The Queen of the Tearling

  Dark work, Javel thought again, and ordered two whiskeys at the bar. The second was for pleasure; the first was an absolute requirement for him to be able to sit down at the table with Arlen Thorne, who had pulled Allie’s name from the lot with his own hand. When the shots came, Javel nearly threw the first down his throat. But he held on to the second, staring down at the bar, trying to linger there as long as he could.

  Three stools down was an aging whore with a transparent white blouse and blonde hair that was almost certainly dyed. She leaned back against the bar in a contortionist’s pose, one that allowed her to poke her breasts out two inches farther than nature had ever intended, and looked Javel over with a businesslike gaze. “Queen’s Guard, are you?”

  Javel nodded shortly.

  “Five for a fuck, ten for the works.”

  Javel closed his eyes. He’d tried to go to a whore once, three years ago, but he hadn’t been able to get it up, and had ended up weeping. The woman had been very kind and understanding, but it had been a surface sort of understanding, and Javel could sense her eagerness to get him gone so that she could move on to the next customer. Business was business.

  “No, thanks,” he muttered.

  The whore shrugged, taking a deep breath and thrusting forward again as two more men entered the pub. “Your loss.”

  “Javel.” Thorne’s low, unctuous voice carried across the pub with perfect clarity. “Join me.”

  Javel carried his whiskey across the room and sat down. Thorne leaned across the table, crossing his long, thin arms. Every time Javel saw Thorne, he seemed to have too many limbs. Javel turned away and found the woman Brenna staring at him, though rumor had it she was stone-blind. Her milky eyes had the distinctive pink cast of the albino. If Javel had to guess what sort of woman Thorne would pick for a captive, this was exactly what he would come up with: shunned, blind, and dependent. Vil said that she had always been with Thorne, a tag-along remnant of his childhood in the Gut, that she was the only thing on God’s earth that Thorne cared about. But that was just a tale begun by some idiot storyteller who needed to rehabilitate even the likes of Arlen Thorne. Javel wondered what services Brenna had to perform for Thorne’s patronage, but his mind shied away from the question.

  “She doesn’t like it when you stare.”

  Javel glanced away quickly and met Thorne’s eyes.

  “You’re a Gate Guard, Javel.”

  “Yes.”

  “And are you happy in your work?”

  “My work’s fine.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s an honest job,” Javel replied, trying not to sound self-

  righteous. There were probably those in the Tear who would call Thorne’s current job honest, but they were a rarefied group who had never had to watch their wife’s blonde hair disappear over the Pike Hill.

  “Your wife was shipped six years ago.”

  “My wife is none of your business.”

  “Everything shipped is my business.” Thorne’s eyes lingered on Javel’s clenched fist, his smile widening. Men like Thorne were built to notice what others tried to keep hidden. Javel glanced at Brenna out of the corner of his eye, unable to avoid rogue thoughts about the life she must lead. Thorne reached for his cup of water, and Javel watched with sickly fascination.

  That hand put Allie in the cage. One inch to the left, and it would have been someone else’s wife.

  “My wife wasn’t a thing.”

  “Cargo,” Thorne replied dismissively. “Most people are cargo, and they’re content to be cargo. I’m content to facilitate the shipment.”

  That was certainly true. Even before the Mort shipment legitimized the practice, the Tearling had had a thriving underground slave trade, and Thorne had been right in the middle of it. Even after Thorne became Overseer of the Census, he was still the man to see if you wanted something more exotic, a child or a redhead, even a black woman out of Cadare. As Javel sat there, wondering what he was doing with this flesh peddler who had sent his wife to Demesne, an idea began to occur to him, an idea that improved as the whiskey spread along his veins. Javel didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  Each Gate Guard carried two weapons: a short sword and a knife. The knife was tucked into Javel’s waistband right now; he could feel the uncomfortable weight of the hilt pressing into his left ribs. He was no great fighter, but he was very quick. If he pulled the knife now, he could chop off Thorne’s right hand, that hand that had reached to the left when it might have reached right and changed everything. If he could take Thorne’s good hand, he could probably take a considerable portion of the rest of the man too; Thorne was rumored to be quick himself, but he’d come here without a guard. He obviously didn’t consider Javel a threat.

