They were halfway back to New Canaan before Jonathan said a word. Lily had spent the journey looking out the window, trying to think of a more plausible story for Security. She had nothing. With each mile, her stomach tightened, then tightened further, knots seemed to coil in on themselves until she thought she might be sick.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. M.”
Lily jumped. She had forgotten that someone else was in the car. She looked up and found Jonathan’s eyes on her in the rearview mirror.
“I think I killed him, Jonathan.”
“You had cause.”
Lily blushed. This was the closest they’d ever come to talking about that night . . . about any of the nights. “Security won’t care about that.”
“We look out for each other, Mrs. M. We take care of each other. Without that there’s nothing.”
“Won’t you be in trouble too? If they track this car?”
“I fixed the tag on this car a long time ago. It was in the garage most of the night, until you called and I came to pick you up.”
Lily nodded slowly. It boggled her mind, the world of hidden things that had undoubtedly been going on around her for years. Outside the window, another green sign flashed by: Tolland. The horizon was lightening, blush pink eating its way into the dark sky overhead. Lily stared at the pink haze, wishing she could see much farther east, all the way to the Atlantic, where the sun would already be up. She leaned against the window, enjoying its coolness on her cheek, and behind her eyes she saw the half-finished ship. There must be many more ships, she realized, hidden . . . where? All over New England? She thought she knew, now, what would happen on September first: they would leave, Tear and his people, and more than anything, Lily wanted to go with them, to that wide-open place covered in water and trees. In the distance, outside the glass, she heard a voice.
“Kelsea.”
Lily shook herself awake, but it was a losing battle. Half of her body was already fast asleep.
“Kelsea.”
“Mrs. M.?”
“Who’s Kelsea?” Lily murmured. The glass felt so cool, pillowing her cheek. She wanted to stay there forever, wanted—
Kelsea!”
She opened her eyes to a moving world, Pen shaking her shoulders. The hallway jumped wildly around her. For a moment she was back in the car, then she was back with Pen. Her head throbbed wildly. She felt sick.
“Lady, I had to wake you. It’s important.”
“What time is it?”
“Eleven in the morning.”
Kelsea shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to get her bearings. She was standing in the hallway, just outside the balcony room. The early sunrise was still bright in her mind, bruised pink. She could feel cool window glass on her cheek. “Well, what couldn’t wait?”
“The Mort, Lady. They’ve reached the walls.”
Kelsea’s heart sank. “We knew this was coming.”
“Yes, but Lady—”
“What?”
“The Red Queen. She’s come with them.”
Chapter 12
Night
You cannot bargain with the tide.
—TEAR PROVERB OF UNVERIFIED ORIGIN, GENERALLY ATTRIBUTED TO THE GLYNN QUEEN
The Mort army covered both sides of the Caddell, spread north and south across the Almont and even curving around the southern edge of New London. Dusk was coming down on the city, and in the fading light the Mort camp was an impenetrable dark sea.
In front of the black tents stood more than fifty neatly ordered lines of soldiers. To the naked eye, they seemed to be covered in glittering iron. It was an ostentatious display, clearly designed to frighten Kelsea, and it worked. She was terrified, both for herself and for the people behind her, almost her entire kingdom now crammed inside New London’s walls. How could they resist the force assembled down there? Behind the tents, Kelsea glimpsed a line of siege towers, and somewhere out there, hidden from view, were the cannons. Assuming that the cannons worked—and Kelsea did—the Mort wouldn’t even need their siege towers. They could simply smash the walls of New London to rubble.
Glee stirred in Kelsea’s arms, making her jump. The child was so easy to hold that Kelsea had forgotten she was there. Andalie had opted to come on this outing, and Kelsea had taken the girl to give her a rest. But the people in the streets had murmured in astonishment when they saw the small child in Kelsea’s arms, and now Kelsea worried that she might have called too much attention to both Andalie and Glee. They were valuable, just as Andalie had said, and their best hope seemed to be in anonymity. Glee had fallen asleep on the way to the wall, but now she was awake, staring up at Kelsea, her gaze contemplative. Kelsea put a finger to her lips, and Glee nodded solemnly.
