The Second Mort Invasion had all the makings of a slaughter. On one side was the vastly superior Mort army, armed with the best weapons available in the New World and commanded by a man who would balk at nothing. On the other was the Tear army, one-fourth the size and bearing weapons of cheaply forged iron that would break under the impact of good steel. The odds were not so much lopsided as catastrophic. There seemed no way for the Tearling to escape disaster.
—The Tearling as a Military Nation, CALLOW THE MARTYR
Dawn came quickly on the Mort border. One minute there was nothing but a hazy line of blue against the horizon, and the next, bright streaks stretched upward from eastern Mortmesne, drenching the sky. The luminous reflection spread across Lake Karczmar until the surface was nothing but a glowing sheet of fire, an effect only broken when a light breeze lapped at the shores and the smooth surface divided into waves.
The Mort border was a tricky business in this region. No one knew precisely where the dividing line was drawn. The Mort asserted that the lake was in Mort territory, but the Tear staked its own claim to the water, since a noted Tear explorer named Martin Karczmar had discovered the lake in the first place. Karczmar had been laid in his grave nearly three centuries since, but the Tearling had never quite relinquished its shaky claim to the lake. The water itself was of little value, filled with predatory fish that were no good to eat, but the lake was an important spot, the only concrete geographical landmark on the border for miles to the north or south. Both kingdoms had always been anxious to establish a definitive claim. At one point, long ago, there had been some talk of negotiating a specific treaty, but nothing had ever come of it. The eastern and southern edges of the lake were salt flats, the territory alternating between silt and marshland. These flats stretched eastward for miles before they ran into a forest of Mort pine. But on the western edge of Lake Karczmar, the salt flats continued for only a few hundred feet before they climbed abruptly into the Border Hills, steep slopes covered with a thick layer of pine trees. The trees wrapped up and over the Hills, descending on the other side into the Tearling proper and flattening out into the northern Almont Plain.
Although the steep eastern slopes of the Border Hills were uninhabited forest, the hilltops and western slopes were dotted with small Tear villages. These villages did some foraging in the Almont, but they mostly bred livestock—sheep and goats—and dealt in wool and milk and mutton, trading primarily with each other. Occasionally they would pool their resources and send a heavily guarded shipment to New London, where goods—particularly wool—fetched a greater price, and the payment was not in barter but in coin. The villages stretched across the hillside: Woodend, Idyllwild, Devin’s Slope, Griffen . . . easy pickings, their inhabitants armed with wooden weapons and burdened with animals they were unwilling to leave behind.
Colonel Hall wondered how it was possible to love a stretch of land so much and yet thank great God for the fate that had taken you away. Hall had grown up the son of a sheep farmer in the village of Idyllwild, and the smell of those villages—wet wool caked with a generous helping of manure—was such a fixed part of his memory that he could smell it even now, though the nearest village was on the western side of the Border Hills, several miles away and well out of sight.
Fortune had taken Hall away from Idyllwild, not good fortune, but the backhanded sort that gave with one hand while it stabbed with the other. Their village was too far north to have suffered badly in the first Mort invasion; a party of raiders had come one night and taken some of the sheep from an unguarded paddock, but that was all. When the Mort Treaty was signed, Idyllwild and its neighbor villages had thrown a festival. Hall and his twin brother, Simon, had gotten roaring drunk and woken up in a pigpen in Devin’s Slope. Father said their village had gotten off easy, and Hall thought so too, until eight months later, when Simon’s name was pulled in the second public lottery.
Hall and Simon were fifteen, already men by border lights, but their parents forgot that fact over the next three weeks. Mum made Simon’s favorite foods; Pa relieved both boys from work. Near the end of the month they made the journey to New London, just as so many families had made since, with Pa weeping in the front of the wagon, Mum grim and silent, and Hall and Simon working hard to produce a forced gaiety on the way.
His parents hadn’t wanted Hall to see the shipment. They’d left him in a pub on the Great Boulevard, with three pounds and instructions to stay there until they returned. But Hall wasn’t a child, and he left the pub and followed them to the Keep Lawn. Pa had collapsed shortly before the shipment departed, leaving Mum to try to revive him, so in the end it was only Hall who saw the shipment leave, only Hall who saw Simon disappear into the city and out of their lives forever.
Their family stayed in New London that night, in one of the filthiest inns the Gut had to offer. The horrendous smell finally drove Hall outside, and he wandered the Gut, looking for a horse to steal, determined to follow the cages down the Mort Road, break Simon out or die trying. He found a horse tied outside one of the pubs and was working on the complicated knot when a hand fell on his shoulder.
“What do you think you’re doing, country rat?”
The man was big, taller than Hall’s father, and covered in armor and weapons. Hall thought he would likely die within moments, and part of him was glad. “I need a horse.”
The man looked at him shrewdly. “Someone in the shipment?”
“None of your business.”
“It certainly is my business. It’s my horse.”
Hall drew his knife. It was a sheep-shearing knife, but he hoped the stranger wouldn’t know. “I don’t have time to argue with you. I need your horse.”
“Put that away, boy, and stop being a fool. The shipment is guarded by eight Caden. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Caden, even out in whatever shithole town you come from. They could break your puny little knife with their teeth.”
The stranger made to grab the horse’s bridle, but Hall held the knife up higher, blocking his path. “I am sorry to be a thief, but that’s the way it is. I have to go.”
The stranger gazed at him for a long moment, assessing. “You’ve got stones, boy, I’ll give you that. What are you, farmer?”
“Shepherd.”
The stranger considered him for another moment and then said, “All right, boy. Here’s how it plays out. I will lend you my horse. His name, appropriately enough, is Favor. You ride him down the Mort Road and take a look at that shipment. If you’re smart, you’ll realize that it’s a no-win proposition, and then you have two choices. You can die senselessly, achieving nothing. Or you can turn around and ride to the army barracks in the Wells, so we can talk about your future.”
“What future?”
“As a soldier, boy. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life stinking of sheep shit.”
Hall eyed him uncertainly, wondering if his words were a trick. “What if I just ride off with your horse?”
“You won’t. You’ve a sense of obligation in you, or you’d never be off on this fool’s errand in the first place. Besides, I have an entire army’s worth of horses if I need to come after you.”
