11. Tabitha
Tabitha
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a girl might get to walk into her own palace without being attacked. You’d think being the actual Queen of the actual realm might come with, at minimum, the front door not trying to kill you.
You would be wrong.
We’re barely through the black granite courtyard when three demons peel out of the shadows near the columns, low-level, ugly, all claws and slit eyes, and come straight for us. Not for the men. For me.
“Oh, come on,” I snap, ducking as Gavriel’s ax takes the first one’s head clean off. “I live here. I pay the mortgage on this dump with my actual soul.”
“They don’t recognise you,” Valerian says, incinerating the second with a flick of violet. “You know why.”
“Because I haven’t thrown myself a coronation, yeah, yeah, I’ve heard the lecture.” Luka bats the third demon into a wall hard enough to leave a dent, and it doesn’t get up. “I just don’t see why the throne needs a whole ceremony. Can’t I just, I don’t know, sit on it and shout ‘mine’?”
“It’s not the chair,” Valerian says, and for once he’s not being cutting about it. “You keep thinking it’s the chair. It isn’t. It’s you. The realm can’t recognise a Queen who won’t recognise herself.”
I don’t have an answer for that, so I do what I always do with things I don’t have an answer for. I file it under later and go looking for the library.
The Palace library is the one part of this whole grim mausoleum I actually love. Towers of shelves, ladders on rails, the smell of old paper and older magic. If I weren’t so busy being hunted I could happily die in here. Well. Again.
Valerian goes straight to the oldest, blackest section, the histories, and starts pulling volumes like he’s got a grudge against them. Azaan lights the sconces. Luka prowls the door. Gavriel sits, which he does like it costs him something, ax across his knees.
“Talk to me about Mordecai,” I say, hauling myself up onto a table because that’s clearly what tables are for. “And don’t do the thing where you tell me a quarter of it and let me find the rest out at the worst possible moment. We’ve established that goes badly.”
Valerian sets a heavy book down and opens it to a page thick with those circle-and-line symbols. His symbols. Mordecai’s mark.
“Long before the sealing,” he says, “Sanguisca had a border. The realm of the Sorcerers sat against ours, the way two countries share a river.” He taps the page.
“They feared us. Not without reason. A realm that runs on desire and darkness doesn’t make for good neighbours.
And Tabeitha, our Queen, was strong. Stronger than anything they had.
So they didn’t fight her head-on. They found a crack and they poured poison into it. ”
“Azazel,” I guess.
“Azazel.” His mouth goes thin. “Ambitious, jealous, and stupid enough to think the Sorcerers would let him keep the throne once they’d used him.
They turned him. He weakened Tabeitha from the inside, challenged her, drained her, and when she was low enough, the Sorcerers struck.
They overpowered her and they sealed the whole realm, all of us, into the book.
To keep us contained. To keep us out of their world for good. ”
I sit with that. The book that appeared in my shop. The book that dragged me here. A prison. A whole world folded up and shut in a drawer.
“What are they, though?” I ask. “The Sorcerers. You keep saying the word like I’m meant to shudder, and I don’t know what it means. Are they people? Demons? What?”
“Neither.” Valerian’s mouth thins. “They’re the other side of the coin, little kitty.
If Sanguisca is a realm of heat and desire and darkness, theirs is a realm of cold and order and unmaking.
Where we create, they erase. Where we burn, they freeze.
They’re not evil, exactly, which is the frightening part.
They don’t hate us. They simply believe a realm like ours shouldn’t be allowed to exist, that it’s a wound in the fabric of things, and they’d close it the way you’d close a wound, without malice, without hesitation.
” He taps the old page. “They folded us into a book and called it mercy. They’d have said they were healing the world. ”
“That’s worse,” I say. “That’s so much worse than evil. Evil you can fight. How do you fight something that thinks switching you off is a favour?”
“You become a wound too big to close.” He looks at me, blue eyes steady. “That’s what a claimed Queen is, Tabby. That’s what Tabeitha was, before they poisoned her. A realm strong enough that the cold thinks twice.”
I file that away with everything else I’m not ready to think about, and I ask the question underneath the question.
“And Mordecai?”
“Was outside the walls when they came down.” Valerian’s blue eyes are far away, three centuries away.
“Tabeitha’s consort. He’d have fought to the last for her, and instead he watched the realm fold shut with her inside it and him left in the cold.
He didn’t get to die with her. He didn’t get to save her.
He got three hundred years alone on the margins of nowhere, with nothing to do but hate. ”
“So he’s not just after power,” I say slowly, the picture assembling itself, ugly and sad. “He wants her back. Tabeitha. That’s what he means when he says he’s been waiting.”
“That’s what he means.”
“And I’m the box she came in.”
Valerian doesn’t answer that. He doesn’t have to.
I can see it on all their faces, the thing none of them want to say, which is that a man who’s spent three centuries grieving a dead Queen is going to be very, very interested in the descendant carrying her soul, and not in a way that ends with me alive.
I look down at the two claw-marks on my arm. Deep down, Tabeitha shifts, and I could swear she’s smiling.
“Well,” I say, hopping off the table. “He can want. Wanting’s free. Now who’s for finding out what my ex actually plans to do about it, because I’ve had quite enough surprises for one lifetime, and I’ve got about seven left.”