Chapter 2

Lily

“It is merely crossing,” said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass, “merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.”

—David Copperfield, CHARLES DICKENS (pre-Crossing Angl.)

Her eyes opened on a deep grey world, storm clouds promising certain rain. In the distance, through the windshield, she could see a bleak sky dominated by a line of dark grey silhouettes.

Manhattan.

The car hit a bump crossing the bridge, and Lily looked out the window, annoyed. Greg was in charge of their household finances, but Lily had overheard him telling Jim Henderson that he paid a good chunk of money to the utilities every month to use the bridge. In return, they were supposed to maintain the paving. But they never did as good a job as they should have, and lately Lily had noticed bumps and potholes that took longer and longer to repair. Still, the trip beat taking the public bridge; their Lexus was begging to be carjacked on a public roadway. Security regularly patrolled this bridge and its connecting roads, and officers would appear in moments if Jonathan pressed the panic button. A few potholes were a small price to pay for safety.

The bridge ended, and Lily looked eagerly out the window as the high walls tapered down to a low barrier. She came into the city less and less often, and it seemed like things were worse every time, but she still liked to visit. Her own house in New Canaan was beautiful, a stately colonial with white columns, just like those of all of her friends. But even an entire town could get old when everything was the same. Lily dressed more carefully for her rare trips outside the wall than she did for her own dinner parties; dangerous or not, this excursion always seemed like an event.

Looking over the edge of the roadside barrier, she glimpsed the slums, hung with garbage bags to create shelter from the coming rain. Shapeless, shiftless people huddled against walls and beneath overhangs. The first time Greg had brought Lily to New York, just after they married, most of the buildings had already been empty, the windows covered with For Lease signs. By now squatters had torn down even the signs, and so many buildings had been abandoned that Security hardly bothered with the downtown at all. The blank windows made these buildings look empty, but they weren’t; Lily shrank from imagining what went on inside. Drugs, crime, prostitution . . . and she’d even read online that people caught sleeping unawares were often killed for their organs. There were no rules outside the wall. Nothing was safe.

Greg said that the people outside the barriers were lazy, but Lily had never thought of them that way. They were simply unlucky; their parents hadn’t been wealthy, like hers and Greg’s. Greg hadn’t been so rigid when he was at Princeton; sometimes, on weekends, he would even work with the homeless. That was how they’d met, both of them volunteering in Trenton at the last homeless shelter left in New Jersey, though more and more, these days, Lily wondered whether Greg had done it for his résumé; he had gone on to a government internship the next summer. Lily went to Swarthmore, studying English because it was the only thing she liked. The books were all purged by then, free of sex and profanity and anything else the Frewell administration had found un-American, but Lily could still enjoy them, could still dig deep beneath the sterilized surface to find a good story. She loved being in school, and the thought of the future made her feel panicky and out of control. Greg was the ambitious one, the one who’d worked summers in Washington, who traveled to New York on countless weekends to network with his parents’ friends. Lily had liked that, liked that Greg seemed to have such a handle on where his life was going. When he landed a good job, assisting the liaison for a defense contractor, and asked Lily to marry him after graduation, it had seemed like nothing short of a godsend. She wouldn’t have to work; her entire job would be keeping the house and making nice with other people like herself. And of course, taking care of the children, when the children came. None of it seemed like real work. Lily would have plenty of time to shop, to read, to think. The car hit another bump, jarring her against the seat, and Lily felt something almost like a smile stretch across her lips. She had hit the jackpot, all right.

Rain pelted down on the car all at once, hitting the window in spatters that obscured Lily’s view. The sky had been darkening all day, and many of the people outside the barrier were wearing some sort of synthetic bags over their clothing in preparation. Lily wondered if they had to find new bags for each rainstorm, or whether they reused the same bags over and over again.

“Detour up ahead, Mrs. M.,” Jonathan said over his shoulder.

“Why?”

“Explosion.” He pointed out the windshield, and Lily saw an oily sheen of flame through the rain, perhaps a mile ahead. She’d read about this as well; sometimes criminals would climb up and plant explosives on the private highways, trying to block them off, to force people to take public routes. Just one of many constant dangers in traveling outside the wall, but so long as Jonathan wasn’t concerned, Lily wasn’t either. Greg had hired Jonathan for Lily three years ago, in the week before their wedding. Jonathan was a good bodyguard, but an even better driver; during his service in the Oil Wars, he’d been in charge of security for supply caravans, and he seemed to know the entire eastern seaboard’s roadways like the back of his hand. He guided the car through the high streets, which now ran so flush against the buildings that Lily could only glimpse a thin line of darkness over the edge. She pictured the people beneath her, imagining them as rats that scuttled through the gloom. Embeth, a high school friend of Lily’s, had come to New York after graduation to be a nanny, but a few years ago Lily could have sworn she had seen Embeth on a corner in lower Manhattan, dressed in rags, skin grimy and hair looking as though she hadn’t washed it in years. Just a brief glimpse through a car window and then gone.

As they passed over the crumbling remains of Rockefeller Center, Lily saw that someone had lasered blue words onto the pavement where the old fountain used to be, the graffiti so large that it was visible from the roadway above.

THE BETTER WORLD

That was the slogan of the Blue Horizon, the separatist group, but no one seemed to know exactly what it meant. Most of the Blue Horizon’s activities seemed to involve blowing things up or hacking into various government systems to cause trouble. Last year, when the separatists had presented Congress with a request to secede, Lily had been all for it, but Greg told her no; there was too much money at stake, too many customers and debtors to lose. Lily, who thought only of the reduction in violent crime, considered it a good trade, but she left it alone. That had been a stressful time for Greg at work; he was constantly on edge, drinking too much. He had never really relaxed until the petition failed.

Jonathan took a smooth left into the basement of the Plymouth Center and stopped at the Security barrier. Two men with guns in their hands approached the car, and Jonathan presented his pass.

“Mrs. Mayhew, appointment to see Dr. Davis on the fiftieth floor.”

The guard peered into the back of the car. “Open her window.”

Jonathan rolled down Lily’s window and she leaned forward, presenting her left shoulder. The guard had a cheap portable scanner; he had to wave it over Lily’s shoulder several times before her tag registered with a small, cricketlike beep.

“Thank you, Mrs. Mayhew,” the guard said, and gave her a smile with no warmth. He went up to scan Jonathan, and Lily settled back into the leather seat as the car proceeded smoothly into the garage.

The body scanner beside the elevator buzzed loudly as Lily went through; she’d forgotten to take off her watch. It was a big, chunky thing, nearly solid silver with a diamond face, and her friends always eyed it covetously when she wore it to the club. To Lily, a watch was a watch, but like so many things Greg had bought her, she wore it because she was expected to. As soon as she made it through the gate, she stuffed the watch into her purse.

The elevator beeped as it read the implant in her shoulder. The tag would show her location, if Greg should check, but what of that? To the outward eye, Dr. Davis was a perfectly respectable doctor, and many wealthy women consulted him for their fertility troubles. Still, Lily felt a guilty blush spreading over her cheeks. She always got caught when she lied, and she had never been able to keep a secret. Only this one, the biggest secret of all, and the longer she kept it, the more frightened she became. If Greg found out . . .

But she didn’t let her thoughts go too far down that road. If she did, she would turn around and run out of the building, and she couldn’t afford to do that. She took a deep breath, then a few more, until her pulse slowed and her nerve came back. When the elevator doors opened, she turned left and went down a long hallway carpeted with deep, rich green. She passed many doors advertising various specialty doctors: dermatologists, orthodontists, cosmetic surgeons. Dr. Davis’s was the last door on the right, a thick walnut slab that looked exactly as it should, with a brass nameplate that advertised “Anthony Davis, M.D., Fertility Specialist.” Lily place her thumb against the pad and waited a few seconds, looking up at the pinhole camera fixed to the side of the door, until the tiny red light turned green and the lock clicked.

The waiting room was crammed with women. Nearly all of them were like Lily, white and well dressed, holding high-quality handbags. But a few were clearly from the streets, betrayed by their hair and clothing, and Lily wondered how they had gotten past Security. One of them, a Hispanic woman, perhaps five or six months pregnant, had squashed herself into a chair just beside the door. She was gasping for breath, clutching the arms of the chair, her face pale and frightened. When Lily looked down, she saw that the lap of the woman’s jeans was soaked with blood.

Two nurses came hurrying out of the back office with a wheelchair and helped the woman slide into it. She clasped her swollen belly with both hands, as though trying to hold something in. Lily saw tears trickling from the corners of her eyes, and then the nurses pushed her through the door, to the examining rooms beyond.

“Can I help you?”

Lily turned to the receptionist, a young brunette with an impersonal smile.

“Lily Mayhew. I have an appointment.”

