The Mort do nothing halfway.
—ANON.
Tree.”
Tyler held up another slip of paper. The Mace looked at it for a moment, wearing the same irritated, truculent expression that he always wore during these sessions.
“Bread.”
Tyler held up another slip, holding his breath. After some dithering, he had decided to throw some difficult words into this batch, for this particular student would not want to be coddled. The Mace stared at the word for a moment, his eyes flickering back and forth between syllables. Tyler had encouraged him to sound out the words, but the Mace refused to do so. He wanted to do everything inside his head. His reading level progressed at a pace that was nearly alarming.
“Difference,” the Mace finally declared.
“Good.” Tyler put the cards down. “That’s very good.”
The Mace wiped his brow; he’d been sweating. “I’m still having trouble between C and K.”
“It’s difficult,” Tyler agreed, not meeting the Mace’s eyes. Tyler walked a fine line in these sessions, tiptoeing between being encouraging and being solicitous, for if the Mace felt that Tyler was treating him as a child, he would likely beat Tyler senseless. But still, Tyler found himself looking forward to these lessons. He enjoyed teaching, and was sorry that he’d waited until his seventy-first year to discover that fact.
But this was the only enjoyable part of Tyler’s days. His leg, which had fractured at the shin, was wrapped in a cast, a constant reminder of the Holy Father’s anger. The entire Arvath seemed to know that Tyler was in trouble, and his brother priests had shunned him accordingly. Only Wyde, who was too old to be concerned about his place on the Arvath ladder, seemed willing to be seen in Tyler’s company.
The Mace was looking at him expectantly, waiting for more instructions. But Tyler had suddenly lost his enthusiasm for the lesson. He stacked the cards on his desk and looked curiously at the Mace. “How did you get away with it all of these years?”
The Mace’s expression tightened, became wary. “What does it matter?”
“It doesn’t. I’m only curious. I could certainly never have pulled it off.”
The Mace shrugged; he was immune to flattery. “Carroll knew. He wanted my skills in the Guard, and so he helped me to keep it a secret. We had an agreement.”
“Why didn’t he teach you?”
“He offered.” The Mace looked away. “I refused. It didn’t matter then, anyway. Elyssa had about as much use for books as a cat has for a riding crop. But now . . .”
Tyler heard the Mace’s unspoken thought easily. Queen Elyssa may not have cared about illiteracy, but Queen Kelsea would care, very much. “But the Queen would never kick you out of the Guard.”
“Of course she wouldn’t. I just don’t want her to know.”
Tyler nodded, wondering, as he so often did, whether the Mace was the Queen’s father. His attitude toward her was often that of an exasperated parent. But the identity of the Queen’s father was one of the most closely held secrets of the Guard. Tyler wasn’t even sure whether the Queen knew herself.
“What’s next?”
Tyler thought for a moment. “Practice stringing individual words together. In the Queen’s library are several books by a man named Dahl. Choose one and try to work your way through it. Don’t skip the longer words; sound them out, and bring the book with you the next time you come.”
The Mace nodded. “I think—”
Three sharp raps sounded on Tyler’s door.
The Mace sprung from his chair, a quick, silent movement. When Tyler turned to look behind him, the room was empty, the hidden door beside the desk just swinging shut.
“Come in, please.”
The door opened, and Tyler froze as the Holy Father entered the room. Brother Jennings was behind him, his round face curious, but the Holy Father left him outside, closing the door. Tyler grasped the edge of the desk and pulled himself to his feet, keeping his broken leg off the floor.
“Good day, Tyler.”
“Your Holiness.” Tyler offered him the good chair, but Anders waved it away.
“Sit, Tyler, sit. You, after all, are the one with the broken leg. Most unfortunate, that accident.”
Tyler sat, watching Anders’s eyes dart all over the room, taking in everything while his face remained immobile. In that way, he did remind Tyler of the old Holy Father, who never missed a single thing. All of Tyler’s earlier feelings of bravery seemed to have evaporated, quickly and quietly, and he was acutely aware of his own old age, how fragile he was in comparison to this hearty, middle-aged man.
“I am in a difficult position, Tyler.” The Holy Father gave a heavy, melodramatic sigh. “The Queen . . . she has laid hands on me, you see.”
Tyler nodded. No one was supposed to touch a priest of God’s Church—not publicly, anyway—and it was unthinkable for anyone, let alone a woman, to lay hands on the Holy Father himself. It had only been a week, but Wyde, who worked at the homeless kitchens in the morning, said that the entire city already seemed to know what had happened at the Queen’s dinner. Wyde had even heard one rumor that the Queen had given the Holy Father a savage beating with her bare hands. These stories were harmful to the Queen, certainly; the devout were scandalized. But the damage to the Holy Father was much greater.
“This won’t stand, Tyler. If no consequences fall on the Queen for her actions, then we are all left hanging in the wind. The Arvath’s political power will dwindle to nothing. You understand?”
Tyler nodded again.
“But if God’s wrath were to fall on her swiftly . . . think of it, Tyler!” The Holy Father’s eyes brightened, sparkling with a hint of that same terrible glee that Tyler had seen there on the night of Father Seth. “Think of how God’s Church would benefit! Conversions would increase. Tithing would increase. Faith has grown slack, Tyler, and we need to make an example. A public example. You see?”
Tyler didn’t see, not exactly, but he didn’t like the turn of the conversation. Anders had halted in his pacing now, right in front of Tyler’s bookshelves. He pulled down A Distant Mirror, and Tyler tensed, lacing his fingers together at his waist. When Anders opened the book and ran a finger down one of the middle pages, Tyler’s flesh crawled beneath his skin.
“The Queen is not vulnerable!” he blurted out. “There is the Mace—and she has magic—”
“Magic?”
In a sudden, sharp movement, Anders wrenched the book down the binding, tearing it in two. Tyler cried out, his hands reaching automatically before he snatched them back. He did not have the Queen’s gall; he could not lay hands on the Holy Father. He could only watch as Anders dropped one shredded half of the book and began to rip pages out of the other, one at a time. They drifted lazily, back and forth, toward the floor.
“Magic, Tyler?” Anders asked softly. “And you a priest?”
A soft knock came at the door, and Brother Jennings leaned through the doorway, his avid eyes taking in the entire scene. “Everything all right, Your Holiness?”
