“You’re pacing again,” Galen remarked. “If you can’t keep it together, I’ll have to tie you to a chair.”
“Sorry,” Javel muttered, forcing himself to be still. It was a terrible thing, having hope. Sometimes he longed for the old days. The last six years in New London had been miserable, yes, but at least there had been a cold certainty there.
Outside, the rain had changed from a steady drizzle into a downpour, and on both sides of the street, the vendors hawking their wares had begun to close up shop. Just beneath Javel, on the sidewalk outside, was a pile of curdled horse droppings that no one had bothered to clean up. Abundant windows or not, this wasn’t a good neighborhood. Although Demesne didn’t have an area comparable to the Gut, where nearly everyone was up to no good, in his exploration of the city Javel had found plenty of neighborhoods that the Red Queen’s improvements had failed to reach, where decay had set in. He had plotted these places on a map in his head. This was his usefulness, the reason he didn’t feel like completely dead weight on this enterprise. Dyer had spent most of his life in the Keep, and Galen was more or less a country boy turned Guard. Both of them were intimidated by Demesne’s size, its navigational difficulty, and whenever they had a question about the city’s geography, they turned to Javel.
In his twenty minutes next to the window, Javel had already seen three troops of Mort soldiers go by. Despite the lack of a Gut, in some ways the vast majority of the city was nothing else, everyone doing what they had to and looking the other way. The people of Demesne didn’t seem to consider themselves under martial law, but the city’s standing police force roved the streets ceaselessly. Javel had seen no real unrest, though Galen had pointed out that the Tearling, even under Thomas Raleigh, had always had a much higher tolerance for civil unrest than Mortmesne. Galen said the soldiers were an anticipatory measure, and he was right. Even three strangers could feel the difference in the city now, the rumblings of discontent in quiet quarters. Galen, who never forgot that he was a Queen’s Guard, liked to sit in the pubs at night, making a mug of ale last for hours while acting as the Mace’s ears, and lately he’d heard plenty. The Queen of the Tearling—widely acknowledged by Demesne to be a fearsome sorceress—had marched into the Mort camp and turned back the Mort army at the very gates of New London, just as her mother had done, though no one quite seemed to know how. Javel wondered briefly if the Queen had reinstituted the shipment, but then dismissed the idea. He was no sycophant, like Galen and Dyer, but he had never forgotten the woman he had seen on the Keep Lawn, the woman who had opened the cages. She would cut her own throat before reviving the slave traffic.
Both Dyer and Galen were anxious over the Queen—though each tried to hide it—but there was no more news to be had of her, not in any pub. The rest of the gossip was of Mortmesne’s difficulties, and they were many. Some sort of plague was crossing the northland, emptying villages and scattering the inhabitants. A rebellion was raging in the northern cities, Cite Marche and Arc Nord. The rebels were moving their resistance down to Demesne, and Demesne was waiting for them. Without flesh to peddle, many in the city had lost their jobs, and many more in other industries had temporarily lost their regular subsidy of labor from the Crown. Even the girl in the Auctioneer’s Office had confided to Dyer that she lived in fear of being sacked. Demesne’s economy grew increasingly shaky, and all corners of the city placed the blame squarely on the Red Queen. The invasion of the Tearling, which should have injected some badly needed wealth into the city when the army returned, had yielded nothing.
Javel had assumed that the return of the soldiers would calm the city’s unrest. But instead, the Red Queen had found her problems compounded. The two guards seemed to think that all of this chaos was good, that it would make their job easier. Javel hoped they were right.
“Sir!”
A fist pounded on the door. The voice was Dyer’s, and Javel realized, disgruntled, that Dyer had snuck past him somehow. At a nod from Galen, he went to unlock the door and was nearly thrown backward as Dyer burst into the room, panting.