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.
“All of you Blue Horizon fools are alike. You will not be reasoned with. Very well, you