Pen had stationed himself in front of her now, a sword in each hand. When one of the Regent’s guards broke forward, trying to push through, Pen sidestepped him neatly and chopped off his arm at the biceps, burying a sword in his rib cage. The man screamed, a high, thin shrieking that seemed to go on and on as his severed arm landed several feet away on the flagstones. He dropped to the ground and Pen resumed his waiting posture, unfazed by the blood dripping down his sword arm. Mhurn joined him a moment later, his blond hair streaked with crimson and his face whiter than ever now, as if he were on the edge of fainting.
Two men appeared on her periphery and Kelsea swung that way, trying to tighten her grip on the slippery knife. But it was only Elston and Kibb, planting themselves on either side of her, their swords dripping blood. Kibb had taken a wound to the hand, a deep gash that looked like an animal bite, but otherwise they appeared unharmed. The clang of swords came more slowly now, the fighting dying down. When Kelsea looked out into the crowd, she saw that Arlen Thorne had disappeared. The priest, Father Tyler, was crouched against the nearest of the massive pillars, hugging his Bible to his chest, staring at a blue-clad corpse that lay bleeding at the foot of the dais. The priest looked as though he might faint, and in spite of her distrust, Kelsea felt a brief flash of pity for him. He didn’t seem the sort who’d ever been strong, even as a young man, and he wasn’t young.
He needs to recover, another, colder voice snapped in her mind. Quickly. Kelsea, brought back to herself by the steel in that voice, nodded in agreement. It was extraordinary, how a coronation could mean so little and yet so much. Her legs gave way and she stumbled against Mace, hissing as pain dug into her back like a burrowing insect.
Women scream when they’re hurt, Barty’s voice echoed in her head. Men scream when they’re dying.
I’m not going to scream, either way.
“Lazarus, you have to hold me up.”
Mace got an arm beneath hers and firmed it up, giving her something to lean on. “We need to get that knife out, Lady.”
“Not yet.”
“You’re losing blood.”
“I’ll lose more when the knife is pulled. First this.”
Mace inspected the wound in a cursory way. The color drained from his face.
“What?”
“Nothing, Lady.”
“What?”
“It’s a grave wound. Sooner or later you’re going to pass out.”
“Then hit me and wake me up.”
“I was set to guard your life, Lady.”
“My life and that throne are one,” Kelsea replied hoarsely. It was true, though she hadn’t fully realized until she said it. She reached up to clutch Mace’s shoulder, pointing to the sapphire on her chest. “I’m nothing now but this. You see?”
Mace turned and shouted to Galen in the gallery. Two bodies clad in blue tumbled over the wall and landed with a wet thud on the flagstones. The foremost members of the audience cried out and drew back several feet.
“Wary now!” Mace barked. “Eyes on the crowd! Kibb, you need a doctor?”
“Fuck you,” Kibb replied in a good-natured tone, though his face was white and he was clutching his hand in a death grip. “I’m a medic.”
Many of her uncle’s guard were dead on the dais. Several of her own guards were sporting wounds, but she could see no grey-clad bodies on the floor. Who had thrown the knife?
The Regent remained seated, his manner still unconcerned despite the blood that spattered his face and the four Queen’s Guards who had him at sword point. But a thin layer of sweat gleamed on his upper lip now, and his eyes twitched continuously toward the crowd. Considering the lax skills of his guard, it had been a fool’s attempt on Kelsea’s life. A delaying tactic; her uncle knew the importance of this crowning as well as Kelsea did. An entirely new landscape of pain had begun to radiate outward from her shoulder, and blood was pooling in the small of her back. She sensed that she had very little time. She reached out and grabbed one of her guards, a young one whose name she didn’t know. “Get the priest.”
With a doubtful glance, the guard went and hauled Father Tyler back up to the dais, where he blanched at the pile of dead bodies strewn across the floor. Kelsea opened her mouth and that cold voice emerged, a tone of command that didn’t seem entirely her own. “We’ll continue now, Father. Stick to the essential language.”
He nodded, producing the tiara in one shaking hand. With Mace’s help, Kelsea knelt back down on the floor. Father Tyler opened his Bible again and began to read in a quavering voice, the words running together in Kelsea’s ears. Beyond the priest, she saw the beautiful redhead, still as stone on the top step of the dais, her body streaked and smeared with blood. It had painted her face and soaked through the blue gauze of her clothing. She hadn’t moved an inch, but she was alive; her grey eyes stared at the same fixed point on the floor. Kelsea closed her eyes for a moment, and then she was looking up at the ceiling, an enormous vaulted expanse, revolving above her.
