The Queen of Mortmesne stood on her balcony, staring across her domain. She’d begun to come here when she was wakeful, which was nearly every night now. She wasn’t getting enough sleep, and small things had begun to slip. She’d forgotten to sign a set of execution orders one night, and the next morning the crowd had gathered in Cutter’s Square and waited . . . and waited. The King of Cadare had invited her for a visit and she’d mistaken the date by a week, confusing her servants and necessitating some unpacking. One night they’d brought her a requested slave and she’d already been fast asleep. These things were small, and Beryll caught most of them, but sooner or later someone besides Beryll would notice and it would become a problem.
It was the girl, always the girl. The Queen wanted a look at the girl, wanted it so badly that she’d even gathered her generals and broached the possibility of a state visit to the Tearling. They rarely vetoed her suggestions, but they’d done so this time, and the Queen had eventually admitted their point. The overture would be a sign of weakness, and a pointless one; the girl would likely refuse. But even if she accepted, there were hidden dangers. By now the Queen could see that the girl was an unknown quantity, nothing like her mother at all. Worse, the girl’s guard was captained by the Mace, who was not an unknown quantity. Even Ducarte didn’t want to tangle with the Mace yet, not without more information and advantages than they held at present. The Mace was a terror, the girl was a blind spot, and both of these things boded ill.
The Queen liked this balcony; it was two floors above her chambers, at the top of one of the Palais’s many turrets. She could see for miles in every direction: across the vastness of her land to Callae in the east, Cadare in the south, and due west to the Tearling. The Tearling, which had given her no trouble for almost twenty years, and now it felt as though she’d stepped into an anthill. It was a disaster. Thorne’s shipment would arrive tomorrow, and it would work as a stopgap, but it wouldn’t resolve the larger problem. If she allowed the Tearling to evade tribute, it would be only a matter of time before the others followed suit.
The domestic situation was no better. The Queen had ruled her kingdom with an iron grip for over a century, but now the lack of new slaves had created a novel problem: internal unrest. The Queen’s spies reported that Mort nobles had been gathering in secret, in larger and larger groups. The commanders of her army weren’t so secretive; they voiced their displeasure to anyone who would listen. The northern cities, particularly Cite Marche, had reported increasing levels of popular unrest. Cite Marche was full of young radicals, most of whom had never owned a single slave, but they scented opportunity in the spread of discontent.
I will have to invade the Tearling, the Queen realized, troubled. She moved to the southwest corner of the balcony and looked out beyond the city, to the dark shadow that blanketed the vastness of the Champs Demesne. She had mobilized her army weeks ago but then delayed sending it, something in her gut counseling caution. Invasion was simpler, but also riskier, and the Queen didn’t care for unquantified risk. A victory could carry unintended consequences. She didn’t want more land to police; she wanted things to go on quietly, as they always had, with each surrounding kingdom paying tribute and doing as it was told. If she were forced to take real military action, it would delay the project, keep things from moving forward.
But she didn’t really have a choice anymore. Thorne’s assessment was clear: the girl would not be bought. She showed dangerous strains of her grandmother, Arla, and even something more.
Who was the father?
Some mornings, the Queen thought that everything hinged on this question. She was a geneticist, perhaps the most advanced geneticist since the Crossing, and she appreciated the power of bloodlines to create change, even abrupt, aberrant change, from generation to generation. Both Elyssa and her Regent had been so easy to manage, constrained by vanity and lack of imagination. There was no reason the girl should be so different, unless some entirely original strain had been introduced to the mix. The Regent had always refused to tell her the identity of the girl’s father; she should have forced the information from him years ago, but it hadn’t seemed that critical. Only now, when he had disappeared and her plans had ground to a halt, did she see that the girl’s paternity might matter more than anything else.
I’ve grown complacent, the Queen realized suddenly. Everything had been so easy for so long . . . but the complacent ruler stood at the whim of any indignity evolution could produce, even a nineteen-year-old girl who should have been dead years before.
