“He didn’t. He tried, but in the end he had no choice but to run away. They called it the Crossing, but in reality, it was nothing but a retreat. And now that’s failed too.”
His voice was bleak, so bleak that it arrowed straight down to Katie’s core and seemed to slice her open. She groped for his hand in the dark, twining his fingers with hers.
“Don’t be a prat.”
“I’m not.” Jonathan’s voice suddenly strengthened, as though he had resolved something. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
There was a clink of metal in the darkness, and then Katie jumped as she felt something slither against her neck, a heavy chunk of stone tumbling down her breastbone.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m giving it to you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re tougher than I was. You always were.” Jonathan’s voice was bitter in the darkness. “You’ll take much longer to break.”
“Neither of us will break.”
“I will.” Jonathan’s hand clasped hers. “We’re out of options. It’s better than nothing.”
Katie made a face. The Tears were pragmatists; they always had been. But she couldn’t help longing for something better: not a compromise but a silver bullet, the holy grail of government. Where was it, that one perfect thing? She felt that if she could only find it, she would be willing to spend her life working to make it fire.
Fine words in a dungeon, Jonathan’s voice mocked her.
Katie frowned, then leaned her head back again. It was time to wait, to clear her head, to prepare for the moment when her oldest and closest friend would come through the door, carrying a knife meant for her.
Time drifted. Hours, days perhaps, Katie couldn’t see. Sometimes she slept on Jonathan’s shoulder, sometimes he on hers. Sometimes she woke in the dark with no memory of where she was, and then she would feel Jonathan’s hand in hers and realize that it hardly mattered whether they were in a dungeon or in a clearing, in the Town or outside it. They were together, the two of them, united in purpose, and that brought them a thousand times closer than they had ever been, so close that when Jonathan’s hand slipped beneath her shirt and Katie climbed into his lap, it seemed almost an afterthought, natural outgrowth of a place they had already been, not love but something a thousand times more powerful, and when Jonathan entered her, yanking her hair back to expose her throat, Katie almost shrieked with pleasure, and when the sapphire at her throat began to glow, illuminating both Jonathan’s face and her own, she saw that he was not entirely himself, that he too was in the hands of something else, and then she forgot as her mind stuttered and then fired, thinking over and over Now we are together now we are one—
When it was over, they dozed. Jonathan said nothing, and neither did Katie, but she didn’t think either of them were really sleeping. They were each waiting . . . preparing, in their own ways, for that ultimate moment: the click of the lock, and the opening of the door.
Chapter 14
The Great Gamble
When the invasion of New London finally came, it was very different from what anyone had imagined. More than one thousand Mort soldiers entered the defenseless city, looting and burning as they came, and of these, five hundred went on to lay siege to the Keep. The Holy Father had hired these troops—and, as later evidence revealed, had gone to great expense to transport them in secret—but as is so often the case in the hiring of mercenaries, the outcome reached was not the outcome sought. The Mort felt badly used, and they came not only for wealth, but for blood and revenge. The carnage can only be estimated, for few were left alive to chronicle it, and none of these able to write . . .
—The Tearling as a Military Nation, Callow the Martyr
Staring up at her city, Kelsea felt a curious sense of doubling. She was looking at New London, a place she knew well. The cluster of houses on hills, the grey fortress of the Keep, the white tower of the Arvath, all of these things were familiar. But at the same time, she couldn’t help seeing the city through Katie’s eyes, as a vast cancer of ruined potential. Knowing what New London had been meant to be made it much worse to see what it had become.
The western side of the city was aflame. Even from here, at the base of the southwestern slope, Kelsea could hear the screams as people fled the fire, but she didn’t deceive herself that the fire was the only problem. The Mort were loose in her city. There was no wall on the western side, and it was an easy climb up the hill to the base neighborhood, the Lower Bend. But Kelsea didn’t know where to begin. She was surrounded by armed men: Hall and the remainder of his army, as well as her Guard. But they weren’t enough. She couldn’t retake her city by force.
“Majesty,” Mace muttered urgently.
She turned south, toward the vast dust cloud that had been following them for the last day. At first it had been small, little more than a slight disturbance of air on the horizon, but in the past few hours it had resolved itself into a wide, dusty haze spread across the Lower Almont. Her Guard had kept an uneasy eye behind them, but there had been no time to stop. Kelsea turned to the Fetch and found him watching her, his eyes wide and hopeless.
“Is he coming for you?” she asked.
“No, Tear Queen. For you.”
“What are you jabbering about?” Elston asked. “Speak sense. What is that?”
“The Orphan.”
“The Orphan is a children’s fable,” Dyer protested.
“Hush, Dyer.” She paused, suddenly struck by a thought, and moved over to crouch beside the Fetch.
“What really happened to Row? After Jonathan died?”
“Cursed. We didn’t know Katie had Jonathan’s magic until after Jonathan was dead, and once we found out, even Row didn’t dare touch her. She fled, but first she cursed us all.” The Fetch gestured to the four men around him, who nodded unhappily, then turned his doomed eyes back to the dust cloud behind him. “She cursed us as traitors, and we still pay and pay.”