“Wait, please, until we call you.”

There were no seats left but the newly vacated chair, its light green cushion soaked with blood. Lily couldn’t bring herself to sit there, so she leaned against the wall, stealing covert glances at the people around her. A woman and a teenage girl, clearly mother and daughter, sat in two nearby chairs. The girl was anxious, her mother was not, and Lily read their dynamic easily. She had felt the same way the first time Mom had brought her to this office, understanding that it was a rite of passage, but also that it had to be kept secret, that what went on here was a crime. Lily hated this appointment, hated this office, the necessity of it, but at the same time she was utterly grateful for this place, that there were people who didn’t fear Greg, all the Gregs of this world.

But it was a mistake to think of Greg now; Lily felt as though he were looking over her shoulder, and the idea made her forehead break out in sweat. Each year she came here made it more likely that she would get caught, if not by Security then by Greg himself. Greg wanted children in the same way he had wanted a new BMW, the same way he wanted Lily to wear her diamond-studded watch. Greg wanted children so he could show them off to the world. All of their friends had at least two children already, some even three or four, and the wives gave Lily pitying looks at the club, at parties. These looks didn’t hurt at all, but Lily had to pretend that they did. A few times she had even drummed up some tears, small tantrums for Greg’s benefit, solid evidence of sorrow over her failure as a wife. Once upon a time Lily had wanted children, but that seemed very distant now, an entire lifetime that had happened to someone else. Greg was the one who had suggested that Lily go to a fertility clinic, not knowing she’d been coming to Dr. Davis for years, not knowing that he had just made things that much easier for her to hide in plain sight.

After an eternity, Dr. Anna leaned out the glass door and called Lily’s name. She led Lily into an office and drew the curtain, leaving her with the inevitable paper gown. Dr. Anna was Dr. Davis’s wife, a woman well into her fifties. She was one of the few women doctors Lily had ever met. Lily had mostly been too young to understand the Frewell Laws; President Frewell’s term in office had begun when Lily was eight and ended when she was sixteen. But his laws had left their legacy, and medical schools rarely admitted women anymore. Lily, who could no more have let a strange man look between her legs than she could have gone outside naked, was grateful that there was a Dr. Anna at all, but Dr. Anna had the constantly irritated face of the old-time schoolmarm, and she always seemed annoyed at Lily for being there, for taking her away from something more important. She asked Lily the routine questions, making notes on her clipboard, while Lily worked at tucking the paper gown more tightly around her, trying to cover as much skin as possible.

“Do you need more pills?”

“Please.”

“A whole year’s worth?”

“Yes.”

“How will you pay?”

Lily dug inside her purse and produced two thousand dollars in cash. Greg had given it to her for shopping last weekend, and Lily had poked the money through a hole in the lining of her purse, then lied and said she’d bought herself a pair of shoes. The hole in her purse had come in handy several times in the past year, when Greg had taken to making unscheduled inspections of her things. She had no idea what he was looking for; when he found nothing, he would give Lily an odd, cheated look, the look of the store clerk who had failed to catch someone shoplifting. The inspections were unsettling, but that look worried Lily even more.

Dr. Anna took the cash and slipped it into her pocket, and then they went on to the messy, unpleasant business of the exam itself, which Lily endured by gritting her teeth, staring at the cheap plaster tiles on the ceiling, and thinking of the nursery. She and Greg had no children, but Lily had furnished the nursery just after their marriage, back when things were different. The nursery was the only place in their house that belonged entirely to Lily, where she could really be alone. Greg needed people around him, needed someone to respond to him. Nowhere in the house was safe; he might come barging into any room at any time without knocking, seeking attention. But he never came into the nursery.

When Dr. Anna had sent out all of the various tools and swabs, she told Lily, “The receptionist will tell you your test results, and she’ll have your pills together. Just give her your name.”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Anna went for the door, but paused just before opening it and turned around, her schoolteacher’s face set in its default expression of pinched disapproval. “You know, it won’t ever get better on its own.”

“What won’t?”

“Him.” Dr. Anna’s eyes dropped to the ring on Lily’s finger. “Your husband.”

Lily clutched the hem of the paper gown more tightly between her fingers. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you do. I see over five hundred women a month in here. The bruises don’t lie.”

“I don’t—”

“Plus,” Dr. Anna continued, cutting Lily off, “you’re clearly a wealthy woman. There’s no reason you can’t get contraception closer to home. With black-market prices what they are these days, you could even get a dealer to deliver pills to your house. Unless, of course, you’re afraid your husband will find out.”

Lily shook her head, not wanting to hear any of this. Sometimes she thought that everything was almost fine, so long as it wasn’t brought out into the open.

“Your husband doesn’t own you.”

Lily looked up, suddenly furious, because Dr. Anna didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. That was all marriage meant: ownership. Lily had sold herself for someone to take care of her, to pay the bills and tell her what to do. Certainly there had been some buyer’s remorse along the way, but that was the proverbial pig in a poke, as Lily’s mother would have said. Mom and Dad hadn’t wanted her to marry Greg, but Lily had been so sure of what was best. Thinking of her parents, Lily felt a sudden, hopeless longing for her old room back at their house in Pennsylvania, for the twin bed and oak desk. The furniture had been plain, nowhere near as nice as the things Lily owned now. But her room had been her own. Even her parents didn’t come in without knocking first.

Lily’s eyes had watered; she wiped a quick hand across them, smearing her makeup. “You don’t know anything about it.”

Dr. Anna gave a mirthless chuckle. “This dynamic never changes, Mrs. Mayhew. Believe me, I know.”

“He’s only done it a few times,” Lily mumbled, knowing even as she spoke that it was a mistake to answer. Had she ever resented Dr. Anna’s clinical, impersonal manner? She longed to have it back now. “He’s been under a lot of pressure at work this year.”

“Your husband’s a powerful man?”

“Yes,” Lily replied automatically. It was always the first thing that popped into her head about Greg: that he was a powerful man. He worked for the Department of Defense, acting as a civilian liaison between the military men and the weapons contractors. His division oversaw supply for all of the military bases on the East Coast. He was six foot two and had played football in college. He had met the president. There was nowhere that Lily could escape to.

“Even so, there are places you can go, you know. Places you can hide.”

Lily shook her head, but there was no way to explain to Dr. Anna. Women did run sometimes, even in New Canaan; last year, Cath Alcott had just taken off one night, packed her three kids into the family Mercedes and disappeared. Security had found the car, abandoned in Massachusetts, but so far as Lily knew, they never found Cath. John Alcott, a big, quiet man who had always made Lily feel slightly uneasy, had hired a private firm to find his wife, but it hadn’t helped. They couldn’t even trace her tag. Cath had done the impossible: she had taken her children and gotten away clean.

But Lily would never be able to disappear, even without children in tow. Where would she live? How would she eat? All of the money was in Greg’s name; the big banks wouldn’t open individual accounts for married women anymore. Even if Lily had known people who could create a new identity for her—she didn’t—she had no skills. She had graduated college with English credentials. No one would hire her, not even to clean houses. Lily closed her eyes and saw the homeless of Manhattan in their shapeless garbage bags, living in clusters beneath the roadways, fighting for scraps. Even if she made it so far, she wouldn’t last a day in that world.

“Well, think it over,” Dr. Anna told her, face severe again. “It’s never too late.”

Reaching into her pocket, she produced a card and, with a questioning glance at Lily, tucked it into Lily’s purse where it sat on the chair. Then she slipped out, closing the door behind her.

Lily slithered down off the paper-covered exam table, carefully shedding her paper gown so that it didn’t rip; her parents’ waste-not-want-not upbringing still ruled her sometimes, even in such silly matters as a paper gown that couldn’t be reused. Looking down at herself, she saw purple finger-shaped bruises on her upper arms from where Greg had grabbed her on Tuesday. The rest of the cuts and bruises from the bad night almost a month ago had finally healed, but these new marks meant that she couldn’t wear anything sleeveless for a while, and Greg liked her in sleeveless tops.

She began to put on the rest of her clothes, trying not to look down at the rest of her body. Greg had been under a lot of stress; that, at least, hadn’t been a lie, and he had been sorry afterward. But “a few times” was stretching it. There had been six times so far, and Lily could remember each of them in detail. She could lie to Dr. Anna, but there was no use varnishing the truth inside her own head. Greg was getting worse.

When Lily exited the elevator, she found several members of Security clustered around a well-dressed man at the scanner. The man looked respectable enough to Lily’s eye, with just a touch of grey in his hair and a very smart navy suit. But the guards hustled him behind the desk, through a blank white door with “Security” painted on it in black letters. All sound ceased when they closed the door behind them.

