She sensed the second soldier coming for her now, could feel his heartbeat, light and rapid as a rabbit’s, on the far side of the pillar. She could kill him easily, but two lieutenants had never hatched this plot on their own; she needed at least one of them alive. From the center of the room came the thick, gagging sound of a man being throttled. She hoped it wasn’t Ducarte, but was forced to concede that it might be. The assassin was edging around the curve of the pillar now, approaching on her left, and the Queen tensed, preparing to go for his sword hand. But then something slammed into the pillar, an impact that the Queen felt even through ten feet of solid stone. The man’s sword clattered to the ground in front of her.
“Majesty? You are well?”
The words were spoken with a heavy Tear accent. The Queen peeked around the pillar and found one of her pages, the new girl that Juliette had selected when Mina died. The Queen could not remember her name. Continuing around the curve, she found that the girl held the lieutenant up against the pillar, his face smashed into the stone and a knife to his throat. The Queen couldn’t help being impressed. Though tall and muscular for a woman—all of the Queen’s pages were built so—the girl was still smaller than the soldier. But she held the lieutenant immobilized.
The state of the throne room said a great deal. Juliette had not moved, nor had the rest of the pages. The Queen’s guard captain, Ghislaine, was just pulling Ducarte from beneath his attacker, and even from here the Queen could see the ugly bruises forming on Ducarte’s throat. The other lieutenant was dead, knifed in the back. Most of the Queen’s private guard still lined the walls, sharp eyes watching her every movement. They had barely even stirred.
Good God! the Queen thought. My own Guard!
She turned back to the new page. “What is your name?”
“Emily, Majesty.”
“Benin! Are you well enough to take a prisoner?”
“I’m fine!” Ducarte spat, nearly snarling. “He blindsided me.”
The Queen’s lips tightened. No one ever took Ducarte by surprise. She turned back to the girl, Emily, sizing her up: good Tear stock, tall and blonde, tightly corded muscles in her arms. Pretty, but not bright; her face had that dull look which the Queen had always associated with the Tear underclass.
“You came in the shipment,” the Queen remarked.
“Yes, Majesty,” the girl replied in a mixture of Tear and broken Mort. “A page I’m chosen, last month only.”
A page who couldn’t even speak the language properly! Juliette must have been desperate. And yet, given the events of the past few minutes, the Queen couldn’t really fault the choice. She could have dealt with the assassins herself, but that didn’t matter. Of all the people in the room, only two had acted: Ghislaine and the slave. Competent Mort speakers were abundant, but loyalty was in very short supply these days. What a pity the girl was a Tear!
“Give him to General Ducarte,” she told Emily. “Benin! I want names!”
“Yes, Majesty,” Ducarte replied, dragging himself to his feet. The new page handed the prisoner over while the Queen kept a careful eye on Juliette, who was working hard to conceal her anxiety. Whether that indicated guilt, the Queen couldn’t say. Treachery seemed to surround her now. It was like the old Tear tale: the lonely dictator, safe in his castle, so well guarded that he could not leave. Ducarte had warned her that withdrawing the army would cause a real problem, and now she realized that he had understood his men better than she had. She should have listened. As Ducarte began marching his prisoner toward the door, the Queen found herself forced to face an unpleasant truth: this miserable man was the closest thing she had to a friend. Alone, neither of them would last very long.
“Benin!”
He turned back. “Majesty?”
The Queen took a deep breath, feeling as though she had to coax each word from her throat. Asking for help . . . it was the most difficult thing, the most terrible thing. But she had run out of options.
“It is only you and I now, Benin. You see?”
Ducarte nodded, his face twitching, and the Queen made a startling discovery: he found her just as unpleasant as she found him. That would be something to think on, but later, when this crisis was over, when she’d finally had one good night’s sleep.
“Go.”
