“Get the body out of his sight—there, now. That’s better, isn’t it?”
I blinked, and found myself crouched on the stones, my arms empty. Three of my fingernails had been ripped away, leaving nothing but pink pulp. Perhaps that’s why my hands were shaking so badly; perhaps that’s where all the blood had come from.
Fine white skirts brushed my knees. Gentle fingers touched my face, tilting it upward, and I was sufficiently returned to myself to feel shame, that Queen Yvanne the First would see my coward’s face covered in snot and tears.
She did not look ill anymore. Her veil was pulled back over her crown, and her cheeks were flushed, her skin taut.
She smiled down at me, and for a tilted, dizzy moment I was standing again in a dark-paneled office with a white card clutched in my hand. The back of my hand throbbed sharply, in memory.
I realized then what had been wrong about the voice: It had not spoken in Middle Mothertongue.
“Well done, Corporal Mallory,” said Vivian Rolfe.
9
I WASN’T SHOCKEDor dismayed. I wasn’t anything, really, except tired, and a little chagrined, as if I had fallen for a rather cruel joke. I wanted to leave. I wanted to fall asleep, or wake up, or run away.
But the first queen who was also the former Minister of War, a paper doll of a woman switching from one costume to the next, looked down at me and said, quietly, “On your feet, Corporal.”
I stood up.
A flock of attendants descended, cooing and fretting as they shuffled me out of the hall. I followed them placidly, holding my hands out from my sides so they did not accidentally brush against my body.
We spiraled up one staircase and then another. They deposited me in a small, barren tower room and left.
It was cold. The windows were uncovered, and the wind licked through the room like a tongue, worming beneath the collar of my coat, tasting the ruined beds of my nails. There were logs stacked in the hearth, but it did not occur to me to search for a tinderbox, or even to button my coat. I would have had to use my hands, and I didn’t want to use my hands.
The light fell. The tongue of the wind grew teeth and chewed at me. Snow spat through the windows, scudding over my boots.
Footsteps sounded sometimes on the other side of the door, and I called out, but it was difficult to speak through the chattering of my teeth. Once I managed to ask, “Where is she?”
A voice answered, soothingly, “Her Majesty will speak with you soon.”
I hadn’t been asking about the queen.
Eventually, though, she arrived, sweeping into the room like the sun itself, orbited by attendants. They scurried to light the fire and pull the drapes, sending me furtive, appalled looks from the corners of their eyes, as if I were embarrassing myself somehow.
I recalled that people were supposed to bow before royalty, or was it kneel? I knelt. My knees cracked like frost underfoot.
The queen looked down at me with her hands folded gracefully at her waist, one atop the other. She murmured softly and the room emptied around us.
Her posture changed as soon as we were alone, loosening at the joints. She rolled her neck to either side and sat, wide kneed, patting the mattress beside her.
“At ease, Corporal.” There was such dry good humor in her voice, such natural authority, that something in me eased, instinctively. I never missed the war, but I missed the sense that someone else, someone better and braver, held the reins of my life.
I rose and perched at the very edge of the bed.
“Sorry for hustling you offstage. It’s just a delicate situation down there, at the moment. Half those bastards were planning coups of their own, before the Hinterlanders beat them to it.” She shook her head. “They loved Yvanne, but love isn’t enough, for a queen. If there’s a woman on the throne, there are ten men trying to take it from her.” At my silence, she prompted, gently, “I imagine you have questions.”
I did—why is the (former) Minister of War dressed up as a medieval monarch, what the hell is going on, et cetera—but I found I didn’t care much about the answers. I shrugged.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Vivian said. “If it matters—I can see why you loved her.”
“I didn’t—that is, I admired her very—”
Vivian continued before I could perjure myself further. “I knew how it would end. I’d read the stories, too. But I really thought, up until the end, that she’d done it.” There was, I thought, real regret in her voice. “And then that little shit killed her. Ancel was in league with the Hinterlanders, as you may have guessed.”
I suppose I had. I hadn’t wanted to think about it, but my brain must have been ticking coldly along, picking at the torn edges of the story and stitching them into something new, as if I were taking notes in the archives.