Under the watchful eyes of the two remaining guards, Lily moved toward the waiting Lexus. Terrible memory had awoken: Maddy’s blonde pigtails, disappearing through the doors. Sometimes there were whole months when Lily managed not to think of Maddy, and then she would see something: a woman being escorted from her car, Security knocking on someone’s door, even the faintest glimpse in the distance of one of the sprawling detention centers that lay along I-80. Maddy was gone, but even the tiniest thing could bring her back. Lily jerked the car door open angrily, forcing the image away. This little expedition was hard enough; she didn’t need Maddy along for the ride.

“Back home, Mrs. M.?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes, please,” Lily replied, feeling the same odd, amalgamated emotions the word always evoked in her: half comfort and half revulsion. “Home.”

After Jonathan dropped her off, Lily went right to the nursery. Greg wasn’t home yet and the house was empty, silent but for the humming of circuits inside its walls. Jonathan was supposed to stay with Lily at all times, even when she was at home, but she heard the engine gun outside and knew that he had left again. He often ran his own errands on the clock, sometimes at odd hours, but Lily had never mentioned this to Greg. She never felt unsafe by herself, not here in New Canaan. The walls around the city were twenty feet high and topped with electrified fencing. There was never any crime . . . or at least, Lily amended to herself, any violent crime. The city was full of law-abiding thieves.

The nursery was a spacious, airy room on the ground floor. Lily had chosen this room because it was beside the kitchen, but even more so because the nursery opened onto a small brick patio that overlooked the backyard. Lily had liked the idea of being able to bring a baby outside to feed it in the shade of the elms. Three years ago, but it seemed like a hundred, and now Greg’s baby was something to avoid having at all costs.

When no children came, the room had become Lily’s by default. Greg wasn’t the sort of man who would ever enter the nursery anyway; his father, whom Lily had loathed, had raised Greg with very definite ideas of what was masculine and what wasn’t, and a room full of stuffed animals didn’t make the cut. The fact that Lily remained childless only made the nursery less inviting to him, and despite the toys strewn all over the place, the room had more or less taken on the air of a Victorian lady’s parlor: a quiet, sedate space where men never entered. Sometimes when Lily had friends over, they would have coffee in here, but it was always the women, never the men.

Of course, the house’s surveillance system was set up so that Greg could watch her in the nursery, even while he was at work. But Lily had taken care of that wrinkle early on by recording several days’ worth of innocuous footage—Lily knitting, napping, even staring longingly into the crib, as well as plenty of footage of the empty room—and looping it within the feed. Greg was not particularly computer-literate; in his parents’ house, everything had always been done for him by the nanny, the tutor, the bodyguards. Now, at work, he had a secretary who handled his entire life. But Lily knew something about computers, at least enough to alter the surveillance system. Maddy had been something of a hacker; in the last two years before she disappeared—was taken, Lily’s mind amended; this was a fact she was never allowed to forget inside her own head—Maddy had more or less lived in her room with the door closed, spending long hours on the computer. But sometimes, during weeks when Lily and Maddy were getting along, Maddy would show her interesting things, and this was one of them: how to cut into surveillance footage. If Security ever decided to monitor their surveillance system, Lily would need a new trick, but fortunately Greg’s job as a military liaison meant that he and Lily were respectable citizens, and so their house feeds were supposedly closed. Lily had a sneaking suspicion—confirmed the longer she got away with it—that Greg didn’t like to look at the nursery, not even on a monitor. If he did check up on her in this room, it was probably limited to a brief glance, certainly not long enough to connect anything he saw with earlier footage. So far, it had worked fine. Her time in the nursery belonged to her and no one else. Even in the past year, as Greg grew increasingly invasive of her few remaining privacies, this place was still safe.

Lily closed the door behind her and took the pills over to the secret place beneath the corner tile. Even if Greg ever did decide to come in here, Lily didn’t think he would be able to spot the loose tile, which lay perfectly flush with the wall. Over the years Lily had hidden plenty of contraband here: cash, painkillers, old paperback books. But nothing was as important as the pills, which Lily arranged in neat, careful stacks of three boxes each beneath the tile. She stared down at them, wondering for the hundredth time why she was so different from all of her friends, why she didn’t want to be a mother. Being childless was a failure; she heard this message constantly, from her friends, from the minister, from the government bulletins online (the tone of these had grown increasingly panicked in the past ten years, as the ratio of poor to rich had quadrupled). There were even tax incentives now, deductions for people above a certain income level who had multiple children. To the outward eye, Lily had failed at her most important task, but she could only dissemble the shame that her friends would have felt. Inside, she thanked God for the pills. She wasn’t ready to have children, and certainly not with Greg, not when he got worse all the time. The night last week . . . Lily had tried not to think of it since, but now the bubble in her mind popped, and all at once, for the first time, Lily found herself seriously considering a new life.

Considering escape.

Even Lily knew that the world was full of dark places to hide. She thought again of Cath Alcott, who had bundled her children into a car and simply vanished. Had Cath had a plan? Had she joined the separatists? Or had she reestablished herself somewhere as an ordinary citizen, with a new name and a new face? There were forgers and surgeons out there who would do such work.

But I have no money.

This was the real stumbling block. Money bought options, the ability to disappear. Lily could ask her mother for help, but Mom didn’t really have any money either; when Dad died, his company claimed he had breached his employment contract, and so there was no pension. Mom barely had enough to pay the property taxes on the house. But even if Mom had been rich, she didn’t want to hear about Lily’s problems with Greg. As far as Mom was concerned, Lily had made her own bed. She had plenty of friends in New Canaan, but no real friends. There was no one she could trust, no one who would help her with something like this, and she suddenly found herself hating Dr. Anna, hating her utterly for trying to upset the status quo. Lily didn’t need to peek over the horizon at another, better world that was far beyond her reach. This, right here, was the best possible outcome: to get her pills every year and not have to bring a child into this house.

“Lil!”

She started guiltily. Greg was home. The front door panel on the wall was blinking brightly, but she hadn’t noticed.

“Lil! Where are you?”

She shoved the tile back into position and stood up, hastily smoothing her skirt down over her hips. On her way out, she tapped the panel on the wall and was rewarded with the quiet, somehow comforting whirring of the house beginning to make dinner as she went down the stairs.

Greg had gone straight to the bar. This was another thing Lily had noticed lately: Greg used to drink only when something good had happened at work, but now it seemed to be every night, and his intake was increasing. They didn’t all turn into bad nights for Lily, but she couldn’t help noticing the correlation, the way Greg immediately went for the booze every night now, the way he drank as though he were trying to escape from something.

“How was your appointment?”

“Good. Dr. Davis said it’s looking better.”

“What’s looking better?” He came toward her, tumbler in one hand, and wrapped an arm around her waist.

“He thinks my body will respond well to something called Demiprene. It stimulates my ovaries.”

“To release eggs?”

“Yes.” The lies flowed glibly, well rehearsed, from Lily’s mouth. She had done her research two years ago, knowing that the time would come when Greg would demand real information about what the hell was wrong with her reproductive system. But his questions grew more pointed all the time, and Lily had begun to have the uneasy feeling that he was doing his own research now.

“I got good news today,” Greg remarked, and she relaxed a bit; there would be no real interrogation tonight.

“Really?”

“Ted said—well, hinted—that there’s a Senior Liaison spot opening up next year. Sam Ellis is retiring. Ted says I’m in line for it.”

“That’s good.”

Greg nodded, but his hands were already pouring another glass of scotch. Lily saw that something was troubling him, badly. “What’s wrong?”

“Ted said I was in line for the job, but he made a crack when I was leaving. I think he meant it as a joke, but—”

“What was it?” Lily asked, but that was merely routine, the routine of comforting her husband at the end of the day. She already knew.

Greg’s cheeks had stained a dull brick red. “He said that if it wasn’t for my little problem, I would have been an SL last year.”

“He was joking.”

“The first couple of times, maybe. Now I don’t think so.”

Lily took his hand, trying to project more sympathy than she felt. Greg was under enormous pressure, certainly, but it was a pressure with which Lily couldn’t identify. She had never been ambitious. She didn’t care whether Greg made senior anything, so long as they had a roof over their heads and a decent life. Other wives at the club took great pride in their husbands’ advancements, as though they were all still in high school, where dating the starting quarterback meant you were somehow superior to every other girl in your class. But not Lily. Greg had a good job, and his superiors liked him. He was in no danger of being fired. Who gave a fuck if he became the youngest Senior Liaison in the history of the Pentagon?

