from the Rock, but one night when his great-aunt kissed his forehead, he saw the sparkle in her eyes. 'Is it true, Finnikin, that the queen has chosen you to be her king?'
'Do not speak of such things, Aunt Celestina,' he said quietly. 'When there's so much sadness in our kingdom.'
Although Sir Topher had sent messengers requesting his presence, Finnikin could not bring himself to walk the road to the palace. Instead he focused on the task the queen's First Man had assigned him, to account for every one of their citizens based on the last census. It was with a heavy heart that Finnikin began his new role, yet what started as a task of asking heartbreaking questions turned into something that marked the end of years of silence for their people.
'Talk,' he would suggest gently wherever he went. It had been what the novice Evanjalin had allowed him to do on the rock in Sorel. What the queen feared had happened to her people: nobody had talked these past ten years. They had whispered words to survive. Muttered curses beneath their breath. Murmured plans in the deep of the night. Even exchanged words of love. But nobody had told their stories, until Finnikin asked them to.
In the days that followed, he listened, sitting at their tables, if they were fortunate enough to have a roof over their heads, or working alongside them harnessed to a plow, baling hay, thatching roofs. He heard tales of anguish from people as fractured as the land they were rebuilding. He saw more tears in that time than he had seen in his lifetime, but he wrote with a steady hand so the lives of these Lumaterans would not be forgotten. Perhaps, he thought, these chronicles would be read in centuries to come. Perhaps they would act as a deterrent. He could not believe anyone who heard such stories of wickedness would allow it to happen again. Never had he loved his fellow Lumaterans more than in those moments when they told their stories of terror.
'If we challenged or resisted,' Jorge of the Flatlands told him, 'the bastard king's men would return the next day and say, 'Pick one.'' The man fought back a sob. ' 'Pick one you love to die. If not, you sacrifice your whole family. Your whole village.''
'Men were on their knees begging, 'Take me. Take me instead,'' Roison of the River explained.
'We would sit and discuss our plan, Finnikin,' Egbert of the Rock whispered. 'We would work out, as a family, who we would choose to die alongside us if we were forced to decide. Better to make the choice as a family, rather than in moments where there would be no time for good-byes.'
'So men would choose their sons?' Finnikin asked, sickened by the idea of Trevanion having to make such a decision.
The man looked at him with tears running down his face. 'No,' he said, shaking his head. 'No father would leave his daughter behind to be raped and abused. We chose our daughters. Always our daughters.'
As Finnikin and Sir Topher had expected, the royal treasury was almost intact; the curse meant that the impostor king and his men had not had opportunity to squander the gold. Horses and oxen purchased from Osteria and Belegonia provided much needed assistance to those plowing the Flatlands, and the construction of cottages became a priority. Both Osteria and Belegonia had volunteered to send workers to help with the rebuilding, but Trevanion refused to allow any foreigners into Lumatere and kept the borders heavily guarded. In the first week, the Guard brought back fruit and vegetables from Osteria and hunted the woods for game and rabbits. By the end of the second week, activity on the river had begun and the first of the barges came upstream from Belegonia. Finnikin stood with Sefton and the lads, watching his father as he supervised the goods being unloaded. Trevanion's hair and beard had been clipped in the same fashion as the rest of his Guard, which made him seem more like the Trevanion of old. Yet there was still a haunted look in his eyes, and Finnikin knew it would be a long while before songs were sung on the riverbank and laughter rang through the air once more.
That afternoon Finnikin traveled with Sir Topher to see Lady Beatriss. He had caught a glimpse of her earlier that week in the palace village but was reluctant to approach for fear of not knowing what to say. But when he stood before her in the parlor of the manor house, he realized no words were required. She took his face in her hands and kissed him gently on the forehead, then gestured for them to sit, and began to prepare the tea.
'Please do not serve me, Lady Beatriss. It humbles me to have you do so,' Finnikin said.
'It should humble you to have anyone serve you, Finnikin,' she said without reprimand.
On the table before them, Sir Topher laid out the pages of their records. 'We have already recorded the names of all the exiles. If there is a cross marked next to the name, it means we know they died outside the kingdom,' Sir Topher said. 'If there are two strokes, we know they live.'
She looked at him for a moment. 'Exiles? We called you 'our lost ones.'' She looked at the records in front of her, her fingers brushing gently over the names. A small sound escaped her lips and she covered her mouth with her hand. 'Lord Selric and his family?'
Sir Topher nodded soberly. 'There was a plague in Charyn. Three years ago.'
'All of them?' she asked in a hushed tone. 'All those beautiful children?'
Sir Topher cleared his throat and nodded again.
She went back to the list on the table. 'The family of Sym the potter?'
'Sarnak,' Finnikin said flatly.
Her face paled. 'Sarnak,' she whispered. 'The queen spoke to us about it just yesterday, when I visited the cloister of Sagrami with Lady Abian. I could tell the queen exactly when the massacre had taken place. When my Vestie was three years old, she screamed for days until she had no voice left. I could only sit by and watch over her. Tesadora gave her a tonic that would make her sleep. We had no idea what had happened, only that it must have been catastrophic for our people.'
'The queen walked your sleep that night and said it was the reason for her journey to the cloister in Sendecane,' Sir Topher said gently.
'I was never aware of her walking my sleep. It was a shock when the queen spoke of it. For a long time we could not question Vestie, for she began to speak late, and even then it was only a few words. But I always sensed there was something different about my child each month during those days of walking.'
'Good or bad?' Finnikin asked.
'Unlike the queen's or Tesadora's experience, it was usually peaceful for Vestie. Tesadora was somehow able to keep the darkness away from her. But during the time of Vestie's unrest, which we now understand to be the time of the massacre in Sarnak, I remember praying to the goddess Lagrami to protect the queen. And so our goddess sent her to Sendecane, where she was safe and at peace for a time.'
'So you knew it was the queen all along?' Finnikin asked.
She nodded. 'Vestie's only word for a long time was 'Isaboe.' But you had best ask Tesadora about the connection between Vestie and the queen. There are things about the curse and magic that I will never understand.' She looked up, sensing Finnikin's gaze on her.
'So you spoke to the queen?' he said quietly. 'Just yesterday?' He had not seen Isaboe since he placed her on Tesadora's cart. 'Yet the Guard has not been allowed inside the cloister.'
'Tesadora will not allow men near the girls.'
'We would never hurt them, Lady Beatriss,' Sir Topher said.
'The damage is already done, Sir Topher. Boredom made monsters out of the bastard king and his men. They went for the cloister of Lagrami first. It was close to the palace, and the novices had no protection. On the night the impostor's men attacked, not one of them was left inviolate, not even the priestess. One night, they all disappeared, and although I suspected that Tesadora and the novices of Sagrami had taken them into their protection, it was many months before I knew for certain.'
'Wouldn't the impostor king have known where the novices had disappeared to and attacked the Sagrami cloister?' Finnikin asked.
'Oh, he knew,' she said bitterly. 'But if there was one person in this kingdom the bastard king feared, it was Tesadora. Her mother had cursed the kingdom and there were stories that the daughter was even more powerful.'
As he had many times in the past week, Finnikin wanted to tear someone apart with his bare hands. He wanted to be like Trevanion and Perri and forget protocol. Yesterday his father and some of the senior guards had entered the palace dungeon to question the impostor king and his surviving men. Finnikin knew that few words had been exchanged and that the howls from the prisoners could be heard all over the palace. He remembered the look on Sir Topher's face when they later saw the blood-splattered dungeon walls. Horror, certainly. But mostly satisfaction.
'If I could make a request, Finnikin, on their behalf. Could you ask your father to remove some of the guards
