The Mort Treaty had been spread out on the large dining table that stood at one end of Kelsea’s audience chamber. It was short for such a document, only several sheets of thick vellum that had browned slightly with age. Kelsea touched the sheets gingerly, fascinated to see her mother’s initials, ER, scrawled messily in black at the bottom left of each page. On the right was a separate set of initials, scrawled in dark red ink: QM. The final page of the document contained two signatures: on one line, “Elyssa Raleigh,” the handwriting almost illegible, and on the other, “Queen of Mortmesne,” neatly written in the same bloodred ink.
She truly doesn’t want anyone to know her real name, Kelsea realized, her intuition flickering. It’s desperately important to her that no one finds out who she really is. But why?
Kelsea was disappointed to find the language of the treaty as straightforward as Mace had claimed. The Tearling was obligated to provide three thousand slaves per year, divided into twelve equal shipments. At least five hundred of them needed to be children, at least two hundred of each gender. Why so many children? Mortmesne took a quota of slave children from Callae and Cadare as well, but children weren’t much use for hard industrial labor or mining, and Mortmesne had few farms. Even if there were a disproportionately high number of pedophiles in the market, they couldn’t go through children so quickly. Why so many?
The terse, mechanical language of the treaty provided her with no answers. If any individual shipment failed to reach Demesne by the eighth day of the month, the treaty granted Mortmesne the right to immediately enter the Tearling and satisfy its quota by right of capture. But, Kelsea noticed, the document placed no limits on the length of that entry, nor did it include any requirement of withdrawal when conditions were met. Reluctantly, she was forced to admit that Mace was right: by stopping the shipment, Kelsea had given the Red Queen an umbrella grant to invade. What had possessed her mother to sign such a one-sided document?
Be fair, a new voice cautioned in her mind. The voice was neither Carlin’s nor Barty’s; Kelsea couldn’t identify it, and distrusted its pragmatism. What would you have done, with the enemy at the very gates?
Again, Kelsea had no answer. She gathered the pages of the treaty together into a neat sheaf and straightened them, feeling sick. A new idea occurred to her, one that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago, but Kelsea had already found her mind trying to insulate itself from further disaster by imagining the worst. She turned to Mace. “Was my mother assassinated?”
“There were several attempts,” Mace replied indifferently, though Kelsea thought his indifference feigned. “She nearly died of nightshade poisoning when someone got it into her food. That was when she decided to send you away for fostering.”
“So she did send me away to protect me?”
Mace’s brow furrowed. “Why else?”
“Never mind.” Kelsea looked back down at the table, the treaty in front of her. “There’s no mention of a lottery in here.”
“The lottery is an internal matter. At first, your mother simply sent convicts and the mentally ill. But such people make poor slaves, and the arrangement didn’t satisfy the Red Queen for long. The Census Bureau was your uncle’s answer.”
“Is no one exempt?”
“Churchmen. But otherwise, no. Even the babies are taken; their names go into the lot as soon as they’re weaned. They say the Red Queen uses them as gifts for barren families. For a while women got around it by nursing their children well beyond the weaning age, but Thorne’s on to that trick. His people are in every village in the kingdom, and there’s little they don’t know.”
“Is he loyal to my uncle?”
“Thorne’s a businessman, Lady. He’ll go whichever way the wind is blowing.”
“And which way is it blowing now?”
“Toward Mortmesne.”
“We should keep an eye on him then.”
“I always have at least one eye on Arlen Thorne, Lady.”
“How did my mother actually die? Carlin would never tell me.”
“They say it was the poison, Lady. That it gradually weakened her heart until she died a few years later.”
“They say that. What do you say, Lazarus?”
He stared at her without expression. “I say nothing, Lady. That’s why I’m a Queen’s Guard.”
Frustrated, Kelsea spent the rest of the day inspecting the Queen’s Wing and meeting various people. They began with her new cook: Milla, a blonde so petite that Kelsea didn’t even want to think about how she’d borne her four-year-old son. Kelsea gathered that Milla had been doing something unpleasant to make ends meet; when told that her only job would be cooking, even for the twenty-odd people who now crowded the Queen’s Wing, she became so violently happy that Kelsea had to tuck her own hands into the folds of her dress, terrified that the woman would try to kiss them.
The other woman who’d come in with them, Carlotta, was older and round-faced, with bright red cheeks. She seemed frightened, but after a few repeated questions admitted that she could sew passably well. Kelsea asked her for more black dresses, and Carlotta agreed that she could make them.