Greg does, she reminded herself. But that fact no longer carried the weight it once had. It would have been much easier to cheer for Greg if he had shown some reciprocal concern for her. Early in their marriage things had been better; Greg had treated her like a separate person once. But the tone had shifted, and now all of Lily’s actions were evaluated in terms of the main chance, as though she were merely a booster engine on Greg’s rocket. These little stories from the office were always the same, and while Greg was certainly looking for reassurance, he was also looking to goad. The message was clear: Lily’s shriveled uterus was impeding his career path. The possibility that Greg’s testicles might be an issue had never even come up. Lily felt anger climbing up the back of her throat, but then Greg leaned forward, elbows on the bar, burying his head in his hands. He wasn’t crying, not Greg; his hateful father had smacked that out of him long before Lily had ever come on the scene. But this was as close as he ever got.

“Greg.” She bit her lip, trying to gather courage. She had broached this topic twice in the first year of their marriage and Greg had shut her down each time, but now it seemed like a moment when he might actually be able to listen. Lily reached out and took his hand. “Greg, you know, maybe it’s okay.”

He raised his head, looking at her as though he’d never seen her before. “What?”

“Lots of people don’t have children. Maybe it’s not the end of the world.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve always wanted kids.”

No I haven’t! She bit back the words, but they continued as a kind of scream deep in her mind. You assumed I did! We never discussed it! You never even asked!

Lily swallowed, trying to get her anger under control. This was her husband, and once they had been able to talk honestly, sometimes even for hours on end. She reached out and touched Greg’s hair, took a deep breath, and continued. “Greg, if we never had kids, I would be okay with it.”

He wrapped his arms around her with an incredulous chuckle. “You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not.” She pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Greg, we’d be fine.”

He reared back, his eyes filling with hurt. “You think I’m infertile, don’t you?”

“No, of course not—”

He grabbed her shoulders, clenched fingers digging into the soft skin just above her collarbone. Lily could almost feel the bruises starting. “I’m not.”

“I know,” Lily whispered, looking away. Already she could sense herself shrinking inward, her personality diving behind any cover it could find. What point was there in pressing onward, when it only made Greg worse?

He shook her, and Lily felt her teeth rattle. “What?”

“I know you’re not infertile. You’re right. It’s important.”

He watched her narrowly for a moment longer, then smiled, good humor easing back into his face. “Absolutely, Lil. And I’ve had an idea about what we can do.”

“What’s that?”

He shook his head, smiling, the barely hidden grin of a boy who knows he’s been naughty. “I have to look into it first, make sure it’s viable.”

Lily had no idea what he was considering, but she didn’t like that grin. It reminded her of a time in college when Greg’s frat had been under investigation for assaulting a pledge. Despite Princeton’s best efforts, the news had trickled all over the nearby campuses. When Lily asked Greg about it, he claimed that he’d had nothing to do with it, but the same little gleam had been in his eyes then. The younger Lily just hadn’t been smart enough to read the forecast.

“Dr. Davis says the odds are still very good—”

“Dr. Davis is taking too long.”

Lily stood still, almost frozen, as he wrapped his arms around her again. “Think how wonderful it would be if we had a baby, Lil. You’d be such a good mother.”

Lily nodded, though her throat felt as if there was a tennis ball in there. She thought of being pregnant, having Greg’s baby inside her, and a ripple of revulsion traveled just beneath her skin, making her shiver, making Greg clutch her tighter.

“Lil? Say you love me.”

“I love you,” Lily replied, and he kissed her neck, his hand moving to her breast. Lily had to force herself to hold still and not recoil. She didn’t understand how words that sounded so automatic to her own ears could be so pleasing to Greg. Maybe all he really needed was the structure of things. Maybe quality was a different consideration, too graded for him.

I liked this man once, Lily thought. And she had, when they were both young and in college and Lily didn’t know her ass from her elbow, when Greg would buy her nice things and Lily would mistake that for love. Greg said he loved her, but Greg’s definition of that word had morphed into something dark and invasive. Lily’s friend Sarah said love was different in every marriage, but Sarah had been sporting her own black eye that day, and she didn’t believe her own platitudes any more than Lily did.

He doesn’t know, her mind whispered. He still doesn’t know about the pills.

But that was no longer a comfort. Lily had known that she couldn’t get away with the pills forever, but for a long time they had seemed to provide an almost magical protection, the same talismanic quality that she found in her nursery. Even the bad nights had been easier to get through, knowing that some part of her was ultimately safe, that Greg would not have his way everywhere. But she knew that grin, knew it very well. Greg had gotten away with nearly everything in his life, usually with his father’s enthusiastic approval, and now he was once again up to no good. Whatever he was planning, it seemed certain that the status quo wouldn’t hold. Greg was groping around under her dress now, and Lily fought not to move, not to push him away. She thought of saying no—she had been thinking of it for months now—but that no would open up an entire conversation that she wasn’t ready to have yet . . . what would she say, when he asked why? She closed her eyes and pictured her nursery, that quiet space where there was no intrusion, no violation, no—

Kelsea blinked and found herself in the blessedly familiar space of her library. She was standing in front of her bookshelves with Pen beside her, less than a foot away. For a moment the world wavered, but then she saw all of the books, Carlin’s books, and felt reality solidify around her, the Queen’s Wing settling back in with a solid thud in her mind.

“Lady? Are you all right?”

She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. A hissing sound came from the fireplace in the corner, making her jump, but it was only the fire, dying out in the early hours of the morning.

“I was dreaming,” Kelsea whispered. “I was someone else.”

But dreaming was the wrong word. Kelsea could still feel the man’s hands digging into her shoulders, laying the groundwork for bruises. She could remember each thought that had passed through the woman’s head.

“How did we get here?” she asked Pen.

“You’ve been wandering the wing for the better part of three hours, Lady.”

Three hours! Kelsea swayed slightly, her hand tightening on the edge of the bookshelf. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Your eyes were open, Lady, but you couldn’t see or hear us. Andalie said not to touch you, said it’s bad luck to lay hands on a sleepwalker. But I’ve been with you, to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself.”

Kelsea began to protest that she hadn’t been sleepwalking, but then closed her mouth. Something nagged at her memory, something that would shed light. The woman in the Almont! Kelsea had never even learned her name, but six weeks ago she had watched, through the woman’s eyes, as Thorne took her two children. That had not been a dream either; it had been too clear, too sharp. But what Kelsea had just experienced was even sharper. She knew this woman, knew the terrain inside her head as well as that inside her own. Her name was Lily Mayhew, she lived in pre-Crossing America, she was married to a wretch. Lily was no figment of Kelsea’s imagination. Even now, Kelsea was able to picture a whole host of sights she had never seen, wonders lost centuries before in the Crossing: cars, skyscrapers, guns, computers, freeways. And she could now see chronology, the timing of political developments that had always eluded pre-Crossing historians like Carlin, who had no written record to work with. Carlin had known that one of the biggest factors precipitating the Crossing was socioeconomic disparity, but thanks to Lily, Kelsea now saw that the problem had been much uglier. America had descended into true plutocracy. The gap between rich and poor had indeed been steadily widening since the late twentieth century, and by the time Lily was born—2058, Kelsea’s mind produced the year with no trouble at all—more than half of America was unemployed. Corporations had begun to hoard the dwindling supplies of food for sale on the black market. With most of the population either homeless or in unrecoverable debt, desperation and apathy had combined to allow the election of a man named Arthur Frewell . . . and that was a name that Kelsea had heard before, many times, from Carlin, who spoke of President Frewell and his Emergency Powers Act in the same tones she used for Hiroshima or the Holocaust.

“Lady, are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Pen. Let me think.” Memory had suddenly assaulted Kelsea: sitting in the library, five or six years ago, while Carlin’s voice echoed waspishly against the walls.

“The Emergency Powers Act! A lesson in creative naming! Honest legislation would have simply called itself martial law and been done with it. Remember this, too, Kelsea: the day you declare martial law is the day you’ve lost the game of government. You may as well simply take off your crown and sneak away into the night.”

According to Carlin, the Emergency Powers Act had been created to deal with a growing—and very real—threat of domestic terrorism. As the economic divide widened, separatist movements proliferated across America. The better world . . . Kelsea had seen that in her vision, blue letters more than thirty feet tall. But what did it mean? She wanted so badly to know. To see. She looked down at her two necklaces, expecting to see the stones shining brightly, as they had when she awoke from that terrible vision in the Almont. But they were dark. The last time she remembered seeing them illuminated had been that night in the Argive Pass when she had brought the flood. For the first time, Kelsea wondered if it was possible that the jewels had somehow burned out. They had worked a great and extraordinary miracle in the Argive, but it seemed to have drained everything from them. Perhaps they were no more than ordinary jewels now. The idea brought relief, followed quickly by fear. The Mort were massing on the border, and any weapon would help, even one as inconsistent and unpredictable as her two jewels. They could not burn out.

“You should go to bed, Lady,” Pen told her.

