“They haven’t. Not unless it happened in the last two days.”
“Find out.”
Arliss got up and headed for his office.
“Go through Levieux rather than Galen!” the Mace called after him. “We’ll get quicker answers!”
Arliss waved him off. Aisa wondered what the Mace would do. Glee’s visions sometimes ended up empty, meaning nothing, but Aisa had never known one of her predictions to actually be wrong. She had never heard of Gin Reach.
“El? What do you think?”
Elston shrugged. “The little one sees, for certain, but I’ll take concrete information over vague any day. I say we head on to Demesne, like we planned.”
The Mace nodded. “I agree. We can’t miss our window.”
He turned to the rest of the room, and Aisa found that disturbing phrase—a killer of children—echoing inside her head. She had asked Maman about it, and Maman had said she didn’t know, but Aisa had seen a different truth in her eyes. Aisa had asked Coryn where the Mace came from, and Coryn had said he didn’t know. There was a secret here, and Aisa was determined to ferret it out.
“All of you who remain here,” the Mace announced, “Devin is in charge of Guard business! All other matters belong to Arliss or Andalie!”
At this, Aisa’s mouth dropped open. The Mace, leaving Maman in charge? Several of the guards clearly didn’t like it either, but their mutters died under the Mace’s gaze. Looking around the room, Aisa suddenly noticed Pen, standing several feet behind the Mace. His eyes were circled dark, but he looked sober. He was armed and dressed for travel, his sword at his hip.
“Have this place ready for our return,” the Mace told the guards. “We’re bringing the Queen home. Don’t let her find you napping.”
But despite the confidence of his tone, the Mace still looked troubled. Ten minutes later, when Aisa went to fetch her saddlebags, he was still bent over the dining table, staring at a map.
It was thrilling to be out in the city after dark. The Mace had chosen the quietest hour of the night, after the drunks went to bed but before the early laborers were out, and the streets were nearly empty.
But all was not quiet. As they approached the outskirts of the Gut, Aisa became aware of a growing din, men shouting to each other and the occasional clash of swords.
“What is that?” Ewen asked. He was riding beside Aisa, near the back of the troop.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the Creche,” said Bradshaw, who was riding on Ewen’s other side. He was a last-minute addition to the Guard, but in the end, even the Mace had been forced to admit that a magician might make himself useful in a jailbreak. Aisa still did not know why the Mace had decided to bring Ewen. The three of them, Aisa, Ewen, and Bradshaw, existed in a strange twilight, armed but not real guards, and Aisa wondered if they would serve the same function on this journey: essentially ballast. But that was the life of a Queen’s Guard. The Queen’s safety came first, even if all three of them were nothing more than human shields.
“What’s the Creche?” Ewen asked.
“The tunnels beneath the Gut. The Caden have gone to work in earnest, clearing the place out.”
Ewen still looked confused, but of course he would; how would he even know what the Creche was? Now they were close enough that the battle noise echoing from the Gut was horrendous. Aisa wondered how the people who lived there could stand it, how they got any sleep.
“Why are they working at night?” Ewen asked.
Bradshaw’s mouth curled in disgust. “Because at this hour, there’s a better chance of catching the clientele.”
Aisa grimaced as well. She found herself able to picture the Creche with extraordinary clarity: the tunnels, the fleeing men, the torches. Red cloaks. All of it was somehow tied up in her head with Da, because of all the children down there, all of them in danger.
“Aisa?”
She blinked and found that she had brought her horse to a stop. Ewen and Bradshaw were some ten feet ahead, beckoning her to catch up.
“Aisa?” Ewen asked again.
She opened her mouth, meaning to explain this thing to him. After all, Ewen was not a real Queen’s Guard either. He knew what it was like to be only halfway part of this world. But no, she could not burden Ewen; his imagination would not extend so far, would not be able to encompass the human ugliness that played out only a few streets away. But Aisa’s could, and did. To her left, a man screamed, and there was a sound of running footsteps. Aisa’s temperature was rising, and she suddenly remembered something Glee had said, days ago: They turn the corner and you grasp your chance.
