The Queen of the Tearling

  Now the sound of rain was broken by singing, a man’s sonorous baritone echoing through the woods behind them. The tone was mocking, but carried such an undercurrent of violence that Thomas’s stomach clenched. He heard this voice often in dreams, and each time he woke before its owner could kill him. But now he was wide-awake.

  The shipment nears, the cages fill,

  A voice rings out across the Tear,

  The cages burn, the Keep Lawn still,

  The Tearling weeps, the Queen is here.

  The singing stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Thomas squinted into the dusk. He could see nothing, but he didn’t deceive himself that the blindness was mutual; that bastard had cat’s eyes. Thomas’s guards surrounded him, each of them peering into the foliage, swords drawn. He thought of telling them to save the effort, but remained silent. If they wanted to die bravely, it wasn’t his business to tell them otherwise. They knew the identity of the singer, of course they did. The rain poured down even harder, the world narrowing to all of them standing there into the stillness. Thomas called out, “Let my men pass!”

  Laughter echoed from multiple directions.

  “These men who follow you to swear allegiance to the Mort bitch?” the Fetch called from his invisible vantage. “I’d sooner allow a pack of rogue dogs to live. Cowards and traitors, all of you!”

  He broke into song again.

  The Queen concealed now reappears,

  The knife is thrown, the girl struck down,

  Still she rises, eighteen long years,

  Our Queen, and we care not which crown.

  “They’re singing it in every corner of the city!” the Fetch shouted, anger biting through the mockery now. “Who will ever compose a ballad for you, Thomas Raleigh? Who will extol your greatness?”

  Tears filled Thomas’s eyes, but in front of his men he didn’t dare dash them away. He suddenly understood why, despite so many opportunities, the Fetch had never killed him before. The Fetch had been waiting for the girl, waiting for her to come out of hiding.

  “I won’t beg!” Thomas cried.

  “I’ve heard you beg enough.”

  On Thomas’s left, Keever went down with a horrible gurgling sound, a knife protruding from his throat. Arvis and Cowell crumpled next, pierced with arrows in their chests and heads. Thomas looked up and saw a monstrous black shape against the trees, descending on him from above. He shrieked in terror, but his voice cut off as the thing landed on him, knocking him from his horse. He hit his head, hard, on the ground and lay momentarily stunned, rocks digging into his back, the air full of his stallion’s outraged scream, hooves tearing away through the woods.

  When he opened his eyes, he was looking up at the Fetch, who perched like a giant bat on his chest, pinning him to the ground. The Fetch wore the same mask he donned each time he entered the Keep: a harlequin, designed for masquerades. Such masks could be bought at many shops in the city, but Thomas had never seen the like of this one anywhere else: the red-smudged mouth drawn up into a sneer and the eyes deep-socketed in black. Once, Thomas had woken deep within the womb of his quilts to find that face leaning over him, and he’d wet himself like a baby. The Fetch had waltzed out of his chamber and disappeared from the Keep like smoke, and Thomas had been so ashamed that he had never told anyone about the incident. It was almost possible to believe the Fetch an illusion until he inevitably reappeared, utterly substantial, always wearing his dreadful mask.

  “Well, false prince?” The Fetch grabbed Thomas by the shoulders and shook him as a dog would a bone, slamming his head repeatedly against the ground. Thomas felt his teeth rattle. “No bribes to offer, Thomas? And where’s your puppeteer? Hasn’t she sorcery enough to get you out of this?”

  Thomas remained mute. He had tried to argue with the Fetch before and found that he only made himself more vulnerable. The man was devilishly clever with words, and Thomas had thanked God more than once that the Fetch was forced to remain anonymous. As a public orator, he would have been devastating.

  Then again, if he were a public orator, we could’ve taken and killed him long ago.

  “The Census Bureau is in shambles,” the Fetch whispered silkily. “They may construct new cages, but no one will forget what became of the old. If the girl lives, she’ll undo much of your harm.”

  Thomas shook his head. “The Red Queen is coming. She’ll level the kingdom before the girl can accomplish anything.”