The stranger turned and headed back into the pub, leaving Hall standing there at the hitching post.
“Who are you?” Hall called after him.
“Major Bermond, of the Right Front. Ride fast, boy. And if any harm comes to my horse, I’ll take it out of your miserable sheep-loving hide.”
After a hard night’s ride, Hall caught up to the shipment and found that Bermond was right: it was a fortress. Soldiers surrounded each cage, their formations dotted by the red cloaks of the Caden. Hall didn’t have a sword, but he wasn’t fool enough to believe that a sword would make any difference. He couldn’t even get close enough to distinguish Simon; when he tried to approach the cages, one of the Caden launched an arrow that missed him by no more than a foot. It was just as the Major had said.
Still, he considered charging the shipment and ending everything, the terrible future he had already sensed on the trip to New London, a future in which his parents looked at him and only saw Simon missing. Hall’s face would not be a comfort to them, only a terrible reminder. He tightened his grip on the reins, preparing to charge, and then something happened that he would never be able to explain: through the mass of tightly packed prisoners in the sixth cage, he suddenly glimpsed Simon. The cages were too far away for Hall to have seen anything, but seen it he had, all the same: his brother’s face. His own face. If he rode to his death, there would be nothing left of Simon, nothing to even mark his passage. And then Hall saw that this was not about Simon at all, but about his own guilt, his own sorrow. Selfishness and self-destruction, riding hand in hand, as they so often did.
Hall turned the horse, rode back to New London, and joined the Tear army. Major Bermond was his sponsor, and although Bermond would never admit it, Hall thought that the Major must have spoken a word in someone’s ear, because even during Hall’s years in the unranked infantry, he had never been pulled for shipment duty. He sent a portion of his earnings home each month, and on his rare journeys to Idyllwild, his parents surprised him by being gruff but proud of their soldier son. He rose quickly through the ranks, becoming the General’s Executive Officer by the young age of thirty-one. It wasn’t rewarding work; a soldier’s life under the Regency consisted of breaking up brawls and hunting down petty criminals. There was no glory in it. But this . . .
“Sir.”
Hall looked up and saw Lieutenant-Colonel Blaser, his second-in-command. Blaser’s face was darkened with soot.
“What is it?”
“Major Caffrey’s signal, sir. Ready on your command.”
“A few more minutes.”
The two of them sat in a bird’s nest deep on the eastern slope of the Border Hills. Hall’s battalion had been out here for several weeks now, working steadily, as they watched the dark mass move across the Mort Flats. The sheer size of the Mort army hindered its progress, but it had come, all the same, and now the encampment sprawled along the southern edge of Lake Karczmar, a black city that stretched halfway to the horizon.
Through his spyglass, Hall could see only four sentries, posted at wide lengths on the western edge of the Mort camp. They were dressed to blend in with the dark, silty surface of the salt flats, but Hall knew the banks of this lake well, and outliers were easy to spot in the growing light. Two of them weren’t even patrolling; they’d dozed off at their posts. The Mort were resting easy, just as they should. The Mace’s reports said that the Mort army numbered over twenty thousand, and their swords and armor were good iron, tipped with steel. And by any measure, the Tear army was weak. Bermond was partly to blame. Hall loved the old man like a father, but Bermond had become too accustomed to peacetime. He toured the Tearling like a farmer inspecting his acres, not a soldier preparing for battle. The Tear army wasn’t ready for war, but now it was upon them, all the same.
Hall’s attention returned, as it had so often in the past week, to the cannons, which sat in a heavily fortified area right in the center of the Mort camp. Until Hall had seen them with his own eyes, he hadn’t believed the Queen, though he didn’t doubt that she’d had some sort of vision. But now, as the light brightened in the east, it gleamed off the iron monsters, accentuating their smooth, cylindrical shapes, and Hall felt the familiar twist of anger in his gut. He was as comfortable with a sword as any man alive, but a sword was a limited weapon. The Mort were trying to bend the rules of warfare as Hall had known it all of his life.
“Fine,” he murmured, tucking away his spyglass, unaware that he spoke aloud. “So will we.”
He descended the ladder from the bird’s nest, Blaser right behind him, each dropping the last ten feet to the ground before they began to climb the hill. In the past twelve hours Hall had quietly deployed more than seven hundred men, archers and infantry, over the eastern slopes. But after weeks of hard physical work, his men found it difficult to remain still and simply lie in wait, particularly in the dark. One sign of increased activity on the hillside would have the Mort wide awake and on their guard, and so Hall had spent most of the night going from post to post, making sure his soldiers didn’t simply jump out of their skins.
The slope grew steeper, until Hall and Blaser were forced to scrabble for handholds among the rocks, their feet slipping in pine needles. Both of them wore thick leather gloves and climbed carefully, for it was dangerous terrain here. The rocks were riddled with tunnels and small caves, and rattlesnakes liked to use the caves for their dens. Border rattlers were tough brutes, the result of millennia spent grappling for survival in an unforgiving place. Thick, leathery skins rendered them nearly impervious to fire and their fangs delivered a carefully controlled dose of venom. One wrong handhold on this slope and it was your life. When Hall and Simon were ten years old, Simon had once captured a rattler with a cage trap and tried to make it into a pet, but the game had lasted less than a week. No matter how well Simon fed the snake, it could not be tamed, and would attack any movement. Finally Hall and Simon had let the snake go, opening the cage and then running for their lives back up the eastern slope. No one knew how long border rattlers lived; Simon’s snake might even be here somewhere, slithering among its brethren just behind the rocks.
Simon.
Hall shut his eyes, opened them again. The smart man trained his imagination not to venture too far down the Mort Road, but in these past few weeks, with all of western Mortmesne spread out before him, Hall had found himself thinking of his twin brother more often than usual: where Simon might be, who owned him now, how he had been used. Probably labor; Simon was considered one of the best shearers on the western slope. It would be wasteful to use such a man for anything besides heavy labor; Hall told himself this again and again, but probability held no sway. His mind dwelled constantly on the small percentage, the chance that Simon might have been sold for something else.
“Bastard.”
Blaser’s quiet curse brought Hall back to himself, and he snuck a look back over his shoulder to make sure his lieutenant hadn’t been bitten. But Blaser had only slipped slightly before regaining his hold. Hall continued to climb, shaking his head to clear it of unwanted thoughts. The shipment was a wound, one that did not heal with the passage of time.
