The Queen of the Tearling (Queen of the Tearling, The) by Erika Johansen

Author:Erika Johansen [Johansen, Erika]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Mort Treaty had been spread out on the large dining table that stood at one end of Kelsea’s audience chamber. It was short for such a document, only several sheets of thick vellum that had browned slightly with age. Kelsea touched the sheets gingerly, fascinated to see her mother’s initials, ER, scrawled messily in black at the bottom left of each page. On the right was a separate set of initials, scrawled in dark red ink: QM. The final page of the document contained two signatures: on one line, “Elyssa Raleigh,” the handwriting almost illegible, and on the other, “Queen of Mortmesne,” neatly written in the same bloodred ink.

She truly doesn’t want anyone to know her real name, Kelsea realized, her intuition flickering. It’s desperately important to her that no one finds out who she really is. But why?

Kelsea was disappointed to find the language of the treaty as straightforward as Mace had claimed. The Tearling was obligated to provide three thousand slaves per year, divided into twelve equal shipments. At least five hundred of them needed to be children, at least two hundred of each gender. Why so many children? Mortmesne took a quota of slave children from Callae and Cadare as well, but children weren’t much use for hard industrial labor or mining, and Mortmesne had few farms. Even if there were a disproportionately high number of pedophiles in the market, they couldn’t go through children so quickly. Why so many?

The terse, mechanical language of the treaty provided her with no answers. If any individual shipment failed to reach Demesne by the eighth day of the month, the treaty granted Mortmesne the right to immediately enter the Tearling and satisfy its quota by right of capture. But, Kelsea noticed, the document placed no limits on the length of that entry, nor did it include any requirement of withdrawal when conditions were met. Reluctantly, she was forced to admit that Mace was right: by stopping the shipment, Kelsea had given the Red Queen an umbrella grant to invade. What had possessed her mother to sign such a one-sided document?

Be fair, a new voice cautioned in her mind. The voice was neither Carlin’s nor Barty’s; Kelsea couldn’t identify it, and distrusted its pragmatism. What would you have done, with the enemy at the very gates?

Again, Kelsea had no answer. She gathered the pages of the treaty together into a neat sheaf and straightened them, feeling sick. A new idea occurred to her, one that would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago, but Kelsea had already found her mind trying to insulate itself from further disaster by imagining the worst. She turned to Mace. “Was my mother assassinated?”

“There were several attempts,” Mace replied indifferently, though Kelsea thought his indifference feigned. “She nearly died of nightshade poisoning when someone got it into her food. That was when she decided to send you away for fostering.”

“So she did send me away to protect me?”

Mace’s brow furrowed. “Why else?”

“Never mind.” Kelsea looked back down at the table, the treaty in front of her.

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