After the Fourth Great War, when most of the cities of the world were leveled, for decades the people lived without governance. Until our city was built, and those who would become the Court came together and decided that the element of the population that in the past had caused crime and unrest—the young, angry, and disadvantaged men who had been sent into a hundred pointless wars—needed a war that made sense to them, needed to compete for a real and fixed goal.
They also, for the good of the rest of the city, needed to be eliminated.
The reward of a hero in children’s stories is the hand of a princess, the fairest of them all, and half her kingdom. Power and beauty is what men fight for.
The people who would become the Court created the most beautiful woman who ever lived, and held the first Trials. They set the traditional tasks of the maze, the monster, and the mystery, built the maze beneath the city for men to get through, created the monster for the men to fight, and made up the riddle for men to think their way past. Every step of the way, the men had to battle with each other, because they knew that only one of them would be allowed out alive. Every unmarried man who did not receive the dispensation of the Court had to participate in the Trials.
All but one of the men died, and that one married the queen. With its most violent element eliminated, the city was at peace.
It was clear to all that the way to ensure civil peace was to repeat the Trials.
We created the most beautiful woman in the world again, and again.
• The Trials must take place every generation: that is, every twenty-five years, or when the old queen dies and the princess inherits. The Trials may be delayed or put forward according to the judgment of the Court, but it must not be delayed more than two years. Each queen is designed to last no more than forty years.
• Men of Court families, and other families the Court determines to be contributing to society, are exempt from entering the Trials.
• To be considered for exemption, families must pay the Court five hundred drachmae per head.
• Married men are exempt from entering the Trials, but as marriage must not be entered into lightly, every man must pay a brideprice. Each family may set their own bride-prices for their daughters, but it cannot be less than a hundred drachmae. A bride should be treasured, as the queen must be treasured.
• All volunteers for the Trials will be accepted. Wishing to enter shows either a commendable desire for the queen, or a volatile and violent spirit that needs eliminating.
• 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.
Yvain had launched himself from the Nests, slid down the material awning of the sixty-ninth floor, snagged at the statue on the fifty-first to check his fall, grabbed at the iron pipe that ran around the thirty-seventh, landed on one knee on the balcony of the twenty-fifth. He heard the scrape of the balcony door and a shout, but he didn’t look behind him as he vaulted over the railing to the slanted little roof over the next balcony.
He’d landed on top of one of the market stalls, breathing hard and blinking sweat out of his eyes. It had stung like tears.
Once, long ago, criminals were hanged and quartered. In these more enlightened times, criminals were still publicly punished. That was a deterrent to other prospective criminals.
But the body parts weren’t wasted, as they had been in the past. Machines cut open the criminal and removed their organs, harvesting them for law-abiding citizens.
And the criminal was punished with a live dissection.
Yvain had sat on the stall and watched Persie die in the market square, blood vivid on screens set on various buildings around the square, his small bright-haired wife’s pain interspersed with advertisements for the latest virtual sports equipment.
All for asking around about a buyer for a sovereign.
That night, once harsh daylight and those images of blood were gone, Yvain melted down the sovereign in a glow of fire and bright metal. He saw his reflection cast in the shining surface of a skyscraper wall, saw the light of the fire make the tears on his face look as if they were burning, as if he were crying gold.
The sovereign wasn’t pure gold after all. It had all been a lie.
After Persie died, for the three years of nights between Persie’s death and the Trials, Yvain did not go to sleep watching the birds. He turned his eyes to the golden mountains where the queen lived in her palace.
Persie had been right. Yvain had been able to make some money selling the metal of the melted-down sovereign. Rosamond was worth something.
Not enough. Not anything like enough.
Roz could not leave the palace until the Trials, but she was allowed to go anywhere she wanted inside the palace.
She always asked to train in the Hall of Mirrors.
There were no mirrors in the hall, of course, for anyone but Roz. It was lined with pictures of all the Rosamonds who had ever been made.
It was also the place where she and Miri learned hand-to-hand combat—what to do if a man broke into the palace, how to use the things that surrounded them as weapons—where she and Miri had learned lessons they would probably never put into practice. Roz could do backflips down the hall, seeing her own image upside down and blurred, repeated a hundred times.
Rosamond: carefully constructed by the finest technology to be the most beautiful of them all. Every Rosamond who had ever lived, and she was just the Rosamond who was living now. The only Rosamond who was living now, since the old queen was dead.
Except no Rosamond had ever learned to fight before.
