Thorne merely looked at Javel, that cold gaze never wavering. Javel thought of the vision he had seen on the Keep Lawn: the tall woman, older and hardened, with the crown on her head. The Queen had been crowned, Javel knew, two days ago; Vil, who always got information first, told them that the Regent had tried to ambush her during the coronation itself, but had failed. When Javel rode through the streets at dusk, he’d passed through the usual cacophony of vendors closing up shop, yelling and gossiping and trading news, and heard them call her the True Queen. Javel didn’t know the phrase, but there was no mistaking the sentiment: it was the name for the tall, grave woman he’d seen on the Keep Lawn, the one who didn’t exist yet.
But she could, Javel thought. Someday she could. And although he hadn’t been to church, hadn’t even believed in God since the day Allie had vanished into Mortmesne, he suddenly felt damnation hanging over his head, damnation and history like two hands waiting to grab him and squeeze. The men who’d assassinated Jonathan the Good had never been caught, but theirs were the blackest pages in the history of the Tearling. Whoever they were, Javel had no doubt that they had been damned for their crimes. But he couldn’t articulate any of these fears to Thorne. He could only say, “She’s the Queen. You can’t kill the Queen.”
“There’s no proof that she’s the actual Queen, Javel. She’s only a girl with a burn scar and a necklace.”
But Thorne’s eyes shifted away, and in a sudden flash of intuition, Javel knew: Thorne had seen that tall, regal woman on the Keep Lawn too. He’d seen her, and the sight had scared him so badly that he’d conceived this course. Thorne had never seemed so much like a spider as he did at that moment; he’d crept out from a corner to repair his web, and soon he would scuttle back into his dark crack to scheme, to wait with an endless, malevolent patience for some helpless thing caught and thrashing.
Javel looked around the pub, seeing it with fresh eyes: the dirt that had grimed into the floorboards; the cheap tallow that dripped from the torches to harden on the walls; the whore who smiled desperately at every man who walked in. Most of all, the smell of beer and whiskey mingled, a mist so pervasive that it might as well precipitate out of the air. Javel loved that smell, and hated it, and he knew somehow that the love/hate tangle in his mind was the reason Thorne had chosen him. Javel was weak, and his weakness probably smelled just as good to Thorne as whiskey did to Javel.
This is the dark crack, Javel finally realized. This right here.
He doubled over again; some small animal had awakened inside his stomach, shredding pink meat with jagged claws and teeth like needles. He was walking a tightrope; the distance was short, but below him lay infinite darkness. And what would he see on the way down?
“What if your plan fails?” he gasped. “What guarantee do I have?”
“You have no guarantees,” Thorne replied. “But you needn’t worry. Only a fool keeps all of his eggs in one basket. I have many baskets. If one idea fails, we move to another, and eventually we succeed.”
Thorne reached into his shirt and pulled out a vial of amber-colored liquid. He offered it to Javel, who grabbed for it, only to close his fingers on empty air.
“I’d estimate you have only a minute, maybe two, before this won’t help you. So, Gate Guard, I have only one question: can you do the math?”
I can’t win, Javel thought, clutching his stomach. There was a dark, sneaking comfort in the knowledge. Because once you couldn’t win, it wasn’t your fault, no matter what course you chose.
The shipment was late.
The Queen of Mortmesne had not been able to forget this fact, not today, not yesterday, not the day before. She tried to concentrate as her Auctioneer gave her the figures from last month’s auction. February had been good; the crown had cleared well over fifty thousand marks. Typically, when the shipment came in, the Queen cherry-picked the best merchandise, either for her own use or to give as gifts. But most of the slaves went at auction, to Mort nobles or wealthy entrepreneurs who would resell the slaves for higher prices in the northern cities and outlying towns. The auction always produced a good profit, but February’s high sales were not enough to distract the Queen from the nagging sense of disruption, the feeling that a problem was developing just out of her reach. The girl had turned nineteen, she had not been found, and now the shipment was late. What did that mean?
Without a doubt, the Tear Regent had botched things. He had allowed Elyssa to smuggle the girl into exile in the first place (although even the Queen herself hadn’t foreseen that particular move . . . who would have thought Elyssa had even an ounce of guile?). But after eighteen years, the girl should have been found. At the Queen’s urging, the Regent had finally hired the Caden several months ago, but she’d known somehow that it was already too late.
“That’s all, Majesty.” Broussard, her Auctioneer, tucked his papers away into his case.
“Good.”
Broussard remained standing below, his case clutched in both hands.
“Yes?”
“Any word on the new shipment, Majesty?”
Even her own people wouldn’t allow her to forget.
“When I know, you’ll know, Broussard. Go prepare for your auction. And remember to weed out the vermin this time.”
Broussard colored, his jaw clenching beneath his beard. He was good at his job, with an instinctive ability to monetize flesh. Years ago, when the auction had still been a novelty, the Queen had enjoyed sitting on a low balcony on the tenth of every month, watching Broussard wring the last possible profit from each pound of humanity. It satisfied something deep inside her, to see the Tear go on the block. But there had been one month, some four or five years ago, when one of Broussard’s handlers had been lax in the delousing process, and soon the Palais and several noble homes were crawling with lice. The Queen had kept the whole mess from going public by offering a free slave to each offended party, taking the loss from Broussard’s pay. The lice had been bad, but in retrospect, she was glad the incident had happened. It was good to have a failure to dangle in front of Broussard at moments like this, moments when he forgot that he was only a flesh peddler, and that without the Queen there would be no auction at all.