Mace had picked Andalie’s other daughter, Aisa, to accompany them. She remained several feet behind Kelsea, almost like a second Pen, holding a knife in her hand. Mace had taken a liking to the girl, but then so had many of the Guard. Coryn said she had the best knife hand since Prasker—whoever that was—and Elston deemed her a tough piece of business, which was the highest praise he could give. Aisa was taking this expedition very seriously, never loosening her grip on the knife, her thick brows lowered over a face that was both solemn and grim. The heroism of her small, determined form, now, when it could make no difference, only made Kelsea feel worse.
Scanning the Mort camp, Kelsea finally found what she was looking for: a crimson tent located near the center. Though it was only a tiny speck of red among all that black, something tolled inside Kelsea like a funeral bell. The Red Queen was leaving nothing to chance this time; she had come herself, just to make sure the job was done right. Torches surrounded the tent, but after a moment Kelsea noticed something odd: these torches were the only fire she could see in the Mort camp. It was just after dinner, but the perimeter was dark. Kelsea considered this fact for a moment before tucking it away.
“Did everyone make it inside the city?” she asked.
“They did, Lady,” Mace replied, “but the army was decimated in the last attempt to hold the Mort from the bridge.”
Kelsea’s stomach roiled, and she peered down at the New London Bridge, cursing her poor eyesight. “What keeps the Mort off the bridge?”
“A barricade, Lady.” Colonel Hall stepped forward, emerging from a group of army men farther down the wall. A thick bandage swaddled his right arm, from which the sleeve had been cut away, and he had taken a nasty wound across the jaw. “It’s a good barricade, but it won’t hold forever.”
“Colonel Hall.” Kelsea smiled, relieved to see him alive, but sobered at the sight of his injuries. “I’m sorry for the loss of General Bermond, and your men. All of their families will receive full pensions.”
“Thank you, Lady.” But Hall’s mouth twisted wryly, as though acknowledging how little a pension meant in this moment.
Mace poked her lightly in the back, and Kelsea remembered. “I formally invest you as general of my armies. Long life to you, General Hall.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and though Kelsea did not think the laughter was meant to be unkind, it rang in her ears. “Above all, let us have niceties, Lady.”
“What else do we have now?”
“Glory, I suppose. Death with honor.”
“Precisely.”
Hall came a bit closer, paying no attention to Pen, who moved to block him. “May I tell you a secret, Lady?”
“Certainly.” Kelsea patted Glee’s back and set her on the ground, where the child wrapped an arm around Kelsea’s knee.
Hall lowered his voice. “It’s a real thing, glory. But it pales in comparison to what we sacrifice for it. Home, family, long lives filled with quiet. These are real things too, and when we seek glory, we give them up.”
Kelsea did not reply for a moment, realizing that Bermond’s death must have hit Hall harder than she had expected. “Do you think I sought this war?”
“No, Lady. But you are not content with the quiet life.”
&n
bsp; Mace grunted beside her, a soft sound that Kelsea recognized as agreement, and she fought the urge to kick him. “You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“This entire kingdom knows you now, Queen Kelsea. You’ve brought us all to disaster, to satisfy your own notions of glory. Of better.”
“Be careful, Hall,” Pen warned. “You don’t—”
“Shut up, Pen,” Mace growled.
Kelsea swung around, furious. “Have you turned on me for good now, Lazarus?”
“No, Lady. But it’s not wise, particularly in wartime, to silence the voice of dissent.”
Kelsea’s face burned, and she turned back to Hall. “I didn’t end the shipment for glory. I never cared about that.”
