The Invasion of the Tearling

“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.

“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.”