You cannot bargain with the tide.
—TEAR PROVERB OF UNVERIFIED ORIGIN, GENERALLY ATTRIBUTED TO THE GLYNN QUEEN
The Mort army covered both sides of the Caddell, spread north and south across the Almont and even curving around the southern edge of New London. Dusk was coming down on the city, and in the fading light the Mort camp was an impenetrable dark sea.
In front of the black tents stood more than fifty neatly ordered lines of soldiers. To the naked eye, they seemed to be covered in glittering iron. It was an ostentatious display, clearly designed to frighten Kelsea, and it worked. She was terrified, both for herself and for the people behind her, almost her entire kingdom now crammed inside New London’s walls. How could they resist the force assembled down there? Behind the tents, Kelsea glimpsed a line of siege towers, and somewhere out there, hidden from view, were the cannons. Assuming that the cannons worked—and Kelsea did—the Mort wouldn’t even need their siege towers. They could simply smash the walls of New London to rubble.
Glee stirred in Kelsea’s arms, making her jump. The child was so easy to hold that Kelsea had forgotten she was there. Andalie had opted to come on this outing, and Kelsea had taken the girl to give her a rest. But the people in the streets had murmured in astonishment when they saw the small child in Kelsea’s arms, and now Kelsea worried that she might have called too much attention to both Andalie and Glee. They were valuable, just as Andalie had said, and their best hope seemed to be in anonymity. Glee had fallen asleep on the way to the wall, but now she was awake, staring up at Kelsea, her gaze contemplative. Kelsea put a finger to her lips, and Glee nodded solemnly.
Mace had picked Andalie’s other daughter, Aisa, to accompany them. She remained several feet behind Kelsea, almost like a second Pen, holding a knife in her hand. Mace had taken a liking to the girl, but then so had many of the Guard. Coryn said she had the best knife hand since Prasker—whoever that was—and Elston deemed her a tough piece of business, which was the highest praise he could give. Aisa was taking this expedition very seriously, never loosening her grip on the knife, her thick brows lowered over a face that was both solemn and grim. The heroism of her small, determined form, now, when it could make no difference, only made Kelsea feel worse.
Scanning the Mort camp, Kelsea finally found what she was looking for: a crimson tent located near the center. Though it was only a tiny speck of red among all that black, something tolled inside Kelsea like a funeral bell. The Red Queen was leaving nothing to chance this time; she had come herself, just to make sure the job was done right. Torches surrounded the tent, but after a moment Kelsea noticed something odd: these torches were the only fire she could see in the Mort camp. It was just after dinner, but the perimeter was dark. Kelsea considered this fact for a moment before tucking it away.
“Did everyone make it inside the city?” she asked.
“They did, Lady,” Mace replied, “but the army was decimated in the last attempt to hold the Mort from the bridge.”
Kelsea’s stomach roiled, and she peered down at the New London Bridge, cursing her poor eyesight. “What keeps the Mort off the bridge?”
“A barricade, Lady.” Colonel Hall stepped forward, emerging from a group of army men farther down the wall. A thick bandage swaddled his right arm, from which the sleeve had been cut away, and he had taken a nasty wound across the jaw. “It’s a good barricade, but it won’t hold forever.”
“Colonel Hall.” Kelsea smiled, relieved to see him alive, but sobered at the sight of his injuries. “I’m sorry for the loss of General Bermond, and your men. All of their families will receive full pensions.”
“Thank you, Lady.” But Hall’s mouth twisted wryly, as though acknowledging how little a pension meant in this moment.
Mace poked her lightly in the back, and Kelsea remembered. “I formally invest you as general of my armies. Long life to you, General Hall.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and though Kelsea did not think the laughter was meant to be unkind, it rang in her ears. “Above all, let us have niceties, Lady.”
“What else do we have now?”
“Glory, I suppose. Death with honor.”
“Precisely.”
Hall came a bit closer, paying no attention to Pen, who moved to block him. “May I tell you a secret, Lady?”
“Certainly.” Kelsea patted Glee’s back and set her on the ground, where the child wrapped an arm around Kelsea’s knee.
Hall lowered his voice. “It’s a real thing, glory. But it pales in comparison to what we sacrifice for it. Home, family, long lives filled with quiet. These are real things too, and when we seek glory, we give them up.”
Kelsea did not reply for a moment, realizing that Bermond’s death must have hit Hall harder than she had expected. “Do you think I sought this war?”
“No, Lady. But you are not content with the quiet life.”
Mace grunted beside her, a soft sound that Kelsea recognized as agreement, and she fought the urge to kick him. “You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“This entire kingdom knows you now, Queen Kelsea. You’ve brought us all to disaster, to satisfy your own notions of glory. Of better.”
“Be careful, Hall,” Pen warned. “You don’t—”
“Shut up, Pen,” Mace growled.
Kelsea swung around, furious. “Have you turned on me for good now, Lazarus?”
“No, Lady. But it’s not wise, particularly in wartime, to silence the voice of dissent.”
Kelsea’s face burned, and she turned back to Hall. “I didn’t end the shipment for glory. I never cared about that.”
“Then prove me wrong, Majesty. Save the last remnants of my men from an unwinnable fight. Save the women and children—and the men as well—from the nightmare they will surely face when the Mort break the walls. You cut a man to pieces, rather than watch him die a simple death by the noose. Prove me wrong and save us all.”
Hall turned back to the edge, dismissing her in a single movement. Kelsea’s face had gone numb. She felt alone suddenly, alone in a way she hadn’t been since her earliest days in the Keep. She looked over the faces of her Guard, clustered around the stairwells that fed the inner wall. Mace, Coryn, Wellmer, Elston, Kibb . . . they were loyal, they would lay down their lives for her, but loyalty wasn’t approval. They thought she had failed.
“Look, Lady.” Mace gestured over the edge.
The regimented lines of Mort had not moved, but as Kelsea squinted in the dying light, she saw that there was movement down there, a clutch of figures in black cloaks darting through the lines, bearing torches, wending their way toward the front.
Mace had pulled out his spyglass. “The one in the middle is the Red Queen’s personal herald. I remember that little bastard.”
The herald was a wisp of a man, so slight that he could easily have blended into the night in his cloak. But his voice was a thick bass that echoed off the walls of the Keep, and his Tear was perfect, without even the slightest Mort accent.
