Javel kept silent. The idea of being trapped in here, fire ringing them all around, was too terrible to contemplate. He wondered, for perhaps the hundredth time, why he couldn’t have been born brave like the men around him. What good had his cowardice ever done anyone? Allie’s face, set with contempt, flashed before him, and he closed his eyes, as though he could somehow retreat from her gaze.
“Has the Holy Father shown up today?” Vil asked.
“Not yet,” Martin replied. “But he’ll be here. These are his troops. The Queen should charge him with treason.”
“What Queen? Is there a Queen here?”
“I only meant—”
“I know what you meant,” Vil replied tiredly. “Enough. Let’s go down. We need some sleep.”
But when they reached the ground floor, they found not quiet, but a raging argument in front of the Gate, the entire Gate Guard toe-to-toe with a group of Queen’s Guards and a woman Javel recognized easily: Andalie, the Queen’s witch. At her side, holding her hand, was the same tiny girl who had spoken to Javel before. He shivered at the sight of them.
“What is this?” Vil demanded. “Why aren’t you at your posts?”
“The woman, sir,” Ethan replied. “She insists that we open the Gate.”
Vil turned to Andalie, his gaze uneasy. “Nonsense.”
“The Queen is coming,” she replied. “Open the gate.”
One of the Queen’s Guards moved forward, the same archer that Javel had noticed before. He was little more than a boy, but his posture was so combative that Vil actually moved back a step.
“The Mace left Andalie in charge!” the archer snapped. “Open the gate!”
He shoved Vil, and Vil fell backward. Marco and Jeremy drew swords, but they found themselves facing more than twenty Queen’s Guards, all of them armed to the teeth. Javel considered the men before them for a long moment, but he was not seeing them; instead, he saw a tall woman sitting astride a horse, a woman of many sorrows, with a crown on her head. In his mind he heard the shrieks of women and children.
It would take a brave man to open the door, Dyer’s voice whispered.
Are you brave, Javel? Allie, her voice neither cruel nor kind, honestly doubtful. And last of all, the Queen’s voice, long ago in the Keep:
Don’t you want to find out?
Javel did.
A moment later, he had turned to the doors behind him and begun to attack the bolsters in a frenzy, dragging down one wooden plank at a time. Hands were on his shoulders, pulling him backward, but eventually they stopped and he realized, gratefully, that other hands were helping him, many hands, dragging down the enormous planks of wood from the stack, slowly revealing the thick oak of the Keep Gate.
The Arvath was the first building to fall.
It fell quickly, so quickly that Kelsea almost felt cheated. She had wanted to see the Holy Father’s house drop piece by piece, the white stone first cracking, then peeling, then dropping in great chunks, the way snow fell from trees during the first good spring melt. She wanted to see the thing crumble. But the fall was very quick; she had no more than turned her mind to that rising white spire than wide cracks traveled its circumference, cracks so thick that Kelsea could even see them from here. The gleaming cross at the top went first, plummeting from the pinnacle, and within ten seconds, the entire building had gone down in a tornado of dust.
Cheat or not, it was still very good. Only now did Kelsea realize how much of herself she had given away during the past few months, how much of her personality had been dead, dampened beneath the rigid control she had imposed upon herself in order to survive in the dungeon. Everything had been painted in shades of grey down there, and there had been no percentage in letting her temper out, letting it romp. She wondered whether she had nearly gone mad, whether she would even have noticed if she had crossed the border and sunk into insanity. Maybe it would only have seemed like the next phase.
It didn’t matter. Now she was free.
Dimly, she sensed her Guard around her, following her lead as she led them through the city. They were running, all of them, for Row Finn’s creatures were right behind them, and now Kelsea could also sense the man himself, not far back, all of his attention focused upon her. Sometimes she thought she could even feel his eyes. Several times her guards stopped to loose arrows into the street behind them, but Kelsea knew they would hit nothing. Row’s children were too quick.
They crossed the Circus and Kelsea sensed, rather than saw, people scattering from her path. They didn’t seem to matter, all of these people. Their problems were so small; Kelsea sensed them as she flew by: problems with spouses, with money, with drink.
