The Queen of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  “It might have been cause for concern in someone else.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Mace fiddled with the short knife strapped to his forearm. “I have only a few gifts, Lady, but they’re a strange, powerful few. Had there been danger to Your Majesty in the deepest part of any of these people, I’d have ferreted it out and they wouldn’t be here.”

  “She’s not a danger to me, I agree, not now. But she could be, Lazarus. To anyone who threatened her children, she could be.”

  “Ah, but Lady, you saved her youngest child. I think you’ll find that anyone who threatens you faces grave danger from her.”

  “She’s cold, Lazarus. She’ll serve me only so long as it serves her children.”

  Mace considered for a moment, and then shrugged. “I’m sorry, Lady. I think you’re simply wrong. And even if you’re right, you’re currently serving her children infinitely better than she could with that jackal of a husband, or even on her own. Why be gloomy?”

  “If Andalie should become a danger to me, would you know it?”

  Mace nodded, a gesture with so many years of certainty behind it that Kelsea let the matter drop. “Is my crowning arranged?”

  “The Regent knows you’re coming during his audience. I didn’t specify a time; may as well not make things too easy for him.”

  “Will he try to kill me?”

  “Likely, Lady. The Regent doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body, and he’ll do anything to keep the crown off your head.”

  Kelsea inspected her neck in the mirror. Mace had restitched the wound, but his work wasn’t as neat as that of the Fetch. The gash would leave a noticeable scar.

  Andalie had found a plain black velvet dress that hung straight to the floor. Kelsea guessed that sleeveless dresses were the fashion; many of the women she’d seen in the city had displayed their bare arms. But Kelsea was self-conscious about her arms, something Andalie seemed to understand without being told. The dress’s loose sleeves concealed Kelsea’s arms, while the neckline was just low enough to allow the sapphire to hang against her bare skin. Andalie had done an excellent job with Kelsea’s thick, heavy hair as well, wrestling it into a braid and then pinning it high on her head. The woman was a monument to competence, but still, black couldn’t conceal all flaws. Kelsea looked at herself in the mirror for a moment, trying to project more confidence than she felt. Some ancestor of hers, her mother’s grandmother or great-grandmother, had been known as the Beautiful Queen, the first in a line of several Raleigh women renowned for fairness. The Fetch’s face surfaced in her mind, and Kelsea smiled sadly at her reflection, then turned away and shrugged.

  I’ll be more than that.

  “I need to see a copy of the Mort Treaty as soon as possible.”

  “We have one here somewhere.”

  Kelsea thought she heard disapproval in his tone. “Did I do the wrong thing yesterday?”

  “Right versus wrong is a moot point, Lady. It’s done, and now we’ll all face the consequences. The shipment is due in seven days. You’ll need to make some fast decisions.”

  “I want to read the treaty first. There must be some loophole.”

  Mace shook his head. “If so, Lady, others would have found it.”

  “Didn’t you think I would need to know, Lazarus? Why keep it from me?”

  “Please, Lady. How could any of us tell you something like that, when your own foster parents had kept it secret from you all your life? You might not even have believed me. It seemed better to let you see for yourself.”

  “I need to understand this system, this lottery. Who was that man in charge on the lawn yesterday?”

  “Arlen Thorne,” Mace said, his face furrowing. “The Overseer of the Census.”

  “A census only counts the population.”

  “Not in this kingdom, Lady. The Census is a powerful arm of your government. It controls all aspects of the shipment, from lottery to transport.”

  “How did this Arlen Thorne merit his position?”

  “By being extremely clever, Lady. Once he nearly outsmarted me.”

  “Surely not you.”

  Mace opened his mouth to argue, but then he saw Kelsea’s face in the mirror. “Hilarious, Majesty.”

  “Don’t you ever make mistakes?”

  “People who make mistakes rarely live through them, Lady.”

  She turned from the mirror. “How on earth did you become what you are, Lazarus?”

  “Don’t mistake our relationship, Lady. You’re my employer. I don’t confess to you.”

  Kelsea looked down, feeling thoroughly rebuffed. She had forgotten who he was for a moment; it had been like talking to Barty. Mace held up the breastplate from Pen’s armor, and she shook her head. “No.”

