The Fate of the Tearling

  “Do they feed you?” he asked Maya.

  “Yes. Every day a tiny dose, not nearly enough . . .”

  The Fetch grimaced.

  “You will not stay, keep me company?” Maya asked. “I’m not afraid of your mask.”

  “Then you would be the first,” the Fetch murmured. Even he himself had become afraid of the mask, for he no longer knew which was the real man beneath. The outlaw? The rueful traitor who had been forced into hiding, donning the mask only because he could no longer stand the idea that he might be recognized? Or was it a boy named Gavin, a boy who had wanted so badly to be right, to be clever, that he had been easy pickings for the cleverest manipulator of them all?

  Which are you?

  He didn’t know. He had been walking the Tear for more than three hundred years, and sometimes he felt that he was not one man, only a collection of phases, several different men with their own lifetimes.

  But which are you now? his mind hammered relentlessly. Which man have you become?

  Ah, there was the question. The boy, Gavin, would have left the mutilated woman before him on the bench, her purpose served, information extracted. The man, the Fetch, might have rescued her, but only to increase the glory of his legend, as when he had once stolen an unhappy concubine from right under Thomas Raleigh’s nose.

  He dug deep into the inner pocket of his shirt and came up with a cloth-wrapped packet. Inside were several needles and a good quantity of high-grade morphia. He had not expected to need these things, but had brought them along just in case. Now he unwrapped the cloth and snapped his fingers before Maya’s face.

  “Listen.” He pressed the vials into her hand. “These are for you. Hide them away, and hide them well.”

  Her gaze sharpened as she focused on the needles.

  “For me?”

  “Yes. Just in case.” He patted her cheek to make her look at him. “This is the Grandmile grade. Powerful, far more powerful even than what you were getting from the Holy Father. If you took it all at once, you wouldn’t live out the night.”

  She looked up at him steadily, clenching the packet in her fist.

  The Fetch tiptoed backward, leaving her on the bench. Briefly, he considered going upstairs and ending the Holy Father once and for all, but then he realized that he could not; he might need the man in the end, and even if not, there were ranks of eager priests, perhaps worse, waiting behind him. No, better to simply fade away, vanish, as he had always done. And yet he couldn’t help loathing himself.

  “Dear God,” he whispered, and even though he was currently walking through the oldest house of worship in the new world, he knew he was talking to no one at all. If God had ever been in the Tearling, he was long gone.

  Javel could not stand still. He had spent most of the morning pacing in front of the window, which was spattered with tiny droplets. Cold rain had been falling in Demesne on and off for the past two weeks, and the unpaved streets of this neighborhood, the Breen, were nothing but a wet bog. Winter came to the Mort capital several weeks earlier than it did to New London; Javel was grateful that Galen had insisted they bring heavier clothing. Sometimes Galen’s caution was annoying—like having a mother along—but more often than not, that caution was also justified. Javel had learned to trust the man’s instincts, and several days ago, when Galen suggested that it was time to move along to new quarters, they had packed up and moved into the Breen.

  Javel had not expected to like Demesne. Even before it had taken Allie from him, Mortmesne had been a dark realm, evil kingdom in the fairy tales Javel had heard growing up. But Demesne was, after all, only a city, buildings and alleys and streets, and Javel had been a city dweller all his life. Demesne was bigger than New London, and boasted impressive construction, most of its buildings made of brick instead of wood. The streets gleamed with windows, for glass was nearly as cheap as brick in Mortmesne, the result of a glut of supply from Cadare. The Red Queen was no fool; she’d made sure that glass was affordable even for Mortmesne’s poor. The city was filled with such small gestures, the trappings of quality of life, plazas and public parks. It was the facade of an easy, open land, incongruous with the image of Mortmesne that Javel had always carried in his head.

  But the plazas and parks were actually under close surveillance by the Queen’s Internal Security, watching to see who gathered with whom. The windows meant that very little could be hidden.

  “Calm yourself, Gate Guard,” Galen murmured from the desk, where he was busy writing a message to the Mace. “You’ll wear out the rug.”