  The Fetch leaned closer, until he was only inches away. “The Mort bitch never cared for you, you know.”

  “I know,” Thomas replied, and then clamped his mouth shut, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time at the source of the Fetch’s information. His raids on Tear nobles had caused endless trouble, for the Fetch always seemed to know how taxes had been paid, where the money was stored, when the delivery would depart. Angry nobles came to the Keep to demand redress and Thomas had been forced to pay out large bribes in lieu of security, which made him even more despised with the peasantry. And where were those nobles now? Snug in their own castles while he was evicted from his, stuck in the forest with this blood-mad lunatic.

  “Did you throw the knife?”

  “What?”

  The Fetch slapped him across the face. “Did you throw the knife at the girl?”

  “No! Not me.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know! It was Thorne’s plan. Some agent.”

  “What agent?”

  “I don’t know. My men were only to provide the diversion, I swear!”

  The Fetch pressed both thumbs against Thomas’s eyes and ground down until Thomas shrieked helplessly, but the sound vanished into the pouring rain without so much as an echo.

  “What agent, Thomas?” the Fetch asked relentlessly. His thumbs jammed down harder and Thomas felt his left eye fill with hot liquid. “I’ll begin cutting you next. Don’t even kid yourself that I won’t. A Mort agent?”

  “I don’t know!” Thomas cried, sobbing. “Thorne wouldn’t tell me.”

  “That’s right, Thomas, and do you know why? Because he knew you’d fuck it all up.”

  “It wasn’t my fault!”

  “You’d better think of something useful to tell me.”

  “Thorne has a backup plan!”

  “I know of Thorne’s backup plan, you miserable shit. I knew of it before he conceived it himself.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Information, Thomas. Information about the Red Queen. You slept with her, this entire kingdom knows it. You must know something useful.”

  Thomas’s eyes popped open. He tried to keep his face expressionless, but it clearly betrayed him, for the Fetch leaned forward again, his eyes gleaming behind the mask, so close that Thomas could smell horses and smoke and something else, a cloying scent that he felt he should recognize.

  Fifteen years ago, he was in bed with her, the air still reeking of sex, and he had asked her what she wanted with him. Even back then, he hadn’t been able to deceive himself that she cared about him. She fucked automatically, impersonally; he’d gotten better mechanics from mid-priced whores in the Gut. And yet he couldn’t be free of her; she’d grown like a disease in his mind.

  “Tell me something useful, and I will end your life without pain, Thomas. I swear it.”

  “Who is the father?” the Red Queen asked. When she turned to him in the dark, her eyes were glowing, a bright vulpine red. Thomas had reared back, scrambling to get out of bed, and she laughed, that deep bedroom chuckle that got him hard all on its own.

  His eyes ached; he could see nothing but a haze of red from the left. The burning in his thighs was worse. But physical pain paled in comparison to the wave of self-loathing that swept him. The Fetch would have the information; it wouldn’t even take very long.

  “What d’you want to know for?” he asked thickly. She could do that, make him feel as drunk as though he’d put away eight pints of ale. “Elyssa’s dead. What could it possibly matter now?”
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  “It doesn’t,” she replied with a smile. And Thomas, who could never tell what she was thinking, nevertheless saw that it did matter, that it mattered a great deal. She wanted to know, badly, and she knew that he had the answer. It was the only leverage he had ever held, and he had never deceived himself. If he told her, she might kill him.

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  The light in her eyes faded then, and suddenly she was just a beautiful woman in bed with him, grabbing at his cock as though it were a toy. He had kept the one secret, but all other bulwarks had fallen; she’d stretched out before him and he’d agreed to find and murder Elyssa’s daughter, his niece. He even remembered entering her and gasping, “Fuck you,” to a different queen, one who’d been laid in her grave years before. But the Red Queen understood. She always understood, and she had given him what he needed.

  “Well, Thomas?”

  Thomas looked up at the Fetch, seeing him through a wash of tears. Time stretched years back and years forward, but nothing that came afterward ever had the power to wash away what came before. This order of things seemed monstrously unfair, even now when Thomas knew that he had only moments left. He gathered the remaining pieces of his courage. “If you take off the mask, I’ll tell you everything I know about her.”