  “Lady, you need it.”

  “Not today, Lazarus. It sends a poor signal.”

  “So will your dead body.”

  “Doesn’t Pen need his armor back?”

  “He has more than one set.”

  “I won’t wear it.”

  Mace stared at her stonily. “You’re not a child. Stop behaving like one.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I bring several more guards in here and they hold you down while I strap this armor on you forcibly. Is that really what you want?”

  Kelsea knew he was right. She didn’t know why she kept arguing. She was acting like a child; she remembered similar fights with Carlin over cleaning her room in the cottage. “I don’t do well being ordered around, Lazarus. I never have.”

  “You don’t say.” Mace shook the armor again, his expression implacable. “Hold out your arms.”

  Kelsea did, grimacing. “I need my own armor, and soon. A silly queen I’ll look when I’ve been slowly flattened into a man.”

  Mace grinned. “You wouldn’t be the first queen of this kingdom to be mistaken for a king.”

  “God granted me a small enough helping of femininity. I’d like to keep what I have.”

  “Later, Lady, I’ll introduce you to Venner and Fell, your arms masters. Women’s armor is an odd order, but I’m sure they can fill it. They’re good at their jobs. Until then, any time we leave the Queen’s Wing, you wear Pen’s armor.”

  “Wonderful.” Kelsea sucked in a breath as he tightened a strap around her arm. “It doesn’t even cover my back.”

  “I cover your back.”

  “How many people are in the Queen’s Wing?”

  “Twenty-four all told, Lady: thirteen Queen’s Guards, three women, and their seven children. And of course, your own helpful self.”

  “Piss off,” Kelsea muttered. She’d heard the phrase during the Fetch’s poker game, and it seemed to fit her mood perfectly, though she wasn’t sure she’d used it right. “How big can we grow in here?”

  “Considerably bigger, and we will,” Mace replied. “Three of the guards have families in a safe house. As soon as we’re settled, I’ll send them one at a time to bring back their kin.”

  Kelsea turned away and found herself staring at her mother’s bookshelves again. They bothered her more every moment. Bookshelves weren’t meant to be empty. “Is there a library in the city?”

  “A what?”

  “A library. A public library.”

  Mace looked up at her, incredulous. “Books?”

  “Books.”

  “Lady,” Mace said, in the slow, patient tones one would use with a young child, “there hasn’t been a working printing press in this kingdom since the Landing era.”

  “I know,” Kelsea snapped. “That’s not what I asked. I asked if there was a library.”

  “Books are hard to come by, Lady. A curiosity at best. Who would have enough books for a library?”

  “Nobles. Surely some of them still have some hoarded books.”

  Mace shrugged. “Never heard of such a thing. But even if they did, they wouldn’t open them to the public.”

  “Why not?”

  “Lady, try to take away even the m
ost resilient weed in a nobleman’s garden, and watch him scream trespass. I’m sure most of them don’t read any books they might have, but all the same, they would never give them away.”

  “Can we buy books on the black market?”

  “We could, Lady, if anyone valued them enough. But books aren’t contraband. The black market deals in vice for value. The Tear market has high-value weapons from Mortmesne, some sex traffic, rare animals, drugs . . .”

  Kelsea wasn’t interested in the workings of the black market; in every society, they were always the same. She let Mace keep going while she stared despondently at the empty bookshelves, thinking of Carlin’s library: three long walls full of leather-bound volumes, nonfiction on the left and fiction on the right. There was a certain patch of sunlight that came through the front window and remained until early afternoon, and Kelsea had liked to curl up in this patch every Sunday morning to read. One Christmas, when she was eight or nine, she had come downstairs and found Barty’s present: a large built-in chair constructed squarely in the patch of sunlight, a chair with deep pillows and “Kelsea’s Patch” carved into the left arm. The happy memory of collapsing into that chair was so strong that Kelsea could actually smell cinnamon bread baking in the kitchen and hear the grackles around the cottage working their way into their usual morning frenzy.