Mace’s boot landed in the small of her back, and Kelsea bit her tongue against a scream. Her vision cleared slightly, and she saw the priest advancing upon her, Bible closed, tiara in hand. Her guard tensed up around her. Father Tyler leaned down, his eyes wide, his face drained of all blood, and Kelsea felt her earlier suspicions inexplicably vanish. She wished that she could comfort him, tell him that his part in this business was almost done.
But it isn’t, another voice whispered, quiet but sure in her mind. Not even close.
“Your Highness,” he asked, his tone almost apologetic, “do you swear to act for this kingdom, for this people, under the laws of God’s Church?”
Kelsea drew a hoarse breath, feeling something rattle in her chest, and whispered, “I swear to act for this kingdom and for this people, under the law.”
Father Tyler paused. Kelsea tried to draw another breath and felt herself fading, drifting to the left. Mace kicked her again, and this time she couldn’t stop the small screech that escaped her lips. Even Barty would have understood. “You’ll watch out for your church, Father, and I’ll watch out for this kingdom and its people. My vow.”
Father Tyler hesitated a moment longer, then tucked his Bible into the fold of his robes. His face was a mask of resignation and regret, as though he could see into the future, the many possible consequences of this moment. Perhaps he could. He reached out and set the tiara on Kelsea’s head with both hands. “I crown you Queen Kelsea Raleigh of the Tearling. Long be your reign, Majesty.”
Kelsea shut her eyes, her throat choked with a relief so great that it bordered on ecstasy. “Lazarus, help me up.”
Mace hauled her to her feet, and her legs promptly gave way. His arms wrapped around her from behind, holding her up like a rag doll, pitching her torso forward to avoid the knife hilt buried in her shoulder.
“The Regent.”
Mace swung her carefully around and Kelsea faced her uncle, finding his eyes bright with stupid desperation. Slowly, deliberately, she leaned back against Mace until the hilt of the knife bumped his chest. The pain jolted her awake, but not much; darkness was closing in now, a blackening border around the edge of her vision.
“Get off my throne.”
Her uncle didn’t move. Kelsea leaned forward, summoning all of her strength, her breath rasping loudly in the vast, echoing chamber. “You have one month to be gone from this Keep, Uncle. After that . . . ten thousand pounds on your head.”
A woman behind Kelsea gasped, and muttering began to spread throughout the crowd. Her uncle’s panicked eyes darted behind her.
“You can’t place a bounty on a member of the royal family.”
The voice behind her was an oily baritone that Kelsea already recognized: Thorne. She ignored him, forcing words out in thin wheezes of breath. “I’ve given you . . . a running start, Uncle. Get off my throne right now, or Lazarus will throw you out of the Keep. How long . . . do you think you’ll last?”
Her uncle blinked slowly. Afte
r several seconds he rose from the throne, his stomach ballooning as he stood upright. Too much ale, Kelsea thought vaguely, followed by: My god, he’s shorter than I am! Her vision doubled, then tripled. She nudged Mace with one elbow, and he understood, for he hauled her forward and eased her onto the throne. It was like sitting on a freezing cold rock. Kelsea swayed against the icy metal, shut her eyes, and opened them again. There was something else she had to do, but what?
In front of her, Kelsea spotted the redhead, still covered in blood. Her uncle stumbled down the steps of the dais, the slack in the rope pulling tighter as he went.
“Drop the rope,” Kelsea whispered.
“Drop the rope,” Mace repeated.
Her uncle whirled around, and for the first time, Kelsea saw naked fury in his eyes. “The woman’s mine! She was a gift.”
“Too bad.”
Her uncle looked around for reinforcements, but most of his guards were dead. Only three of them followed at his heels, and even these remaining men seemed reluctant to meet his eye. Her uncle’s face was white with anger, but Kelsea saw something worse written in his expression: aggrieved bewilderment, the look of a man who didn’t know why so many terrible things should happen to him when he had meant so well. After another moment’s deliberation, he dropped the rope and scuttled backward.
“She’s mine,” he repeated plaintively.
“She goes with us. Elston—see to it.”
“Majesty.”