“Aisa? Are you all right?”
She smiled. The Guard had turned the corner. Her chance was before her, clear and bright and shining, and she only regretted that she could not apologize to the Mace personally, explain to him that this was something she simply had to do. Her hand wandered to the knife at her waist, and she gripped the hilt, feeling something titanic rise inside her. She was not a Queen’s Guard, not really, for she suddenly saw that there were more important things in the world than one woman’s life. She had wanted to stride the world, stabbing out evil, had been dreaming of it for months. But she knew that the root of these dreams went back further, all the way back to her childhood, back to Da. She had been waiting for this chance her entire life.
“Tell the Captain I’m sorry. Tell him I had no choice.”
Ewen’s face pinched in confusion, but Bradshaw asked, “What are you going to do?”
“What the Queen would have done.” Aisa turned away and found the memory right behind her eyes: the cages; the soldiers; Glee’s face, bewildered and frightened behind the bars; Maman screaming. It had felt like the end of the world, and then the Queen had come. She had released Glee from the cage, but there were cages everywhere.
“Child, you can’t go in there!” Bradshaw protested.
“I’m not a child,” Aisa replied, and knew as she said the words that they were true, that she had finally crossed over that mysterious border in her mind.
“Tell the Captain that I’m about the Queen’s business.”
Ewen’s mouth widened in dismay, but before he could say anything more, Aisa had grasped her chance and disappeared, deep into the shadows of the Gut.
“You! Girl!”
Kelsea looked up, startled. The voice was a man’s, speaking good Tear, but she couldn’t see the source. She sat cross-legged on the floor, perfectly still, but her brain had been working steadily for the past hour or more, trying to assemble information into a unified theory. She was just starting to get somewhere—something about the sapphires and William Tear—but at the sound of the man’s voice, her thoughts fell into disarray.
“You next door!”
It was her invisible cellmate. She went to the bars.
“What?”
“You’re the marked queen?”
Kelsea raised her eyebrows. “I suppose so.”
“My jailor said your army was destroyed. A massacre. Is it so?”
“Yes,” she replied, lowering her voice to a whisper. She could hear footsteps now, descending the shallow stairs at the end of the corridor. “We were heavily outnumbered.”
“Did none survive?”
Kelsea did not reply as the footsteps approached and torchlight came around the corner. She had assumed that it was Lona, her new jailor, come for her, but the steps paused at the next cell, and a man’s voice said in Mort, “Up, you. You’re wanted.”
Kelsea leaned through the bars, trying to peek down the corridor as the guard unlocked her neighbor’s cell. She could not see much, only the far wall and, after a moment, the back of a man’s bald head. He went down the corridor, followed by the shadowy form of his jailor, and the light disappeared behind him.
Kelsea retreated to the back wall of her cell and slid down to the floor. She considered lighting her candle again, then discarded the idea. Thinking was always easier in the dark.
Eig
ht months ago, she had had no magic at all. She had been a young girl with a decent brain, a good education, and a strong conviction that some things were definitely right and others definitely wrong. One sapphire had lain around her neck since her infancy, but it had only been a jewel. She had been royal, perhaps, but not remarkable. Life had been ordinary. She had never felt like a queen.
On the journey to New London was when she had felt the first difference. It was early one morning, she remembered, perhaps the day of the hawk, perhaps some other. But everything had begun to change from that moment onward. Because she was nineteen, the age of ascension? It seemed as good an explanation as any, but still it rang false. Nineteen-year-olds were fools, and William Tear would have known that.
They were together, Kelsea recalled suddenly. Both sapphires. I held them together, in my hands.
Could that be it? She didn’t know. Where had the second sapphire come from? In Katie’s town, two exploration parties had already gotten as far as the foothills of the Fairwitch; surely one of those parties would eventually come across sapphire in the mountains, where it was nearer to the surface. Easy to make a necklace, once you had the raw jewels. Row Finn was the best metalworker in the Town, but by no means the only one.
