It’s not like you’re doing anything else right now.
Kelsea smiled tiredly at the thought, a bit of pragmatism that reminded her of Mace. There was certainly very little she could do from this wagon. The cavalry had crossed the border and descended from the Argive Pass yesterday, leaving the bulk of the Mort army far behind. She didn’t know whether the Red Queen had remained with her army or passed ahead in the night. She stared up at the sky, just beginning to lighten from black to deep blue, and for a moment she missed her country so badly that she thought she would weep again. She had left the Tearling in Mace’s hands, yes, and that was a comfort. But she couldn’t escape the feeling that her kingdom was in terrible trouble.
Above her head, another streetlamp passed, swinging slightly in the early morning wind. Even this bit of Mort organization galled Kelsea. Streetlamps had to be lit at night and doused in the morning, or they were a waste of oil. Who came out here, in the middle of nowhere, to tend to all of these lamps? Again Kelsea mourned her lost sapphires, for the streetlamps seemed to tell their own valuable lesson: fear bred efficiency.
Not lost.
The words made Kelsea jerk in surprise, for the voice deep in her mind was unmistakably Lily’s. True, the sapphires weren’t completely lost, but they were in the keeping of the Red Queen; they might as well be on the moon. The Red Queen couldn’t use them, but neither could Kelsea.
Why can’t she use them? Lily’s voice was miles distant, buried in her mind, but still Kelsea registered the urgency there. Think hard, Kelsea. Why can’t she use them?
Kelsea thought hard, but came up with nothing. Row Finn had said something about Tear blood; she struggled with the memory, which made her head ache. The Red Queen had Tear blood, Finn had said, but Kelsea’s was stronger. She had given the sapphires away, so how could she still be seeing the past? She suddenly remembered the dream she’d had a week ago: the Crossing, the ships and the dark sky with a bright hole in the horizon. William Tear had opened a doorway through time, and in her own limited way, Kelsea had done the same thing, prying open an aperture and peering into the past. Was it possible that the aperture had stayed open, even now when the sapphires were lost? If the Crossing she had seen was real, it aligned neatly with what she had just seen here: Maddy Freeman, Lily’s sister, years older but alive and well.
The sooner Kelsea got out of this wagon, the better. She was not in control during her fugues; both Mace and Pen had told her so. She twisted to lie on her back, feeling slivers of wood dig into her cloak. If only she could reach out to them, to William and Jonathan Tear, tell them of the storm-filled future, change history instead of just watching it play out—
A skull appeared over her head.
Kelsea bolted upright, clapping a hand to her mouth to stifle a gasp, and saw that the skull had actually been hung high in the air, mounted on a pike in between streetlamps. A few traces of flesh still dangled from its jawbone. The eye sockets were crusted with blood, long since aged black. She lost sight of the skull as the light from the streetlamp faded away behind them, but then another streetlamp appeared, and shortly afterward, another skull. This one was very old; wind and time had eaten away at the jawbone and the smooth curvature around the nose.
Well, there was at least one question answered. She was on the Pike Road.
As quietly as she could, Kelsea stood up in the wagon, holding her chains so that they would not rattle and wake her jailor. Dawn was coming quickly now, the eastern horizon lined with pink, but the land below was a vast darkness, broken only by their current road, which was lined with pikes and streetlamps. They were heading on a slight downhill slope, but in the distance, Kelsea could see that the road inclined sharply toward an enormous barrier: a wall, tall and well fortified, a black bulwark against the lightening sky. Above the wall, Kelsea saw the silhouettes of many buildings and, towering over all, a vast structure, tipped with spikes and oblongs that Kelsea identified as turrets.
Demesne, she thought, feeling something knot together in her stomach. Once it had been Evanston, the capital of New Europe, the city on a plateau, built brick by brick by settlers. But now it seemed like something out of a nightmare.
Kelsea sat back down in the bed of the wagon, keeping an eye on her jailor, who was beginning to stir, and wrapped herself up in her cloak. She tried to summon courage, but that well seemed to have dried up. She was in the middle of her own Crossing now, but this voyage was nothing like William Tear’s.
This was a journey into a dark land.