“I don’t have long,” Evelyn whispered. “Please. Everything is cold. And my heart . . .”
Kelsea listened for a moment, and found that the woman was right; her heart was beating, but oddly, sluggishly, as though it were a clock winding down, so many ticks and then a pause. But there was so much more story to see! Only one man had woken completely, and at the sight of the blood-drenched child, her teeth drawn back like an animal’s and her eyes glittering with death, he had fled south into the Dry Lands, never to be heard from again. The incident had wrecked the Cadarese alliance, although it was hushed up and very few people knew what had really happened; the popular story was that negotiations had simply failed. Even now, Kelsea could stop and marvel at how well Evelyn had unwittingly served her own future, for if the Tear and Cadare had built a lasting alliance, Mortmesne could never have risen to the dominance it had enjoyed. Instead, the murder of the ambassadors—a murder that the Cadarese king believed, until the end, had been committed by the Tear—had soured the relationship between the two countries for years to come. When a young sorceress emerged from nowhere and began to wreak havoc on what was then New Europe, there was no unity, and thus no concerted effort to stop her. But that was years in the future. After killing the Cadarese ambassadors, Evelyn had fled north and—
“Please,” the Red Queen repeated.
“Can you not end yourself?” Kelsea asked in desperation.
“I have tried already. The giving in, it goes too much against my grain. My body will not accept that there is no future.”
Kelsea believed it; the anguish in Evelyn’s eyes was too real. Given the choice, this woman would want to end her own life, to control her death as she had mastered everything else. Even dimly, Kelsea could see the agony it would cost her to put her death in the hands of a stranger.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said, and was surprised to find that the words were true.
Evelyn smiled grimly. “There’s a thing my mother used to say: have is the hell of want. This is where we’ve ended up. Please.”
Help me, Kelsea begged, not knowing to whom she spoke. Barty? Carlin? Mace? Tear? The Queen of Spades, the thing that had been inside her when she murdered Arlen Thorne—for she understood, now, that it had been murder—that thing was gone. But there was nothing to replace it. There was only Kelsea. She had wanted to be herself again, but only now did she understand how much that wish would cost. She could feel Evelyn’s heart before her, as vulnerable as though it lay in her hands.
“Soon it will stop on its own,” Evelyn whispered. “And I am afraid, so terribly afraid, that it will begin to beat for someone else.”
Kelsea hesitated, a rogue part of her still desperate to see the end of the Red Queen’s story. Row Finn was there, waiting, and there was so much more that Kelsea needed to know . . .
“Please,” Evelyn repeated. “I am at the end.”
And she was. Kelsea felt the woman’s heartbeat unraveling. The ghosts of Mhurn and Thorne seemed to wander in and out of her field of vision, but strangely, Kelsea did not fear them. Katie, too, was there, demanding a share of Kelsea’s mind. Kelsea sensed time growing short, and she raised the knife over Evelyn’s chest, gripping it in both hands so that it would not slip. As with Mhurn, she had no courage for a repeat.
“He fears you, you know,” Evelyn whispered. She gestured to Finn’s sapphire, now dangling from Kelsea’s hand, its dark facets glittering in the firelight. “Take that, and get it done.”
Kelsea stared at her, but Evelyn had already closed her eyes.
“I’m ready, child. Don’t lose your nerve now.”
Kelsea took a deep breath. Their faces were before her again—Mhurn and Thorne—but Evelyn was right; there were many different kinds of death.
“A kindness,” she whispered, blinking back tears.
“Yes.” Evelyn’s lips lifted in what might have been a smile. “A kindness.”
Summoning everything she had, Kelsea brought down the knife.
Book III
Chapter 11
The Tear Land
The resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity in William Tear’s town was a great blow, one that Jonathan Tear clearly recognized but could not counteract. Few things are more dangerous to an egalitarian ideal than the concept of a chosen people, and the divide drawn by the early iteration of God’s Church helped to exacerbate the many ideological faults that already underlay the landscape. When the chips were down, Tear’s people were ready to turn on each other, and the fall of the Town was very quick, so quick that this historian wonders whether all such communities are not destined to fail. Our species is capable of altruism, certainly, but it is not a game we play willingly, let alone well.
—The Crossing in Hindsight, Ellen Alcott