She shrugged. “The keep is all that stands. Any fool could tell you the survivors gathered there.”
“I saw the machine and heard it speak. I saw the time-star burning blue.”
She closed her hand into a fist. “And who showed you these things? Skilfar perhaps? Mirrored in ice?”
“I showed them to me. They are written in my blood.” I turned to glance back at the old witch by the door. She hadn’t moved but her smile had left her. “And I saw my sister die. She had all the magic you were hunting for in me. . but the Lady Blue stole that chance from you. Edris Dean stole it. Why haven’t you killed him for that? He works for the Dead King now. . why don’t you reach out and. .” I made a twisting motion with my hands. “Why doesn’t she?” I pointed to the Silent Sister, only to find her gone.
“Edris Dean still works for the Blue Lady,” the queen said. “As do many others.”
“But the Dead King-”
“The Dead King is like a forest fire-the Lady Blue encourages the flames this way or that for her own purposes. The Hundred think this war is being fought for Empire but those of us who stand behind it know there are greater things at stake.”
I tried to consider larger stakes than the whole of Empire. And failed. I wasn’t even interested in the empire, broken or unbroken. All I wanted was for the world to roll on its merry way just as it had been doing for my entire life, and to provide me with a careless middle age and comfortable dotage which I could continue to misspend just as I’d been misspending my youth. I didn’t even want to be king of Red March despite my moaning. Just give me fifty thousand in gold, a mansion of my own, and some racehorses and I wouldn’t bother anyone. I would graduate from a rich lecherous young man to a stinking-rich lecherous old man, with a pretty and accommodating young wife and perhaps a handful of blond sons to occupy some pretty and accommodating young nursemaids. And when age claimed me I’d climb into the bottle just like dear Papa. I had only one stain on the glowing imaginary horizon of my future. .
“I want Edris Dean dead.”
“The man is hard to find.” The queen’s face showed a hint of the murder she wore at Ameroth. “My sister cannot see him and his service to the Blue Lady has taken him far beyond our borders. Patience is the key. In the end your enemies always come to you.”
I thought then of Snorri. The key was the key-Edris would come for that. And Snorri would kill him.
“Your sister-my great aunt. .” It made me uncomfortable to state our relationship so plainly but I’d discovered on my journeys that knowledge-a thing I’d always avoided as a tedious obstacle to having fun-could prove handy in the business of staying alive. Since I had so little of it I decided to lay out what I had in the hopes Grandmother might fill in the gaps. If there’s one thing I know about people, from fool to sage, it’s that they have a hard time not showing that they know more than you do-and of course by doing so they close that gap a little. “My great aunt tried to kill me. In fact she killed hundreds of people. . and she’s done it before!” Suddenly out of nowhere I saw Ameral Contaph, his round face, his eyes narrow with suspicion. Just one of many palace functionaries and a pain in my royal arse, but a man who I spoke to that day and who died in the fire. I saw him against a background of violet flames, lit by their glow. “Wait-Ameral Contaph. . he wasn’t. .”
“Ullamere’s grandson.” The Red Queen inclined her head. “One of eight. The apple that fell furthest from the tree.” She fixed her gaze upon me, eyes grave. I wondered if she knew quite how far I’d fallen from her tree. . if we were talking apples then Jalan Kendeth had dropped from the Red Queen’s boughs, rolled down a hill, into a stream, and been carried out to sea to beach on the shores of a whole other country.
“And the mass murder?” I got back to my point, glancing around for the Silent Sister once more, to find with a start that she now stood behind the throne, her seeing eye hard as a stone. I remembered how she looked that night in her rags, painting her curse on the walls of the opera house.
“This is a war that started before I was born, boy.” Grandmother’s voice came low and threatening. “It isn’t about who wears what crown. It’s not for the survival of a city, a country, a way of life, or an ideal. Troy burned for a pretty face. This is about more than that.”
“Name it then! All this grand talk is very well, but what I saw were people burning.” The words escaped me, unstoppable as a sneeze. I had no idea why I was goading the woman. All I really wanted was to be out of there, back to my old pursuits, working the Jalan charm on the ladies of Vermillion. And yet here I was criticizing the second most powerful woman in the world as if I were her tutor. I quickly started to apologize. “I-”
“Good to see you’ve grown, Jalan. Garyus said the north would make or break you.” I swear I saw her lips twitch with the faintest suggestion of approval. “If we fail in this. If the change that the Builders set in motion is not arrested, or more likely reversed, if magic runs wild and the worlds crack open, each bleeding into the next. . then everything is at stake. The rocks themselves will burn. There will be no countries, no people, no life. That’s what the long war is about. That is what is at stake.”
I drew a breath at that. “Even so. .” I started, mind whirling. War is a game, games take two players, the other side have their own goals. “The Lady Blue and all those working for her. . they’re not looking to destroy the world. Or if they are then there’s something in it for them. Everyone’s got an angle.”
The Red Queen looked over her shoulder at that, eye to eye with her elder sister. “Not completely stupid then.”
The Silent Sister smiled, her teeth narrow, yellow, each set apart from the next. She extended her hand, reaching past the queen’s shoulder, and I flinched, remembering her touch. Fingers uncurled and somehow in her palm lay a poppy, so red that for an instant I thought it a wound.
“Smoking the poppy is an addiction that steps around people’s sense, a hunger that reduces proud men and clever women to crawling in the mire in search of more.” The Red Queen took the flower from her sister’s hand and in her fingers it became smoke, a crimson mist, lifting and fading. “Magic is a worse drug, its hooks sink deeper. And it is magic that fractures the world, magic that will drag us to our end. The world is broken-each enchantment tears the cracks a little wider.”
“The Lady Blue wants to doom everyone because she can’t bear to give up her spells?” Even as I asked it my tone changed from disbelief to credulity. The old whores on Mud Lane would sell more than their bodies for the coin to buy another hit of the resin Maeres squeezed from his poppies. They’d sell more than their souls if they had more to barter.
“In part,” Grandmother agreed. “I doubt she could give up her power. But more than that, she believes there is a place for a self-selected few, beyond the conjunction of the spheres. The Lady Blue thinks that those steeped deeply enough in their magic will survive the end and find new forms in a new existence, just as some among the Builders survived their Day of a Thousand Suns. Perhaps she sees herself as the first god to be born into what will come. Her followers she views as an elite, chosen to found a very different world.”
“And you. . don’t believe?” With a start I realized I’d been addressing her without formality all this time and added in a belated, “Your majesty.”
“What I think would follow such an ending is of no matter,” she said. “I have a duty to my people. I will not allow this to happen.”
And in the end, whatever Alica Kendeth said about the stakes, here was a queen defending her lands, her cities, and those subject to her rule. “And the burnings? The whole damn opera house?” I saw her eyes narrow and added, “Your majesty.”
“The world may be wearing thin but still there are very few places where the unborn may return. The opportunities are seldom, and short-lived, hard to predict. A certain spot in a certain hour. If it is missed there may not be another window through which they may pass for months, and it might lie a thousand miles away. To bring an unborn through the veil at any other juncture requires an enormous expenditure of resource.