“Though I would do better if I took your measurements, Majesty,” she ventured, looking terrified at the very idea. Kelsea found the idea of being measured nearly as terrifying, but she nodded and smiled, trying to put the woman at ease.
She met several guards who hadn’t been with them on their journey: Caelan, a thuggish-looking man whom everyone simply called Cae; and Tom and Wellmer, both archers. Wellmer seemed too young to be a Queen’s Guard. He was doing his best to appear as stoic as the older men, but he was clearly fidgety; every few seconds he switched his weight between feet.
“How old is that boy?” Kelsea whispered to Mace.
“Wellmer? He’s twenty.”
“What did you do, pick him from a nursery?”
“Most of us were barely teenagers when we were recruited, Lady. Don’t worry about Wellmer. Give him a bow, and he could pick out your left eye from here, even in torchlight.”
Kelsea tried to reconcile this description with the nervous, white-faced boy in front of her, but gave up. After the guards went back to their posts, she followed Mace down the corridor to one of the first rooms, which had been hastily converted into a nursery. The room was a good choice; it was one of the few chambers with a window, so that light spilled in and made it seem brighter and cheerier than it really was. All of the furniture had been cleared to the walls, and the floor was littered with makeshift toys: dolls made of cloth and stuffed with straw that leaked from every patch, toy swords, and a wooden shopkeeper’s stall shrunken to child size.
Kelsea saw a number of children seated in a half-circle in the middle of the nursery, their focus entirely on a beautiful woman with auburn hair whom Kelsea hadn’t seen before. She was telling the children a story, something about a girl with extraordinarily long hair imprisoned in a tower, and Kelsea leaned against the doorway, unnoticed, to listen. The woman spoke with a pronounced Mort accent, but she had a good power of voice and she told her story well. When the prince was injured by the guile of a witch, the corners of the woman’s mouth went down, her face transformed into grief. And then Kelsea knew her, and turned to Mace, astonished.
He motioned Kelsea away from the door, speaking in a low voice. “She’s been a wonder with the children. The women are content to leave their little ones with her while they work, even Andalie. It’s an unexpected gift; otherwise we’d have children underfoot everywhere.”
“The women don’t mind that she’s Mort?”
“Apparently not.”
Kelsea peered around the doorway again. The redhead was pantomiming now, showing the healing of the prince’s eyes, and she was radiant in the candlelight, a world apart from the miserable creature Kelsea had seen huddled in front of the throne.
“What happened to her?”
“I didn’t question her about her life with the Regent, Lady, deeming that her affair. But if I had to hazard a guess . . .” He lowered his voice even further. “She was the Regent’s favorite plaything. He wouldn’t let her conceive, lest it ruin his sport.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Mace splayed his hands. “She made no secret of her wish for a child, Lady, even one by the Regent. The rest of your uncle’s women took contraceptives willingly, but not this one. They say he had to lace her food. But he also promised to kill any child she bore; I heard that threat myself.”
“I see.” Kelsea nodded calmly, though she was fuming inside. She took a last look at the woman, at the group of children. “What’s her name?”
“Marguerite.”
“How did my uncle get hold of a Mort slave?”
“Redheads are even more of a curiosity in Mortmesne than in the Tearling. Marguerite was a gift to your uncle from the Red Queen several years ago, a sign of great favor.”
Kelsea tipped her head back against the passageway wall. Her shoulder was beginning to throb. “This place is a festering sore, Lazarus.”
“Leadership was needed, Lady. There was none.”
“Not even you?”
“Certainly not.” Mace gestured toward the open doorway. “I would have let your uncle keep his toy. I would have come to an agreement with the Red Queen before stopping the shipment.”
“I heard what you said earlier.”
“I know you did. Don’t misunderstand me, Lady. I don’t say that your choices are right or wrong, only that you were needed to do the things you’ve done, and you were not here.”
There was no tone of reproach in his voice. Kelsea’s irritation quieted, but her shoulder gave another throb, stronger now, and she wondered how on earth simply standing there could have aggravated it. “I need to sit down.”
Within five minutes her guards had moved the large, comfortable armchair out of Kelsea’s bedchamber and into the audience chamber, where they settled the chair securely against a wall.
“My throne,” Kelsea murmured.
“We can’t secure the throne room at present, Lady,” Mace replied. “It has too many entrances, and that twice-damned gallery is simply impossible to cover without more guards. But we could have the throne itself moved in here for the time being.”
“That seems fairly pointless.”
“Maybe, maybe not. The crown on your head is a bit pointless as well, but I know you recognize its value. Perhaps a throne serves the same purpose.”
Kelsea tilted her head, considering. “I’ll need to hold audience, you said.”
“Yes.”