“You,” Kelsea whispered.
Someone was tugging at her skirt. Kelsea looked down and found Glee’s tiny face looking upward.
“Her name,” Glee lisped. “She doesn’t want you to know.”
Kelsea put a light hand on Glee’s head, staring at the red-clad figure. She was less than a mile away, but that distance seemed infinitely vast. Kelsea tested the barrier, trying to slice into it, the same way she would cut into her own flesh. She could not make a dent.
The Mort lines had hastily recovered and reassembled in front of the camp, and now a new man stepped forward, a tall figure in a bulky black cloak.
“I speak for the Queen!”
“Ducarte,” Mace murmured. Kelsea focused her spyglass and found a balding man with close-set, bestial eyes. She shivered, for here she sensed a pure predator. Ducarte’s gaze roved the city’s walls with unconcealed contempt, as though he had already opened a breach and begun the sack.
“If the gates of New London are not opened by dawn tomorrow, none will be spared. These are the Queen’s terms.”
Ducarte waited a moment longer, until even the last echo of his words had died away. Then he put up the hood of his cloak and reversed his journey through the ranks of Mort, leaving the dead behind, heading back to the camp.
ARLISS.”
“Queenie!” He looked up in surprise, his wizened face breaking into a smile, the perennial stinking cigarette clamped between his teeth. “What brings you to my door?”
“I need you to do something for me.”
“Well, sit down.”
Kelsea settled herself on one of the ratty armchairs Arliss used for conducting business, ignoring the miasma of cigarette smoke that clung to the upholstery. She didn’t care for Arliss’s office, a filthy warren of desks and loose papers, but she had the beginnings of a plan now, and she needed him.
“Pen, leave us alone.”
Pen hesitated. “Technically, he’s a danger to your person, Lady.”
“No one’s a danger to my person anymore.” She met his eyes for a long moment, and found an odd thing: although they had slept together several times since that first night—and it had improved exponentially, at least from Kelsea’s end—that night was the one that would always be there, between them. “Go, Pen. I’m perfectly safe.”
Pen went. Kelsea waited until the door closed behind him before asking, “How’s the money?”
“Slowed to a trickle. The minute the Mort came out of the hills, every noble took it as a license to stop paying tax.”
“Of course.”
“I’d hoped to clean up a tidy profit on the sapphire those miners bring back from the Fairwitch, but no one’s heard a peep. I’m guessing they took those bonuses you gave them and disappeared.”
“Money is tight, then.”
“Very. There are fortunes to be made in wartime, Queenie, but not in good government. Personally, I think we’re all fucked.”
“You’re nothing but sunshine, Arliss.”
“This is a dead kingdom walking, Queenie.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Arliss looked up sharply.
“I need you to do something for me, and I need you to keep it a secret.”
“A secret from whom?”
“From everyone. Especially Lazarus.” Kelsea leaned forward. “I need you to draft me a Bill of Regency.”
Arliss leaned back in his chair, watching her narrowly through the haze of smoke. “You plan to give up your throne?”
“For a time.”
“I take it the Mace doesn’t know.”
“He can’t know.”
“Ah.” Arliss tilted his head, considering. “I’ve never drafted a Regency bill before. Your uncle is dead, Queenie. Who’s the Regent?”
“Lazarus.”
Arliss nodded slowly. “That’s a wise choice.”
“Can you get hold of an old copy of my mother’s bill?”
“Yes, but I’ve seen that bastard; it’s fifteen pages long.”
“Well, take the essential language. I don’t want it open to interpretation anyway. Only a page long, and as many copies as you can write. I’ll sign them all, and they can go out to the city tomorrow after I’m gone.”
“And where is it you’re going?”
Kelsea blinked and saw the New London Bridge, the Mort waiting in the hills beyond. “To die, I think. I hope not.”
“Well, now I see why the Mace can’t know.” Arliss tapped his fingers on his desk. “This will change things.”
“For you?”
“For me … and my competitors. But it’s always good to be in the know first.”
“I have to do something.”
“You don’t have to do anything, Queenie. You could take her offer, save the women and your core Guard.”
“That’s what my uncle would have done. But I can’t.”
“Well, that’s the bitch of choice, isn’t it?”
She glared at him. “Choice has been very good to you lately, Arliss. You’ve been coining money from drug sales to the refugees. Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
“Let me tell you something, Queenie … my drugs are the only reason you haven’t had panic or widespread suicide down in that camp. People have to cling to something.”
“I see. You’re an altruist.”
“Not at all. But it’s foolish to blame the dealer for catering to his market.”
“That’s Thorne talking.”
“Yep. Thorne was a little shit all his life, but he was always right about that.”
Kelsea looked up, suddenly forgetting the drugs, and even the Regency bill. “You knew Thorne when he was young?”
“Lord yes, Queenie. He’ll tell you that no one knows where he came from—”
“He’s dead.”
“—but there are a few of us, if you take the trouble to look.”
“Where did he come from?”
“The Creche.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Deep under the Gut, Queenie, there’s a warren of tunnels. God knows what they were built for; they’re too deep to be sewers. If you want something too fucked even for the Gut, and you know the right people, you go down to the Creche.”
“What was Thorne doing there?”
“Thorne was sold to a pimp when he was barely born. Lived his entire childhood down there … such as it was.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t look at me like that, Queenie. I had to go down there on business once or twice, early in my career. They need a fairly steady supply of narcotics, for obvious reasons, but I got out of dealing down there a long time ago.”
“You got out.”
“Yes, I did. It’s a bad place, the Creche. Kids for sex, for—”
“Stop.” Kelsea held up her hand. “I see.”
“A bad place,” Arliss repeated, shuffling the papers on his desk. “But Thorne was smart and quick. He was practically a king down there by the time he was eighteen.”
“Was Lazarus there too?”
“He was, though he’ll not admit it if you ask him.”
“What was—” Kelsea’s voice died, and she swallowed, feeling the words slip around a dry place in her throat. “What was he doing down there?”
“The ring.”
“Explain.”
“Children fighting children.”
“Boxing?”
“Not always. Sometimes they gave them weapons. There’s value in variety.”
Kelsea’s lips felt as though they’d frozen solid. “Why?”
“Gambling, Queenie. More money changes hands over kid-fighting than any other betting matter in this kingdom, and the Mace was one of the greatest contenders they’d ever seen, a juggernaut.” Arliss’s eyes gleamed with memory. “He never lost, even in his early years. Lazarus isn’t even his real name, you know, just a nickname his handlers came up with when no one could bring him down. The odds got so high by the time he was eleven or twelve that I nearly stopped taking bets on him at all.”