“Evelyn, wake up!”
“Mother?” the Red Queen whispered, and with dawning horror, Kelsea realized that the Red Queen was reaching out for her. She scooted backward, but the Red Queen began to crawl toward her, continuing to reach out, her hands grasping at nothing.
“Mother,” she croaked, weeping. “I’m sorry I ran.”
Brenna had cornered Ewen, and she advanced on him now, slowly, the knife tucked behind her back, a smile stretching her mouth.
“Let us discuss this, boy. Come here, look at me.”
“No!” Kelsea shouted, but she saw, despairing, that Ewen was already caught, staring at Brenna with wide eyes and open mouth. Kelsea felt a light pressure on her ankle, looked down, and screamed; the Red Queen was stroking her foot, her mouth upturned in a blood-dabbled smile.
“Mother?”
Sobbing, Kelsea scrambled away, crawling toward Ewen, desperate to break him away from Brenna. She pulled herself forward on her good elbow, one sliding foot at a time, shouting Ewen’s name, but miserably aware that she was moving too slowly, that she would not reach them in time . . . and then she looked up, stunned, as Ewen’s voice echoed throughout the stone room.
“I see that you have a knife behind your back.”
Brenna’s smile slipped. She stared at Ewen for a long moment, eyes wide and teeth gritted in concentration.
“You will drop your knife.”
Brenna’s face contorted with rage, so much anger that Kelsea could feel it across the room, like heat. Ewen moved forward, raising his knife, and Brenna’s eyes rounded in shock.
“You can’t,” she whispered. “You can’t be—”
“Drop your knife,” Ewen demanded again, and Kelsea could only stare at him, wondering if she was dreaming. He was nearly twice Brenna’s size—though until a few moments before, Kelsea had been sure that Brenna was the larger of the two—and she retreated before him, backing toward the fire. She stabbed out wildly with her knife, but Ewen remained just out of her range.
“Put it down.”
“No!”
“Put it down,” Ewen repeated. His face was like a wall, both stubborn and patient, and Kelsea suddenly got an inkling of what was going on here: Brenna had picked a bad target. There was nothing inside Ewen for Brenna’s particular brand of suffering to latch on to, because Ewen was different.
Good.
“Where is it?” Brenna shouted, her eyes locked on Ewen’s face. She stabbed at him again, but this time she swung beyond her reach and lost her balance, falling forward. Ewen made to grab her, and she sliced at his arm, then scrambled backward, right into the fire.
“Grab her!” Kelsea shouted, wriggling wildly. Ewen was trying to pull Brenna from the fire; he let out a cry as the flames seared his hand. Brenna’s shrieks echoed through the tiny stone building until Ewen finally succeeded in hauling her free, but her thick dress was flaming and there was nothing to tamp the fire. Brenna screamed in agony as Ewen hovered over her, helpless. A stomach-churning smell had begun to fill the air, one that Kelsea remembered well from the Argive.
“Roll her!” she shouted at Ewen. “Roll her on the ground!”
Ewen gulped and began rolling Brenna with his feet, trying to damp the fire. But Kelsea knew it was already too late. Brenna had stopped screaming.
“Glynn.”
She looked down and found the Red Queen lying beside her. Her eyes were only half open, but Kelsea could see a red gleam between the lids. Something awakened inside Kelsea, an atavistic instinct that spoke of danger, but she asked, “Are you all right?”
“No.” The Red Queen gestured toward her body, which was a bloody mess. “But I am back, at least.”
“Majesty?” Ewen asked in a broken voice. “Majesty, I tried my best, she . . . I think she . . .”
“Ewen, come here.”
“Majesty—”
“I need you to cut my bonds.”
Ewen scrambled to his feet and hurried over with his knife. Kelsea wriggled to one side as he began to cut, then her wrists were suddenly free and she clasped them in front of her and stretched, feeling her shoulders sing in relief.
“You listen to me, Ewen,” she ordered. “She would have killed me. She would have tortured me for pleasure, and then she would have killed me. And she would have killed you if she could have caught you. But you didn’t kill her. You asked a prisoner to surrender her weapon, and she refused.”
