They topped the hill, and Kelsea halted briefly, stunned by what she saw. Looking down at the Mort camp from the walls of New London was a very different proposition from seeing it up close. Black tents seemed to stretch for miles into the distance, and Kelsea’s first thought was to wonder how they kept from overheating when the sun was up. Then she noticed the sheer, almost reflective nature of the fabric, and her earlier anger recurred. Always, Mortmesne had something new.
As they entered the camp, the six men tightened up around her, and Kelsea saw the reason soon enough. The path they were traversing passed between many tents, and the men lining either side looked at her like hungry dogs. Kelsea tried to prepare for violence, but didn’t know what good it would do. The invisible wall she had sensed the other day was still there, protecting the camp; did the woman never sleep? As they moved farther toward the center, whispering became hissing, and the hissing gradually resolved itself into discrete comments that Kelsea wished she could unhear.
“Tear bitch!”
“When our lady is done with you, I’ll use you until you break!”
Ducarte made no sign that he had heard them. Kelsea straightened her shoulders and stared straight ahead, trying to remind herself that she had been threatened before, that people had been trying to kill her all of her life. But this, the hostility and bile raining down from all sides, some in Mort and some in broken Tear, this was very different, and Kelsea was afraid.
“She’ll make you beg for death!”
So much hate … where does it come from? Kelsea wanted to weep, not for herself but for the waste, the thought of how many extraordinary things could have been accomplished in the new world. She could not close her ears to them, so she searched for Lily and found her, just beneath the surface, staring up at the night sky, the white sails in the moonlight. But the sails were billowing now, as though stirred by a strong wind.
I missed it, Kelsea realized sadly. She had missed the launch. But Lily had made it. Lily was on board one of the ships. Grief threatened to overwhelm Kelsea, but she battled it, thinking of William Tear, of the main prize.
They turned another corner, and now Kelsea glimpsed a hint of scarlet through the mass of black. The Red Queen … soon Kelsea would stand in front her, face-to-face. In all the long, blurred night past, this was the one thing she had avoided thinking about. A piece of discarded metal caught her left foot, and Kelsea nearly fell in the mud, landing heavily on her ankle. The jeering of the men seemed to double in volume. Her body was exhausted from more than a day without sleep, and it was beginning to show. But her mind … her mind felt bright and sharp, sure of its course, if she could only hold herself together a bit longer. The crimson tent loomed ahead, and Kelsea was frightened, but there was relief as well, a sense that her approaching fate was now so final that it could not be averted.
She was nearly done.
THE QUEEN WAS nervous. She didn’t know why; all things were proceeding better than she could have devised. The girl was coming—actually delivering herself!—when the Queen had thought that they would have to fight tooth and nail to get into the Keep. She was wearing both jewels; Ducarte’s runner had been very definite on that point. This development simplified matters enormously, but the Queen didn’t trust it, for it seemed too easy. She had not seen the Tear sapphires in more than a century, and even as a child, she had never been able to study them as she would have liked. Elaine never took the Heir’s Necklace off, and the Queen’s mother had never let her close enough. The sapphires would be the last piece of the puzzle, the Queen was sure of it, but all the same her heartbeat was up and her left leg twitched madly, tapping and tapping beneath her skirts.
How to get hold of them?
From the dark thing, she knew that she could not simply snatch the things off the girl’s neck, not without suffering a terrible consequence. The dark thing had been working on the girl, that much was obvious, but the Queen had no idea how far that work had progressed, what the girl could do. Did she present an actual threat? It seemed unlikely, not with her crown city under the knife. But the dark thing was an extraordinary liar, one of the best the Queen had ever encountered. Who knew what the girl might have learned, what she believed? The Queen couldn’t know, and not knowing tormented her. She had few vulnerabilities left, but in this moment, she was excruciatingly aware of those which remained, and it seemed unfair that they should come to the forefront now, when she was so close to holding the solution in her hand.
Now she heard a new sound: the gathering roar of her soldiers. What could the girl hope to accomplish by coming here? Did she seek martyrdom? The girl had already demonstrated a marked weakness for the grand gesture, although such demonstrations were so revealing that the Queen felt they constituted weakness in themselves. The din outside grew louder, and the Queen drew herself up straight, casting around the tent to make sure that everything was ready. Ducarte had procured a low table for her to eat meals on, an extravagance that would now come in handy. She would kill the girl, certainly, but first they would have a conversation. There were so many things the Queen was curious about. For a moment, she considered drawing the flaps of her tent, so that she could watch as the girl approached. But no: the girl was coming as a supplicant, and the Queen would treat her as one. She remained standing, hands at her sides, though her heartbeat kept climbing and her leg went like mad beneath her dress.
“Majesty!” Ducarte called.
“Come!”
Ducarte pulled back the flap of the tent, creating a doorway, and the girl ducked through. The anxiety that had been growing on the Queen in the past ten minutes suddenly crystallized, and when the girl straightened, revealing her face to the light, it took all of the Queen’s years of control to keep from taking a step backward.
Before her stood the woman from the portrait. Everything was the same: hair, nose, mouth, even the lines of deep sorrow around her eyes.
Is it a trick? the Queen wondered. But how could that be? She had smuggled the portrait from the Keep more than one hundred years ago. Her eyes dropped to the girl’s stomach and she was relieved to notice at least one difference: this girl was not pregnant. But otherwise, the detail was exact, and the Queen felt suddenly as though something had been stolen. The portrait, the woman, these things were hers alone; the girl had no right to stand here wearing the woman’s face. She stood straight, her posture defiant, with no hint of begging about her, and this deepened the Queen’s unease, her sense that something had been tilted askew.
“The Queen of the Tearling,” Ducarte announced, rather unnecessarily, and the Queen flicked her hand toward the door.
“Perhaps I should stay, Majesty.”
“Perhaps not,” the Queen replied. She had spotted another difference now, and this one steadied her, lessened her sense of disorientation: unlike the woman in the portrait, the girl had deep green eyes, the same Raleigh eyes that the Queen had once wished for with all her heart. Both sapphires lay on the girl’s chest, just as Andrew had reported, and once the Queen had noticed them, she could not tear her gaze away.
“Majesty, the New London Bridge—”
“I know all of this, Benin. Go.”
Ducarte left, dropping the flap of the tent behind him.