“You’re in a dark place, my poppet,” Andalie murmured gently. “And you must come out. You can follow me.”
“I can follow you, Maman,” Glee repeated in her child’s lisp.
“Follow my voice, poppet. See the light, and then you can wake.”
Glee stood, staring blankly, for a few more moments. Then she blinked, staring up at her mother with wide eyes.
“Maman?”
“And here you are, poppet. Welcome back.”
Glee climbed into Andalie’s arms. Andalie sat down on one of the sofas and began to rock the girl, who appeared to already be falling asleep.
“Pen. Leave us alone, and make sure we’re not disturbed.”
Pen left, shutting the door behind him.
“I apologize, Majesty,” Andalie murmured quietly. “My Glee is not like my others. I can have both eyes on her, and a moment later she’s gone.”
Kelsea paused for a moment. “Does she have your sight, Andalie?”
“Yes. She is too young to control it. I have been trying to train her, but it is difficult to find time alone, so that my other children will not be jealous. Glee still doesn’t know how to differentiate between what should be said and what should be kept to herself.”
“I’m sure she’ll learn.”
“She will, but the sooner the better. A child like Glee makes a valuable prize.”
“She’s safe from me, Andalie.”
“I am not thinking of you, Majesty.” Andalie continued to rock her daughter, her gaze thoughtful. “Even before my Glee was to go in the shipment, her father had already begun planning a way to use her. His spoken thoughts went no further than dragging her to the dogfights for his own benefit, but I saw the possibility of sale in his mind. He may have told others about Glee.”
“I see.” As always, Kelsea had to fight a morbid curiosity about Andalie’s marriage. “Was it equally hard for you, as a child?”
“Even worse, Lady, for I had no one to guide me through it. My mother sent me away for fostering when I was newly born.”
Like me, Kelsea thought, surprised. Andalie and her children were so tightly knit that Kelsea had never imagined Andalie raised in anything but a close family.
“For a long time, my foster parents thought I was merely mad. They treat these things with great suspicion in Mortmesne.”
“Despite the Red Queen?”
“Perhaps because of her, Lady. The Mort are a science-minded people. They hate what the Red Queen can do, yes, but she is too powerful for them to hate the woman herself. Ordinary Mort quickly learn to hide such gifts.”
“Lazarus tells me—though it’s only a rumor in the Palais—that the Red Queen’s laboratories have been working on the sight. They wish to find out if it’s genetic.”
Andalie smiled, her expression brittle. “Trust me, Lady, it is. My mother was one of the most powerful seers of our age. My gifts are only a shadow of hers. And I am terribly afraid, Majesty, that Glee is more my mother than me. It will make the world very dangerous for her.”
“In what way?”
Andalie considered her thoughtfully for a moment. “We have trust, Lady, you and I?”
“I trust you with my life, Andalie.”
“Then I will tell you a story. I cannot speak to the truth of the entire story, you understand, for some of it is Mort legend, but instructive nonetheless. There is a woman, a plain wife, who lives on the edge of the Foret Evanoui. Her life is uneventful. She has grown bored with her husband, a miner. She does not like keeping house. She has nothing to occupy her mind, until one day a fortune-teller comes to the village. He is handsome, this fortune-teller, and he does parlor tricks: reads palms, offers charms, even carries an ancient crystal ball. But his tricks are very good, and he is no stranger to bored wives in small towns. The woman is enchanted, and enchantment makes her foolish. Nine months later, the fortune-teller is long gone, but a child is born, a child as different from the woman’s other children as can be. This child can predict the weather, knows when visitors approach the village. Useful information for a community, certainly, but the child’s gifts reach even further. She can see not only the future but the past and present, the truth of things. She knows when people are lying. She is a boon to her tiny mining village, and the village prospers, far out of proportion to others in the surrounding countryside.
“And yet the villagers are extremely foolish. They talk freely about the child. They praise her to the skies. They brag about her in Cite Marche, not thinking of the fact that their country has a new queen now, a queen who believes that she has a right to anything she can grab. And one day, inevitably, soldiers come to the village and take the girl away. She is a commodity, you see, just as valuable as a good assassin or spymaster. More valuable, even, for her gifts only sharpen as she reaches adolescence. She lives a gilded life in Demesne, but still she is a prisoner, destined to sit at the right hand of the Queen until she dies.”
The Red Queen’s old seer, Kelsea realized. Dead now. Carlin had spoken of her several times. What was her name?
“And yet, for all that, the woman is not entirely subservient. She has a secret life, you comprehend, and she is so clever, so gifted, that she is able to hide that life, even from the Queen of Mortmesne, who has the most feared surveillance apparatus since the old Etats-Unis. The seer has a man, she conceives a child. Yet she knows the child will never be safe. Her mistress, the Queen, is interested in heredity. Even if the child shows no gifts at all, it will spend its life in a laboratory, subject to horrors. So the seer smuggles her newborn girl from the Palais. She gives the baby to good people, so she thinks, kind people. They live in the Jardins, one of the poorest sections of Demesne. They have always wanted a child. The baby will be safe there.
“And yet here the mother’s sight has failed her. The child does have her mother’s gifts, sporadic and inconsistent, yes, but there. She too can predict the future, see the present. Sometimes she can even see other people’s thoughts as clearly as if they were her own. Such a child will always hold a dangerous value. When her adoptive parents fall into debt and need quick money to keep from losing all they own, they sell her to a man in the neighborhood, a man who has always coveted the child. Not for the usual reasons, you understand. He is a businessman, and he wants her sight for the market. She is a tool to him, and when she cannot perform, she is beaten.”
Kelsea swallowed. “How did you get out?”
“I made my own great mistake, Lady. There was a boy, a Tear slave whose masters lived next door to mine. He was a stupid boy, but persistent. He began coming around when I was ten years old, and he would not take no for an answer. He told me of the Tear, told me that we could escape and live a free life here. I had no interest in the boy, but when I was fifteen, my owner fell on hard times, and he had no leisure to market my particular gifts. He planned to sell me to a knockhouse.”
“Is that—”
Andalie nodded. “In your Tear, Majesty, a whorehouse. Faced with that, I turned to the Tear boy. I thought him harmless.”
Andalie looked down at her daughter, who was fast asleep now, breathing easy. “Always, my sight seems to fail when it is most crucial that it should function. Borwen raped me the first night out of Demesne, and every night after that. We were on foot, and I could not outrun him. By the time we reached the Tearling, I already knew that I was carrying. I did not speak the language, but even if I had, Borwen had misled me about the nature of opportunity in the Tearling. For all of its terrors, Mortmesne at least allows a competent woman to earn her living without being on her back; many Mort women are miners or artisans. But I saw very quickly that there were no such options in the Tearling. Borwen is strong; he quickly found work. But I could find none, Majesty.”