“The Great Queen of all Mortmesne and Callae extends greetings to the Heir of the Tearling!”
Kelsea gritted her teeth.
“My message is as follows. The Great Queen assumes that you realize the futility of your situation. The Great Queen’s army will find it an easy matter to break the walls of your capital and take whatever it wishes. No Tear will be spared.
“However, if the Tear heir removes the barricade to the New London Bridge and opens the gates, the Great Queen promises to spare not only her, but twenty members of her entourage as well. The Great Queen gives her word that these twenty-one will not be harmed.”
Someone’s hand was on Kelsea’s wrist. Glee, clutching too tightly, her tiny nails digging in, but Kelsea barely felt it. Save us all, Hall had said, and now Kelsea saw that if she could not save them, they would not be saved. She focused on the herald, the men around him, calling up the terrible thing inside her. It woke easily, and Kelsea wondered whether it would always be there from now on, ready to spring out at any opportunity. Could she even live that way?
“The bridge is to be cleared and the gates will be opened by dawn,” the herald continued. “If these terms are not met, the Great Queen’s army will enter New London by any means necessary, and lay your city to ruin. This is my—”
The herald broke off, then suddenly doubled over and blew apart in a spray of blood. So great was Kelsea’s anger that it seemed to ripple outward, to encompass the rest of them, knocking some men backward and flattening the rest. It spread throughout the regimented ranks of Mort, gathering speed and power like a hurricane wind.
And then it simply met a wall.
This sudden obstacle was so unexpected that Kelsea stumbled backward, as though she had run into the wall herself, headlong. She nearly knocked Glee over, but Andalie caught the girl easily, and Pen took Kelsea’s arm and kept her upright. Her head throbbed, a sudden, vicious headache that seemed to have come from nowhere.
“Lady?”
She shook her head to clear it, but the headache had clamped down like a vise, waves of pain that made it nearly impossible to focus.
What was that?
She took her spyglass from her pocket. The light was almost entirely gone now, but Kelsea could still see the damage she’d wreaked down there, at least several hundred dead in the front of the Mort lines. Gruesome deaths all, some of them reduced to little more than piles of bloody tissue. But beyond, she still sensed that impenetrable barrier, no less real for the fact that it could not be seen. The crimson tent caught her eye again; its entrance had been drawn, and now Kelsea glimpsed someone beneath the awning. It had grown too dark to make out a face, but the figure was unmistakable: a tall woman in a red gown.
“You,” Kelsea whispered.
Someone was tugging at her skirt. Kelsea looked down and found Glee’s tiny face looking upward.
“Her name,” Glee lisped. “She doesn’t want you to know.”
Kelsea put a light hand on Glee’s head, staring at the red-clad figure. She was less than a mile away, but that distance seemed infinitely vast. Kelsea tested the barrier, trying to slice into it, the same way she would cut into her own flesh. She could not make a dent.
The Mort lines had hastily recovered and reassembled in front of the camp, and now a new man stepped forward, a tall figure in a bulky black cloak.
“I speak for the Queen!”
“Ducarte,” Mace murmured. Kelsea focused her spyglass and found a balding man with close-set, bestial eyes. She shivered, for here she sensed a pure predator. Ducarte’s gaze roved the city’s walls with unconcealed contempt, as though he had already opened a breach and begun the sack.
“If the gates of New London are not opened by dawn tomorrow, none will be spared. These are the Queen’s terms.”
Ducarte waited a moment longer, until even the last echo of his words had died away. Then he put up the hood of his cloak and reversed his journey through the ranks of Mort, leaving the dead behind, heading back to the camp.
Arliss.”
“Queenie!” He looked up in surprise, his wizened face breaking into a smile, the perennial stinking cigarette clamped between his teeth. “What brings you to my door?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Well, sit down.”
Kelsea settled herself on one of the ratty armchairs Arliss used for conducting business, ignoring the miasma of cigarette smoke that clung to the upholstery. She didn’t care for Arliss’s office, a filthy warren of desks and loose papers, but she had the beginnings of a plan now, and she needed him.
“Pen, leave us alone.”
Pen hesitated. “Technically, he’s a danger to your person, Lady.”
“No one’s a danger to my person anymore.” She met his eyes for a long moment, and found an odd thing: although they had slept together several times since that first night—and it had improved exponentially, at least from Kelsea’s end—that night was the one that would always be there, between them. “Go, Pen. I’m perfectly safe.”
Pen went. Kelsea waited until the door closed behind him before asking, “How’s the money?”
“Slowed to a trickle. The minute the Mort came out of the hills, every noble took it as a license to stop paying tax.”
“Of course.”
“I’d hoped to clean up a tidy profit on the sapphire those miners bring back from the Fairwitch, but no one’s heard a peep. I’m guessing they took those bonuses you gave them and disappeared.”
“Money is tight, then.”
“Very. There are fortunes to be made in wartime, Queenie, but not in good government. Personally, I think we’re all fucked.”
“You’re nothing but sunshine, Arliss.”
“This is a dead kingdom walking, Queenie.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Arliss looked up sharply.
“I need you to do something for me, and I need you to keep it a secret.”
“A secret from whom?”
“From everyone. Especially Lazarus.” Kelsea leaned forward. “I need you to draft me a Bill of Regency.”
Arliss leaned back in his chair, watching her narrowly through the haze of smoke. “You plan to give up your throne?”
“For a time.”
“I take it the Mace doesn’t know.”
“He can’t know.”
“Ah.” Arliss tilted his head, considering. “I’ve never drafted a Regency bill before. Your uncle is dead, Queenie. Who’s the Regent?”
“Lazarus.”
Arliss nodded slowly. “That’s a wise choice.”
“Can you get hold of an old copy of my mother’s bill?”
“Yes, but I’ve seen that bastard; it’s fifteen pages long.”
“Well, take the essential language. I don’t want it open to interpretation anyway. Only a page long, and as many copies as you can write. I’ll sign them all, and they can go out to the city tomorrow after I’m gone.”
“And where is it you’re going?”
Kelsea blinked and saw the New London Bridge, the Mort waiting in the hills beyond. “To die, I think. I hope not.”
