The Invasion of the Tearling

I’M SORRY,” KELSEA repeated. She could feel that terrible side of herself, hovering, gleeful, waiting to be unleashed on the woman who stood before her. A different Kelsea, that one, a Kelsea who saw death as the most complete and effective solution to all problems.

She expected the Red Queen to fall to her knees, but she did not, and a moment later Kelsea realized that this was a woman who would never beg. It was easy to see, to browse through the woman’s life in much the same way she browsed through Lily’s, to see patterns forming. Evelyn Raleigh, the child, had begged, and it had gained her nothing. The woman would never beg again. Many memories sailed through Kelsea’s mind: playing with a set of toy soldiers on the ruined flagstones of a floor; staring with longing at the blue pendulum of a jewel as it rested on a woman’s chest; watching from behind a curtain as well-dressed men and women danced in a room that Kelsea recognized easily as her own audience chamber. Evelyn Raleigh had been desperate to be noticed, to matter to others … but in all of those childhood memories, she was alone.

It was the adult memories that Kelsea shrank from. In fragments and pieces, she saw a terrible story: how the disfavored child had risen from obscurity into her own conception of greatness, channeling all of that hurt and disappointment into authoritarianism. Row Finn had helped her, taught her to do her own form of magic, but Kelsea also sensed an innate emptiness in the grown woman before her, a certainty that an accident of birth had deprived her of greater opportunities, and the loss of the sapphires was a particular sore spot. There was a portrait there, too, in the jumble, and though Kelsea glimpsed it for only a moment, she recognized Lily with no difficulty at all. The Red Queen didn’t know Lily from Adam, but she felt a deep connection to her, all the same, and now Kelsea saw that Thorne and Row Finn had only been partly correct. The Red Queen did wish for immortality, but she did not need to live forever. She did not fear death. She only wanted to be invulnerable, to decide her own destiny without being subject to the whims of others. The child, Evelyn, had enjoyed no control over her own life. The Red Queen was determined to control it all.

Kelsea took a step back, trying to disengage from this. A greater understanding of others was always valuable, so Carlin said, but understanding the Red Queen would not make the task at hand any easier. For the first time in several weeks Kelsea thought of Mhurn, whom she had effectively anesthetized before his execution. She had no drugs for the Red Queen, but she could at least make it a quick death, not the protracted nightmare she had inflicted on Thorne.

But even as Kelsea tried to pull away, she caught and held on a memory: the young Evelyn, perhaps only eleven or twelve, standing in front of a mirror. This memory was closely guarded, so closely that when Kelsea began to examine it, the Red Queen’s entire body jerked in refusal, and she leapt at Kelsea, her hands hooked into claws. She went right for the sapphires, but Kelsea ducked and shoved her away. The Red Queen flew across the room, bouncing with a hiss off the wall of the tent. Kelsea followed her, still digging, for she sensed the pain that surrounded the memory, exacerbating it, like a wound that had never been cleaned. Evelyn stood in front of a mirror, staring at herself, in the throes of a terrible revelation:

I will never be beautiful.

Kelsea recoiled, feeling as though she’d been bitten, slapping the memory away from her as though it were a pernicious insect. But Evelyn’s pain did not go easily; Kelsea felt as though it had embedded hooks in her mind. The woman in front of her was beautiful, as beautiful as Kelsea was now … but she had created that beauty, cobbled it together somehow, just as Kelsea had. Deep down, the plain girl still reigned supreme; the Red Queen had never been able to outdistance her, to leave her behind, and in this, Kelsea saw a terrible phantom outline of her own future.