Kelsea nodded slowly, still turning the extraordinary vision over in her mind. Out of habit, she ran a hand over the row of books, taking comfort in their solidity. Sleepwalking or not, she was not surprised that this was where she’d ended up. Whenever she had a problem to consider, she invariably found herself in the library, for it was easier to think when she was surrounded by books. The clean, alphabetized rows provided something to stare at and consider while her mind wandered away. Carlin, too, had used her library as both solace and refuge, and Kelsea thought Carlin would be pleased that she found the same comfort here. Pinpricks of tears stung her eyes, but she turned away from the bookshelf and led Pen out of the library.

Andalie was waiting for Kelsea in her chamber, though the clock showed that it was well after three in the morning. Her youngest daughter, Glee, was asleep in her arms.

“Andalie, it’s late. You should have gone to bed.”

“I was awake anyway, Lady. My Glee has been sleepwalking again.”

“Ah.” Kelsea slipped off her shoes. “A cunning sleepwalker, I hear. Mace says he found her wandering in the Guard quarters last week.”

“The Mace says many things, Lady.”

Kelsea raised her eyebrows. The tone had been judgmental, but she could not interpret the remark. “Well, I don’t need help tonight. You should go to bed.”

Andalie nodded and left, carrying her small daughter with her. Once she was gone, Pen bowed and said, “Good night, Lady.”

“You don’t have to bow to me, Pen.”

Humor sparked in Pen’s eyes, but he said nothing, only bowed again before retreating into his anteroom and drawing the curtain.

Kelsea took off her dress and tossed it into the clothes hamper. She was glad that Andalie had gone so easily. Sometimes Andalie seemed to feel that it was her duty to help Kelsea get undressed. But Kelsea didn’t think she would ever be comfortable being naked in front of others. Andalie had hung a full-length mirror on the wall beside Kelsea’s dresser, but if she was trying to quietly cure Kelsea of her physical shyness, she had picked the wrong tack. Even this simple device created myriad challenges: Kelsea wanted to look in the mirror, but she didn’t want to, and she always ended up looking, and then hated herself. Her reflection did not please her, especially since moving into the Queen’s Wing, where it seemed she was surrounded by beautiful women. But even stronger was distaste for her mother, Queen Elyssa, who had reportedly spent half of her life preening in front of the glass. So Kelsea had made a compromise: whenever she passed the mirror, she would glance at herself quickly, just long enough to determine that her hair was all right and that she hadn’t wiped ink on her face during the day. Anything more than a peek would be vanity.

Now, catching sight of herself in the mirror, Kelsea froze.

She had dropped weight.

This seemed impossible, for Kelsea was even less active now than when she had first come to the Keep. There was too much to do every day, and most of it involved sitting, either on her throne or at her desk in the library. She hadn’t exercised in weeks, and all of her plans to eat less, which seemed so attainable in the morning, were inevitably wrecked by nightfall. But she could not deny what she was seeing now. Her thick legs had slimmed down, and her hipbones were more pronounced. Her stomach, which had always been a special source of embarrassment due to the dimpling that showed just above her abdomen, had retreated to only a slight, rounded protrusion. Kelsea tiptoed closer to the mirror, peering at her arms. They, too, seemed thinner. The thick meat had disappeared from her biceps, and now they tapered neatly down to her forearms. But when had all of this happened? Less than a week ago, certainly, for she had peeked into the mirror before her last meeting with Hall and seen none of these changes. Staring at her face, Kelsea got a nasty shock, for it seemed that something was different there, too . . . but a moment later she realized that it had been only a trick of the firelight.

What’s wrong with me?

Should she ask Mace to get the doctor? She shrank from the idea. Mace didn’t think anyone needed a doctor unless he was bleeding to death, and the Mort doctor favored by Coryn was wildly expensive. Was Kelsea really going to demand him now, simply because she had lost some weight? She wasn’t wounded or bleeding. She felt fine. She could afford to watch and wait, and if anything else happened, then she would tell Mace or Pen. She had been under a great deal of stress lately, after all.

The fire snapped behind her, and Kelsea whirled around. For a moment she was certain that someone was standing in front of the fireplace, watching her. But there was nothing, only shadows. Despite the fire’s warmth, her chamber suddenly seemed cold; after a final, uneasy look in the mirror, Kelsea put on her nightgown and climbed into bed. She blew out her candle, then dug her feet deep into the warm pile of blankets, pulling the covers all the way up to cover her cold nose. She tried to relax, but behind her closed eyes, unbidden, came the same image that had tormented her for weeks now: the Mort army, a poisonous black tide that poured down over the Border Hills into the Almont, leaving devastation behind. The Mort had not entered the Tear, not yet, but they would. Mace and Arliss had been stocking for siege and building reinforcements around the city, but unlike Bermond, Kelsea didn’t deceive herself; when the Mort really came for the city and put all of their efforts into breaching the walls, no amount of last-minute fortification would keep them out. Her mind turned again to Lily Mayhew, who lived in a town surrounded by walls. There must be some lesson in Lily’s life, something helpful . . . but nothing came.

Kelsea rolled onto her back, staring into the darkness. Her mother had faced the same no-win scenario, and ended up selling out the Tearling. Kelsea hated her for it, yes, but what could she do differently? She clutched her sapphires, willing them to give her answers, but they were silent, imparting only a feeling of doomed certainty: Kelsea had judged her mother harshly, and this was the inevitable punishment, to be dealt the same hand.

I have no solutions, Kelsea thought, curling up into a ball. And if I can think of nothing, then I’m no better than she was.

The miners were a rough lot. They had obviously bathed before coming to the Keep, but nevertheless dirt seemed to have grimed its way into their skins, giving them a swarthy appearance. They were independent miners, and this in itself was something of a rarity; most of the miners in the Tearling belonged to guilds, for combination was the only way they could compete against the Mort. One of the miners was a woman, tall and blonde, though she was as grimy as the rest, and wore a beaten green hat that looked as though it had been through a hurricane. Kelsea, who hadn’t known that mining crews accepted women, watched her with interest, but the woman returned her gaze with hostility.

“Majesty, we’re just out of the Fairwitch,” announced Bennett, the foreman. “We’ve been mining in the foothills for nearly a month.”

Kelsea nodded, wishing that she hadn’t worn such a thick wool dress. Summer had come, warm and somnolent, but someone had lit a fire anyway. She hated holding audience these days, for it seemed designed to take her attention away from more pressing problems: the Mort and the refugees. The first wave of border villagers would already be making their way across the Almont, but they were only a fraction of what was coming. Five hundred thousand extra people, at least . . . where would New London put them all?

“We were originally a crew of fifteen, Majesty,” Bennett continued, and Kelsea tried to keep her attention on him, stifling a yawn.

“Where are the rest?”

“Gone, Lady, in the night. We kept a pretty close camp, even at first, but . . . well, you know, a man has to take a piss sometimes. Men would leave the camp in the night, and sometimes they just didn’t come back.”

“And why have you come to tell me this?”

Bennett began to reply, but the female miner, who had the air of a second-in-command, grabbed his arm, muttering frantically into his ear. The exchange quickly became a protracted argument, punctuated by grunts and hissing. Kelsea was content to watch. Father Tyler stood closer to the miners than the rest of them; he could probably hear what was being said. She had begun to allow the priest to attend her audiences on occasion, and he had already provided several valuable insights. He enjoyed the audiences, said it was like watching history in action. He also knew how to keep his mouth shut, so much so that he had reportedly incurred the wrath of the new Holy Father, who didn’t feel that Father Tyler was providing him with enough information. Kelsea didn’t understand what held Father Tyler’s tongue, but attendance here seemed like a fair reward.

“Majesty.” Bennett finally broke free, though his companion glared at him as he spoke. “We found something in the Fairwitch.”

“Yes?”

Bennett nudged the woman, who gave him a disgusted look but pulled a small black pouch from the pocket of her cloak. Kelsea’s guard tightened automatically, doubling up in a line in front of Pen. Something winked blue as Bennett held it up in the torchlight.

“What is that?”

“Sapphire, Majesty, unless I miss my guess. We found a good-size vein.”

Now Kelsea understood the argument. “I assure you, your find is your own. We may try to buy it from you at a fair price, but on my word, there will be no seizure.”

The words had the desired effect; all of the miners seemed to relax at once. Even Bennett’s second-in-command calmed down, her brow smoothing as she doffed her green hat.

“May we inspect your find?”

Bennett looked back to his miners, who gave grudging nods. He moved forward a few feet and held the jewel out to Kibb, who took it and brought it to Kelsea.

She held up one of her own sapphires to inspect them side by side. Bennett’s jewel was rough, chipped directly from the vein, and had seen no polishing, but it was also enormous, almost the size of Kelsea’s palm, and there was no mistaking the quality of the stone. She waited a moment, struck by a ridiculous hope that the new sapphires would react to her jewels, wake them up somehow. But nothing happened.

