After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia (29 page)

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.