The crowd astounded her. After years with only Barty and Carlin, it was hard to accept so much humanity in one place. People were everywhere, and they came in so many varieties, tall and short, old and young, dark and fair, thin and round. Kelsea had met plenty of new people in the past few days, but she had never really considered before how many possibilities were presented by a single human face. She saw a man with a long, hooked nose, almost like the beak of a bird; a woman with long, wavy blonde hair that seemed to reflect the sun in thousands of sparkles. Everything seemed overly bright, enough to make Kelsea’s eyes water. And the sounds! All around Kelsea was the roar of innumerable voices raised at once, a clamor that she had never heard before. Individual voices pressed in on her from time to time, merchants shouting their wares or acquaintances greeting each other across the confusion of the road, but their voices were nothing compared to the overall roar of the crowd. It attacked Kelsea’s ears with a physical force that threatened to crush her eardrums, yet she found the chaos oddly comforting.
As they rounded one corner, a street performer caught Kelsea’s eye. He placed a rose in a vase, made an identical vase appear from nowhere, then made the rose vanish and reappear instantaneously in the second vase. Kelsea slowed her horse to watch. The magician vanished the rose and both vases entirely, and then reached into his own mouth and produced a snow-white kitten. The animal was clearly alive; it squirmed in his hands while the crowd applauded. The magician then presented the kitten to a small girl in the audience, who squealed with excitement.
Kelsea smiled, charmed. Most likely he was gifted only with extraordinary dexterity, not true magic, but she could see no slip in the flawless transition of objects.
“We court danger here, Lady,” murmured Mace.
“What danger?”
“Only a feeling. But my feelings on such matters are usually right.”
Kelsea shook the reins and her horse began to trot forward again. “The magician, Lazarus. Mark him for me.”
“Lady.”
As the day drew on, Kelsea began to share Mace’s anxiety. The novelty of the crowd was diminishing, and everywhere Kelsea looked, she sensed people staring at her. She felt more and more hunted, and wished simply for the journey to be over. She had no doubt Mace had chosen the best route, but still she began to long for an open, clear space where threats could arrive cleanly, an honest fight.
But she didn’t know how to fight.
Although New London had the feel of a labyrinth, some neighborhoods were clearly better off than others. The higher-end areas had well-tended roads and well-dressed citizens on the streets, even a few brick buildings with glass windows. But other areas had tightly packed pinewood buildings with no windows and denizens who slouched along the walls in a creeping, furtive manner. Sometimes Kelsea and Mace were forced to ride through a cloud of stench that suggested that the houses were plumbed poorly, or not at all.
This is what it smells like in February, Kelsea thought, sickened. What must it be like in high summer?
Halfway through a particularly run-down section, Kelsea realized she was in a blue district. The street was so narrow that it was really an alley. The buildings were all made of some cheap wood that Kelsea couldn’t even identify, and many buildings listed so far sideways that it seemed a miracle they were still standing. Occasionally Kelsea heard screams and the sound of things breaking as they passed. The air rang with laughter, a cold laughter that made her skin break out in gooseflesh.
Poorly dressed women appeared from the crooked doorways and leaned against walls, while Kelsea stared at them in helpless fascination from beneath the shelter of her hood. There was an indefinable air of squalor about the prostitutes, something that couldn’t be pinpointed. It wasn’t their clothing; certainly their dresses were neither more nor less fancy than many Kelsea had seen, and despite the considerable amount of flesh they displayed, it wasn’t the cut of the garments either. It was something in the eyes, in the way the eyes seemed to eat up the faces of even the heaviest women. They looked worn, the young as well as the old. Many of them appeared to have scars. Kelsea didn’t want to imagine the lives they must lead, but she couldn’t help it.
I’ll close this entire section down, she thought. Close it down and give them all real employment.
Carlin’s voice spoke up in her head. Will you regulate the length of their dresses as well? Perhaps forbid novels deemed too pornographic?
There’s a difference.
No difference. Blue laws are blue laws. If you wish to dictate private morality, march yourself over to the Arvath.