  Javel grasped the second shot and downed it in a fiery gulp, judging the distance between Thorne’s hand and the knife. He’d been afraid of Thorne a few minutes ago, but all the punishment in the world suddenly seemed less important than what could be accomplished here. The Census Bureau wouldn’t crumble without Thorne; it was too regimented for that. But the loss would be a crippling blow. Thorne ruled his bureaucracy by fear, and fear only worked from the top down. Javel had no time to grab the knife with his stronger hand; he’d have to draw with his weak hand and hope for the best. He glanced between Thorne’s hand and his own, calculating the distance.

  “You’d never make it.”

  Javel looked up and saw that Thorne was smiling again, tight-lipped and coldly amused. “And even if you did make it, you’d die all the same.”

  Javel stared blankly. Beside Thorne, the woman, Brenna, let out a high-pitched, squealing laugh, a sound like rusted hinges.

  “I dosed your shot, Gate Guard. If you don’t get the antidote from me in about ten minutes, you’ll die in agony.”

  Javel looked down at his empty shot glass. Could Thorne have slipped something in there? Yes, while Javel was busy staring at the cursed albino. Thorne wasn’t lying; one only had to look into his eyes, blue ocean rimmed with ice, to know he was telling the truth. Javel glanced at the albino and found that she was gazing adoringly at Thorne, her opaque pink eyes locked on his face.

  “You know the worst thing about having my job?” Thorne asked. “No one understands that it’s business. That’s all it is. Fifteen times in my memory, people have tried to ambush the shipment somewhere between New London and the Mort border. They usually try it just after the end of the Crithe, where there’s nothing but grassland for about a million miles around and you could hide an entire army in the wheat. And you know, ten of those times I’ve been able to simply talk them out of their foolishness. It was easy to do, and I didn’t punish them.”

  “Right,” Javel muttered. His heart was thudding uncomfortably now. He thought he’d felt a small twinge in his gut, just below his navel. He couldn’t convince himself that it was his imagination, and couldn’t convince himself that it wasn’t. He should try to attack Thorne now, before whatever was in his innards came to fruition. But Thorne was ready for him; Javel would have no advantage.

  “I didn’t punish them,” Thorne repeated. “I simply explained the situation to them and let them go. Because it was business. They were misguided, but they didn’t harm my cages, only frightened the horses, and that’s easily repaired. The delay was no more than five or ten minutes. I don’t punish mistakes, at least not first mistakes.

  “But the other five—”

  Thorne leaned forward, his eyes glowing with an unpleasant righteousness, and Javel felt the poison for certain: a clenching sensation deep inside his stomach, something like indigestion. Merely uncomfortable, but Javel sensed its potential to become much more, and fast.

  “The other five weren’t interested in talking. I looked those people in the eye and knew that I could talk rings around them forever and they’d still keep coming for my cages. Some people don’t know or care when they’ve played their hand and lost.”

  Javel hated himself for asking, bu
t couldn’t help it. “What did you do to them?”

  “I made them into an object lesson,” Thorne replied. “Some people can’t do the math, but an object lesson teaches them very quickly. I regretted that it was necessary, of course—”

  I bet you did, motherfucker, Javel thought. I just bet.

  “—but it was necessary. And you’d be astounded at how quickly my lessons make people fall in line. Take yourself, for example—”

  Thorne’s slow, patient voice was unbearable. Javel felt as though he were trapped in a schoolroom again, an experience he hadn’t missed since running away from home at the age of twelve. He glanced over at the albino, found her sightless eyes staring directly at him, and quickly looked away.

  “You had a notion that you could grab your knife and put me away. As though I wasn’t ready for you yesterday. The day before that. As though I haven’t been ready for you since the day I was born.”

