What choice did I ever have? she wondered. Carlin raised me to eschew force, but this world is ruled by force. It’s too late for anything else.
She turned to her Guard, who were clustered around her on the hillside. General Hall and his twin brother were there, too, though Hall’s sorry band of soldiers waited several hundred feet down the slope. Even Ewen was here, having doggedly insisted on following them to the city. Kelsea thought that Bradshaw had taken Ewen on his horse, but she could not be sure of anything about that journey. Too many miles had been spent in the twilight of Katie’s mind. But now she could regret, at the end, that Ewen was with them. She wished he would have stayed behind, stayed safe. She wished she could have kept them all safe, her Guard, her country, wished she could have wrapped them away and hidden them in the past, or perhaps the future. Anywhere but the present. She dangled the necklace from her fingers, watching the light play across the chain.
Force, she thought. Force is what’s left when all other options are exhausted. Even Carlin must have known that.
“We’re going up there,” she told them. “To the Keep. Your first instinct will be to protect me, I know—”
“Here it comes,” Dyer muttered.
“But do me a favor and protect each other. Understand, Dyer?”
“Yes, Lady, yes! Because that’s what I signed up for: to guard other guards while I leave the Queen to her own devices.”
She glared at him for a moment, but found that she could not maintain it; after a moment, she shook her head and continued.
“Smart mouths aside, I mean what I say. I don’t know what will happen when I put this on,” she held up the sapphire, “but it can’t be the safest thing in the world. I may not be myself; I may be—”
The Queen of Spades.
She swallowed. “I want you all to stay out of my way. Agreed?”
None of her Guard would meet her eye, except for Mace, who raised his eyebrow expressively.
“I mean it.”
“Are we going to go?” Elston asked. “Or are we going to wait for those things out there to come up and kiss us on the mouth?”
Kelsea glanced behind her and saw that the tide of children had nearly reached the base of the hill. Taking a deep breath, she put on the second necklace, and as it settled between her breasts, she felt a horrible comfort there, the comfort of coming back to a house that had long since been wrecked but which was, nevertheless, home.
“Come on,” she told them, and scrambled up the hill, not waiting to see whether they would follow.
“Now,” Aisa breathed, and Father Tyler nodded.
Together, they shoved at the grating over their heads. It was heavy, solid iron, but Aisa could feel some give. If they had been strong men, there would have been no problem. But Father Tyler was as frail as ever, and Aisa’s body was racked with fever. Her wounded arm felt as though it had been shot through with veins of molten iron. They pushed until Aisa’s entire back ached, but still only revealed a quarter-crescent of deep evening-blue sky.
“That’s something, anyway,” Aisa muttered. “A few minutes and we’ll try—”
She fell silent, listening.
“Is it them?” Father Tyler whispered, but Aisa put a hand on his wrist to keep him quiet. She thought she had heard something in the tunnel below, the scrape of a boot on stone.
“Again,” she panted. “Quick.”
The two of them grasped the edge of the cover and shoved. Bright lights danced before Aisa’s eyes, but the cover was halfway off now. Starlight illuminated the edges of the ladder upon which they perched, and for a moment Aisa felt her balance waver, felt as though she would simply fall, not into the tunnel she had just climbed out of but into a darkness deeper than any she had ever known.
“I can squeeze out,” Father Tyler murmured. He clambered a few more feet up the ladder, snaking his thin body through the half-moon opening, then boosted himself up and out. The beaten leather satchel he carried with him gonged against the top of the ladder, and Aisa winced. No one in the tunnels below could fail to hear that sound.
Aisa had given the Caden the slip several days ago, vanishing into a deep crevice in the main tunnel while they walked ahead. It had not been an easy decision, for she felt a great deal of loyalty to these four men. But her loyalty to the Queen was stronger, and she knew that the Queen would have wanted Father Tyler back safe in the Keep. She had thought it would be a relatively quick and simple business: fetch Father Tyler from his hidden alcove, smuggle him up to the Keep, and then come back down with no one the wiser. She could claim that she had gotten lost in the tunnels for a day or so. Very neat, very easy.