Something was happening on the Tear border.
The Queen narrowed her eyes, trying to understand what she was seeing. It was just past midnight, and the sky was clear all the way to the border, where the two mountains, Willingham and Ellyre, rose high above the forest, their snow-covered peaks visible by a thin sliver of moon. Useful landmarks, those mountains; the Queen had always been grateful to know exactly where the Tear began, to be able to keep an eye on it from a distance.
Now lightning rent the sky above the Argive Pass, illuminating roiling black storm clouds. The Queen was unimpressed; she could summon lightning herself if she cared to, it was a parlor trick. But this lightning wasn’t white, it was blue. The bright blue of a sapphire.
Fear trickled inside her, making her belly contract, and she narrowed her eyes at the western horizon, trying desperately to see. But magic, like all strengths, was constrained not only by the user but by the audience, and now she could see nothing. She’d never been able to see the girl, not even once. Only in dreams.
The Queen whirled and left her balcony, startling her guards, who froze for a moment before falling into place behind her. She hurried down the circular staircase toward her quarters, not caring whether they could keep up. Premonition was suddenly upon her, unbidden, a sense of disaster. Something terrible was happening on the border, some catastrophe that could wreck all of her plans.
Juliette, the Queen’s head page, was stationed at the door to her quarters. The Queen would have preferred Beryll for this duty, Beryll whose loyalty was unquestioned. But he was an old man now, and he needed his sleep. Juliette was a tall, muscular blonde of about twenty-five, strong and capable, but so young that the Queen wondered what she could possibly know about anything. The price of a long, long life was suddenly clear, laid out in the younger woman’s bright, somehow stupid face.
All of my people have grown old.
“Bring me a child,” she snapped at Juliette. “A boy, nine or ten. Drug him hard.”
Juliette bowed and went swiftly down the hallway. The Queen passed into her quarters and found that someone had already drawn the curtains. Normally, she loved her room with its curtains closed, so that the walls and ceiling were nothing but an unbroken field of crimson silk. It was like being inside a cocoon, and she’d often taken pride in thinking of herself that way, as a creature who’d broken free of the walls of her prison and emerged stronger than before, stronger than anyone had ever imagined she would be. But now she took no pleasure in her surroundings. The dark thing would be angry at being summoned, and even angrier at a request for help.
There was no other option. Her own gifts had failed.
Her guard had prepared for her return; a large, healthy fire burned in the enormous fireplace. That was good. One less thing to do. The Queen rummaged through her drawers until she found a knife and a clean white towel. Then she cleared away the furniture in front of the fireplace, dragging sofa and chairs away to leave a wide space on the stone hearth. When she finished, she found that she was breathing hard, her pulse thudding in her ears.
I’m afraid, she thought miserably. It’s been a long time.
Someone knocked. The Queen opened the door and found Juliette standing there, a young Cadarese boy in her arms. He was the right age, but very skinny, his face slack with unconsciousness. When the Queen lifted an eyelid, she found his pupils dilated almost to the rim of the iris.
“Good.” The Queen took the child in her arms, not liking the warm feel of his thin body. “No disturbances, not for anything, no matter what you hear.”
Juliette bowed again and backed away to the far side of the hall. The night guard stationed against the wall gave Juliette’s ass a frankly lascivious glance, and the Queen paused briefly on the threshold, thinking that she should do something about that. Her pages weren’t supposed to suffer any sort of harassment; it was one of the perks of a difficult job.
Fuck it, she thought resentfully. Beryll could sort it out tomorrow.
She slammed the door with one shoulder, carried the boy to her bed, and dumped him on top of the coverlet. His breathing was deep and even, and the Queen stared at him for a moment, her thoughts moving in various directions. She didn’t particularly like children; they made too much noise and demanded too much energy. She’d never wanted a child herself, not even when she was young. Children were simply a necessary cog in the machine, something to be tolerated. It was only when they were quiet like this that she found them bearable, that she could regret what had to be done.
