“It is all one,” Tear replied. “The past controls the future; is that not why you’re here?”
Kelsea’s gaze fixed on one scene, and she walked down the empty tunnel to have a look at it: a small room with wooden floors and stone walls. A group of men were holding the door closed with all of their might, and behind them, on the floor, a woman sat cross-legged, her eyes closed, her bowed head circled with a crown. As Kelsea watched, a crack appeared in the door, and the wood began to split.
“Very little time,” Tear repeated. “You could go back there. Or you could choose something else.”
But Kelsea was already searching, reading the scenes in front of her, faster than she had ever read any book.
So much time here!
And there was, but it was Kelsea’s time, for in the seemingly infinite number of scenes before her, there was nothing she did not recognize. She saw the shipment rolling through the Almont, nine long cages snaking their way toward Mortmesne. She saw the White Ship going down in its terrible storm—Great God, if she could only have prevented that!—saw President Frewell standing behind a podium; saw a much younger William Tear jumping from an airplane; saw Lily watching in tears as her younger sister was marched down the hall by four men in black uniforms . . . on and on it went. And now Kelsea saw scenes even more distant, further and further back, to a time without cars or electricity or even books. It frightened her, the howling emptiness of that world, most of humanity locked into a bare struggle for survival. She didn’t want to go back there.
She turned her attention to the future, but what she found there was even more terrifying. She would die in the Keep, torn apart by Row’s creatures. They would be a constant torment to humanity, but one day they would be eradicated when someone invented an inoculation; Kelsea’s vision broadened, and she saw the Tearling, hundreds of years along, a despotic kingdom that had built on Kelsea’s legacy and extended its dominance into empire, the entire new world under Tear control. This new Tearling was no better than Mortmesne, bloated with its own power and driven by a sense of superiority so well-honed that it bordered on manifest destiny. And that made perfect sense. The danger of empire, after all, lay in the character of emperors.
“Choose quickly,” Tear said, his voice dispassionate.
Kelsea looked back and found that Row’s children were on her Guard, moving faster than their blades could follow. One of them finally succeeded in toppling Mace, biting into his shoulder. Kelsea felt a crack open inside her, wide and deep, and she clamped her mouth shut to keep from wailing in grief. Pen went next, his sword no use against the creatures that swarmed his ankles and pulled him down. Within a few seconds, the woman with the bowed head was left unguarded, and they swarmed toward her.
“Even here, time doesn’t hold forever,” Tear told her. “Choose.”
Kelsea turned numbly back to the panorama before her, skipping through the scenes, her mind moving faster than it had ever moved, until she found what she was looking for: Katie and Jonathan, sitting in a dank room. The room was lightless, but Kelsea could see them, both asleep, Jonathan with his head on Katie’s shoulder.
“This,” Kelsea told Tear. “I choose this.”
She held up Finn’s sapphire. The Queen of Spades was there, hovering, but Kelsea did not fear her any longer. The things Kelsea could not do, the things that needed to be done, these were her province. Both of them had been born in anger.
Coming home.
“You’re sure?” Tear asked.
“Yes.”
“Then luck to you, child.” He patted her shoulder. “One day, perhaps, when your time is done, we will meet again. I see you have a story to tell, and I would like to hear it.”
Kelsea’s eyes filled with tears. She turned to thank him, but Tear was gone.
Chapter 15
The Tearling
—The Early History of the Tearling, as told by
In the dark of the cell, Katie woke with a start from the strangest dream of her life.
She had been talking to Jonathan’s mother, the two of them wrapped in mist, not the white mist that covered the Town when autumn crept down from the mountains, but a thick curtain of dark grey. You could stare into that mist for a hundred years, in a hundred directions, and not be able to find your way out.
“I need your help,” Lily told her, and Katie nodded; it was only a dream, after all. She should have been afraid, for Lily was long dead, three years. But Katie was not afraid. She had always loved Lily in life, and she could not believe that Lily’s ghost meant to harm her now.