The Queen of the Tearling

  Opening the door slowly, he beckoned Elston into the room. More guards followed, swords drawn, staring first at Kelsea and then at the man on the floor. Coryn came running in with his kit, but Mace held up his hands. “The Queen’s only scratched.”

  Kelsea made a face. She was only scratched, but her wounds were starting to hurt badly now that the adrenaline was leaving her body. The skin above her nipple felt rubbed raw by the rough material of the towel. She touched an exploratory hand to her throat and it came away smeared with crimson. Resigned, she watched Coryn pull out a thin white strip of cloth and soak it with disinfectant. She wished he would let her get dressed first. She didn’t want all of these men to see her bare arms and legs. Then she felt even worse. Vanity. Her mother’s hallmark, and Kelsea wanted nothing of her mother. For one wild moment, she thought of simply dropping the towel, just to make the point. But she didn’t have the courage.

  Mace was staring down at the hole in the floor. Kelsea couldn’t see his face, but the set of his shoulders spoke volumes. Before she could say a word, he drew his sword, leaped into the hole, and disappeared from sight. No one seemed to find this odd. Several of her guards surrounded the assassin’s corpse, staring at it like doctors preparing to diagnose.

  “Traitors all, God help us,” Galen muttered, and the men around him nodded.

  “The Regent?” Cae asked.

  “Not a chance. This is Thorne.”

  “We’ll never prove it,” Mhurn said, shaking his head.

  “Who is this man?” Kelsea asked, clutching the towel tightly around her. Coryn pressed the cloth to her neck, and she hissed and bit down on her lip. Whatever his disinfectant was, it stung like a bastard.

  “A lord of the Graham house, Lady,” a new guard told her. “We thought them loyal to your mother.”

  Kelsea didn’t recognize the guard, but she knew his voice. After a moment she realized, bemused, that it was Dyer. He’d shaved his red beard. “Dyer, is that your face under there?”

  Dyer flushed bright red. Pen snorted gleefully, and Kibb clapped Dyer on the back. “I told him, Lady . . . now we can see every time he blushes.”

  “Where have you been, Dyer?”

  The door to the chamber slammed back against the wall. All of them whirled around, Kelsea with a small shriek, as Mace stormed in. His cheeks were stained wine-red and his dark eyes burned so fiercely that Kelsea almost expected them to throw sparks. Mace’s voice was the bellow of a wrathful God. “PEN!”

  Pen darted forward. “Sir.”

  “From now on, you’ll be the Queen’s close guard. You won’t leave her side for a moment, do you understand? Not for a moment, not ever.”

  “Lazarus,” Kelsea interrupted, as gently as she could, “this isn’t your fault.”

  Mace’s teeth clenched, his eyes darting desperately, like caged things. Kelsea was suddenly afraid that he might strike her.

  “Not for a moment, sir,” Pen replied, and went to stand in front of Kelsea, pointedly shielding her from the rest of the guard.

  Mace turned back to the room at large, pointing at the hole in the floor. “That’s a tunnel, lads. I knew about it, but I wasn’t concerned. You know why? Because it runs beneath three chambers and comes out in one of the empty ones down the hall.”

  Her guards exchanged shocked looks. Elston took an involuntary step back. Mhurn had turned white as a sheet.

  “Anyone not see what that means?”

  All of them stood there as though waiting for a storm to break.

  “It means,” Mace roared, “that we have a traitor here!”

  In one seamless movement, he picked up the chair from the vanity table and hurled it at the far wall, where it shattered into several jagged lumps of wood. “Someone let this pile of shit in! Someone who either guarded one of the tunnels or knew the knocks. One of you is a lying fuck, and when I find you—”

  “Sir,” Galen interrupted quietly, his hands up in a placating gesture.

  “What?”

  “It takes more than one traitor to smuggle an assassin in here. It would take a Gate Guard as well.”

  Several of the guards nodded, murmuring agreement.

  “I don’t care about the Gate Guard,” Mace hissed. “They’re worthless, that’s why they guard the gate.”

