“You did this, Lazarus?”
“I’m a Queen’s Guard, Lady. My first job is to protect the Queen.”
She glared at him, for his words had opened a wide gulf inside her. For the first time, she understood that there were two sides to that statement, one good and one dreadful. Mace, too, had a job to do, just as Kelsea did. Sometimes she thought she would do anything to bring her crumbling country back together, but there was a low beneath which she wouldn’t sink . . . wasn’t there?
“We had a new assassination attempt every day, Lady. Some of them astonishingly clever too, probably originating in Demesne. Carroll and I knew that sooner or later, someone would get past us. We couldn’t just sit and wait for it to happen.”
“And this was your solution?”
“Yes. That, or let the Queen die.”
“What about the kingdom you left behind? And to my uncle, of all people? What about them?”
“The safety of the Queen, Lady,” Mace replied inexorably. “All else is secondary.”
“Did you find a double for me too?”
“No, Lady. I knew you wouldn’t allow it.”
“Damn right, I wouldn’t!” she snapped. “I don’t know what kind of moral carnival you think we’re running, but—”
“You know me now, Lady. You didn’t know me twenty years ago. I was a different man then, not so far removed from the Creche.”
“Oh, he was!” Elyssa broke in, patting Kelsea’s hand before Kelsea could snatch it away. “Shouting and fighting and then sulking in the corner when he didn’t get his way. Carroll used to call him half wild, and he wasn’t wrong.”
Kelsea removed her hand from the arm of the chair, feeling sick. Despite the difference in age, her mother seemed younger than Kelsea, almost like a child . . . but Kelsea would not allow her to escape that way. Child or not, she owed answers.
“Why did you give me away?”
“I had no choice.” Elyssa’s eyes darted toward Mace, then away, a furtive movement. “You were in danger.”
“You’re lying.”
“Why do you want to talk about the past?” her mother pleaded. “The past was so ugly!”
“Ugly,” Kelsea murmured. Mace shot her a pleading glance, but she ignored him, disgusted. Was he really going to run interference for this woman, even now?
“Lazarus, leave us alone.”
“Lady—”
“Close the door behind you and wait outside.”
He stared at her for another long, anguished moment, and then left.
Kelsea turned back to her mother. Some part of her displeasure seemed to have finally broken through to Elyssa, who had begun to fidget in her chair and would not meet Kelsea’s eyes.
“You made all of them promise to keep the shipment from me.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Kelsea heard her own voice rising in anger. “What possible purpose could that serve?”
“I thought I would be able to fix it,” her mother said quietly. “I thought it was a temporary solution, and soon we would think of something else, long before you came home. Mace is so smart, I thought surely he and Thorne—”
“Thorne, fix the shipment? What in holy hell are you talking about?”
“I wish you wouldn’t swear. It’s so ugly.”
That word again. If her mother had set out deliberately to anger Kelsea, she could not have chosen a better. What good was anything, after all, if not beautiful? Her mother’s mind seemed to Kelsea like a still, frozen pond; ideas might skate across it, but nothing would ever penetrate. Kelsea wanted accountability, wanted her mother to answer for her selfishness, her poor decisions, her crimes. But how did one demand accountability from such a frozen waste?
“I hoped you would never need to know,” her mother continued. “And it didn’t turn out so badly! We kept the peace for seventeen years!”
“You didn’t keep peace.” Kelsea’s temper was here now; she sensed it stalking just around the edges of her mind, waiting for any chance to present itself. “You bought peace, by trafficking the people you were supposed to protect.”
“They were poor!” Elyssa insisted indignantly. “The kingdom couldn’t feed them anyway! At least in Mortmesne they would be fed and taken care of, that’s what Thorne said—”
“And why would you ever question the words of Arlen Thorne?” The urge to smack her mother across the face was so strong that Kelsea was forced to shove her hands beneath her thighs, sitting on them until it passed.