  Javel recalled a rumor he’d heard once: that Thorne’s mother had been a prostitute in the Gut, that she had sold Thorne to a slave trader when he was only a few hours old. Javel’s stomach twisted again, more sharply now, as though someone had reached in through his navel, grabbed a handful of moving parts, and squeezed until something popped. He leaned back, breathing slowly, trying to remember the plan, but pain had cut right through the bravery of the whiskey. Javel had always been a baby about pain.

  “So now, Javel, the question is: do you want to keep coming at me, or do you want to talk business?”

  “Talk business,” Javel gasped. Thoughts of his knife were gone; all he could think of was the antidote. So many nights he had gone home, so stuffed to the gills with whiskey that he could barely clamber down off his horse, and thought about ending it all. Now he was surprised by how badly he still wanted to live.

  “Good. Let’s talk about your wife.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s alive.”

  “Bullshit!” Javel snarled.

  “She is. She’s alive and well in Mortmesne.” Thorne tilted his head in acknowledgment of some distinction before remarking, “Fairly well.”

  Javel winced. “How would you know?”

  “I know. I even know where she is.”

  “Where?”

  “Ah, that would be giving away the store, wouldn’t it? It doesn’t concern you at this point, Gate Guard. What concerns you is that I know exactly where she is, and what’s more, I can get her back.”

  Javel stared at Thorne, dumbfounded. His mind dug deep and came out with the last thing he wanted: one of Allie’s birthdays, some nine or ten years ago. Allie had mentioned that she wanted a loom, so Javel went to a women’s shop and bought a pair of looms that seemed well made for a reasonable price. Allie had seemed delighted, but in the months that followed, the two looms stayed in her sewing basket. Javel never saw her weave, not once, and he’d been too puzzled and hurt to ask her why. It wasn’t like Allie, who admitted herself that she was the sort of child who always wanted to play with new things the very instant she got them home.

  But then, about six months after her birthday, Allie had taken the looms out and begun working with them, creating hats and gloves and scarves, and later sweaters and blankets. Javel’s salary wasn’t enormous, but it was enough to keep Allie supplied in wool, and by the time her lottery tile had come, she’d been weaving most of their winter clothing, clothing that was warm and comfortable. After Allie had gone to Mortmesne, Javel had never quite been able to pack up her things; Allie’s sewing basket still sat beside their fireplace, the looms holding half of a hat. Javel liked seeing the basket there, full of unfinished projects, as though Allie had only gone to visit her parents and would be back any day. Sometimes, after a particularly bad drunk, he would even sit in front of the fireplace, holding the basket in his lap. That wasn’t something he could ever tell anyone about, but it helped him to fall asleep.

  Still, that six months worried him. After Allie had gone, Javel found a woman to clean the house and do the laundry, and after several weeks, he picked up the sewing basket and showed the cleaning woman the looms, asked if there was anything wrong with them. That was how Javel found out that he hadn’t bought Allie looms at all, but knitting needles. Weaving and knitting were two different things; even Javel knew that, though how they were different he really couldn’t say. And Allie, who usually didn’t hesitate to tell him when he’d done something wrong, had never said a word, spending six months learning to knit while he was at work. Javel had many regrets about Allie, and new ones seemed to show up every day, but one of the greatest and oddest was that he hadn’t found out about the knitting needles before she’d gone. Some mornings, when he woke up in their bed (still on the same side; he could no more sleep on Allie’s side of the bed than he could breathe underwater), he thought that he would give anything for Allie to know that he understood about the knitting needles. It seemed vitally important, for her to know that he knew.

  “How do I know you can bring her back?”

  “I can,” Thorne replied. “And I will.”

  Another spasm punched Javel in the stomach, and he doubled over, trying to compress his midsection into the smallest ball possible. It didn’t stop the pain, didn’t even come close. Eventually, little by little, the spasm lessened, the fist in his belly unclenching, and when Javel looked up, he found Thorne watching him with a clinical detachment. “You should trust me, Javel. I don’t break my word.”