Hall gained the top of the rise and broke into the clearing to find his men waiting, their gazes expectant. Over the last month they had worked quickly, with none of the complaining that usually marked a military construction project, and had finished so early that Hall was able to test the entire operation multiple times before the Mort army had even reached the flats. The hawk handler, Jasper, was also waiting, his twelve hooded charges tethered to a long perch at the crest of the hill. The hawks had cost a pretty penny, but the Queen had listened carefully and then approved the cost without blinking.
Hall walked over to one of the catapults and placed a hand on its arm, feeling a fierce stab of pride as he touched the smooth wood. Hall was a lover of mechanisms, of gadgets. He constantly sought ways to do things faster and better. In his early career, he had invented a stronger yet more flexible longbow that was now favored by the Tear archers. On loan to a civilian construction project, he had tested and proved a pump-based irrigation system that now carried water from the Caddell to a vast, parched portion of the southern Almont. But these were his crowning achievement: five catapults, each sixty feet long, with thick arms made of Tear oak and lighter cups of pine. Each catapult could fling at least two hundred pounds, with a range of nearly four hundred yards into the wind. The arms were secured to the bases with rope, and on either side of each arm stood a soldier with an axe.
Peeking into the cup of the first catapult, Hall saw fifteen large, bulky canvas bundles, each wrapped in a thin layer of sky-blue fabric. Hall had originally planned to fling boulders, like the siege catapults of old, and flatten a significant portion of the Mort encampment. But these bundles, which had been Blaser’s idea, were much better, well worth several weeks of unpleasant work. The topmost bundle shifted slightly in the wind, its canvas sides rippling, and Hall backed away, raising a clenched hand into the stillness of the morning. His axemen grabbed their weapons and heaved them high over their shoulders.
Blaser had begun humming. He always hummed to himself in tight situations: an annoying tic. Hall, listening with half an ear, identified the tune: “The Queen of the Tearling,” the notes badly off-key but recognizable all the same. The song had taken hold with his men; Hall had heard it more than once in the past few weeks as they sanded lumber or sharpened blades.
My gift to you, Queen Kelsea, he thought, and dropped his hand toward the ground.
Axes hissed through the air, and then the stillness of the morning wrenched wide open, the hillside echoing with an enormous creaking and cracking as the arms of the catapults realized they were free. One by one they levered upward, gaining speed as they lunged into the sky, and Hall felt his heart lift in a pure joy that never evaporated, a joy he’d felt even as a small child testing his first rabbit trap.
My design! It works!
The arms of the catapults reached their limits and halted, with a boom that echoed across the hillside. That would wake the Mort, but it was already too late.
Hall socketed his spyglass and followed the progress of the light-blue bundles as they hurtled toward the Mort camp. They reached their zenith and began to drop, seventy-five of them in all, the sky-blue parachutes unraveling as they caught the wind, their canvas burdens swinging innocuously in the breeze.
The Mort were moving about now. Hall spied knots of activity: soldiers emerging from tents with weapons, sentries withdrawing into the camp in preparation for an attack.
“Jasper!” he called. “Two minutes!”
Jasper nodded and began to pull the hoods from his hawks, feeding each bird a small piece of meat. Major Caffrey, with his uncanny gift for recognizing a dependable mercenary, had found Jasper in a Mort border village three weeks ago. Hall didn’t like Mort hawks any more now than he had as a child, when the birds used to swoop across the hillside looking for easy prey, but he still had to admire Jasper’s skill with his charges. The hawks watched their handler attentively, heads cocked, like dogs waiting for their master to throw a stick.
A warning shout went up from the Mort camp. They had spotted the parachutes, which dropped faster now as wind resistance decreased. Hall watched through his spyglass, counting under his breath, as the first bundle disappeared behind one of the tents. Twelve seconds had elapsed when the first scream echoed across the flats.
More of the parachutes descended on the camp. One landed on an ordnance wagon, and Hall watched, fascinated despite himself, as the ropes relaxed. The bundle shivered for a moment, then sprang open as five furious rattlesnakes realized they were free. Their mottled skins curled and streaked over the pikes and arrows, dropping from the wagon and disappearing from sight.
Screams echoed against the hillside, and in less than a minute, the camp devolved into utter chaos. Soldiers ran into each other; half-dressed men stabbed wildly at their own feet with swords. Some tried to climb to higher ground, the tops of wagons and tents, even each other’s backs. But most of them fled for the boundaries of the camp, desperate to get clear. Officers shouted orders, to no avail; panic had taken hold, and now the Mort army began to pour from the camp on all sides, fleeing west toward the Border Hills or away to the east and south, across the flats. Some even sprinted mindlessly north and splashed into the shallows of Lake Karczmar. They had no armor or weapons; many were stark naked. Several had cheeks still covered with shaving cream.
“Jasper!” Hall called. “Time!”
One by one, Jasper coaxed his hawks onto the thick leather glove that covered his arm from thumb to shoulder and sent them into the air. Hall’s men watched the birds uneasily as they gained altitude, but the hawks were well trained; they ignored the Tear soldiers entirely, soaring down the hillside toward the Mort camp. They dove directly into the exodus of men who streamed from the southern and eastern ends of the campsite, talons opening as they dropped, and Hall watched the first of them seize the neck of a fleeing man who wore only a half-buttoned pair of trousers. The hawk ripped out his jugular, spraying the morning sunlight with a fine mist of blood.
On the west side of the camp, wave after wave of Mort soldiers sprinted mindlessly toward the trees at the foot of the hillside. But fifty Tear archers were scattered among the treetops, and now the Mort went down in droves, their bodies riddled with arrows, sinking into the mud of the flats. New screams came from the lake; the men who’d sought shelter there had discovered their error and now they thrashed back toward the shore, bellowing in pain. Hall smiled with a touch of nostalgia. Going into the lake was a rite of passage among the children of Idyllwild, and Hall still had the scars on his legs to prove it.