Ewen nodded, but a shadow had fallen across his face, and Kelsea did not think it would be an easy shadow to dispel.
“How did you come to be here, Ewen?”
“The Captain, Majesty. He sent me here. Me and Bradshaw.”
“The magician? Is he here?”
“No, Lady. He went to fetch the Captain, days ago. It’s just me.”
Kelsea pushed herself to her feet and crossed the room to stand over Brenna. Her body was a blackened ruin, and Kelsea felt a stab of grief. She had despised this woman, but in the end, Brenna’s grudge had been legitimate. The truth had been staring Kelsea in the face for weeks: executing Thorne had been a terrible mistake, and what she had done to him in the process had been even worse.
“Ewen,” she muttered. “There are cloaks in the wagon outside. Bring them here.”
Ewen hurried away, his face betraying relief at being given an easy task. Kelsea drew a deep breath and regretted it immediately; the air stank of charred flesh.
“Glynn,” the Red Queen whispered again, and Kelsea returned to squat beside her, picking up Brenna’s knife along the way.
“When we get back to town,” she told the Red Queen, “we’ll tend to your wounds.”
“No need. Look.”
Kelsea looked down and found that the gashes in the Red Queen’s thighs were already healing somehow, flesh reassembling itself from nowhere.
Ewen returned, almost running, with the cloaks, and Kelsea directed him to throw them over Brenna’s corpse. She planned to cremate the remains, but that was nothing Ewen would need to see.
“Glynn,” the Red Queen croaked again. “Send the boy outside.”
Kelsea nodded to Ewen, who hesitated for only a moment before he left the tiny house, closing the door behind him. Kelsea turned back to the Red Queen and caught another flash of red in her eyes.
“I am changing,” the Red Queen said steadily. “Changing into something else. I am no longer master of myself. Something in my blood tells me to kill you, and I want to listen to it.”
Kelsea drew back.
“I could stand feeding on flesh. In some ways, I have done nothing else, all the years of my reign.” The Red Queen smiled, her eyes deep red flares. “But to be controlled by another, never directing my own fate . . . I lived that life long ago. I cannot face it again.”
“What happened to you?”
The Red Queen offered a hand, and Kelsea saw Finn’s sapphire sitting on the Red Queen’s palm.
“Would you see, Glynn? If you would, you must do me a kindness in return.”
Do me a kindness. The words echoed inside Kelsea’s head, and she saw Mhurn, his upturned face smiling as she cut his throat. She was suddenly frightened, even more frightened than she had been when she had woken and found Brenna standing over her in the dark.
“I wouldn’t kill you before. What makes you think I’ll do it now?”
“It is different, Glynn. Now I am begging you.”
Kelsea shut her eyes. Something pawed at her hand, and she looked down to see the Red Queen prying open her fist, depositing Finn’s sapphire into her palm, and then squeezing her hand closed again.
“I know what you fear,” the Red Queen whispered. Her eyes glinted red. “You fear to become me.”
That was wrong. Kelsea did not want to become the Red Queen, no, but this wasn’t what kept her awake at night. What she feared, more than anything, was becoming her mother.
“You should fear it. But death is fluid. There is all the difference in the world between cold-blooded murder and t
he prevention of agony. And Glynn, I am begging you.”
Kelsea looked down at Finn’s sapphire. She did not want it, could not wear it, but she could not simply cast it away either. Powerful things had to be guarded. If she was a Tear, as Finn and the Fetch had claimed, then her family had been guarding such things for a very long time.
“I can’t kill myself, Glynn. I don’t have it in me. But you could, I think, and take no injury from the act. You make yourself into whatever you wish to be.”
Kelsea almost winced at these words. Again she saw Mhurn, smiling as Coryn slid the needle into his arm. At the time, Kelsea had thought it was mercy, but was it really? The Red Queen lay before her, not the clumsy mangled body, but the woman beneath, outlined in red light. Yet the Red Queen was fading, being overtaken by something else . . .
“I don’t have long, Glynn. Look and see.”
