The Queen of the Tearling

“I don’t suppose you could untie me? They’ve found a knot I can’t slip.”

  “I don’t think further flight is the way, Lazarus. We wouldn’t escape these men.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather call me Mace?”

  “Carroll didn’t.”

  “Carroll and I, Lady, have a long history.”

  “I don’t doubt that.” Kelsea considered it, realizing that she always thought of him as Mace in her head. “Still, I prefer Lazarus. It’s a name of good omen.”

  “As you like.” Mace shifted, the ropes binding his wrists and ankles visibly expanding as he tried to stretch his muscles.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Discomfort. Certainly I’ve been in worse places. How did we escape from the river?”

  “Magic.”

  “What sort of—”

  “Lazarus,” Kelsea cut in firmly. “I need some answers.”

  He winced visibly, shifting against his bonds.

  “I know my uncle placed a price on my head. But what has he done to the Tearling?”

  “Pick something, Lady. Your uncle’s probably done it.”

  “Explain.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I won’t have this discussion with you, Lady.”

  “Why? Were you in my uncle’s guard?”

  “No.”

  She waited for him to elaborate, but he merely lay there. Somehow Kelsea knew that his eyes were shut tightly, even beneath the blindfold, like a man under heavy interrogation. She bit down on her cheek, hard, trying to keep a rein on her temper. “I don’t understand how I’m supposed to make smart decisions without knowing everything.”

  “Why dwell on the past, Lady? You have the power to make your own future.”

  “What of my dolls and dresses?”

  “I poked you with a stick to see if you’d fight back. And you did.”

  “What if I order you to tell me?”

  “Order away, Lady, and see how far you get.”

  She thought for a moment, then decided not to. It was the wrong road to take with Mace; order though she might, he would be guided by his own judgment. After watching him shift restlessly in his bindings for another minute, Kelsea felt the last of her annoyance give way to pity. They’d trussed him up very hard; he barely had room to stretch.

  “How’s your head?”

  “It’s fine. Bastard hit me just hard enough, in just the right place. A good shot.”

  “Have they fed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Carroll told me that you were the one who smuggled me from the Keep when I was a baby.”

  “I was.”

  “Have you always been a Queen’s Guard?”

  “Since my fifteenth year.”

  “Have you ever regretted choosing this life?”

  “Not once.” Mace moved again, his legs stretching and then relaxing, and Kelsea watched, astonished, as one foot slipped free of its coil of ropes.

  “How did you do that?”

  “Anyone can do it, Lady, if they take the trouble to practice.” He flexed his foot, working the stiffness out. “Another hour and I’ll have a hand out as well.”

  Kelsea stared at him for a moment, then scrambled to her feet. “Do you have family, Lazarus?”

  “No, Lady.”

  “I want you for my Captain of Guard. Think on it while you escape.”

  She left the tent before he could reply.

  The sun was beginning to sink, leaving only a dark line of cloud topped with orange on the horizon. Looking around the camp, Kelsea found the Fetch leaning against a tree, staring at her, his gaze flat and speculative. When she met his eye, he smiled, a dark and frozen smile that made her flinch.

  Not just a thief, but a murderer as well. Beneath the handsome man, Kelsea sensed another man, a terrible one, with a life as black as the water in an ice-covered lake. A murderer many, many times.

  The idea should have brought horror. Kelsea waited for a long moment, but what came instead was an even worse realization: it didn’t matter at all.

  Dinner was an unexpectedly lavish affair. The meat Kelsea had smelled earlier turned out to be venison, and a much better specimen than she’d eaten several days ago. There were boiled eggs, which surprised Kelsea until she caught sight of a small chicken coop out behind her own tent. Morgan had been baking bread over the fire pit for most of the day, and it turned out perfect, crusted on the outside and soft on the inside. The sandy-haired man, Howell, poured her a cup of mead, which Kelsea had never tasted and treated with great wariness. Alcohol and governing went together badly; her books seemed to indicate that alcohol went badly with everything.