  He stood there for a moment, breathing hard. Kelsea thought of storm clouds, clouds that could either blow themselves out or touch down in a funnel that would blast the land. She shivered, suddenly freezing, and a small, selfish part of her wondered when this scene would end so that she could put some clothes on.

  “What I care about,” Mace continued, his voice a low threat caged in violence, “is that someone here broke his vow. I’ll warrant it’s the same someone who managed to stick a knife into the Queen during her crowning. And I’m going to find him; he’s a fool if he thinks I won’t.”

  Breathing heavily, he fell silent. Kelsea looked at the rest of her guard, those men who had surrounded her at her coronation. Elston, Kibb, Pen, Coryn, Mhurn, Dyer, Cae, Galen, Wellmer . . . all of them had been close enough to throw the knife, and only Pen was apparently above suspicion. Mace had pulled the knife from his belt, and now he stared at each of them in turn, his eyes cold. Kelsea wanted to say something, but the silence of the rest of the Guard told her that nothing she might say would do much good. She tried to wrap her mind around the idea that one or more of these men had broken vows. She had thought that she was making progress with them, but once again she had been naive.

  After a moment, Mace seemed to come back to them a bit; he tucked his knife away and pointed to the body on the floor. “Get that pile of shit out of here!”

  Several men sprang forward, and Kelsea almost did so herself.

  “We need something to cover him,” Kibb murmured. “The children don’t need to see the blood.”

  Elston hoisted the corpse into a sitting position. “There’s no blood.”

  “Broken neck?”

  “No.”

  “Then how’d he die?” Mhurn asked from the far wall, his blue gaze pinned on Kelsea.

  “Move along!” Mace barked. Elston and Kibb hoisted the body, and the rest of her guards followed them from the room in a murmuring herd, sneaking puzzled glances at Kelsea as they went.

  Mace turned to Pen. “I’ll spell you out; you get two weekends off each month. But the rest of the time, I don’t want to see you more than ten feet from the Queen, understand? Take one of the bedrooms with an antechamber. You can sleep there, and the Queen can have her privacy.”

  “Some privacy,” Kelsea murmured. Mace’s large, dark eyes turned to her, and she raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine, fine.”

  He whirled and strode from the room.

  “He’ll be all right, Lady,” Pen assured her. “We’ve seen him like this before. He only needs to go off and kill someone and he’ll be right as rain.”

  Kelsea smiled uneasily, not sure whether he was joking. Although she didn’t feel cold, she was shivering, and her legs wobbled beneath her. Andalie appeared out of nowhere, carrying a stack of clean clothes. “You’re covered in blood, Majesty. You should get back into the bath.”

  Pen gave her an apologetic grin. “I’m not supposed to leave you alone, Lady. How about if I face the wall?”

  Kelsea shook her head, chuckling without humor. “Privacy.”

  Pen turned and faced the doorway. After a moment, seeing no alternative, Kelsea took off her towel and climbed back into the tub, grimacing as the water turned a dull pink around her. She began to wash, trying and utterly failing to forget that Pen was in the room

  Oh, who cares? They’ve all seen me naked now. The idea was awful, so mortifying that Kelsea found herself giggling helplessly. There was nothing else. Andalie, busy jerking Kelsea’s unruly wet hair up into a knot on her head and fastening it with a silver pin, appeared not to notice. Her face was immobile, fazed by nothing, and it struck Kelsea for the first time, though not nearly the last, that som
e fateful mistake had been made. Andalie should have been the Queen.

  “Cup of tea, Lady?”

  “Please.”

  On the threshold, Andalie paused and spoke without turning around. “Forgive me, Lady. I saw it coming, but not the shape it would take. I couldn’t see the man or the room.”

  Kelsea blinked, but Andalie had already left, closing the door behind her.

  The Mort deadline came and went, but Mace did not reappear. Kelsea was briefly alarmed until she realized that the rest of her guards took his absence as a matter of course. Pen explained that Mace had a habit of going off on his own errands from time to time, leaving without warning and returning the same way. And Pen was right, for on the third day Mace did return; Kelsea found him sitting at the table, freshly showered, when she came out for lunch. She demanded to know where he’d been, and Mace, being Mace, refused to tell.