  Barty, she thought, and felt tears well in her eyes. It seemed very important that Mace not see; she widened her eyes to keep the tears from falling and stared resolutely at the empty bookshelves, thinking hard. How had Carlin acquired all of her books? Paper books had been at a premium long before the Crossing; the transition to electronic books had decimated the publishing industry, and in the last two decades before the Crossing, many printed books had been destroyed altogether. According to Carlin, William Tear had only allowed his utopians to bring ten books apiece. Two thousand people with ten books each made twenty thousand books, and at least two thousand now stood on Carlin’s shelves. Kelsea had spent her entire life with Carlin’s library at her fingertips, taking it for granted, never understanding that it was invaluable in a world without books. Vandals might find the cottage, or even children searching for firewood. That was what had happened to most of the books that originally came over in the British-American Crossing: the desperate had burned them for fuel or warmth. Kelsea had always thought of Carlin’s library as a set piece, unified and immovable, but it wasn’t. Books could be moved.

  “I want all of the books from Barty and Carlin’s cottage brought here.”

  Mace rolled his eyes. “No.”

  “It might take a week, perhaps two if it rains.”

  He finished buckling the heavy piece of steel to her forearm. “The Caden likely burned that cottage down days ago. You have a limited number of loyal people, Lady; do you really want to throw them away on a fool’s errand like this?”

  “Books may have been a fool’s errand in my mother’s kingdom, Lazarus, but they won’t be in mine. Do you understand?”

  “I understand that you’re young and likely to overreach, Lady. You can’t do all things at once. Power dispersed has a way of scattering altogether in the wind.”

  Unable to debate that point, Kelsea turned back to the mirror. Thinking of the cottage had reminded her of something Barty had said, one week and a lifetime ago. “Where does my food come from?”

  “The food’s secure, Lady. Carroll didn’t trust the Keep kitchens, and he had a kitchen specially constructed out there.” Mace gestured toward the door. “One of the women we brought in is a tiny thing named Milla. She made breakfast for everyone this morning.”

  “It was good,” Kelsea remarked. It had been good . . . griddle cakes and mixed fruit in some sort of cream, and Kelsea had eaten for at least two.

  “Milla’s already staked out the kitchen as her province, and she means business; I hardly dare go in there without her permission.”

  “Where do we get the actual food from?”

  “Don’t worry. It’s secure.”

  “Do the women seem scared?”

  Mace shook his head. “Mildly concerned about their children, perhaps. One of the babies has some sort of retching sickness; I already sent for a doctor.”

  “A doctor?” Kelsea asked, surprised.

  “I know of two Mort doctors operating in the city. One we’ve used before; he’s greedy but not dishonest.”

  “Why only two?”

  “The city won’t support more. It’s rare that a Mort doctor emigrates, and the rates they charge are so exorbitant that few can afford them.”

  “What about in Bolton? Or Lewiston?”

  “Bolton has one doctor that I know of. I don’t think Lewiston has any at all.”

  “Is there a way to tempt more doctors from Mortmesne?”

  “Doubtful, Lady. The Red Queen discourages defection, but some still make the attempt. But professionals have a comfortable life in Mortmesne. Only the very greedy come to the Tear.”

  “Only two doctors,” Kelsea repeated, shaking her head. “There’s a lot to do, isn’t there? I don’t even know where to start.”

  “Start by getting the crown on your head.” Mace tightened a final strap on her arm and stepped back. “We’re done. Let’s go.”

  Kelsea took a deep breath and followed him out the door. They emerged into a large room, perhaps two hundred feet from end to end, with a high ceiling like her mother’s chamber. The floor and walls were blocks of the same grey stone as the exterior of the Keep. There were no windows; the only light came from torches mounted in brackets on the walls. The left wall of the chamber was interrupted by a door-filled hallway that stretched for perhaps fifty yards and ended in another door.

  “Quarters, Lady,” Mace murmured beside her.

  On her right, the wall opened into what was clearly a kitchen; Kelsea could hear the clang of pans being washed. Carroll’s idea, Mace had said, and it was a good one; according to Barty, the Keep kitchens, some ten floors below, had over thirty staff and multiple entrances and exits. There was no way to secure them.

  “Do you think Carroll is dead?”