By now the bulk of the Mort army had deserted the camp. Hall cast a regretful eye toward the ten cannons, which sat entirely unattended. But there was no way to get to them now; everywhere he looked, rattlesnakes slithered among the tents, seeking a good place to nest. He wondered where General Genot was, whether he had fled along with his men, whether he could be one of the hundreds of corpses lying piled at the bottom of the slope. Hall had developed a healthy respect for Genot, but he knew the man’s limitations, many of the same limitations that Bermond suffered himself. Genot wanted his warfare quiet and rational. He didn’t make allowances for extraordinary bravado or crushing incompetence. Yet Hall knew that any army was riddled with such anomalies.
“Jasper!” he called. “Your birds have done good work. Bring them back.”
Jasper gave a loud, piercing whistle and waited, tightening the straps that bound the leather glove to his forearm. Within seconds, the hawks began to soar back in, circling over the hilltop. Jasper whistled intermittently, a different note each time, and one by one each bird dropped to settle on his forearm, where it was rewarded with several pieces of rabbit before being hooded and placed back on the perch.
“Pull the archers,” Hall told Blaser. “And find Emmett. Have him send messengers to the General and the Queen.”
“What message, sir?”
“Tell them I’ve bought us time. At least two weeks until the Mort can regroup.”
Blaser departed, and Hall turned back to stare across the surface of Lake Karczmar, a blinding sheet of red fire in the rising sun. This sight, which used to fill him with longing as a child, now seemed like a terrible warning. The Mort were scattered, true, but not for long, and if Hall’s men lost the hillside, there was nothing to prevent the Mort from shredding Bermond’s carefully assembled defensive lines. Just over the hill sprawled the Almont Plain: thousands of square miles of flat land with little room for maneuver, its farms and villages isolated and defenseless. The Mort had four times the numbers, twice the quality of arms, and if they made it down into the Almont, there was only one endgame: slaughter.
Ewen had been the Keep’s Jailor for several years, ever since his Da retired out of the job, and in all that time, he had never had a prisoner that he considered truly dangerous. Most of them had been men who disagreed with the Regent, and these men generally entered the dungeons too starved and beaten to do more than totter into their cells and collapse. Several of them had died in Ewen’s care, although Da had told him that he was not to blame. Ewen had disliked coming in and finding their bodies cold on their cots, but the Regent hadn’t seemed to care either way. One night the Regent had even marched down the dungeon steps dragging one of his own women, a red-haired lady so beautiful that she seemed like something out of one of Da’s fairy stories. But she had a rope tied around her neck. The Regent led her into a cage himself, calling her bad names the entire way, and snarled at Ewen, “No food or water! She doesn’t come out until I say!”
Ewen didn’t like having a woman prisoner. She did not talk or even weep, only gazed stonily at the wall of her cell. Ignoring the Regent’s orders, Ewen had given her food and water, keeping a careful eye on the clock. He could tell that the rope around her neck was hurting her, and finally, unable to bear it any longer, he went in and loosened the noose. He wished he was a healer, able to fix the circle of raw red flesh on her throat, but Da had taught him only the most basic first aid, for cuts and such. Da had always been patient with Ewen’s slowness, even when it caused trouble. But it didn’t take a smart brain to keep a woman alive for the night, and Da would have been disappointed in Ewen had he failed. When the Regent came to collect the woman the next day, Ewen had felt great relief. The Regent had said he was sorry, but the woman had swept out of the dungeon without giving him so much as a glance.
Ever since the new Queen took the throne, there hadn’t been much for Ewen to do. The Queen had freed all of the Regent’s prisoners, which confused Ewen, but Da had explained that the Regent liked to put men in the dungeon for saying things he didn’t like, and the Queen only put men in the dungeon for doing bad things. Da said this was sensible, and after thinking it over for a while, Ewen decided that Da was right.
Twenty-seven days ago (Ewen had noted it in the book), three Queen’s Guards had burst into the dungeon leading a bound prisoner, a grey-haired man who looked exhausted but—Ewen noted gratefully—uninjured. The three guards didn’t ask Ewen’s permission before hauling the prisoner through the open door of Cell Three, but Ewen didn’t mind. He’d never been so close to Queen’s Guards before, but he’d heard all about them from Da: they protected the Queen from danger. To Ewen, this sounded like the most wonderful and important job in the world. He was grateful to be Head Jailor, but if he’d just been born smarter, he would have wanted most of all to be one of these tall, hard men in their grey cloaks.
“Treat him well,” ordered the leader, a man with a head of bright red hair. “Queen’s orders.”
Though the guard’s hair fascinated him, Ewen tried not to stare, for he didn’t like it when people stared at him. He locked the cell, noting that the prisoner had already lain down on the cot and closed his eyes.
“What’s his name and crime, sir? I have to write it in the book.”
“Javel. His crime is treason.” The red-haired leader stared through the cage bars for a moment, then shook his head. Ewen watched as the men tromped off toward the stairwell, their voices drifting down the hallway behind them.
“I’d have cut his throat.”
“Is he safe with the dummy, you think?”
“That’s between the Queen and the Mace.”
“He must know his job. No one’s ever escaped.”
“Still, she can’t have an idiot as a jailor forever.”
Ewen flinched at the word. Bullies used to call him that, before he got so big, and he had learned to allow the word to roll right off him, but it hurt more from a Queen’s Guard. And now he had something new and terrible to think about: the possibility of being replaced. When Da had retired, Da had gone to speak directly to the Regent, to make sure that Ewen could stay on. But Ewen didn’t think Da had ever spoken to the Queen.
The new prisoner, Javel, was one of the easiest charges Ewen had ever had. He barely spoke, only a few words to tell Ewen when he had finished his meals or run out of water or needed the bucket emptied. For long hours Ewen even forgot that Javel was there, but then Ewen could think of little but being dismissed from his post. What would he do if that happened? He couldn’t even bring himself to tell Da what the Queen’s Guard had called him. He didn’t want Da to know.
Five days after Javel came to the dungeon, three more Queen’s Guards stomped down the stairs. One of them was Lazarus of the Mace, a recognizable figure even to Ewen, who rarely left his cells. Ewen had heard plenty of stories about the Mace from Da, who claimed that the Mace was fairy-born, that no cell would hold him. (“A jailor’s nightmare, Ew!” Da would cackle over his tea.) If the other Queen’s Guards had been impressive, the Mace was ten times so, and Ewen studied him as closely as he dared. The Captain of Guard in his dungeon! He couldn’t wait to tell Da.