Ducarte left, pushing the army lieutenant in front of him. There was probably nothing to be extracted from the man anyway; a dissatisfied army made for fruitful recruiting, but the clever conspirator never told the assassin anything, and her unseen adversary, this Levieux, was nothing if not clever. The Queen seated herself on her throne again, staring at the menagerie of potential traitors before her: guards, pages, soldiers, courtiers, at least thirty people, all of them scheming to bring her down. Juliette had begun to arrange for removal of the corpse on the floor, but her eyes darted constantly to the Queen, fearful.
The Queen sought out the Tear girl, who had retreated to stand against the wall with the other pages. She should dig into the girl’s background, find out where a Tear woman had learned to handle a knife like that. But that was for later; there were too many things to worry about now. Entire villages had disappeared, fleeing from the Glace-Vert. The Queen no longer commanded an army, only a bunch of cutthroats. The Orphan, the dark thing, whatever name he traveled under, he was coming, and she had nothing with which to stop him. The girl might be of use, but she was a dangerous uncertainty, and the Queen hated uncertainty above all things. She felt a sudden urge to scream, to throw something, anything to stop all of these people from staring at her, waiting for her to make another mistake.
“Emily, is it?” she asked the slave.
“Yes, Majesty.”
The Queen stared at her for a moment longer, sizing her up. She could not trust anyone, she realized now, but perhaps a Tear slave was a better choice than most. By and large, the Tear who came in the shipment retained no loyalty to their kingdom; they were more likely to feel active hate. It was a risk, and a large one, to give a Tear slave access to the Tear Queen, but the girl had at least acted, damn it . . . and that was more than the Queen could say for most of the room, even her own guards. Again she thought with longing of Beryll, of a time when loyalty had not been a choice between evils.
“You are no longer a page,” the Queen told her. “Yours is a special assignment. Go down to my dungeons. I want a full report on the status of the Tear Queen. Where is she, what are her conditions. Find out if she has made any requests of her jailors.”
The girl nodded, shooting a triumphant glance at Juliette, whose face darkened further. No love lost there; a good sign.
“And get yourself a Mort tutor. Learn fast. I want to hear no Tear words out of your mouth.”
Another good sign: Emily neither talked back nor asked questions, only nodded and left.
The Queen returned to her throne, but once there, it seemed she could do nothing but stare at the fresh bloodstain on the floor. Rebellion and revolt. No ruler had ever held such things down for long, not by force. Levieux and the dark thing . . . for a moment she wondered if they might be working together. But no, the dark thing would never condescend to work with anyone. Even the Queen, who had thought they were partners, had only been a pawn to him. The dark thing would wait until she was weak, until the rebellion raging across Mortmesne had taken its worst toll, and then it would come for her.
I could flee, the Queen thought, but it was an empty idea at best. She was equally hated in both Cadare and Callae. That left the north, where the dark thing waited, and west, the worst option of all. If the Tear got hold of her, they would stretch her to ribbons just to watch her scream. And even if she could flee, into dark holes and shadowy corners, what kind of life would that be, when she was used to watching kingdoms dance at her command?
Evie! Come here!
“No,” she whispered. Long before the Tear had sent its first shipment, she had already been a slave, and now she could never go back. She would rather be dead. She thought of her recur
ring nightmare, which had plagued her for months now: the last flight, the girl, the fire looming, and the man in grey behind them. You will flee, the dark thing had told her, and perhaps she would, but only at the very end, when she had nothing left. She lifted her chin, staring at the room of traitors before her.
“Next.”
Chapter 3
Demesne
These people are so damned proud of their hatred! Hatred is easy, and lazy to boot. It’s love that demands effort, love that exacts a price from each of us. Love costs; this is its value.
—The Glynn Queen’s Words, as compiled by Father Tyler
In all his years of sneaking in and out of every venue imaginable, the Fetch had found that the most valuable skill was the correct stride. Too fast was suspicious. Too slow was lost. But the right pace, the confident gait of one who belonged there, these things had an almost magical power to set guards and sentries at ease.
