• An order of men will be set up who are trained for the Trials from childhood. Any family who gives one son to the Order will be given exemption for another son. The Trials offer hope to all contestants, but a properly trained man has a better chance both during the Trials, and later with the Court and the queen.
• For her own safety, the queen is not permitted outside the palace grounds, kept both protected and pure by her guard.
• The only occasion on which the queen will appear and speak in public, in each of her lifetimes, is at the ceremony before the Trials. This speech will impress upon the Trial contestants her absolute authority over their lives and deaths, and the sight of her perfect beauty will inspire them.
Hers was the face that lit a thousand lamps. She had brought peace to a thousand homes across their land.
The mosaic of Queen Rosamond was the only bright thing permitted in the temple. Her image was on the farthest wall in the Great Hall, and they saw her during every meal and every prayer.
She stood tall as a mountain over land and sea, the whole earth a sweep of gold, which she had made bright and prosperous, all the waters calm because a glance of her tranquil eyes had stilled storms.
Her hair streamed over the land, black silk on gold, and her face was calm, kind, and impossibly beautiful.
No woman was born this beautiful. They had to make her.
Clustered around her feet were the skyscrapers of their city, shining silver blades rising higher than any buildings had ever risen before. Their city stretched farther, housed more souls, than any other city ever had, and all these souls were safe in her keeping. In the middle of the city were the sloping roofs that formed the buildings of the temple where Tor’s Order lived. On the mountains outside the city rose the golden dome of the palace, and all the buildings of the Court around it.
The mosaic was two centuries old, but the colors were still as vivid as the queen. Beneath the gorgeous blaze were words carved dark and deep into the old stone:
Tor had learned to read from those words. He’d been four years old when his parents sent him to the temple, thirteen summers ago, so he did not remember his father’s face or his mother’s.
The first face he remembered was the queen’s.
The second face he remembered was Master Roland’s, the oldest of the masters, withered as the last apple left rolling in a basket. He could not teach the trainees how to fight any longer, so his job was to run herd on the youngest, making sure they ate and went to bed, monitoring the machines as they trained to be ready for the Trials.
He found Tor curled on the floor by the mosaic of the queen, looking up into those wide bright eyes.
Tor expected a scolding, but he did not receive one. Master Roland knelt by him, though his old joints cracked like dry tree branches.
“She’s real, you know,” he said in a whisper.
Tor had placed his hand on the shimmering blue stones that formed the hem of Queen Rosamond’s garment, confused, not sure if he was proving she was real or trying to conjure her from the cold stone.
“She is alive this moment,” Master Roland said, and his voice thrilled. “Not so very far from here. She is always alive, ever alive. She never dies. She is the eternal rose. She is the soul of this country. And you are training so you may be chosen as fit to serve her.”
The Order, set up so the right man could be prepared to win the Trials.
Yes, Tor thought, and it all felt so right. He’d known there must be a reason for the Trials, a good reason. For the simulated programs and the real programs, having to hurt his friends, for the lack of any warmth or softness in his life. He’d known there had to be something, somebody, who was worth everything.
Master Roland put out his arm to encircle Tor, to lead him back to the dormitory. A Knight of the Order must learn to sleep and wake on command.
“So do you think you can do it?” he murmured. “Be her one true knight?”
That night and every night, that day and every day, before the first bit of food or first prayer passed his lips, Tor looked up at the queen. Rosamond, rose of the world.
He could do anything, for her sake.
His answer was yes, and yes, and yes.
Rosamond was nothing but trouble. Yvain had known that from the time he was fourteen, from the first moment he’d seen her face stamped on gold.
He’d dreamed about that day every night for the next three years.
He’d hooked a wallet from the lining of a man’s expensive coat. Rosamond bless the fancy designer who’d had the idea of custom-made coats that fit wallets in the lining as a preventative against theft. It meant that all the rich guys now kept their money in the same place.
Then he’d reached the Nests, and opened the wallet, and saw the queen’s face carved on a gold coin.
Rosamond’s face was only put on sovereigns. Sovereigns were only carried by members of the Court. The Court used them as passes into exclusive clubs, as markers of identification. They were worth more than a thousand drachmae—were enough to buy a real house and not just an apartment lower down outside the Nests. They were too valuable ever to spend.
Anyone not of the Court who got caught with one was dead.
Yvain had been a stupid boy. He’d laughed and tossed the coin through the air to Persie, who’d caught it in both hands and gazed at it with awe.
“Rosamond,” she’d said, drawing out the word in disbelief, as if she’d seen the sun rise in a night sky. “There has to be a way we can spend it.”
Then she’d turned it over and over in her hands, watching it gleam.
Yvain and Persie had been together in the Nests since they were little. They’d gotten married when Persie turned fourteen, as soon as it was legal to wed, and had been married for less than two months. Yvain was a boy from the Nests, after all, and one with a criminal record. Marriage was the only way to escape the Trials. And Persie was an orphan girl, with no family to set a brideprice that a boy from the Nests could not afford.
They had planned it like that, to keep each other safe. Yvain could skim the skyscrapers and pick any pocket in the City. He’d promised Persie that she would never regret marrying him.
“Believe me,” Yvain had said, winking at her. “I know when a lady is too much trouble.”
It made him impatient even to think about the Trials. As if their lives weren’t difficult enough, being born with nothing on the horizon but blood and waste, and all for some woman. A face on a useless coin.
Without Persie, he didn’t like to think about what would have happened to him when it was time for the Trials.
He took the hand that didn’t hold the sovereign, and kissed it. Persie smiled, but kept her eyes fixed on the coin in her palm. It caught the multicolored lights of the city below, and the golden lights from the palace up on the hill beyond the city, where the queen lived.
“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, remember,” Persie told him. “And there is the question of a life of luxury. Nothing but gold and sherbet and the veil of Rosamond’s hair between you and the world, if you win the Trials. That would be worth something. Like this coin is worth something. A collector would be interested.”
“Oh, let it drop,” said Yvain. “I’m going to sleep.”
The Nests were called the Nests because they were so high up, the peak of every building, and so many birds lived there. There were not many trees left in the city, so the top of every skyscraper was crammed with the filth and noise of the birds.
Yvain liked to lie on his back and watch the birds wheeling. He never turned his head to the side to look at the mountain where Rosamond had lived for centuries. He had no interest.
He’d gone to sleep like that a hundred times as a child, watching the birds, hearing Persie breathe near him.
When he woke up this time, Persie was gone.