“Well, now I see why the Mace can’t know.” Arliss tapped his fingers on his desk. “This will change things.”
“For you?”
“For me . . . and my competitors. But it’s always good to be in the know first.”
“I have to do something.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Queenie. You could take her offer, save the women and your core Guard.”
“That’s what my uncle would have done. But I can’t.”
“Well, that’s the bitch of choice, isn’t it?”
She glared at him. “Choice has been very good to you lately, Arliss. You’ve been coining money from drug sales to the refugees. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“Let me tell you something, Queenie . . . my drugs are the only reason you haven’t had panic or widespread suicide down in that camp. People have to cling to something.”
“I see. You’re an altruist.”
“Not at all. But it’s foolish to blame the dealer for catering to his market.”
“That’s Thorne talking.”
“Yep. Thorne was a little shit all his life, but he was always right about that.”
Kelsea looked up, suddenly forgetting the drugs, and even the Regency bill. “You knew Thorne when he was young?”
“Lord yes, Queenie. He’ll tell you that no one knows where he came from—”
“He’s dead.”
“—but there are a few of us, if you take the trouble to look.”
“Where did he come from?”
“The Creche.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Deep under the Gut, Queenie, there’s a warren of tunnels. God knows what they were built for; they’re too deep to be sewers. If you want something too fucked even for the Gut, and you know the right people, you go down to the Creche.”
“What was Thorne doing there?”
“Thorne was sold to a pimp when he was barely born. Lived his entire childhood down there . . . such as it was.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Queenie. I had to go down there on business once or twice, early in my career. They need a fairly steady supply of narcotics, for obvious reasons, but I got out of dealing down there a long time ago.”
“You got out.”
“Yes, I did. It’s a bad place, the Creche. Kids for sex, for—”
“Stop.” Kelsea held up her hand. “I see.”
“A bad place,” Arliss repeated, shuffling the papers on his desk. “But Thorne was smart and quick. He was practically a king down there by the time he was eighteen.”
“Was Lazarus there too?”
“He was, though he’ll not admit it if you ask him.”
“What was—” Kelsea’s voice died, and she swallowed, feeling the words slip around a dry place in her throat. “What was he doing down there?”
“The ring.”
“Explain.”
“Children fighting children.”
“Boxing?”
“Not always. Sometimes they gave them weapons. There’s value in variety.”
Kelsea’s lips felt as though they’d frozen solid. “Why?”
“Gambling, Queenie. More money changes hands over kidfighting than any other betting matter in this kingdom, and the Mace was one of the greatest contenders they’d ever seen, a juggernaut.” Arliss’s eyes gleamed with memory. “He never lost, even in his early years. Lazarus isn’t even his real name, you know, just a nickname his handlers came up with when no one could bring him down. The odds got so high by the time he was eleven or twelve that I nearly stopped taking bets on him at all.”
“You took bets?”
“I’m a bookie, Queenie. I take bets on anything where I can calculate the odds.”
Kelsea rubbed her eyes. “Didn’t anyone try to put a stop to it?”
“Who would, Lady? I saw your uncle down there several times. Your mother too.”
“How did they decide who won?”
Arliss met her gaze steadily, and Kelsea shook her head, feeling ill. “I see. Lazarus never told me.”
“Of course he didn’t. If some comes out, it all comes out.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that the Mace was almost an animal by the time he was done. No one could wrangle him, except maybe Carroll; it was Carroll who got him out of the Creche for good. But the Mace was still a danger to others, long after his days in the ring were over. He’s ashamed of his deeds. He doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
Arliss raised his eyebrows. “I don’t answer to the Mace, Queenie. You’re a fool if you think I do. I don’t even answer to you. I’ve reached the good time of life now, the time where I’ve made my money, and if someone is fool enough to threaten me, I don’t need to care. I do and say as I please.”
“And it pleases you to be here? Now? Why haven’t you fled to Mortmesne? Or Cadare?”
Arliss grinned. “Because I don’t want to.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.” Kelsea got up from the armchair, wiping off several puffs of dust that had settled on her skirt. “Will you draft my bill?”
“Yes.” Arliss sat back, crossing his arms over his chest, and eyed her speculatively. “So you’re going to die tomorrow?”
“I think so.”
“Then what in the happy Christ are you doing sitting here talking to me? You should be out getting drunk, getting laid.”
“With whom?”
Arliss smiled, a sudden and gentle smile that sat oddly on his twisted face. “You think we don’t know?”
“Shut up, Arliss.”
“As you like.” He pulled a blank sheet of paper from the stack at his left hand, and his next words were muttered down at the desk.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. Don’t throw in the towel yet, Queenie. You’re a clever piece of business . . . smarter even than your grandmother, and that’s saying something. This is a gutsy thing you mean to do.”
“Mad, perhaps. I’ll be back to sign the bills before dawn.”
Leaving Arliss’s office, she wandered up the hallway, feeling lost, not knowing what to do now. Tomorrow morning she would walk out of here, and chances were that she wouldn’t be coming back. She wondered whether Arliss was right, whether she ought to simply spend the entire night in bed with Pen.
Kelsea.
She halted in the middle of the hallway. The voice was Lily’s, not words but a pleading grab for help. It felt as if a drowning woman were grasping at the edges of Kelsea’s mind.
Kelsea.
Lily was in trouble. Terrible trouble. Kelsea stared at the asymmetrical pattern of stones on the floor, her mind racing, moving from point to point. Lily had called, and Kelsea had heard her. In the span of history, Lily Mayhew’s life meant nothing; she was not even a footnote. Whatever was happening to her, she was long dead and buried now, but Kelsea couldn’t turn away. Yet she didn’t know how to reach Lily. They were separated by three centuries, an endless gulf. Kelsea had always thought of time as a solid wall behind her, blocking out everything that had already passed . . . but the world she now inhabited was greater than that.
Was it possible to create one of her fugues?
Kelsea stilled, arrested by this idea. The distance might be vast in time, but Kelsea no longer lived in pure time, did she? She had moved in and out of it for months. Could she step off the edge of one age and into another, as neatly as pre-Crossing passengers would have boarded a train? She called up the outlines of Lily’s world: the dark storm-filled horizon, much like the Tearling, threaded through with inequality and violence. A burst of fire seared through Kelsea’s chest, sending her staggering against the wall.