“Perfectly so,” Anders replied, his gaze fixed on Tyler. “Fetch a few more brothers in here. There’s work to do.”
Brother Jennings nodded and left. Tyler stared mutely at the books on his shelves. There were so many of them.
“Please,” he heard himself beg. “Please don’t. They never did you any harm.”
“These are secular books, Tyler, and you’ve been storing them in the Arvath. I’d be well within my rights to burn them.”
“They don’t hurt anyone! I’m the only one who reads them!”
Brother Jennings knocked and entered. Several other priests followed, including Wyde, who gave Tyler an apprehensive glance as he came through the door.
Anders pointed to the shelves. “Remove the books and their holders to my private apartments.”
The younger priests began to move immediately, but Wyde hesitated, staring at Tyler.
“Problem, Father Wyde?” Anders asked.
Wyde shook his head and held out his arms to accept a pile of books from the shelf. He didn’t look at Tyler again. While they worked, Anders continued to rip the pages from A Distant Mirror. One landed at Tyler’s feet, and when he looked down, he saw “Chapter 7” in bold print. Tears filled his eyes, and he had to bite his lip to keep them there. Looking up, he made the unpleasant discovery that Anders was enjoying himself enormously, his eyes sparkling with pleasure. The priests continued to march in and out of the room, until finally the shelves stood empty against the wall. The sight made Tyler want to break down and weep. Brother Jennings levered the bookshelves from the wall and tipped them horizontal, and Wyde snuck Tyler one last apologetic glance as he grabbed hold of a corner. Then they were gone. The wall was blank; only two whitened rectangles remained to show where Tyler’s books had been. He stared numbly at them, and now the tears came, beyond his power to hold back.
“Tyler?”
Tyler turned, his heart pounding, to face the Holy Father. For the first time in his adult life, he wanted to do violence to another person. His hands had clenched into fists inside the sleeves of his robe.
Anders reached inside his own robes and came out with a small vial of clear, colorless liquid. He passed it thoughtfully from one hand to another before remarking, “The Queen is not protective of her person with you. I watched you pass her the bread at dinner. Does her drink ever pass through your hands?”
Tyler nodded jerkily. His face had gone cold. “Tea.”
“The Mace can’t consider you a threat, or he would never tolerate such an arrangement.” The Holy Father held out the vial. It looked smooth in his hand, almost oily, and Tyler stared numbly, unable to accept.
“I won’t insult your intelligence, Tyler, by explaining what you’re to do with this. But I want it done within a month. If not, you will watch me douse every single one of your books in oil and strike a match. I will do it personally, on the front steps of the Arvath, and you will watch.”
Tyler cast around for answers, but there was nothing, only the pile of torn pages on the ground.
“Take it, Tyler.”
He took the vial.
“Come with me,” the Holy Father commanded, opening the door. Tyler grabbed his crutches and lurched forward to follow. Several brothers and fathers had their doors open, and they stared at Tyler as he went by, following the Holy Father down the hallway toward the staircase. Tyler sensed them, but did not see them, his mind utterly blank now. It seemed important not to think of his books, and that meant not thinking of anything at all.
At the end of the corridor, they emerged onto the staircase landing. Tyler tried to keep his eyes on the ground, but at the last moment he couldn’t help looking up. Seth was there, sitting on his stool as he had done every day for the past two weeks, his legs spread wide to display the mangled area between them. The actual wound had been cauterized and stitched up somehow, but what remained was almost worse, a charred and seamed landscape of red flesh. Pink streaks radiated outward along Seth’s inner thighs, signifying the beginnings of infection. Hung around his neck was a placard with one scrawled word:
Seth stared blankly down the hallway, his gaze so fixed that Tyler wondered if they were keeping him dulled with some sort of narcotic. But no, what killed pain would also kill the point of the lesson, wouldn’t it? For the first week, Seth’s moans of agony had been audible all the way down the hall, and none of them had slept for days.
Tyler closed his eyes and then, mercifully, they were past Seth and down the stairs. Anders began to speak again, his voice pitched low enough to reach Tyler, but not Brother Jennings, who trailed silently several feet behind. “I am not unaware, Tyler, that this must be an unpleasant errand for you. And every unpleasant errand requires not only punishment for failure, but reward for success.”
Tyler followed mutely, still trying to push Seth’s image from his mind. The Holy Father’s talk of reward did not cheer him in the slightest; in his childhood, Tyler had seen village dogs trained in much the same way for the ring. When an animal was beaten hard enough, it would work just to not be beaten, and consider itself well rewarded. The status quo could shift at any time.
My books.
The numbness broke slightly and Tyler felt agony there, waiting, like freezing water beneath thin ice. He focused on walking, feeling each step as an individual ache. The old Holy Father had always used the lift to transport him between floors, but Anders rarely did so. He seemed to enjoy demonstrating his own fitness, and now he was surely enjoying Tyler’s discomfort as well. The arthritis had woken up, causing Tyler’s hip to throb unhappily. His broken leg snarled with each step, even though Tyler was careful never to let it bump against the ground. He concentrated on each of these discomforts, almost relishing them, easy pains that were entirely physical.
After endless flights of stairs, they passed the ground floor and continued down the steps into the Arvath’s basement. Tyler had never been to the basement, which was only a resting place for Holy Fathers deceased. No one came down here except for two unfortunate brothers who had drawn the duty to keep the crypts free of insects and rats. These two, men unfamiliar to Tyler, sprang to their feet and bowed as the Holy Father entered, Tyler following at his heels like a ghost.
Anders took the torch that one of the young men offered and led Tyler into the tombs. It was bone-cold down here, and Tyler shivered in his thin robes. They passed the entrances to many crypts, decorated arches of stone that stretched high above them on both sides. The corpses of Holy Fathers were always embalmed before being laid to rest, but Tyler still thought that he could smell death in this place. Briefly, he wondered if Anders had brought him down here to kill him, and then he discarded that idea. He was needed.
God, please show me the way out.
The crypts were behind them now. Ahead was only a single large stone door, covered with a layer of dust. As they drew up in front of it, Anders produced a simple iron key.
“Look at me, Tyler.”