“Lazarus?”

“Looks the same stone to me. But what of it?”

“You say you found a lot of this stuff, Bennett?”

“Yes, Majesty. We had to dig deep for the vein in the foothills, but I would guess it’s shallower up in the Fairwitch proper. We just didn’t dare go up there after . . . after Tober.”

“What happened to Tober?”

“Gone, Majesty.”

“He deserted?”

“To where?” an old miner in the back asked scornfully. “We had all the supplies.”

“Well, what do you think happened then?”

“I don’t rightly know. But we heard noises out there in the night sometimes, like some big animal.”

“Only some of us heard it, Lady,” Bennett cut in, glaring at the old miner. “Out in the woods and away up in the higher Fairwitch. It was a big thing, but it moved too stealthy to be an ordinary animal. It took Tober, we’re sure of it.”

“Why?”

“We found his clothing, Lady, and his boots, a few days later, at the bottom of a ravine. They was all torn up and stained with blood.”

Arliss snorted quietly, a sound of disbelief.

“Three other men disappeared also, Lady, before we learned to tighten up our camp at night and work only in groups. We never found a trace of them.”

Kelsea turned the sapphire over in her hand. Arliss couldn’t know it, but this wasn’t the first such story she’d heard lately. Now that there was no shipment, the Census people stationed in every village were anxious to prove that they were still relevant, and information of all sorts poured in to Mace from every corner of the kingdom, including the tiny villages at the base of the Fairwitch. There had been three complaints of missing children in the foothills, as well as several men and women disappeared on the fells. No one had seen anything. Whatever the predator was, it came in the night and then simply vanished with its prey.

“Kibb, return this, please.” Kelsea handed him the stone and leaned back against the throne, thinking. “Lazarus, there have always been disappearances in the Fairwitch, yes?”

“Plenty of them, Lady. It’s a dangerous place, particularly for children. Scores of young ones disappeared before Tear families simply stopped settling in the mountains. The Mort more or less avoid their portion of the Fairwitch as well.”

“Majesty?” Father Tyler spoke up tentatively, raising his hand in the air, and Kelsea bit back a grin.

“Yes?”

“The old Holy Father believed the Fairwitch to be cursed.”

Mace rolled his eyes, but Father Tyler plowed on. “I don’t believe in curses, but I will tell you: in the late first century, the Arvath sent missionaries up into the Fairwitch, looking for those who’d drifted up there after the Crossing and settled in the mountains. None of the missionaries ever returned. This isn’t merely rumor; the report is part of the Arvath records.”

“Hasn’t anyone ever found any bodies?” Kelsea asked.

“Not to my knowledge. This is the first I’ve heard of any remains at all, blood or clothing.”

This made Kelsea even more uneasy. If people had disappeared, where were the bones? She turned back to the miners. “Bennett, do you plan to return to the Fairwitch?”

“We haven’t decided yet, Majesty. The sapphire is good quality, but the risk . . .”

Arliss tapped Kelsea’s shoulder and leaned forward to murmur in her ear. “The Cadarese value sapphire highly, Majesty. This stuff would be a good investment.”

Kelsea nodded, turning to the miners. “Your choice is your own. But should you go back, I’ll buy your haul at . . .”

She looked to Arliss.

“Fifty pounds per kilo.”

“Sixty pounds per kilo. I’ll also pay extra for any information on what stalks up there.”

“How much extra?”

“It depends on the quality of the information, doesn’t it?”

“Give us a moment, Majesty.”

Bennett led his crew to the far side of the room, where they gathered into a huddle. The old miner, on the outskirts, prepared to spit on the floor and was forestalled only when Wellmer grabbed his shoulder and gave him a forbidding shake of the head.

“Sixty pounds per kilo?” Arliss moaned in an undertone. “You’ll make no money that way.”

“I know you, Arliss. Your markup is ruthless.”

“The right price is whatever the market will bear, Queenie. The ruler of a poor kingdom should remember that.”

“Just do your job and make sure the taxes come in on time, old man.”

“Old man! You’ve never had a better tax collector. Ten thousand pounds this month alone.”

“Majesty!” Bennett stood at the foot of the dais. “It’s a fair deal. We’ll leave next Friday.”

“Good,” Kelsea replied. “Arliss, give them each five pounds’ bonus in advance.”

“Five pounds each, Queenie!”

“Goodwill, Arliss.”

“Much appreciated, Majesty,” said Bennett. The rest of the miners grunted agreement, crowding around Arliss with hungry expressions. Arliss pulled out his little book and bag of coins, grumbling the entire time, but Kelsea considered the money well spent. The Tearling didn’t have enough metal in the ground to support more than a handful of mining crews. If miners disappeared from the Tear, the kingdom would be forced to get the bulk of its metal from Mortmesne . . . which meant there would be no metal at all.

A loud yawn came from Kelsea’s left: Pen. He was very tired; his eyes had a dark, hollow look about them, and he seemed to have lost weight.

“Pen, are you ill?”

“No, Lady.”

For a moment, Kelsea was reminded of Mhurn, whose chronic exhaustion had hidden an addiction to morphia. She blinked and saw deep scarlet blood, dripping over her knife hand, then shook her head to clear it. Pen would never be so stupid. “Well, have you been sleeping enough?”

“Certainly.” Pen smiled, a private type of smile that had nothing to do with the conversation, and in that moment Kelsea became sure of something she’d only suspected: Pen had a woman somewhere. Two weekends a month, Mace took Pen’s place in the antechamber; Queen’s Guards didn’t usually get time off, but a close guard was a special matter, since he had no downtime. Mace was good company, but Kelsea could always sense Pen’s absence. She’d been wondering lately what he did in his spare time, and now, somehow, she knew.

A woman, Kelsea thought, a trifle bleakly. She could ask Mace about it—surely he would know—but then she cut that impulse off at the knees. It wasn’t her business, no matter how curious she was. She didn’t know why she felt so unhappy, for it wasn’t Pen she thought of at night. But he was always there, and she had grown to depend on him. She didn’t like the idea of him spending time with anyone else.

She’d been staring at Pen so long and so alertly that he straightened up in his chair now, looking alarmed. “What?”

“Nothing,” Kelsea muttered, ashamed of herself. “Get more sleep if you can.”

“Yes, Lady.”

Once the miners had received their coin, they bowed and followed Bennett away. The money had enlivened them, for they chattered like children as they headed for the doors. Kelsea leaned back in her chair and found a steaming mug of tea sitting on the table beside her.

“You’re a wonder, Andalie.”

“Not really, Lady. I’ve yet to see the moment when you don’t want tea.”

“Sir.” Kibb appeared in front of the throne, an envelope in his hand. “Colonel Hall’s latest report from the border.”

Mace took the envelope and offered it to Kelsea, who had just picked up her tea. “I don’t have hands. Just read it to me, Lazarus.”

Mace nodded stiffly, then began to open the envelope. Kelsea noticed small red spots blooming in his cheeks, and wondered if she should have said please. Mace stared at the message for a very long time.

“What is it?”

“Majesty!” Father Tyler jumped forward, so unexpectedly that several of Kelsea’s Guard moved forward to intercept him, and he backed off, hands in the air. “I’m sorry, I’d forgotten. I have a message from the Holy Father.”

“Can it wait?”

“No, Lady. The Holy Father wishes to have dinner with Your Majesty.”

“Ah.” Kelsea narrowed her eyes. “I thought he might have some complaints.”

“I wouldn’t know, Lady,” Father Tyler replied, but his eyes darted away from hers. “I’m only the messenger. But I wondered if the Mace and I might sort it out now, before I need to leave.”

Kelsea was not anxious to meet the new Holy Father, whose priests had already begun to give entire sermons on her shortcomings: her lack of faith; her socialist taxation policies; her early failure to get married and begin breeding an heir. “What if I don’t want to dine with him?”

“Lady.” Mace shook his head. “The Holy Father’s a bad enemy to have. And you may need the Arvath if it comes to siege.”

“For what?”

“Housing, Lady. It’s the second largest building in New London.”

He was right, Kelsea realized, though the idea of requesting assistance from God’s Church made her skin break out in gooseflesh. She put down her tea. “Fine. Give me that letter, Lazarus, and work it out with the good Father. Let’s have His Holiness in here as soon as possible.”

Mace gave her the paper and then turned to Father Tyler, who visibly quailed, backing away. Kelsea scanned the letter and then looked up, pleased. “We’ve scored a tactical victory on the Mort flats. The Mort camp is disbanded. Colonel Hall estimates their recovery time at two weeks.”

“Good news, Majesty,” Elston remarked.

“Not all good news,” Kelsea replied, reading further. “The Mort supply route remains intact. The cannons are undamaged.”

