The Queen of the Tearling Read Free Page A

crying openly now, tracks of tears glinting on his face. Kelsea felt her own eyes wanting to water again, but she took the reins and turned the horse toward Carroll. “We can go now, Captain.”
    â€œAt your command, Lady.”
    He shook the reins and started down the path. “All of you, in kite, square around the Queen,” he called back over his shoulder. “We ride until sunset.”
    Queen . There was the word again. Kelsea tried to think of herself as a queen and simply couldn’t. She set her pace to match the guards’, resolutely not looking back. She turned around only once, just before they rounded the bend, and found Barty and Carlin still standing in the cottage doorway, watching her go, like an old woodsman couple in some tale long forgotten. Then the trees hid them from view.
    Kelsea’s mare was apparently a sturdy one, for she took the uneven terrain surefootedly. Barty’s stallion had always had problems in the woods; Barty said that his horse was an aristocrat, that anything less than an open straightaway was beneath him. But even on the stallion, Kelsea had never ventured more than a few miles from the cottage. Those were Carlin’s orders. Whenever Kelsea spoke longingly of the things she knew were out there in the wider world, Carlin would impress upon her the necessity of secrecy, the importance of the queenship she would inherit. Carlin had no patience with Kelsea’s fear of failure. Carlin didn’t want to hear about doubts. Kelsea’s job was to learn, to be content without other children, other people, without the wider world.
    Once, when she was thirteen, Kelsea had ridden Barty’s stallion into the woods as usual and gotten lost, finding herself in unfamiliar forest. She didn’t know the trees or the two streams she’d passed. She’d ended up riding in circles, and was about to give up and cry when she looked toward the horizon and saw smoke from a chimney, some hundred feet away.
    Moving closer, she found a cottage, poorer than Barty’s and Carlin’s, made of wood instead of stone. In front of the cottage had been two little boys, a few years younger than Kelsea, playing a make-believe game of swords, and she had watched them for a very long time, sensing something she’d never considered before: an entirely different upbringing from her own. Until that moment, she had somehow thought that all children had the same life. The boys’ clothes were ragged, but they both wore comfortable-looking shirts with short sleeves that ended at the bicep. Kelsea could only wear high-necked shirts with tight, long sleeves, so that no chance passersby would ever get a look at her arm or the necklace she wasn’t allowed to remove. She listened to the two boys’ chatter and found that they could barely speak proper Tear; no one had sat them down every morning and drilled them on grammar. It was the middle of the afternoon, but they weren’t in school.
    â€œYou’s Mort, Emmett. I’s Tear!” the older boy proclaimed proudly.
    â€œI’s not Mort! Mort’s short!” the littler one shouted. “Mum said you supposed to make me Tear sometime!”
    â€œFine. You’s Tear, but I’s using magic!”
    After watching the two boys for a while, Kelsea marked the real difference, the one that commanded her attention: these children had each other. She was only fifty yards away, but the companionship between the two boys made her feel as distant as the moon. The distance was only compounded when their mother, a round woman with none of Carlin’s stately grace, came outside to gather them up for dinner.
    â€œEw! Martin! Come wash up!”
    â€œNo!” the little one replied. “We ain’t done.”
    Picking up a stick from the bundle on the ground, the mother jumped into the middle of their game, battling them both while the boys giggled and shrieked. Finally, the mother pulled each