“Here, Majesty!” Father Tyler announced from the far end of the hallway.
Kelsea turned and found that the wall they had just come through was lined with portraits. They ran the length of the gallery in both directions. Father Tyler had gone to the farthest portrait and rested a hand on the base of the frame, where there was an engraved wooden plaque. The portrait showed the same man Kelsea had seen in her vision: a tall, severe man with short-cropped blond hair, his face set in businesslike lines. Kelsea’s heart leapt. She had known that her visions were real, of course, but it was still an enormous relief to have empirical proof.
“William Tear,” Father Tyler announced, placing his torch in the empty bracket on the wall. The sunlight was so bright in here that there was no need of fire. “The plaque says this was painted five years after the Crossing.”
Kelsea moved closer, staring up at the first Tear King. He stood in front of a fireplace, but not the sort of grand fireplace that littered the Keep, more like that of the cottage where she had grown up. Even the artist had not been able to disguise Tear’s annoyance at having to simply stand still; his expression betrayed extreme impatience. The portrait must have been someone else’s idea. Dimly, in the background, Kelsea glimpsed a shelf full of books, but a thick layer of grime had accumulated on the surface of the portrait and she couldn’t make out any titles.
“I want a Keep servant to clean these,” she told Mace. “Surely they have plenty of time on their hands.”
Mace nodded, and Kelsea moved on to the next portrait: a young blond man barely out of his teens. He was good-looking, but even through layers of dust, Kelsea could see the worry that shrouded his eyes. She ran her fingers over the frame, looking for a plaque, and found it coated with dust as well. She polished it with her thumb, wiping her dirty hand on her skirt, and bent down to read the engraving. “Jonathan Tear.”
“Jonathan the Good,” Father Tyler murmured beside her.
On Jonathan Tear’s chest, Kelsea spotted a sapphire, one of hers, dangling on its chain. She looked quickly back to the portrait of William Tear. He wasn’t wearing any jewelry, at least not that Kelsea could see. There was a sizable space between the two portraits, William and Jonathan, wide enough that Kelsea wondered if another portrait had once hung there.
“Who was Jonathan Tear’s mother?”
Father Tyler shook his head. “That I don’t know, Majesty. William Tear had no queen; legend says he didn’t believe in marriage. But there’s no record of any doubt that Jonathan the Good was his son. The resemblance is marked.”
“What was Jonathan so worried about, do you think?”
“Perhaps he feared death, Lady,” Coryn replied behind her. “He was twenty years old when he was murdered. That portrait couldn’t have been done more than a couple years before.”
“Who murdered him?”
“No one knows, but they got through Tear’s Guard. The worst moment in our history, that—”
Coryn broke off suddenly, and she knew that he was thinking of Mhurn. Barty had said the same thing about the Tear assassination: the Guard had failed. Regretting Coryn’s discomfort, Kelsea swallowed the rest of her questions about Jonathan Tear and passed onward to the next portrait: a woman, very innocent-looking, with a beautiful head of reddish-brown hair that ran over her shoulders like a river, dropping in long streamers down her back. She smiled beatifically from the canvas. Kelsea checked the engraved plaque: “Caitlyn Tear.” Jonathan Tear’s wife. After the assassination, Caitlyn Tear had been hunted down and slaughtered. Although the woman in the portrait was long dead, beyond any harm, Kelsea’s heart wrenched. This woman looked as though she couldn’t even conceive of evil, much less endure it.
The next portrait made Kelsea suck in her breath. She would have known this man anywhere: he had stood in front of her fireplace two weeks earlier, the handsomest man in the world. He sat on the Tear throne—the elaborately carved back was unmistakable—smiling an easy politician’s smile. But his amber eyes were cold, and by an odd artist’s trick, they seemed to follow Kelsea no matter where she moved. Gingerly, she felt along the edges of the frame, but there was nothing, only an odd scarring of the wood that suggested that the plaque, if one existed, had been torn away long ago. She wondered at the handsome man’s presence in this gallery of Tear royalty, but said nothing.
“Handsome devil,” Mace remarked. “No idea who he is, though. Father?”