Tyler looked up, but found that he couldn’t meet the other man’s eyes. Instead, he fixed his gaze on the bridge of Anders’s nose.
“I am the only person with a key to this door, Tyler. But if you succeed in your task, I will give this key to you.”
He opened the door, though it required several twists of the key to do so. The door squealed miserably as the Holy Father shoved it open; no one had entered this room in a long time. The Holy Father beckoned him inside, but Tyler already knew, somehow, what would be there, and as light from the torch fell over the room, despair wrapped around Tyler’s heart.
The room was full of books. Someone had constructed shelves for them, the sort of rough-hewn furniture that had predominated after the Landing, when even simple tools were difficult to come by. Tyler’s eyes roamed helplessly across the room: shelf after shelf of books, thousands of them, all the way down to the far wall.
He stepped forward, drawn helplessly, reaching out to touch the books on their shelves. Some were leather-bound, some paper. No one had cared for them, or even bothered to organize them; titles and authors had been thrown together haphazardly, stacked horizontally on the shelves. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust. The sight hurt Tyler’s heart.
“Tyler.”
He started. For a moment, he’d forgotten that the Holy Father was there.
“If you succeed,” the Holy Father said softly, “not only will you have the key to this room, but you will become the Arvath’s first librarian. You will cease to be the Keep Priest, and I will relieve you of all other duties. No one will ever bother you again. Your only task will be to live down here and take care of these books.”
Tyler turned back to stare at the room, breathing in the smell of old paper. He could spend the rest of his life in here and not read the same book twice.
“The poison is delayed,” the Holy Father continued. “It will take some two or three hours for the Queen to show the first symptoms. This is your window to return to the Arvath.”
“They’ll come after me. The Mace will.”
“Perhaps. But not even the Mace will dare to remove you from the Arvath without my permission. You saw how they had to lure Matthew to the Keep in order to take him. You may never be able to leave the Arvath again, but so long as you make it back, you will be safe from reprisal, and you may live your life out here, with these books.”
Thinking of the Mace’s uncanny ability to appear and disappear from walls at will, Tyler almost smiled. The Mace would find him, no matter where he went, but Tyler didn’t bother to correct the Holy Father. He wondered what the Queen would say if she could see this room.
“What happens after she dies?” he asked, startling himself.
“There will be a bit of squabbling, certainly, but eventually the Tear will become a Mort protectorate.”
Tyler blinked. “The Red Queen is a noted unbeliever. Will that not be worse for the Church?”
“No.” A smile played at the corners of Anders’s mouth. “Everything has already been arranged.”
Poor bedfellows, Tyler thought sickly, recalling the Mace’s words. “My leg is still weak, Your Holiness. I would like to go back upstairs.”
“Of course,” Anders replied, his tone solicitous now. “We will go at once.”
Anders locked the door behind them and they moved slowly back between the tombs. Tyler’s leg had gotten so bad that he was now forced to hobble.
“We will take the lift, Tyler, to spare your leg.”
Together, they crowded onto the thick platform of wood that stood beside the staircase, and Anders nodded to the two priests who waited there.
“Brothers’ quarters.”
Tyler grabbed the railing, slightly sick again, as the lift began to rise.
“This is a test, Tyler,” the Holy Father told him. “God is testing your faith, your loyalty.”
Tyler nodded, but he felt lost and bewildered. He had lived in the Arvath for his entire adult life, considered it home. But now it seemed a strange landscape, pitted with unknown dangers. When the lift reached the quarters, he wandered away from the Holy Father without a word, past Seth and down the hallway, past the staring eyes of his brothers, past Wyde, who waited beside Tyler’s doorway, his eyes downcast.
“I’m sorry,” Wyde murmured. “I didn’t want to, Tyler, but—”
Tyler closed the door in his face and went to sit on the bed. The bare walls seemed to glare at him, and he tried to ignore them, tried to pray. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that no one was listening, that God’s attention was elsewhere. Finally he gave up and pulled the small vial out of his robes, rolling it in both hands, running one thumb over the wax stopper. The liquid inside was perfectly clear; Tyler could look straight through and see a distorted image of the tiny room around him, the room where, not so long ago, he had expected to live contentedly for the rest of his life. He thought of the Queen’s library, the way time seemed to disappear as Tyler sat there, everything melting away until he felt that he was part of some better world. He could not do this thing, but he could not leave his books either. There seemed no way out.
Tyler got up and placed his hand on the wall, smoothing a palm across the white stone. There was no help for him in prayer, he saw now, nor could he afford to wait for miracles. God would not single Tyler out. If he wanted salvation, he would have to save himself.
This is a fool’s errand,” Mace grumbled.
“You think all of my errands are foolish, Lazarus. I’m not impressed.”
They were traveling in near darkness, through one of Mace’s many tunnels that seemed to beehive the Keep. The only illumination came from a torch carried by Father Tyler, who limped alongside Pen. In the dim amber light, the priest’s face looked paler than ever. Kelsea had asked Mace what was going on in the Arvath, to make Father Tyler so miserable, but Mace, being Mace, had refused to say, remarking only that the new Holy Father was even worse than the old.
It was Father Tyler who had sent Kelsea on this little jaunt. The vision of William Tear had sent her into a kind of frenzy, and in the past week she had torn Carlin’s library apart, determined to find some information about Lily Mayhew, about Greg Mayhew, about Dorian Rice, about any of them. When Father Tyler had arrived this morning, Kelsea had been sitting there on the library floor, in a rut of sleeplessness and failure, surrounded by Carlin’s books, and she seized on the priest as a last resort. Were there any written histories about the years surrounding the Crossing, the life of William Tear? There had been no actual publishing after the Crossing, of course, but perhaps there was a handwritten history? Someone should have kept a journal, at least.
Father Tyler shook his head regretfully. Many of the original generation of utopians had indeed kept journals, but in the dark period after the Tear assassination, most of them had disappeared. Several fragments had been preserved in the Arvath, and Father Tyler had seen them, but they discussed everyday problems of survival: the scarcity of food, the labor of constructing the fledgling village that would one day become New London. Most of Father Tyler’s own knowledge of the Crossing was based on oral history, the same folklore that pervaded the rest of the Tearling. No real writings had survived.
