“What do you want, Row?”
“I’m leaving next week.”
Katie’s jaw dropped. Her first thought was that Row was going with Tear, but no, Tear would never take him along. After a moment she realized what he meant.
“You’re going on the mountain expedition?”
“Yes.”
Katie nodded, but that touch of disquiet inside her intensified. Jen Devlin’s expedition had been meant to leave this week, but they had pushed the date back now that Tear was leaving too. He had announced his plans to cross the ocean at meeting last week, and predictably, the Town had erupted in protest. Everyone seemed to sense disaster, but even the pleas of the entire Town could not sway Tear to stay.
“You’re no explorer, Row. What do you want with Jen’s expedition?”
“I want to get away.”
This made sense. The closer Row drew to moving out, the more officious his mother became. When Row was at work at the shop, Mrs. Finn would show up with something she claimed he’d forgotten, his lunch or his jacket. When Row went out with friends, his mother could sometimes be seen following him, tagging along perhaps a hundred feet behind, her eyes squeezed down into small, jealous triangles. Mum said Mrs. Finn was becoming unhinged, and it made perfect sense that Row would want to get clear of her hawklike vigilance; even the mountain expedition seemed like a good choice, since Mrs. Finn wasn’t hardy enough to attempt such a journey. Everything was utterly plausible, but Katie, who knew Row well, sensed a great falsity in his answer, some other reason glimmering just beneath. She wanted to dig for it, grab his shirt and demand the truth, but even then, he might not tell her. And Katie suddenly realized just how far their friendship had eroded in the past few years. She had no idea what Row was thinking, what he meant to do. The effortless simpatico they had enjoyed when they were younger was gone, and now Katie could only imagine what lay beneath that angel’s face. For a terrible moment, she wondered whether she had ever known Row, or whether she had simply invented the boy she thought she knew from whole cloth. Nothing seemed certain any longer.
“I’m going to miss you, Katie.”
She looked up and found Row watching her, a small smile playing on his lips.
“I’ll miss you too, Row,” she replied, not sure whether she meant it. After Tear left, she would begin guarding Jonathan in earnest, and though she had never guarded a person before, she understood the security problems posed by uncertainty. Her mind tipped sideways, and for a moment she was standing in the woods, staring at a monster in the moonlight. Uncertainty was dangerous, and Row was nothing if not a wild card.
What is a childhood friendship really worth? she wondered, staring at the ground. How much loyalty do I owe?
“When will you be back?”
“Jen estimates two months, three if we get caught in bad weather. They saw snow on top of those mountains, and that was in spring.”
“Well,” Katie said awkwardly, and in that awkwardness she felt as though a door was closing somewhere, walling off everything that had come before, all of the times they had snuck away from their parents and decided to run away, the forts they had built in each other’s backyards, the times Row had helped her with her maths homework, all the way back to that day against the wall of the schoolhouse when Row had smoothed a hand over her aching scalp and made her forget that someone had been cruel. The door closed, deep in her mind, with a hollow boom that Katie heard rather than felt, and when she blinked, she found that her eyes were full of tears. Row opened his arms and she stumbled into them, trying not to weep. Row wasn’t crying; she wouldn’t either.
“Be safe, Row,” she told him.
“You too, Rapunzel,” he replied, smiling. Reaching for one of her long curls, he gave it a tug, then turned and walked back into the woods, heading east, toward town.
He never apologized, Katie realized suddenly. All these years and he never apologized for stranding me there and leaving me for that thing—
The thought tried to crystallize, to become anger, but before it could, Katie shoved it away. She still loved Row; she always would. She would miss him while he was in the mountains.
But why is he going to the mountains? her mind demanded, hammering her with the question, refusing to relent. Why is he going to the mountains, Katie? Why is he going to the—
“Shut up,” Katie whispered, and picked up her book.
Three weeks passed, then four, and still William Tear did not return.
