Time drifted. Hours, days perhaps, Katie couldn’t see. Sometimes she slept on Jonathan’s shoulder, sometimes he on hers. Sometimes she woke in the dark with no memory of where she was, and then she would feel Jonathan’s hand in hers and realize that it hardly mattered whether they were in a dungeon or in a clearing, in the Town or outside it. They were together, the two of them, united in purpose, and that brought them a thousand times closer than they had ever been, so close that when Jonathan’s hand slipped beneath her shirt and Katie climbed into his lap, it seemed almost an afterthought, natural outgrowth of a place they had already been, not love but something a thousand times more powerful, and when Jonathan entered her, yanking her hair back to expose her throat, Katie almost shrieked with pleasure, and when the sapphire at her throat began to glow, illuminating both Jonathan’s face and her own, she saw that he was not entirely himself, that he too was in the hands of something else, and then she forgot as her mind stuttered and then fired, thinking over and over Now we are together now we are one—
When it was over, they dozed. Jonathan said nothing, and neither did Katie, but she didn’t think either of them were really sleeping. They were each waiting . . . preparing, in their own ways, for that ultimate moment: the click of the lock, and the opening of the door.
Chapter 14
The Great Gamble
When the invasion of New London finally came, it was very different from what anyone had imagined. More than one thousand Mort soldiers entered the defenseless city, looting and burning as they came, and of these, five hundred went on to lay siege to the Keep. The Holy Father had hired these troops—and, as later evidence revealed, had gone to great expense to transport them in secret—but as is so often the case in the hiring of mercenaries, the outcome reached was not the outcome sought. The Mort felt badly used, and they came not only for wealth, but for blood and revenge. The carnage can only be estimated, for few were left alive to chronicle it, and none of these able to write . . .
—The Tearling as a Military Nation, Callow the Martyr
Staring up at her city, Kelsea felt a curious sense of doubling. She was looking at New London, a place she knew well. The cluster of houses on hills, the grey fortress of the Keep, the white tower of the Arvath, all of these things were familiar. But at the same time, she couldn’t help seeing the city through Katie’s eyes, as a vast cancer of ruined potential. Knowing what New London had been meant to be made it much worse to see what it had become.
The western side of the city was aflame. Even from here, at the base of the southwestern slope, Kelsea could hear the screams as people fled the fire, but she didn’t deceive herself that the fire was the only problem. The Mort were loose in her city. There was no wall on the western side, and it was an easy climb up the hill to the base neighborhood, the Lower Bend. But Kelsea didn’t know where to begin. She was surrounded by armed men: Hall and the remainder of his army, as well as her Guard. But they weren’t enough. She couldn’t retake her city by force.
“Majesty,” Mace muttered urgently.
She turned south, toward the vast dust cloud that had been following them for the last day. At first it had been small, little more than a slight disturbance of air on the horizon, but in the past few hours it had resolved itself into a wide, dusty haze spread across the Lower Almont. Her Guard had kept an uneasy eye behind them, but there had been no time to stop. Kelsea turned to the Fetch and found him watching her, his eyes wide and hopeless.
“Is he coming for you?” she asked.
“No, Tear Queen. For you.”
“What are you jabbering about?” Elston asked. “Speak sense. What is that?”
“The Orphan.”
“The Orphan is a children’s fable,” Dyer protested.
“Hush, Dyer.” She paused, suddenly struck by a thought, and moved over to crouch beside the Fetch.
“What really happened to Row? After Jonathan died?”
“Cursed. We didn’t know Katie had Jonathan’s magic until after Jonathan was dead, and once we found out, even Row didn’t dare touch her. She fled, but first she cursed us all.” The Fetch gestured to the four men around him, who nodded unhappily, then turned his doomed eyes back to the dust cloud behind him. “She cursed us as traitors, and we still pay and pay.”
“What about Row?”
“I don’t know what Katie did to him. Row began to fade, and then he simply disappeared. The Town fell into warring factions, tore itself apart. Half of the population struck out eastward across the plains. It was only years later that we found out Row wasn’t dead, but in the Fairwitch.”
“And I let him loose,” Kelsea murmured. She needed no spyglass to see them now: a horde of small, dark forms, running on all fours, advancing north across the plains. Had she led them to her city, or had they been coming here all along? She didn’t know, but it hardly seemed to matter any longer. She had no answer for the tide below . . . no answer in the present, anyway. She didn’t understand what Row Finn had become, but she didn’t believe he could be beaten here. This problem, like so many, began in the past, and it was too late to fix.
“Lady,” Mace repeated. “We must move. Now.”
Kelsea nodded, then looked back up the hill. The immediate problem was up there. She needed to get into her Keep, but pandemonium reigned. Her city was overtaken with violence . . . which left Kelsea back where she had been all along.
She dug into her pocket and brought out Row’s sapphire. The blue facets sparkled in the dying light, and again Kelsea had the uncomfortable feeling that the jewel was winking at her, almost daring her to put it on.