“Still, you’re playing for time,” Pen reminded her. “Delay is important.”

Playing for time. Kelsea looked around the room and saw, or fancied she saw, the same question in every face. When the time ran out, what then? There was no anxiety here; her Guard clearly expected her to produce another miracle, as she had in the Argive. Kelsea wished she could hide from them, from the calm trust in their eyes.

Mace finished up with Father Tyler and returned to his place beside the throne. The priest raised his hand in farewell to Kelsea, and she waved back as he headed off toward the doors.

“What’s next?” she asked Mace.

“A group of nobles is waiting outside to see you.”

Kelsea closed her eyes. “I hate nobles, Lazarus.”

“That’s why I thought it best to deal with them quickly, Lady.”

When the nobles entered, Kelsea was struck first by their clothing, ostentatious as ever. Now, in summer, there were no hats or gloves, but they all displayed a new fashion that Kelsea had seen before: what appeared to be gold and silver, melted down and allowed to run in rivulets across the fabric so that shirts and dresses seemed to be dripping with precious metal. To Kelsea’s eye, the effect was merely sloppy, but clearly they thought otherwise. Carlin would have had much to say about this bunch; despite the fact that she had been a noble herself, she loathed conspicuous consumption. Kelsea was not surprised to see the tall, wasplike figure of Lady Andrews near the front of the group, cloaked in red silk. She looked, if possible, even more fleshless than before, but that might only have been the look in the woman’s eyes, a loathing for Kelsea that seemed to dwarf everything else in her face.

“Majesty.” The man in front, a tiny creature with an enormous beer belly, bowed before her.

“Lord Williams,” Mace murmured.

“Greetings, Lord Williams. What can I do for you?”

“We come with a common grievance, Majesty.” Lord Williams swept an arm toward the group behind him. “All of us hold property in the Almont.”

“Yes?”

“The evacuation is already incredibly destructive. Soldiers and refugees march across our lands, flattening the crops. Some of the refugees even loot in our fields. The soldiers do nothing.”

Kelsea bit down on her tongue, realizing that she should have foreseen this issue. These people, after all, had nothing to do but sit and count every last penny of profit.

“Do you have complaints of violence, Lord Williams? Armed thievery, harassment of your farmers?”

Lord Williams’s eyes widened. “No, Lady, of course not. But we lose money on the damaged and stolen crops, as well as lost work time.”

“I see.” Kelsea smiled, though it hurt her face. “What would you suggest?”

“Majesty, it’s not really my place—”

“Speak plainly.”

“Well, I . . .”

Another noble stepped forward, a taller man with a tightly clipped mustache. After a moment’s thought, Kelsea placed him: Lord Evans, who owned vast fields of corn north of the Dry Lands. “I have reports, Lady, that while your soldiers protect the refugees on their journey, they make no attempt to supervise them. You could order better enforcement.”

“I will do that. Anything else?”

“My farmers can’t work with an army of vagrants marching across their fields. Why not conduct the evacuation at night? That way, it won’t interrupt production.”

Something flared behind Kelsea’s ribs. “Lord Evans, I suppose you have a residence in New London?”

“Why, yes, Majesty. My family owns two.”

“So long before the Mort come, you will simply move your household and all your valuables into town.”

“For certain, Majesty.”

“How convenient for you. But these people are being transplanted from their homes with no such ease. Some of them have never left their villages before. Most will be on foot, and many are carrying infants and young children. Are you honestly suggesting that I force them to cross unfamiliar territory in the dark?”

“Of course—of course not, Your Majesty,” Evans replied, his mustache twitching in alarm. “I only meant—”

“I am suggesting it,” Lady Andrews announced, stepping forward. “Property rights have always been inviolate in the Tearling.”

“Be careful, Lady Andrews. No one is violating your property rights.”

“They cross our lands.”

“So did the shipment, once a month. It must have done a good bit of damage to your roadways. But you did not complain then.”

“I profited!”

“Precisely. So let’s talk about what’s really at stake here. Not right to property, but right to profit.”

“Profit is where we find it, Majesty.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No one is threatening Your Majesty!” Lord Williams cried. He looked around to the group behind him, and several of them nodded frantically. “Lady Andrews does not speak for all of us, Majesty. We simply wish to minimize the damage to our lands.”

Lady Andrews rounded on him. “If you had any balls at all, Williams, I would not have needed to attend this farce!”

“Keep it civil!” Mace barked. But the admonishment sounded automatic, and Kelsea suspected that Mace was enjoying himself.

“At some point, Majesty,” Lady Andrews continued, “the Mort will have to cross my lands. I can make it difficult for them, or I can stand aside.”

Kelsea stared at her. “Did you just tell me you mean to commit treason? Here, in front of thirty witnesses?”

“I have no such intention, Majesty. Not unless I am forced to it.”

“Forced to it,” Kelsea repeated, grimacing. “I know how you conduct yourself in wartime, Lady Andrews. You’ll probably greet General Genot himself with a glass of whisky and a free fuck.”

“Lady!” Mace pleaded.

“Majesty, I beg you!” Lord Williams interrupted. “Please do not take Lady Andrews’s words as representative of—”

“Be quiet, Williams,” Kelsea replied. “I understand what Lady Andrews is about here.”

Lady Andrews had begun to examine her nails, as though she found Kelsea uninteresting.

“You all have property rights, for certain. But property rights are not inviolate, not in my Tear. These people must be evacuated, and their safety is more important than your profit. Try to stand on your rights in this matter, and watch me bring out the principle of eminent domain.”

Several of the nobles gasped, but Lady Andrews merely looked up at Kelsea, bewildered. Lord Williams grabbed Lady Andrews’s arm and began to hiss in her ear. She shook him off.

“I will do my best to curtail the looting,” Kelsea continued. “But if any of you”—she looked around the group of nobles—“any of you hinder the evacuation in any way, I will not even think twice before I seize your lands for the greater good. Do you understand me?”

“We understand, Majesty!” Lord Williams bleated. “Believe me. Thank you for doing what you can.”

He tugged Lady Andrews away from the throne, but she shook him off again, staring up at Kelsea with eyes like daggers. “She’s bluffing, Williams. She wouldn’t dare. Without the support of the nobles, she has nothing.”

Kelsea smiled. “What do I care for your support?”

“If we abandon the monarchy, Kelsea Raleigh—”

“My name is Glynn.”

“If we abandon you, then you have no money, no protection, no structure. Even your army is shaky. Without us, what do you have?”

“The people.”

“The people!” Lady Andrews mimicked. “They’d as soon kill any highborn as look at us. Without force or arms or gold, you’re as vulnerable as the rest.”

“My heart flutters.”

“You’re taking my threat lightly. That’s an error.”

“No, your threat is real enough,” Kelsea admitted, after a moment’s thought. “But your overestimation of your own importance is staggering. I knew it the first moment I ever laid eyes on you.”

She returned her attention to the rest of them. “I am sorry for the inevitable impact on your profits. You will simply have to content yourself with a bit less gold on your clothing this year, and hope the strain doesn’t become too much. Get out.”

The nobles turned and moved off toward the doors. Some of their faces betrayed anger, but most of them only looked a bit bewildered, as though the ground had shifted beneath their feet. Kelsea gave a great sigh of impatience, and that seemed to hurry them onward.

“Wondrous diplomacy, Lady,” Mace muttered. “You realize you only make my job more difficult.”

“I am truly sorry for that, Lazarus.”

“You need the support of your nobles.”

“I disagree.”

“They keep the public in line, Lady. The people blame the nobles and their overseers for their problems. Remove that buffer, and they might start looking higher up the chain.”

“And if their eyes come to rest on me, I will deserve that.”

Mace shook his head. “You’re too absolutist for power politics, Lady. Who cares if your nobles are hypocrites? They serve a function for you, and a useful one.”

“Parasites,” Kelsea remarked, but the retreating group had reminded her, again, of Lily Mayhew. Lily had lived in a town with walls, high walls built to keep out the poor. And yet both she and her husband still had to be afraid of the world outside. Was Kelsea any better? Mace and Arliss had ordered the construction of an enormous temporary camp just outside of New London’s walls to house the refugees, but if the Mort came, these refugees would have to be moved inside the city, probably into the Keep itself, since New London was already stuffed to bursting. Would Kelsea mind having them there? She thought for a moment and realized, with some relief, that she would not.

“Now I’ll have to keep an eye on all of these fops,” Mace continued, looking troubled. “I doubt any of them would open direct negotiations with Mortmesne, but they could do so through an intermediary.”

“What intermediary?”

“Most nobles are churchgoing folk, Lady. The Andrews woman is a regular guest in the Arvath, and the new Holy Father is no admirer of yours.”

“Are you spying on the Church?”