“Lady?”
Pen, behind her, his voice muffled as though Kelsea were swimming in deep water.
“Pen. It’s going to be a long night, I think. I need you to watch out for me when I fall.”
“Fall?”
Kelsea’s vision had blurred now. Pen was a kind shape in the torchlight. “I don’t know where I land.”
“Lady?” Pen grabbed her arm. “Is it your fugue?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll get you to your chamber.”
Kelsea allowed him to lift her along, barely even noticing. Her mind was full of Lily: Lily’s life, Lily’s fright. What had been waiting for her when she got home from Boston?
“What’s wrong?”
Elston’s booming, bearlike voice, but now Kelsea heard it from a great distance. Pen was carrying her, she realized, and she had no idea when it had happened.
“Fugue,” Pen muttered. “It came on fast. Help me get her to bed.”
“No,” Kelsea whispered. “Can’t afford to sleep the night. Just stay with me and don’t let me fall.”
“Lady—”
“Shhh.” Kelsea was dreaming now, awake and dreaming at the same time. Lily had called, and Kelsea had heard her. Everything had darkened; Kelsea groped blindly in the shadows, seeking the past. If Kelsea could only reach them, Lily and William Tear. She could picture them standing before her, their eyes kind . . . but all around them swirled a maelstrom of violence. Lily—
Lily.”
She spun around, hearing a whisper behind her, certain it was Greg. But there was nothing, only early sunlight streaming through the living room windows. The nearly silent motors of the house’s internal processes hummed along inside the walls. Had her house ever seemed so small before? The furniture she had bought, the carpet she had chosen . . . there was a falsity to these things, a sense that she could push them aside and see chalk markings, a bare stage.
Greg was not in the house. The kitchen floor had provided no answers, only a large smear of dried blood. Had Greg gotten up, called an ambulance? There was no way to know. The stain on the kitchen floor had the thick, viscous look of menstrual blood, and it reminded Lily that she had forgotten to take her pill the night before. She headed for the nursery, leaving Jonathan in the kitchen. Did she have anything to do today? Yes, lunch with Michele and Sarah, but that could be canceled. If Security came for her, it would be better to have it happen here than downtown or at the club. Lily didn’t kid herself that she would hold up well under questioning, but she thought she had the parameters clear now. She would break, one way or another; her job was simply to make sure that she didn’t break until September first. Could she do that? She closed her eyes, looking for the better world, but instead she found William Tear, standing beneath the streetlights.
The nursery faced eastward, a wash of light in the early sun. Lily darted over to the loose tile, suddenly aware of the sun moving, of the fact that Greg, or Security, could show up at any time. After she took her pill, she would run upstairs and take a shower, put on a good dress and some makeup. Security would come, and when they did, the way she looked would matter. She would appear as respectable as possible, a woman who couldn’t possibly be involved in midnight journeys, in separatist plots. She would—
The space beneath the tile was empty.
Lily rocked back on her heels, staring in disbelief. Yesterday she’d had ten boxes of pills in there. Cash too, over two thousand dollars, her emergency stash. Lily’s stomach seemed to contract in on itself as the meaning of the empty hole socked home. Her pills were gone.
“Lose something?”
Lily croaked in fright and nearly fell over, clutching the arm of her sofa for balance, as Greg emerged from behind the nursery door. The left side of his head was caked with dried blood; it had matted his hair and trickled down his neck to stain the shoulder of his white shirt. He was grinning.
“Where’ve you been, Lily?”
“Nowhere,” she whispered. She wanted to speak up, to be strong, but she seemed to have no voice. When Greg wasn’t around, he became diminutive in her mind, but in real life, he wasn’t small at all. In the light, airy space of the nursery, he seemed about ten feet tall.
“Nowhere,” Greg repeated smoothly. “Just out and about, all night, outside the wall.”
“That’s right. I got carjacked too, in case you care.”
“All night, outside the wall,” Greg repeated, and Lily shuddered. His eyes were wide and empty, dark orbs that seemed to reflect no light. “My dad was right, you know. He said all women are cunts, and I said no, Lily’s different. And look here!”
Greg held up a box of her pills, pinching them between two fingers, the way he would something diseased. And now something utterly unexpected and wonderful happened: at the sight of her pills, Lily’s panic melted quickly and silently away. She straightened, took a deep breath, and tipped her head to one side, cracking her neck, as he loomed closer. She had to fight the urge to jump up and grab the small orange box out of his hand.
“All the bullshit I had to listen to, all the jokes they made at my expense. Do you know what I’ve had to put up with because of you? I lost out on a promotion last year because I didn’t have a son! My boss calls me Blank-Shooting Greg.”
“Catchy.”
Greg’s eyes narrowed. “You want to be careful, Lily. I could turn you over to Security right now.”
“Do that. Better them than you.”
“No.” Greg’s mouth twisted upward in a wide, spitless grin. “I think we’ll keep this just between us. Where were you?”
“None of your business.”
He slapped her, and her head rocked backward on her neck, a flower bobbing on its stalk. But she kept her feet.
“You need to learn to watch your mouth, Lily. Where were you last night?”
“Sucking Arnie Welch’s cock.”
She didn’t know where that had come from; it was merely the first thing to pop into her mind. But she watched, amazed, as Greg’s eyes narrowed into tiny slits and his cheeks turned white.
He believes it!
For a moment Lily teetered on the edge of hysterical laughter. An image popped into her head: kneeling in front of Arnie Welch, poor old Arnie who was as dumb as a bag of hammers, and Lily began to laugh. She barely felt Greg grab hold of her hair—should have put it up, her brain remonstrated—and draw her up, making a square target. She giggled at the sight of his face, the tiny burning red spots in his white cheeks, the bared teeth, even the emptiness of his eyes.
“Stop laughing!” he shouted, spraying spittle across her face, and of course this only made Lily laugh harder.
“Weak,” she giggled. “And you know it too.”
Greg clouted the side of her head, sending her flying. Lily glimpsed a wall of sparkling sunlight in front of her and then she went through the patio doors, shattering both panes of glass. A million pinpricks seemed to needle into her arms and face. She pinwheeled for balance on top of the patio, then fell, rolling down three brick steps to land in the grass of the backyard.