Mace directed her to the left, between two buildings, and Kelsea was relieved when they emerged onto a wide boulevard lined with neatly kept shops. The grey facade of the Keep was closer now, blotting out the surrounding mountains and most of the sky. Despite the width of the boulevard, it was so crowded that Kelsea and Mace were boxed in again, and could only muddle along at the crowd’s pace. There was more sunlight here, and Kelsea felt uneasy, exposed despite her cloak and hood. No one knew what she looked like, but Mace must cut a recognizable figure anywhere. He seemed to share the feeling, for he spurred his stallion forward until he was literally nudging the crowd of riders and pedestrians out of the way. A path opened before them, with some grumbling on either side.
“Straight ahead,” Mace muttered, “as quickly as we can.”
Still their progress was slow. Rake, who had behaved well throughout the journey, seemed to sense Kelsea’s anxiety and now began to resist her direction. Her efforts to control the horse quickly became exhausting in combination with the weight of Pen’s armor. She was sweating in thick drips that trickled down her neck and back, and Mace’s darting glances behind them became more frequent as they went. The crowds continued to pack them in more and more tightly as they approached the Keep.
“Can’t we take another way?”
“There’s no other way,” Mace replied. He was controlling his horse with only one hand now; the other was on his sword. “We’re out of time, Lady. Push on; not much farther now.”
For the next few minutes, Kelsea struggled to stay conscious. The late-afternoon sun bore down on her dark cloak, and the close quarters created by the crowd did nothing to relieve the feeling of suffocation. Twice she swayed in her saddle, and was only restored by Mace’s tight grip on her shoulder.
Finally the boulevard ended, branching off onto a wide field of grass that circled the Keep and its moat. At the sight of the Keep Lawn, Kelsea felt a moment of atavistic excitement. Here the Mort soldiers had gathered with their siege equipment, had nearly breached the walls, and then had been turned away at the last minute. The lawn sloped gently downhill toward the Keep, and almost directly below Kelsea, a wide stone bridge crossed the water, leading to the Keep Gate. Two lines of guards were stationed at even intervals along the edges of the bridge. The grey monolith of the Keep itself towered almost directly over Kelsea’s head, and staring at the top made her dizzy, forced her to look away.
The Keep Lawn was covered with people, and Kelsea’s first reaction was surprise: wasn’t her arrival supposed to be a secret? Adults, children, even the elderly streamed like water across the grass and down toward the moat. But this wasn’t at all how Kelsea had pictured this day in her daydreams. Where were the cheering masses, the flowers thrown? Some of these people were weeping, but not the happy tears that Kelsea had imagined. Like the farmers in the Almont, all of these people looked as though they could use several hundred good meals. They wore the same sort of clothing Kelsea had seen in the Almont as well: dark and shapeless wool. Deep misery was etched into each face. Kelsea felt a sudden wave of powerful anxiety. Something wasn’t right.
Another scan of the lawn revealed that while many of the people on the lawn were milling around, apparently loitering, some of them had organized into long, straight lines that stretched down to the edge of the moat. When the crowd parted, Kelsea saw that there were several tables down there, tables with men stand
ing behind them, probably officials, given the deep, identical blue of their clothing. Kelsea felt relief, tinged with slight disappointment. These people hadn’t come to see her at all. They were here for something else. The lines were very long, and they weren’t moving. The entire crowd appeared to be waiting.
But for what?
She turned to Mace, who was keeping a sharp eye on the lawn, one hand clenched on the hilt of his sword. “Lazarus, what are all these people doing here?”
He didn’t answer, wouldn’t meet her eye. A cold noose seemed to tighten around her heart. The crowd shifted again, and Kelsea spotted something new, some sort of metal contraption beside the moat. She stood up in her stirrups to get a better look and saw a series of structures: low rectangular boxes, about ten feet tall. The tops and bottoms were wood, and the sides were metal. There were nine of them in a line, stretching all the way down the lawn toward the far corner of the Keep. Kelsea squinted (her eyesight had never been very good) and saw that the walls of the boxes were actually a series of metal bars. Time suddenly slipped backward, and she saw Barty, heard his voice as clearly as if he was beside her, his fingers cleverly weaving wire through a series of holes punched in a piece of sanded wood. “Now, Kel, we make the wire tight enough that the rabbit can’t get away, but not so tight that the poor little bastard suffocates before we find him. People have to trap to survive, but a good trapper makes sure the animal suffers as little as possible.”