The other two guards carried a prisoner between them like a sack of grain, and after Ewen unlocked Cell One, they threw the man on the cot. The Mace stood looking at the prisoner for what seemed to Ewen a very long time. Finally he straightened, cleared something deep in his throat, and spat, a great glob of yellow slime that landed square on the prisoner’s cheek.
Ewen thought this unkind; whatever the man’s crime, surely he had suffered enough. He was a miserable, shriveled creature, starved and dehydrated. Mud had caked into the thick welts over his legs and torso. More welts, deep red rivets, crossed his wrists. Great hanks of hair had been pulled from his head, leaving patches of scabbed flesh. Ewen couldn’t imagine what had happened to him.
The Mace turned to Ewen and snapped his fingers. “Jailor!”
Ewen stepped forward, trying to stand as tall as he could. Da had chosen Ewen as his apprentice, even over Ewen’s smarter brothers, for exactly this reason: Ewen was big and strong. But he still only came up to the Mace’s nose. He wondered if the Mace knew he was slow.
“You watch this one closely, Jailor. No visitors. No little field trips outside the cell for exercise. Nothing.”
“Yes, sir,” Ewen replied, wide-eyed, and watched the group of guards exit the dungeon. No one called him any names this time, but it was only after they’d departed that Ewen realized he had forgotten to ask for the man’s name and crime for the book. Stupid! The Mace would surely notice such things.
The next day, Da had come to visit. Ewen was tending the new prisoner as best he could, though the man’s wounds were well beyond the power of anything but time or magic. But Da had taken one look at the man on his cot and spat, just like the Mace.
“Don’t bother trying to cure this bastard, Ew.”
“Who is he?”
“A carpenter.” Da’s bald head gleamed, even in the dim torchlight, and Ewen saw with some uneasiness that the skin of Da’s forehead was getting thin, like linen. Even Da would die eventually, Ewen knew that, deep in a dark place in his mind. “A builder.”
“What did he build, Da?”
“Cages,” Da replied shortly. “Be very careful, Ew.”
Ewen looked around, confused. The dungeon was full of cages. But Da didn’t seem to want to talk about it, and so Ewen stored the facts in his mind alongside the rest of the mysteries he didn’t understand. Once in a while, usually when Ewen wasn’t even trying, he would solve a mystery, and that was a great and extraordinary feeling, the way he imagined birds would feel as they swooped across the sky. But no matter how he stared at the man in the cell, no answers were forthcoming.
After that, Ewen thought he was prepared for anyone to enter his dungeon, but he was wrong. Two days before, two men in the black uniform of the Tear army had burst in, dragging a woman between them. But this was no fancy woman like the Regent’s redhead; she spat and kicked, shouting curses at the two men who dragged on her arms. Ewen had never seen anything like her. She seemed all white, from head to toe, as if her flesh had lost all of its color. Her hair was similarly faded, like hay that had sat too long in the sunlight. Even her dress was white, though Ewen thought it might once have been light blue. She looked like a ghost. The soldiers tried to force her through the open door of Cell Two, but she grabbed at the bars and hung on.
“Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be,” the taller soldier panted.
“Fuck you, you limp prawn!”
The soldier kept patient pressure on her hands, trying to peel back her locked fingers, while the other soldier worked on hauling her into the cage. Ewen hung back, not sure whether to get involved. The woman’s eyes fell on him, and he went cold inside. Her irises were circled pink, but deep in the center was a blue so light that it glittered like ice. Ewen saw something terrible there, animal and sick. The woman opened her mouth, and Ewen knew what was coming, even before she spoke.
“I know all about you, boy. You’re the halfwit.”
“Give us some help, for Christ’s sake!” one of the soldiers snarled.
Ewen jumped forward. He didn’t want to touch any part of the ghost-woman, so he took hold of her dress and began to tug her backward. With both soldiers free to work on her fingers, they finally succeeded in prying her loose from the bars and then flung her into the cage, where she ran into the cot and fell to the ground. Ewen was barely able to get the door closed before the woman hurled herself against the bars, spewing more curses at the three of them.
“Christ, what a job!” one of the soldiers muttered. He wiped his brow, where a mole grew like a small mushroom. “Locked in, though, she shouldn’t give you too much trouble. She’s blind as a mouse.”
“Only watch out when the owl comes hunting,” the other remarked, and they chuckled together.
“What’s her name and crime?”
“Brenna. Her crime . . .” The soldier with the mole looked at his friend. “Hard to say. Treason, probably.”
Ewen wrote the crime in the book, and the soldiers left the dungeon, cheerful now, their work done. The soldiers had said that the ghost-woman was blind, but Ewen quickly discovered that wasn’t so. When he moved, she turned her head and her blue-pink eyes followed him across the dungeon. When he looked up, he found her gaze pinned on him, a horrible smile stretching her mouth. Ewen usually brought his prisoners their food in their cells, for he was too big to be physically overpowered by an unarmed man. But now he was glad of the little door on the front of the cell that allowed him to slide the woman’s food trays through. He wanted the comfort of bars between them. Cell Two was the best cell for dangerous prisoners, since it faced directly into Ewen’s small living quarters; he was a light sleeper. But now, when it came time for bed, he found that he could not sleep with that awful gaze upon him, and he finally moved his cot into the corner so that the doorway blocked the view. Still, he could sense the woman, sleepless and malevolent, even in the dark, and for the past few days his sleep had been uneasy, frequently broken.
Tonight, after Ewen had finished his dinner and inspected the empty cells for rats or rot (there was neither; he cleaned his cellblock thoroughly every other day), he settled down with his pictures. He tried constantly to paint the things he saw, but he always failed. It seemed like an easy business, with the right paper and some good paints and brushes—Da had given him these for his last birthday—but the images always escaped somewhere between his thoughts and the paper. Ewen couldn’t see why it had to be that way, but it was. He was trying to paint Javel, the prisoner in Cell Three, when the door at the top of the steps crashed open.
For a few moments, Ewen had a bad fright, worried about a jailbreak. Da had warned him about jailbreaks, the worst shame that could befall a jailor. Two soldiers were stationed outside the door at the top of the steps, but Ewen was all alone down in the dungeon. He didn’t know what he would do if someone had forced his way in. He grabbed the knife that lay on his desk.
