The Invasion of the Tearling

“You don’t like being recognized,” the girl mused. “Was life with the Beautiful Queen really so bad?”


The Queen snarled, an animal sound that lashed through her teeth before she could hold it back. She had forgotten about the damned portrait. It must still be lying around the Keep somewhere, their last family moment before all hell had broken loose. But the Queen had shed that sad child as though she were emerging from a chrysalis. The girl should never have been able to connect the two. The Queen thought about calling for Ducarte, but she couldn’t seem to open her mouth.

“I have poor vision,” the girl remarked. “But my jewels are useful. Sometimes I see. I simply see, where other people might notice nothing.” She stood up from the table and approached the Queen slowly, her gaze appraising and, worse, pitying. “You’re a Raleigh, aren’t you? A bastard Raleigh, unloved and unwanted and always forgotten.”

The Queen felt her guts twist. “I am not a Raleigh. I am the Queen of Mortmesne.”

But the words sounded feeble, even to her own ears.

“Why do you hate us so much?” the girl asked. “What did they do to you?”

Evie! Come here! I need you!

The Queen shuddered. The woman’s face, her mother’s voice … one was bad, but both were too much to bear. She tried to gather herself, to find some of the control she’d had when the girl first entered the tent, but whatever she took hold of seemed to melt in her hands.

Evie!

More impatient now, her mother’s voice, a bit of steel showing through. The Queen clapped her hands to her ears, but that did no good, for the girl was already inside her head. The Queen could feel her there, reading the Queen’s memories as though they were a novel, running through them, flipping the pages, pausing on the worst moments. The Queen stumbled away, but the girl followed her across the tent, across her mind, leafing through the past and discarding it behind her. Elaine, her mother, the Keep, the portrait, the dark thing … they were all there, called up suddenly, as though they had been waiting all along.

“I see,” the girl murmured, her voice laced with sympathy. “She traded you away. They all did. Queen Elaine got everything.”

The Queen shrieked, wrapping her arms around herself and clawing at her own skin.

“Don’t do that.” The girl pulled up the sleeve of her dress, and the Queen saw that her left arm was a mess of welts, some new, some healing. The sight was so shocking, so contrary to what the Queen thought she knew about the girl, that her hands dropped away from her own arms.

“I do it too, you know,” the girl continued, “to control my anger. But it does no good in the long run. I see that now.”

Ducarte burst through the doorway of the tent, his sword drawn, but the girl whirled toward him and suddenly Ducarte was doubled over, choking, his hands clasped around his throat.

“Don’t interfere, Monsieur General. Stay over there, and I will allow you to breathe.”

Ducarte backed toward the far wall of the tent.

The girl turned back to the Queen, her green eyes contemplative. The Queen’s mind ached, a feeling of terrible violation, as though everything she kept locked away had been laid out in the open under a corrosive sunlight. She could still feel the girl in there, somehow, looking her over, picking through the debris. The Queen tried to summon anything, any of the thousand small tricks she had wielded over the course of her life. She had not felt so powerless since she was a small girl, trapped in a room. The past was supposed to be past. It should not be able to reach up and drag her down.

“What is your name?” the girl asked.

“The Queen of Mortmesne.”

“No.” The girl walked up and stood right in front of her, only a few inches away. Close enough for the Queen to wound, but the Queen couldn’t so much as raise a hand. She felt the girl’s mind again, prying at hers, running fingers over everything, and now she understood that the girl might be able to kill her. No weapon would have done the job, but the girl had found her own knives in the Queen’s mind. Each little piece of history that she touched was sharpened to a fine point, and the Queen felt her entire psyche shudder at the violation of that, of having another person handle her identity so easily. The girl had found her answer now, and the pressure in the Queen’s mind finally eased.

“Evelyn,” the girl murmured. “You’re Evelyn Raleigh. And I am sorry.”

The Queen of Mortmesne closed her eyes.