Kelsea’s eyes ran over the line of metal boxes again, assessing, and she felt everything inside her go cold, all at once.
Not boxes. Cages.
She gripped Mace’s arm, heedless of the wounds that she knew lay beneath his cloak. When she spoke, her voice didn’t entirely sound like her own. “Lazarus. You tell me what’s going on here. Now.”
This time he finally met her eye, and his bleak expression was all the confirmation that Kelsea needed. “It’s the shipment, Lady. Two hundred and fifty people, once a month, like clockwork.”
“Shipment to where?”
“To Mortmesne.”
Kelsea turned back to the lawn. Her mind seemed to have gone blank. The lines had begun moving now, slowly but surely, toward the tables down beside the moat. While Kelsea watched, one of the officials marched a woman away from the table, toward the cages. He stopped at the third cage and gestured to a man in a black uniform (the Tear army uniform, Kelsea realized faintly), who then pulled open a cleverly concealed door at the cage end. The woman marched meekly inside, and the soldier in black closed and locked the door.
“The Mort Treaty,” Kelsea murmured numbly. “This is how my mother made peace.”
“The Red Queen wanted tribute, Lady. The Tearling had nothing else to offer.”
A sharp pain arrowed through Kelsea’s chest, and she pressed a clenched fist between her breasts. Peeking beneath her shirt, she saw that her sapphire was glowing, a bright and angry blue. She gathered the jewel in a handful of the cloth and found that the thing was scalding, deep heat that burned her palm through the cloth. The sapphire continued to burn her hand, but the pain was nothing compared to the burn inside her chest, which continued, deepening with each passing second until it began to change, moving toward something different. Not pain . . . something else. She didn’t question the feeling, for she seemed to be beyond any capacity for wonder now, and could only stare mutely at the scene in front of her.
More officials were escorting people toward the cages. The crowd had backed up to allow them space, and Kelsea saw now that each cage had enormous wheels of wood. Tear soldiers had already begun to tether a team of mules to the cage at the far end of the Keep. Even from a distance, Kelsea could tell that the cages had seen hard use; several of the bars were visibly scarred, as if they’d been attacked.
Rescue attempts, her mind murmured. There must have been at least a few. She suddenly remembered standing in front of the big picture window at the cottage as a child, crying about something—a skinned knee, perhaps, or a chore she hadn’t wanted to do—staring at the forest, certain that this was the day when her mother would finally come. Kelsea couldn’t have been more than three or four, but she remembered her certainty very well: her mother would come, she would hold Kelsea in her arms, and she would be nothing but good.
I was a fool.
“Why these people?” she asked Mace. “How do they choose them?”
“By lottery, Lady.”
“Lottery,” she repeated faintly. “I see.”
Family members had begun to gather around the cages now, speaking to people inside, holding hands, or merely loitering. Several of the black-clad soldiers had been stationed next to each cage, and they watched the crowd stonily, clearly anticipating the moment when a family member presented a threat. But the onlookers were passive, and to Kelsea that seemed the worst thing of all. They were beaten, her people. It was clear in the long, straight lines that stretched from the official table, the way families merely stood beside the cages, waiting for their loved ones to depart.
Kelsea’s attention caught and held on the two cages nearest the table. These cages were shorter than the others, their steel bars set more tightly in their frames. Already, each cage held several small forms. Kelsea blinked and found that her eyes had filled with tears. They coursed slowly down her face until she tasted salt.
“Even children?” she asked Mace. “Why don’t the parents just flee?”
“When one of the allotted runs, his entire family is forfeit in the next lottery. Look around you, Lady. These are large families. Often they must sacrifice the welfare of one child, thinking of the other eight.”
“This is my mother’s system?”
“No. The architect of the lottery is down there.” Mace pointed toward the officials’ table. “Arlen Thorne.”
