“His contact gave us the name Gareth, Majesty. But that may be an alias.”
“And where was he found?”
“Off the Cord Launch, Majesty,” one of the soldiers below the dais replied. “Trying to escape in a skiff. We found more than a thousand pounds in the bottom of the boat.”
“Indeed? And where did this thousand come from?”
“Bishop Laurence’s manse. The bishop has confirmed that this is the fortune that was stolen from him several nights ago.”
Low murmuring passed through the court. News of the robbery of Bishop Laurence had traveled the city like wildfire, despite the Church’s attempts to keep it quiet; the bishop’s servants were not discreet, and it was too good a tale. The bishop had invited a pro into his chambers, a woman dressed as a priest. The costume was clearly the most scandalous part of the tale, though Elyssa had hardly been surprised to hear it; God’s Church was a collection of fetishists if she had ever seen one. When the servants came the next morning, they found Bishop Laurence unconscious, badly beaten, and his private store of gold cleaned out.
“Well, we all know that tale,” Queen Arla remarked. Elyssa sensed private glee beneath her mother’s words; the Queen loathed the Church. She might claim that her objections were philosophical, but Elyssa knew that the matter was jealousy. Her mother hated the priests’ hold over the kingdom, hated the fact that there was widespread fear not inspired by herself. The Queen had to play sweet with the Arvath in public, to keep the Holy Father happy, but she loved to see the Church humiliated as much as anyone else.
“But this is no woman,” the Queen said after a moment. “Where is his accomplice, the prostitute who dressed up as a frock?”
There was a long silence, and then Welwyn Culp replied stiffly. “I have been unable to compel that information, Majesty.”
This time, the murmuring was louder. Culp was a virtuoso among interrogators; he never failed to produce answers. The Queen often declared Culp one of her most valued assets, but Lady Glynn, Elyssa’s old tutor, had been a staunch opponent of torture, and Elyssa had taken her beliefs to heart. She hated Welwyn Culp, hated everything his lower dungeons represented, so much so that she had once presented her mother with a passage, carefully copied in her own hand from one of Lady Glynn’s books, a historical analysis on the inefficacy of torture in interrogation. Elyssa had been only eleven or twelve then, still young enough to believe that her mother would be swayed by the passage’s logic, its faultless combination of numbers and reason. Instead, the Queen had ordered her locked in Culp’s dungeons for the night. It was Culp himself who had dragged Elyssa downstairs, past the regular dungeons and into the sunken chambers beneath: mold-encrusted rooms where the smell of blood hung in the air like rotten incense and the paving stones still bore traces of decades-old gore. Culp had locked Elyssa into an empty cell . . . empty save for a long, raised wooden board, set with manacles at hand and foot, which stood in the center of the room.
Elyssa had stared at that board all night, her eyes wide, unsleeping. She sensed ghosts in the room, not spectral beings but something much worse: an echo of endless suffering, as much a part of the place as the foundation stones beneath her feet. In the morning, when Culp had come to let her out, Elyssa had gone as docilely as a lamb, and she had taken the lesson to heart. She never raised the issue of Welwyn Culp with her mother again . . . but she should have, she realized now, staring at the bruised panoply of colors on the prisoner’s skin.
“Well, Gareth, or whatever your name is,” Queen Arla remarked, “you have a choice before you. You can either give me the name of your accomplice, or I can hand you back to Culp for another go. Depend upon it, he will make you talk in the end.”
Elyssa shook her head in silent disagreement. This was not the first member of the Blue Horizon the army had captured, and others had talked . . . but they had merely been middlemen: fencers of stolen goods or dealers who had provided the Blue Horizon with weapons. Gareth seemed different. Despite his injuries, he stood straight, with no hint of begging or obeisance, and his light eyes did not flinch from the anger in her mother’s face. The Blue Horizon had incurred Queen Arla’s wrath in a variety of ways, but Elyssa often thought that their real crime was this: they would not kneel. Her mother could threaten all she wanted; this man would never talk.
“Well?” her mother demanded. “Where is the woman? Your accomplice?”
“Picture a world where there are no rich and poor,” Gareth said flatly. “A world where all are equally valuable. This is the better world. I see it all the time.”
Elyssa could almost see her mother’s ears begin smoking. The Queen probably didn’t know the origin of the words, but Elyssa did; they were the litany of William Tear, who had founded the Tearling nearly three hundred years before. Lady Glynn had also been a great admirer of William Tear, though that was nothing that Elyssa’s mother needed to know about. The Queen had brought Lady Glynn to the Keep to teach Elyssa about power politics, and while Lady Glynn certainly knew about such things, she was also a devout believer in William Tear’s better world. When Elyssa was sixteen, Lady Glynn had taken an unthinkable step for a noble, dissolving her family seat and redistributing her acres to the nearly three hundred tenants who worked on her land. The Queen had been furious, the kingdom in uproar, when Lady Glynn disappeared.
Did you kill her? Elyssa wondered, staring at her mother. She asked this question often in her head, though she had never been able to bring herself to ask it aloud. But the entire Queen’s Guard stood ready to kill at the Queen’s command, and no one had seen or heard from Lady Glynn in nearly five years. She was dead, all right. The Queen’s anger had been too terrible.
“Your Majesty would compel me to speak,” Gareth continued from the foot of the throne, bringing Elyssa back to herself. “But Your Majesty does not understand the Blue Horizon in the least.”
The Queen muttered something inaudible, but it had the ring of profanity. Gareth was right; she did not understand them. Elyssa herself had never spoken with any member of the Blue Horizon, but thanks to Lady Glynn, she knew what they wanted well enough. A world with no rich and poor was only the beginning; William Tear had wanted to eradicate narcotics, trafficking, bigotry, illiteracy, ignorance, organized religion, greed . . . in short, all the ills of society. For a brief time, he had even succeeded, before his new civilization sank back down into the old mire. Now the Blue Horizon meant to follow in his footsteps. The rebels were a relatively new development in the Tearling; they had first shown up when Elyssa was a child. But they clearly weren’t going anywhere.
How is he still standing? Elyssa wondered, staring at the dark-haired man below her. His injuries should have had him on his back, but instead he stared up at the Queen, defiance in every muscle. And Elyssa suddenly wondered why her mother had brought him here, to her audience chamber, when such an outcome was inevitable. Did she mean to demonstrate publicly that the Blue Horizon were intractable? That seemed to be it, for now her mother gave a rueful sigh, and spoke in tones of ersatz regret.