Kelsea retreated to the back wall of her cell and slid down to the floor. She considered lighting her candle again, then discarded the idea. Thinking was always easier in the dark.
Eight months ago, she had had no magic at all. She had been a young girl with a decent brain, a good education, and a strong conviction that some things were definitely right and others definitely wrong. One sapphire had lain around her neck since her infancy, but it had only been a jewel. She had been royal, perhaps, but not remarkable. Life had been ordinary. She had never felt like a queen.
On the journey to New London was when she had felt the first difference. It was early one morning, she remembered, perhaps the day of the hawk, perhaps some other. But everything had begun to change from that moment onward. Because she was nineteen, the age of ascension? It seemed as good an explanation as any, but still it rang false. Nineteen-year-olds were fools, and William Tear would have known that.
They were together, Kelsea recalled suddenly. Both sapphires. I held them together, in my hands.
Could that be it? She didn’t know. Where had the second sapphire come from? In Katie’s town, two exploration parties had already gotten as far as the foothills of the Fairwitch; surely one of those parties would eventually come across sapphire in the mountains, where it was nearer to the surface. Easy to make a necklace, once you had the raw jewels. Row Finn was the best metalworker in the Town, but by no means the only one.
How does this help you? her mind demanded. All of this history, how has it ever helped?
But that voice carried no weight with the adopted daughter of Carlin Glynn. History always mattered. There was a pattern here, and sooner or later, it would begin to repeat itself. Both Kelsea and Jonathan Tear had inherited kingdoms that were falling apart. They were falling apart for different reasons, true, but—
You’re wandering. You’ve had one of the jewels around your neck since you can remember. So why did it lie there for so many years, doing nothing?
Perhaps there was nothing to do.
This felt right. All of those years, she had been hidden in the Reddick, safe in anonymity. Many people had been hunting her, but none of them had found the cottage. If they had, would Kelsea’s jewel have lain, meek and quiescent, around her neck? The same jewel that had killed the assassin who dragged her from her bathtub?
He was trying to take my necklace off, she remembered, but this fact only seemed to confuse the matter further. Where did such power come from? How could a sapphire act as its own enforcer? Kelsea had given the jewels to the Red Queen of her own free will, but the Red Queen had not been able to use them, though she certainly knew more of magic than Kelsea did herself. Did the jewels have a mind of their own? If so, why choose Kelsea? The Raleighs had worn the jewels for years, but as far as Kelsea knew, there had been no hint of magic about them.
She looked up, broken from the run of her thoughts. She had heard something, down the hallway on her left. She had the measure of this dungeon now, and this sound did not belong: a sliding rasp, as though something had scraped the wall of the corridor. There was no other sound, not even from the accused thief up the corridor, and Kelsea realized then that she had not heard from him in days. People probably died in these cells all the time. The Red Queen’s page, Emily, came down to check on Kelsea at least twice a day . . . but these sounds were not hers.
Another rasp, this one soft, almost furtive, definitely closer. Something inside Kelsea went cold, and without thinking, she reached over to the small pile of provisions by her bedding, feeling around for the rock, Katie’s rock. Katie had thought it was blue quartz, but Kelsea had examined it for a long time in the candlelight before deciding that it was sapphire, like those in her necklaces, the same sapphire that seemed to run through the bedrock of the Tearling. It might be easiest to get at in the Fairwitch, but it was everywhere, anchoring her kingdom, shaping the ground beneath the Town, and Kelsea had recognized the blue glow lighting Katie’s path with no problem at all.