Katie knew that Tear was dead. She had no gift of vision; the answer was much simpler. She knew because Jonathan knew. He still kept himself very close, but by now, Katie had learned to read him better than anyone, to parse his words, to extrapolate from the little he revealed. In the fifth week, when the knock came on Jonathan’s door in the middle of the night, it was Katie who answered, because she knew.
The woman outside the door was almost unrecognizable as Aunt Maddy. She was in the final stages of starvation, each bone visible in her pallid face, even by candlelight. When Katie grabbed her arm, Aunt Maddy’s skin burned beneath her fingers. Katie’s mind registered these things, but even then her first priority was to get Aunt Maddy inside, to get the door closed. She knew that Aunt Maddy was dying, because no one could survive the condition Katie saw before her. But even in that early moment, some part of Katie had already focused on the greater priority: keeping a secret.
Aunt Maddy told them her story in a hoarse, rasping voice, her skeletal hands clasped in front of her. All of the muscle that had roped her body was gone now, and her forearms were little more than twigs.
“He couldn’t do it,” she murmured, and though she didn’t look at any of them, Katie knew that she was talking to Lily. “You remember last time, it almost took everything out of him. Whether he was too old, or whether it was harder in the other direction, I don’t know. But I saw that he wasn’t going to make it, that he would kill himself trying. I tried to help him, grabbed his hand, thought he could draw on me for some of it. And he did. But it still didn’t work. The door wouldn’t open.”
Katie didn’t understand much of this, but a quick look around showed that she was the only one in the dark. Jonathan and Lily wore identical expressions of resignation, their eyes downcast.
“In the end, I saw that it was killing him. He knew it too, because he shoved me away. But before he died, he gave me this.”
She reached into her pocket and came up with Tear’s sapphire, dangling on its fine silver chain. The chain had become tangled, the silver dulled by tarnish, but the jewel gleamed as brightly as ever.
“He told me to give it to you,” Aunt Maddy croaked, offering it to Jonathan. “And now I have.”
Jonathan took the jewel on his palm and stared at it for a long time. Katie could usually tell what he was thinking, but in this moment, she had no idea. At some point, Lily had gotten up and left the room, and now she came back with a plate, piled high with bread and cheese. But Maddy only stared at the food for a moment, then looked up at them, her eyes dark and flat. “I’m dying. I know I am. I made it back here because I had his share of the food, but whatever he pulled out of me, it’s gone forever. Every day I weaken.”
“What about his body?” Lily asked.
“Gone,” Aunt Maddy replied. “I had to dump it overboard.”
At this, Lily turned away and didn’t speak. Jonathan was still staring at the jewel in his hand. Katie longed to grieve for William Tear, but she could not, for Tear himself had already directed her thoughts toward the more important issue: how would this affect Jonathan? What would the Town do when it found out that Tear was dead? The others might not have traveled so far in their thinking, but a deep part of Katie’s mind had already grasped the implications and begun to think of concealment.
“We can’t tell anyone,” Aunt Maddy announced, and Katie looked up gratefully.
“What are you talking about?” Lily asked. “We can’t keep this a secret.”
“Of course we can,” Aunt Ma
ddy replied, her rasping voice closing off all argument. “This is the last thing the Town needs right now.”
Katie nodded. William Tear had always been the stopgap for the worst impulses of the Town. Without him, there would be nothing to stand in the way of Paul Annescott or any one of the countless other forces grappling for influence. Sooner or later, people would conclude that Tear was dead, but even uncertainty was preferable to the facts.
“How can we keep something like that a secret?” Lily demanded. “What will people say when they see you’ve come back without him?”
“They won’t see anything. I don’t have long.” Aunt Maddy pushed herself up from the sofa. Even in the soft candlelight, Katie fancied that she could see the bones of Aunt Maddy’s arms through her skin. “I’m leaving. Now, before the sun comes up.”
“You can’t!” Aunt Lily cried, her voice cracking.
“Lil.” Aunt Maddy grabbed her shoulder, squeezing it until Lily winced. “Stop.”
“But where will you go?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Aunt Maddy replied. “This is more important than either of us. It always was, and you knew it as well as I did. He told me you were always one of us, even way back then, in Boston.”
