Mad, was Kelsea’s first thought. The woman appeared to be wearing only a robe, and her hair was in disarray. She held a torch just above her head, and it seemed only blind luck that she had not set her own hair on fire. Her breath gasped from her throat, and her eyes were wide and desperate. The hem of her robe was stained with blood.
“Declare yourself!” Emily cried. But a moment later Emily was flung aside like a rag doll, straight into the wall, where she collapsed to the floor. As the woman skidded to a stop in front of her cell, Kelsea’s mouth dropped open. No one would have recognized this deranged creature as the Queen of Mortmesne.
“No time,” the Red Queen panted. “Right behind me.”
She dropped to Emily’s inert body and began digging through her pockets. “Key, key, key. Where is it?”
The squeal of wrenching steel echoed down the hall from the stairwell, and a low animal moan emerged from the Red Queen’s throat. She took her hands from Emily’s pockets, defeated, and sat back on her heels for a moment before moving on to the chain around the woman’s neck.
“What is that?” Kelsea asked.
The Red Queen pushed herself to her feet, holding the silver key in her left hand.
“It looks like a child,” she murmured, unlocking Kelsea’s cell and throwing the door wide open. “But it’s not.”
She held out her right hand, and there were Kelsea’s sapphires on her palm. Kelsea gaped at this offering. The Red Queen’s face was calm, but her eyes were wide with panic.
“Help me,” she whispered. “Help me, please.”
A giggle echoed down the corridor, and the Red Queen jumped. Leaning out of her cell, Kelsea saw a small form, too small to be anything but a child, at the foot of the stairwell. But this child’s chin was smeared with red, and it wore a bib of blood.
“You are good at hide-and-seek,” the child lisped, her thin voice echoing down the hall. “But I have found you now.”
“What is it?” Kelsea whispered.
“One of his. Please.” The Red Queen grabbed Kelsea’s hand and pressed the sapphires into her palm, and Kelsea realized, astonished, that she was speaking not in Mort, but in Tear.
“Please. They are yours. I give them back.”
Kelsea stared at the sapphires in her hand. She had spent so many months longing for her jewels, longing for the ability to punish and retaliate. But now that she had them in hand, she felt exactly the same. All of the power she had drawn from the sapphires, all of that ability to channel her anger into force, it was gone. But there was something there, for now she realized that she could actually tell them apart. The two jewels might appear identical, but they were different, utterly different, two discrete voices inside her head . . .
She had no time to analyze the difference. The child—a little girl, Kelsea saw now—was coming down the corridor, loping on all fours like a wolf, her teeth bared and face twisted in a snarl.
The Red Queen ducked behind Kelsea, clutching her shoulder in an iron grip of terror. Kelsea wondered what she was supposed to do in the two seconds before the child reached them, how on earth she was supposed to have time to make a plan, let alone act . . .
And time slowed down.
Kelsea saw this quite clearly. The child, which had been coming along the corridor at great speed, was suddenly reduced to the lazy velocity of the mud turtles of the Reddick. She moved only by inches.
No hurry at all, Kelsea thought, marveling. I have all the time in the world.
She looked down at her sapphires. Different, yes, but connected, wed to each other somehow. One of them was William Tear’s sapphire; it spoke to her clearly, not in words but in a flow of images, of ideas, speaking of the good and the light. Tear’s sapphire, which had allowed him to master time, to bring them all safely across the Atlantic and God’s Ocean. Carlin had always said that Tear’s settlers were lucky to stumble on the new world, the equivalent of hitting a bull’s-eye on a dartboard in the pitch-black. But that wasn’t true at all. William Tear had known exactly where he was going. There was no luck involved, because—
“It came from here,” Kelsea whispered, feeling the very rightness of the idea. A piece of Tear sapphire had somehow found its way into the old world, and Kelsea saw its journey clearly, like a story inside her head: passed down from Tear to Tear, hidden and smuggled, sometimes to the far corners of the earth, concealed from the powerful, guarded from the weak. Centuries of Tears, all of them fighting to hold back the darkness, to keep it at bay. Tear’s sapphire dealt in time; it had allowed her to slow the ravening child before her, to lengthen the hallway until it was nearly infinite, to see into the past.
How could I ever have thought they were identical?
The difference was like a chasm in her mind. The other jewel’s voice was low and hectoring, speaking of petty slights and jealousies and desires, of sneaking and spying, anger and violence. This sapphire had also been passed down through generations of Raleighs, but it had never really belonged to any of them, not even to Kelsea.