They should scatter, she thought grimly, as though this journey were an argument in which she had been somehow vindicated. They should scatter. I’m the Queen of Spades.
They circled around the outside of the Gut, where the houses and buildings descended into a valley, the cup between two hills. Once upon a time this depression had held an amphitheater, where William Tear’s utopians would meet and decide things by popular vote. Democracy in action, but not really. Behind everything had been Tear, always Tear, and when that driving force was gone, the Town had nothing, left open to the lowest common denominator. Leadership was all that stood between democracy and the mob. As they crossed the Gut, Kelsea sensed the Creche beneath, a great anthill of chambers and tunnels, built God knew when. Thinking of that deep dungeon sunk in the earth, Kelsea wondered if the Creche had been built by Row himself. Who knew what he might have accomplished in the dark?
If only I could stop it, she thought, the thought now so familiar that it seemed to run a set course, a well-worn groove in her mind. If only anyone could have stopped it! As they began to leave the Gut behind, Kelsea sent a massive crack running through the earth, just as she had done when she cracked the New London Bridge all those months ago. The street beneath her trembled, but she didn’t stay to watch the effects of her handiwork. She knew how it would go, could predict it as surely as Simon could predict the operation of one of his many machines. The crack would travel deep, all the way down through that warren of tunnels where the dark heart of New London lived. Struts would collapse, foundations would sink, even the streets themselves would begin to tumble into the fissure she had made. It might take hours, or days, but eventually the Gut, the Creche, these would be nothing more than an archaeology site, infinite layers of wood and stone for someone to excavate in the distant future.
“Lady, no!” Mace shouted. “The girl! Aisa!”
Kelsea shrugged that off, annoyed at his interference. What possible value could one life hold against the vast expanse of pain that had gone on beneath these streets? Perhaps, given enough time, the entire city would fall through a hole in the earth, settling into so much detritus. That outcome seemed entirely right. How could you rebuild on a broken foundation? They would have to wipe it clean and start over.
That’s Row talking.
The voice was Katie’s, but Kelsea shrugged it off as well. Rebuilding could come later. Now, she wanted only to punish. Down the Great Boulevard, where people scattered before her approach. She made eye contact with a woman standing in front of a milliner’s, and the woman began to scream.
What do they see? Kelsea wondered. She turned, meaning to ask Mace, but he was nowhere to be seen. Twenty feet behind her, Elston was struggling with several men in the black uniforms of the Mort army.
Mort? she thought bemusedly. Here?
She turned her attention to the Mort soldiers and they dropped to the ground, the chests of their uniforms darkening with blood. The rest of her Guard was still with her, but Kelsea couldn’t help noticing that they did not look at her, that they worked hard to keep their eyes elsewhere. No one had ever liked the Queen of Spades . . . not Mace, not her guards, not anyone. The sapphire throbbed against her skin, and now she could feel Row Finn inside her head, his long life, a seemingly endless accumulation of experiences, no time to linger on a sin
gle one, but she saw
Her own pudgy fingers playing with jacks on wooden floorboards
Her worthless mother sitting at the table, weeping by candlelight, and Kelsea stared up at the woman and felt something that was almost hatred, contempt coursing through her heart
William Tear standing across the road, staring at her from a distance, his face betraying both suspicion and sorrow
Following Jonathan Tear up the road, both of them young, no more than ten or eleven, but Kelsea’s heart burned with hunger, the hunger to be someone special, a golden child in the eyes of the Town
Jen Devlin’s face beneath her, eyes bulging and cheeks turning purple as Kelsea throttled the woman, neither liking nor disliking the agonized confusion in Jen’s eyes, only thinking that it was Jen’s own fault for trusting, for thinking she meant well
Staring down at the pile of rough-cut sapphires in her hand, not sure what to do with them, not sure what she had accomplished, only that here at last was something that was hers
They crested the rise of the boulevard and here was the Keep Lawn, but not as she had left it. There were more Mort here, scattered across the lawn and circling the Keep. The drawbridge was down and the gate appeared to have already fallen, but the bulk of the Mort were busily at work with a ram, all the same. Several of them were trying to climb the Keep’s stone outer wall, aiming for the balconies on the third floor.
