near the Fetch, but he was suddenly gone, carried away from her in the whirls and eddies as the crowd surged toward the base of the platform. Niya too was carried forward, so close that she could see Barty and Galen, swords drawn, standing at the foot of the Seat’s steps, and Niya ducked her head, not wanting them to see her. The air felt cold on her face; only then did Niya realize that she was weeping.
Elyssa had clearly said what she meant to say; she was descending the platform. All eight of her guards had surrounded the staircase now, but they were not going to be nearly enough to fight off the crowd, and Niya wondered that Barty did not know it. A great judge of assassins, Barty, but perhaps not of people, for he clearly thought this crowd intended violence. The guards raised their swords, but the horde was determined to get to Elyssa, and after a moment Barty and the rest were hauled away, pulled free of their places and raised in the air . . . not violently, but in places of honor, on people’s shoulders. They struggled mightily, but they were no match for the wave that enveloped them. Barty went into the air just beside Niya, two men holding him high as he flailed, his legs kicking.
“Put me down!” he shouted, raising his sword, and without thinking Niya reached up and grabbed his leg.
“No, Barty!” she shouted. “Do not!”
Barty gaped down at her, but at that moment the crowd reached Elyssa, pulling her from the steps and hoisting her high in the air. Niya took a trembling, relieved breath . . . but not too relieved. There was no danger in the mob, but the Fetch had placed his finger on the heart of the matter: when Arla found out about this little excursion, the world itself might shudder open.
“True Queen! True Queen!”
All around Niya people screamed the words, transported, and despite her misgivings, Niya too was borne along. She didn’t know whether Elyssa was the True Queen or not, but in that moment it hardly mattered, for she was swept along with them, tears rolling down her face, screaming in jubilation as the people carried them off: the eight guards and the True Queen, borne out of the Circus and into the heart of the city.
Book II
Chapter 13
THE DEEP PATCH
And now we must turn our attention to Arlen Thorne, who presents a unique puzzle for a historian. Who was this man, who started as a simple Creche sale and went on to a career of such infamy that, each year on William Tear’s Day, men would dig up his grave and literally piss on the bones? We could call Thorne many things: pimp, villain, traitor, butcher, criminal . . . even war criminal, as the later Glynn archives reveal. All of these names fit, yes, but their use remains an empty exercise in vocabulary, for history has shown us that the Arlen Thornes of this world are far too complex for a single term. His kind defies description.
—Famous Traitors of the Tear: A Compendium, Evan Crawford
Christian thought that finding Arlen Thorne would be an easy matter, for rumors about the young pimp flew around the Creche like moths. They said that he was a noble’s bastard, sold into the Creche shortly after birth. That he had had some sort of wasting disease as a baby, so that his body would not take nourishment, keeping him thin as a rail. They said he owned a seer, a woman of fabulous ghost-white skin whose eyes could dissect a man. All of the rumors combined to create a figure who was positively glamorous by Creche lights, and so Christian had assumed that the voices of the Creche would direct him straight to Thorne, like signposts in the dark.
But Thorne’s stable was not easy to find. He denned in the Deep Patch, and Christian tried never to go there, for even in the twisted moral hierarchy of the Creche, the Deep Patch had an unpleasant reputation. Dogfighting ran on the fourth level, and if one had a stranger fetish than children, he was likely to find it on the fifth. Few men down there would talk about Thorne at all, and they were particularly reluctant to talk about Thorne’s stable. But Christian finally found a man he knew, a longtime ring promoter who now handled dogs, and this man directed Christian to a stifling recess on