“Nothing we do is pointless. You only judge because you can’t see the whole picture.”
“I don’t judge.”
“Of course you do. Why wouldn’t you? This is a lofty perch you sit on.”
Lily flushed, and she suddenly found herself wanting to contradict him, to explain about Greg, to tell this man how the perch wasn’t so lofty at all. But she couldn’t say any of that to a stranger. She couldn’t even say it to her friends.
“Boss?” Dorian asked from the couch.
“There you are, love.”
Dorian smiled, a sleepy smile that turned her face into that of a child. “Knew you’d come. Did it work?”
“Beautifully. Months before they can fly again. You did a good job.”
Dorian’s eyes brightened.
“Sleep, Dori. Heal up.”
Dorian closed her eyes. Lily didn’t know what to make of this exchange. Clear affection between the two of them, yes, but what man sent the woman he loved to plant explosives, to be shot?
“I have to get her out of here,” the man murmured, his eyes troubled.
“She can stay as long as she needs to.”
“Until you tire of the novelty and turn her in.”
“I won’t!” Lily snapped back, stung. “I would never do that.”
“Forgive me my skepticism.”
“The doctor said she shouldn’t be moved!” Lily insisted, alarmed, for the man had risen from his armchair, and she saw that he meant to pick Dorian up and carry her out. Lily sprang from her own armchair, then hissed in pain as all of her separate wounds woke up at once.
“Seen some rough handling, haven’t we, Mrs. Mayhew? Who’s done that to your face?”
“None of your business.”
He nodded, his eyes bright, and Lily saw that he already knew . . . maybe not everything, but more than she wanted him to.
“Don’t take her away, please.”
“Why not?”
Lily cast around for more of the doctor’s words. “There might be roadblocks.”
“There are three roadblocks around New Canaan, Mrs. Mayhew. They’re no impediment to me.”
“Please.” Lily was appalled to find herself near tears. The entire day seemed to have crashed down on her all at once: the horrible surgery, Greg, Maddy . . . and now this man, who wanted to take Dorian away before Lily could atone for anything. “Please let her stay.”
“What’s your interest here, Mrs. Mayhew? Might as well tell me; I’ll know if you’re lying. Are you looking to collect a reward?”
“No!”
He bent toward Dorian again. Lily fumbled for words, for any excuse, but she came up with nothing. Only the truth.
“I turned my sister in.”
He looked up sharply. “What?”
Lily tried to stop, but the words came tumbling out. “My sister. I turned her in to Security, eight years ago. I didn’t mean to, but I did. Dorian looks just like her.”
He studied her closely for a moment, his eyes narrowed. “What’s your maiden name, Mrs. Mayhew?”
“Freeman.”
“Good name for a separatist. What did your sister do?”
“Nothing.” Lily closed her eyes, feeling tears threatening to swamp her again. “She had a pamphlet in her room. I didn’t know what it was at the time.”
“You showed it to someone?”
Lily nodded, and the tears began to slide down her cheeks. “My friends. One of them had a father who worked for Security, but I never thought about that. I just wanted to know what Maddy was doing.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen. Maddy was fifteen.”
“Did they come for her?”
Lily nodded again, unable to speak. She had no way to explain that morning, the way it never changed in her memory no matter how badly she wished it to: Lily, standing by her locker, surrounded by her own friends, all of them glued to their phones; Maddy, coming out of a classroom thirty feet away; and just around the corner, not yet seen, the four Security officers, closing in. Sometimes Lily had dreams, hopeless nightmares in which she reached for Maddy, grabbed her arm at the last minute and helped her duck into a classroom, behind a door, out the window. But even her dreaming self knew it was futile, that any moment the four men in black uniforms would come around the corner, that two of them would grab each of Maddy’s arms and escort her down the hallway, that Lily’s last glimpse of her sister would be a flash of blonde pigtails before the doors closed.
At dinner the three of them, Mom and Dad and Lily, had waited for Maddy to turn up. They had waited through the night as well, and into the next morning. Dad got on the phone with every important person he knew, and Mom cried almost nonstop, but Lily was silent, some deep and awful part of her already beginning to put two and two together, to understand what she had done. Dad was only an engineer; his clout was nowhere near strong enough to get a prisoner released, especially not one with suspected separatist ties. They had waited for days, and then weeks, but Maddy had never come home; she had vanished into the vast, dark mechanism of Security. The doctors said that Dad had died of cancer, but Lily knew the truth. Dad had been dying for a long time, dying slowly and horribly of Maddy’s disappearance years before. Mom didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t even want to think about it. She told friends that Maddy had run away, and when Lily tried to talk about it, Mom would simply ignore her, turning the conversation into a different path. Mom’s attitude was maddening, but Dad’s grief had been terminal.
I killed him too, Lily often thought to herself, in those defenseless moments right before sleep. I didn’t mean to, but I killed my father.
She looked up at the man in front of her, expecting judgment. But his face was neutral.
“It’s been eating you up, I see.”
Lily nodded.
“And you’re using Dorian as . . . what? Self-punishment?”
“Fuck you!” Lily hissed. “I’m not the one who sent her to blow up a jet field.”