Father Tyler shook his head. “He doesn’t match any Raleigh monarch I’ve ever heard of. He is exceptionally good-looking, though; perhaps he was a companion to one of the Raleigh Queens. Several of them never married, but all of them managed to produce heirs. They had an eye for the handsome men.”
Kelsea picked that unfortunate moment to look at Pen, and found his eyes on her as well. The night he had rejected her sat between them like a vast gulf, and Kelsea had a terrible feeling that they would never get back to the easy friendship they’d had before. She wanted to say something to him, but there were too many people nearby, and after a moment even the impulse at reconciliation vanished. The eyes of the man from the fireplace were hypnotic, but Kelsea dragged herself away and moved on to the next portrait. They were into the Raleighs now; all of these portraits had their plaques intact, and the engravings became clearer, less worn by the passage of time, as Kelsea moved closer to the present day.
All of the Raleighs wore both sapphires, the jewels appearing changeless from one portrait to the next. These were Kelsea’s ancestors, her blood, but she found them somehow less important than the three Tears, less real. Carlin had never admired the Raleighs; perhaps her prejudices in this, as in so many things, had simply trickled down to Kelsea over the years.
In the tenth portrait, Kelsea was confronted with a woman so beautiful that she almost defied description. She had the same blonde hair and bright green eyes as many of the Raleigh queens, but her face was creamy-skinned and flawless, and she had the most gracefully proportioned neck that Kelsea had ever seen on a woman. Unlike the previous portraits, which had focused on one person at a time, this one also portrayed a child, a pretty girl of nearly six years, who sat on her mother’s lap. And in this portrait Kelsea noticed a new development: the woman wore one sapphire, the child wore the other. Kelsea bent down to the attached plaque and read, “Amanda Raleigh.”
“Ah, the Beautiful Queen!” Father Tyler moved down to join her in front of the portrait. Kelsea’s guards, most of whom had been scattered down at the far end of the room, slightly bored, moved closer as well, staring avidly up at the portrait. Kelsea felt irritation bite against her mind, but then she spotted a second child in the portrait, tucked almost behind the Beautiful Queen’s skirts. This girl was even younger than the child on the Queen’s lap, perhaps no more than three or four, but already she was dark-haired and sullen-looking, and Kelsea was suddenly reminded of her own childhood self, staring back at her in the pool of still water behind the cottage. In the radiance of the Beautiful Queen and her daughter, the girl was easy to miss, and Kelsea realized that this must have been the artist’s deliberate choice: to highlight one child and obscure the other.
“The Beautiful Queen had only one child, so I’m told. That must be Queen Elaine on her lap.” Kelsea pointed to the little girl who cringed behind the Beautiful Queen’s skirts. “So who’s this?”
Mace shrugged. “No idea.”
Father Tyler considered the girl. “A disfavored child, would be my guess. Amanda Raleigh had a husband, Thomas Arness. He was Elaine’s father. But I’ve heard that Amanda was hardly faithful to Arness, and there may have been other children. Disfavored children sometimes showed up in royal portraits from the pre-Crossing, but never in positions of prominence. A cruel thing, really, almost worse than not being included at all.” Father Tyler studied the portrait for a moment before remarking, “This is the worst case I’ve ever seen. That child is completely marginalized.”
Kelsea stared at the little girl, pity stirring inside her. Unlik
e the smiling princess on the Beautiful Queen’s lap, the hidden girl had dark, unhappy eyes. She wasn’t looking at the artist, as the other two subjects did; rather, she was staring up at the Beautiful Queen, her gaze filled with poorly concealed longing. Kelsea suddenly wanted to weep, and didn’t know whether it was for the child or for herself.
In the next portrait, the child on the Beautiful Queen’s lap had grown up and borne a child of her own. The engraving identified them as Queen Elaine and Crown Princess Arla. Elaine was not as beautiful as her mother—but who could be? Kelsea wondered bitterly—but she reminded Kelsea of someone. Andalie? No, for although this woman was a brunette, she didn’t have Andalie’s pale, ethereal style of beauty. Queen Elaine did not smile for the artist; she, too, looked extremely annoyed at having to sit for a portrait.
