“They’re singing it in every corner of the city!” the Fetch shouted, anger biting through the mockery now. “Who will ever compose a ballad for you, Thomas Raleigh? Who will extol your greatness?”
Tears filled Thomas’s eyes, but in front of his men he didn’t dare dash them away. He suddenly understood why, despite so many opportunities, the Fetch had never killed him before. The Fetch had been waiting for the girl, waiting for her to come out of hiding.
“I won’t beg!” Thomas cried.
“I’ve heard you beg enough.”
On Thomas’s left, Keever went down with a horrible gurgling sound, a knife protruding from his throat. Arvis and Cowell crumpled next, pierced with arrows in their chests and heads. Thomas looked up and saw a monstrous black shape against the trees, descending on him from above. He shrieked in terror, but his voice cut off as the thing landed on him, knocking him from his horse. He hit his head, hard, on the ground and lay momentarily stunned, rocks digging into his back, the air full of his stallion’s outraged scream, hooves tearing away through the woods.
When he opened his eyes, he was looking up at the Fetch, who perched like a giant bat on his chest, pinning him to the ground. The Fetch wore the same mask he donned each time he entered the Keep: a harlequin, designed for masquerades. Such masks could be bought at many shops in the city, but Thomas had never seen the like of this one anywhere else: the red-smudged mouth drawn up into a sneer and the eyes deep-socketed in black. Once, Thomas had woken deep within the womb of his quilts to find that face leaning over him, and he’d wet himself like a baby. The Fetch had waltzed out of his chamber and disappeared from the Keep like smoke, and Thomas had been so ashamed that he had never told anyone about the incident. It was almost possible to believe the Fetch an illusion until he inevitably reappeared, utterly substantial, always wearing his dreadful mask.
“Well, false prince?” The Fetch grabbed Thomas by the shoulders and shook him as a dog would a bone, slamming his head repeatedly against the ground. Thomas felt his teeth rattle. “No bribes to offer, Thomas? And where’s your puppeteer? Hasn’t she sorcery enough to get you out of this?”
Thomas remained mute. He had tried to argue with the Fetch before and found that he only made himself more vulnerable. The man was devilishly clever with words, and Thomas had thanked God more than once that the Fetch was forced to remain anonymous. As a public orator, he would have been devastating.
Then again, if he were a public orator, we could’ve taken and killed him long ago.
“The Census Bureau is in shambles,” the Fetch whispered silkily. “They may construct new cages, but no one will forget what became of the old. If the girl lives, she’ll undo much of your harm.”
Thomas shook his head. “The Red Queen is coming. She’ll level the kingdom before the girl can accomplish anything.”
The Fetch leaned closer, until he was only inches away. “The Mort bitch never cared for you, you know.”
“I know,” Thomas replied, and then clamped his mouth shut, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time at the source of the Fetch’s information. His raids on Tear nobles had caused endless trouble, for the Fetch always seemed to know how taxes had been paid, where the money was stored, when the delivery would depart. Angry nobles came to the Keep to demand redress and Thomas had been forced to pay out large bribes in lieu of security, which made him even more despised with the peasantry. And where were those nobles now? Snug in their own castles while he was evicted from his, stuck in the forest with this blood-mad lunatic.
“Did you throw the knife?”
“What?”
The Fetch slapped him across the face. “Did you throw the knife at the girl?”
“No! Not me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know! It was Thorne’s plan. Some agent.”
“What agent?”
“I don’t know. My men were only to provide the diversion, I swear!”
The Fetch pressed both thumbs against Thomas’s eyes and ground down until Thomas shrieked helplessly, but the sound vanished into the pouring rain without so much as an echo.
“What agent, Thomas?” the Fetch asked relentlessly. His thumbs jammed down harder and Thomas felt his left eye fill with hot liquid. “I’ll begin cutting you next. Don’t even kid yourself that I won’t. A Mort agent?”
“I don’t know!” Thomas cried, sobbing. “Thorne wouldn’t tell me.”
“That’s right, Thomas, and do you know why? Because he knew you’d fuck it all up.”
“It wasn’t my fault!”
“You’d better think of something useful to tell me.”
“Thorne has a backup plan!”
“I know of Thorne’s backup plan, you miserable shit. I knew of it before he conceived it himself.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Information, Thomas. Information about the Red Queen. You slept with her, this entire kingdom knows it. You must know something useful.”