“But there is something, Majesty,” Tyler remarked, after a moment’s thought. “Father Timpany used to tell stories about a portrait gallery somewhere in the lower floors of the Keep. The Regent would visit the gallery from time to time, and Timpany said there’s a portrait of William Tear down there.”
“Why on earth would my uncle visit a portrait gallery?”
“It’s a gallery of your ancestors, Majesty. Timpany said that when the Regent was drunk, he liked to go down and scream at your grandmother’s portrait.”
It turned out that Mace knew exactly where the gallery was: two floors down, on the laundry level. As they descended a twisting staircase, Kelsea could hear many people speaking through the walls. Although she had her own private laundry—Mace, who worried about contact poisons, had insisted on it—Kelsea had kept the Keep laundry open, sending the rest of the Queen’s Wing’s linen down there. Her uncle’s Keep had been stuffed with unnecessary services, but Kelsea couldn’t bring herself to put so many people out of work. She had fired the worst of the Keep servants, the masseuses and escorts, those she simply wouldn’t have on her payroll. But she tried to make use of everyone else. At the bottom of the staircase, she could see no farther than the tiny, dim circle of torchlight that surrounded them, but she had the sense of a vast, hollow space above her head.
“Who built all these tunnels?”
“They’re part of the original architecture, Lady. There are hidden ways all the way from the top of the Keep down to the dungeons. Several passages extend out into the city as well.”
Mention of dungeons made Kelsea think of Thorne, who now sat in his own specially constructed cell several floors up. Kelsea didn’t trust him in the Keep’s dungeons, not even with Elston standing guard over him at all times. She also had a vague idea that Thorne should remain separated from the albino, Brenna. So he remained in isolation, save for a gloating Elston just outside the bars of his cell. Kelsea didn’t know what to do about Thorne. Should she put him to trial? For the past six weeks Kelsea and Arliss had been quietly converting the Census Bureau into a tax collection agency, but they had also been pulling the honest men from the Bureau and moving them back into the judiciary. Creation of a justice system was slow going; the Tearling had few laws, and none of them were codified anywhere. Since the Mort had reached the border, Kelsea had found little time to devote to this endeavor, but at her request, Arliss had kept at it, and now New London had five public courts, where anyone could petition a judge for redress of grievances. The Crown could try Arlen Thorne in a public court, but what if he was acquitted? Judge or jury, either one could be bought. Conversely, even if Thorne’s guilt was not beyond question, many jurors would condemn him regardless of the evidence. After the Regent, Thorne was the most hated figure in the Tear. There was no real purpose to a trial, and yet Kelsea felt there should be one, all the same.
Mace wanted to simply put Thorne to death. The man was so universally hated that no one would protest a quick execution, particularly not if Kelsea made the execution public. She saw the wisdom of Mace’s advice; such a move would gain her throne the diehard support of anyone who had ever watched a loved one put into the cage. Even the Arvath didn’t protest against capital punishment these days, and Kelsea certainly had no problem with it. Yet something in her demanded a trial, even a show trial, something to legitimize the act. But there was legal precedent for summary executions: if Father Tyler’s folklore was to be believed, William Tear had practiced them, had even carried one out with his own hands.
And so have I, Kelsea thought, suddenly cold. In her mind she saw blood, thick and warm, spurting over her right hand and dripping down her forearm. The outside world assumed that Mhurn had simply been a casualty of the Battle of the Argive. Mace had allowed that belief to flourish, but Kelsea and the rest of her Guard knew better, and no matter how she tried to dismiss the matter from her mind, the image kept recurring to her: her knife hand, bathed in blood. It seemed so important for Thorne to have a trial.
“Cover your eyes, Lady.”
Kelsea shielded her eyes as daylight bloomed in the darkness ahead. She passed through one of Mace’s hidden doors and found herself in a long, narrow room with a high ceiling. The light came from a bank of windows on the far wall. Looking out these windows, Kelsea saw that they were at the extreme western end of the Keep; outside, she saw first the rolling foothills of the city and then the tan backdrop of the Clayton Mountains.
“Here, Majesty!” Father Tyler announced from the far end of the hallway.
Kelsea turned and found that the wall they had just come through was lined with portraits. They ran the length of the gallery in both directions. Father Tyler had gone to the farthest portrait and rested a hand on the base of the frame, where there was an engraved wooden plaque. The portrait showed the same man Kelsea had seen in her vision: a tall, severe man with short-cropped blond hair, his face set in businesslike lines. Kelsea’s heart leapt. She had known that her visions were real, of course, but it was still an enormous relief to have empirical proof.
“William Tear,” Father Tyler announced, placing his torch in the empty bracket on the wall. The sunlight was so bright in here that there was no need of fire. “The plaque says this was painted five years after the Crossing.”
Kelsea moved closer, staring up at the first Tear King. He stood in front of a fireplace, but not the sort of grand fireplace that littered the Keep, more like that of the cottage where she had grown up. Even the artist had not been able to disguise Tear’s annoyance at having to simply stand still; his expression betrayed extreme impatience. The portrait must have been someone else’s idea. Dimly, in the background, Kelsea glimpsed a shelf full of books, but a thick layer of grime had accumulated on the surface of the portrait and she couldn’t make out any titles.
“I want a Keep servant to clean these,” she told Mace. “Surely they have plenty of time on their hands.”
Mace nodded, and Kelsea moved on to the next portrait: a young blond man barely out of his teens. He was good-looking, but even through layers of dust, Kelsea could see the worry that shrouded his eyes. She ran her fingers over the frame, looking for a plaque, and found it coated with dust as well. She polished it with her thumb, wiping her dirty hand on her skirt, and bent down to read the engraving. “Jonathan Tear.”
“Jonathan the Good,” Father Tyler murmured beside her.
On Jonathan Tear’s chest, Kelsea spotted a sapphire, one of hers, dangling on its chain. She looked quickly back to the portrait of William Tear. He wasn’t wearing any jewelry, at least not that Kelsea could see. There was a sizable space between the two portraits, William and Jonathan, wide enough that Kelsea wondered if another portrait had once hung there.
“Who was Jonathan Tear’s mother?”
Father Tyler shook his head. “That I don’t know, Majesty. William Tear had no queen; legend says he didn’t believe in marriage. But there’s no record of any doubt that Jonathan the Good was his son. The resemblance is marked.”