But the crash of the door was followed by many voices and footsteps, such unexpected sounds that Ewen could only sit at his desk and wait to see what would come down the hallway. After a few moments a woman entered the dungeon, a tall woman with short-cropped brown hair and a silver crown on her head. Two great blue jewels hung on fine, glittering silver chains around her neck, and she was surrounded by five Queen’s Guards. Ewen considered these things for a few seconds, then bolted to his feet: the Queen!
She went first to stare through the bars of Cell Three. “How have you been, Javel?”
The man on the cot looked up at her with empty eyes. “Fine, Majesty.”
“Nothing else to say?”
“No.”
The Queen put her hands on her hips and huffed, a sound of disappointment that Ewen recognized from Da, then moved over to Cell One to gaze at the wounded man who lay there.
“What a miserable-looking creature.”
The Mace laughed. “He’s endured rough handling, Lady. Rougher, maybe, than even I could have devised. The villagers took him in Devin’s Slope when he tried to barter carpentry for food. They bound him to a wagon for the trip to New London, and when he finally collapsed, they dragged him the rest of the way.”
“You paid these villagers?”
“All two hundred, Majesty. It’s a lucky break; we need the loyalty of those border villages, and the money will probably keep Devin’s Slope for a year. They don’t see a lot of coin out there.”
The Queen nodded. She didn’t look like the queens in Da’s stories, who were always delicate, pretty woman like the Regent’s redhead. This woman looked . . . tough. Maybe it was her short hair, short like a man’s, or maybe just the way she stood, with her feet spread and one hand tapping impatiently on her hip. A favorite phrase of Da’s popped into Ewen’s head: she looked like no one to fiddle with.
“You! Bannaker!” The Queen snapped her fingers at the man on the cot.
The prisoner groaned, putting his hands to his head. The welts on his arms had begun to scab over and heal, but he still seemed very weak, and despite Da’s words, Ewen felt a moment’s pity.
“Give it up, Lady,” the Mace remarked. “You won’t get anything out of him for a while. Men’s minds can break from a journey like that. It’s usually the point.”
The Queen cast around the dungeon and her deep green eyes found Ewen, who snapped to attention. “Are you my Jailor?”
“Yes, Majesty. Ewen.”
“Open this cell.”
Ewen stepped forward, digging for the keys at his belt, glad that Da had labeled them all so it was easy to find the key with the big 2. He didn’t want to keep this woman waiting. Once a month he oiled the locks, just as Da had advised, and he was grateful to feel the key turn smoothly, with no squealing or hitches. He stepped back as the Queen entered the cell with several guards. She turned to one of them, a huge man with ugly, jagged teeth. “Stand him up.”
The big guard hauled the prisoner off the cot and grabbed him by the neck, dangling him just above the ground.
The Queen slapped the prisoner’s face. “Are you Liam Bannaker?”
“I am,” the prisoner gurgled in a low, thick voice. His nose had begun to trickle blood, and the sight made Ewen wince. Why were they being so unkind?
“Where is Arlen Thorne?”
“I don’t know.”
The Queen said a bad word, one that Da had once spanked Ewen for repeating, and the Mace cut in. “Who helped you build your cages?”
“No one.”
The Mace turned to the Queen, and Ewen watched, fascinated, as they locked eyes for a long moment. They were talking to each other . . . talking without even opening their mouths!
“No,” the Queen finally murmured. “We’re not going to start that now.”
“Lady—”
“I didn’t say never, Lazarus. But not for such small chance of reward as this.”
She came out of the cell, signaling her guards to follow. The big guard dumped the prisoner back on his cot, where he breathed in great wheezes like an accordion. Ewen, feeling the Mace’s eyes on him, assessing, locked the cell immediately behind them.
“And you,” the Queen remarked, moving over to gaze at the woman in Cell Two. “You’re the real prize, aren’t you?”
The ghost-woman giggled, a sound like metal on glass. Ewen wanted to clap his hands over his ears. The woman grinned at the Queen, showing rotten lower teeth. “When my master comes, he’ll punish you for keeping us apart.”
“Why is he your master?” the Queen asked. “What has he ever done for you?”
“He saved me.”
“You’re a fool. He abandoned you to save his own skin. You’re nothing but chattel to a slave trader.”
The woman flew at the bars, her arms flailing like the wings of a bird gone wild inside its cage. Even the Mace took a step back. But the Queen moved forward until she was only a few inches from the bars, so close that Ewen wanted to shout a warning.
“Look at me, Brenna.”
The ghost-woman looked up, her face wrenching, as though she wanted to look away but could not.
“You’re right,” the Queen murmured. “Your master will come. And when he does, I will take him.”
“My magic will protect him from harm.”
“I have my own magic, dear heart. Can’t you feel it?”
Brenna’s face twisted in sudden pain.
“I will hang your master’s corpse from the walls of my Keep. Do you see?”
“You can’t do that!” the ghost-woman howled. “You can’t!”
“Sport for vultures,” the Queen continued smoothly. “You can’t protect him. You’re nothing but bait.”
The ghost-woman screamed in fury, a high and unbearable sound like the screech of a hunting bird. Ewen covered his ears and saw several Queen’s Guards do the same.
“Be quiet,” the Queen ordered, and the woman’s screams cut off as suddenly as they had begun. She stared at the Queen, her pink eyes wide and frightened as she huddled on her cot.
The Queen turned back to Ewen. “You will treat all three of these prisoners humanely.”
Ewen bit his lip. “I don’t know that word, Majesty.”
“Humanely,” the Queen replied impatiently. “Enough food and water and clothing, no harassment. Make sure they can sleep.”
“Well, Majesty, it’s hard to make sure someone can sleep.”
The Queen looked very hard at him, her brow furrowing, and Ewen realized he’d said something wrong. It had been easier when Da was the Jailor and Ewen only an apprentice. Da could always step in when Ewen didn’t understand. He was about to apologize—for it was always better to do that before someone got angry—when the Queen’s forehead suddenly smoothed.
“You’re down here alone, Ewen?”
“Yes, Majesty, since my Da retired. His arthritis got too bad.”
“Your dungeon looks very clean.”