This is my mother, she thought. The idea was unbearable. How she wished that she were Carlin’s daughter, anyone else’s. This woman had given her half of what she was . . . but only half. The thought struck Kelsea like a life rope, and she leaned forward, suddenly forgetting her anger.
“Who is my father?”
Elyssa’s eyes dropped, her expression once more anxious. “Surely it can no longer matter.”
“I know you worked your way through your entire Guard. I couldn’t care less. But I want a name.”
“Perhaps I don’t know.”
“You do. So does Lazarus.”
“He wouldn’t say?” Elyssa smiled. “My faithful guard.”
Kelsea grimaced. “Lazarus doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“He did, once, to me.” Elyssa’s eyes were distant now. “I threw him away.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Why do we speak of the past?” Elyssa asked again. “It’s long gone. I hear the Red Queen is finally dead. Is it so?”
Kelsea closed her eyes, opened them again. “You won’t distract me. My father. I want a name.”
“It doesn’t matter! He’s dead!”
“Then there’s no reason not to tell me.”
Elyssa’s eyes darted away again, and an awful suspicion suddenly crossed Kelsea’s mind. In all of her ruminations on who had fathered her, there was one option she had never considered, because she couldn’t. Mace would have told her.
No, he wouldn’t, her mind reminded her, almost smugly. He’s a Queen’s Guard, through and through.
“One of my guards,” Elyssa finally replied. “I took up with him for only a few weeks. He didn’t matter!”
“The name.”
“He was so sad when he came to us!” Elyssa was babbling now, her words running together. “He was a good swordsman, even though he came from farm country. Carroll wanted him for the Guard and I only thought to make him feel better, didn’t mean to—”
“Who?”
“Mhurn. I don’t know if you ever met him—”
“I met him.” Kelsea heard her own voice, flat and almost suspiciously calm, but her mother wasn’t one to notice such things. “Did he know?” she demanded. “Did he know he was my father?”
“I don’t think so. He never asked.”
Kelsea felt a wave of relief, but only a small one. There seemed to be two halves of her mind now, running parallel tracks. One functioned well enough, but the other was transfixed by memory: blood spurting over her hand and Mhurn’s smiling face, eyes hazy with morphia.
I killed my father.
“Carroll brought Mhurn into the Guard. He had lost a wife and daughter to the Mort and oh, he was a wreck!” Elyssa looked up now, and Kelsea saw a rare hint of rueful honesty in her eyes. “I’ve never been able to resist a wreck.”
Kelsea nodded, keeping the pleasant smile on her face with an effort. “It’s not my weakness—”
I killed my father.
“—but I have read of it. Please, go on.”
“When Mace found out, he was just furious, but you know he didn’t have any right to be, we were long done by then. Sometimes I do wonder, though, if he took you away merely to punish me—”
“Lazarus took me away?”
“He and Carroll. They did it behind my back!” The trace of a pout crossed Elyssa’s lips. “I would never have given you away.”
Kelsea sat back in her chair, Mhurn pushed mercifully into the backg
round. Finally, an answer to the question that had tormented her since that day on the Keep Lawn: why would a woman as selfish as this one give her child away for safekeeping? Kelsea had conjectured all manner of reasons, and yet had missed the simplest answer of all: her mother hadn’t given her away. Others had made the decision for her.
But why?
“I missed you a great deal at first.” Elyssa’s voice was musing, as though she were describing something that had happened to someone else. “You were a sweet baby, and oh—how you used to smile at me! But it turned out to be a good choice. Else we would have had to find a double for you too!”
She giggled, and at the sound, something in Kelsea finally broke open. She sprang from the chair, knocking it over, grabbed the smiling woman, and began to shake her. But that wasn’t enough. She wanted to slap her mother, demand that she account for her failings, that she make amends somehow.
“Lady,” Mace murmured, and Kelsea paused. He had stolen back into the room, and now he stood several feet away, his hands raised to halt her.
