deliberately, but if only we could all come together, just once, all of us at the same time. . . .
But even this thought faded as Fallon threw her through the doorway. Aislinn landed, sprawling, on the hard-packed dirt floor of the cottage, and a sizable puff of dust rose into the air around her, causing her to cough. Fallon was advancing now through the open doorway, little more than a hulking silhouette against the sunlight. He outweighed her by at least five stone. The world was not a fair place; Aislinn had accepted that fact long before she could walk. But fair or no, this should not be the choice a woman faced: to give in and live, or fight and die. Fallon grasped her ankle, and it was then that Aislinn saw the poker, lying half out of the fireplace. Someone, probably her sister Lita, who was lame and could not work in the fields for long, had been stoking the fire in preparation for dinner, and there was a good blaze going. The poker’s tip glowed a bright and cheerful red; Aislinn stared at it as though hypnotized.
“Come here, girlie,” Fallon whispered, tugging her leg, pulling her toward him. “You be nice, now—”
But he got no further, for Aislinn had already grabbed the poker and swung it around, bashing him in the face.
The screaming was terrible, so terrible that it brought Aislinn’s parents and the rest of the tenants running across the field. But by the time they got there, the deed was already done: Fallon lying on the floor, covered with burn marks and large, round wounds where Aislinn had stabbed him with the poker. Eventually word was sent to Lady Andrews’s castle, and the search was begun. But Aislinn had already disappeared, fled into the open Almont, knowing that there was no other option, that they would kill her if they found her.
She spent that first night in a cornfield, picking locusts from her hair, shivering though the night was hot, and when she rose the next morning, hungry and thirsty, she knew that the best course of action was to flee farther. She had no water, but she could follow the remaining trickle of the Crithe, work her way toward the central Almont, and perhaps find a new village, distant enough from Lady Andrews’s acreage that she would not be known. This seemed a decent enough plan . . . until Aislinn thought of Fallon’s stupid grin, his grasping hands, of Lady Andrews tapping her chest with the crop.
That was when she knew that she wasn’t going anywhere.
Chapter 6
THE EMPRESS
For a supposedly Christian nation, the Tearling has evinced a stunning ability to accept the presence of magic. Seers, ghosts, even street magicians coexist happily alongside God and the Devil, and people who cross themselves will also live by prophecy. This is a contradiction of confounding proportions, but this historian believes that it can be explained by a single defining event: the Crossing.
No one but William Tear has ever understood how the Crossing itself was accomplished, how two thousand men and women departed America that was and ended up on a shore that existed on no map. The little information available to us suggests that the mechanism of the journey was a closely guarded secret, even among Tear’s inner circle. But explanation is not necessary for belief. More than three centuries on, that single voyage continues to hold the popular imagination, far more tightly than the Bible ever will.
—The Glynn Queen and the Rise of Atheism in the Tearling: A Treatise, Father Tyler
Highness, we shouldn’t be here,” Barty said. He spoke in a low, urgent voice, as though he had not already made this remark some ten or twelve times. “Your mother will surely hear of it.”
“Of course she will,” Elyssa replied. “But it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t be here.”
She crept closer to Gareth’s bed, moving quietly . . . but not too quietly. She wanted him to wake up. She had spent the past week going over her mother’s various security reports on the Blue Horizon, finding them almost entirely worthless. Oh, they covered the Blue Horizon’s nefarious deeds well enough: acquisition of arms, robbery of nobles, raids on Arvath storehouses. But they did not include, to Elyssa’s mind, the important information. They did not report who had founded the Blue Horizon, or when, or why they had suddenly appeared in such force in the past few years. They did not report why