“Then prove me wrong, Majesty. Save the last remnants of my men from an unwinnable fight. Save the women and children—and the men as well—from the nightmare they will surely face when the Mort break the walls. You cut a man to pieces, rather than watch him die a simple death by the noose. Prove me wrong and save us all.”
Hall turned back to the edge, dismissing her in a single movement. Kelsea’s face had gone numb. She felt alone suddenly, alone in a way she hadn’t been since her earliest days in the Keep. She looked over the faces of her Guard, clustered around the stairwells that fed the inner wall. Mace, Coryn, Wellmer, Elston, Kibb . . . they were loyal, they would lay down their lives for her, but loyalty wasn’t approval. They thought she had failed.
“Look, Lady.” Mace gestured over the edge.
The regimented lines of Mort had not moved, but as Kelsea squinted in the dying light, she saw that there was movement down there, a clutch of figures in black cloaks darting through the lines, bearing torches, wending their way toward the front.
Mace had pulled out his spyglass. “The one in the middle is the Red Queen’s personal herald. I remember that little bastard.”
The herald was a wisp of a man, so slight that he could easily have blended into the night in his cloak. But his voice was a thick bass that echoed off the walls of the Keep, and his Tear was perfect, without even the slightest Mort accent.
“The Great Queen of all Mortmesne and Callae extends greetings to the Heir of the Tearling!”
Kelsea gritted her teeth.
“My message is as follows. The Great Queen assumes that you realize the futility of your situation. The Great Queen’s army will find it an easy matter to break the walls of your capital and take whatever it wishes. No Tear will be spared.
“However, if the Tear heir removes the barricade to the New London Bridge and opens the gates, the Great Queen promises to spare not only her, but twenty members of her entourage as well. The Great Queen gives her word that these twenty-one will not be harmed.”
Someone’s hand was on Kelsea’s wrist. Glee, clutching too tightly, her tiny nails digging in, but Kelsea barely felt it. Save us all, Hall had said, and now Kelsea saw that if she could not save them, they would not be saved. She focused on the herald, the men around him, calling up the terrible thing inside her. It woke easily, and Kelsea wondered whether it would always be there from now on, ready to spring out at any opportunity. Could she even live that way?
“The bridge is to be cleared and the gates will be opened by dawn,” the herald continued. “If these terms are not met, the Great Queen’s army will enter New London by any means necessary, and lay your city to ruin. This is my—”
The herald broke off, then suddenly doubled over and blew apart in a spray of blood. So great was Kelsea’s anger that it seemed to ripple outward, to encompass the rest of them, knocking some men backward and flattening the rest. It spread throughout the regimented ranks of Mort, gathering speed and power like a hurricane wind.
And then it simply met a wall.
This sudden obstacle was so unexpected that Kelsea stumbled backward, as though she had run into the wall herself, headlong. She nearly knocked Glee over, but Andalie caught the girl easily, and Pen took Kelsea’s arm and kept her upright. Her head throbbed, a sudden, vicious headache that seemed to have come from nowhere.
“Lady?”
She shook her head to clear it, but the headache had clamped down like a vise, waves of pain that made it nearly impossible to focus.
What was that?
She took her spyglass from her pocket. The light was almost entirely gone now, but Kelsea could still see the damage she’d wreaked down there, at least several hundred dead in the front of the Mort lines. Gruesome deaths all, some of them reduced to little more than piles of bloody tissue. But beyond, she still sensed that impenetrable barrier, no less real for the fact that it could not be seen. The crimson tent caught her eye again; its entrance had been drawn, and now Kelsea glimpsed someone beneath the awning. It had grown too dark to make out a face, but the figure was unmistakable: a tall woman in a red gown.
“You,” Kelsea whispered.
Someone was tugging at her skirt. Kelsea looked down and found Glee’s tiny face looking upward.
“Her name,” Glee lisped. “She doesn’t want you to know.”
Kelsea put a light hand on Glee’s head, staring at the red-clad figure. She was less than a mile away, but that distance seemed infinitely vast. Kelsea tested the barrier, trying to slice into it, the same way she would cut into her own flesh. She could not make a dent.
