You know better, Elyssa Raleigh. If it were only an heirloom, the witch would not be going to such lengths. Don’t you dare take that sapphire off. Not until—
Lady Glynn’s voice cut off sharply. Brenna was striding toward the bed now, her white face twisted in fury . . . just as the Queen always looked during Elyssa’s little rebellions. The similarity between the two women struck Elyssa again.
Until what? she demanded. Lady Glynn remained silent, but even so, there came an answer, soft and diffuse, like a distant echo inside Elyssa’s mind.
Kelsea.
Brenna had closed the distance between them now. She reached down and grabbed Elyssa by the hair, jerking her up off the bed. Around Elyssa, the guards recoiled, and Carroll crossed himself, murmuring a prayer. They saw, yes . . . but they could not see.
“Listen to me, my girl,” Brenna snarled. “Give me the jewel, or you will suffer the worst I have to offer. No nightmare you’ve ever had will begin to compare.”
Elyssa believed her, for she suddenly saw many things, with a merciless clarity that cut through her mind like a blade. The witch was powerful, more powerful than anyone in the Queen’s Wing suspected. Famine was here; Elyssa saw it, as clearly as though the Almont were spread out before her like a vast chessboard. Even those who managed to find water would still die, and Elyssa saw it all: abandoned fields, starving children, corpses rotting in their hovels while the nobles feasted behind locked gates. She saw her mother, sitting on the silver throne, hoarding the kingdom’s meager food in the city while thousands died outside the walls. Her mother would not prevent this famine. Elyssa might have prevented it, had she been less a fool, but that opportunity was gone. The witch’s threat was real, and Elyssa would not be given time.
I will never be the True Queen.
Something deep inside her seemed to wail, but Elyssa did not listen . . . could not. She was transfixed by the image in her mind: a vast black cloud on the horizon, moving swiftly toward the Tearling, growing in power and strength. Her sapphire pulsed at her chest, but it was not painful now . . . only warning.
Magic, Elyssa thought. Real magic, and oh, what I could have done with it, if I had known—
But it was too late for if.
I can’t take it off, Elyssa realized . . . and then, more firmly, clutching the sapphire in her right hand: I won’t.
“You won’t have it,” she told the witch. “Not now, not ever.”
Brenna screamed with rage, and this time even the guards heard it; dimly, Elyssa saw both Dyer and Carroll jump, all of them looking around, as though at a distant alarm. Then the witch bent over her, and Elyssa began to scream, for the face above hers was no longer that of a woman, or anything human at all, only a glaring whiteness from which eyes as blue and cold as death itself spiraled downward, twisting into a hell so deep that it could not be charted, and Elyssa saw the end of everything there: of Gareth, of Tear’s better world, of Elyssa’s dreams for her kingdom, of her own future. There was no future, Brenna’s eyes promised, and no past either, only the unspeakable present . . . and the present was infinite.
Chapter 21
PEACOCKS
The divide between wealthy and poor in the early Tearling was nothing short of an abyss, but the gap was made even worse by the total absence of that concept the ancients called noblesse oblige: the notion that power and privilege convey responsibilities as well as rights. However misguided this principle in application during the pre-Crossing, that aristocratic sense of obligation at least allowed for the possibility of shame. But for nobles of the Raleigh era, privilege came with no strings at all.
—Socialism in the Greater Tear, Michael Klunder
Twenty minutes into his first royal audience, Christian had already discovered that he did not like the nobility. He didn’t like their clothes, which were elaborate to the point of ridiculous, or their hair, which was more ridiculous still. One of the first things Carroll had done after they came to an accord was to take Christian to a barber, who shaved him and sheared his head down to a thin layer of dark brown. The tortured tresses of the horde of rich beggars in front of the throne offended him in some