He padded stolidly up the stairs, the walk of a much heavier man who did not relish his destination. He wore the cloak of one of the Arvath guards, but beneath the hood his eyes darted everywhere, looking for movement. It was half past three in the morning, and most of the Arvath was asleep. But not all; the Fetch could hear the activity far above him, the sound of many voices drifting down the center of the staircase from the upper floors. A new mob. When the Holy Father had been anointed, the devout of the city had hailed the event in a three-day waking fast before the Arvath. These same people thought the Holy Father would restore the glory of the Church, a glory that had steadily eroded since the Glynn Queen took the throne. It was from this demographic that the Holy Father assembled his mobs.
I could tell you, the Fetch thought, the thought tinged with black inside his head, and now, instead of the Holy Father, he saw Row, swathed in white. I could tell you about God’s Church.
The mobs were bad; they had already slaughtered several “sinners” in various corners of the city. But there was worse to come. The new Holy Father had hired more than twenty-five bookkeepers for the Arvath, but even a casual observer could see that these men were not accountants but enforcers. Howell had followed several of them around the city, into the Gut and the warehouse district, even down into the Creche, where they dealt in whatever obscenity would give a good rate of return. Intuition told the Fetch that a vast criminal empire was being assembled here, under the streets, in the dark.
Of course, there were many gangsters in the Tearling; the Queen’s treasurer was one of them. But this was the Church, and the Fetch, who had once been a member of God’s Church in its infancy, felt the difference deep inside himself. Criminals and panderers . . . he didn’t know why this fact should continue to surprise him. But the shame he felt now was the same shame he had felt then.
Before he died, Thomas Raleigh had told the Fetch that the crown was in the keeping of the Holy Father. Thomas had offered an infinite number of minor bribes to get it back, but he had at least had the presence of mind to withhold what the old Holy Father had really wanted: a permanent income tax exemption for the Church. It was, after all, only a crown, though the Fetch, who had always been able to read Thomas easily, saw a different truth in the condemned man’s eyes: he had wanted the crown terribly. He had no idea of what it could do—for that matter, neither did the Fetch—but the silver circlet symbolized something that Thomas had needed to prove. In that final moment before execution, the Fetch had pitied him, but not enough to withhold the axe.
Several weeks ago, just before the Queen’s capture, Howell had picked up word that something had been stolen from the Arvath. The Holy Father’s enforcers didn’t know that something from Adam, but they knew that it was kept in a polished cherrywood box; it was this information that had made Howell prick up his ears. The Fetch’s men had never seen that box, but the Fetch had, long ago, in the hands of the man he had thought was his friend. Keeping it out of Row’s hands was paramount, but there were other hands almost as bad. The entire Church was on the lookout for the Keep priest, Father Tyler, and the bounty on his head seemed to go up every day. If the Keep priest had taken the crown, then the Fetch would not find it by skulking around the Arvath. But yesterday he had spotted something interesting, and if life had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that more information was never a bad thing. The small facts one learned by accident often became useful later.
Before him was a dark-haired woman sitting on a bench in the hallway that ran the length of the brothers’ quarters. Her face had been sliced to ribbons by what looked like a straight razor. The cuts had not been stitched, leaving the woman’s face a seamed patchwork of dried blood and infected flesh. She stared at the ground as the Fetch approached.
Howell had not said anything about this woman, but the Fetch had picked up enough gossip in the kitchens to know that her name was Maya, and she had been one of the Holy Father’s concubines. The Fetch, who knew a comer when he saw one, had kept a weather eye on Cardinal Anders for years; the man always had women, two of them, no more and no less. Though well hidden from the populace, these women were no secret in the Arvath. They came from prostitution and usually went back there when Anders was finished with them. But this one, Maya, would never be able to work again. Like all of the Holy Father’s women, she was addicted to morphia, and the Fetch guessed that her addiction was the only thing that kept her sitting obediently on the bench. She might be looking no further than her next fix, but the Fetch knew that her death could not be far behind.
