Roz looked at her wet, shining pearl-face in the real mirror and thought about those who had to go through the maze, endure the monster and the mystery of the Trials, had to walk in blood to Rosamond’s side.
The Court had created the monster—a fierce hybrid beast that all the men who made their way through the maze had to fight—by using the same science they’d used to create their perfect queen. Sometimes Rosamond felt like
“Let me put cream on that,” said Miri.
“When I give my speech,” Roz said, “I could tell them all not to fight.”
Miri gave her a patient look. “Would they listen, Roz?”
“They should,” Roz muttered.
“And you should win our fights,” Miri murmured. “You’re better than I am. But you don’t. Try to be a little sneaky, Rosamond. You have to work within the rules of the Trials.”
But the rules of the Trials said men would kill each other, and she would belong to the survivor. Handed over like a bloodstained trophy.
She felt it press down on her sometimes, so heavy it was like stones being piled on her chest, making it impossible for her to move or breathe. She was meant to be worth so many lives.
Tor should have been the favorite to win Rosamond’s hand. He knew that much. He was the best at every exercise. He had taken great pains to be the best, worked long hours to make himself worthy.
He could never be worthy enough. That was not the point, or the code of the courts of love. The aim was to have all you could to offer on your lady’s altar.
But he wasn’t the favorite. He didn’t make friends easily, or rather, he made the wrong sort of friends. There were groups of the strongest boys, the quickest and the cleverest, and then there were the boys who fell in the maze, who were burned or scarred or torn at by monsters, who never solved a riddle. Tor could not help it. He always went back for them. Most of Tor’s friends died. The training was meant to weed out the weak.
Tor took the judgment of his peers and bowed his head, and was ashamed. He knew it was time-wasting, that it was an insult to Rosamond, like choosing someone else before her. It was his duty and his only desire to put her above all others. It worried him, the way his head always turned at a cry. It worried him that he could not seem to crush this weakness.
It also worried him that they only did training exercises. Surely there was some way to use his training to serve the queen now, to protect her city.
He’d always been sure that if there was something real happening, he would do the right thing.
And now it was only a few weeks until the Trials, something real was finally happening, and he wasn’t fast enough.
A ruffian had dared break into the Order and steal the small gold statue of Rosamond that received their offerings of incense in the training square. He’d swooped in, before the horrified eyes of three hundred training recruits, and grabbed a symbol of their queen.
All the other recruits were far behind now. The thief had lost them when he’d started swinging from the rafters. It was like nobody else had been spending nights making sure they could bear all their own weight and more on their arms.
There was a narrow space between the ceiling of the attics and the outside of the roof, where they both had to slither and crawl, and the blasphemer was less bulky than Tor, able to go faster and slip through smaller spaces, and he almost got away. Then they reached the oriel window and the thief swung through with a crash, like the heavens being shattered.
Tor followed him, and from there it was a sprint across rooftops.
The thief was fast, but so was Tor, and Tor had endurance. He gained remorselessly.
He could see the golden statue glint in the sun, winking in the thief’s hand. Rosamond, waiting for him to save her.
The thief had to check his stride to crouch and leap, going for a roof over the wall, outside the temple grounds. Tor launched himself at him and they went tumbling down to the curved roof ’s edge.
Tor grabbed for the statue. The thief held on, and went for a knife.
Tor slammed an elbow down on the inside of the thief ’s wrist and saw the knife fall from his temporarily paralyzed fingers.
“Now,” Tor said, looking down at the thief ’s face. He was younger than Tor had expected, to be so black in villainy. He was Tor’s age, with snarled flame-red hair. “Please hand over the queen.”
“Oh, is
“Silence,” said Tor.
“Don’t you think we should be informed about that sort of thing before the Tri—”
“I said silence!” Tor shouted.
The blasphemer’s dagger looked poisoned, so Tor kicked it over the edge of the roof.
“Hey!” he had the gall to yell. “That was expensive!”
“I’m sure you can steal another one,” Tor said through his teeth. “Or you could if you weren’t going to be quartered in the square.”
That sent the thief into a spasm of frenzied activity. He wouldn’t have been bad with some training, Tor thought, but keeping him pinned was fairly easy, even though the rascal tried to bite.
Tor caught his blaspheming face between two gloved fingers and held him still.
“None of that.”
Tor realized his error almost immediately. He’d let go of the statue.
The thief immediately did so as well, and Tor watched, with time stretched slow by horror, as the gleaming queen rolled toward the gutter.
Then the thief elbowed Tor, hard and efficient, in the eye, rolled and dived, and stood on the edge with the statue in one hand—and one of the Nest boys who the masters hired to wash the upper windows in another. The thief held them both out over the street, the boy’s feet scrabbling on the edge of the gutter.
The statue would be damaged. The boy could be killed.
“Which one is it going to be?” the thief asked.
It shouldn’t even have been a question. It should be Rosamond, or any small part of her, before the world. But Tor couldn’t take his eyes off the Nest child’s fraying garment in the thief ’s grip. It could tear and the child could die without any decision being made at all.
He could save both, he told himself. He was fast enough.
So he lunged for the boy, caught him small and safe against his chest, and grabbed air where the thief should have been. He looked across a wall and saw the glint of the gold statue and the flame of the thief’s hair, already distant.
Tor touched the pin he wore proclaiming the Order, with the comm inside it, to report his failure to the masters.
As he did so, he let go of the child, and saw the child’s dirty, grinning face.
He didn’t look scared.
Of course he didn’t. Of course both the thief and the child were from the Nests, and the child had never been in any danger at all.
Tor was so unutterably stupid. He had failed Rosamond again.
He could have the child quartered in the square, but he didn’t have the stomach for it. He waved him back to his work, and he thought, next time, my queen, next time I will be strong enough and good enough. He did not know if he was lying to himself again.
He did not know if he was ever going to be ready for the Trials.
Yvain knew perfectly well that he’d been an idiot. The statue had not been worth the risk. But then, the statue was Rosamond. She never was worth the risk, was she?
He walked through the sunlit square with the statue stashed safe beneath his regulation winter jacket, humming to himself. That big Order trainee with the South-dark skin and the eyes of a fanatic might have covered him in bruises and given him a bad moment—would even a knight sacrifice a kid for a piece of metal?—but Yvain