“See here, Lady!” Dyer pointed at Elaine’s face. “She has your stubborn jaw!”
“Hilarious,” Kelsea muttered, but she could not deny that there was a likeness, even now, when so many changes had overtaken her own face. Before Dyer could remark on anything else, she continued to the next portrait.
Arla the Just sat on the Tear throne, no child in sight, both sapphires around her neck and the Tear crown on her head. Fascinated, Kelsea stared at the crown, a single, elegant circle of silver, set with perhaps four or five sapphires. She tapped her finger against the canvas. “Any luck on finding that thing, Lazarus?”
“None yet, Lady.”
Kelsea nodded, disappointed but not surprised, and turned back to the portrait. Queen Arla had not been particularly pretty, but she possessed a magnetic quality that shone clearly through the canvas. She was much older than the other Raleigh women, and Kelsea remembered then that Queen Elaine had lived long, that her daughter had not been crowned until she was nearing her own middle age. Arla had been an autocrat, and the portrait showed her as such, reflected a clear determination to have her own way. Her smile was so contented that it was nearly smug, radiating pride to the point of arrogance. But pride had gotten Arla in trouble in the long run.
Barbarians at the walls, Kelsea’s mind whispered, and she provoked them, just like you.
She shook the thought off, moved quickly to the next portrait, and found herself staring up at her mother.
Queen Elyssa did not look at all the way Kelsea had imagined. There had been long days in the cottage, lonely days when Carlin had been angry with her, when Kelsea would console herself by picturing the phantom woman who had borne her: a delicate, willowy woman, like something out of a Grimm tale. But the Elyssa in the portrait didn’t look frail at all; she was tall, taller than Kelsea, and she radiated health and substance, a striking blonde woman with sparkling green eyes. She stood beside a plain, unadorned table, but she was grinning, the carefree grin of a woman with nothing in the world to worry about. Kelsea, who had almost been pleased with this version of her mother, found herself latching on to that grin. Even if the portrait had been painted immediately after Elyssa took the throne, the Mort would already be tearing their way through the Tear countryside. The Mort Treaty, the lottery, these things couldn’t be far away, and the utter carelessness of her mother’s expression sharpened Kelsea’s resolve, her determination that no one would suffer for her mistakes.
“Lady,” Mace murmured.
“What?”
“It does no good to dwell on the past. The future, now . . . that’s everything.”
Kelsea was annoyed that Mace had read her so easily. But she saw no judgment in his face, only his own brand of hard truth, and after a moment she relaxed, shrugging. “And yet sometimes the answer to the future lies in the past, Lazarus.”
Mace turned and barked, “Spread out, all of you!”
Kelsea’s guards moved away, to all ends of the room. Kelsea stared at Mace, bewildered, but he only moved closer and murmured, “Is that where you go at night, Lady, on your wanderings? The past?”
Kelsea swallowed, though something seemed to catch in her throat. “What makes you think I go anywhere?”
“Pen missed it, that night last week. He was on the library door. But I was right next to you, Lady. You said, ‘There’s a better world out there. So close we can almost touch it.’ I know those words; there was a song about them in the village where I grew up. A song of the Crossing.”
“I was sleepwalking.”
Mace chuckled. “You’re no more a sleepwalker than Andalie’s little one, Lady. I found her in Arliss’s office the other night. When Arliss is gone, that office is always locked. But Glee got in there, all the same.”
“What’s your point, Lazarus?”
“That night, for a minute, just before you came out of your fugue, you seemed to . . . fade.”
“Fade?” The word chilled Kelsea, but she produced a halfhearted snicker.
“Laugh if you like, Lady, but I did see it.” Mace leaned in even closer now, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Do you ever consider, Lady, that it might be better to simply take them off and throw them away?”
Kelsea reached up automatically, taking her jewels in a clenched fist. She didn’t know whether they even functioned any longer, or whether something else was working on her now. But everything in her rebelled at the idea of taking them off.
Mace shook his head and then gave her a pained grin. “Well, it was worth a try.”