“Take me out, Lazarus, please,” Kelsea rasped. Drawing breath was an exercise in agony. Mace and Pen debated for a moment, and then each of them stooped down and got an arm beneath her, forming a chair. Kelsea was dimly grateful; it was a more dignified way to leave the room than being slung around like a sack. Her guard quickly re-formed around her, then made their way off the dais and down the center aisle. The crowd blurred past. Kelsea wished they hadn’t first seen her this way, bloody and weakened. At some point they passed a noblewoman in a red velvet dress, the color brilliant in the darkness. Carlin had always liked to wear that same deep, rich red at home, and Kelsea reached out a hand to the woman, whispering, “It will be a hard road.” But she was too far away to touch. Many faces streaked by; for a moment, Kelsea thought she saw the Fetch, but that was madness. Still she reached out again, grasping helplessly.
“Sir, we need to hurry,” Pen muttered. Mace grunted assent, and their progress quickened, through the enormous double doors and out into the broad entry passage. Kelsea could smell her own blood now, impossibly vivid. All of her senses were in riot. Each torch was as bright as the sun, but when she squinted at Mace, she found his face shrouded in darkness. The guards muttered to each other, their whispers deafening, but Kelsea couldn’t understand a single word. The tiara was slipping from her head.
“My crown is falling off.”
Mace tightened the arm that supported her back. Reaching for a wall, he touched something invisible to Kelsea’s eyes, and to her astonishment, a hidden door swung open into darkness. “Not if I can help it, Lady.”
“Nor I,” echoed Pen. As they went through the darkened doorway, Kelsea felt a careful hand secure the crown on her head.
Chapter 7
Ripples in the Pond
In the wake of her crowning, the Glynn Queen was not seen in the Keep for five days. She was unconscious for much of that time, having taken a knife wound that bled her close to death. For the rest of her life, she would carry the scar on her back; it was this scar, and not, as popularly supposed, the burn on her arm, that earned her the designation “The Marked Queen.”
But the world didn’t stop moving while the Queen slept.
—The Early History of the Tearling, AS TOLD BY MERWINIAN
When Thomas woke the next morning, he hoped the coronation had been a bad dream. He clung to that, clung hard, even though part of his mind already knew that it wasn’t so. Something had gone wrong.
The first clue was Anne, who slept beside him with her manicured hands curled around her pillow. Only Marguerite ever slept beside him. Anne was a poor substitute, with a shorter, pudgier body and red hair that frizzed while Marguerite’s flowed like a river of amber. Anne had a better mouth, but she was no Marguerite. Thomas’s head throbbed, the beginnings of a hangover waiting to assert itself. Marguerite was definitely part of the problem.
He rolled over and buried his head in the pillow, trying to drown out the noise beyond his chamber. It sounded as if someone was moving boxes, a combination of shuffling and thumping that made it impossible to get back to sleep. But the pillow only made his head throb harder, and he finally took it off, cursing fluently under his breath, rang for Pine, and then pulled the coverlet back over his head. Pine would stop the noise.
The girl had taken Marguerite, he remembered now. The girl had fixed on the one thing he couldn’t bear to lose, and that was what she’d taken. There had been one brief moment of hope when the guard managed to knife the girl and she went down, but then Thomas had watched her drag herself from the floor and complete her crowning while her life’s blood ran out, an act of absolute will. She’d taken Marguerite for her own and now she would go to bed with Marguerite every night and oh how his head throbbed, it was like a bellows inside.
Still, perhaps some hope remained. The girl had lost a lot of blood.
It had been several minutes, and no Pine. Thomas pulled the coverlet off his head and rang again, feeling Anne stir beside him. The racket was pretty bad if it had woken her as well; they had put away three bottles of wine last night, and Anne had no head for wine at all.
Pine wasn’t coming.
Thomas sat up and flung off the covers, snarling another curse. More than once, he’d gifted Pine with the use of one of his women for the night, but Pine wasn’t the sort to stop at what was offered. If Thomas found him in bed with Sophie, he would skin Pine alive.