  She ate little. For the first time in a very long while, she was conscious of her weight. The cottage had always been well stocked with food, and Kelsea usually had second helpings at dinner without a thought. But now she pecked at her meal, not wanting them to think she was a glutton. Not wanting him to think so. He sat beside her, and there might as well have been an invisible cord that tugged at her when he smiled or laughed.

  The Fetch urged Kelsea to tell them of her childhood in the cottage. She couldn’t imagine why he would be interested, but he pressed her, and so she told them, blushing occasionally at the intensity of their gazes. The mead must have loosened her tongue, for she suddenly had many things to say. She told them about Barty and Carlin, about the cottage, about her lessons. Every day, Barty had her in the morning until lunch, and then Carlin had her until dinnertime. Carlin taught her from books, Barty taught her outside. She told them that she knew how to skin a deer and smoke the meat to last for months, that she could snare a rabbit in a homemade cage, that she was handy with her knife but not fast enough. She told them that every night after dinner, she began a book of fiction, reading just for herself, and usually finished it before bedtime.

  “A fast reader, are you?” Morgan asked.

  “Very fast,” Kelsea replied, blushing.

  “It doesn’t sound like you’ve had much fun.”

  “I don’t think the point was for me to have fun.” Kelsea took another sip of mead. “I’m certainly making up for it now, anyway.”

  “We’ve rarely been accused of being fun,” the Fetch remarked. “You clearly have no head for alcohol.”

  Kelsea frowned and put her cup back down on the table. “I do like this stuff, though.”

  “Apparently. But slow down, or I’ll have How cut you off.”

  Kelsea blushed again, and they all laughed.

  At the urging of the others, the black man, Lear, stood up and told the tale of the White Ship, which had sunk in the Crossing and taken most of American medical expertise with it. Lear told the tale well, much better than Carlin, who was no storyteller, and Kelsea found herself with tears in her eyes as the ship went down.

  “Why did they put all of the doctors in one ship?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense for each ship to have its own doctor?”

  “The equipment,” Lear replied, with a slight sniff that told Kelsea he liked to tell stories, but didn’t appreciate having to answer questions afterward. “Lifesaving medical equipment was the one technology that William Tear allowed them to bring on the Crossing. But it was lost all the same, along with the rest of medicine.”

  “Not entirely lost,” Kelsea replied. “Carlin told me that there’s birth control available in the Tear.”

  “Indigenous birth control. They had to rediscover it when they landed, mostly by trial and error with local plant life. Real science has never existed in the Tearling.”

  Kelsea frowned, wondering why Carlin hadn’t told her that. But of course, to Carlin, birth control was just one of many figures to take into account on a population chart. The Fetch sat down beside her and she felt blood rush to her cheeks. It was a dangerous subject to think about while he was next to her in the dark.

  After dinner was cleared, they pushed two tables together and taught her how to play at poker. Kelsea, who had
never even seen playing cards before, took a pure pleasure in the game, the first time she’d taken real pleasure in anything since the Queen’s Guard had come to Carlin’s door.

  The Fetch sat beside her and peered at her cards. Kelsea found herself blushing from time to time, and prayed that he wouldn’t notice. He was undeniably attractive, but the real source of his charm was something very different: he obviously didn’t care one whit what Kelsea thought of him. She wondered if he cared what anyone thought.

  After a few hands, she seemed to be getting the hang of the game, though it was difficult to remember the many ways to get the high hand. The Fetch ceased to comment on her discard choices, which Kelsea took as a compliment. However, she continued to lose each hand and couldn’t understand why. The mechanics of the game were simple enough, and most of the time prudence counseled that she fold. Each time she did so, however, the hand was usually won by a lower set of cards, and each time, the Fetch chortled into his mug.

  Finally a scruffy blond man (Kelsea was fairly certain his name was Alain), while collecting the cards to shuffle and deal, caught Kelsea’s eye and commented, “You have dire need of a poker face.”

  “Agreed, girl,” said the Fetch. “Every thought you have is written plain in your eyes.”

  Kelsea took another gulp of mead. “Carlin says I’m an open book.”

  “Well, you’d better fix that, and fast. Should we decide not to kill you, you’ll find yourself in a den of snakes. Honesty will serve you ill.”