“What, Lazarus?” Her hands were only inches from her mother’s throat and she wanted, oh she wanted . . . Her mother was not true evil, perhaps, any more than Thorne, or the jailor, or even the young Row Finn. But all the same, she wanted so badly . . .
“Don’t do it, Lady.”
“You couldn’t stop me.”
“Perhaps not, but I would have to try. And she is . . .” Mace took a deep breath. “She is not worth it.”
Kelsea looked down at her mother, who had shrunken into her chair and was staring up at her with wide, surprised eyes. Worse than surprised—bewildered, as though she could not imagine what she had done wrong. Kelsea wondered if a much younger Elyssa had looked just this way as the assassination attempts began, shipments rolling beneath her windows each month, a woman unable to understand why she wasn’t loved by all the world . . .
“Don’t do it, Lady,” Mace repeated, his voice pleading, and now Kelsea saw that he was right, though not for the reasons he believed. No matter what Kelsea did here, she would not have what she wanted. She longed for revenge, but the woman she wanted to unleash her fury upon was not this one. This woman-child could never comprehend the magnitude of her mistakes. There would be no explanation, no accountability. There would be no catharsis.
No one for me to hate.
In a book, the thought would perhaps have been liberating, would have healed something deep inside Kelsea. In reality, it was the loneliest idea she could have imagined. All of the strength faded from her arms, and she backed away.
“There, that’s sorted,” said Elyssa, her face brightening. “Are we all done with the past now?”
“All done,” Kelsea replied, though her voice sounded ghastly to her own ears. They would never be done with the past, but her mother wasn’t one to understand that. Elyssa stood up from her own chair, her arms outstretched, and Kelsea saw, horrified, that her mother meant to embrace her. She scooted backward, stumbling over the uneven stones.
“What is it?” her mother asked, her voice bewildered again and, worse, a little hurt. “There are no more secrets now. We can finally get to know each other.”
“No.”
“What? Why not?” Elyssa stared at her, that faint hint of a pout back at the corners of her mouth. “You’re my daughter. I wasn’t a perfect mother, certainly, but you’re grown now. Surely we can put the past behind us.”
“No, we can’t.” Kelsea paused, choosing her words very carefully, for she never planned to speak to this woman again. “You are a selfish woman, and careless, and stupid. You should never have had the fate of others in your hands. I believe that I am a better person for having been raised by Barty and Carlin, for never having known you. I want no part of you at all.”
Her mother’s mouth fell open. She began to protest, but Kelsea turned away. Elyssa tried to follow, but Mace moved to block her way.
“Where is your door?” he demanded.
“What door?”
“Your door,” Mace repeated patiently. “How did you get in here?”
“It’s here.” Elyssa tapped the wall, and a door opened to reveal a black rectangle in the stone. Another secret passage; was no building in this kingdom just as it appeared?
“Go.”
“But she doesn’t understand! She—”
“The Queen has spoken.”
Elyssa’s lips rounded in outrage. “I’m the Queen!”
“No. You traded your crown for safety, long ago.”
“But—”
“Will you go? Or must I escort you?”
“You used to be my best guard, Mace!” Her mother sounded as though she were on the verge of tears. “What happened?”
Mace’s jaw tightened. Without another word, he guided her through the doorway and yanked the door shut behind her. For a long minute, fists slammed against the other side, and then there was silence.
“Does the Guard know?” Kelsea asked Mace. “The rest of them?”
“Only Carroll. He always used me for the jobs no one else would do. I often think it’s why he recruited me.”
“She could always come back,” said Kelsea. “She could just come right down the hall, and show herself to the whole guard.”
“She won’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I told her I would kill her if she did.”
“Did you mean it?”
“I don’t know.”
Kelsea sat on her bed. She wanted to lie down, go back to sleep and forget all of this. But she sensed that if she and Mace didn’t have this conversation now, they never would. Kelsea would lose her nerve, and they would fall back into their easy, sometimes acerbic friendship, a still pond that both of them would want to leave undisturbed.