Roz had read the books. The city council had wanted to make a prize people couldn’t pass up: setting every young man in the city a series of tasks—the Trials—that, if won, would mean the kingdom and the hand of the princess.
This way, the numbers of disaffected young men on the streets of their city were slashed, and the population and the crime level were kept down. Although with so many early marriages, and the men of the Court keeping strings of mistresses in town, the population never went down too much.
All because of you, dear, Roz’s nurse had murmured to her while she was gently warning Roz against taking risks when she was playing, against the hideous possibility that she might one day be hurt and disfigured. All because of your face.
Even Miri and Dareus always, always remembered not to touch her face.
One could wish Dareus was as careful about her ribs, Roz thought as Dareus got a staff under them and sent her flying through the air and sliding across the marble floor, until she landed with a smack against the wall.
She gasped for breath and fought down the urge to be sick.
“My captain,” she wheezed, in a most ladylike fashion. “That is no way to treat your queen.”
“My queen,” said Dareus, turning his staff over and over in his hands. “That is no way to guard your left side.”
Roz concentrated on the ceiling, and on the suddenly difficult task of breathing in and out. She heard the soft sound of Miri’s footsteps, and the light tap and tumble of a staff against marble.
“I always get smashed to bits, and you always win,” Roz said, closing her eyes. “Because you’re a sneak, and Dareus plays favorites.”
“I don’t,” said Dareus, his voice a little sharp.
“I always watch for an opening and you always dash right in,” said Miri. “Which helps create my opening, mark you.”
Miri was Roz’s favorite lady-in-waiting. The Court sent its daughters to keep her company for a time—never long enough to form a real friendship. But Miri’s parents had died in an accident, and the Court had let her stay in the palace, murmuring that she was bound to be a good influence. Since she was so quiet and well-behaved.
Little did the Court know that it was Miri who had persuaded Dareus to let them learn to fight. Roz was the one who had wanted to, but Miri was the one who had made it happen. She had made it sound so reasonable, that if anyone were to break into the palace, the queen and her lady should know how to defend themselves.
It was not reasonable; Dareus should never have allowed it, and all three of them knew it.
Roz put a hand under her head and opened her eyes. Miri sat down beside her with Dareus’s staff in one hand, Miri’s crisp dark curls blurring at the edges in Roz’s vision. She looked over Miri’s shoulder at Dareus. He looked at them both with soldier’s eyes, proud of Miri’s prowess, assessing Roz’s injuries and coolly finding them negligible.
“Come on, back on your feet,” he said. “Your guard has all been killed, my queen, and a man is in the palace. A real man.”
He said it absolutely emotionlessly. Dareus’s uncle had taken him in, brought him up, trained him to be part of the guard, trained him so that when his uncle died, Dareus would become the youngest captain a Rosamond had ever had.
But no man was allowed to approach Rosamond except the champion of the Trials. Rosamond’s guards were all cut so they could not dishonor the queen even if they wanted to.
Roz was surprised that Dareus didn’t hate her, sometimes.
But he didn’t. He was her friend, before being her guard. He’d agreed to teach her and Miri how to train. He’d even agreed to keep it a secret from the Court.
Roz climbed to her feet. “All right,” she said, and took another deep breath, ignoring her ribs. “Come at me again.”
Roz was beaten down twice more, but she beat down Dareus once to make up for it. Neither of them ever got near Miri. She was sly. Besides which, Dareus totally played favorites.
Roz left the Hall of Mirrors, went to her own bathroom, and washed up, with Miri in attendance. She had nice bruises coming in on her ribs, but when she washed her face, she saw it was still clear and clean, pale and untouched as a pearl.
The perfect face, they claimed—not the flatterers, but books written a hundred years ago. Designed perfect, all in symmetry, with tumbling dark hair—bright hair made you look too flashy, pretty rather than beautiful—but of course, porcelain skin, and clear blue eyes.
Dareus’s eyes had flecks of black in the gray color, and his nose was too long. Miri’s teeth stuck out slightly, and she was much too short to be the ideal. Roz had always found looking at them so interesting, rather than looking at her own image, so familiar it almost seemed worn, passed down and down and down again as it was. Never changing.
The world had called them clones before it called them queens.
Other people might have thought it was vanity that made Roz train in the Hall of Mirrors, but the truth was she fought better there. She was angry there.
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 she was the monster.
“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 this the queen,” said the thief. “Pardon me. I had no idea she’d be so metallic. Or seven inches high.”
“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 had won.
Take that, Rosamond.