“I keep myself informed, Lady. The new Holy Father has already sent several messages to Demesne.”

“For what purpose?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“That Andrews bitch is no more devout than I am, Lazarus.”

“And when has that ever stopped anyone from being a pillar of the Church?”

Kelsea had no answer.

Aisa?”

Marguerite was teaching them fractions, and Aisa was bored. School was harder to get through on the days when she hadn’t had enough sleep the night before. The air of the schoolroom always seemed too warm, and it put Aisa into a semi-doze, awake and asleep at the same time.

“Two-fifths,” Aisa answered, feeling smug. Marguerite had been trying to catch her napping. Marguerite, who liked all children, didn’t like Aisa at all. Aisa seemed to create instinctive distrust in adults, as though they could sense that she was watching them, looking for errors and inconsistencies. But it was frustratingly hard to find mistakes in Marguerite. She was too pretty, and Aisa gathered from overheard conversations that she had been the Regent’s concubine, but even Aisa had to admit that neither of these things was Marguerite’s fault.

Something prodded Aisa sharply in the ribs: Matthew, sitting behind her, nudging with his foot where Marguerite couldn’t see. After a few more pokes, Aisa turned around, baring her teeth.

Matthew smiled wide, a malicious smile that spoke volumes: he had achieved his objective, broken Aisa out of her head. Her brother was the worst sort of bully: one who couldn’t stand the sight of other people sitting quietly and contentedly, one who simply had to ruin things. Maman made allowances for Matthew, said that Da had been hard on him and he wasn’t equipped to handle it well. Aisa thought that was nonsense. She had taken the worst from Da, even Wen admitted that, but it hadn’t turned her into a little prick who couldn’t leave other people alone.

Matthew’s foot nudged her again, digging right into the space between her ribs. Something struck inside Aisa, a thick, deep, gonglike reverberation, and before she could think, she whipped around and flung herself on Matthew, punching and kicking. He shook her off and ran, and without thinking Aisa got up and ran after him, out the door and into the hallway. Matthew was a year older and much bigger, but Aisa was quicker, and just as Matthew reached the end of the hallway, she launched herself at him and brought him down. They fell to the stone floor together, Matthew screaming and Aisa snarling. She got a fist up into Matthew’s throat, making him cough and gag, then bloodied his nose with a good, hard slap from the heel of her hand. She loved the sight of the blood against Matthew’s white, frightened face, but then a man’s hands were locked beneath her arms, hauling her backward. Aisa kicked her heels, but she could get no leverage on the smooth stone of the floor. None of this seemed real; even when Aisa looked up and saw Maman, the Queen, the rest of the Guard, the wide eyes of the crowd assembled in the audience chamber, it seemed only another phase of the insomnia, the hours before sleep that caught Aisa like a long, continuous fever dream. Any moment now she would sit up in the dark, mouth dry and heart pounding, and be pleased that nothing truly terrible had happened before she jerked awake.

“Majesty, I apologize!”

Maman, apologizing for her. She had embarrassed Maman. The Queen merely shook her head, but Aisa could sense irritation in the gesture, and this was almost as bad. Marguerite had arrived in the audience chamber now, and she bent over Matthew, shooting Aisa a venomous look as she did so. Whoever had laid hold of Aisa was now dragging her backward, toward the hallway, and Aisa’s mind conjured up a rogue memory of Da, who always pulled and tugged.

“Let go!”

“Shut up, brat.”

The Mace, Aisa realized, and that brought home the seriousness of what she had just done. She planted her heels on the ground, but that was no help; the Mace simply took one of Aisa’s arms and swung her around, clamping her wrist in an iron grip and dragging her down the hallway. Where was Maman? Aisa wondered frantically. Memory was growing stronger and stronger, overtaking fact; the Mace even smelled like Da at the end of the day, sweat and iron, and Aisa couldn’t go with him. She dug her heels in again, and when the Mace turned, she brought her foot up and around, launching a kick into his stomach. It caught him squarely, and even in her fright, Aisa felt a brief moment of satisfaction; it was no small thing to sneak a move on the Captain of Guard. The Mace coughed and bent double, but his other arm snapped forward and flung Aisa against the wall. She hit, hard on her shoulder, bounced off, and staggered to the ground, black spots in front of her eyes.

It took her a few seconds to recover, but Aisa came up ready, prepared to kick and scratch. But the Mace was leaning against the opposite wall, one hand on his stomach, watching her with that same speculative gaze.

“You have a great deal of anger in you, girl.”

“So?”

“Anger is a liability for a fighter. I’ve seen it many times. If he doesn’t let the anger go, or at least harness and drive it, it brings him down.”

“What do I care?”

“See here.” The Mace detached himself from the wall, his bulky frame towering over hers, and Aisa tensed, preparing. But he merely pointed to her foot. “A kick in the guts is good. But you didn’t plan it well, and so I wasn’t disabled. In a real fight, you’d be dead now. What you want to do is point your toe, catch me with the tip rather than the arch or ankle, knock the wind out of me. It’s very few men who can keep fighting without breath. Point your toe hard enough, and you could even damage one of my organs. As it is, all I’ll have is a good-size bruise.”

Aisa considered this for a moment, sneaking a glance at her own feet. She never planned anything; it just happened, actions exploding out of her. “Still, I hurt you.”

“And what of that? Any man in this wing can keep fighting through much worse. I watched the Queen finish her crowning with a knife stuck in her back. Pain only disables the weak.”

Pain only disables the weak. The words struck a chord inside Aisa, making her think of all those years under Da’s roof. Wen and Matthew each had broken bones, and Wen’s shoulder had never healed properly, giving him a strange, slightly hunched appearance when he tried to stand up straight. Maman had taken so many beatings that some of her bruises never went away. And Aisa and Morryn . . .

Pain only disables the weak.

“Come along, hellcat.” The Mace resumed his course down the corridor, rubbing his stomach. “I want to show you something.”

Aisa followed him cautiously, a few feet behind. She had never been so far down the hall; it was mostly the guards and their families down here. Near the end, the Mace opened one of the doors and swung it wide.

“Have a look.”

Warily, keeping an eye on him, Aisa peeked around the doorway and blinked in surprise. She had never seen so much metal in one place before. The entire room gleamed in the torchlight.

“The arms room,” she breathed, her eyes wide.

“Welcome to my domain.” A tall, lanky man with a hooked nose emerged from behind a table on the other side of the room. Aisa recognized him: Venner, the arms master. Even on the rare occasions when he emerged into the audience chamber, he always had a weapon in his hands, sword or knife or bow, fine-tuning them as though they were musical instruments. “Come inside, child.”

Aisa only hesitated for a moment. Children were never allowed in the arms room. Wen would be so jealous. Even Matthew would be jealous, though he would try to hide it with scorn. Swords and knives covered the tables; armory sets hung on the walls; there were even some long, twisted metal weapons, taller than a man, which rested against the wall, pointing toward the sky. Several maces, a rack of bows, their wood a deep, polished bronze, and bundles of tied sticks that Aisa eventually recognized as arrows, hundreds and hundreds of them, piled in the corner. So much weaponry! And then Aisa realized what this stockpile was for: siege. Maman had explained siege, but only to Aisa and Wen. Maman thought the Mort army would reach New London by autumn.

The Mace had followed her into the room, and now he paused beside a table that held row after row of knives. “You can’t keep starting brawls with the other children. It’s a distraction we don’t need.”

“It only distracts Marguerite.”

“Today it distracted everyone. Your little squabbles are both noisy and dangerous.”

Aisa flushed. She added up the number of fights she’d been in since they’d come to the Keep, and her cheeks burned brighter. Did they all think she was a brat? The Mace’s gaze was hard, almost contemptuous; he was waiting for her to make an excuse. She would surprise him, just as she had caught him off guard with a kick to the stomach.

“Sometimes the anger runs me, and I can’t control it. I hit and kick before I know what I’m doing.”

The Mace settled back on his heels, his mouth crimping in a small smile. “That’s a strong admission. Many men refuse to face the fact of their anger.”

“Maybe it helps that I’m not a man.”

“In this room it won’t matter,” Venner interrupted, striding forward. “It’s a lesson I learned from the Queen. Here you’re a fighter, and I will treat you like one.”

Aisa looked up, instantly suspicious, and found Venner holding out a knife on one palm, offering her the hilt.

“What do you say, hellcat?” the Mace asked. “Want to learn?”

Aisa looked at the room around her, the weapons piled everywhere, the walls hung with metal. She used to spend days of her childhood fearing that Da’s shadow would appear on the ground beside her, and when she looked up to find him standing there, her stomach would fall to pieces. Staring at Venner and the Mace, Aisa saw that their faces were hard, yes, and grim . . . but she saw none of Da’s meanness there, none of his taking.

She reached out and grasped the knife.