  His casual talk of killing her made Kelsea’s stomach clench, but she attempted to school her face to blankness.

  “Better,” the Fetch remarked.

  “Why can’t you make this decision about killing me and be done with it?” Kelsea asked. The mead seemed to have cleared her head even while muddling it, and she longed for a straight answer.

  “We wanted to see what sort of queen you look to be.”

  “Why not just give me a test, then?”

  “A test!” The Fetch’s grin broadened, and his black eyes gleamed. “What an interesting idea.”

  “This is a fine game,” grumbled Howell. He had a wide, painful-looking scar on his right hand that appeared to be a burn mark. Of course he wanted to get back to play; he won the most often, with the worst cards.

  “We’re going to play a different game now,” the Fetch announced, pushing Kelsea none too gently off the bench. “It’s a proper examination, girl. Get yourself over there.”

  “I’ve had too much mead to take an examination.”

  “Too bad.”

  Kelsea glared at him but moved away from the bench, noticing with slight astonishment that she was unsteady on her feet. The five men turned from the table to watch her. Alain, who had been dealing, snapped the cards in one last shuffle and then pocketed them in a movement too quick to follow.

  The Fetch leaned forward and placed his hands beneath his chin, studying her closely. “What will you do should you become a queen indeed?”

  “What will I do?”

  “Have you any policy in mind?”

  The Fetch spoke lightly, but his black eyes were grave. Beneath the question, Kelsea sensed an infinite and deadly patience, perversely coupled with a desperate need for her answer. A test indeed, and she knew instinctively that if she answered incorrectly, the conversation was done.

  She opened her mouth, not knowing what she would say, and Carlin’s words spilled out into the darkness, Carlin’s vision, reiterated so often in the library that Kelsea now spoke the words in a litany as practiced as though she read from the Bible of God’s Church. “I’ll govern for the good of the governed. I’ll make sure that every citizen is properly educated and doctored. I’ll cease wasteful spending and ease the burden on the poor through redistribution of land and goods and taxation. I’ll restore the rule of law in this kingdom and drive out the influence of Mortmesne—”

  “So you do know of it!” Lear barked.

  “Of Mortmesne?” She looked at him blankly. “I know that Mortmesne’s hold over this kingdom grows all the time.”

  “What else of Mortmesne?” boomed Morgan, his huge form bearlike in the firelight.

  Kelsea shrugged. “I’ve read of the early years of the Red Reign. And I’ve been told that my uncle has likely made alliance with the Red Queen.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really. Some information on Mort customs.”

  “The Mort Treaty?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Great God,” murmured Howell.

  “Even her guardians sworn to secrecy,” the Fetch told the rest of them, shaking his head. “We should have known.”

  Kelsea thought of Carlin’s face, her voice, always so laden with regret: I promised.

  “What is the Mort Treaty?”

  “You do at least know of the Mort invasion?”

  “Yes,” Kelsea replied eagerly, glad to finally know something. “They made it all the way to the walls of the Keep.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The Fetch turned away from her and stared off into the darkness. Kelsea looked up at the night sky, and she saw thousands upon thousands of stars. They were miles from everything out here, and the sky was enormous. When she looked back at the group of men, she was dizzy, and nearly stumbled before catching herself.

  “No more mead for you,” Howell announced, shaking his head.

  “She’s not drunk,” Morgan disagreed. “She’s lost her legs, but there’s nothing wrong with her wits.”

  The Fetch returned to them then, with the decisive air of a man who had made a difficult decision. “Lear, tell us a story.”

  “What story?”

  “A Brief History of the Mort Invasion, from Crossing to Disaster.”

  Kelsea narrowed her eyes; he was treating her like a child again. He turned to her and grinned, almost as though he’d read her thoughts.

  “I’ve never told that as a story,” Lear remarked.

  “Well, make a good tale of it, if you can.”

  Lear cleared his throat, took a sip of mead, and locked his gaze on Kelsea. There was no charity there, none at all, and Kelsea had to fight not to look down at her feet.