She turned and limped down the hallway.
“She’s right, Mum,” Jonathan said quietly, turning the sapphire over in his hands. “Dad dead, and this town falls apart.”
“We have to stop her!” Lily insisted. But neither Katie nor Jonathan moved, and when Lily made to get up, Katie grabbed her arm and pulled her back down. A few seconds later, the front door clicked shut, and Lily began to sob. Katie wanted to cry as well, for William Tear, for Aunt Maddy, and even more, for what they had all lost, the entire Town. But in the face of Jonathan’s stoicism, she had no choice but to swallow her own tears, turning her thoughts to the immediate future.
No one was ready to hear that William Tear was dead. Tear had left Mum in charge, but that was an interim solution; Mum was not the woman to hold the Town together for the long term. It would have to be Jonathan, but the Town wasn’t ready to accept that either. Aunt Maddy was right. Tear’s death would have to be concealed at all costs. Katie was a guard now, and secrets were her business, but a rogue part of her mind could not help wishing that this charge had fallen to someone else. She loved the Town, and she was no good at telling lies.
You’ll learn, Tear whispered inside her head, and Katie shivered, realizing the truth of that voice: she was working for a dead man now.
Chapter 9
Flight
Even at this late date, we have been unable to discover any conclusive proof of the origins of the Red Queen. This historian believes that she was born in one of the small villages of northern Mortmesne, but this is guesswork only, for how can we research a woman about whom so little is known, not even her true name?
—The Tearling as a Military Nation, Callow the Martyr
When the Queen woke, she lay still for a moment. She was sure she’d heard something, a rustling on the far wall. Once, during a particularly cold winter, the Palais had become infested with rats. They’d taken care of it with poison bait, but perhaps the rodents had come back.
They have indeed.
The Queen’s mouth stretched in a cold smile. More of her people deserted every day. Her throne room had not been cleaned for a week, since most of the Palais cleaning staff had run off. Half of her own personal Guard could not be found. Ghislaine, her Guard captain, was the only reason the Queen dared to sleep; at this moment, Ghislaine stood watch outside her chamber door. Beyond her windows, she could hear the distant sounds of battle in the city. Demesne was in anarchy.
That odd, rustling sound came again.
The Queen uttered a low curse and reached for her candle. She slept very little at night anyway; it was so much easier to fall asleep in the daytime, in the light. The room beyond her covers was ice-cold, full of drafts from the many broken windows in the Palais. Three weeks ago, the King of Cadare had missed his first shipment in more than twenty years. Even the thought of it made the Queen’s blood boil. The old bastard had sensed her weakness, and the Queen, who had not had to worry about Cadare for years, suddenly had a problem on her southern border. Glass, once cheaper than food on the streets of Demesne, was about to become a priceless commodity, and the Queen, who had once had the best-insulated bedroom in the kingdom, now shivered beneath her blankets. The treasury couldn’t spare the money to repair windows. The Palais was wide open to the early winter air, as well as whatever vermin might crawl inside.
The Queen found her matches, sat up, and lit the candle. Her chamber looked as always, crimson walls and furniture. They’d had to replace almost all of the furnishings after the dark thing’s fire this past summer, but her furnishers had done an admirable job, making the new room almost identical to the old. Where were those furnishers now? Fled, most likely, to join Levieux and his band of traitors. A civil war raged in Demesne, and on some days the Queen could convince herself that she was winning. But most days she knew she was not.
This is what the fall feels like, the Queen thought, wrapping herself in her robe. As a child, she had read her history; her nurse, Wright, had forced her to read many pages on the fall of dictators throughout the world. But no one ever mentioned how soporific the experience was, almost narcotic, like being lulled to sleep. She was fighting an invisible enemy, one who did not announce his victories but stole away into the night. Gradually, more and more of her city was being annexed by Levieux and his rebels, and she only found out about specific incursions after the deed was done. Paralysis was setting in, for it was easy, so damned easy, to simply sit here, barricaded in, clutching her crown, her throne, until someone came and took them away.