  Her guards had taken the assassin’s body to the plaza at the center of New London and (by custom, Kelsea was appalled to discover) spitted his corpse on a sharpened pole, leaving it there to rot. If Arliss was to be believed, word was running like quicksilver through the city that the Queen had killed a Caden herself, that she’d used magic. There wasn’t a mark on the young Lord Graham, but he was dead as a doornail all the same.

  Several times a day, Kelsea pulled the sapphire from her dress and stared at it, willing it to speak to her again, to do anything out of the ordinary. But nothing happened. She felt like a fraud.

  Mace didn’t share her concern. “Just as useful as if you’d done it on purpose, Lady, so who cares?”

  Kelsea was perched over the dining room table, looking at a map of the Mort border. Mace had pinned its four corners down with tea mugs to keep it from rolling up. “I care, Lazarus. I’ve no idea what happened or how to repeat it.”

  “Yes, but only you and I know that, Lady. It’s a boon, believe me. They’ll think twice before trying a direct attack on you again.”

  Kelsea lowered her voice, mindful of the guards stationed on the walls. “What of our traitor?”

  Mace frowned and pointed to a space on the map, lowering his voice as well. “I’ve made some progress, Lady. Nothing concrete to place before you yet.”

  “What progress?”

  “A theory, nothing more.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “My theories are rarely wrong, Majesty.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Only if Pen gets caught off guard, Lady. I’m more worried about the sun rising westerly.” The map suddenly escaped from one of its corners and Mace cursed, unrolled it, and slammed the mug back down to hold it in place.

  “What’s eating at you, Lazarus?”

  “Whoever this man is, Majesty, he should never have gotten so far. Treachery leaves a smell; a stench really, and I’ve never before failed to sniff it out.”

  Kelsea smiled, poking him in his bicep. “Perhaps this is a healthy test of your complacency.” But then, seeing that his pride was really injured, she sobered and clasped his shoulder. “You’ll find him, Lazarus. I wouldn’t be that traitor for all the steel in Mortmesne.”

  “Majesty?” Dyer had emerged from the hallway.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve something to show you.”

  “Now?” Kelsea straightened and saw an odd phenomenon: Dyer was grinning. Mace waved a hand to indicate that she should go, and she followed Dyer down the corridor with Pen’s soft tread just behind her. Tom and Wellmer were waiting two doors down from her new bedchamber, both grinning as well, and Kelsea approached cautiously. Maybe she had been too casual with them all. Was she about to become the subject of a practical joke?

  “Go on, Lady,” Wellmer told her, gesturing her inside. In his excitement, he seemed even younger than usual, hopping from foot to foot like a small boy on Christmas, or at least a small boy who had a dire need for the bathroom.

  Kelsea turned into the chamber, a cozy space with low ceilings and no windows. Five armchairs and two sofas had been scattered around, and several of these contained children. Andalie’s, Kelsea thought, but she couldn’t be sure. She turned a questioning glance to Dyer, and he gestured toward the far wall.

  She recognized the bookshelves; she’d been looking at them in her mother’s chamber, hating their emptiness, for the past two weeks. But now the shelves were full. Kelsea moved further into the room, staring at the books as though hypnotized. She recognized all of the titles, but it was only when she saw the enormous brown leather volume of Shakespeare, Carlin’s pride and joy, that she knew what Mace had done.

  “Dyer, is this where you’ve been?”

  “Aye, Lady,” he replied. “Mace was determined to make it a surprise.”

  Kelsea inspected the books closely. They looked just as she remembered them in Carlin’s library. Someone had even gone to the trouble to alphabetize them all by author. They’d left the fiction intermingled with the nonfiction; Carlin would have screamed bloody murder. But Kelsea was touched by the effort.

  “We didn’t lose a single book, Majesty. We covered the wagon well, but it didn’t even rain. I don’t think they took any damage.”

  Kelsea stared at the shelves for a moment longer, and then turned back to him, her vision blurred with sudden tears. “Thank you.”

  Dyer looked away. Kelsea turned her attention to the children perched on the furniture: two adolescent boys, a girl of perhaps eleven or twelve, and a younger girl, eight or so. “You’re Andalie’s children, aren’t you?”