Kelsea looked, and almost drew back in terror. The woman’s mind, which had fought her so hard before, was now wide open, a vast, roaring metropolis of thoughts and ideas and memories and regrets. Sound, sight, feeling, all of it swept over Kelsea like a tide, so strong that she thought she might drown.
At the bottom of it all was the mother, trapped in a vast web of contradictory feelings: love, hatred, jealousy, longing, regret, sorrow. The Beautiful Queen had viewed young Evelyn as a pawn, just as Evelyn herself now viewed others, a cycle that seemed to Kelsea almost inevitable, and the sadness of that idea nearly made her stop and withdraw from the Red Queen’s mind. But she didn’t, for, as always, the story was the compelling thing, worth all of its sufferings to find out the ending.
When Evelyn was fourteen, the Cadarese king offered the Tearling an alliance, a complicated trade involving horses and lumber, gems and gold. The negotiations had been long and complex, dragging on for months. By the end, both ambassadors were exhausted and the Tear court was utterly tired of entertaining the Cadarese delegation, which expected elaborate courtesies and consisted almost entirely of men who didn’t know how to keep their hands to themselves. The entire Keep breathed a sigh of relief when the two delegations reached a tenuous agreement, and in order to seal the deal with goodwill, the Beautiful Queen threw in Evelyn, the court bastard, as a gift to the Cadarese king.
Evelyn was used to being treated differently. She had lived with the snide remarks, the praise that others heaped on Elaine—her beautiful sister, the purebred—while in Evelyn they only seemed to find fault. She was even used to her mother’s neglect, which vacillated between indifference and irritation. But this final betrayal . . . Evelyn had not been ready for it. There was a scene there—an image that would not come clear to Kelsea, perhaps because it existed in a haze for Evelyn as well—a scene of screaming and recrimination and tears and, finally, begging, fruitless begging that Evelyn remembered only dimly, through a dark veil of humiliation. Her mother had not been moved, and in the end Evelyn had been bundled off with the Cadarese. Her last view of the Keep was almost identical to Kelsea’s own: standing at the far end of the New London Bridge, rent with sorrow, surrounded by men she couldn’t trust, her eyes drawn helplessly back to her city. But by the time the delegation had traveled out of sight of New London, the sorrow had turned to rage.
The Cadarese delegation never made it home. On the third night out, the ambassadors, drunk on a complimentary keg of Tear ale and grandiose dreams of the rewards they would receive from the King for completion of their mission, went to sleep without securing the strange, ugly child they were hauling home. She had been so curiously withdrawn throughout the journey that they had forgotten all about her. They had gone through the bulk of the keg, and most of them barely put up a struggle when the child Evelyn tiptoed up, knife in hand, and began cutting throats.
A hand grasped Kelsea’s.
“I don’t have long,” Evelyn whispered. “Please. Everything is cold. And my heart . . .”
Kelsea listened for a moment, and found that the woman was right; her heart was beating, but oddly, sluggishly, as though it were a clock winding down, so many ticks and then a pause. But there was so much more story to see! Only one man had woken completely, and at the sight of the blood-drenched child, her teeth drawn back like an animal’s and her eyes glittering with death, he had fled south into the Dry Lands, never to be heard from again. The incident had wrecked the Cadarese alliance, although it was hushed up and very few people knew what had really happened; the popular story was that negotiations had simply failed. Even now, Kelsea could stop and marvel at how well Evelyn had unwittingly served her own future, for if the Tear and Cadare had built a lasting alliance, Mortmesne could never have risen to the dominance it had enjoyed. Instead, the murder of the ambassadors—a murder that the Cadarese king believed, until the end, had been committed by the Tear—had soured the relationship between the two countries for years to come. When a young sorceress emerged from nowhere and began to wreak havoc on what was then New Europe, there was no unity, and thus no concerted effort to stop her. But that was years in the future. After killing the Cadarese ambassadors, Evelyn had fled north and—
“Please,” the Red Queen repeated.
“Can you not end yourself?” Kelsea asked in desperation.
“I have tried already. The giving in, it goes too much against my grain. My body will not accept that there is no future.”