The Trials were on the horizon sure as the sun at dawn, and it had never seemed like a better time to spit in the queen’s eye.
Which, speaking of, Yvain thought. It was market day, the last one before the Trials, and the queen’s ladies-in-waiting were out in force. He saw the distinctive coral-colored gowns everywhere he looked, and he looked at them all, searching for the prettiest face.
Said face belonged to a fetching little thing with crisp curls and demure eyes, standing by a fruit stall.
When Yvain approached her, she said, without looking up, “Do you think Roz would like—” Then she blinked her brown eyes and smiled. “Sorry, wrong man.”
“Ah now,” Yvain said. “You have the right man. You just don’t know it yet.”
She smiled a smile that made her even prettier. “Believe me, I do.”
“Can I not even get a small chance to convince you?” Yvain asked. “A tiny chance. The smallest of chances.”
“Is the Nest brat bothering you, my lady?” asked a voice, and by the sound of it—not quite a woman’s, but not quite a man’s either—Yvain knew it was one of the queen’s guard.
Both Yvain and the lady turned. It was a guardsman, in the uniform of blue on gray. Yvain wondered why they even needed uniforms. It wasn’t like anyone else aspired to be a cut man.
Nest brat, he’d said. It made Yvain think of growing up in the Nests with Persie, how people had shouted the words after them as they ran hand in hand over the rooftops.
“We were just talking, Dareus,” said the girl, touching his arm.
“She didn’t seem bothered,” Yvain said, with the guard’s words ringing in his ears. “Must be a nice novelty for her, talking to a real man.”
“Hmm,” said the guard. He seemed young enough, though it was hard to tell sometimes. Smaller than a real man and with a woman’s soft curve to his face, even if training meant he had muscles like a man.
The guard looked at Yvain with narrowed thoughtful eyes, and Yvain curled his lip into a sneer—who would let that happen to them?—just before he bit his tongue.
Which he did because the guard hooked a foot around his ankle and yanked him down so he fell, hitting his head on the fruit stall on the way down. Then the guard planted a foot on his chest. Yvain grabbed at it and tried to pull his feet out from under him, but the guard was already a little crouched, center of gravity low. Yvain grabbed at the knife hilt in the guard’s boot and brandished—a hilt without a blade.
“I’m the captain of the queen’s guard,” said the cut man—Dareus, the lady-in-waiting had called him. His gray eyes were still thoughtful, almost bored. “I don’t carry my weapons where Nest brats can see and steal them. Watch your tongue and your talk of real men.”
“Why don’t you watch your tongue and your talk of Nest brats?” Yvain snapped.
He jackknifed in the dirt and out from under the guard’s heel, only to find himself rolled again, this time with the guard kneeling beside him, a hand fastened at his throat.
Dareus’s eyes were still bored, but he was smiling slightly. “I might,” he said. “If you could make me.”
He released Yvain and got up, brushing his hands off, then made a slight bow to the lady.
“Forgive me for intruding,” he said. “I’ll leave you to your conversation.”
Yvain had somewhat expected him to walk off with the lady on his arm. That was the usual outcome when you bested someone in a fight over a woman—but then, what would a cut man want with a woman?
Yvain had a natural advantage here.
He used another of his natural advantages, his smile, as he used the fruit stall to help him stand.
“Now, about convincing you,” he began.
The lady-in-waiting’s warm brown eyes were, he noticed a little late, absolutely furious.
“He’s ten times the man you are,” she informed him, and turned sharply to hurry away after the guard.
“Am I missing something here?” Yvain asked the empty air.
“Only the same thing you’ve been missing all your life,” said the stall owner, a kind-faced woman who had given him and Persie apples when they were young. “Which is that you’re a bit of an idiot.”
She looked like she’d rather enjoyed the entertainment of Yvain being beaten up by yet another of Rosamond’s people.
“I thought girls liked this sort of thing,” Yvain added, making a small gesture to his trousers.
“Many of us find them completely irrelevant.”
“Even mine?” Yvain asked, making a face of mock horror.
The woman laughed. “Especially yours, lad.”
Yvain laughed too. He was getting the last laugh, after all, no matter how battered he was by the queen’s men. He had the gold statue at the small of his back, and he could melt that down too. It would fetch enough to buy every man in the Nests a drink, the night before the Trials.
And if the money wasn’t quite worth the trouble, it still pleased Yvain to spite the queen, even in some small way.