Broussard left, holding his case as though it were his only child, and the Queen was pleased to see the stiff, offended set of his shoulders. But it didn’t still the whispering of her mind, the quiet question that had been nagging at her for days now: where was the shipment? Four days in good weather, five days in bad. It had never come any later than the fifth of the month. Now it was March 6. If there had been a problem, either the Regent or Thorne should have informed her by now. The Queen pressed one palm to her forehead, feeling the beginning of a headache developing behind her temples. Her physiology had progressed so far that she hardly ever got sick anymore. The only exception was the headaches, which came from nowhere, had no medical cause, and disappeared just as quickly.
What if the shipment doesn’t come at all?
She jumped in her seat, as though someone had pinched her through her dress. The flow of human traffic had become a crucial part of the Mort economy, as regular and expected as the tides. Callae and Cadare sent slaves as well, but even their combined tribute didn’t equal half of the Tear shipment. Affordable slaves kept her factories running, her nobles happy, her treasury full. Any snag in the process created a loss.
The Queen suddenly found herself missing Liriane. Like all of the Queen’s servants, Liriane had aged while the Queen remained young, and several years ago she’d been laid in her grave. Liriane’s had been the true sight, an ability to see not only the future but the present and past as well. She would have been able to see what had happened in the Tear. Try as the Queen might to convince herself otherwise, she couldn’t escape a nagging suspicion that whatever had gone wrong must have something to do with the girl. Unless they’d killed her en route, she would have reached the Keep by now. Had Thorne managed to take care of it yet? The Regent was incompetence personified, but Thorne was quite the opposite. If Thorne failed, what was the next step? To haul out the treaty and go to war? The Queen had never wanted to invade the Tearling in the first place. Holding a foreign territory took money, equipment, trouble. The shipment was cleaner, an elegant solution.
Still, she realized, it might not be the worst thing in the world to mobilize her army. Her soldiers hadn’t had to go to war since the last Tear invasion. There were no threats on the Mort border. There hadn’t even been any fighting since the Exiled had hatched their conspiracy. Even on its worst day, her army was still more than a match for the Tear’s, but it wasn’t beyond possibility that they had grown soft during the caesura. It might be good to get them into shape now. Just in case. But at the thought, her headache seemed to double in amplitude, a steady incoming tide against the walls of her skull.
Some sort of commotion had begun brewing outside her audience chamber. The Queen looked up and saw Beryll, her chamberlain, striding off toward the great doors. He would handle it. Now that Liriane was dead, Beryll was her oldest and most trusted servant, so attuned to her wishes that the Queen rarely even had to interest herself in the everyday doings of the castle anymore. She looked down at her watch and decided to retire to her room. An early dinner, and then she would have one of her slaves. The tall one she’d taken from the last Tear delivery, a muscular man with thick black hair and beard and the look of a blacksmith. Only in the Tearling did men grow so tall.
The Queen signaled Eve, one of her pages, and whispered for her to remove the man to her chamber after the performance. Eve listened with as bright an expression as she could muster, which the Queen appreciated. Her pages hated this duty; the men weren’t always cooperative. Eve would drug him and feed him a constrictive, and then the Queen could have him hard enough to escape the dream. The drug wasn’t necessary anymore, of course; by now the Queen’s transformation had progressed so far that she wasn’t even sure she could be hurt. But she had never told her pages, and today she was glad. With a headache coming on, she wanted the man pliant. She swept out of the audience chamber, through her private entrance behind the throne and down a long hallway to her apartments.
The hallway was lined with guards, all of whom kept their eyes prudently on the ground. At the sight of them, some of the Queen’s ebullience faded. The Regent’s last report had informed her that most of Elyssa’s guards had departed the castle to search for the girl. Carroll, the Mace, Elston . . . these were names the Queen knew, men she had learned to take into consideration. If she had found the Mace before Elyssa had, things might have been so different. The Tear sapphires had disappeared, seemingly into thin air, a development that reeked of the Mace’s guile. If only the Queen had been able to get hold of the jewels before Elyssa died! She probably wouldn’t even have headaches anymore, much less need medicine.
But now everything would be righted. She would have the sapphires, and when the shipment came, she could probably even charge the Regent a hefty late fee. He would whine and complain, but he would pay, and the thought of his white, upset face made the Queen smile as she took off her clothes, anticipating the slave’s arrival. Her pages were very quick; she had been in her apartments for no more than five minutes when the knock came on her door.
“Come!” she snapped, annoyed to find that her headache was worsening. The kitchen might create a powder for her to take, but the powder would delay sleep long after the slave had ceased to perform, and sleep was at a premium these days.
The door opened. She turned to see Beryll, and began to ask him for a headache powder. But the request caught in her throat. Beryll’s face was white, his eyes socketed with deep fear. He clutched a scroll of paper in one shaking hand.
“Lady,” he quavered.