The Invasion of the Tearling

The Red Queen’s old seer, Kelsea realized. Dead now. Carlin had spoken of her several times. What was her name?

“And yet, for all that, the woman is not entirely subservient. She has a secret life, you comprehend, and she is so clever, so gifted, that she is able to hide that life, even from the Queen of Mortmesne, who has the most feared surveillance apparatus since the old Etats-Unis. The seer has a man, she conceives a child. Yet she knows the child will never be safe. Her mistress, the Queen, is interested in heredity. Even if the child shows no gifts at all, it will spend its life in a laboratory, subject to horrors. So the seer smuggles her newborn girl from the Palais. She gives the baby to good people, so she thinks, kind people. They live in the Jardins, one of the poorest sections of Demesne. They have always wanted a child. The baby will be safe there.

“And yet here the mother’s sight has failed her. The child does have her mother’s gifts, sporadic and inconsistent, yes, but there. She too can predict the future, see the present. Sometimes she can even see other people’s thoughts as clearly as if they were her own. Such a child will always hold a dangerous value. When her adoptive parents fall into debt and need quick money to keep from losing all they own, they sell her to a man in the neighborhood, a man who has always coveted the child. Not for the usual reasons, you understand. He is a businessman, and he wants her sight for the market. She is a tool to him, and when she cannot perform, she is beaten.”

Kelsea swallowed. “How did you get out?”

“I made my own great mistake, Lady. There was a boy, a Tear slave whose masters lived next door to mine. He was a stupid boy, but persistent. He began coming around when I was ten years old, and he would not take no for an answer. He told me of the Tear, told me that we could escape and live a free life here. I had no interest in the boy, but when I was fifteen, my owner fell on hard times, and he had no leisure to market my particular gifts. He planned to sell me to a knockhouse.”

“Is that—”

Andalie nodded. “In your Tear, Majesty, a whorehouse. Faced with that, I turned to the Tear boy. I thought him harmless.”

Andalie looked down at her daughter, who was fast asleep now, breathing easy. “Always, my sight seems to fail when it is most crucial that it should function. Borwen raped me the first night out of Demesne, and every night after that. We were on foot, and I could not outrun him. By the time we reached the Tearling, I already knew that I was carrying. I did not speak the language, but even if I had, Borwen had misled me about the nature of opportunity in the Tearling. For all of its terrors, Mortmesne at least allows a competent woman to earn her living without being on her back; many Mort women are miners or artisans. But I saw very quickly that there were no such options in the Tearling. Borwen is strong; he quickly found work. But I could find none, Majesty.”

Andalie’s voice was rising, and Kelsea realized, horrified, that Andalie seemed to be trying to justify herself, to ward off some inevitable condemnation.

“No fifteen-year-old can make good decisions, Andalie. I can barely make easy decisions for my own life now.”

“Perhaps, Majesty, but had I known that my children would also pay for my mistakes, I would gladly have taken the knockhouse. I knew that Borwen was a brute, but I didn’t realize precisely what he was until Aisa was five years old. I tried to send both Aisa and Wen away, but we had no friends who would take them to safety. Heaven help me, I even tried our local priest, to see if he would take them for fostering in lieu of tithe. But the priest told Borwen what I had done. Finally I tried to run away, but it is difficult to disappear with children, and it seemed that I was always pregnant. Each time, Borwen found me, and if I refused to come home, he would snatch one of the children. In the end, it seemed better to keep them with me; at least I could help them, shield them somewhat.”

“That seems reasonable,” Kelsea ventured, not knowing whether it was true. What she was hearing now was so far beyond her own experience that she couldn’t begin to imagine what she would have done. Her mind skipped back to the pre-Crossing woman, Lily Mayhew. Lily had wanted to run, but as a lone woman, there was no safety for her to run to. The Crossing was more than three centuries past, but that world suddenly seemed very close, separated by only a thin veil of time.