“What was Jonathan so worried about, do you think?”
“Perhaps he feared death, Lady,” Coryn replied behind her. “He was twenty years old when he was murdered. That portrait couldn’t have been done more than a couple years before.”
“Who murdered him?”
“No one knows, but they got through Tear’s Guard. The worst moment in our history, that—”
Coryn broke off suddenly, and she knew that he was thinking of Mhurn. Barty had said the same thing about the Tear assassination: the Guard had failed. Regretting Coryn’s discomfort, Kelsea swallowed the rest of her questions about Jonathan Tear and passed onward to the next portrait: a woman, very innocent-looking, with a beautiful head of reddish-brown hair that ran over her shoulders like a river, dropping in long streamers down her back. She smiled beatifically from the canvas. Kelsea checked the engraved plaque: “Caitlyn Tear.” Jonathan Tear’s wife. After the assassination, Caitlyn Tear had been hunted down and slaughtered. Although the woman in the portrait was long dead, beyond any harm, Kelsea’s heart wrenched. This woman looked as though she couldn’t even conceive of evil, much less endure it.
The next portrait made Kelsea suck in her breath. She would have known this man anywhere: he had stood in front of her fireplace two weeks earlier, the handsomest man in the world. He sat on the Tear throne—the elaborately carved back was unmistakable—smiling an easy politician’s smile. But his amber eyes were cold, and by an odd artist’s trick, they seemed to follow Kelsea no matter where she moved. Gingerly, she felt along the edges of the frame, but there was nothing, only an odd scarring of the wood that suggested that the plaque, if one existed, had been torn away long ago. She wondered at the handsome man’s presence in this gallery of Tear royalty, but said nothing.
“Handsome devil,” Mace remarked. “No idea who he is, though. Father?”
Father Tyler shook his head. “He doesn’t match any Raleigh monarch I’ve ever heard of. He is exceptionally good-looking, though; perhaps he was a companion to one of the Raleigh Queens. Several of them never married, but all of them managed to produce heirs. They had an eye for the handsome men.”
Kelsea picked that unfortunate moment to look at Pen, and found his eyes on her as well. The night he had rejected her sat between them like a vast gulf, and Kelsea had a terrible feeling that they would never get back to the easy friendship they’d had before. She wanted to say something to him, but there were too many people nearby, and after a moment even the impulse at reconciliation vanished. The eyes of the man from the fireplace were hypnotic, but Kelsea dragged herself away and moved on to the next portrait. They were into the Raleighs now; all of these portraits had their plaques intact, and the engravings became clearer, less worn by the passage of time, as Kelsea moved closer to the present day.
All of the Raleighs wore both sapphires, the jewels appearing changeless from one portrait to the next. These were Kelsea’s ancestors, her blood, but she found them somehow less important than the three Tears, less real. Carlin had never admired the Raleighs; perhaps her prejudices in this, as in so many things, had simply trickled down to Kelsea over the years.
In the tenth portrait, Kelsea was confronted with a woman so beautiful that she almost defied description. She had the same blonde hair and bright green eyes as many of the Raleigh queens, but her face was creamy-skinned and flawless, and she had the most gracefully proportioned neck that Kelsea had ever seen on a woman. Unlike the previous portraits, which had focused on one person at a time, this one also portrayed a child, a pretty girl of nearly six years, who sat on her mother’s lap. And in this portrait Kelsea noticed a new development: the woman wore one sapphire, the child wore the other. Kelsea bent down to the attached plaque and read, “Amanda Raleigh.”
“Ah, the Beautiful Queen!” Father Tyler moved down to join her in front of the portrait. Kelsea’s guards, most of whom had been scattered down at the far end of the room, slightly bored, moved closer as well, staring avidly up at the portrait. Kelsea felt irritation bite against her mind, but then she spotted a second child in the portrait, tucked almost behind the Beautiful Queen’s skirts. This girl was even younger than the child on the Queen’s lap, perhaps no more than three or four, but already she was dark-haired and sullen-looking, and Kelsea was suddenly reminded of her own childhood self, staring back at her in the pool of still water behind the cottage. In the radiance of the Beautiful Queen and her daughter, the girl was easy to miss, and Kelsea realized that this must have been the artist’s deliberate choice: to highlight one child and obscure the other.
“The Beautiful Queen had only one child, so I’m told. That must be Queen Elaine on her lap.” Kelsea pointed to the little girl who cringed behind the Beautiful Queen’s skirts. “So who’s this?”
Mace shrugged. “No idea.”
Father Tyler considered the girl. “A disfavored child, would be my guess. Amanda Raleigh had a husband, Thomas Arness. He was Elaine’s father. But I’ve heard that Amanda was hardly faithful to Arness, and there may have been other children. Disfavored children sometimes showed up in royal portraits from the pre-Crossing, but never in positions of prominence. A cruel thing, really, almost worse than not being included at all.” Father Tyler studied the portrait for a moment before remarking, “This is the worst case I’ve ever seen. That child is completely marginalized.”
Kelsea stared at the little girl, pity stirring inside her. Unlike the smiling princess on the Beautiful Queen’s lap, the hidden girl had dark, unhappy eyes. She wasn’t looking at the artist, as the other two subjects did; rather, she was staring up at the Beautiful Queen, her gaze filled with poorly concealed longing. Kelsea suddenly wanted to weep, and didn’t know whether it was for the child or for herself.
In the next portrait, the child on the Beautiful Queen’s lap had grown up and borne a child of her own. The engraving identified them as Queen Elaine and Crown Princess Arla. Elaine was not as beautiful as her mother—but who could be? Kelsea wondered bitterly—but she reminded Kelsea of someone. Andalie? No, for although this woman was a brunette, she didn’t have Andalie’s pale, ethereal style of beauty. Queen Elaine did not smile for the artist; she, too, looked extremely annoyed at having to sit for a portrait.
“See here, Lady!” Dyer pointed at Elaine’s face. “She has your stubborn jaw!”
“Hilarious,” Kelsea muttered, but she could not deny that there was a likeness, even now, when so many changes had overtaken her own face. Before Dyer could remark on anything else, she continued to the next portrait.
