Who killed Jonathan Tear?
Kelsea frowned at the piece of loose sapphire in her lap. She wished she could speed up Katie’s memory, skip over that mental film, but sapphires or no, that had never been within her power. She could only watch and wait. She wondered if she had the power to make Katie kill Row Finn before it was too late—for they were not always divided, Katie and Kelsea; sometimes they blended, in that wholly organic way that Kelsea remembered from those last desperate moments with Lily—but something in her balked at that solution. It seemed too easy. Row was riding a wave in the Town, a wave of discontent and fear, but was he really the cause? Kelsea didn’t think so. A part of her wanted to kill Row anyway, just on principle, but she recognized that part very well: the Queen of Spades, forever circling in her mind, always looking for a way back in. Past, present, or future, it made no difference; that side of Kelsea would be perfectly happy to run through the new world, grinning blackly, meting out justice with a scythe.
“No,” Kelsea whispered.
“You’ve gone very quiet over there,” Simon remarked. “Did I put you to sleep?”
“No,” Kelsea replied slowly, in a louder voice. “Simon, let me ask you: if you had the chance to go back into history and correct a great evil, would you do so?”
“Ah, the old question.”
“Is it?”
“Yes, with a clear answer. Physicists look at it in terms of the butterfly effect.”
“What is that?” Kelsea didn’t know why she was pursuing this; killing Row was no answer for the Town’s troubles. According to history, the Tear assassination was the problem, but there was no guarantee that killing Row would prevent that. She wished she could see everything, know everything, all at once.
“I’ve only read one book on the subject,” Simon told her. “The butterfly effect deals in the tendency of infinitesimal variations to amplify over time. You never play around with history, because the change you thought you were making for the better is likely to cause so many unforeseen ripples that it may well add up to a net loss. Too many variables to control the outcome.”
Kelsea considered this for a moment. Simon had presented a scientific argument, but beneath it was a moral question: whether she had the right to gamble with the future. In the brief six months she had sat on her throne, she had made many decisions, some good and some disastrous. Two Kelseas warred inside her: the child raised by Barty and Carlin to believe in easy rights and wrongs, and the Queen of Spades, who had come to see everything in shades of dark grey. The Queen of Spades didn’t care about moral questions.
“You didn’t answer me, Simon. What would you do?”
“You mean, would I dice with the chance that something even worse would come along?”
“Yes. Is it a good gamble, or a poor one?”
“I think the outcome would be entirely a matter of chance, of circumstance. Neither a good gamble nor a poor one, but a great gamble, one in which you would stake all, seeking a vast reward that might not materialize even if you did succeed. I am a cautious man, not a gambler. I don’t think I would chance it.”
Kelsea sat back on her heels, nodding. She saw the argument. Even if she somehow succeeded in killing Row Finn, another Row might simply spring up in his place. Power was a double-edged sword; it didn’t make Kelsea any more likely to do the right thing, and oh, the disastrous results when it led her wrong . . . She closed her eyes and there was Arlen Thorne again, his face scrubbed with blood.
“Strange turn of the conversation,” said Simon. “Can I ask—”
A hollow boom echoed through the dungeon. Emily woke instantly, jumping to her feet; Kelsea sensed that she, like Mace, was embarrassed to be caught napping. She raised her knife to face the end of the corridor.
“It is them?” Kelsea asked. If, as Emily said, Mace was planning a rescue attempt, it would explain what Emily was doing down here in the middle of the night.
“No.” Emily shook her head. “More than a day early.”
A fusillade of clanging blows rang through the corridor. It sounded like a child banging pots together, but in the echo-prone environment of the dungeons, the noise was almost deafening, and Kelsea had to clap her hands to her ears until it stopped.
“Is it a mob?” asked Simon from his cell.
Kelsea raised her eyebrows at Emily, who shook her head. According to the page, the Palais was now surrounded by a mob, one selected and directed by Levieux. Mace and the Fetch, working together; Kelsea would have to see it to believe it. As the echoes faded, a woman appeared on the staircase and came sprinting down the corridor.