  The Fetch turned and took a quick survey of the action behind him. Squinting, his good eye blurry with moisture, Thomas saw that all three of his men were dead. Keever was the worst; he’d fallen with his throat gashed wide open, and now lay in a pool of his own blood, staring without sight.

  Three men, masked and dressed in black, were crouched in the copse. They watched Thomas with a predatory, waiting quality, like dogs that had brought something to bay. But still he feared them less than he did their master. The Fetch was intelligent, diabolically so, and intelligent people devised intelligent cruelties. That was where the Red Queen had always excelled.

  When he looked back up at the Fetch, the mask was gone, the man’s face plain in the dying light. Thomas dashed the tears from his right eye and stared for a long minute, his mind blank. “But you’re dead.”

  “Only on the inside.”

  “Is it magic?”

  “The darkest kind, false prince. Now speak.”

  Thomas spoke. The words came slowly at first, caught in his throat, but then they became easier. The Fetch listened carefully, even sympathetically, asking occasional questions, and soon it seemed perfectly rational for the two of them to be sitting here together, telling tales while the night fell. Thomas told the Fetch the entire story, the story he had never told to anyone, each word easier than the last. Telling the truth was what a Queen’s Guard would do, he realized, and that seemed so much the crux of the matter that he found himself repeating important points carefully, desperate to make the Fetch understand. He told all that he could remember, and when there was no more, he stopped.

  The Fetch straightened and called out, “Bring an axe!”

  Thomas clutched the Fetch’s arm. “Won’t you forgive me?”

  “I will not, Thomas. I’ll keep my word, and that’s all.”

  Thomas closed his eyes. Mortmesne, Mortmesne, burning bright, he thought inexplicably. The Fetch would take his head, and Thomas found that he didn’t begrudge him. Thomas thought of the Red Queen, the first time he’d ever seen her, a moment of such mixed terror and longing that it still had the power to freeze his heart. Then he thought of the girl, dragging herself from the floor with the knife in her back. Perhaps she could do it, extricate them all from the quagmire they’d created. Stranger things had happened in the history of the Tearling. Perhaps she was even the True Queen. Perhaps

  Chapter 11

  The Apostate

  God’s Church was a strange marriage of the hierarchy of pre-Crossing Catholicism and the beliefs of a particular sect of Protestantism that emerged in the early aftermath of the Landing. This sect was less concerned with the moral salvation of souls than with the biological salvation of the human race, a salvation viewed as God’s great plan in raising the New World out of the sea.

  This strange mixture of disparate elements was both a marriage of necessity and a harbinger of things to come. God’s Church became a realist’s religion, its interpretation of the gospels riddled with pragmatic holes, the influence of the pre-Crossing Bible limited to what would serve. Ecclesiastical discontent was inevitable; many priests, faced with the increasingly brutal political realities of theology in the Tearling, needed only the slightest touch and they were ready to topple.

  —Religious Dimensions of the Tearling: An Essay, FATHER ANSELM

  When Father Tyler entered the audience chamber, Kelsea’s first impression was that he carried a great burden. The priest she remembered had been timid, not saturnine. He still moved cautiously, but now his shoulders sagged. This weight on him was new.

  “Father,” she greeted him. Father Tyler looked up toward the throne, his blue eyes flickering to meet hers and then darting away. Years of Carlin’s tutelage had prepared Kelsea to find all priests either bombasts or zealots, but Father Tyler seemed neither. She wondered about his function in the Church. With such a quiet demeanor, he couldn’t be a ceremonial priest. There were weak priests, certainly; Carlin had covered that territory extensively. But only a fool mistook caution for weakness.

  “You’re welcome here, Father. Please.” She indicated the chair on her left.

  Father Tyler hesitated, and no wonder; Mace was stationed behind the proffered chair. The priest approached as toward a chopping block, his white robe trailing behind him up the steps to the dais. He sat down without meeting Mace’s eyes, but when he finally turned to Kelsea, his gaze was clear and direct.