  Javel halted in front of the window. Once still, he could feel steady pounding under his feet. Steel foundries, brick kilns, and many other types of industry operated beneath the streets, and the noise was horrendous, even indoors. The racket made ground-floor space extremely cheap, and they had been at Meiklejohn’s Pub for two days now, paying daily rent to the extremely bad-tempered publican. Galen, ever cautious, had expressed some concern about asking Javel to stay in a pub, but Galen needn’t have worried. Demesne’s pubs were not like those of New London, dark holes where a man could get lost and drown. And Javel had never felt less like drinking in his life. Dyer had been gone all night, but soon he would return, and if he’d been successful, he would return with Allie’s location.

  They were a badly mismatched group. Queen’s Guard or not, Galen was too old for such an enterprise. Dyer and Javel had reached an uneasy balance of civility and mistrust, but Javel knew that, all things being equal, Dyer would like nothing better than to run him through. Dyer often baited him, and it was an easy business, for Javel could not argue with Dyer’s two recurring themes: Javel was a traitor and Javel was a drunk. Several times, Galen had broken them up when the argument was just about to tip over into violence—though Javel knew he would come off badly in such a brawl—but any truce they made was no more than temporary. Dyer loathed him, and Javel often considered telling the truth and saving him some time: Dyer could not possibly hate Javel more than he hated himself.

  But their odd partnership was often effective. Galen, who had grown up in a border village, spoke excellent Mort, good enough to blend in with the people of the city. They let him do most of the talking—Dyer spoke good Mort, but with a slight accent that might be picked up by a keen ear, and Javel, who did not speak Mort, was not allowed to talk at all. Javel had to admit that Galen was a savvy negotiator. He’d gotten them the rooms in Meiklejohn’s for next to nothing, and even more importantly, he’d ensured that the landlord would leave them alone.

  Then there was Dyer. Javel had assumed that Dyer had been sent along primarily as a sword, for he was well known to be one of the Queen’s best. But he had other talents: it had taken him only two days to pick up a girl in the Auctioneer’s Office. Since then, there had been several more meetings, from each of which Dyer returned with an increasingly unbearable air of having made sacrifice for Queen and country. The three of them were posing as merchants up from the south, and Dyer was also feigning a gruesome interest in the slave trade. Last night, the girl had been meant to show him the Auctioneer’s Office itself, but when Javel woke this morning, Dyer still hadn’t returned. Now Javel could do nothing but pace in front of the window. The Auctioneer’s list held the name, location, and origin of every slave in Mortmesne, for Gain Broussard’s office was nearly as efficient as Thorne’s former Census Bureau. Word had reached Demesne almost a month ago: Arlen Thorne was dead. The Glynn Queen had ended him, and even the Mort consensus seemed to be good riddance. But for Javel, news of Thorne’s death had not brought the satisfaction he might have expected, only a sense of futility. He would have bet his last pound that Thorne had died believing he had done nothing wrong, but even if the man had discovered some late form of repentance, the world remained full of Thornes.

  “You’re pacing again,” Galen remarked. “If you can’t keep it together, I’ll have to tie you to a chair.”

  “Sorry,” Javel muttered, forcing himself to be still. It was a terribl
e thing, having hope. Sometimes he longed for the old days. The last six years in New London had been miserable, yes, but at least there had been a cold certainty there.

  Outside, the rain had changed from a steady drizzle into a downpour, and on both sides of the street, the vendors hawking their wares had begun to close up shop. Just beneath Javel, on the sidewalk outside, was a pile of curdled horse droppings that no one had bothered to clean up. Abundant windows or not, this wasn’t a good neighborhood. Although Demesne didn’t have an area comparable to the Gut, where nearly everyone was up to no good, in his exploration of the city Javel had found plenty of neighborhoods that the Red Queen’s improvements had failed to reach, where decay had set in. He had plotted these places on a map in his head. This was his usefulness, the reason he didn’t feel like completely dead weight on this enterprise. Dyer had spent most of his life in the Keep, and Galen was more or less a country boy turned Guard. Both of them were intimidated by Demesne’s size, its navigational difficulty, and whenever they had a question about the city’s geography, they turned to Javel.