The Mort lines had hastily recovered and reassembled in front of the camp, and now a new man stepped forward, a tall figure in a bulky black cloak.
“I speak for the Queen!”
“Ducarte,” Mace murmured. Kelsea focused her spyglass and found a balding man with close-set, bestial eyes. She shivered, for here she sensed a pure predator. Ducarte’s gaze roved the city’s walls with unconcealed contempt, as though he had already opened a breach and begun the sack.
“If the gates of New London are not opened by dawn tomorrow, none will be spared. These are the Queen’s terms.”
Ducarte waited a moment longer, until even the last echo of his words had died away. Then he put up the hood of his cloak and reversed his journey through the ranks of Mort, leaving the dead behind, heading back to the camp.
Arliss.”
“Queenie!” He looked up in surprise, his wizened face breaking into a smile, the perennial stinking cigarette clamped between his teeth. “What brings you to my door?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Well, sit down.”
Kelsea settled herself on one of the ratty armchairs Arliss used for conducting business, ignoring the miasma of cigarette smoke that clung to the upholstery. She didn’t care for Arliss’s office, a filthy warren of desks and loose papers, but she had the beginnings of a plan now, and she needed him.
“Pen, leave us alone.”
Pen hesitated. “Technically, he’s a danger to your person, Lady.”
“No one’s a danger to my person anymore.” She met his eyes for a long moment, and found an odd thing: although they had slept together several times since that first night—and it had improved exponentially, at least from Kelsea’s end—that night was the one that would always be there, between them. “Go, Pen. I’m perfectly safe.”
Pen went. Kelsea waited until the door closed behind him before asking, “How’s the money?”
“Slowed to a trickle. The minute the Mort came out of the hills, every noble took it as a license to stop paying tax.”
“Of course.”
“I’d hoped to clean up a tidy profit on the sapphire those miners bring back from the Fairwitch, but no one’s heard a peep. I’m guessing they took those bonuses you gave them and disappeared.”
“Money is tight, then.”
“Very. There are fortunes to be made in wartime, Queenie, but not in good government. Personally, I think we’re all fucked.”
“You’re nothing but sunshine, Arliss.”
“This is a dead kingdom walking, Queenie.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Arliss looked up sharply.
“I need you to do something for me, and I need you to keep it a secret.”
“A secret from whom?”
“From everyone. Especially Lazarus.” Kelsea leaned forward. “I need you to draft me a Bill of Regency.”
Arliss leaned back in his chair, watching her narrowly through the haze of smoke. “You plan to give up your throne?”
“For a time.”
“I take it the Mace doesn’t know.”
“He can’t know.”
“Ah.” Arliss tilted his head, considering. “I’ve never drafted a Regency bill before. Your uncle is dead, Queenie. Who’s the Regent?”
“Lazarus.”
Arliss nodded slowly. “That’s a wise choice.”
“Can you get hold of an old copy of my mother’s bill?”
“Yes, but I’ve seen that bastard; it’s fifteen pages long.”
“Well, take the essential language. I don’t want it open to interpretation anyway. Only a page long, and as many copies as you can write. I’ll sign them all, and they can go out to the city tomorrow after I’m gone.”
“And where is it you’re going?”
Kelsea blinked and saw the New London Bridge, the Mort waiting in the hills beyond. “To die, I think. I hope not.”
“Well, now I see why the Mace can’t know.” Arliss tapped his fingers on his desk. “This will change things.”
“For you?”
“For me . . . and my competitors. But it’s always good to be in the know first.”
“I have to do something.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Queenie. You could take her offer, save the women and your core Guard.”
“That’s what my uncle would have done. But I can’t.”
“Well, that’s the bitch of choice, isn’t it?”
She glared at him. “Choice has been very good to you lately, Arliss. You’ve been coining money from drug sales to the refugees. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”