There were several pedophiles in high positions in her military. The Queen felt a strange, sickly contempt for these men, unable to understand what was wrong with them. Genetics gave her no answers; there was nothing sexual in children. Some people were simply broken, something inside them grown wrong and twisted. These men were diseased, and the Queen made a special point of never touching them, not even to shake hands.
But she needed them, needed them badly. When they weren’t being what they were, they were incredibly useful, and Ducarte in particular was invaluable. The trick was not to think of these things, not while she watched the sleeping child in front of her, utterly vulnerable on the bed.
Someday, she thought, when everything is completed, I’ll rid the land of all of them. I’ll go from one end of the New World to the other, scraping out the rot, and I’ll start in the Fairwitch.
But for tonight, she needed the child. And she should act quickly, before the drug began to wear off.
Picking up the knife, the Queen reached down and made a shallow slice across the boy’s forearm. Blood welled up in a fat line and she blotted it with the towel, soaking the white cotton. The boy didn’t even stir; a good sign. Maybe she could get through this more cleanly than last time.
The Queen took off her gown and underclothes, leaving them in a scarlet puddle on the floor behind her. She dropped to her knees on the stone hearth and whispered a few words of a language long gone, then sat back on her heels and waited, gritting her teeth. The stone of the floor was hard and sharp, digging into her knees, but the dark thing liked that, just as it liked to have her naked. It appreciated discomfort, enjoyed it in some way she didn’t fully understand. If she kept her panties on, or put down a pillow to soften the floor, it would notice.
A voice spoke from the fire, a low, toneless voice that couldn’t be identified as either male or female. At the sound of it, gooseflesh broke out on the Queen’s arms.
“What is your need?”
She swallowed, wiping perspiration from her forehead. “I need . . . advice.”
“You need help,” the dark thing corrected, its voice expectant. “What will you give in return?”
She leaned forward, as far as she dared, and threw the bloody towel into the fire. Despite the heat, her nipples had hardened to tiny points, as though she were cold, or excited. Crackling sounds filled the room as the flames consumed the towel.
“Innocent blood,” the dark thing remarked. “It is good to taste.”
The air in front of the fireplace began to darken and coalesce. As always, the Queen stared at this phenomenon, trying to understand what she was seeing. The space in front of her was turning a rich black, a dark, fathomless hole opening there. It looked as though oil were condensing right out of the air.
“What troubles you, Mort Queen?”
“The Tearling,” the Queen replied, unhappy to find that her voice wasn’t entirely steady. The creature in the fire needed her just as much as she needed it, she reminded herself. “The new Queen of the Tearling.”
“The Tear heir. You’ve been unable to yoke her; I have been watching.”
“I couldn’t see what happened on the border tonight. I can’t see the girl at all.”
The hole in front of the fire widened now, pulsing blackly in the firelight. “I do not come to listen to you complain. Ask your question.”
“What happened on the border tonight?”
“Tonight is nothing. There is no time here.”
The Queen pursed her lips and tried again. “Arlen Thorne was bringing a clandestine shipment of Tear across the border. Did something happen?”
“He failed.” There was no emotion in its voice, no human tone at all. “There will be no shipment.”
“How did he fail? Was the girl there?”
“The Tear heir holds both jewels now.”
The Queen’s stomach dropped unpleasantly, and she looked down at the hearth, considering various choices. All of them led to the same place. “I must invade the Tearling and kill the girl.”
“You will not invade the Tearling.”
“I have no choice. I have to kill her before she learns to use them.”
The black mass in front of the Queen trembled suddenly, like a door frame struck by a heavy blow. A spear of flame shot from the fire, crossing the hearth to bury itself in the skin of her right hip. She cried out and fell backward, rolling against the carpet until the flames were extinguished. Her hip had burned black, and it squalled in agony when she tried to sit up. She lay on the floor, panting.