On her bedside table, twinkling darkly in the candlelight, lay the two Tear sapphires, and the Queen stared at them for a long moment, hearing the girl’s voice inside her head: You lost.
Yes, she had lost. Whatever the girl had done, she had done it well. The sapphires were a broken tool, just like Ducarte. When the Red Queen went to bed, Ducarte had been down the hall, closeted with several of the Queen’s generals. To the outward eye, it looked like a strategy meeting, but the Queen knew what it really was: hiding. All of her generals were now hunted, for it was common knowledge that she had compensated them out of the treasury. If the regular army got hold of any of the high command, their fates would be no prettier than her own.
More rustling from the far wall.
With a sigh, the Queen tucked the sapphires into her pocket, then tiptoed toward the far corner of the room. If a rat was here, she would kill it. There was nowhere for it to hide, except beneath the bed or the sofa. As a child, she used to kill rats to pass the time when she was left alone.
Evie!
She placed her fingers against her temples, willing the voice away. But these days, it seemed that all the power in the world would not give her command of her own mind. Her mother’s voice was always there, hectoring, criticizing, finding fault. The girl had woken the Beautiful Queen, and she would not go back to sleep. The floor was freezing against the Queen’s feet, and she cast around for her slippers, finding them beneath her desk. She was halfway across the room when the rustling came again, directly over her head.
Evie!
The Queen looked up and felt her blood turn to ice.
There was a little girl on the ceiling. Her thin limbs were white and bloodless. Her grimy fingers appeared to be latched to the wood, allowing her to cling there like an insect. Her back faced the Queen, dark hair hanging beneath her. She was dressed in rags.
The Queen forced herself to take a deep breath, deep enough to make her muscles unlock. She backed toward the wall and the little girl followed, scuttling across the ceiling like a spider. The rustling sound was the child’s knees, scraping against the wood. It reached the join of wall and ceiling and began to crawl down the wall. Again the Queen thought of a spider, not the webbed spiders of southern Mortmesne b
ut the hunting spiders of the Fairwitch foothills, which would stalk their prey for long minutes across grass and rocks. They were slow in the early going, but could move like lightning as they closed in.
Keeping her eyes on the girl, the Queen backed toward her desk. She had a knife in the top drawer, though she was unsure whether a knife would be of any value here. This creature belonged to the dark thing; she could sense the similarity in the strange, shifting texture of the girl’s form. Not wholly solid, this child, almost as though she were not real, and the Queen, who had the ability to turn a man inside out in a hundred different ways, could not find anywhere on the child’s body to begin. If she could not reach it with her mind, then she was unlikely to reach it with a weapon, but a knife was better than nothing, and she fumbled in the drawer, pushing aside paper and pens and stamps, searching for the sharp edge of the blade. She tried to call up what she remembered from conversations with the dark thing, so long ago when they had been allies . . . or at least, when it had still considered her useful. There wasn’t much. The dark thing had taught her a great deal, but about its own history, the strange transformation that had made it what it was, it remained silent.
The girl reached the bottom of the wall and clambered to her feet. The Queen shuddered, for she recognized the rags the girl wore: remnants of one of the cheap blue uniforms that had once been used to clothe auctioned slaves. But Mortmesne hadn’t used such uniforms for more than forty years, long before Broussard’s tenure as Auctioneer. This child would have been in one of the earliest loads sent north to the Fairwitch, back when a much younger Queen of Mortmesne still thought she could placate the dark thing, buy him off with homeless children culled from the city streets. The girl’s eyes were dark and empty, and when she spoke, her voice was hoarse, as though she hadn’t used it in a long time.
“I don’t want to go,” she rasped. “Don’t make me get on the wagon.”
The Queen scooted away, around the back end of the sofa. She tested the girl again, gently, pushing with her mind, and found that she had been right: the girl’s flesh was like the dark thing’s, low and humming like a hive, not entirely there. The Queen looked down at her candle, wondering if the girl would burn . . . but no. Nothing that belonged to the dark thing would ever be vulnerable to flame.
The Fate of the Tearling Page 26