Thomas finally located his robe beneath a pile of clothes in the corner, but the silk tie was stuck and yanked right out of its loops. Thomas cursed again, louder this time, and looked toward Anne, who merely rolled over and put her own head back under a pillow. He wrapped the robe around his body, holding the front closed. If Pine had bothered to actually hang up the clothes, this wouldn’t have happened. When Thomas found him, it would be time for a serious discussion. Failure to answer the bell, piles of dirty laundry everywhere . . . and hadn’t they run out of rum a few days ago? The entire place was falling apart, and at absolutely the worst time. He pictured the girl’s face, that round face that would have been right at home on any peasant in the streets of New London. But her eyes were the same cat-green as his own, and they had pinned him like a dart.
She sees me, he’d thought helplessly. She sees everything.
Of course she couldn’t see everything. She might guess, but she couldn’t know. Arlen Thorne, who always prepared for every eventuality, would already have one of his many backup plans in motion; he had just as much to lose if the shipment failed. Thorne had never bothered to hide his contempt for Thomas, telling him only what he needed to know to play his part. But only now did Thomas see how well Thorne had planned things, absolving himself of all risk. It had been Thorne’s scheme, but none of the Census people had been involved. Thomas’s guards had been the ones to create the diversion. No one could implicate Thorne but Thomas himself, Thomas who was now surely suspect.
His stomach had swelled again; the robe was barely large enough to wrap around it. The best Thomas could do was to hold it closed in two places, over his stomach and his groin. Six months ago, when the robe was ordered, he hadn’t been this fat. But he’d been eating more and drinking more heavily as he slowly realized that no one was going to be able to find and kill the girl in time . . . not even the Caden, who had never failed to hunt down anything.
Thomas headed for the door. Even if Pine was ignoring the bell, a good shout would bring him running; the Regent’s quarters weren’t as large or luxurious as the Queen’s Wing, and sound carried well. Years ago Thomas
had tried to move into the Queen’s Wing, but both Carroll and the Mace had stopped him short, and that was when Thomas had realized that they were all there, the Queen’s Guard, still living in the guard quarters, still waiting in the vain hope that the Queen would appear someday. Worse yet, they were recruiting. The Mace had reached into that dim heart of the Tearling that only he could navigate and produced Pen Alcott, who was good enough with a sword to be one of the Caden, but had chosen to be a Queen’s Guard at half the pay. Thomas himself had tried several times to recruit Alcott, along with other members of the Queen’s Guard, but they’d never wanted to ally with him, and he hadn’t understood why until the girl’s crowning. She wasn’t like him at all, nor, for that matter, was she anything like Elyssa.
Her father’s child, Thomas thought bitterly. They’d had to arrange three abortions for Elyssa (that Thomas knew of, anyway); she was as absentminded about taking her damned syrup as she was about everything else. But Thomas hadn’t been able to talk her into the last abortion, the one he most needed her to have. She’d been terrified of the doctor in those last years, seeing him as a potential assassin. Even Thomas had to admit that it would probably be very easy to kill a woman during the procedure, but that knowledge only increased his bitterness. How like Elyssa, to jettison three pregnancies without a thought and then decide, for all the wrong reasons, to bear this particular child, the one who would make things difficult. Pine had told him yesterday that the girl was already installed in the Queen’s Wing, with guards surrounding her and the great doors locked. Any hope Thomas had ever had of moving into Elyssa’s chambers was now gone.
Still, it could be worse. His own quarters were comfortable; there was room enough for his own personal guard and all of the women, as well as several body servants. It had been a drab place when Thomas had first moved in, but he’d dressed it up with a number of pictures by his favorite artist, Powell. Pine had also found some thick gold paint, which seemed a good, cheap way to make everything look regal. Once Thomas had received the patronage of the Red Queen, she sent better and more expensive presents, and these littered his quarters: a solid silver statue of a naked woman, deep red velvet drapes, and a set of real gold dishes set with rubies. This last gift had pleased Thomas most of all, so much so that he ate dinner off the dishes every night. From time to time, the unpleasant realization surfaced that the Red Queen was using him, much as the Tear nobility used their overseers; Thomas was a buffer, a necessary conduit standing between the one who had all the power and those who had none. He was the one the Tear hated; Elyssa was gone, and so there was only him. If the Tear poor ever rebelled, his was the head they would want, and the Red Queen would undoubtedly sacrifice him, just as the Tear nobles would undoubtedly barricade themselves up high and leave their overseers to the mob. This, too, was unpleasant knowledge that could not always be ignored . . . but the idea of the Tear poor rebelling against anyone was so remote as to be laughable. They were too busy trying to find their next meal.