“It takes more than one traitor to smuggle an assassin in here. It would take a Gate Guard as well.”
Several of the guards nodded, murmuring agreement.
“I don’t care about the Gate Guard,” Mace hissed. “They’re worthless, that’s why they guard the gate.”
He stood there for a moment, breathing hard. Kelsea thought of storm clouds, clouds that could either blow themselves out or touch down in a funnel that would blast the land. She shivered, suddenly freezing, and a small, selfish part of her wondered when this scene would end so that she could put some clothes on.
“What I care about,” Mace continued, his voice a low threat caged in violence, “is that someone here broke his vow. I’ll warrant it’s the same someone who managed to stick a knife into the Queen during her crowning. And I’m going to find him; he’s a fool if he thinks I won’t.”
Breathing heavily, he fell silent. Kelsea looked at the rest of her guard, those men who had surrounded her at her coronation. Elston, Kibb, Pen, Coryn, Mhurn, Dyer, Cae, Galen, Wellmer . . . all of them had been close enough to throw the knife, and only Pen was apparently above suspicion. Mace had pulled the knife from his belt, and now he stared at each of them in turn, his eyes cold. Kelsea wanted to say something, but the silence of the rest of the Guard told her that nothing she might say would do much good. She tried to wrap her mind around the idea that one or more of these men had broken vows. She had thought that she was making progress with them, but once again she had been naive.
After a moment, Mace seemed to come back to them a bit; he tucked his knife away and pointed to the body on the floor. “Get that pile of shit out of here!”
Several men sprang forward, and Kelsea almost did so herself.
“We need something to cover him,” Kibb murmured. “The children don’t need to see the blood.”
Elston hoisted the corpse into a sitting position. “There’s no blood.”
“Broken neck?”
“No.”
“Then how’d he die?” Mhurn asked from the far wall, his blue gaze pinned on Kelsea.
“Move along!” Mace barked. Elston and Kibb hoisted the body, and the rest of her guards followed them from the room in a murmuring herd, sneaking puzzled glances at Kelsea as they went.
Mace turned to Pen. “I’ll spell you out; you get two weekends off each month. But the rest of the time, I don’t want to see you more than ten feet from the Queen, understand? Take one of the bedrooms with an antechamber. You can sleep there, and the Queen can have her privacy.”
“Some privacy,” Kelsea murmured. Mace’s large, dark eyes turned to her, and she raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine, fine.”
He whirled and strode from the room.
“He’ll be all right, Lady,” Pen assured her. “We’ve seen him like this before. He only needs to go off and kill someone and he’ll be right as rain.”
Kelsea smiled uneasily, not sure whether he was joking. Although she didn’t feel cold, she was shivering, and her legs wobbled beneath her. Andalie appeared out of nowhere, carrying a stack of clean clothes. “You’re covered in blood, Majesty. You should get back into the bath.”
Pen gave her an apologetic grin. “I’m not supposed to leave you alone, Lady. How about if I face the wall?”
Kelsea shook her head, chuckling without humor. “Privacy.”
Pen turned and faced the doorway. After a moment, seeing no alternative, Kelsea took off her towel and climbed back into the tub, grimacing as the water turned a dull pink around her. She began to wash, trying and utterly failing to forget that Pen was in the room
Oh, who cares? They’ve all seen me naked now. The idea was awful, so mortifying that Kelsea found herself giggling helplessly. There was nothing else. Andalie, busy jerking Kelsea’s unruly wet hair up into a knot on her head and fastening it with a silver pin, appeared not to notice. Her face was immobile, fazed by nothing, and it struck Kelsea for the first time, though not nearly the last, that some fateful mistake had been made. Andalie should have been the Queen.
“Cup of tea, Lady?”
“Please.”
On the threshold, Andalie paused and spoke without turning around. “Forgive me, Lady. I saw it coming, but not the shape it would take. I couldn’t see the man or the room.”
Kelsea blinked, but Andalie had already left, closing the door behind her.
The Mort deadline came and went, but Mace did not reappear. Kelsea was briefly alarmed until she realized that the rest of her guards took his absence as a matter of course. Pen explained that Mace had a habit of going off on his own errands from time to time, leaving without warning and returning the same way. And Pen was right, for on the third day Mace did return; Kelsea found him sitting at the table, freshly showered, when she came out for lunch. She demanded to know where he’d been, and Mace, being Mace, refused to tell.
Her guards had taken the assassin’s body to the plaza at the center of New London and (by custom, Kelsea was appalled to discover) spitted his corpse on a sharpened pole, leaving it there to rot. If Arliss was to be believed, word was running like quicksilver through the city that the Queen had killed a Caden herself, that she’d used magic. There wasn’t a mark on the young Lord Graham, but he was dead as a doornail all the same.
Several times a day, Kelsea pulled the sapphire from her dress and stared at it, willing it to speak to her again, to do anything out of the ordinary. But nothing happened. She felt like a fraud.
Mace didn’t share her concern. “Just as useful as if you’d done it on purpose, Lady, so who cares?”
Kelsea was perched over the dining room table, looking at a map of the Mort border. Mace had pinned its four corners down with tea mugs to keep it from rolling up. “I care, Lazarus. I’ve no idea what happened or how to repeat it.”
“Yes, but only you and I know that, Lady. It’s a boon, believe me. They’ll think twice before trying a direct attack on you again.”