  “Once upon a time, there was a kingdom called the Tearling. It was founded by a man named William Tear, a utopian who dreamed of a land of plenty for all. But ironically, the Tearling was a kingdom of scarce resources, for the British and Americans had not been fortunate in their choice of landing place. The Tearling had no ores, no manufacturing. The Tear were farmers; all they had to offer was the food they grew, the meat they raised, and a limited amount of good lumber from their indigenous oaks. Life was difficult, basic necessities were hard to come by, and over the years many Tear became poor and illiterate. They had to buy everything else from the lands surrounding, and since they were stuck in a hard place, the price wasn’t cheap.

  “The neighboring kingdom had been luckier in the Crossing. It had everything that the Tearling lacked. It had doctors with access to centuries of European knowledge. It had masons, decent horses, and some of the technology that William Tear had forbidden. Most important of all, it had vast deposits of iron and tin in the ground, so it had not only mining but an army with superior weapons of steel edge. This kingdom was New Europe, and for a long time it was content to be rich and invulnerable, to have its citizens live and die in health and comfort.”

  Kelsea nodded; she knew all of this already. But Lear’s voice was deep and hypnotic, and he did make it sound like a fairy tale, like something from Carlin’s Complete Brothers Grimm back at home. Kelsea wondered if Mace could hear the tale in his tent, whether he’d worked his other hand free. Her mind felt wildly out of focus, and she shook her head to clear it as Lear continued.

  “But toward the end of the second Tear century a sorceress appeared, seeking the rule of New Europe for herself. She slaughtered the democratically elected representatives, their wives, even their child
ren in cradles. Citizens who resisted woke to find their families dead, their homes on fire. It took nearly half a century to subdue the populace, but eventually democracy gave way to dictatorship, and everyone in the surrounding kingdoms forgot that this rich land had once been New Europe; instead it became Mortmesne, the Dead Hand. And likewise, everyone forgot that this sorceress had no name. She became the Red Queen of Mortmesne, and today, one hundred and thirteen years later, she still holds her throne.

  “But unlike her predecessors, the Red Queen wasn’t content to control only her own kingdom; she wanted the entire New World. After consolidating her rule, she turned her attention to the Mort army, building it into a vast and powerful machine that could not be defeated. And some forty years ago, she began to move beyond her own borders. She took Cadare first, then Callae. These countries surrendered easily, and now they’re subject to Mortmesne. They pay tribute, as any good colony would. They allow Mort garrisons to quarter in their homes and patrol their streets. There is no resistance.”

  “That’s not true, though,” Kelsea objected. “Mortmesne had an uprising. Carlin told me about it. The Red Queen sent all the rebels to Callae, into exile.”

  Lear glared at her, and the Fetch chuckled. “You can’t interrupt him when he’s telling a tale, girl. The Callae uprising lasted about twenty minutes; he’s right to omit it.”

  Kelsea bit her lip, embarrassed. Lear gave her a warning glance before continuing. “But when the Red Queen had reduced these nations to colonies and finally turned her attention to the Tearling, she found trouble in the form of Queen Arla.”

  My grandmother, Kelsea thought. Arla the Just.

  “Queen Arla was sickly all her life, but she had brains and courage, and she liked being the queen of a free nation. All of the landowners in the kingdom, particularly God’s Church, were worried about their land, and they demanded that she reach a settlement with the Red Queen. The Tearling army was weak and poorly organized, utterly outmatched by the Mort. Nevertheless, Queen Arla refused all Mort overtures and challenged the Red Queen to take this kingdom by force. So Mortmesne invaded the eastern Tearling.

  “The Tearling army fought well, perhaps better than anyone could have anticipated. But they had weapons of wood and a few black-market swords, while the Mort army was armed and armored with iron. They had steel-edged blades and steel arrowheads, and they carved their way through the Tear with little difficulty. The Mort had already taken the eastern half of the country by the time Queen Arla died of pneumonia in the winter of 284. She left two surviving children: the Crown Princess Elyssa, and her younger brother Thomas. Elyssa began to make overtures of peace to the Mort Queen almost immediately upon taking the throne. But she couldn’t offer tribute, even if she’d been so inclined. There simply wasn’t enough money.”