Thomas’s eyes popped open. He tried to keep his face expressionless, but it clearly betrayed him, for the Fetch leaned forward again, his eyes gleaming behind the mask, so close that Thomas could smell horses and smoke and something else, a cloying scent that he felt he should recognize.
Fifteen years ago, he was in bed with her, the air still reeking of sex, and he had asked her what she wanted with him. Even back then, he hadn’t been able to deceive himself that she cared about him. She fucked automatically, impersonally; he’d gotten better mechanics from mid-priced whores in the Gut. And yet he couldn’t be free of her; she’d grown like a disease in his mind.
“Tell me something useful, and I will end your life without pain, Thomas. I swear it.”
“Who is the father?” the Red Queen asked. When she turned to him in the dark, her eyes were glowing, a bright vulpine red. Thomas had reared back, scrambling to get out of bed, and she laughed, that deep bedroom chuckle that got him hard all on its own.
His eyes ached; he could see nothing but a haze of red from the left. The burning in his thighs was worse. But physical pain paled in comparison to the wave of self-loathing that swept him. The Fetch would have the information; it wouldn’t even take very long.
“What d’you want to know for?” he asked thickly. She could do that, make him feel as drunk as though he’d put away eight pints of ale. “Elyssa’s dead. What could it possibly matter now?”
“It doesn’t,” she replied with a smile. And Thomas, who could never tell what she was thinking, nevertheless saw that it did matter, that it mattered a great deal. She wanted to know, badly, and she knew that he had the answer. It was the only leverage he had ever held, and he had never deceived himself. If he told her, she might kill him.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
The light in her eyes faded then, and suddenly she was just a beautiful woman in bed with him, grabbing at his cock as though it were a toy. He had kept the one secret, but all other bulwarks had fallen; she’d stretched out before him and he’d agreed to find and murder Elyssa’s daughter, his niece. He even remembered entering her and gasping, “Fuck you,” to a different queen, one who’d been laid in her grave years before. But the Red Queen understood. She always understood, and she had given him what he needed.
“Well, Thomas?”
Thomas looked up at the Fetch, seeing him through a wash of tears. Time stretched years back and years forward, but nothing that came afterward ever had the power to wash away what came before. This order of things seemed monstrously unfair, even now when Thomas knew that he had only moments left. He gathered the remaining pieces of his courage. “If you take off the mask, I’ll tell you everything I know about her.”
The Fetch turned and took a quick survey of the action behind him. Squinting, his good eye blurry with moisture, Thomas saw that all three of his men were dead. Keever was the worst; he’d fallen with his throat gashed wide open, and now lay in a pool of his own blood, staring without sight.
Three men, masked and dressed in black, were crouched in the copse. They watched Thomas with a predatory, waiting quality, like dogs that had brought something to bay. But still he feared them less than he did their master. The Fetch was intelligent, diabolically so, and intelligent people devised intelligent cruelties. That was where the Red Queen had always excelled.
When he looked back up at the Fetch, the mask was gone, the man’s face plain in the dying light. Thomas dashed the tears from his right eye and stared for a long minute, his mind blank. “But you’re dead.”
“Only on the inside.”
“Is it magic?”
“The darkest kind, false prince. Now speak.”
Thomas spoke. The words came slowly at first, caught in his throat, but then they became easier. The Fetch listened carefully, even sympathetically, asking occasional questions, and soon it seemed perfectly rational for the two of them to be sitting here together, telling tales while the night fell. Thomas told the Fetch the entire story, the story he had never told to anyone, each word easier than the last. Telling the truth was what a Queen’s Guard would do, he realized, and that seemed so much the crux of the matter that he found himself repeating important points carefully, desperate to make the Fetch understand. He told all that he could remember, and when there was no more, he stopped.
The Fetch straightened and called out, “Bring an axe!”
Thomas clutched the Fetch’s arm. “Won’t you forgive me?”
“I will not, Thomas. I’ll keep my word, and that’s all.”
Thomas closed his eyes. Mortmesne, Mortmesne, burning bright, he thought inexplicably. The Fetch would take his head, and Thomas found that he didn’t begrudge him. Thomas thought of the Red Queen, the first time he’d ever seen her, a moment of such mixed terror and longing that it still had the power to freeze his heart. Then he thought of the girl, dragging herself from the floor with the knife in her back. Perhaps she could do it, extricate them all from the quagmire they’d created. Stranger things had happened in the history of the Tearling. Perhaps she was even the True Queen. Perhaps