Kelsea lowered her voice, mindful of the guards stationed on the walls. “What of our traitor?”
Mace frowned and pointed to a space on the map, lowering his voice as well. “I’ve made some progress, Lady. Nothing concrete to place before you yet.”
“What progress?”
“A theory, nothing more.”
“That’s not much.”
“My theories are rarely wrong, Majesty.”
“Should I be worried?”
“Only if Pen gets caught off guard, Lady. I’m more worried about the sun rising westerly.” The map suddenly escaped from one of its corners and Mace cursed, unrolled it, and slammed the mug back down to hold it in place.
“What’s eating at you, Lazarus?”
“Whoever this man is, Majesty, he should never have gotten so far. Treachery leaves a smell; a stench really, and I’ve never before failed to sniff it out.”
Kelsea smiled, poking him in his bicep. “Perhaps this is a healthy test of your complacency.” But then, seeing that his pride was really injured, she sobered and clasped his shoulder. “You’ll find him, Lazarus. I wouldn’t be that traitor for all the steel in Mortmesne.”
“Majesty?” Dyer had emerged from the hallway.
“Yes?”
“We’ve something to show you.”
“Now?” Kelsea straightened and saw an odd phenomenon: Dyer was grinning. Mace waved a hand to indicate that she should go, and she followed Dyer down the corridor with Pen’s soft tread just behind her. Tom and Wellmer were waiting two doors down from her new bedchamber, both grinning as well, and Kelsea approached cautiously. Maybe she had been too casual with them all. Was she about to become the subject of a practical joke?
“Go on, Lady,” Wellmer told her, gesturing her inside. In his excitement, he seemed even younger than usual, hopping from foot to foot like a small boy on Christmas, or at least a small boy who had a dire need for the bathroom.
Kelsea turned into the chamber, a cozy space with low ceilings and no windows. Five armchairs and two sofas had been scattered around, and several of these contained children. Andalie’s, Kelsea thought, but she couldn’t be sure. She turned a questioning glance to Dyer, and he gestured toward the far wall.
She recognized the bookshelves; she’d been looking at them in her mother’s chamber, hating their emptiness, for the past two weeks. But now the shelves were full. Kelsea moved further into the room, staring at the books as though hypnotized. She recognized all of the titles, but it was only when she saw the enormous brown leather volume of Shakespeare, Carlin’s pride and joy, that she knew what Mace had done.
“Dyer, is this where you’ve been?”
“Aye, Lady,” he replied. “Mace was determined to make it a surprise.”
Kelsea inspected the books closely. They looked just as she remembered them in Carlin’s library. Someone had even gone to the trouble to alphabetize them all by author. They’d left the fiction intermingled with the nonfiction; Carlin would have screamed bloody murder. But Kelsea was touched by the effort.
“We didn’t lose a single book, Majesty. We covered the wagon well, but it didn’t even rain. I don’t think they took any damage.”
Kelsea stared at the shelves for a moment longer, and then turned back to him, her vision blurred with sudden tears. “Thank you.”
Dyer looked away. Kelsea turned her attention to the children perched on the furniture: two adolescent boys, a girl of perhaps eleven or twelve, and a younger girl, eight or so. “You’re Andalie’s children, aren’t you?”
The older three remained silent, but the youngest girl nodded her head vigorously and exclaimed, “We helped alphabet the books! We stayed up late!”
“They’re Andalie’s, Lady,” Dyer informed her.
“You did a very good job,” Kelsea told them. “Thank you.”
The boys and the younger girl smiled timidly, but the oldest girl merely sat there, staring at Kelsea with sullen eyes. Kelsea was puzzled. She’d never spoken to the girl before, barely even recognized her. Of all of the children on the sofa, this one looked the most like Andalie’s husband; her mouth was naturally downturned at the corners, her eyes dark-socketed and suspicious. After a moment she turned away, and Kelsea was reassured; the girl might look like her father, but the dismissal in the gesture was pure Andalie.
Kelsea looked around for Mace, but he wasn’t there. “Where’s Lazarus?”
She found him back at the dining table, still bent over the enormous map of the New World. “Thank you for the surprise.”
Mace shrugged. “I could tell you wouldn’t be able to focus on anything until we got you some books.”
“It means the world to me.”
“I don’t understand your fascination with the damned things. They don’t feed or protect you. They don’t keep you alive. But I see that they’re important to you.”
“If there’s ever something I can do for you in return, you’ve only to name it.”
Mace raised his eyebrows. “Be careful about making open-ended promises, Lady. I know all about those, believe me; they bite you in the ass when you least expect it.”
“Even so, I mean it: if there’s ever anything I can do for you, it’s yours.”
“Fine. Put all of those books in a pile, and set them on fire.”
“What?”
“There’s your open-ended promise.”
Kelsea’s stomach clenched in knots. Mace watched her with an interested gaze for a moment before he chuckled. “Relax, Lady. The debt of a queen is a valuable commodity; I wouldn’t waste it. Your books are harmless enough, at least from a defensive standpoint.”
“You’re a piece of work, Lazarus.”
“Indeed.”
“Honestly, thank you.”
He shrugged. “You earned it, Lady. It’s twice as easy to guard a tough customer.”
Kelsea bit back a smile, then sobered. “Any word on Barty and Carlin?”
“Nothing yet.”