“Thank you, Majesty,” he replied, smiling, for she was the first person besides Da who had ever noticed. “I clean it every other day.”
“Do you miss your Da?”
Ewen blinked, wondering if she was winding him up. The Regent had liked to do that, and his guards had liked to even more. Ewen had learned to spot the telltale sign in their faces: a sly meanness that might crouch hidden but never went away. The Queen’s face was hard, but not mean, and so Ewen answered truthfully. “Yes. There’s lots of things I don’t understand, and Da always explained them.”
“But you like your job.”
Ewen looked down at the ground, thinking of the other guard, the one who had called him an idiot. “Yes.”
The Queen beckoned him to stand in front of Cell Two. “This woman may not seem dangerous, but she is. She’s also very valuable. Can you watch her every day and not let her trick you?”
Ewen stared at the ghost-woman. Certainly bigger and tougher prisoners had been housed in the dungeon. Several of them had tried to trick Ewen, everything from pretending to be sick, to offering Ewen money, to begging the loan of his sword. The ghost-woman stared at the Queen, her eyes gleaming with hatred, and Ewen knew that the Queen was right: this woman would be a tough prisoner, smart and quick.
But I can be smart too.
“I’m sure you can,” the Queen replied, and Ewen jumped, for he hadn’t said anything. He turned and saw something that made his jaw drop in astonishment: the blue jewels that dangled around the Queen’s neck were sparkling, glittering brightly in the torchlight.
“Once a week,” the Queen continued, “you’ll come upstairs and give me a report on all three of your prisoners. If you need to, take notes.”
Ewen nodded, pleased that she assumed he could read and write. Most people thought he couldn’t, but Da had taught him, so that he could keep the book.
“Do you know what suffering is, Ewen?”
“Yes, Majesty.”
“Behind your three prisoners there is another man, a tall starving-thin man with bright blue eyes. This man is an agent of suffering, and I want him alive. Should you ever see him, you send word to Lazarus immediately. Do you understand?”
Ewen nodded again, his mind already full of the picture she had put there. He could see the man now: a looming scarecrow figure with eyes like great blue lamps. He longed to try to paint him.
The Queen reached out, and after a moment Ewen realized that she wanted to shake his hand. Her guards tensed, several of them placing hands on their swords, so Ewen offered his hand, very carefully, and allowed her to shake it. The Queen didn’t wear any rings, and Ewen wondered at this. He wondered what Da would say when Ewen told him that he’d met the Queen, that she wasn’t at all how Ewen had thought she would be. He stood by his cells, keeping an eye on all of the prisoners, but also peeking at the Queen as the five guards surrounded her and seemed to carry her in a wave, down the hallway and up the stairs, out of his dungeon.
Kelsea Glynn had a temper.
She was not proud of this fact. Kelsea hated herself when she was angry, for even with her heart thumping and a thick veil of fury obscuring her vision, she could still see, clearly, the straight path from unchecked anger to self-destruction. Anger clouded judgment, precipitated bad decisions. Anger was the indulgence of a child, not a queen. Carlin had impressed these facts upon her, many times, and Kelsea had listened. But even Carlin’s words had no weight when fury washed over Kelsea; it was a tide that cleared all obstacles. And Kelsea knew that although her anger was destructive, it was also pure, the closest she would ever get to the girl she really was deep down, beneath all of the controls that had been instilled in her since birth. She had been born angry, and she often wondered what it would be like to release her rage, to drop all pretense and let her true self out.
Kelsea was working very hard to contain her anger now, but every word from the man across the table made the dark wave behind the dam swell a bit further. Mace and Pen were beside her, Arliss and Father Tyler in seats farther down the table. But Kelsea saw nothing but General Bermond, seated down at the other end. On the table before him lay an iron helmet topped with a ridiculous blue plume. Bermond was dressed in full armor, for he had just ridden in from the front.
“We don’t want to stretch the army too thin, Majesty. It’s a poor use of resources, this plan.”
“Must everything be a fight with you, General?”
He shook his head, clinging doggedly to his point. “You can defend your kingdom, or you can defend your people, Majesty. You don’t have the manpower to do both at once.”
“People are more important than land.”
“An admirable statement, Majesty, but poor military strategy.”
“You know what these people suffered in the last invasion.”
“Better than you do, Majesty, for you weren’t even born yet. The Caddell ran red. It was wholesale murder.”
“And mass rape.”
“Rape’s a weapon of war. The women got over it.”
“Oh Christ,” Mace breathed, and put a restraining hand on Kelsea’s arm. She started guiltily, for Mace had caught her. General Bermond might be old and lame, but she had still been thinking of dragging him from his chair and giving him several good, hard kicks. She took a deep breath and spoke carefully. “Men were raped along with the women, General.”
Bermond frowned, annoyed. “That is apocryphal, Majesty.”
Kelsea met Father Tyler’s eye, saw him give a slight shake of the head. No one wanted to talk about this facet of the last invasion, not even twenty years later, but the Arvath had received many consistent reports from local parish priests, the only observers to really chronicle the invasion. Rape was a weapon of war, and the Mort did not discriminate by gender.
Kelsea suddenly wished that Colonel Hall could have attended this council. He didn’t always agree with her, but he was at least willing to look at all sides of a thing, unlike the General, whose mind had hardened long ago. But the Mort army had reached the border several days ago, and Hall could not be spared.
“We’re wandering from the subject, Majesty,” Arliss remarked.
“Agreed.” Kelsea turned back to Bermond. “We have to protect these people.”
“By all means, Majesty, build a refugee camp and take in every stray. But don’t sidetrack my soldiers from more important business. Those who want your protection can find a way to the city by themselves.”
“That’s a dangerous journey to make alone, particularly with small children. The first wave of refugees is barely out of the hills, and we’ve already had reports of harassment and violence along the way. If that’s the only option we offer, many of them will choose to stay in their villages, even when the Mort draw near.”
“Then that’s their choice, Majesty.”
The dam in Kelsea’s mind shuddered, its foundations weakening. “Do you honestly not know the right thing to do, General, or do you just pretend not to know because it’s easier that way?”
Bermond’s cheeks reddened. “There’s more than one right here.”
“I don’t think there is. Here we have men, women, and children who have never done anything but farm. Their weapons are wood, if they have weapons at all. Invasion will be a bloodbath.”