Kelsea believed it; the anguish in Evelyn’s eyes was too real. Given the choice, this woman would want to end her own life, to control her death as she had mastered everything else. Even dimly, Kelsea could see the agony it would cost her to put her death in the hands of a stranger.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said, and was surprised to find that the words were true.
Evelyn smiled grimly. “There’s a thing my mother used to say: have is the hell of want. This is where we’ve ended up. Please.”
Help me, Kelsea begged, not knowing to whom she spoke. Barty? Carlin? Mace? Tear? The Queen of Spades, the thing that had been inside her when she murdered Arlen Thorne—for she understood, now, that it had been murder—that thing was gone. But there was nothing to replace it. There was only Kelsea. She had wanted to be herself again, but only now did she understand how much that wish would cost. She could feel Evelyn’s heart before her, as vulnerable as though it lay in her hands.
“Soon it will stop on its own,” Evelyn whispered. “And I am afraid, so terribly afraid, that it will begin to beat for someone else.”
Kelsea hesitated, a rogue part of her still desperate to see the end of the Red Queen’s story. Row Finn was there, waiting, and there was so much more that Kelsea needed to know . . .
“Please,” Evelyn repeated. “I am at the end.”
And she was. Kelsea felt the woman’s heartbeat unraveling. The ghosts of Mhurn and Thorne seemed to wander in and out of her field of vision, but strangely, Kelsea did not fear them. Katie, too, was there, demanding a share of Kelsea’s mind. Kelsea sensed time growing short, and she raised the knife over Evelyn’s chest, gripping it in both hands so that it would not slip. As with Mhurn, she had no courage for a repeat.
“He fears you, you know,” Evelyn whispered. She gestured to Finn’s sapphire, now dangling from Kelsea’s hand, its dark facets glittering in the firelight. “Take that, and get it done.”
Kelsea stared at her, but Evelyn had already closed her eyes.
“I’m ready, child. Don’t lose your nerve now.”
Kelsea took a deep breath. Their faces were before her again—Mhurn and Thorne—but Evelyn was right; there were many different kinds of death.
“A kindness,” she whispered, blinking back tears.
“Yes.” Evelyn’s lips lifted in what might have been a smile. “A kindness.”
Summoning everything she had, Kelsea brought down the knife.
Book III
Chapter 11
The Tear Land
The resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity in William Tear’s town was a great blow, one that Jonathan Tear clearly recognized
but could not counteract. Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people, and the divide drawn by the early iteration of God’s Church helped to exacerbate the many ideological faults that already underlay the landscape. When the chips were down, Tear’s people were ready to turn on each other, and the fall of the Town was very quick, so quick that this historian wonders whether all such communities are not destined to fail. Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well.
—The Crossing in Hindsight, Ellen Alcott
In the two years following William Tear’s death, Katie Rice had learned many things. She was with Jonathan constantly, and Jonathan sometimes simply knew things. But there was more to it than that. Sometimes Katie felt as though she existed at the hidden heart of the Town, a hub where all of the Town’s secrets were buried, and by now she knew many things, even some she wished she did not.
She knew, for instance, that when Lily Tear was in the final extremity of her childbirth, Jonathan and Mrs. Johnson, the midwife, had tried to perform a caesarean section. The results were ghastly, and Lily had died screaming. Katie would hear those screams to the end of her days, but that was not the worst of it. In the last moment, a thought had come arrowing out of Jonathan, the thought limned with despair, and yet so clear and sharp that Katie could almost read it, as though he had written it down:
We are failing.
Katie didn’t understand this. Lily’s death was not Jonathan’s fault; if anything, it was his father’s fault, for failing to return with doctors, or even to bring the White Ship safely in the original Crossing—though Katie could not truly believe this, not with the memory of Tear’s anguished face upon her. He had already punished himself. No fault could be laid at Jonathan’s door, but Katie knew that he blamed himself for his mother’s death. No man was an island, perhaps, but Jonathan was at least an isthmus, and Katie did not try to talk him out of his guilt. He would not be comforted, could only work his way out of it in time. Katie knew him well enough to understand that.
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