Chapter 14: The Queen's Price

The Queen of Sunhallow received her under a red tent on the frozen meadow below Fort Hale.

Thessaly rode to it at dawn on the second day, with a white cloth on her lance and Eskil at her side as far as the line of pickets.

There he stopped his horse.

"I go on alone," she said.

"I know."

"Then do not look at me like that, or I will turn around."

"I am looking at the road," he said, and did not take his eyes from her face.

She rode through the pickets alone.

The Queen was a spare woman of sixty in a plain red gown, with grey eyes and her cousin's mouth.

Thessaly knew it at once, because she had seen it in a miniature of her mother.

"Sit, child," said the Queen. "You look like her."

"Your Majesty."

"I will be brief."

"I am not a cruel woman, and I do not make war for pleasure," said the Queen.

"I have the Prince's own letter that the Empire will no longer honor my cousin's daughter's betrothal, and that the girl is to be handed to me."

She set a folded paper on the table between them. "Read it."

Thessaly read it.

The hand was a clerk's.

The seal at the foot was the Crown Prince's own, the sun and the laurel, pressed deep in white wax.

She had seen that seal ten thousand times.

"The seal is real," she said slowly.

"Of course it is."

"I do not know how the Prince came to write this."

"Nor do I care." The Queen leaned back.

"I care that I have twelve thousand men on a frontier, a treaty broken, and an Empire that has told me in writing it will not hold."

"I will have my price, and I will have it kindly, or I will have it by siege."