“What about Row?”
“I don’t know what Katie did to him. Row began to fade, and then he simply disappeared. The Town fell into warring factions, tore itself apart. Half of the population struck out eastward across the plains. It was only years later that we found out Row wasn’t dead, but in the Fairwitch.”
“And I let him loose,” Kelsea murmured. She needed no spyglass to see them now: a horde of small, dark forms, running on all fours, advancing north across the plains. Had she led them to her city, or had they been coming here all along? She didn’t know, but it hardly seemed to matter any longer. She had no answer for the tide below . . . no answer in the present, anyway. She didn’t understand what Row Finn had become, but she didn’t believe he could be beaten here. This problem, like so many, began in the past, and it was too late to fix.
“Lady,” Mace repeated. “We must move. Now.”
Kelsea nodded, then looked back up the hill. The immediate problem was up there. She needed to get into her Keep, but pandemonium reigned. Her city was overtaken with violence . . . which left Kelsea back where she had been all along.
She dug into her pocket and brought out Row’s sapphire. The blue facets sparkled in the dying light, and again Kelsea had the uncomfortable feeling that the jewel was winking at her, almost daring her to put it on.
What choice did I ever have? she wondered. Carlin raised me to eschew force, but this world is ruled by force. It’s too late for anything else.
She turned to her Guard, who were clustered around her on the hillside. General Hall and his twin brother were there, too, though Hall’s sorry band of soldiers waited several hundred feet down the slope. Even Ewen was here, having doggedly insisted on following them to the city. Kelsea thought that Bradshaw had taken Ewen on his horse, but she could not be sure of anything about that journey. Too many miles had been spent in the twilight of Katie’s mind. But now she could regret, at the end, that Ewen was with them. She wished he would have stayed behind, sta
yed safe. She wished she could have kept them all safe, her Guard, her country, wished she could have wrapped them away and hidden them in the past, or perhaps the future. Anywhere but the present. She dangled the necklace from her fingers, watching the light play across the chain.
Force, she thought. Force is what’s left when all other options are exhausted. Even Carlin must have known that.
“We’re going up there,” she told them. “To the Keep. Your first instinct will be to protect me, I know—”
“Here it comes,” Dyer muttered.
“But do me a favor and protect each other. Understand, Dyer?”
“Yes, Lady, yes! Because that’s what I signed up for: to guard other guards while I leave the Queen to her own devices.”
She glared at him for a moment, but found that she could not maintain it; after a moment, she shook her head and continued.
“Smart mouths aside, I mean what I say. I don’t know what will happen when I put this on,” she held up the sapphire, “but it can’t be the safest thing in the world. I may not be myself; I may be—”
The Queen of Spades.
She swallowed. “I want you all to stay out of my way. Agreed?”
None of her Guard would meet her eye, except for Mace, who raised his eyebrow expressively.
“I mean it.”
“Are we going to go?” Elston asked. “Or are we going to wait for those things out there to come up and kiss us on the mouth?”
Kelsea glanced behind her and saw that the tide of children had nearly reached the base of the hill. Taking a deep breath, she put on the second necklace, and as it settled between her breasts, she felt a horrible comfort there, the comfort of coming back to a house that had long since been wrecked but which was, nevertheless, home.
“Come on,” she told them, and scrambled up the hill, not waiting to see whether they would follow.
“Now,” Aisa breathed, and Father Tyler nodded.
Together, they shoved at the grating over their heads. It was heavy, solid iron, but Aisa could feel some give. If they had been strong men, there would have been no problem. But Father Tyler was as frail as ever, and Aisa’s body was racked with fever. Her wounded arm felt as though it had been shot through with veins of molten iron. They pushed until Aisa’s entire back ached, but still only revealed a quarter-crescent of deep evening-blue sky.
“That’s something, anyway,” Aisa muttered. “A few minutes and we’ll try—”
She fell silent, listening.
“Is it them?” Father Tyler whispered, but Aisa put a hand on his wrist to keep him quiet. She thought she had heard something in the tunnel below, the scrape of a boot on stone.
“Again,” she panted. “Quick.”
The two of them grasped the edge of the cover and shoved. Bright lights danced before Aisa’s eyes, but the cover was halfway off now. Starlight illuminated the edges of the ladder upon which they perched, and for a moment Aisa felt her balance waver, felt as though she would simply fall, not into the tunnel she had just climbed out of but into a darkness deeper than any she had ever known.
“I can squeeze out,” Father Tyler murmured. He clambered a few more feet up the ladder, snaking his thin body through the half-moon opening, then boosted himself up and out. The beaten leather satchel he carried with him gonged against the top of the ladder, and Aisa winced. No one in the tunnels below could fail to hear that sound.
Aisa had given the Caden the slip several days ago, vanishing into a deep crevice in the main tunnel while they walked ahead. It had not been an easy decision, for she felt a great deal of loyalty to these four men. But her loyalty to the Queen was stronger, and she knew that the Queen would have wanted Father Tyler back safe in the Keep. She had thought it would be a relatively quick and simple business: fetch Father Tyler from his hidden alcove, smuggle him up to the Keep, and then come back down with no one the wiser. She could claim that she had gotten lost in the tunnels for a day or so. Very neat, very easy.
