The Queen found her matches, sat up, and lit the candle. Her chamber looked as always, crimson walls and furniture. They’d had to replace almost all of the furnishings after the dark thing’s fire this past summer, but her furnishers had done an admirable job, making the new room almost identical to the old. Where were those furnishers now? Fled, most likely, to join Levieux and his band of traitors. A civil war raged in Demesne, and on some days the Queen could convince herself that she was winning. But most days she knew she was not.
This is what the fall feels like, the Queen thought, wrapping herself in her robe. As a child, she had read her history; her nurse, Wright, had forced her to read many pages on the fall of dictators throughout the world. But no one ever mentioned how soporific the experience was, almost narcotic, like being lulled to sleep. She was fighting an invisible enemy, one who did not announce his victories but stole away into the night. Gradually, more and more of her city was being annexed by Levieux and his rebels, and she only found out about specific incursions after the deed was done. Paralysis was setting in, for it was easy, so damned easy, to simply sit here, barricaded in, clutching her crown, her throne, until someone came and took them away.
On her bedside table, twinkling darkly in the candlelight, lay the two Tear sapphires, and the Queen stared at them for a long moment, hearing the girl’s voice inside her head: You lost.
Yes, she had lost. Whatever the girl had done, she had done it well. The sapphires were a broken tool, just like Ducarte. When the Red Queen went to bed, Ducarte had been down the hall, closeted with several of the Queen’s generals. To the outward eye, it looked like a strategy meeting, but the Queen knew what it really was: hiding. All of her generals were now hunted, for it was common knowledge that she had compensated them out of the treasury. If the regular army got hold of any of the high command, their fates would be no prettier than her own.
More rustling from the far wall.
With a sigh, the Queen tucked the sapphires into her pocket, then tiptoed toward the far corner of the room. If a rat was here, she would kill it. There was nowhere for it to hide, except beneath the bed or the sofa. As a child, she used to kill rats to pass the time when she was left alone.
Evie!
She placed her fingers against her temples, willing the voice away. But these days, it seemed that all the power in the world would not give her command of her own mind. Her mother’s voice was always there, hectoring, criticizing, finding fault. The girl had woken the Beautiful Queen, and she would not go back to sleep. The floor was freezing against the Queen’s feet, and she cast around for her slippers, finding them beneath her desk. She was halfway across the room when the rustling came again, directly over her head.
Evie!
The Queen looked up and felt her blood turn to ice.
There was a little girl on the ceiling. Her thin limbs were white and bloodless. Her grimy fingers appeared to be latched to the wood, allowing her to cling there like an insect. Her back faced the Queen, dark hair hanging beneath her. She was dressed in rags.
The Queen forced herself to take a deep breath, deep enough to make her muscles unlock. She backed toward the wall and the little girl followed, scuttling across the ceiling like a spider. The rustling sound was the child’s knees, scraping against the wood. It reached the join of wall and ceiling and began to crawl down the wall. Again the Queen thought of a spider, not the webbed spiders of southern Mortmesne but the hunting spiders of the Fairwitch foothills, which would stalk their prey for long minutes across grass and rocks. They were slow in the early going, but could move like lightning as they closed in.