“How weak am I, Lily?” Greg asked, his voice closing, following her down the steps. Lily’s arms had been sliced open, her head ached, and it felt like her ankle was twisted. Greg kicked her in the ribs, and Lily groaned and curled up, trying to protect her sides. As she rolled, she saw something that made her go cold: the fly of Greg’s pants had tented outward. Lily hadn’t taken a pill in more than thirty-six hours, and the old Lily, the careful one, had read every word of the insert that came inside the orange box. The math came out bad. If he raped her now, she could get pregnant.
She rolled over and lashed out with both legs, kicking Greg’s feet out from under him. Bright pain exploded in her bad ankle, but the move worked; Greg went down, an expression of almost comical surprise on his face. Lily tried to get up, but he had bruised her ribs, if not something worse, and her left arm wouldn’t respond to commands. She couldn’t get herself off the ground. She began to crawl, leaning on her right side, dragging herself sideways across the grass toward the kitchen door. In the center of the kitchen island sat a polished wooden block, and its gleaming surface hid more than a dozen knives. Picturing the smoothness of the big butcher knife, its weight in her hands, Lily felt a nearly dizzying excitement, and began to pant as she dragged herself along. Right arm out, as far as her shoulder socket would allow, and then drag her body to catch up. But her arm was already starting to ache. Lily had never been so conscious of her own physical weakness; she remembered Dorian doing pushups despite her stitches, thought longingly of the tough ripple of muscle along Dorian’s arms. She tasted blood.
A hand grabbed her bad ankle, making her squeal in pain. Lily peered over her shoulder and saw that Greg had hit something when he fell; fresh blood covered his chin. But he was still grinning, even with the bright red stream slavering from his mouth. He squeezed her ankle, and Lily screamed as she felt something grind together in there: muscle or bone, it didn’t matter which, it was all mixed up in a bright implosion of pain. She tried to kick Greg in the face, but there was no leverage while she was lying on her side. She yanked her foot from his hand and pulled herself closer to the kitchen door, thinking only how good the handle of the big butcher knife would feel, how smooth in her hand . . . if she could reach it. But she only made it a few more feet before Greg grabbed her again, by the calf this time, his fingers digging in.
“Where you goin’, Lily? Where the fuck you think you’ll go?”
His voice came thickly, almost bubbling behind her. Lily wondered if he had broken a tooth. She tried to wriggle forward again, but he worked a hand beneath her hip and flipped her over, neatly as a pancake, before crawling on top of her. He put a hand between her legs and squeezed. Lily screamed, but her screams were muffled against his shirt. She took a deep, gasping breath, filled with the sandalwood of his cologne, and felt vomit begin to work its way up her throat. And now, incredibly, Greg was muttering, “Say you love me, Lily.”
He had managed to pin both of her wrists over her head with one hand. Lily hawked back and spat, feeling thin pleasure as he recoiled.
“I hate you,” she hissed. “I fucking hate you.”
Greg punched her in the face. His fist missed her still-healing nose, but the bridge tingled with warning pain. Greg unbuttoned her jeans and Lily struggled harder, screaming, furious that it could still be this way, right here, with her husband’s broad shoulders and thick arms pinning her down.
“Get off her. Right now.”
Greg froze. Lily peered over his shoulder and saw Jonathan, his dark eyes wide and furious, holding a gun to the back of Greg’s head.
“Up, asshole.”
Greg eased off her, sinking back to rest on his knees, and Lily scrambled away, panting hoarsely. She could already feel heavy pressure high on the ridge of her cheekbone, the beginnings of a shiner. She fumbled with her jeans for a moment before she got them buttoned.
“What are you doing, Johnny?” Greg asked, blinking up at Jonathan as though trying to place him. Lily pushed herself to her feet, but found that her ankle would take no weight. She balanced on the other foot, tottering awkwardly.
“You all right, Mrs. M.?” Jonathan asked, never taking his eyes from Greg.
“Fine. My ankle’s broken, I think.”
“Whatever you think you saw,” Greg began, “marital disputes are resolved between husband and wife, Johnny. That’s the law.”
“The law,” Jonathan repeated, and his mouth twisted up into something that might have been a smile.
“Why don’t you go back to the house, and we’ll forget this ever happened? I won’t even report it.”
“That right? You won’t?” Jonathan’s words were beginning to broaden, southern twang showing up between each carefully spoken consonant. Dorian had called him South Carolina, Lily remembered, in an early morning that already seemed like years ago. She stared, transfixed, at the gun barrel pressed against the back of Greg’s skull.
“Come on, Johnny. You know me.”
Jonathan grinned wide, a rictus that showed all of his white teeth. “Yes, indeed, Mr. Mayhew. We have boys like you where I come from. Three of them took my sister for a ride once.”
He turned to Lily. “Go inside, Mrs. M.”
“No.”
“You don’t need to see this.”
“Of course I do.”
“Johnny, put the gun away. Remember who you work for.”
Jonathan began to laugh, but it was hollow laughter, and his dark eyes blazed. “Oh, I do. And I’ll tell you a secret, Mayhew. The man I work for wouldn’t even think twice.”
He shot Greg in the back of the head.
Lily couldn’t stop a small shriek as Greg’s body fell forward to land at her feet. Jonathan leaned down, planted the gun at Greg’s temple and fired another shot. The reverberation was very loud, bouncing off the backyard walls. Security would come now, Lily thought, whether they had found the Mercedes yet or not.
Jonathan wiped the gun barrel on his dark pants and put it away. At Lily’s feet, half of Greg’s head was blown away, leaking steadily into the bright green perfection of the lawn. Lily looked down and found herself covered with gore, but most of the blood was hers, from the cuts on her arms.
“You need a doctor,” Jonathan told her.
“I have bigger problems now,” Lily replied, then reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Thank you.” The words were not enough, but she could think of nothing better, and now she heard the first siren, still distant, somewhere downtown. Someone must have called Security when Lily went through the glass doors. “They’re coming. You should go.”
“No.” Jonathan’s face was resigned. “We take responsibility.”
“You can’t stay here!”
“Sure I can.”
“Jonathan. They’ll never listen. Even if I told them everything, they wouldn’t listen. They’ll kill you.”
“Probably. But I had to do it.”