He played with the idea of winning the Trials for a moment, and telling Rosamond the truth she’d probably never heard in all her spoiled lifetimes. That the only worth she would have to him was the gold.
You would see a lot of gold, though, being Rosamond’s king. Why anyone tried to pretend the girl herself was the thing to fight for, Yvain couldn’t say.
“I hear you were being terribly brave and impressive in the marketplace today,” Roz whispered as Dareus escorted her through the marble halls of her palace to the stateroom, where the First Minister sat waiting. “Miri was so impressed.”
“It wasn’t impressive,” Dareus said. “I was up against a boy who had no training, and I let myself get angry. It would have been much more impressive if I’d kept my temper.”
“But where,” said Roz, “is the fun in that? Miri said you were great.”
“The lady Miri always assumes the best of people,” Dareus said. “Which does credit to her but little to them.”
Roz slowed her step before they reached the doors of the stateroom.
“If you like her,” she began.
“My queen,” Dareus said, “just because the lady Miri is allowed to go out on market days does not mean she has experienced life. Both of you have grown up with the palace walls as the border to your world. Neither of you has walked the city, neither of you has ever had the chance to talk to men. Once you are married, you and the lady Miri can mix freely with the Court. You are going to marry a champion. She should at least find a whole man.”
“She should get to choose who she wants,” Roz murmured. “Someone should.”
Roz didn’t suggest that she herself should. But it was close enough to speaking blasphemy that Dareus gave her a reproachful look as he leaned forward and opened the door.
“Her Majesty the new Queen Rosamond, flower of the world,” he said, and gave her a tiny shove the First Minister would not see.
“Deeply honored, Your Majesty,” said the First Minister, without glancing up or rising.
Rosamond went and found herself a chair. The First Minister, she saw, was looking at lists, at rows and rows of men’s names.
Men who would be forced to participate in the Trials.
“You must be very excited, Your Majesty,” said the First Minister. “Not long now until your wedding day.”
Just a few more days of funerals until your wedding day.
Roz had read the records of past Rosamonds, the Rosamond who would not eat, the Rosamond who cut lines down her perfect arms, the Rosamond who kept to her bed for three years, as well as the Rosamonds who seemed absolutely fine, to all appearances. It wouldn’t matter what one Rosamond felt, there would always be another.
The First Minister looked surprised at Rosamond’s lack of enthusiasm.
“It is men for you, isn’t it?” the First Minister inquired. “We’ve had a Rosamond who wanted a female champion once or twice, but I am afraid it is unlikely to happen. Women have to volunteer, and very few do.”
“I think it’s men,” Rosamond whispered.
It was hard to know. She really had not met many people, and it was not as if anyone would have responded to her desire if she had felt it. She was not meant to want anyone. Even the idea of desiring someone seemed like murdering them.
What she wanted was to run to the Hall of Mirrors and do the forbidden, do what no other Rosamond had done before—fight.
“Isn’t that nice,” said the First Minister. “So who do you think will win you, Your Majesty: one of those dedicated knights, or perhaps a more worldly city man?”
What did it matter? Either way, she was what she was: a Rosamond. The goal, the prize, the symbol.
“It doesn’t matter,” she murmured, more to the table and the list than to the First Minister.
“Ah,” said the First Minister. “My guess is that it will probably be one of the Temple boys again. Most suitable. It’s what they’re raised for, of course. To win, not to question—and to make you happy, Your Majesty, of course.”
“Of course,” Roz said.
“More important, are you word perfect in your speech?”
More important than Roz’s happiness or her desires, or who would win her. The most important thing was that she be perfect.
“That’s what everything’s based on, isn’t it?” Miri asked later, as Roz raged and Miri brushed her hair. “For the Court. What things look like.”
“Especially,” Roz snapped, “when things look like me.”
“And when you look perfect,” said Miri. “When you stay perfectly within the rules. When the Court proclaims you to the whole city as perfect, that’s your opening.”
Like the way Miri took an opening when Dareus was distracted.
But what opening was there if she could not stop the Trials? Roz heard the First Minister’s voice in her head, saying, Who do you think will win you, Your Majesty?
She was a prize to be won. She did not know how to fight that.
The first day of the Trials, the day when Tor would see her, the sky was a deep particular blue. The color of Rosamond’s eyes, he thought, or perhaps a few shades lighter.
He was going to see her today for the first, and perhaps the last, time.
She would give her speech, and then the trainees would go through the maze below the city, fight the monster that was kept underground, and try to work out the riddle—all the while keeping on guard against their fellow competitors.
