The Queen nodded. The penalties for runaway slaves had always been sufficiently severe to create an effective deterrent. “But?”
“There is a curious migration under way, Majesty. The villages of the Glace-Vert have been abandoned. People are taking their livestock and whatever valuables they can carry and moving southward. Many of them are already crammed into Cite Marche.”
“Why?”
“My people were too spread out to conduct proper interrogations, Majesty. This is only the word they were able to pick up from voluntary statements. There is an old superstition in the Fairwitch—” Ducarte paused and coughed lightly. “A creature that supposedly stalks the mountains and foothills, seeking young prey—”
“The Orphan,” the Queen murmured.
“Majesty?”
“Nothing. I know this superstition, Benin; it is older than I am. What has changed?”
“There are new reports, Majesty, of villages assaulted by not one, but an army of such things. My agent in Devin’s Copse found blood and bones on the floors of the empty houses. My people have found eight villages so abandoned. Two of my agents have gone missing themselves, more than a week overdue.”
“What is the alternate explanation?” the Queen asked. But her tone was hollow, for it was an empty question. The dark thing was on the hunt. She could tell Ducarte so, but then he would ask for an explanation, and what story would she tell?
Once, long ago, a frightened young girl fled from a village in the Glace-Vert. She was already in exile, and she had gone north to hide. But she found no comfort in the villages of the Glace-Vert, only abuse, so much so that she chose to starve in the mountains instead. She was prepared to die, but one night she saw a flicker of flame—
“Again, I had no resources to interrogate these people, but I tell you, Majesty, they believed what they were saying. Something is at bloody work in the north, and if it continues to move south, the entire country will be knocking at our door for asylum.”
The Queen leaned back against her throne, a pulse drumming unpleasantly in her temples. Two weeks before, she had woken from a nightmare, the most terrible nightmare of her life, in which the dark thing, not phantom but solid, no longer bound by fire, chased her up and down the corridors of her castle, the length of the new world . . .
Free, she realized. Call it the dark thing, call it the Orphan—and those poor hunted villagers out in the Fairwitch certainly needed to call it something, to name the reason their children sometimes disappeared without a trace—but it was out now, free to roam . . . and would it be coming in this direction? Was there even any doubt?
Evie!
The voice rang inside her head, but the Queen pushed it away, staring sadly at her oldest and most faithful ally. Ducarte leaned forward now, resting his crossed arms on his knees and staring at the ground. He was not sixty yet, but he looked like an old man, worn and exhausted. The old General Ducarte, the Chief of Internal Security whose name had made her entire kingdom tremble, that man was dead, and the Queen mourned him. Ducarte had put down the Callaen rebellion, had helped to transmute the Queen’s grasp on Mortmesne from wood to iron. But he was broken, and the Queen was only now awakening to the fact that sending Ducarte to the Tearling might have been the gravest mistake she had ever made. Without him, there was no one to shield her, not even from the army itself.
Have there been others? she wondered, feeling the question scurry in her mind, back and forth, like a panicked rodent. Other failures? How many mistakes have I made?
“What do you want to do, Majesty?”
The Queen tapped her fingers on the arm of her throne for a moment, then asked, almost idly, “Where’s the girl?”
Ducarte’s expression did not change, but his face paled a fraction, and in that moment, he seemed to grow older. The Queen didn’t like to think of the girl either; the memory of that scene in the tent was terrible, so terrible that she had pushed it to the bottom of her mind. The girl knew so much now—
Evie!
—so many things that the Queen had meant to carry to her grave.
“They brought her in yesterday, Majesty. She’s in the dungeons, safe and sound.”
But Ducarte winced as he spoke.
“I want her well guarded.”
“You worry about jailbreak, Majesty?”
“Of course not. I worry about her dying in custody. Your people don’t have the best record in this department, Benin. I need the girl alive.”
“Her name is a rallying cry for the rebels. Wouldn’t it be better to simply execute her?”
The Queen slammed her fist down on the throne, and had the pleasure of seeing him jump.
“Did you hear me, Benin?”