“It’s fine. Bastard hit me just hard enough, in just the right place. A good shot.”
“Have they fed you?”
“Yes.”
“Carroll told me that you were the one who smuggled me from the Keep when I was a baby.”
“I was.”
“Have you always been a Queen’s Guard?”
“Since my fifteenth year.”
“Have you ever regretted choosing this life?”
“Not once.” Mace moved again, his legs stretching and then relaxing, and Kelsea watched, astonished, as one foot slipped free of its coil of ropes.
“How did you do that?”
“Anyone can do it, Lady, if they take the trouble to practice.” He flexed his foot, working the stiffness out. “Another hour and I’ll have a hand out as well.”
Kelsea stared at him for a moment, then scrambled to her feet. “Do you have family, Lazarus?”
“No, Lady.”
“I want you for my Captain of Guard. Think on it while you escape.”
She left the tent before he could reply.
The sun was beginning to sink, leaving only a dark line of cloud topped with orange on the horizon. Looking around the camp, Kelsea found the Fetch leaning against a tree, staring at her, his gaze flat and speculative. When she met his eye, he smiled, a dark and frozen smile that made her flinch.
Not just a thief, but a murderer as well. Beneath the handsome man, Kelsea sensed another man, a terrible one, with a life as black as the water in an ice-covered lake. A murderer many, many times.
The idea should have brought horror. Kelsea waited for a long moment, but what came instead was an even worse realization: it didn’t matter at all.
Dinner was an unexpectedly lavish affair. The meat Kelsea had smelled earlier turned out to be venison, and a much better specimen than she’d eaten several days ago. There were boiled eggs, which surprised Kelsea until she caught sight of a small chicken coop out behind her own tent. Morgan had been baking bread over the fire pit for most of the day, and it turned out perfect, crusted on the outside and soft on the inside. The sandy-haired man, Howell, poured her a cup of mead, which Kelsea had never tasted and treated with great wariness. Alcohol and governing went together badly; her books seemed to indicate that alcohol went badly with everything.
She ate little. For the first time in a very long while, she was conscious of her weight. The cottage had always been well stocked with food, and Kelsea usually had second helpings at dinner without a thought. But now she pecked at her meal, not wanting them to think she was a glutton. Not wanting him to think so. He sat beside her, and there might as well have been an invisible cord that tugged at her when he smiled or laughed.
The Fetch urged Kelsea to tell them of her childhood in the cottage. She couldn’t imagine why he would be interested, but he pressed her, and so she told them, blushing occasionally at the intensity of their gazes. The mead must have loosened her tongue, for she suddenly had many things to say. She told them about Barty and Carlin, about the cottage, about her lessons. Every day, Barty had her in the morning until lunch, and then Carlin had her until dinnertime. Carlin taught her from books, Barty taught her outside. She told them that she knew how to skin a deer and smoke the meat to last for months, that she could snare a rabbit in a homemade cage, that she was handy with her knife but not fast enough. She told them that every night after dinner, she began a book of fiction, reading just for herself, and usually finished it before bedtime.
“A fast reader, are you?” Morgan asked.
“Very fast,” Kelsea replied, blushing.
“It doesn’t sound like you’ve had much fun.”
“I don’t think the point was for me to have fun.” Kelsea took another sip of mead. “I’m certainly making up for it now, anyway.”
“We’ve rarely been accused of being fun,” the Fetch remarked. “You clearly have no head for alcohol.”
Kelsea frowned and put her cup back down on the table. “I do like this stuff, though.”
“Apparently. But slow down, or I’ll have How cut you off.”
Kelsea blushed again, and they all laughed.
At the urging of the others, the black man, Lear, stood up and told the tale of the White Ship, which had sunk in the Crossing and taken most of American medical expertise with it. Lear told the tale well, much better than Carlin, who was no storyteller, and Kelsea found herself with tears in her eyes as the ship went down.
“Why did they put all of the doctors in one ship?” she asked. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense for each ship to have its own doctor?”
“The equipment,” Lear replied, with a slight sniff that told Kelsea he liked to tell stories, but didn’t appreciate having to answer questions afterward. “Lifesaving medical equipment was the one technology that William Tear allowed them to bring on the Crossing. But it was lost all the same, along with the rest of medicine.”
“Not entirely lost,” Kelsea replied. “Carlin told me that there’s birth control available in the Tear.”
“Indigenous birth control. They had to rediscover it when they landed, mostly by trial and error with local plant life. Real science has never existed in the Tearling.”
Kelsea frowned, wondering why Carlin hadn’t told her that. But of course, to Carlin, birth control was just one of many figures to take into account on a population chart. The Fetch sat down beside her and she felt blood rush to her cheeks. It was a dangerous subject to think about while he was next to her in the dark.