  “Yes,” Mace replied, his face crossed by a momentary shadow. “He always said that he’d die bringing you back, and I never believed him.”

  “His wife and children. I made a promise in that clearing.”

  “Worry later, Lady.” Mace turned and began to bark orders at the guards stationed on the walls. More guards emerged from the quarters at the end of the hall. Men surrounded Kelsea until she could see nothing but armor and shoulders. Most of her guards seemed to have bathed recently, but there was still an overwhelming man-smell, horses and musk and sweat, which made Kelsea feel as though she was in the wrong place. Barty and Carlin’s cottage had always smelled like lavender, Carlin’s favorite scent, and although Kelsea had hated the cloying smell, at least she had always known where she was.

  Mhurn crowded behind her, boxing her in. Kelsea thought about greeting him and decided not to; Mhurn looked as though he hadn’t slept in days, his face far too white and his eyes rimmed in red. To her right was Dyer, his expression hard and truculent behind his red beard. Pen was on her left, and Kelsea smiled, relieved to see him unharmed. “Hello, Pen.”

  “Lady.”

  “Thanks for the loan of your horse; I’ll return your armor as soon as may be.”

  “Keep it, Lady. It was a good thing you did yesterday.”

  “It probably won’t make any difference. I’ve doomed myself.”

  “You’ve doomed us all with you, Lady,” Dyer remarked.

  “Stuff that, Dyer!” Pen snapped.

  “You stuff it, runt. The very moment that shipment doesn’t arrive, the Mort army begins to mobilize. You’re fucked as well.”

  “We’re all fucked,” Elston rumbled behind her. His voice came thickly through his broken teeth, but he didn’t seem so hard to understand now. “Don’t listen to Dyer, Lady. We’ve watched this kingdom sink into the mud for years. You might’ve come too late t
o save it, but it’s a good thing, all the same, to try to stop the slide.”

  “Aye,” someone joined in behind her. Kelsea blushed, but was spared from replying by Mace, who shoved his way through the group of guards to station himself on her right.

  “Tighten it up, men,” he growled. “If I could get through, so could anyone else.”

  The journey to the Great Hall was an ordeal of low grey hallways cut by torchlight. Kelsea suspected that Mace was taking a roundabout route, but still she was daunted by the endless corridors and staircases and tunnels. She hoped there was a map of the Keep somewhere, or she would never dare to venture outside her own wing.

  They passed many men and women dressed in white, with hoods drawn low over their foreheads. From Carlin’s descriptions, Kelsea knew that these must be Keep servants. The Keep had its housekeepers and plumbers, but it was also stuffed to bursting with unnecessary services: bartenders, hairdressers, masseuses, all of them on the Crown’s payroll. Keep servants were supposed to remain inconspicuous when they weren’t needed, and they drew out of Kelsea’s way to hug the wall as she passed. After passing perhaps the twentieth servant, Kelsea felt her temper beginning to unravel, and no amount of gnawing on the inside of her cheek could bring it back into line. This was where her treasury had been going for the past two decades: into luxury and cages.

  At last they crossed a small antechamber toward massive double doors made of some sort of oak. It didn’t look like Tearling oak, though. The grain was too even, and the doors were covered in elaborate carvings of what appeared to be zodiacal signs. Tearling oak didn’t carve well; Kelsea had tried to whittle it with her knife as a child, only to find the wood chipping away in chunks and splinters. She tried to get a better look at the doors, but had no time; at her approach, they opened as if by magic, and the tide of guards pushed her through.

  To her left, a herald shouted, “The Princess Apparent!” Kelsea grimaced, but quickly found other things to focus on. She was in a room of greater size than she had ever imagined, with ceilings at least a good two hundred feet high and the far wall so distant that she couldn’t clearly see the faces of those who stood there. The floor had been assembled from enormous tiles of dark red stone, each some thirty feet square, and the room was interspersed with massive white pillars that could only be Cadarese marble. Several skylights had been carved into the ceiling, allowing random shafts of bright sunlight to arrow down to the floor. It was eerie, the enormous torch-lit room broken by those random scatterings of white-hot light. As Kelsea and her guards passed through one beam, she felt momentary heat on her arm, then it was gone.