“Precisely, and the best way to protect them is to make sure that the Mort never invade this kingdom.”
“Do you really believe that the Tear army can hold the border?”
“Of course I do, Majesty. To believe otherwise is treasonous.”
Kelsea clamped her teeth down on the inside of her cheek, unable to believe the cognitive dissonance implied in such a statement. Hall’s reports came from the border, regular as clockwork and grim as doom, but Kelsea didn’t need Hall to tell her the true state of affairs. The Tear army would never hold against what was coming. In the past week, a vision had begun to grow on Kelsea: the western Almont, covered over with a sea of black tents and soldiers. The girl who had been raised by Carlin Glynn would never have trusted in visions, but Kelsea’s world had broadened well beyond the width of Carlin’s library. The Mort would come, and the Tear army wouldn’t be able to stop them. All they could hope to do was slow them down.
Arliss spoke up again. “The Tear infantry are out of training, Majesty. We already have reports of tin weapons breaking under impact due to improper storage. And there is a serious morale problem.”
Bermond turned to him, furious. “You have spies in my army?”
“I have no need of spies,” Arliss replied coolly. “These problems are common knowledge.”
Bermond swallowed his anger with poor grace. “Then all the more reason, Majesty, for us to spend the limited time we have in training and supply.”
“No, General.” Kelsea came to a decision suddenly, as she so often did: because it seemed the only thing that would allow her to sleep at night. “We’re going to use resources where they’ll do the most good: in evacuation.”
“I refuse, Majesty.”
“Indeed?” Kelsea’s anger crested, breaking like a wave. It was a wonderful feeling, but as always, damnable reason intruded. She could not lose Bermond; too many of the old guard in her army had a misplaced faith in his leadership. She forced a pleasant smile. “Then I will remove you from command.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Of course I can. You have a colonel who’s ready to lead. He’s more than capable, and certainly more of a realist than you.”
“My army will not follow Hall. Not yet.”
“But they will follow me.”
“Nonsense.” But Bermond’s eyes edged away from hers. He had heard the rumors too, then. Less than a month had elapsed since Kelsea and her Guard had returned from the Argive Pass, but prevailing wisdom now held that Kelsea had unleashed a titanic flood on Arlen Thorne’s traitors and washed them all away. It was a favorite tale, demanded constantly from storytellers in New London’s pubs and markets, and it had done wonders for security. No one even tried to sneak into the Keep anymore, Mace had informed Kelsea, in a tone of near-regret. The incident in the Argive had drastically altered the political landscape, and Bermond knew it. Kelsea leaned forward, scenting blood.
“Do you really believe that your army will defy me, Bermond? For your sake?”
“Of course they will. My men are loyal.”
“It would be a pity to test that loyalty and come up short. Wouldn’t it be easier to simply help with my evacuation?”
Bermond’s glare was furious, but Kelsea was pleased to see that it was also weakening, and for the first time since the meeting had begun, she felt her anger beginning to recede a bit.
“The camp’s one thing, Majesty, but what will you do when the Mort come? This city is crowded as it is. There certainly isn’t room for half a million extra people.”
Kelsea wished she had a ready answer, but this problem had no easy solution. New London was already overpopulated, creating issues with plumbing and sanitation. Historically, when disease had broken out in the more crowded sections of the city, it was almost impossible to control. Double the population, and these problems would multiply exponentially. Kelsea planned to open the Keep to families, but even with its great size, the Keep would only absorb perhaps a quarter of the influx. Where would she put the rest?
“New London is not your concern, General. Lazarus and Arliss are in charge of preparing for siege. You worry about the rest of the kingdom.”
“I do worry, Majesty. You’ve opened Pandora’s box.”
Kelsea did not allow her expression to change, but the satisfaction on Bermond’s face told her that he knew he had struck his mark. Kelsea had opened the door to chaos, and while she told herself there had been no alternative, her nights were tormented by the certainty that there had been another option, some path that could have stopped the shipment while avoiding the bloodshed to follow, and if Kelsea had only been a bit more clever, she could have found it. She drew a slow breath. “Regardless of blame, General, done is done. Your job is to help me minimize the damage.”
“Like trying to dam up God’s Ocean, eh, Majesty?”
“Just like that, General.” She grinned at him, a grin so ferocious that Bermond recoiled against his chair. “The first wave of refugees will reach the Almont proper tomorrow. Give them some guards, and then begin moving the rest. I want those villages cleared out.”
“And what happens if my army is as weak as you seem to think, Majesty? The Mort will make straight for New London, just as they did in your mother’s time. Mort soldiers get a salary, but it’s a pittance; they build their wealth on plunder, and the good plunder is right here. If I can’t keep them from crossing the border, do you really think you can keep them from sacking the city?”
Something was wrong with Kelsea’s eyes. A thick cloud seemed to obscure her vision, light at the corners and heavy in the center. Was it her sapphires? No, they had been quiet for weeks, and now they hung dark and still against her chest. Kelsea blinked rapidly, trying to clear her head; it wouldn’t do to show weakness in front of Bermond now.
“I’m hoping for help,” she told him. “I have opened negotiations with the Cadarese.”
“And what good will that do?”
“Perhaps the King will lend us some of his troops.”
“Fool’s hope, Lady. The Cadarese are isolationists, always have been.”
“Yes, but I’m exploring all options.”
“Lady?” Pen asked quietly. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Kelsea muttered, but now spots were dancing across her field of vision. She was going to be ill, she realized, and she could not do that in front of Bermond. She stood up, grabbing at the table for balance.
“Lady?”
“I’m fine,” she repeated, shaking her head, trying to clear it.
“What’s wrong with her?” Bermond asked, but his voice was already growing faint. The world suddenly smelled like rain. Kelsea clenched the table and felt the slickness of polished wood slipping beneath her fingers.
“Grab her, man!” Mace barked. “She’ll fall!”
She felt Pen’s arm around her waist, but his touch was unwelcome, and she shook him off. Her vision blurred entirely and she glimpsed unfamiliar surroundings: a small compartment and a grey, threatening sky. Panicked, she closed her eyes tightly and then opened them again, looking for her audience chamber, her guards, anything that was known. But she saw none of them. Mace, Pen, Bermond . . . they were all gone.