“I killed my father,” she told Mace. “I didn’t know, but I did it, all the same.”
“Yes, Lady.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“If you hadn’t put Mhurn out of his misery, Lady, we would have. It was the right thing to do. He was broken, and at the time, it seemed unlikely that you would ever find out who he was. Certainly none of us would ever have told you, not after that.”
“You should have told me.”
“To what end?”
Kelsea couldn’t answer that. She had killed many people; was this so different? And what was so important about blood anyway? She had just cut ties with the woman who’d borne her, and it had been the right decision. She might have many feelings about that scene down the line, some of them tinged with regret, but not nearly as much regret as if she’d made a different decision. Blood did not make Elyssa a better mother, nor had it made Mhurn a father; he had knifed her in the back. Kelsea felt far closer to Barty and Carlin, even to Mace, than she ever had to her own parents.
“Only as strong as I want it to be,” she whispered. Someone had said that to her once. Mace? The Red Queen? She couldn’t remember. Animals cared about bloodlines, but humans should have evolved to do better.
The circumstances of your birth don’t matter. Kindness and humanity are everything.
This voice she recognized: William Tear, speaking to Lily on one of the worst nights of her life. If it was true, if that was the Tear test, then both of Kelsea’s parents had failed.
“Where do we go from here, Lazarus?” she asked. “Do I stay in exile, just like she does, hiding out here in the middle of nowhere while things get worse and worse?”
“I don’t know, Lady. We can’t stay here, not for long, but I don’t know where we go. New London is under the Holy Father and the Mort, but you have only seventy-five soldiers downstairs. It would be suicide to go back.”
Kelsea nodded. She was no stranger to charging into the lion’s mouth; indeed, reckless action had been the foundation of much of her queenship, even when all she could do was get herself killed. But it felt equally reckless, somehow, to simply sit here, guaranteeing her own safety while her kingdom burned. That was her mothe
r’s way.
“We came so far, Lazarus. Did we really come all this way only to fail?”
“Sometimes that’s just how it turns out, Lady.”
But Kelsea didn’t believe that. Perhaps it was simply her long life of reading books, where plot was carefully scripted and every action taken was supposed to mean something. They had fought through too much together to fail now. There must be some option, even if she couldn’t see it. Her restless mind searched the past, the many-layered history of the Tear through which she had suffered. Jonathan Tear’s death was approaching rapidly, a terrible tragedy . . . but could it have been averted? And would that really have saved the Tear? Katie might have been able to kill Row Finn—maybe—but the Town’s problems were deeper than a single man, and killing a would-be dictator only left an empty throne. Kelsea sensed a solution somewhere in the past, but it would not come clear, not yet.
How did Jonathan Tear die?
Katie had not shown her yet, but she could no longer wait for Katie’s memories to unfold. She looked up at Mace, who still watched her with worried eyes.
“Where’s the Fetch?”
They found him out on the second-floor balcony with Hall and several of his soldiers. The sun was about to break the eastern horizon, but the morning air was crisp and cold; winter had truly come. Lady Chilton’s—my mother’s, Kelsea thought, my mother’s—house was surrounded by scrubby patches of grass that glittered with ice crystals in the ivory morning.
As Kelsea and her guards emerged onto the balcony, Hall and Blaser bowed. She was glad to see both of them, though she had to cut off something from Hall that sounded horribly like the beginnings of an apology. On her way through the house, they had passed through a gallery that overlooked the entryway, a vast stone floor where soldiers slept, fewer than a hundred, all that remained of Hall’s army. The idea of him apologizing to her was intolerable.
The Fetch and his four men stood on the balcony, all of them peering eastward through spyglasses. For a moment, Kelsea was transfixed by the sight of them: Howell, Morgan, Alain, Lear, and Gavin, five boys of the Town, now grown up and apparently damned.
Kelsea turned to her Guard. “Leave us alone for a moment.”