“I know what you fear,” the Red Queen whispered. Her eyes glinted red. “You fear to become me.”
That was wrong. Kelsea did not want to become the Red Queen, no, but this wasn’t what kept her awake at night. What she feared, more than anything, was becoming her mother.
“You should fear it. But death is fluid. There is all the difference in the world between cold-blooded murder and the prevention of agony. And Glynn, I am begging you.”
Kelsea looked down at Finn’s sapphire. She did not want it, could not wear it, but she could not simply cast it away either. Powerful things had to be guarded. If she was a Tear, as Finn and the Fetch had claimed, then her family had been guarding such things for a very long time.
“I can’t kill myself, Glynn. I don’t have it in me. But you could, I think, and take no injury from the act. You make yourself into whatever you wish to be.”
Kelsea almost winced at these words. Again she saw Mhurn, smiling as Coryn slid the needle into his arm. At the time, Kelsea had thought it was mercy, but was it really? The Red Queen lay before her, not the clumsy mangled body, but the woman beneath, outlined in red light. Yet the Red Queen was fading, being overtaken by something else . . .
“I don’t have long, Glynn. Look and see.”
Kelsea looked, and almost drew back in terror. The woman’s mind, which had fought her so hard before, was now wide open, a vast, roaring metropolis of thoughts and ideas and memories and regrets. Sound, sight, feeling, all of it swept over Kelsea like a tide, so strong that she thought she might drown.
At the bottom of it all was the mother, trapped in a vast web of contradictory feelings: love, hatred, jealousy, longing, regret, sorrow. The Beautiful Queen had viewed young Evelyn as a pawn, just as Evelyn herself now viewed others, a cycle that seemed to Kelsea almost inevitable, and the sadness of that idea nearly made her stop and withdraw from the Red Queen’s mind. But she didn’t, for, as always, the story was the compelling thing, worth all of its sufferings to find out the ending.
When Evelyn was fourteen, the Cadarese king offered the Tearling an alliance, a complicated trade involving horses and lumber, gems and gold. The negotiations had been long and complex, dragging on for months. By the end, both ambassadors were exhausted and the Tear court was utterly tired of entertaining the Cadarese delegation, which expected elaborate courtesies and consisted almost entirely of men who didn’t know how to keep their hands to themselves. The entire Keep breathed a sigh of relief when the two delegations reached a tenuous agreement, and in order to seal the deal with goodwill, the Beautiful Queen threw in Evelyn, the court bastard, as a gift to the Cadarese king.
Evelyn was used to being treated differently. She had lived with the snide remarks, the praise that others heaped on Elaine—her beautiful sister, the purebred—while in Evelyn they only seemed to find fault. She was even used to her mother’s neglect, which vacillated between indifference and irritation. But this final betrayal . . . Evelyn had not been ready for it. There was a scene there—an image that would not come clear to Kelsea, perhaps because it existed in a haze for Evelyn as well—a scene of screaming and recrimination and tears and, finally, begging, fruitless begging that Evelyn remembered only dimly, through a dark veil of humiliation. Her mother had not been moved, and in the end Evelyn had been bundled off with the Cadarese. Her last view of the Keep was almost identical to Kelsea’s own: standing at the far end of the New London Bridge, rent with sorrow, surrounded by men she couldn’t trust, her eyes drawn helplessly back to her city. But by the time the delegation had traveled out of sight of New London, the sorrow had turned to rage.
The Cadarese delegation never made it home. On the third night out, the ambassadors, drunk on a complimentary keg of Tear ale and grandiose dreams of the rewards they would receive from the King for completion of their mission, went to sleep without securing the strange, ugly child they were hauling home. She had been so curiously withdrawn throughout the journey that they had forgotten all about her. They had gone through the bulk of the keg, and most of them barely put up a struggle when the child Evelyn tiptoed up, knife in hand, and began cutting throats.
A hand grasped Kelsea’s.