortmesne from wood to iron. But he was broken, and the Queen was only now awakening to the fact that sending Ducarte to the Tearling might have been the gravest mistake she had ever made. Without him, there was no one to shield her, not even from the army itself.
Have there been others? she wondered, feeling the question scurry in her mind, back and forth, like a panicked rodent. Other failures? How many mistakes have I made?
“What do you want to do, Majesty?”
The Queen tapped her fingers on the arm of her throne for a moment, then asked, almost idly, “Where’s the girl?”
Ducarte’s expression did not change, but his face paled a fraction, and in that moment, he seemed to grow older. The Queen didn’t like to think of the girl either; the memory of that scene in the tent was terrible, so terrible that she had pushed it to the bottom of her mind. The girl knew so much now—
Evie!
—so many things that the Queen had meant to carry to her grave.
“They brought her in yesterday, Majesty. She’s in the dungeons, safe and sound.”
But Ducarte winced as he spoke.
“I want her well guarded.”
“You worry about jailbreak, Majesty?”
“Of course not. I worry about her dying in custody. Your people don’t have the best record in this department, Benin. I need the girl alive.”
“Her name is a rallying cry for the rebels. Wouldn’t it be better to simply execute her?”
The Queen slammed her fist down on the throne, and had the pleasure of seeing him jump.
“Did you hear me, Benin?”
“Yes, Majesty. Alive, I understand.”
But the Queen no longer trusted him. Would Ducarte ever turn against her? No loyalty seemed certain anymore. She thought wistfully of Beryll, her old chamberlain, who would have walked into fire on her command. But Beryll was dead, and in his place the Queen now had Juliette, who seemed always to be whispering. Even now, Julie was forgetting herself, lounging against the wall and making eyes at one of the palace guards. The Queen’s other pages were scattered around the room, barely even paying attention.
“What else?”
“The army, Majesty,” Ducarte ventured, shooting an uneasy glance at the two men behind him. “It’s a problem. Many of the soldiers refused to return home after they were discharged. Large groups of soldiers hold meetings which they believe to be secret. We have reports of widespread public drunkenness and brawling all over Demesne, and in the aftermath of broken furniture and abused women, the people blame you.”
The Queen smiled, allowing some of her own spite to enter her voice. “Well, why don’t you do something about it, Benin?”
“I no longer hold sway with my men, Majesty,” Ducarte admitted stiffly. “They do not want platitudes or patriotism. They want their plunder, all the way down to the infantry. Failing that, they want to be paid in coin.”
The Queen nodded, but what Ducarte asked was impossible. She had always acted as her own treasurer, and she knew down to the mark how much money was in her vaults. She had reserves, but the flow of money had slowed considerably since the Tear shipment had stopped. There certainly wasn’t enough to pay the thousands of disaffected soldiers anything close to what they had expected to reap from the Tear invasion. Briefly, the Queen considered paying them all a small fraction anyway; such a gesture would empty the Treasury, but sometimes gestures were necessary. The Queen had gambled thus several times before, and the gamble had always paid off.
But something about the idea stuck in her craw. After all, she had not been paid either. The two Tear sapphires lay beneath her clothes, but they were only pretty baubles. All of the power, the invincibility, she had hoped to gain from the Tear invasion had been reduced to the empty trophies that now hung between her breasts. Upon her return to the Palais, she had tried everything, every enchantment she knew, but the jewels would not speak to her. It was maddening. She had Tear blood—at least the dark thing had told her so—and she should have been able to wield them. Where had their power gone?
Ducarte was still waiting for a solution, but the Queen had none to give. Her soldiers were children. She had compensated her high command, generously so. What they chose to do with that money was their own problem.
“This is my army,” she finally replied. “They work for me. If they forget, I can remind them.”
“Fear will only hold them for so long, Majesty.”
“Just watch, Benin.”
Ducarte wanted to argue further, she could tell, but after a moment he merely resumed his former defeated posture, hanging his head over his knees. For perhaps the hundredth time, the Queen wondered what in holy hell the girl had done to him. She hadn’t even known that this man was capable of fear, and now he seemed to be nothing but a quivering mass of it.
“Anything else?”
“One disturbing report. When your soldiers meet in secret, my people are always watching. Two days ago, a group of ten lieutenants met down in an abandoned house in the southern district.”
“And?”
“They met with two priests.”
“Tear priests?”
“Yes, Majesty. We did not recognize the second, but the man in charge was Father Ryan, he who took over as the pope’s right hand when Brother Matthew was executed.”
The Queen’s lips pulled back in a snarl. The Tear pope’s principles were so flimsy as to be nearly transparent, and the bargain he had struck with the Queen now sat in limbo. The pope had failed to kill the girl, and the Queen had withdrawn her army. She would not touch the Tearling further; even though the jewels appeared lifeless, she had sworn an oath upon them, one she did not dare test. But she should have known that the two-faced bastard in the Arvath would now be seeking his own accommodation. She longed to have his neck in her hands.
“The substance of this meeting?” she demanded.
“I don’t know yet, Majesty. I have two of the lieutenants in custody, but they have not broken.”
“Break them now.”
“Of course, Majesty.” But Ducarte sounded discouraged, and the
Queen heard his unspoken thought easily: it was so hard to keep people from plotting in the dark.
Evie!
“Christ God, shut up!” she whispered.
“Majesty?”
“Nothing.” The Queen rubbed her temples, willing her mind to be silent. The girl had done quite a number on Ducarte, but he wasn’t alone. The Queen, who believed she had killed off Evelyn Raleigh long ago, now found her mind peopled with Evelyn’s unquiet ghosts. She needed peace, time to sit and think, to figure out what to do. Some tea and a hot bath. Answers would come, and if they didn’t, she could at least take a nap, remove some of the muddle that seemed to cover her mind at all times these days. She had been so sure that the Tear sapphires would cure her insomnia, but of course they had not done this either, and now every day seemed to be about recovering the sleep she had lost the night before—
A light clang of steel echoed in the air. Out of old instinct, the Queen sprang from her throne and leapt off the side of the dais, landing in a crouch. Something thudded against the back of her throne, but she was already scurrying behind one of the enormous pillars that sat on either side of the dais. Her mind clocked glimpses of activity: Ducarte, grappling with one of his lieutenants; a knife lying at the foot of the stairs; the other lieutenant, stalking toward the pillar, sword in hand.
Assassination, the Queen thought, almost bemused at the idea. It was an old game, but it had been a long time since anyone had dared to play it here. She pressed her body against the smooth, rounded surface of the pillar, her mind working rapidly. The army was discontented, yes, but discontent alone would never drive them to such a drastic move. They thought her vulnerable, somehow. Did they think she had left the Tear intact out of weakness? Intolerable. Could Ducarte be in on it? She thought not; more likely, Ducarte was a secondary target. No one loved him, not even his own troops.