Lily nodded, trying to think. Even now, at the strangest of all times, the better world was in her head, crowding out all else, every other consideration. It was the river that held her, she saw now, the river with its deep blue water. She had failed in Boston, but here was another chance.
“Give me the gun.”
“What?”
“Give me the gun and get out of here.”
Jonathan shook his head.
“Listen to me. They’ll be coming for me anyway, sooner or later. I can tell the same story, and I have better evidence. Look at me; I’m a mess.”
“You won’t do any better, Mrs. M.; Security is Frewell’s organization, right down to its bones. They’ll look at your face and arms, believe every word you say, and find you guilty, all the same.”
“He won’t let me go, Jonathan. On the ship. I asked and he said no.”
“I’m sorry.”
“But you have to go.” Lily looked down at Greg’s corpse, wishing she were as brave as the rest of them, but she knew she was not, and she needed Jonathan to leave, now, before she lost her nerve. “We take care of each other, yes? You did this for me. Now I want you to go.”
“They execute wives who kill their husbands.”
“I’m dead anyway,” Lily retorted, taking a shot in the dark. “On September first, right?”
Jonathan swallowed.
“Isn’t that what’s going to happen?”
“Mrs. M.—”
She reached out and grasped the barrel of the gun. Jonathan resisted for a moment, then let it slide bonelessly from his fingers. The sirens were louder now, leaving downtown and entering the quiet maze of streets that had made up Lily’s adult life.
“Go. Think about him, not me. Help him.”
Jonathan’s dark face had gone pale. “They’ll check your hands. For powder. Fire a shot into the ground.”
“I will. Go.”
He hesitated a moment longer, then headed for the wall and climbed it, in almost the exact spot where Dorian had fallen down. Even in the midst of her terror, this symmetry pleased Lily; she felt that she had now come full circle, completed the journey from the woman she had been pretending to be to the woman she really was. At the top of the wall, Jonathan turned and gave Lily a last reluctant look, but she waved him away with the gun, relieved when he dropped soundlessly into the Williamses’ yard, out of sight.
Lily planted herself, aiming the gun at the ground several feet away. She knew that guns recoiled, but she was still unprepared for the force of the shot, which sent her sprawling backward. The gunshot echoed around the garden, and as it faded, Lily heard the squeal of tires turning onto her street.
I killed my husband. He was beating on me and I shot him.
How did you get the gun?
I took it from Jonathan the last time he drove me downtown. Tuesday.
Bullshit. He would’ve noticed it was gone.
That was true. Lily tried again. What if I tell them it was Greg’s gun?
The gun’s tagged. They’ll only need to scan it to know it was Jonathan’s.
She couldn’t think of a response. Jonathan was right; the story was too flimsy, no matter who did the telling. Greg was dead, shot by two bullets from Jonathan’s gun. Last night, Lily had gone outside the wall alone and come back with Jonathan. They would either think that Jonathan had killed him, or that she and Jonathan had done it together. No one would care about Lily’s black eye, the cuts on her face and arms. It was all over now; she was a woman who had killed her husband. She thought of the executions that played regularly on the giant screen in the living room: men and women turning pale as the poison hit their veins, drowning them in their own lung fluid. Their agonized gasping always seemed to go on forever before they finally succumbed, and Greg would laugh at Lily when she tried to cover her ears. They died with bulging, pleading eyes, like fish in the bottom of a boat.
Lily dropped the gun and closed her eyes. When Security burst into the backyard, she was standing on a high brown hill, miles of grain all around her, staring down at the deep blue river that ribboned the land below. She didn’t hear them speak to her, didn’t understand their questions. She was caught by the world around her, Tear’s world, Tear’s creation, the sights and sounds of the land, even the smell: freshly turned earth and a tang of salt that reminded her of childhood trips to the Maine shore. Lily didn’t feel them pin her arms behind her back and march her toward the front door. She didn’t feel anything at all, not even when they pushed her into the back of the truck.
For the first time, Kelsea opened her eyes and found herself not in her library, but in the arms room.
“There you are, Lady.”
She blinked and found Pen on one side, Elston on the other.
“What am I doing here?”
“You wandered in.” Pen released her. “You’ve been all over the Queen’s Wing.”
“What time is it?”
“Almost midnight.”
Less than two hours gone. Lily’s life was moving faster now. Kelsea blinked and saw, as if through a thin veil, the dark tin box of the Security truck, its armored inner walls. It was night again; flashes of street lighting spilled intermittently through the small slats near the ceiling, fleeing over her hands and legs before it disappeared. Lily was right there, not centuries away, not over the borders of unconsciousness, as she had once been, but right there inside Kelsea’s mind. If she wanted to, Kelsea could reach out and touch her, make Lily scratch her forearm or close her eyes. They were bound.
“Only crossing,” Kelsea whispered, clutching her sapphires. Who had said that? She couldn’t remember anymore. “Only crossing.”
“Lady?”
“I’m going back, Pen.”
“Back where?” Elston asked crossly. “Sooner or later, Lady, you’ll have to sleep.”
“Back under, I think,” Pen replied, but his voice was already distant. Dimly, Kelsea remembered something she was supposed to do, something about the Red Queen. But Lily took precedence now. Another flash intruded: Lily being pulled from the truck and marched down a long staircase, her eyes blinded by glaring fluorescent light. A wave of nausea broke over Kelsea like a wave, and she remembered that Lily had hit the double doors headfirst. Did she have a concussion? “You stay, Pen. Don’t let me fall.”
“Go, El.”
“I’ll get the Captain,” Elston muttered. “Christ, what a mess it all turned out to be.”
He said the last bit quietly, as though hoping Kelsea wouldn’t hear. But if she could have found her voice, she would have agreed with him. It had all gone wrong, but where was the tipping point? Where had all of her good intentions fallen apart? Lily’s feet tangled on the stairs, and Kelsea lurched forward. She grabbed for the armrail, found there was none, and stumbled.
“Get the fuck up!”
“Lady?”
Get the fuck up!”
Lily pushed herself off the wall and regained her feet.
These were not the polite guards of the New Canaan Security station. Four men surrounded Lily; three carried small oblong objects, some sort of electrical prod, while the fourth carried a gun.