Still, she was a puzzle. Anders had never been one to cut his women. He was a violent man, for certain, but he had always reserved that violence for his antisodomy demonstrations. There was no attempt to hide Maya; she was out on full display. She was being punished, made an example of. He was determined to find out why.
The Fetch tapped her on the shoulder, and she looked up. The slashes on her face were cruelly visible, even in the dim torchlight; one of them traveled up and over the bridge of her nose, very near to the corner of her eye. It looked as though her eye had wept blood, and this made the Fetch think again of Row. In the excitement of discovering this woman, he had forgotten about the hell that was currently raining down on the northern end of both kingdoms, Tear and Mortmesne. That was one of Row’s many dangers; he was so damnably easy to ignore until it was too late.
“You are the Fetch,” Maya murmured.
For a moment he was stunned, and then he remembered that he was wearing his mask. He often forgot about it; he was so used to its leathery feel that it often seemed like part of his face. Far away, deep in the bowels of the Arvath, he heard a clock strike two.
“What do you want with me?” she asked.
The Fetch touched a light hand to her hair, brushing it away from her forehead. He had often used artifice to get what he wanted, particularly from women, but there was no art here. The Tearling was full of battery, but the Fetch had rarely seen any woman so poorly used as this one. For a moment, the Fetch seemed to hear William Tear’s voice, deep in his mind.
God does not keep his hands to himself. Believe, or not; your neighbor’s belief will wound you just as surely as your own.
The Fetch nearly groaned. They had heard, all of them; they had heard William Tear speak these words—or some variation thereof—many times, but they had never listened. To all of them, born after the Crossing, with no frame of reference, Tear’s words were merely so much breath. The Fetch had belonged to God’s Church long enough to know that the carnage before him was nothing to do with God, or good. Brutality found such great camouflage under the cross.
We didn’t listen.
No, you didn’t listen. Katie listened.
That was true. She had. And she had paid for it, forced into exile, her belly great with Jonathan’s child. More than anything, the Fetch suddenly wished that he might have five minutes with Katie, just to apologize, to tell her that she had been right. The younger Gavin had been too proud even to think of apologizing, but the Fetch had found that age brought that need,
to even scores and make things right. But it was many long years too late to beg forgiveness of Katie. There was only the woman in front of him, her face a path of razors.
“Why has he done this to you?” the Fetch asked.
“Because I let the Keep priest get away.”
“Why?”
Maya stared at him blearily. “The old man was kind. He listened. He said the Queen was good—”
She paused, looking around her, and the Fetch realized that he’d been wrong; she was immobilized not by morphia, but by withdrawal. The skin of her neck and shoulders was damp with sweat.
“Good,” Maya continued, her voice growing hoarse now; her muscles were spasming, constricting her vocal cords. “He said she was good. And I thought, well, if she is good, then Anders shouldn’t be allowed to keep it from her. He shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
“Keep what?”
“The crown. He liked to try it on when no one was looking, and even when I was deep under the spoon, I would think: it’s not his; it belongs to the Queen. He shouldn’t get to wear it.” She blinked slowly; the Fetch thought that she must be very close to sinking into unconsciousness. “When the old man came, I saw my moment, and I jumped.”
The Fetch needed to ask her more, but his time was running out. “This crown. What did it look like?”
“Silver. A circle. Blue sapphires. In a pretty box.”
“And the Keep priest took it away?”
She nodded.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. They said he got away, took Father Seth with him. When Anders found out, he cut my face.”
The Fetch frowned, his stomach twisting. Few in the Tear knew that the silver circlet the Raleighs had worn for centuries was only an imitation. The real crown had disappeared completely, along with its cherrywood box. The Fetch suspected that Katie had taken it with her, but he had never been sure. Regardless of where the crown was now, for at least a brief moment it had been here in the Arvath, and he had lost it. Two cloistered Arvath priests, on their own, in New London? The thought made him shudder.