Arla the Just sat on the Tear throne, no child in sight, both sapphires around her neck and the Tear crown on her head. Fascinated, Kelsea stared at the crown, a single, elegant circle of silver, set with perhaps four or five sapphires. She tapped her finger against the canvas. “Any luck on finding that thing, Lazarus?”
“None yet, Lady.”
Kelsea nodded, disappointed but not surprised, and turned back to the portrait. Queen Arla had not been particularly pretty, but she possessed a magnetic quality that shone clearly through the canvas. She was much older than the other Raleigh women, and Kelsea remembered then that Queen Elaine had lived long, that her daughter had not been crowned until she was nearing her own middle age. Arla had been an autocrat, and the portrait showed her as such, reflected a clear determination to have her own way. Her smile was so contented that it was nearly smug, radiating pride to the point of arrogance. But pride had gotten Arla in trouble in the long run.
Barbarians at the walls, Kelsea’s mind whispered, and she provoked them, just like you.
She shook the thought off, moved quickly to the next portrait, and found herself staring up at her mother.
Queen Elyssa did not look at all the way Kelsea had imagined. There had been long days in the cottage, lonely days when Carlin had been angry with her, when Kelsea would console herself by picturing the phantom woman who had borne her: a delicate, willowy woman, like something out of a Grimm tale. But the Elyssa in the portrait didn’t look frail at all; she was tall, taller than Kelsea, and she radiated health and substance, a striking blonde woman with sparkling green eyes. She stood beside a plain, unadorned table, but she was grinning, the carefree grin of a woman with nothing in the world to worry about. Kelsea, who had almost been pleased with this version of her mother, found herself latching on to that grin. Even if the portrait had been painted immediately after Elyssa took the throne, the Mort would already be tearing their way through the Tear countryside. The Mort Treaty, the lottery, these things couldn’t be far away, and the utter carelessness of her mother’s expression sharpened Kelsea’s resolve, her determination that no one would suffer for her mistakes.
“Lady,” Mace murmured.
“What?”
“It does no good to dwell on the past. The future, now . . . that’s everything.”
Kelsea was annoyed that Mace had read her so easily. But she saw no judgment in his face, only his own brand of hard truth, and after a moment she relaxed, shrugging. “And yet sometimes the answer to the future lies in the past, Lazarus.”
Mace turned and barked, “Spread out, all of you!”
Kelsea’s guards moved away, to all ends of the room. Kelsea stared at Mace, bewildered, but he only moved closer and murmured, “Is that where you go at night, Lady, on your wanderings? The past?”
Kelsea swallowed, though something seemed to catch in her throat. “What makes you think I go anywhere?”
“Pen missed it, that night last week. He was on the library door. But I was right next to you, Lady. You said, ‘There’s a better world out there. So close we can almost touch it.’ I know those words; there was a song about them in the village where I grew up. A song of the Crossing.”
“I was sleepwalking.”
Mace chuckled. “You’re no more a sleepwalker than Andalie’s little one, Lady. I found her in Arliss’s office the other night. When Arliss is gone, that office is always locked. But Glee got in there, all the same.”
“What’s your point, Lazarus?”
“That night, for a minute, just before you came out of your fugue, you seemed to . . . fade.”
“Fade?” The word chilled Kelsea, but she produced a halfhearted snicker.
“Laugh if you like, Lady, but I did see it.” Mace leaned in even closer now, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Do you ever consider, Lady, that it might be better to simply take them off and throw them away?”
Kelsea reached up automatically, taking her jewels in a clenched fist. She didn’t know whether they even functioned any longer, or whether something else was working on her now. But everything in her rebelled at the idea of taking them off.
Mace shook his head and then gave her a pained grin. “Well, it was worth a try.”
“Look here, Lady!” Coryn announced, pointing to the next portrait.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Kelsea breathed. Her uncle’s face beamed down at her from the wall: younger than the man she had met, but unmistakably Thomas Raleigh. He carried less weight, and his nose didn’t quite have the alcoholic shade of red that it would attain later, but the air of entitlement, the sense of being God’s gift to the earth, these things emanated from the canvas in nearly visible waves.
“Take that nonsense down!” Kelsea snapped. “He’s not a Tear monarch, he never was. Get rid of it.”
“I’ll take care of it, Lady,” Mace replied. “I had no idea he’d put up a portrait. I haven’t been down here in years.”
“Doesn’t anyone use this gallery?”
“I doubt it. Look at the dust.”
Kelsea went back to glaring at her mother’s portrait. Even if she somehow found a solution to the Mort nightmare on the horizon, it did nothing for the fifty thousand Tear who had already gone to Mortmesne, her mother’s gift to the world. This was familiar territory, a problem with no solution.
“May I ask you a question, Lady?” Dyer asked.
“Please.”
“I wondered if you had decided what to do with the prisoner Javel.”
“I will let him out of prison, certainly, but only once I’ve thought of a way to keep him from drinking himself to death.” Kelsea turned away from the portraits to face her five guards, who stood in front of the sunlit windows like a row of chessmen. “I don’t know what to do with the boy, the Jailor, either. He’s earned some reward, but for the life of me, I don’t know what to give him. Does he have no friends, no one who knows him well?”
Coryn spoke up. “I know his father a little. The old Jailor, retired now. I can ask.”
“Do that. I don’t want the reward to be meaningless. They gave us a great gift, both Ewen and Javel.”
“And what will you do with the gift?” Pen asked. It was the first full sentence Kelsea had gotten in days, but she wished that she could just ignore him. “What about Thorne?”
“I don’t know.”
“Better decide soon, Lady,” Dyer cut in. “The entire kingdom is screaming for his blood.”
“Yes, but they scream for the wrong reasons. They want him to suffer because of his years as Overseer of the Census. Yet that was a government position, and as terrible as they were, Thorne’s actions as Overseer were legal under the Regency. I can’t have a rule of law that bows under public pressure. If I execute Thorne, it must be for his crimes.”
“He’s guilty of treason, Lady.”
“And yet that’s not the reason the entire kingdom will line up to watch him hang.”
The five guards stared at her, and Kelsea felt more than ever that she was on a chessboard, a pawn facing five power pieces. “You all agree? That I should execute him?”
They all nodded, even Pen, who Kelsea had thought might be a secret holdout.