  More afraid of Mace than of me, Kelsea thought ruefully. Well, he wasn’t the only one.

  “Majesty,” the priest opened, in a voice as thin as paper. “The Church, and the Holy Father in particular, send greetings and wishes for Your Majesty’s health.”

  Kelsea nodded, keeping her expression pleasant. Mace had informed her that the Holy Father had entertained many Tear nobles in the Arvath over the past week. Mace had great respect for the guile of the Holy Father, and so Kelsea did not underestimate it either; the question was whether that guile extended to this junior priest, who stared at her expectantly.

  Everyone is waiting for something from me, Kelsea thought tiredly. Her shoulder, which hadn’t troubled her for at least several days, gave an answering throb. “Daylight runs, Father. What can I do for you?”

  “The Church wishes to consult you about the matter of your Keep Priest, Majesty.”

  “I understood that a Keep Priest was a discretionary matter.”

  “Yes, well . . .” Father Tyler glanced around, as though looking for his next words on the floor. “The Holy Father requests a report on what your discretion has dictated.”

  “Which priest would they give me?”

  His face twitched, betraying anxiety. “That matter hasn’t been decided yet, Majesty.”

  “Of course it has, Father, or you wouldn’t be here.” Kelsea smiled. “You’re no card player.”

  Father Tyler gave a surprised huff of laughter. “I’ve never played cards in my life.”

  “Are you close to the Holy Father?”

  “I’ve met him personally twice, Lady.”

  “In the past two weeks, I’ll wager. What are you really doing here, Father?”

  “Just what I said, Majesty. I’ve come to consult you about appointment of your Keep Priest.”

  “And who would you recommend?”

  “Me.” The priest stared at her defiantly, his eyes full of a bitterness that seemed entirely impersonal. “I present myself and my spiritual knowledge for Your Majesty’s service.”

  No one would ever know the courage it took Tyler to drag himself to the Keep on his devil’s errand. If he succeeded, he would become a loathsome creature, an agent of duplicity. If he failed, the Holy Father would have his revenge on Tyler's library. For
years, the Church had turned a blind eye to the growing collection of secular books in Tyler’s quarters. The senior priests thought his hobby odd but harmless. Ascetics had few enough pleasures, and no one had a burning interest in pre-Crossing history anyway. Upon Tyler’s death, his room would be cleaned out and all of his books would belong to the Church. No harm done.

  But if the question were put to him, Tyler would be forced to admit that he wasn’t a true ascetic. His love of the things of this world was as strong as anyone’s. Wine, food, women, Tyler had let them all go easily. But his books . . .

  The Holy Father wasn’t a stupid man, and neither was Cardinal Anders. Two days ago, Tyler had awakened from the most vivid yet of his nightmares, in which he failed in his errand and returned to the Arvath to find his room locked from the inside, smoke pouring from beneath the door. Tyler knew it was a dream, for he was wearing robes of grey, and no priest of God’s Church wore grey. But the knowledge that he was dreaming didn’t change the horror. Tyler clawed at the doorknob, then tried to break the door down, until both of his thin shoulders were battered and he was screaming. When he finally gave up, he turned and found Cardinal Anders behind him, holding a copy of the Bible, his red robes aflame. He held the Bible out to Tyler, intoning solemnly, “You are part of God’s great work.”

  For the past two days, Tyler had slept for only a few minutes at a time.

  He thought that the Queen might burst out laughing when he finally got around to the real subject of his visit, but she didn’t. She stared at him, and Tyler began to glimpse, if only dimly, how this girl could command such a fearsome character as the Mace. One could watch the Queen and almost see her thinking, a series of rapid and complex calculations. It made Tyler think of pre-Crossing computers, machines whose great value had essentially been the ability to do many things at once. He felt that hundreds of small variables went into the Queen’s deliberation, and wondered what sort of variable he was.

  “Accepted, with conditions.”

  Tyler struggled to hide his surprise. “Yes?”

  “The Keep chapel will be converted into a school.”