How does this help you? her mind demanded. All of this history, how has it ever helped?
But that voice carried no weight with the adopted daughter of Carlin Glynn. History always mattered. There was a pattern here, and sooner or later, it would begin to repeat itself. Both Kelsea and Jonathan Tear had inherited kingdoms that were falling apart. They were falling apart for different reasons, true, but—
You’re wandering. You’ve had one of the jewels around your neck since you can remember. So why did it lie there for so many years, doing nothing?
Perhaps there was nothing to do.
This felt right. All of those years, she had been hidden in the Reddick, safe in anonymity. Many people had been hunting her, but none of them had found the cottage. If they had, would Kelsea’s jewel have lain, meek and quiescent, around her neck? The same jewel that had killed the assassin who dragged her from her bathtub?
He was trying to take my necklace off, she remembered, but this fact only seemed to confuse the matter further. Where did such power come from? How could a sapphire act as its own enforcer? Kelsea had given the jewels to the Red Queen of her own free will, but the Red Queen had not been able to use them, though she certainly knew more of magic than Kelsea did herself. Did the jewels have a mind of their own? If so, why choose Kelsea? The Raleighs had worn the jewels for years, but as far as Kelsea knew, there had been no hint of magic about them.
She looked up, broken from the run of her thoughts. She had heard something, down the hallway on her left. She had the measure of this dungeon now, and this sound did not belong: a sliding rasp, as though something had scraped the wall of the corridor. There was no other sound, not even from the accused thief up the corridor, and Kelsea realized then that she had not heard from him in days. People probably died in these cells all the time. The Red Queen’s page, Emily, came down to check on Kelsea at least twice a day . . . but these sounds were not hers.
Another rasp, this one soft, almost furtive, definitely closer. Something inside Kelsea went cold, and without thinking, she reached over to the small pile of provisions by her bedding, feeling around for the rock, Katie’s rock. Katie had thought it was blue quartz, but Kelsea had examined it for a long time in the candlelight before deciding that it was sapphire, like those in her necklaces, the same sapphire that seemed to run through the bedrock of the Tearling. It might be easiest to get at in the Fairwitch, but it was everywhere, anchoring her kingdom, shaping the ground beneath the Town, and Kelsea had recognized the blue glow lighting Katie’s path with no problem at all.
But though Kelsea scrabbled on the floor, she could not find the rock, only her matches and the remnants of her last meal. She forced herself to be still. Down the hallway, she heard one footstep, and then another. Soft, as though someone were barefoot—or walking on tiptoe. If they had been carrying a torch, Kelsea would have seen the light by now; whoever it was traveled in the dark. A cold hand seemed to rest on the back of her neck, making her think of Brenna, Thorne’s creature, who could lower the room temperature by her very presence. But Brenna was locked safely away in the Keep. The footsteps moved directly in front of her cell and Kelsea held still, not even breathing, caught in the momentary hope that if she didn’t move, no one could find her. The bars thrummed gently as fingers ran lightly across the front of her cell. Her nerve broke.
“Who’s there?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t. There was something terrible about asking questions of the faceless dark. She thought of Katie, calling into the night, and closed her eyes.
“They thought they could keep pretty from me.”
Kelsea froze.
“They thought I wouldn’t have my own key.”
Kelsea backed up against the wall. She had forgotten about the jailor, and that was a bad misstep. She heard the jingle of a ring of keys, felt the thrum of her pulse racing.
“Stay away from me.”
“As though pretty could belong to anyone except me.”
At the words, Kelsea’s fear suddenly morphed into anger, beautiful and welcome anger. Vague memories tugged at her, echoes of the day she had ripped Arlen Thorne to pieces. She had promised never to do that again, but now she was ready to jump.