“Where’s the Captain?” Coryn shouted behind her.
“Gone!” Elston shouted back. “He was with us on the boulevard, and then I don’t know!”
Kelsea shook her head. She could not be bothered with Mace right now, or with any of them. She had business to tend to, for she had spotted something on the lawn below: a white tent, topped with a cross. If His Holiness had escaped the Arvath, so much the better. Her mind reached out to Row Finn, looking for fire, the fire he had always controlled, and when she found it she gasped in joy, watching the white tent go up, men’s shrieks echoing through the fabric. The men on the walls were next; they toppled into the moat and disappeared, leaving only a widening pool of blood on top of the water. The men at the gate had oil, she saw now, and had been preparing to set fires themselves, across the wide front expanse of her Keep. She grabbed at the men’s insides and yanked, smiling as blood sprayed across the lawn and their bodies fell where they stood.
“Lady! The Captain!”
Elston’s voice. Annoyed again, Kelsea turned and saw that he was pointing up the hill toward the entrance to the boulevard. The view struck a chord of memory in her, so clear that it was almost déjà vu, and she shivered, coming back to herself a bit; when
—People of the Tearling!—
had that been?
At the entrance to the lawn, Mace was battling with four men in red cloaks. It was a day for memories; for a moment, Kelsea wondered whether they were back on the shores of the Caddell, battling for their lives. A small form was beside Mace, tiny really, next to his bulk, battling as well. The tiny warrior’s hood dropped, and she saw Andalie’s daughter, Aisa, trying to hold off two Caden with her knife. Her face was bright with fever, and her left arm dangled limply at her side. It was no contest; as Kelsea watched, one of the Caden grabbed her and broke her neck over his arm.
Behind her, Kelsea heard a long shriek from the Keep: Andalie, but Kelsea could not trouble about her now either. A third form was fleeing down the hill toward Kelsea and her Guard, and the tide of violence inside Kelsea was momentarily muted as she recognized Father Tyler. Unreality washed over her again, the same sense of being half in a dream that she had experienced, on and off, ever since she had woken in her mother’s house.
Father Tyler had the look of a scarecrow; his filthy clothing hung off him like a sail. Mace covered his retreat, holding the four Caden off. Dyer and Kibb had gone to help him, but there was no need for that; Kelsea could take care of the four cloaked men easily. She no longer feared the Caden, or anyone else.
“Get her inside!” Mace shouted. He left Dyer and Kibb to it and came running down the hill, shepherding them all onward.
Inside where? Kelsea wondered, but when she turned back to the Keep she saw that, by some miracle, the gate was open. Dead Mort lay strewn around the drawbridge and the lower lawn, and Kelsea could only marvel at the sight; had she done that? No, of course not. It had been the Queen of Spades.
“Lady, run!” Elston shouted, grabbing her arm, pointing to the top of the hill. Following his gaze, Kelsea felt real fear overtake her for the first time that day. The entrance to the Great Boulevard was crammed with children, a horde so vast that they were shoving and squeezing past each other to gain access. Like the little girl in the dungeon, they loped on all fours, and this made it easy to distinguish the tall figure on two legs who stood in their midst: Row Finn, with pale white skin and glaring eyes. He had finally dispensed with his handsome face, and Kelsea had no power to stop him. She sensed a wall there, surrounding him and the children, the same sort of shield the Red Queen had thrown up to defend her army below the New London walls.
“Come on, Lady!” Elston shouted again, and Kelsea allowed him to tug her down the lawn. Now she was running with a solid bloc of guards around her, and she did not see what became of Dyer or Kibb, or of the Caden.
“Majesty,” Father Tyler panted beside her. Never in her life had she seen a man so ill-used, so close to collapse. He held out a thick strap, and Kelsea saw that he was still carrying his old satchel, though it looked considerably the worse for wear. Did he expect her to carry it for him? Now?
The old Kelsea would have carried it for him, Carlin’s voice mocked in her head, and Kelsea took the satchel, frowning.
