The Invasion of the Tearling

“The Mace has a source in the Palais. The Mort have orders to avoid the Fairwitch, even the foothills. It’s this stretch or nothing.” Hall set down his spyglass. His palms were sweating, but he hoped that Blaser hadn’t noticed. “Put fresh men in the trees and tell them not to let their eyes wander. Any changes in the Mort sentry line come directly to me.”


Blaser left, humming to himself, and Hall began to shave again, though his hand wasn’t quite as steady this time; he drew the razor down his bare jaw and felt the blade slice through his skin. Hall had no people; his parents had died several years ago, victims of a winter fever that had swept through all of the villages on the hillside. But what faced the Tear now was infinitely worse, and Ducarte’s arrival only darkened the outlook further. In the last invasion, according to Bermond, Ducarte had liked to throw his Tear prisoners into pens with starving bears. There would be no mercy for the taken, not even the wounded, and part of Hall could not help wondering whether the Queen had considered these eventualities before she had violated the treaty and opened the door wide. The Queen had brought this upon them, and for a rogue moment Hall cursed her, sitting safely on her throne back in New London. There was some Bible story Hall remembered vaguely from his childhood, something of a little man who took on a giant and emerged victorious … yet the Mort were ten giants. Even after Hall’s victory two weeks ago, the Mort army still had more than four times the men, enough to divide and crush the Tear army from multiple angles. The Queen had not thought of her soldiers, only of principle, and principle was cold comfort to men who were going to die. Hall wondered if she truly had magic, as the rumors said, or whether that was simply a fairy tale that the Mace had allowed to spread. The rumors were difficult to reconcile with the woman who sat on the throne, the child-adult with the gaze of an owl. Hall had already made his military assessment—all was lost—but intuition was not logical, and his gut would not allow him to give up.

She could save us, he thought stubbornly. She could.





CHAPTER 4


MATTERS OF CONSCIENCE


Flee, we are in the hands of a wolf.

—Giovanni de’ Medici, upon the ascension of Rodrigo Borgia, POPE ALEXANDER VI

FATHER TYLER SHOULD have been at ease. He was reading, sitting in the comfortable chair at his desk, and reading usually calmed him, reminded him that there was a world beyond this one, a better world that seemed almost tangible. But this was the rare day when reading calmed nothing. Tyler had covered the same two pages several times before he finally put down his book and gave up. The candle on his desk was covered with dried drips of wax, and without thinking, Tyler began to peel them off. His fingers worked independently of his brain, peeling and peeling, as he stared out the window.

The Holy Father had died two weeks ago, on the last day of May. Cardinal Anders had succeeded him, in a conclave so short that a few of the more distant cardinals arrived to find him already in the Holy Father’s seat. The Holy Father, recognizing a political mind as sharp as his own, had handpicked Anders as his successor years ago, and everything had proceeded as it should.

But Tyler was afraid.

The new Holy Father had attended to many things since taking the robes. He immediately fired five cardinals, men with known reformist sympathies, men who’d spoken against Anders during his tenure. Their sees went to nobles’ sons for more than a thousand pounds each. The new Holy Father had also hired sixteen new bookkeepers for the Arvath, increasing the total to forty. Some of these new bookkeepers were not even ordained men; several of them looked and sounded as though the Holy Father had plucked them right off the streets of the Gut. Tyler and his brothers had heard nothing, but the conclusion was clear: more money would be coming in.