  The older three remained silent, but the youngest girl nodded her head vigorously and exclaimed, “We helped alphabet the books! We stayed up late!”

  “They’re Andalie’s, Lady,” Dyer informed her.

  “You did a very good job,” Kelsea told them. “Thank you.”

  The boys and the younger girl smiled timidly, but the oldest girl merely sat there, staring at Kelsea with sullen eyes. Kelsea was puzzled. She’d never spoken to the girl before, barely even recognized her. Of all of the children on the sofa, this one looked the most like Andalie’s husband; her mouth was naturally downturned at the corners, her eyes dark-socketed and suspicious. After a moment she turned away, and Kelsea was reassured; the girl might look like her father, but the dismissal in the gesture was pure Andalie.

  Kelsea looked around for Mace, but he wasn’t there. “Where’s Lazarus?”

  She found him back at the dining table, still bent over the enormous map of the New World. “Thank you for the surprise.”

  Mace shrugged. “I could tell you wouldn’t be able to focus on anything until we got you some books.”

  “It means the world to me.”

  “I don’t understand your fascination with the damned things. They don’t feed or protect you. They don’t keep you alive. But I see that they’re important to you.”

  “If there’s ever something I can do for you in return, you’ve only to name it.”

  Mace raised his eyebrows. “Be careful about making open-ended promises, Lady. I know all about those, believe me; they bite you in the ass when you least expect it.”

  “Even so, I mean it: if there’s ever anything I can do for you, it’s yours.”

  “Fine. Put all of those books in a pile, and set them on fire.”

  “What?”

  “There’s your open-ended promise.”

  Kelsea’s stomach clenched in knots. Mace watched her with an interested gaze for a moment before he chuckled. “Relax, Lady. The debt of a queen is a valuable commodity; I wouldn’t waste it. Your books are harmless enough, at least from a defensive standpoint.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Lazarus.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Honestly, thank you.”

  He shrugged. “You earned it, Lady. It’s twice as easy to guard a tough customer.”

  Kelsea bit back a smile, then sobered. “Any word on Barty and Carlin?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  Kelsea frowned. Lately, she was surpris
ed to find that she wanted to see not only Barty but Carlin as well. She had many things to say to Carlin. It would be a relief to be able to talk to Carlin about her mother, about the state of the kingdom, the true state of the kingdom, the one Carlin had never been allowed to broach. It would also be a relief, Kelsea thought guiltily, to tell Carlin that she had been right, that day when she’d torn the dress from Kelsea’s body. So much of her resentment over that day seemed to have melted away now.

  Don’t deceive yourself, her mind whispered. Nothing has melted away. It’s just found a better target.

  “Are they no longer in Petaluma?”

  “When I know, Lady, you’ll know.”

  “All right.” She stood up, nearly bumping into Pen, who put a hand on her back. “Sorry, Lady.”

  “How’s it working out between the two of you?” Mace asked, his attention on the map.

  Kelsea looked at Pen in surprise. He smiled and shrugged.

  “Fine, I suppose. Though Pen snores like a bellows.”

  “To be fair, Lady, Mace knew that before.”

  “Honestly, you’re like a foundry in there. If only you produced Mort steel, you’d be an invaluable resource.”

  “He is an invaluable resource,” Mace replied absently. He’d produced a pen from his shirt, and now began to draw a thick, dark line down the Mort border. “Snoring and all.”

  “I’d agree.”

  “Arliss!” Mace shouted toward the corridor. “We’re ready for you now!”

  Arliss had clearly been eavesdropping; he emerged from the hallway almost immediately, walking with his familiar crablike gait, one leg dragging the other along behind it. Kelsea made a face at his approach. She’d been planning to go and spend several hours, or perhaps a year, looking over Carlin’s books before dinner, though it would mean skipping her usual lesson with Venner. But the military men would be here in a few days’ time, and her first audience would take place on Saturday; she was supposed to spend several hours in conference with Arliss to prepare for both. All of the information that Carlin had never given her now needed to be crammed into the space of one week, and the schedule was exhausting.