“Look here, Lady!” Coryn announced, pointing to the next portrait.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kelsea breathed. Her uncle’s face beamed down at her from the wall: younger than the man she had met, but unmistakably Thomas Raleigh. He carried less weight, and his nose didn’t quite have the alcoholic shade of red that it would attain later, but the air of entitlement, the sense of being God’s gift to the earth, these things emanated from the canvas in nearly visible waves.
“Take that nonsense down!” Kelsea snapped. “He’s not a Tear monarch, he never was. Get rid of it.”
“I’ll take care of it, Lady,” Mace replied. “I had no idea he’d put up a portrait. I haven’t been down here in years.”
“Doesn’t anyone use this gallery?”
“I doubt it. Look at the dust.”
Kelsea went back to glaring at her mother’s portrait. Even if she somehow found a solution to the Mort nightmare on the horizon, it did nothing for the fifty thousand Tear who had already gone to Mortmesne, her mother’s gift to the world. This was familiar territory, a problem with no solution.
“May I ask you a question, Lady?” Dyer asked.
“Please.”
“I wondered if you had decided what to do with the prisoner Javel.”
“I will let him out of prison, certainly, but only once I’ve thought of a way to keep him from drinking himself to death.” Kelsea turned away from the portraits to face her five guards, who stood in front of the sunlit windows like a row of chessmen. “I don’t know what to do with the boy, the Jailor, either. He’s earned some reward, but for the life of me, I don’t know what to give him. Does he have no friends, no one who knows him well?”
Coryn spoke up. “I know his father a little. The old Jailor, retired now. I can ask.”
“Do that. I don’t want the reward to be meaningless. They gave us a great gift, both Ewen and Javel.”
“And what will you do with the gift?” Pen asked. It was the first full sentence Kelsea had gotten in days, but she wished that she could just ignore him. “What about Thorne?”
“I don’t know.”
“Better decide soon, Lady,” Dyer cut in. “The entire kingdom is screaming for his blood.”
“Yes, but they scream for the wrong reasons. They want him to suffer because of his years as Overseer of the Census. Yet that was a government position, and as terrible as they were, Thorne’s actions as Overseer were legal under the Regency. I can’t have a rule of law that bows under public pressure. If I execute Thorne, it must be for his crimes.”
“He’s guilty of treason, Lady.”
“And yet that’s not the reason the en
tire kingdom will line up to watch him hang.”
The five guards stared at her, and Kelsea felt more than ever that she was on a chessboard, a pawn facing five power pieces. “You all agree? That I should execute him?”
They all nodded, even Pen, who Kelsea had thought might be a secret holdout.
“I’ll make a decision soon, but not yet. I did promise Elston his fun, you know.”
Leaving them chuckling behind her, Kelsea moved back down the gallery to have another look at the man from the fireplace. He was even more striking in daylight, and although the portrait was clearly very old, he had not aged a day since. His eyes followed her as she came closer, and although Kelsea knew it was silly, she felt as though he really could see her from a distance.
“Take this one down as well,” she said finally. “I don’t know who he is, but he’s not a monarch. He doesn’t belong on this wall.”
“Should we get rid of it?”
“No. Bring it upstairs.” She peered around her guards until she found Father Tyler, staring out the window. “Thank you, Father. Most interesting, this place.”
“Yes, Lady,” the priest replied absently. But his bleak gaze remained fixed on the mountains.
What have they done to him? Kelsea wondered again. Her eyes strayed to the cast on his knee. She was surprised by her own protective instinct toward the priest. He was an old man, one who wanted only to sit and read books and think about the past; it seemed a crime for anyone to harm him. On several mornings lately, Kelsea had found Father Tyler asleep on his favorite sofa in the library, as though he no longer wished to spend his nights in the Arvath. Had the Holy Father done something else to him? If he had—
Stop, Kelsea told herself. She couldn’t try to assert authority over the inner workings of the Arvath. That path would only lead to disaster. She pushed God’s Church from her mind, and as it went, she suddenly had an idea, a possible solution . . . not to Father Tyler, but to another problem.
“Lazarus? Can any of the Guard speak Mort?”
Mace blinked in surprise. “Kibb, Dyer, and Galen, Lady. And myself.”