The Fate of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling #3)(5)

“How are you, pretty?” the jailor asked.

She ignored him, though something seemed to shudder in her stomach. He called her “pretty,” but Kelsea didn’t know whether it was a personal comment or not. She was pretty now, Lily in duplicate, but she would have given anything to have her old face back, though she didn’t know if being plain would have allowed her to escape this man’s attentions. After their third day in the tent, he had administered a thorough, careful beating to her face and upper body. Kelsea didn’t know what had set him off, or even whether he was angry; his face remained empty, void of expression, the entire time.

If I had my sapphires, she thought, staring back at him, refusing to drop her eyes lest he view such behavior as weakness. Weakness encouraged him. Kelsea had spent many hours of this journey fantasizing about what she would do if she ever got her sapphires back. Her short life as queen had comprised many forms of violence, but the threat presented by the jailor was entirely new: violence that seemed to come from nowhere, to accomplish nothing. The very senselessness of it made her despair, and this, too, reminded her of Lily. One night, perhaps a week ago, she had dreamed of Lily, of the Crossing, a bright and gaudy nightmare of fire and raging ocean and pink dawn. But Lily’s life was encapsulated somehow in the sapphires, and they were lost to Kelsea, and now she wondered, almost viciously, why in hell she’d had to go through that, to see so much. She had Lily’s face now, Lily’s hair, Lily’s memories. But what purpose did it all serve, if she couldn’t see the end of the story? Row Finn had told her that she was a Tear, but she didn’t know what that was worth without the jewels. Even Lady Andrews’s tiara was gone now, lost in the camp. Everything of her old life had been left behind.

For good reason.

True. It was important to keep the Tear before her now. Her death must lie somewhere at the end of this journey—she wasn’t even sure why she was alive now—but she left behind a free kingdom, headed by a good man. Her mind conjured an image of Mace, grim and unsmiling, and for a moment she missed him so badly that tears threatened to spill from beneath her closed lids. She fought the impulse, knowing that the man who sat across the wagon would take pleasure in her distress. She was sure that one of the reasons he had beaten her so badly was that she had refused to cry.

Lazarus, she thought, trying to alleviate her dismal mood. Mace sat on her throne now, and although he did not see the world precisely as Kelsea did, he would be a good ruler, fair and decent. But still Kelsea felt a subtle agony, growing with each mile traveled. She had never been outside her kingdom, not once in her life. She didn’t know why she was still alive, but she was almost certainly going to Mortmesne to die.

Something slid along her calf, making her jump. Her jailor had reached across the floor of the wagon and was stroking her leg with one finger. Kelsea could not be more revolted if she had found a tick burrowing into her skin. The jailor was grinning again, his eyebrows lifted as he waited for a response.

I am already dead, Kelsea reminded herself. On paper, she had been a dead woman walking for months. There was great freedom in the thought, and that freedom allowed her to draw her legs inward, as if to curl up in the corner of the wagon, and then, at the last moment, to arch her back and kick her jailor in the face.

Down he went, landing sideways with a thump. The riders around them exploded in laughter, most of it unkind; Kelsea sensed that her jailor was not very popular with the infantry, but that fact would not help her here. She tucked her legs beneath her and brought her chained hands forward, ready to fight as best she was able. The jailor sat up, blood trickling from one of his nostrils, but he seemed not to notice it, didn’t even bother to wipe it away as it worked its way down toward his upper lip.

“I was only playing,” he said, his voice petulant. “Doesn’t pretty like games?”

Kelsea didn’t reply. The rapid changes in mood had been her earliest indication that he wasn’t right in the head. There were no patterns of behavior that she could anticipate. Anger, confusion, amusement . . . each time, he reacted differently. The man had noticed his nosebleed now, and he wiped the blood away with one hand, smearing it on the wagon floor.

“Pretty should behave herself,” he scolded, his tone that of a tutor with a wayward pupil. “I’m the man who cares for her now.”

Kelsea curled up in the corner of the wagon. Again she thought, ruefully, of her sapphires, and with a blink of surprise, she realized that she actually meant to survive this journey somehow. The jailor was only one in a series of obstacles to be overcome. In the end, she meant to go home.

The Red Queen will never allow that to happen.

Then why is she taking me back to Demesne?

To kill you. She probably means to put your head in the place of honor on the Pike Road.

But this seemed too easy to Kelsea. The Red Queen was a direct woman. If she wanted Kelsea dead, Kelsea’s body would be rotting on the banks of Caddell. There must be something the Red Queen wanted from her, and if so, she might yet go home.

Home. This time it was not the land she thought of, but people. Lazarus. Pen. The Fetch. Andalie. Arliss. Elston. Kibb. Coryn. Dyer. Galen. Wellmer. Father Tyler. For a moment Kelsea could see them all, as though they were gathered around her. Then the image was gone, and there was only glaring sunlight in her eyes, making her head ache. Not a vision, only her mind, trying to free itself. There would be no more magic, not anymore; the reality was this dusty wagon, rolling inexorably onward, taking her away from her home.