The Blacktongue Thief

61 The Witch-Queen

The queen was too weak to even try to climb thirty feet down the sheer, loose rock-face leading up to her shelf. I could climb it, though, thanks to training and luck, and a ring of Catfall to (hopefully) save me a leg-break if I did tumble. So up I went and brought the queen water. Before she drank, she asked if there was more. When I said no, she only took a small sip but kept the skin near her. I also gave her Norrigal’s second kirtle to cover her nakedness.

I had never seen a queen before, not close; when Conmarr of Holt made his progresses through Holt’s Galtish lands, he never bothered with a place as small as Platha Glurris. When he came through Pigdenay, which he did twice while I studied there, he made a point not to bring his Gunnish wife, Birgitta—Pigdenay’s courtesans were the best in Holt and you don’t bring beer to a tavern, do you? This Mireya was everything I expected a queen to be, and nothing about her seemed mad. She was kind and powerful and generous. When I addressed her, I turned my gaze down as I seemed to remember Ispanthian protocol demanded, but she took my chin and pointed my face up until I met her eyes. People looked in the king’s eyes in Oustrim and in all the frank, northern Gunnish lands.

Mireya was beautiful, her face worn but showing good bones. What small gray had begun to frost her hair only served to show how black the rest was. Those eyes she insisted I look into were hazel as a cat’s, neither brown nor blue nor green, but all and none of them. She spoke no Holtish, nor Galtish, and I knew only the barest Ispanthian, so it was up to Galva, below us, to translate.

“You can speak with the giant?” she said.

“We have nearly the same tongue.”

“What did she tell you already?”

I told her.

“My husband the king forbade his subjects to go over the Thralls. He did not kill or kidnap giants. It was the Takers, to punish us for closing their Guildhouses.”

After Galva finished translating for her, the queen looked at me, said something in rapid Spanth to Galva. Galva replied, and Mireya looked at me again, her eyes softer.

“What was that?” I asked the birder.

“She wanted to know if you are Guildron. I said that you were, but now you were against them. I am correct about this, yes?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Because I swore on my death.”

The queen now spoke some words into the waterskin I had offered her, sending the hairs on the back of my neck standing up with the prickle of magic, and sent me down to offer water to the half-dead giantess. She saw in my eyes that this would be half a swallow for a creature her size, and she said:

“Pour it into her mouth from above. There will be enough.”

I did as she asked. The giant wouldn’t let go of the book she held, but suffered me to stand on a near rock and pour the water for her. I dearly hoped she wouldn’t take it in mind to do to me what she’d done to the Full Shadow and the other dead man in yellow robes—I was too close to her to be sure I could get away before one of her huge hands grabbed and flattened me.

Misfa’s tongue worked in her open mouth as she swallowed down the water, which, to my wonder and surprise, kept gurgling out. I didn’t have to lift the bottom of the flask as it emptied, because it wasn’t emptying. The queen of Oustrim, the infanta Mireya of Ispanthia, was an actual witch!

She is hard to keep down here, but I think it makes more mischief if I don’t tell you why.

Now I understood in my bones why Deadlegs and Norrigal and even Fulvir in his way had been devoted to our journey—if Mireya took the throne of Ispanthia back, she would be the first witch-queen since well before the Goblin Wars. And she could chase the Guild out of Ispanthia the way she’d done it in Oustrim. For the first time in my life, I had glimpsed a future in which the Guild might not control everything under the sun and moon.

They could never let that happen.

Mireya, now that she was out of their grasp, had to die.