She had forgotten that the Caden were not fools.
In hindsight, she realized that they must have known something was up from the very moment she had discovered Father Tyler. She had felt uneasy, leaving him down there, and her worry must have showed. When she slipped them, they had not gone on up the tunnel as she had thought, but had waited, hiding, to see where she would go and what she would do. It was only this morning that she began to suspect that she and Father Tyler were being tracked through the tunnels, and by that point, it was too late to make an alternate plan. They were on the southern edge of the Gut, an area of the labyrinth that Aisa did not know well and could not navigate with any skill. It seemed their best hope to get up and outside, but this, too, presented dangers, and they had been forced to wait until dark.
As soon as Father Tyler was up and out, he resumed shoving the manhole cover. His leverage was better now, and even on his own, he was able to move the iron disc well out of the way. He reached down into the hole.
“Come, child. Boost yourself up.”
Aisa did. She usually resented being called a child, but somehow, coming from the old priest, it didn’t irk. She took his hands and bent her knees, preparing to spring upward, then shrieked as a hand clutched her ankle.
“Where do you think you’re going, girl?”
Kicking frantically, she peered downward and saw the dim white circle of Daniel’s face. Her kicks were ineffective; his hand on her ankle was like iron. Again she thought of simply letting go. She was close to death, had been so for days. Only concern for the priest kept her fighting that grim spectre off.
“We gave you a clean shot, girl,” Daniel hissed. “And how do you reward us? That’s a ten-thousand-pound bounty you’re trying to hold for yourself.”
“I’m not after a bounty,” she panted.
Daniel’s face moved closer, and she realized, alarmed, that he was climbing the ladder beneath her. His other hand encircled her calf, squeezing until she squealed.
“We’re a guild, you little cheat. No one holds back money from the guild.”
“That’s a lie!” she gasped. “You did! They told me! Lady Cross! You let her go and kept the money and they threw you out!”
Daniel gaped at her, and in that moment Father Tyler leaned over the edge of the hole and swung his satchel in a short, sharp arc. The business end of the bag thumped Daniel in the face and he fell, howling, from the ladder.
“Come, child!” Father Tyler cried. “Now!”
Aisa took his hands and let him pull her up from the hole. She saw immediately that she had misjudged their position; they were not in the Gut any longer, but on the edge of the Lower Bend. She could find her bearings here easily, but they were at least a mile from the Keep Lawn. It was too far. She could barely walk, let alone run. Her arm was a dangling web of agony.
From the hole at her feet came a string of curses, then the deep gonging sound of boots climbing the ladder.
“Child, we must go!” Father Tyler grabbed her good arm and pulled her along. Aisa blinked, half blind with pain and fever, seeing little, hearing a deep voice inside her head, long ago. A father’s voice, but not Da’s.
“Pain,” she whispered to the priest, covering her eyes as the brightly lit windows passed by them, an endless panoply. “Pain only . . .”
Her legs tangled and she began to collapse. A moment later, though she barely felt it, the priest had picked her up and begun to run with her in his arms. Each step made Aisa feel as though her head would split open, but she thought Father Tyler must know where he was going, for he darted down a nearby alley, then another, wending his way carefully around the edge of the Gut, heading for the center of the city.
Javel was hungry. He could feel the hunger, like a rock, deep inside his stomach, a gnawing, cloying sort of pain, so closely aligned with nausea that sometimes he could not tell the difference. For a while the pain went away and he forgot it completely, but all it took was one whiff of food, and hunger came surging back. They had alrea
dy begun to ration the provisions, and now, no matter how hard the Gate Guard worked, they were down to two small meals a day. The Keep was still relatively well stocked from the Mort invasion, and if needed, the food would last for a long time. But siege was siege.
After a long fight, they had finally succeeded in getting the Keep Gate closed, bolstering it with wooden bars. In a brave move, Vil had led a small force down the wall and onto the drawbridge, laying a wall of bricks on the bridge while the Mort slept, so that by the time they woke, the mortar had hardened into a real obstacle. But yesterday, the Mort had broken the wall and gone to work on the Gate. The wood reinforcements were gradually weakening, but Vil did not seem perturbed. He was acting true to form, as a hero, not thinking of himself but of the people upstairs, the women and children trapped in the Keep. Vil might be a hero, but Javel was frightened.
From time to time, Vil would take two or three Gate Guards up to the balconies on the higher floors, where they could look out over the city. There was nothing good to see. As many Mort as swarmed below on the lawn and the drawbridge, there seemed to be twice as many out in the city proper, setting fires, carrying off goods, and much, much worse. Javel didn’t want to watch, but he seemed unable to help himself. The vantage was too good, and the sound of screaming carried easily across the lawn. But today the view was mercifully hazy, obscured by smoke from the fire that burned across the western skyline of the city.
“If only that fire would travel over this way,” Martin remarked. “They’ve got oil down there, and nowhere to dump it.”
“Fire would be just as bad for us,” said Vil. “Too much wood in here. The bridge is wood.”
The Fate of the Tearling Page 40