“I’ll make a decision soon, but not yet. I did promise Elston his fun, you know.”
Leaving them chuckling behind her, Kelsea moved back down the gallery to have another look at the man from the fireplace. He was even more striking in daylight, and although the portrait was clearly very old, he had not aged a day since. His eyes followed her as she came closer, and although Kelsea knew it was silly, she felt as though he really could see her from a distance.
“Take this one down as well,” she said finally. “I don’t know who he is, but he’s not a monarch. He doesn’t belong on this wall.”
“Should we get rid of it?”
“No. Bring it upstairs.” She peered around her guards until she found Father Tyler, staring out the window. “Thank you, Father. Most interesting, this place.”
“Yes, Lady,” the priest replied absently. But his bleak gaze remained fixed on the mountains.
What have they done to him? Kelsea wondered again. Her eyes strayed to the cast on his knee. She was surprised by her own protective instinct toward the priest. He was an old man, one who wanted only to sit and read books and think about the past; it seemed a crime for anyone to harm him. On several mornings lately, Kelsea had found Father Tyler asleep on his favorite sofa in the library, as though he no longer wished to spend his nights in the Arvath. Had the Holy Father done something else to him? If he had—
Stop, Kelsea told herself. She couldn’t try to assert authority over the inner workings of the Arvath. That path would only lead to disaster. She pushed God’s Church from her mind, and as it went, she suddenly had an idea, a possible solution . . . not to Father Tyler, but to another problem.
“Lazarus? Can any of the Guard speak Mort?”
Mace blinked in surprise. “Kibb, Dyer, and Galen, Lady. And myself.”
“Do any of them speak it well enough to pass for Mort?”
“Only Galen, really.” Mace’s brow furrowed. “What’s on your mind?”
“We’re going back upstairs now, but not everyone. Two of you go down to the dungeon and bring me Javel. Try to wake him up a bit.”
But an hour later, when Javel entered the Queen’s Wing, Kelsea was disappointed to see that his earlier apathy had not changed. He looked around without interest as Coryn escorted him to the foot of the dais, then simply stood staring at the ground. Where was the man who had attacked the burning cage, all alone, with an axe? Kelsea wondered whether she would have seen the real Javel on the day Thorne had broken into the dungeon. Ewen had been very cagey about what had happened down there, but Mace finally got the whole truth from him: if Ewen hadn’t intervened, Javel would have beaten Thorne to death with his bare hands. That was the man Kelsea wanted to see.
She was pleased to notice that Ewen had at least left off Javel’s manacles. There was no need for restraint; Javel merely stood there, straight and beaten, as though waiting for his own execution.
“Javel.”
He didn’t look up, only replied hollowly, “Majesty.”
“You’ve done me a great service in the capture of Arlen Thorne.”
“Yes, Majesty. Thank you.”
“I have pardoned you. You’re free to leave the Keep now, at any time, and go your own way. But I would ask you to stay and listen to a proposal.”
“What proposal?”
“I’m told that your wife went to Mortmesne in the shipment six years ago. Is this correct?”
“Yes.”
“Is she still alive?”
“I don’t know,” Javel replied listlessly. “Thorne said so. He said he could get her back. But now I think it was all lies, and she’s dead.”
“Why?”
“She was a pretty woman, my Allie. They don’t last long.”
Kelsea winced, but plowed forward. “Was your Allie pretty and weak, Javel? Or was she pretty and tough?”
“A damned sight tougher than me, Lady, though that doesn’t say much.”
“And yet you think she couldn’t have survived six years in a Mort knockhouse?”
Javel looked up, and Kelsea was pleased to see a hint of anger in his eyes. “Why say this to me, Lady? Do you wish to make it worse?”
“I wish to see whether you still care about anything at all. Do you think your wife would be happy to see you here now, like this?”
“That’s between her and me.” Javel looked around him, seeming to notice Coryn for the first time. “You said I was free to leave.”
“So you are. The door is behind you.”
Javel turned and walked away. Kelsea sensed Mace bridling beside her, but to his credit, he kept quiet.
“What will you do now, Javel?” she called after him.
“Find the nearest pub.”
“Is that what your wife would have wanted?”
“She’s dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
Javel kept walking.
“Don’t you want to find out?”
He halted, perhaps ten feet from the doors.
“I have ended the lottery, Javel,” Kelsea continued, staring at his back, willing him to stay still. “No shipment will ever leave this country under my Crown. But that doesn’t redress the wrongs of the past, the Tear already in Mortmesne. What do I do about all of them, all of those slaves? The answer is clear: I have to get them out.”
Javel remained in place, but Kelsea saw his shoulders heave, once, an involuntary movement.
“Lazarus is thinking that I have other things to worry about,” she continued, with a nod to Mace, “and he’s right. My people are starving and uneducated. We have no true medicine. On the eastern border is an army that will crush us into dust. These are real problems, and so for a time I’ve let the others lie. But here is where Lazarus and I differ a bit. He believes that avoiding the wrongs of the future is more important than righting the wrongs of the past.”
“So it is, Lady,” Mace muttered, and Kelsea threw him a quick, pained grin. She wished that Father Tyler were still here; he would have understood. But he had already gone back to the Arvath.
“Lazarus means well, but he’s mistaken. The wrongs of the past are not less significant, they’re just harder to fix. And the longer you ignore them in favor of more pressing issues, the worse the harm, until the problems of the past actually create the problems of the future. And that brings us back to your Allie.”
Javel turned around, and Kelsea saw that his eyes were wet.
“Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that your wife is alive, Javel. Let’s say that the very worst has happened to her in Mortmesne, the most terrible thing that your imagination can conjure. Would you still want her back?”
“Of course I would!” Javel spat. “Do you think it was easy, watching her carted off in the cage? I would do anything to change it!”
“You can’t change it. And since you can’t, I ask you again: do you still want her back?”
“I do.”
“Then here is my proposal. You will go to Mortmesne with two of my Guard. I will arm and fund you. And if you can get your Allie out, then I’ll know it can be done.”
Javel blinked, his expression doubtful. “I’m not a particularly good fighter, Lady. I can’t even speak Mort.”
“And you’re a drunk,” Dyer remarked from the wall.