Only one of them would re-emerge into the light and see the queen again.
Tor might die in the Trials. He was prepared for that—to not be worthy of her, to fail her even though he would try his best.
He would have the sight of her, once, to call up as a last image before he died.
He should try to remember every moment of this day. He should hold every second sacred.
Tor put his uniform on, not slowly—because wasting time would be letting Rosamond down, since his every second was consigned to her—but with deliberation. He did his last practice exercises in calm and measured movements, not listening to the whispering all around him, the wondering and the betting on his chances.
He marched out of the temple with his head held high, in step with his brethren, a black-clad regiment dedicated to perfect love and beauty. Ready to kill for Rosamond.
The other contestants were already ranged in the square. Tor saw his own face on the huge screens set in the skyscrapers, reproduced a hundred times larger for the city’s view. He was startled by the look in his own eyes, as if he were watching a tragedy, when this was the happiest day of his life.
The cameras left him and showed a swooping view of the crowd, then the other contestants, in their colorful disarray. Some were in restraints and some wore bruises.
Tor turned his face away, a tremor of disgust running through him at the idea that someone would need to be forced to serve Rosamond.
His eyes fell on another crowd of contestants, among whom stood the tall flame-haired thief of the week before. Tor’s lip curled back from his teeth, and the thief spotted him, looked massively and spitefully delighted, and blew him a kiss.
Tor looked steadfastly away from him, and toward the dais.
It stood empty, but there was music rising in the air. She was coming. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest like a child frantically thumping at a door to get out.
She came shining, her dark hair like a cloud behind her.
It was almost a shock to see her, real, the size of a woman. Almost like an ordinary woman, almost as if she were someone who could be approached without fear or reverence.
But not quite. Tor had the curve of that mouth memorized, the exact shape of her brilliant eyes.
It should have been enough simply to behold her—real love is love that asks for nothing and does everything; real love should not even ask for a look—but he did want her to look at him, to have looked at him, just once before he died.
She gazed down as she passed the Order, her eyelashes shadows on her cheeks. Tor had not thought about her as having eyelashes, but of course she did.
Rosamond, he thought, and wanted to say her name just once so she would hear it.
When she reached the dais and began to speak, he stopped thinking about himself and all the things she was in relation to him.
Sheer shock wiped away all of that.
Queen Rosamond, the eternal rose, undid the top button of her robe.
He looked at the pale hollow of her throat—he had not thought, should not think, about Rosamond’s skin or her body—and saw her swallow, and felt not the familiar awe but a rush of the stupid tenderness that always had him betraying himself and running back at a cry for help.
Rosamond was a scared girl.
They did not have to beat Yvain or restrain him on the day of the Trials. He woke up with the Nests wrapped in cloud and smoke, and went quietly down into a clear morning below.
Fighting was no use, and he didn’t need to go through the Trials wounded already. That would be pointless and ridiculous.
Besides, he was—curious.
He wanted to see her—Rosamond—whose face was supposed to be worth dying for. He wanted her to see him, and see that he was not impressed. That all there was to her was gold, and it was not worth enough.
He saw others around him who had fought against being dragged here, though. Men with black eyes and bloody noses. Some of them gave him a friendly look, comrades in misfortune, and some looked at him coldly as if the Trials had begun and they were enemies already.
Some of them looked as rapt as the Order Knights, waiting for the queen. There was a thrum and a murmur in the air. Rosamond, Rosamond, and Yvain felt a thrill of anticipation and disgust.
He saw the knight from the rooftops standing with his regiment, eyes black and accusing, and was grateful, for a moment. Yvain was able to laugh and blow the idiot a kiss. He was never going to be one of the Order, trembling and waiting.
He tried to catch the knight’s eye again, but he was turned toward the dais. Yvain gave up and looked there too.
She was just as he’d expected, more gold than girl.
What girl there was, was pretty, but also so familiar. Girls in the Nests, just like other girls in the City, all straightened and darkened their hair, tried to make their eyes look light, tried to look like Rosamond and the ideal of beauty. It was why Yvain had always perversely liked curls.
He looked at Rosamond’s still, perfect face, and wished he could tell her, tried to send the thought to her: I’m bored.
The glitter of gold was distracting. They had done that on purpose, of course, wrapped her up with a promise of luxury, making you think of always waking up warm and well fed, of jewels brighter than Rosamond’s eyes.
He let himself look, and covet. If she saw him looking, he wanted her to know that that was all he saw of her, all she was.