Lily needed a doctor. None of the cuts on her arms had been very deep; they were already beginning to scab. But she had taken an ugly slice on her scalp when she went through the glass doors, and blood was steadily oozing through the hair on the right side of her head. From time to time nausea beset her; the last attack had been so bad that she nearly collapsed. But she fought it, hard, because those taser-type weapons looked well used. As a child, Lily had once stuck her finger into the socket of a desk lamp that was missing its bulb, and she would never forget the brief, burning agony that had taken her hand in that moment. The four men who surrounded her didn’t seem the sort to think twice before giving her a jolt.
They had kept her at the New Canaan station until early afternoon, in a dingy cell that was still years removed from the terrible conditions Lily would have imagined. There was no one else in the cell with her; it was dirty from disuse, not overuse. New Canaan’s Security probably never hosted prisoners; there was no petty crime there. Lily was in the cell for hours, but she never spotted so much as a single roach. She hadn’t slept in more than thirty hours, and she was exhausted. Hungry too, but the sharpness of that hunger quickly began to fade against her thirst. She didn’t know if they would have given her water at the station, but she had forgotten to ask. Now her throat felt as though someone had gone at it with sandpaper.
When the sun was just beginning to set, they had taken her from the cell and loaded her onto another truck. Lily didn’t know how long the journey had been, only that night fell long before they came to a halt, and when they pulled her from the truck, she found herself in a wasteland of bright fluorescence and asphalt. The better world had never seemed farther away than it did in that moment, Lily freezing cold from the long journey in only her T-shirt and jeans, blinded by the bright lights and the slow trickle of blood from her scalp. She tried to remember why she was here, but at that moment William Tear and his people seemed infinitely distant. Tracking backward through her memory, Lily realized that it was still only August 30, that September first was still two days away. Two days until the carnival, Parker had said, but Tear would never let a creature like Parker into his better world. So what was the carnival?
What does it matter now?
But no matter how many times Lily had asked herself this question during the interminable truck ride, she remained unconvinced. Carnivals were excess and abandon, doing anything you liked. Lily was no extraordinary empathist, but it took only a few minutes for her mind to slip into Parker’s, conjure an image, and spread it out before her like a mural. Parker’s carnival would be the same as any other: excess and abandon, brought now into the limitless range of the monstrous, troubled world they all lived in, a world of walls that separated the privileged from the deprived. And the deprived were angry. Lily’s mind created the pictures faster than she could push them away, and by the time they reached the Security compound, she had seen the end of the world inside her head, a bacchanal of rage and revenge. Parker’s glee was easy to understand now; he might be too debased for the better world, but on the first of September, Tear meant to turn him loose in this one.
I should tell Security, Lily thought. I should warn someone.
But that was impossible. Even if anyone would believe her, there was no way to tell them about Parker without also telling them about Tear. They were going to ask her about Tear anyway, no doubt, and despite Tear’s words, Lily suspected that she wouldn’t last long under interrogation.
I can’t tell them anything. Lily steeled herself against another wave of nausea. I keep quiet until the second of September. That’s my job. It’s all I can do for them now.
One of the guards opened a plain black metal door and stood back. “Find her an empty room.”
They marched Lily down a dark, narrow corridor filled with doors. Lily was swamped with sudden déjà vu, so strong that it crashed over her mind like a wave, obscuring everything. She had been here before. She was certain of it.
They sat her down in a small room whose fluorescent light barely provided enough of a thin, sickly glow to illuminate a steel table and two chairs that were bolted to the ground. The man with the gun cuffed Lily to the chair, and then she was left, staring blankly at the wall, as the door closed behind them.
Greg was dead. Lily kept this idea firmly in front of her, for despite her current predicament, there was comfort in it. No matter what happened now, it would not be Greg, not ever again. She fell asleep and dreamed that she was back in the backyard, trying to crawl toward the kitchen door. Something terrible was behind her, and Lily knew that if she could only reach the door, there would be solace there. She was searching for the door handle when a hand grabbed her ankle, making her scream. The backyard blew apart and now she was in the long, door-filled corridor again, stumbling along, lost. The light was a dim orange: not fluorescents, but torchlight, and Greg was no longer important, Greg was nothing, because she held a great fate in her hands, the fate of a country, the fate of—
“The Tearling,” Lily muttered, jerking awake. The dream dissolved, leaving her with the confused afterimage of a torch behind her eyes. Someone had just doused her with water. She was soaking wet.
“There you are.”
The back of the chair seemed to have dug claws into her spine, and Lily groaned as she straightened. She felt as though she had slept for hours. It might even be morning, but there was no way to tell inside this tiny, cramped room.
Across from her sat a thin blade of a man with a pointed face and wide dark eyes punctuated by arching, neatly sculpted black eyebrows. His legs were crossed, one on top of the other, his hands folded on his knee. His posture was very prim, but somehow it fit the room around him. Beneath his dark Security uniform, the man looked like an accountant with several secret nasty habits. He had brought up a screen on the table beneath him, and Lily saw her own upside-down face peering at her from the steel surface.
“Lily Mayhew, née Freeman. You had a busy day.”
Lily merely stared at him, her face blank and bewildered, though the sense of futility struck her again. She couldn’t act for shit.
“Where is this place?”
“You don’t care,” the accountant answered pleasantly. “All you care about is how you can get out, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you do, Mrs. Mayhew. One of the qualities that gained me my present position is a great talent for sniffing out a member of the Blue Horizon. You have the same look as the rest of them, something around the eyes . . . you all look like you’d seen Christ himself and come back to tell the tale. Have you seen Christ, Mrs. Mayhew?”
Lily shook her head.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily replied patiently. “I thought I was here because of my husband.”
“You are, certainly. But national security trumps local crime, and I have a lot of latitude in such matters. It could go either way, really. On the one hand we have Lily Mayhew, the brutally battered wife whose life was in danger, who acted to defend herself. And on the other, we have Lily Mayhew, the cheating cunt who screwed her black bodyguard—a separatist black bodyguard, just to add to the fun—and then convinced him to help her murder her husband.”
He leaned forward, still smiling the pleasant smile. “Latitude, you see, Mrs. Mayhew. It really could go either way.”
Lily stared at him, unable to reply. Everything inside her seemed to be frozen.
Screwed Jonathan? Did he really say that?