“But my mother approved it?”
“She did.”
“She did,” Kelsea repeated faintly. The world tipped crazily in front of her and she dug her fingernails into her arm, drawing blood, until the haze disappeared. In its wake came fury, a terrible, cheated anger that threatened to overwhelm her. Elyssa the Benevolent, Elyssa the Peacemaker. Kelsea’s mother, who had sold her people off wholesale.
“All’s not lost, Lady,” Mace said unexpectedly, putting a hand on her arm. “I swear to you, you’re nothing like her.”
Kelsea gritted her teeth. “You’re right. I won’t allow this to continue.”
“Lady, the Mort Treaty is specific. There is no appeals process, no outside arbiter. If a single shipment fails to arrive in Demesne on time, the Mort Queen has the right to invade this country and wreak terror. I lived through the last Mort invasion, Lady, and I assure you, Mhurn wasn’t exaggerating the carnage. Before you take action, consider the consequences.”
Somewhere a woman had begun wailing, a high, eldritch shrieking that reminded Kelsea of a story Barty used to tell her as a child: the banshee, a terrible creature that summoned one to her death. The screams echoed over the crowd, and Kelsea finally pinpointed the source: a woman who was trying desperately to reach the first cage. Her husband was trying just as hard to drag her away, but he was heavyset and she was too quick for him, wriggling out of his grasp and pushing her way toward the enclosure. The husband buried a hand in her hair and simply yanked, pulling her from her feet. The woman went down to the ground in a pile, but a moment later she was up again, straining toward the cage.
The four soldiers on guard around the cage were visibly on edge; they watched the mother uneasily, not certain whether to get involved. Her voice was giving way, her shrieks fading to a bruised cawing like a crow’s, and her strength also appeared to be giving out. While Kelsea watched, the husband finally won the battle and got a grip on her wool dress. He pulled her away to a safe distance from the cage, and the soldiers settled back into their formerly relaxed postures.
But the mother continued to croak brokenly, the sound audible even from Kelsea’s distance. Husband and wife stood watching the cage, surrou
nded by several children. Kelsea’s vision was blurred, and her hands were shaking on the reins. She sensed something terrible within her, not the girl hidden in the cottage: someone on fire, burning. The sapphire branded her chest. She wondered if it was possible for her own skin to break open, revealing another person entirely.
Mace touched her shoulder gently, and she spun around to him with wild eyes. He held out his sword. “Right or wrong, Lady, I see that you mean to take action. Hold this.”
Kelsea took the hilt in her hand, liking the heft of it, though the blade was too long for her build. “What about you?”
“I have many weapons, and we have friends here. The sword is for appearance only.”
“What friends?”
Slowly and casually, Mace raised an open palm into the air, clenched it into a fist, and dropped his arm again. Kelsea waited a moment, half expecting the sky to break open. She sensed some shifting in the crowd around her, but nothing distinct. Mace, however, seemed satisfied, and turned back to her. Kelsea looked at him for a moment, this man who’d guarded her life for days now, and said, “You were right, Lazarus. I see my own death, and exalt in it. But before I go, I’m going to cut a wide swath here, wide as God’s Ocean. If you don’t want to die with me, you should leave now.”
“Lady, your mother wasn’t a good queen, but she wasn’t evil. She was a weak queen. She would never have been able to walk straight into death. A fey streak carries enormous power, but be very certain that the havoc you wreak is for your people, not against your mother’s memory. This is the difference between a queen and an angry child.”
Kelsea tried to focus on his words, the way she would have considered any problem set before her, but what popped into her mind instead were illustrations from Carlin’s history books. People of deep brown skin, an old and infamous brutality that had darkened an age. Carlin had dwelled long on this period in history, and Kelsea had wondered more than once why it should be relevant. Behind her closed eyes, she saw stories and illustrations: people in chains. Men caught fleeing and roasted alive. Girls raped at so young an age that their wombs never recovered. Children stolen out of their mothers’ arms and sold at auction. State-sponsored slavery.
The Queen of the Tearling Page 11