“She volunteered,” he replied mildly.
“Please. Your group recruits people with nowhere else to go.”
“True, most of them have nowhere else. But that’s not why they volunteer.”
“Then why?”
He leaned forward, his remarkably light eyes gleaming in the candlelight. He steepled his hands, and Lily saw that his fingers were scarred and burned in several places. Whatever she had imagined when she thought of the Blue Horizon, it wasn’t this man.
“Tell me, Mrs. Mayhew, have you ever dreamed of a better world?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“Anyone who profits by keeping the world as it is. You and your husband, for instance.”
“I don’t profit by it,” Lily muttered, wiping the tears from her cheeks.
“Maybe not,” he replied, his eyes going to the cut on her forehead. “Profit is a relative thing. But regardless, there’s a better world out there. I see it all the—”
The Englishman broke off abruptly, tilting his head to one side. A moment later, Lily heard it as well: a siren, no more than a couple of streets away.
“Time for me to be going.” He began digging in the medical bag on the table. “I thought I’d need this, but the doctor seems to have done well. Did he leave antibiotics?”
Lily nodded. “I’m supposed to give her one shot per day.”
“Good. Don’t go shopping and forget.”
Lily’s cheeks colored, but she didn’t take the bait. “She can stay?”
“Until I find a safe way to get her out. A few days at most.” He pulled a small white packet from the bag and held it out to Lily. “Take this. Pour a bit in the bath for a few days.”
“Take it for what?”
He stared down at her, his face unreadable. “You put on a good show, Mrs. Mayhew, but men like your husband rarely limit the damage to the outside.”
Lily took the packet, trying not to touch his fingers. “I suppose you think I have options.”<
br />
“Oh, I know you don’t.” He closed the flap of his medical bag. “But don’t lose all hope of the better world. It’s out there, so close we can almost touch it.”
“What better world?”
The Englishman paused, deliberating. Lily had thought that his eyes were grey, but now she saw that they were actually bright silver, the color of moonlight on water.
“Picture a world where there are no rich and poor. No luxury, but everyone is fed and clothed and educated and cared for. God controls nothing. Books aren’t forbidden. Women aren’t the lower class. The color of your skin, the circumstances of your birth, these things don’t matter. Kindness and humanity are everything. There are no guns, no surveillance, no drugs, no debt, and greed holds no sway at all.”
Lily fought against his voice, but not hard enough, for she glimpsed his better world for a moment, clear and limned in shades of blue and green: a village of small wooden houses, of pure kindness, beside a river, surrounded by trees.
Wake up, Lily!
She dug her fingernails into her palms. “I’m told that pipe dreams go better with lubricant.”
His shoulders shook with silent amusement. “That’s late night, Mrs. Mayhew. But you did ask the question.”
He opened the patio door and stood framed for a moment in the doorway, listening to the night. He was taller than Greg, Lily saw now, but whereas Greg was still bulky from his football years, this man was agile, with the lithe muscles of a runner or a swimmer. When he turned back to her, she noticed a long, jagged scar running down the side of his neck.
“Do you want to help us further?”
“Help you how?”
“We can always use information. Anything you can pass along via Jonathan would be helpful.”
“How did Jonathan join up with you?”
“That’s his story to tell.”
“How did you get over the New Canaan wall?”
“There are ways through every barrier, Mrs. Mayhew.”
Lily blinked, stunned by the calm assurance of this statement. “Who are you?”
She knew what she would get: no names. The Englishman stepped through the door, and Lily ignored him, staring resolutely at the sleeping woman on the sofa. He had allowed Dorian to stay, but Lily felt as though she had already lost something. Soon they would both be gone, Dorian and this man, and what would Lily have then? A lifetime with Greg, an eternity of nights like tonight. This brief glimpse of another life would make that future a thousand times worse. When the man spoke, his reply was so unexpected that Lily froze in her chair, and by the time she looked up, he had already vanished into the night.
“My name is William Tear.”
Chapter 6
Ewen
Even small gestures of kindness have the potential to reap enormous rewards. Only the shortsighted man believes otherwise.
—The Glynn Queen’s Words, AS COMPILED BY FATHER TYLER
The Cadarese ambassador, Ajmal Kattan, was a charmer: tall, sharp-witted, and handsome, with almond-colored skin and a blinding white smile. Kelsea liked him immediately, despite Mace’s warning that this was exactly the sort of ambassador the King of Cadare always sent to women: smooth and plausible and seductive. Kattan’s Tear was imperfect, but even his accent was engaging, riddled with pauses before long words and a sharp drop on the penultimate vowel. He had brought Kelsea a beautiful chess set carved from marble, kings and rooks and bishops with intricately detailed faces, and she accepted the gift happily. After their return from the Argive, she had sent several Keep servants to clean out Carlin and Barty’s cottage, and among assorted other things, they had brought back Carlin’s old chess set. Both Arliss and Mace were good players; Arliss could beat Kelsea two times of three. But Carlin’s set was old, whittled—by Barty, no doubt—of plain wood and beginning to show its wear. It had great sentimental value to Kelsea, but the new set would be more durable for play.