“Now, me, I’m not interested in your husband. In fact, I too thought Greg was an asshole. But I am extremely interested, one might almost say obsessively interested, in what you were doing down at the Port of Boston early yesterday morning.”
“I wasn’t,” Lily replied. A frog was in her throat, and she coughed it out. “I was heading that way, but I got carjacked on Highway Eighty-Four, just over the state line into Massachusetts.”
The accountant’s smile widened, and he shook his head. “A tragedy! Do go on.”
“I called my bodyguard to come and get me, and he brought me home.”
“That is very neat.” His fingers played over the steel surface of the table, and a moment later Lily heard her own voice, echoing from speakers on her left.
“Jonathan?”
“Where are you, Mrs. M.?” The static that had covered the call was entirely gone now, Jonathan’s voice crystal clear.
“Mrs. M.?”
“I’m on my way to Boston.”
“What’s in Boston?”
“The warehouse! They’re in trouble, Jonathan, all of them. Greg had Arnie Welch over for dinner—”
“Mrs. M.? I can’t hear you! Don’t come to Boston!”
“Jonathan?”
The call broke off.
“Your tag tells a better story than you do, Mrs. Mayhew. Last night, you traveled up to Boston, to Conley Terminal, and you were there most of the night.” The neat little man in front of Lily smiled again, and Lily noticed that he had a real mouthful of teeth, white and square and neat, too neat to be anything but implants. “There are only two ways for this to play out. You can tell me what you know, in which case I will be tempted—though I promise nothing—to paint you as Lily Mayhew, the sympathetic battered wife. It’s a terrible crime, to kill your husband, but there are ways around that, even when your husband was Greg Mayhew, Defense Department liaison and all-around Good Citizen. I’m not God, so you’ll likely serve a couple of years, but they will be soft years, and when you get out, your husband’s money, your beautiful house in New Canaan, your three cars, all of it will be waiting for you. You can start a new life.”
His words made Lily think of Cath Alcott, who had gotten into her car one night with her three children and simply vanished. She wondered if Cath had had any money. It changed everything, money. It was the difference between vanishing without a trace and simply dying in some dark place with no one to know or care. Lily thought of the group of people she had seen hunched around the bonfire beside Highway 84 . . . and then the man’s voice jerked her back.
“If you say nothing, we go to work on you, and you tell anyway. Don’t even kid yourself that you’ll be able to stay silent. There’s never been a member of your little group that I couldn’t break. But if you waste my precious time and delay my investigation, I guarantee that you’ll be Lily Mayhew, the cheating whore who shot her husband, and after I’m done with you, you’ll die by the needle.”
Lily held silent during this speech, though his words made her stomach twist into thick, ropy knots. She was no good with pain, never had been. She feared the dentist, even a cleaning. It was all she could do to drag herself into Manhattan once a year to allow Dr. Anna to poke the horribly uncomfortable speculum between her legs. But the thought of Dr. Anna steadied Lily as well, reminded her that William Tear wasn’t the only one who could be hurt if she opened her mouth.
“I’ll give you thirty minutes to think it over,” the accountant told her, rising from the table. “In the meantime, I’m sure you’re hungry and thirsty.”
Lily nodded miserably. She was thirsty, so much so that she could feel each individual tooth throbbing in its own dry socket. He left the room and she bent to lay her head on the table, feeling the sting of tears behind her eyes. She searched for the better world, but there was nothing now; she could not call it up in her imagination as she had so many times before. The better world was gone, and without it she wouldn’t last long.
Am I really this weak? She thought that the answer might be yes. There had always been something flimsy inside her. Greg must have sensed it; in fact, Lily saw now, Greg might have understood her better than anyone else ever had. All of Lily’s bravery only kicked in when there was little risk involved. When the chips were down, she folded. She thought of being alone in their enormous house, of having all of that space to herself, to do as she pleased, without Greg’s shadow lurking around every corner. It would be an amazing thing.
Bullshit, Maddy whispered. They’re never going to let you go. And even if they did, you think they’d let a single woman keep all of that money, do as she pleases? In New Canaan? In any city?
Lily smiled gently. Maddy was right, it was a pipe dream. The little accountant had looked straight through Lily and seen what she wanted more than anything—freedom, the ability to live her own life—and then dangled it in front of her like a cheap toy. Lily Mayhew, née Freeman, had been weak all of her life, but she had never been dumb.
“I won’t break,” she whispered silently into her crossed arms, into the wetness of tears. “Please, just this once, let me not break.”
The door opened with a hollow clang, and a hulking man with a soldier’s buzz cut came in, carrying a tray. Lily sat up eagerly, hating herself, but she was too hungry and thirsty to stage a hunger strike. She guzzled the water, then attacked the meat, a cold lump of unidentifiable off-white gristle that didn’t seem to taste like anything at all. The food only made her more hungry, and then it was done. She pushed the tray to one side, staring at the grey cement walls around her. The accountant had told her to think it over, but now she could think of nothing but all of them: Tear, Dorian, Jonathan. Where were they now?
With the ships, her mind answered. Wherever the ships are, that’s where they’ll be.
Lily felt certain that this was true. Tear would let Parker loose, and now Lily saw exactly how Parker fit in with the program: he was a distraction, a smokescreen for Security. While Parker was wreaking havoc, Tear’s people would board the ships, and then they would leave.
Leave for where? There’s nowhere to go! Do you really think he’ll sail off the edge of the earth and straight into paradise?
Lily did. The image was eerily persuasive: an entire flotilla of ships, all of them heading toward an unknown horizon where the sun was just beginning to rise. This vision didn’t feel like Lily’s; rather, it was as though someone else was dreaming inside her head. Did any of them know what was on the other side of that horizon? No, Lily felt certain they had no idea. They would probably end up sinking in the middle of the ocean. Did she really want to face everything that the accountant threatened for that?
Tear. Dorian. Jonathan.
The door clanged open again. The accountant had returned, and he stood over her, smiling broadly, his hands tucked behind his back.
“Well, Lily, what’s it to be?”
She looked up at him, sweat misting her brow, her guts sick with anticipation. But the words came out strong and clear, not her own words, and Lily suddenly felt as though there was another woman inside her, someone trying to hold her together, to get her through.
“Fuck it. Let’s go.”