“Thank God,” Father Tyler said, tears pouring down his cheeks. “Thank God.”
She stared at him, confused, but they were pounding across the drawbridge now and through the gate. Mace caught up to them as they ran and as soon as they were through, he began shouting orders, leading Kelsea around several piles of broken brick. She saw many faces: Andalie, white with horror as she clutched Glee in her arms; Devin; even Javel, in the uniform of a Gate Guard. But there was no time to speak to anyone, for the Guard was already hustling her down the hallway. Behind them, Kelsea could hear Row’s children still coming, a high-pitched screaming that seemed to be inside her head as well as without. Glancing backward, she saw that the corridor was covered with them; they swarmed over the Gate Guard, climbing the walls and ceiling, their movements sickening and insectile. Father Tyler’s satchel bounced against Kelsea’s leg, hurting her knee, but she couldn’t give it back to him; the priest had been left behind.
“Here,” Mace said, throwing open one of the many doors on the main hallway. “Seal us inside.”
He pushed Kelsea through, and she was relieved to see Pen, Elston, Ewen, Coryn, and Galen follow them inside. Mace slammed the door behind them.
“Bar the door!” he shouted.
Elston and Coryn put their shoulders to the door just as it began to shudder. Pen stood in front of Kelsea, sword in hand. She sank to the floor, blinking, and Father Tyler’s satchel thudded to the ground beside her.
“Ah, God, Lazarus,” she murmured. “How I failed.”
“That’s not you talking, Lady,” Mace grunted, shoving his shoulder against the pile of men holding the door closed. “Don’t you get maudlin on me now.”
What else am I supposed to do? she wanted to ask. Mace had chosen this room well; the door was thick oak, but it would not hold forever. The Queen of Spades was gone, and all that remained was Kelsea, who was not nearly so resilient. A great blow shook the door, and the room echoed with a moan of wounded wood. With nothing else to do, Kelsea opened Father Tyler’s satchel and found two items: an old, battered Bible and a large red box.
“Push, boys!” Mace shouted. “Push for the Queen!”
Another blow echoed off the door, but Kelsea barely heard it. She stared down at the polished cherrywood surface. She had seen this box before, in Katie’s hands. I
t was nearly as old as the Tearling, but here it was. Flicking the latch, she opened it and stared down at the crown inside, perfect in every detail, just as Katie had seen it.
He wanted to be a king, she thought. That’s all he ever wanted, and wouldn’t I love to introduce him to the Queen of Spades? Oh, how I would love that—
BOOM!
Another great blow shook the doorframe, and several of her guard cried out at the impact. Coryn flew backward.
Brought back to herself, Kelsea picked up the crown, ignoring a weakly hectoring voice that seemed to travel through her fingers all the way to her brain—
Don’t you dare!
—and placed it on her head. Beyond the stone walls, she heard Row Finn scream with rage.
She had expected the crown to be heavy—it had felt so in the box—but it was light as air on her head; she felt its power travel through her, a line of current directly down to her chest, a pleasure so great that it was agonizing, making her close her eyes. She opened them and
Found herself in the cottage.
But it was empty. She had always been able to tell, even upon waking, whether Barty and Carlin were home. Now she could sense their absence. Nothing moved in the rooms around her. Even the dust motes dancing in the light seemed lethargic, undisturbed.
She was standing in the middle of Carlin’s library. She felt years younger, seven or eight perhaps, as on those mornings when she used to come in here and curl up in Kelsea’s Patch and feel that all was right with the world. But Kelsea’s Patch was not here; in fact, the room held no furniture at all, apart from the bookshelves. Carlin’s books surrounded her on all sides . . . but not old and beaten, as so many of them had been in Kelsea’s youth. These books looked brand-new. Instinctively, Kelsea reached for one—she had not held a book in so long!—and found that she had taken down The Bluest Eye. But when she opened the cover, the pages were blank.
Alarmed, she pulled down another book—Something Wicked This Way Comes—and flipped through it. Nothing, only a collection of empty pages.
The Fate of the Tearling Page 41