Gold melting, and Persie dead.
Rosamond had buttons of chased mother-of-pearl and gold, each one probably worth more than a sovereign.
The buttons rose and fell as she breathed, and Yvain wished they would be still, that he could look at her like the statue he’d stolen and reduced to nothing but gold.
She didn’t let him. She put up her hands to the buttons and slid them out one by one.
All the gold fell away, and there was a girl underneath.
The day of the Trials was blinding. Roz had never been outside the palace walls before, but she had been in the gardens and the courtyards and on the balconies: she had not thought she would be dazzled by the sun. Yet she was, and she felt almost blind every step of the bright way to the square at the heart of the city.
Appearances were all that mattered to the Court, Miri had told her, as if it were very important.
Roz thought about it every step of the way, and by the time she reached the square, her vision was clear.
So this is the city they tell me is mine, she thought, and looked at the tall steel-and-silver skyscrapers. The cobblestones of the square looked freshly washed, but there were dark lines etched between them. Dirt or blood, Roz did not know.
She glanced behind her to see Dareus—who had taught her, against the rules, to fight for herself—and met his steady gaze. It let her walk across the stones, blood and all.
When she neared the dais, every screen set in the towers reflected her face. It was like the Hall of Mirrors writ large, like all her past selves whispering their name in her ear: Rosamond, Rosamond, Rosamond—the weight of their expectations, of everybody’s expectations, forming her into what they wanted. The face on the screen, lapis lazuli eyes set in an idol’s face.
Except it didn’t matter how she felt, so she could feel any way she chose.
She tried to feel determined as she climbed the steps to the dais, her heavy golden skirt trailing behind her.
Then she looked down upon her people, from women and children—some cheering and some silent, some holding on to their men with white-knuckled hands—to the contestants for the Trials.
There were men wreathed with blood and bruises and in rags, and men who seemed fine—happy, healthy, and eager to die for her. Somebody cheered and called her name. She looked but could not tell who it had been.
She could not quite understand why someone would cheer for her when she hadn’t done anything.
What am I to you? she thought as she looked at the crowd. What is Rosamond to you?
Different things, she thought, looking at all the different faces. The Knights of the Order stood in black ranks, like soldiers at a funeral, and one of them was staring at her with the widest eyes in the crowd, large and dark and wondering.
There was worship in those eyes, and an abyss.
In the most bruised and ragged group, she saw the knight’s counterpart, the one with the narrowest eyes in the crowd. He was looking at her appraisingly, as though she were a gold coin he could bite down on so as to assess her worth.
Love her, hate her, blame her, worship her, whatever they felt toward her, they did not know her. Maybe they did not care to. Maybe they thought her face was all there was to know.
None of the other Rosamonds had known Dareus and Miri, and how they loved each other despite being imperfect.
Roz did not know herself what else there was to her, but she wanted to know.
The First Minister, standing on the dais, observed her approvingly. Roz wore the golden gown, wore her hair long and loose, looked like a queen. Looked the part.
When you look perfect, Miri had said. When you stay perfectly within the rules. When the Court proclaims you to the whole city as perfect, that’s your opening.
Everyone was watching her. The whole city was watching her, and she looked perfect.
“Welcome to this day, the beginning of our city’s thirty-second Trials,” she said, and heard cheers. “I was consulting with our First Minister yesterday”—she nodded to the First Minister, who appeared mildly pleased by this courteous going off script—“and she reminded me that women have to volunteer to enter the Trials.”
The Court had their Trials and their rules, and Roz was playing by the rules. They had their figurehead queen, and now it was her right to speak.
The maze, the monster, and the mystery of the Trials. They weren’t the test. This was.
Roz put her hands to the large buttons on her gown. It was a stiff, high-necked thing, more a robe than a gown, and the buttons slipped under her fingers.
The crowd went still and silent as she undid it. The gold gown fell with a sound like coins tossed in a scale.
Beneath the robe, Roz was wearing dark, simple clothes that she could move freely in. The clothes she trained in.
“I volunteer to enter the Trials,” she said.
“What are you doing?” the First Minister exclaimed, her careful politician’s face going slack.
Who is it going to be? the First Minister had asked her.
Not a knight or a city boy. If the rules said she was a prize to be won, so be it. She would obey the rules to the letter.
All the screens in the city reflected her face, and it was determined. The whole city heard their perfect queen speak, and her word was law.
“I am going to fight,” said Queen Rosamond, who knew as no man did what she was fighting for. “I am going to win myself.”