The jailor slid his key into the lock, and with the sound of the tumblers falling, Kelsea felt the last of her fear disappear. Fury swelled inside her, bright and shining, until her chest felt twice its actual size. Oh, how she had missed her rage in these past weeks, missed it in a way she would not have imagined possible, and now she felt as though she were reuniting with herself, becoming whole.
“Where is she?” the jailor mused. This was a game to him, one he had played before. How many prisoners had been forced to endure this? As he moved into the cell, Kelsea suddenly realized that she could see him, a vague figure cast in dim blue light. It was the rock, Katie’s rock, Katie’s sapphire, lying in the corner of the cell, glowing a thin blue. But Kelsea had no time to reflect upon it, for the jailor was moving closer.
“There she is,” he murmured. His gaze flicked to the corner, marked the glowing piece of sapphire, then seemed to dismiss it.
“You do not want to come near me,” Kelsea said, speaking slowly. She had meant the words as a bluff, but she also felt a certain truth in them. Something enormous was gathering force inside her, a boulder careening down a hill, picking up speed and power. The jailor pulled a dagger from his waist, and somehow this angered Kelsea most of all. He had at least fifty pounds on her, but still, he didn’t want even the semblance of a fair fight. She considered various parts of his body and settled on the eyes, visible in the thin blue light. What a pleasure it would be, to claw them from his head.
No sooner had she thought this than the jailor stumbled, clapping his hand to his eyes. The dagger clattered to the floor and Kelsea snatched it up. The jailor sank to his knees, howling, and Kelsea darted forward and knocked him over, using her full weight to drive him off his knees and onto the floor. His head clanged against the bars, but Kelsea barely noticed. Whatever had incapacitated him could end at any time, and the urgency of that thought allowed her to straddle him—though she hated to touch him at all—take a good grip on the knife, and bury it in his throat. The jailor groaned and gagged, while Kelsea held tight to the dagger’s hilt, driving it downward.
“No one owns me,” she whispered.
It went on for a long time, somewhere between five minutes and forever, but finally, the jailor’s struggles ceased. Feeling the muscle beneath her go slack, Kelsea relaxed.
The glow from the rock, if it had even been there at all, had vanished, and Kelsea felt as though her anger had drained away with it. Groping around under the edge of her mattress, she found her matches. The candle took longer, for the struggle had knocked it all
the way into the far corner of her cell. When Kelsea finally got it lit, she stood over the man on the floor, staring down at him. She felt very little, only a mild disappointment that she remembered from killing Thorne, and now she heard Andalie’s voice, echoing from a dark corner of her memory.
This, I think, is the crux of evil in this world, Majesty: those who feel entitled to anything they want, anything they can grab.
There was the disappointment. Kelsea longed to eradicate true evil, but she could not. All she could do was kill men like the jailor, like Thorne, men who represented evil’s weak and worthless implements. True change danced beyond her grasp.
“How do I fix it?” she whispered to the corpse. “How do we get to the better world?”
She remained silent, hoping against hope that someone would hear her and answer. William Tear himself, perhaps, possessed of so much power that his voice might echo across the great twin voids of time and death. But after a moment’s thought, she realized that Tear had already answered her, long ago. There was no quick and easy eradication of evil. There was only the passage of time, of generations, of people raising children who would hold all other lives just as valuable as their own. Tear had known that was the answer, but even his best efforts had failed.
Because they forgot, her mind answered. It took them less than a generation to forget everything they should have learned.
But that wasn’t strictly true. The parents, the generation that had made the Crossing, they had deliberately hidden the past from their children. Katie had learned something of world history in her schoolwork, but the brutal period just before the Crossing—the guns, the surveillance, the poverty—Katie had no sense of these things, and neither did her peers. The generation that was beginning to rebel against Tear’s socialism had no familiarity with the flip side of the coin. Tear had had access to the ultimate cautionary tale, but he had wasted it, allowed the warning to vanish.
But you remember, Kelsea, Carlin whispered. By the end, you might even know it all.