Scanning the Mort camp, Kelsea finally found what she was looking for: a crimson tent located near the center. Though it was only a tiny speck of red among all that black, something tolled inside Kelsea like a funeral bell. The Red Queen was leaving nothing to chance this time; she had come herself, just to make sure the job was done right. Torches surrounded the tent, but after a moment Kelsea noticed something odd: these torches were the only fire she could see in the Mort camp. It was just after dinner, but the perimeter was dark. Kelsea considered this fact for a moment before tucking it away.
“Did everyone make it inside the city?” she asked.
“They did, Lady,” Mace replied, “but the army was decimated in the last attempt to hold the Mort from the bridge.”
Kelsea’s stomach roiled, and she peered down at the New London Bridge, cursing her poor eyesight. “What keeps the Mort off the bridge?”
“A barricade, Lady.” Colonel Hall stepped forward, emerging from a group of army men farther down the wall. A thick bandage swaddled his right arm, from which the sleeve had been cut away, and he had taken a nasty wound across the jaw. “It’s a good barricade, but it won’t hold forever.”
“Colonel Hall.” Kelsea smiled, relieved to see him alive, but sobered at the sight of his injuries. “I’m sorry for the loss of General Bermond, and your men. All of their families will receive full pensions.”
“Thank you, Lady.” But Hall’s mouth twisted wryly, as though acknowledging how little a pension meant in this moment.
Mace poked her lightly in the back, and Kelsea remembered. “I formally invest you as general of my armies. Long life to you, General Hall.”
He threw his head back and laughed, and though Kelsea did not think the laughter was meant to be unkind, it rang in her ears. “Above all, let us have niceties, Lady.”
“What else do we have now?”
“Glory, I suppose. Death with honor.”
“Precisely.”
Hall came a bit closer, paying no attention to Pen, who moved to block him. “May I tell you a secret, Lady?”
“Certainly.” Kelsea patted Glee’s back and set her on the ground, where the child wrapped an arm around Kelsea’s knee.
Hall lowered his voice. “It’s a real thing, glory. But it pales in comparison to what we sacrifice for it. Home, family, long lives filled with quiet. These are real things too, and when we seek glory, we give them up.”
Kelsea did not reply for a moment, realizing that Bermond’s death must have hit Hall harder than she had expected. “Do you think I sought this war?”
“No, Lady. But you are not content with the quiet life.”
Mace grunted beside her, a soft sound that Kelsea recognized as agreement, and she fought the urge to kick him. “You don’t know me well enough to say that.”
“This entire kingdom knows you now, Queen Kelsea. You’ve brought us all to disaster, to satisfy your own notions of glory. Of better.”
“Be careful, Hall,” Pen warned. “You don’t—”
“Shut up, Pen,” Mace growled.
Kelsea swung around, furious. “Have you turned on me for good now, Lazarus?”
“No, Lady. But it’s not wise, particularly in wartime, to silence the voice of dissent.”
Kelsea’s face burned, and she turned back to Hall. “I didn’t end the shipment for glory. I never cared about that.”
“Then prove me wrong, Majesty. Save the last remnants of my men from an unwinnable fight. Save the women and children—and the men as well—from the nightmare they will surely face when the Mort break the walls. You cut a man to pieces, rather than watch him die a simple death by the noose. Prove me wrong and save us all.”
Hall turned back to the edge, dismissing her in a single movement. Kelsea’s face had gone numb. She felt alone suddenly, alone in a way she hadn’t been since her earliest days in the Keep. She looked over the faces of her Guard, clustered around the stairwells that fed the inner wall. Mace, Coryn, Wellmer, Elston, Kibb … they were loyal, they would lay down their lives for her, but loyalty wasn’t approval. They thought she had failed.
“Look, Lady.” Mace gestured over the edge.
The regimented lines of Mort had not moved, but as Kelsea squinted in the dying light, she saw that there was movement down there, a clutch of figures in black cloaks darting through the lines, bearing torches, wending their way toward the front.
Mace had pulled out his spyglass. “The one in the middle is the Red Queen’s personal herald. I remember that little bastard.”
The herald was a wisp of a man, so slight that he could easily have blended into the night in his cloak. But his voice was a thick bass that echoed off the walls of the Keep, and his Tear was perfect, without even the slightest Mort accent.
“The Great Queen of all Mortmesne and Callae extends greetings to the Heir of the Tearling!”
Kelsea gritted her teeth.
“My message is as follows. The Great Queen assumes that you realize the futility of your situation. The Great Queen’s army will find it an easy matter to break the walls of your capital and take whatever it wishes. No Tear will be spared.
“However, if the Tear heir removes the barricade to the New London Bridge and opens the gates, the Great Queen promises to spare not only her, but twenty members of her entourage as well. The Great Queen gives her word that these twenty-one will not be harmed.”
Someone’s hand was on Kelsea’s wrist. Glee, clutching too tightly, her tiny nails digging in, but Kelsea barely felt it. Save us all, Hall had said, and now Kelsea saw that if she could not save them, they would not be saved. She focused on the herald, the men around him, calling up the terrible thing inside her. It woke easily, and Kelsea wondered whether it would always be there from now on, ready to spring out at any opportunity. Could she even live that way?
“The bridge is to be cleared and the gates will be opened by dawn,” the herald continued. “If these terms are not met, the Great Queen’s army will enter New London by any means necessary, and lay your city to ruin. This is my—”
The herald broke off, then suddenly doubled over and blew apart in a spray of blood. So great was Kelsea’s anger that it seemed to ripple outward, to encompass the rest of them, knocking some men backward and flattening the rest. It spread throughout the regimented ranks of Mort, gathering speed and power like a hurricane wind.
And then it simply met a wall.
This sudden obstacle was so unexpected that Kelsea stumbled backward, as though she had run into the wall herself, headlong. She nearly knocked Glee over, but Andalie caught the girl easily, and Pen took Kelsea’s arm and kept her upright. Her head throbbed, a sudden, vicious headache that seemed to have come from nowhere.
“Lady?”
She shook her head to clear it, but the headache had clamped down like a vise, waves of pain that made it nearly impossible to focus.
What was that?
She took her spyglass from her pocket. The light was almost entirely gone now, but Kelsea could still see the damage she’d wreaked down there, at least several hundred dead in the front of the Mort lines. Gruesome deaths all, some of them reduced to little more than piles of bloody tissue. But beyond, she still sensed that impenetrable barrier, no less real for the fact that it could not be seen. The crimson tent caught her eye again; its entrance had been drawn, and now Kelsea glimpsed someone beneath the awning. It had grown too dark to make out a face, but the figure was unmistakable: a tall woman in a red gown.