“Shut up, Dyer!” Kelsea snapped, thinking of Barty. Barty, she now suspected, had been an alcoholic. There was no way to know for sure, but a thousand tiny hints had been scattered throughout her childhood. “Your drunkenness, Javel, is not my primary concern. I want someone committed to the enterprise.”
“I only want my Allie back.”
“That’s all I’m asking you for.”
“I’ll go.” Javel’s eyes gleamed . . . not with life, not yet, but at least with some purpose. “I don’t know how it can work, but I’ll go.”
“Good. Take a few days for yourself, get your affairs in order. Lazarus will be in touch.”
Javel’s face fell; he had clearly meant to leave right then. Mace stepped forward and growled, “Do yourself a favor, Gate Guard, and stay out of the pubs. This will be a tough trick even with a clear head.”
“I can do that.”
“Good. Devin, escort him to the Gate.”
Javel followed the guard out the door with wandering footsteps, as though unsure of where he was going.
“You’re mad, Lady,” Mace muttered. “The ways that this can fail . . . I can’t even list them. And you want to send two of my best men along with that ass.”
“When it fails, they do call it madness, Lazarus. But when it succeeds, they call it genius, and the genius will be yours, for I’m putting this entire operation into your hands. I want to know nothing more about it.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
Kelsea smiled, but as the doors closed, she whipped around sharply. “Dyer!”
He came forward.
“Your mouth is a fine source of amusement to me, Dyer. But that means nothing if you can’t learn when to keep it shut.”
“I apologize, Majesty.”
“You speak passable Mort, yes?”
Dyer blinked. “I do, Lady. My accent isn’t wonderful, but I am fluent. Why?”
Kelsea glanced at Mace, who gave her an almost imperceptible nod. Dyer stared at them for a moment, then groaned. “Oh, Lady, don’t tell me.”
“You’re going, my friend,” Mace cut in. “You and Galen.”
Dyer looked up at Kelsea, and she was surprised to see real hurt in his eyes. “Am I being punished, Lady?”
“Of course not. This is important work.”
“To break a single slave out of Mortmesne?”
“Think bigger, you prick,” Mace growled. “I’m sending you over there. Do you really think you’ll have only one agenda?”
This time, it was Kelsea who blinked, but she recovered quickly. If she was already looking further down the road, it was no surprise that Mace was doing the same. The Mort rebellion, it had to be; Mace had made it something of a pet project in his limited free time. Under his direction, the Crown had already sent several shipments of goods to the rebels in Cite Marche.
“I apologize, Majesty,” Dyer said.
“Accepted.” Kelsea glanced at her watch. “Is it dinner yet?”
“Milla says thirty minutes, Majesty!” a new man called from the kitchen doorway.
“Call me when it’s ready,” Kelsea told Mace, climbing off the throne. “All of you have worn me out today.”
In her chamber, she found the portrait they had brought up from the gallery, now leaning against the wall beside her fireplace. Kelsea stared at it for a long moment, then turned to Pen.
“Go away.”
“Lady—”
“What?”
Pen splayed his hands. “Things can’t remain like this forever. We have to move past what happened.”
“I have moved past it!”
“You haven’t.” Pen spoke quietly, but Kelsea heard the low hum of anger in his voice.
“It was a weak moment, and it won’t repeat.”
“I’m a Queen’s Guard, Lady. You have to understand that.”
“I understand that you’re just like every other man in the world. Get out.”
Pen’s breath hissed through his teeth, and Kelsea was pleased to see real pain in his eyes for a moment before he retreated to his antechamber. But as soon as he pulled the curtain closed, she collapsed in her armchair, regretting her own words. Here had been a perfectly good opportunity to repair the situation, and she had thrown it away.
Why must I be such a child?
Looking up, Kelsea caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the mirror and stiffened. She wasn’t a child anymore; the ground had shifted beneath her again. A pretty—though stern—woman stared back at her from the glass. Even by the soft light of the fire, Kelsea could see that her cheekbones had become more prominent; they seemed to shape her face, pointing it downward toward a mouth that had somehow become lush.
Kelsea gave a croak of laughter. If she had a fairy godmother somewhere, then the old woman must be senile, for she was granting the wrong wishes, those that mattered least. The Tear was in a shambles and the Mort army had begun its assault on the border, but Kelsea grew prettier by the day.
Maybe this is what I wished for, she thought, staring at the mirror. Maybe this is what I wanted more than any other thing. A phrase from one of Carlin’s books recurred: blood will tell. Kelsea thought of the portrait two floors beneath her, the smiling blonde woman with no care in the world beyond her own pleasure, and felt like screaming. But the face in the mirror remained serene, mysterious, just on the point of deepening into beauty.
“True Queen,” Kelsea muttered bitterly, and heard her voice crack. Her reflection blurred for a moment, became indistinct. She blinked, confused, and then found herself fading, that curious sense of incipient otherness, of becoming someone else, which she had experienced before. She should call Pen, warn him that she was starting on one of her fugues, but humiliation overwhelmed her, and for a moment she could not find her voice. The power of this particular memory did not seem to fade with the passage of time; at any moment it could rise like the tide, swamping Kelsea and drowning her in an ocean of shame. Why should she tell Pen what was coming? It would serve him right if she blundered into a wall or a piece of furniture, if she injured herself on his watch.
You are being utterly childish. These aren’t real problems. Lily has real problems. The Tearling has real problems. Your little dramas aren’t even on the map.
Kelsea tried to shut the voice out, but it was too right to ignore, and for a moment she loathed the sensible side of herself, that pragmatic core that no longer allowed her even the luxury of throwing a tantrum. The room faded around her, rippling, and Kelsea felt a moment of wonder at how close the two worlds seemed to be. Lily’s life and her own . . . sometimes it seemed as though they lay right beside each other, perfectly aligned . . . as though Kelsea could step over some line and simply be in a different time, in the America that was gone.
“Pen!”
He appeared in moments, his face stiff.
“I’m going,” Kelsea murmured. The room was fading away now, and as Pen approached, she found that he was fading as well, until she could look right through him, into a sunlit room.
“It’s all right, Lady,” Pen murmured. “I won’t let you fall.” His grip on her arm was good, strong and comforting, but Kelsea sensed that, in time, even that would fade.