  In his twenty minutes next to the window, Javel had already seen three troops of Mort soldiers go by. Despite the lack of a Gut, in some ways the vast majority of the city was nothing else, everyone doing what they had to and looking the other way. The people of Demesne didn’t seem to consider themselves under martial law, but the city’s standing police force roved the streets ceaselessly. Javel had seen no real unrest, though Galen had pointed out that the Tearling, even under Thomas Raleigh, had always had a much higher tolerance for civil unrest than Mortmesne. Galen said the soldiers were an anticipatory measure, and he was right. Even three strangers could feel the difference in the city now, the rumblings of discontent in quiet quarters. Galen, who never forgot that he was a Queen’s Guard, liked to sit in the pubs at night, making a mug of ale last for hours while acting as the Mace’s ears, and lately he’d heard plenty. The Queen of the Tearling—widely acknowledged by Demesne to be a fearsome sorceress—had marched into the Mort camp and turned back the Mort army at the very gates of New London, just as her mother had done, though no one quite seemed to know how. Javel wondered briefly if the Queen had reinstituted the shipment, but then dismissed the idea. He was no sycophant, like Galen and Dyer, but he had never forgotten the woman he had seen on the Keep Lawn, the woman who had opened the cages. She would cut her own throat before reviving the slave traffic.

  Both Dyer and Galen were anxious over the Queen—though each tried to hide it—but there was no more news to be had of her, not in any pub. The rest of the gossip was of Mortmesne’s difficulties, and they were many. Some sort of plague was crossing the northland, emptying villages and scattering the inhabitants. A rebellion was raging in the northern cities, Cite Marche and Arc Nord. The rebels were moving their resistance down to Demesne, and Demesne was waiting for them. Without flesh to peddle, many in the city had lost their jobs, and many more in other industries had temporarily lost their regular subsidy of labor from the Crown. Even the girl in the Auctioneer’s Office had confided to Dyer that she lived in fear of being sacked. Demesne’s economy grew increasingly shaky, and all corners of the city placed the blame squarely on the Red Queen. The invasion of the Tearling, which should have injected some badly needed wealth into the city when the army returned, had yielded nothing.

  Javel had assumed that the return of the soldiers would calm the city’s unrest. But instead, the Red Queen had found her problems compounded. The two guards seemed to think that all of this chaos was good, that it would make their job easier. Javel hoped they were right.

  “Sir!”

  A fist pounded on the door. The voice was Dyer’s, and Javel realized, disgruntled, that Dyer had snuck past him somehow. At a nod from Galen, he went to unlock the door and was nearly thrown backward as Dyer burst into the room, panting.

  “Sir, come. Now.”

  Galen stood and grabbed his cloak. This was a thing Javel had learned to admire about the Queen’s Guard: no arguing, not even petty bickering, all questions cleared to one side in the expedience of the moment. He wanted to ask about Allie, but Galen’s professionalism had shamed him into silence. No one had invited him, but he followed them anyway, carefully locking the door of their rooms behind him. He was forced to hurry, for the two guards pounded past the glaring publican and did not slow until they reached the street. The rain had reduced to drizzle again, almost a mist. The air was rank with the acrid smell of steam from the steel foundries. Above the buildings to their right, Javel could just glimpse the topmost turrets of the Palais, the crimson flag that flew over all, lest the people of Demesne forget that the Red Queen’s reign had begun in blood.

  The two Queen’s Guards maintained a steady jog, brisk enough to make Javel feel as though his lungs would collapse, but after a mile or so their progress slowed. They were nearing the Rue Grange, the enormous boulevard that bisected Demesne. Javel enjoyed exploring the city, but he tried to avoid the Rue Grange when possible, for it was the main entry through Demesne’s western gate, the beginning of the Pike Road. Javel could not forget that Allie must have gone down this very boulevard in a cage, years ago. But Dyer led them in that direction, and Javel had no choice but to follow. The crowds intensified as they closed on the Rue; a throng of people seemed to be stuffed down every side street, but the two big Queen’s Guards were able to push through easily, Javel trailing in their wake.