  Javel considered this statement, one hand on his stomach in preparation for the next assault. The city was full of information about Thorne, some true and some apocryphal. Javel had heard plenty of stories that could curdle the blood, but he had never heard that Thorne had broken his word.

  Beside Thorne, the albino began to breathe in quick, shallow pants, almost as though she were approaching hyperventilation. Her eyes were closed as though in ecstasy. She reached up and began to tweak her own nipple, lightly and tenderly, through the thin fabric of her pink shirt.

  “Calm yourself, Bren,” Thorne murmured. “Our business here is almost concluded.”

  The woman subsided, placing her hand back in her lap. Javel’s flesh crawled. “What do you want?”

  Thorne nodded in approval. “I need to get something inside the Keep. I want a man on the Keep Gate to conveniently fail to ask difficult questions.”

  “When?”

  “When I say.”

  Javel stared at Thorne, understanding dawning in his mind. “You’re going to kill the Queen.”

  Thorne merely looked at Javel, that cold gaze never wavering. Javel thought of the vision he had seen on the Keep Lawn: the tall woman, older and hardened, with the crown on her head. The Queen had been crowned, Javel knew, two days ago; Vil, who always got information first, told them that the Regent had tried to ambush her during the coronation itself, but had failed. When Javel rode through the streets at dusk, he’d passed through the usual cacophony of vendors closing up shop, yelling and gossiping and trading news, and heard them call her the True Queen. Javel didn’t know the phrase, but there was no mistaking the sentiment: it was the name for the tall, grave woman he’d seen on the Keep Lawn, the one who didn’t exist yet.

  But she could, Javel thought. Someday she could. And although he hadn’t been to church, hadn’t even believed in God since the day Allie had vanished into Mortmesne, he suddenly felt damnation hanging over his head, damnation and history like two hands waiting to grab him and squeeze. The men who’d assassinated Jonathan the Good had never been caught, but theirs were the blackest pages in the history of the Tearling. Whoever they were, Javel had no doubt that they had been damned for their crimes. But he couldn’t articulate any of these fears to Thorne. He could only say, “She’s the Queen. You can’t kill the Queen.”

  “There’s no proof that she’s the actual Queen, Javel. She’s only a girl with a burn scar and a necklace.”

  But Thorne’s eyes shifted away, and in a sudden flash of intuition, Javel knew: Thorne ha
d seen that tall, regal woman on the Keep Lawn too. He’d seen her, and the sight had scared him so badly that he’d conceived this course. Thorne had never seemed so much like a spider as he did at that moment; he’d crept out from a corner to repair his web, and soon he would scuttle back into his dark crack to scheme, to wait with an endless, malevolent patience for some helpless thing caught and thrashing.

  Javel looked around the pub, seeing it with fresh eyes: the dirt that had grimed into the floorboards; the cheap tallow that dripped from the torches to harden on the walls; the whore who smiled desperately at every man who walked in. Most of all, the smell of beer and whiskey mingled, a mist so pervasive that it might as well precipitate out of the air. Javel loved that smell, and hated it, and he knew somehow that the love/hate tangle in his mind was the reason Thorne had chosen him. Javel was weak, and his weakness probably smelled just as good to Thorne as whiskey did to Javel.

  This is the dark crack, Javel finally realized. This right here.

  He doubled over again; some small animal had awakened inside his stomach, shredding pink meat with jagged claws and teeth like needles. He was walking a tightrope; the distance was short, but below him lay infinite darkness. And what would he see on the way down?

  “What if your plan fails?” he gasped. “What guarantee do I have?”

  “You have no guarantees,” Thorne replied. “But you needn’t worry. Only a fool keeps all of his eggs in one basket. I have many baskets. If one idea fails, we move to another, and eventually we succeed.”

  Thorne reached into his shirt and pulled out a vial of amber-colored liquid. He offered it to Javel, who grabbed for it, only to close his fingers on empty air.

  “I’d estimate you have only a minute, maybe two, before this won’t help you. So, Gate Guard, I have only one question: can you do the math?”