Mace had warned Kelsea that the Cadarese placed great value on appearances, and as such, she had not wanted to conduct this meeting in the large central room of the Queen’s Wing that usually served for such functions. At her urging, Mace had finally relented and moved the throne back down to the massive audience chamber several floors below. When not filled with people, the chamber felt ridiculously cavernous, so they had also thrown this audience open to the public. Tear nobles had more or less stopped attending Kelsea’s audiences once they realized that no gifts would be dispensed from the throne, and Mace and Kelsea had decided on a simple, fair system: the first five hundred people who came to the Keep Gate could attend the audience, so long as they submitted to a search for weapons. Kelsea had found that clothing was a fairly reliable index of wealth; some of the people who stood in front of her were clearly of the entrepreneurial class, probably dealing in lumber if not something less legal. But the majority of the audience was poor, and Kelsea had the regrettable thought that most of them had come here for entertainment. Her first few public audiences had featured quite a bit of talk and some occasional catcalling from the crowd, but Mace had taken care of that, announcing that anyone who captured his attention could look forward to a private conference. Now Kelsea barely heard a peep.
“My master begs that you will honor him with a visit,” the ambassador said.
“Perhaps one day,” Kelsea replied, seeing Mace frown. “At the moment, I have too much to do.”
“Indeed you have the full plate. You have provoked the Ageless Queen. My master admires your bravery.”
“Has your master never provoked her?”
“No. His father did, and received a painful reminder. Now we pay twice as much in glass and horses.”
“Perhaps that’s the difference. We were paying in humans.” A moment later Kelsea remembered that the Cadarese also sent slaves to Mortmesne, but the ambassador did not seem to take offense.
“Yes, we’ve heard this as well. You forbid human traffic within your borders. My master is greatly entertained.”
There was an insult wrapped in the last statement, but Kelsea made no attempt to unpack it. She needed help from the Cadarese king, and she could not offend the ambassador by questioning him in front of his aides, but neither did she have time to engage in the lengthy and circuitous prelude to serious discussion that was fashionable in Cadare. This morning, a message had arrived from Hall, with bad news: General Ducarte had taken command of the Mort army. Everyone in the Queen’s Wing seemed to know a horror story about Ducarte, and although the border villages had already been evacuated and Bermond was now beginning to clear out the eastern Almont, even a successful evacuation would accomplish nothing if Ducarte got to New London. The city’s defenses were weak. The eastern side had a high wall, but that wall was too close to the Caddell River, built on watery ground. The western side of the city had nothing. Her mother had trusted the natural defense of the Clayton Mountains to protect the west against a prolonged siege, but Kelsea was not so sanguine. She wanted a western wall around the city, but Mace estimated that they had less than two months until the Mort reached the city. Even if she conscripted every stonemason in New London, they would never build it in time.
But Cadare had many masons, the best stoneworkers in the New World. Even if the King was unwilling to supplement the Tear army with his own forces, perhaps Kelsea could get him to lend her some of his craftsmen. At the very least, she needed him to stop sending horses to Mortmesne; there was a saying, only lightly exaggerated, that a sick Cadarese mare could outrun a healthy Tear yearling. Better horses weren’t much use to the Mort up in the Border Hills, but once they got down into the Almont, superior cavalry would be a crushing advantage. She needed these negotiations to bear fruit.
“Shall we get down to business, Ambassador?”
Kattan’s eyebrows rose. “You move quickly, Majesty.”
“I’m a busy woman.”
Kattan settled in his chair, looking a bit disgruntled. “My master wishes to discuss an alliance.”
Kel
sea’s heart leapt. A murmur ran through the audience chamber, but Mace did not react; he was too busy staring at the ambassador with narrowed, suspicious eyes.
“My master likewise wishes to reduce his tribute to the Mort,” Kattan continued. “But neither Cadare nor the Tearling is strong enough to do so alone.”
“I agree. What would the terms of this alliance be?”
“Slowly, slowly, Majesty!” Kattan insisted, waving his hands, and that was Kelsea’s real clue that she would not like what was coming: the ambassador felt the need to wend his way into it. “My master recognizes your bravery in defying the Mort, and would reward you accordingly.”
“Reward me how?”
“By making you first among his wives.”
Kelsea froze, dumbfounded, hearing several of her Guard mutter around her. She swallowed hard and managed to reply, though it felt as though her throat were full of moths. “How many wives does your King have?”
“Twenty-three, Majesty.”
“Are they all Cadarese?”
“All but two, Majesty. Those two are Mort, gifts from the Ageless Queen.”
“What are the ages of these wives?”
The ambassador looked away and cleared his throat. “I am not sure, Majesty.”
“I see.” Kelsea wanted to kick herself. She should have seen it coming. Mace had told her that the Cadarese were isolationists, that their assistance would come with heavy strings. But she didn’t think that even Mace had foreseen such an offer. She scrambled to think of a counterproposal. “What is the value of being the first wife?”
“You sit immediately beside the master at table. You have first pick of all gifts delivered to the palace. Once you have produced a healthy son, you have the right to refuse the master’s attentions if you wish.”
The Invasion of the Tearling Page 18