After dinner was cleared, they pushed two tables together and taught her how to play at poker. Kelsea, who had never even seen playing cards before, took a pure pleasure in the game, the first time she’d taken real pleasure in anything since the Queen’s Guard had come to Carlin’s door.
The Fetch sat beside her and peered at her cards. Kelsea found herself blushing from time to time, and prayed that he wouldn’t notice. He was undeniably attractive, but the real source of his charm was something very different: he obviously didn’t care one whit what Kelsea thought of him. She wondered if he cared what anyone thought.
After a few hands, she seemed to be getting the hang of the game, though it was difficult to remember the many ways to get the high hand. The Fetch ceased to comment on her discard choices, which Kelsea took as a compliment. However, she continued to lose each hand and couldn’t understand why. The mechanics of the game were simple enough, and most of the time prudence counseled that she fold. Each time she did so, however, the hand was usually won by a lower set of cards, and each time, the Fetch chortled into his mug.
Finally a scruffy blond man (Kelsea was fairly certain his name was Alain), while collecting the cards to shuffle and deal, caught Kelsea’s eye and commented, “You have dire need of a poker face.”
“Agreed, girl,” said the Fetch. “Every thought you have is written plain in your eyes.”
Kelsea took another gulp of mead. “Carlin says I’m an open book.”
“Well, you’d better fix that, and fast. Should we decide not to kill you, you’ll find yourself in a den of snakes. Honesty will serve you ill.”
His casual talk of killing her made Kelsea’s stomach clench, but she attempted to school her face to blankness.
“Better,” the Fetch remarked.
“Why can’t you make this decision about killing me and be done with it?” Kelsea asked. The mead seemed to have cleared her head even while muddling it, and she longed for a straight answer.
“We wanted to see what sort of queen you look to be.”
“Why not just give me a test, then?”
“A test!” The Fetch’s grin broadened, and his black eyes gleamed. “What an interesting idea.”
“This is a fine game,” grumbled Howell. He had a wide, painful-looking scar on his right hand that appeared to be a burn mark. Of course he wanted to get back to play; he won the most often, with the worst cards.
“We’re going to play a different game now,” the Fetch announced, pushing Kelsea none too gently off the bench. “It’s a proper examination, girl. Get yourself over there.”
“I’ve had too much mead to take an examination.”
“Too bad.”
Kelsea glared at him but moved away from the bench, noticing with slight astonishment that she was unsteady on her feet. The five men turned from the table to watch her. Alain, who had been dealing, snapped the cards in one last shuffle and then pocketed them in a movement too quick to follow.
The Fetch leaned forward and placed his hands beneath his chin, studying her closely. “What will you do should you become a queen indeed?”
“What will I do?”
“Have you any policy in mind?”
The Fetch spoke lightly, but his black eyes were grave. Beneath the question, Kelsea sensed an infinite and deadly patience, perversely coupled with a desperate need for her answer. A test indeed, and she knew instinctively that if she answered incorrectly, the conversation was done.
She opened her mouth, not knowing what she would say, and Carlin’s words spilled out into the darkness, Carlin’s vision, reiterated so often in the library that Kelsea now spoke the words in a litany as practiced as though she read from the Bible of God’s Church. “I’ll govern for the good of the governed. I’ll make sure that every citizen is properly educated and doctored. I’ll cease wasteful spending and ease the burden on the poor through redistribution of land and goods and taxation. I’ll restore the rule of law in this kingdom and drive out the influence of Mortmesne—”
“So you do know of it!” Lear barked.
“Of Mortmesne?” She looked at him blankly. “I know that Mortmesne’s hold over this kingdom grows all the time.”
“What else of Mortmesne?” boomed Morgan, his huge form bearlike in the firelight.
Kelsea shrugged. “I’ve read of the early years of the Red Reign. And I’ve been told that my uncle has likely made alliance with the Red Queen.”
“Anything else?”
“Not really. Some information on Mort customs.”
“The Mort Treaty?”
“What’s that?”
“Great God,” murmured Howell.
“Even her guardians sworn to secrecy,” the Fetch told the rest of them, shaking his head. “We should have known.”
Kelsea thought of Carlin’s face, her voice, always so laden with regret: I promised.
“What is the Mort Treaty?”
“You do at least know of the Mort invasion?”
“Yes,” Kelsea replied eagerly, glad to finally know something. “They made it all the way to the walls of the Keep.”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know.”
The Fetch turned away from her and stared off into the darkness. Kelsea looked up at the night sky, and she saw thousands upon thousands of stars. They were miles from everything out here, and the sky was enormous. When she looked back at the group of men, she was dizzy, and nearly stumbled before catching herself.
“No more mead for you,” Howell announced, shaking his head.
“She’s not drunk,” Morgan disagreed. “She’s lost her legs, but there’s nothing wrong with her wits.”
The Fetch returned to them then, with the decisive air of a man who had made a difficult decision. “Lear, tell us a story.”
“What story?”