  When they emerged onto the Rue itself, they were forced to halt; there was simply no more room. The middle of the boulevard had been cleared of people by the approach of hundreds of heavy horse, all marching in neatly ordered lines toward the Palais. The ground shook with the impact of their hooves, but Javel could hear nothing over the roar of the crowd.

  “What is it?” he shouted in Dyer’s ear. He half expected Dyer to turn and clout him in return—it had happened before—but Dyer paid him no heed. His eyes were fixed on the endless columns of horse, searching.

  “There!” he cried.

  Javel stood on his tiptoes, trying to see over the big men’s shoulders. After a few seconds, he spotted something: an open wagon, buried deep in the center of the Mort column. Hopping slightly to peer over Galen’s shoulder, he saw a figure seated inside the wagon, facing the rear, a hood drawn low over his face.

  “What is it?” he shouted again, and this time Dyer deigned to notice him, though his lip curled in disgust as he spoke.

  “It’s the Queen, you fucking drunk.”

  Javel wanted to shout back that he wasn’t a drunk; he had been sober for six months now. But then Dyer’s words struck him.

  “The Queen?”

  “Yes, the Queen,” Dyer snarled, “taken prisoner while we were stuck here playing at nonsense with you.”

  Javel stood on his tiptoes again, staring at the wagon, which was now nearly in front of them. The line of the shoulders did suggest a woman, and so did the thin wrists, chained to the wagon. As she approached, the roar of the crowd increased, and a piece of what looked like raw meat flew from the other side of the Rue, narrowly missing her head.

  “What do we do?” Dyer shouted at Galen.

  Javel felt the lightest of touches at his waist. He looked down and found a pickpocket, little more than a child, busily exploring beneath his cloak. He shoved the boy away.

  “Ah, Jesus!” Galen cried.

  Javel looked up again and found the wagon past them now, far enough that they could see under the prisoner’s hood. Someone had worked her over; her lower lip was busted and the mother of all shiners adorned her right eye. But those green eyes could not be mistaken; they darted over the crowd, even as the people cursed her and clods of mud landed almost in her lap. For one interminable moment, Javel was certain that her gaze had swept across the three of them, her good eye fixing on his. Then the wagon dropped out of sight.

  Dyer began to draw his sword, and Javel felt panic clutch his heart. Was Dyer really going to bring the Mort army down on them all? Now? What about A
llie?

  A hand snaked from behind them to clamp Dyer’s wrist, and a voice hissed in Tear, “Do nothing!”

  They whirled to find a group of dark-garbed men standing behind them. The leader was not big, but he was surrounded by larger men, one of them far too big for either Dyer or Galen to take. If this was a Mort patrol, they were all likely dead. Javel considered begging Dyer to tell him where Allie was, in case there was no other chance.

  Galen had pulled a knife, but the stranger only marked it for a moment before returning his gaze to Dyer.

  “She’s beyond your reach at this time, Queen’s Guard. Save your strength for another moment. She’s bloodied, but not broken; look!”

  The three of them turned to look, but the wagon had long since disappeared. The Mort cavalry marched onward, seemingly endless.

  “Who are you?” Galen demanded, turning around again.

  But the man and his companions had already faded into the crowd.

  Kelsea’s dungeon was eight feet by eight feet. She had discovered this by walking the length of each wall, measuring paces. Three of the walls were stone, well built; Kelsea’s fingers could detect no cracks or leaks. The fourth wall was made up of iron bars and a door, beyond them a hallway of indeterminate length. The sounds from this hallway were not good: some screaming, some moaning, and, down the corridor, one man who could not stop babbling, holding an interminable dialogue with someone named George. The fact that George was not there to hold up his end of the conversation was no impediment to this poor soul, who seemed determined to convince his invisible friend that he was not a thief.