The Queen’s Resistance

I wrote about Master Cartier, and how afraid we used to be of him, because he never smiled until the day I coaxed him to stand on a chair with me, the day I first heard him laugh.

I thought of the days before us, days we would carve with our hands and our minds and our words, days that would no doubt be uncertain and difficult and yet beautiful in the same breath.

“Mer,” I said, half pleading, half warning as she gleefully approached my bedroom door. “You know that I hate being surprised.”

“And that is why all of us decided to surprise you,”

“All right, you are making me sound like a mighty warrior when I am only a humble musician.”

“Why can’t you be both, brother?”

Because I saw myself without it, not as a girl who had been chained and shorn and scarred, but as a woman who had survived.

“I am not the only one who knows where the stone is,” he said, struggling to breathe.

“Who and where is this other man, then?” Fergus demanded.

Tristan smiled. “She is not a man.”

Fergus grew still, shocked. But Patrick chuckled, not at all surprised.

“Where is this woman, then, Allenach? Tell us, and we might let you live, as well as her.”

Tristan leaned his head back against the stone wall of his cell, the cell he had been living in the past week. His vision was about to go, and he fought for the last draw of breath.

“It’s misfortunate for you …” He lowered his chin to look at the Lannon boys one final time, to utter his last words. “Because she hasn’t been born yet.”

We were exhausted, devastated, clueless. We should give over the stone. We should not give over the stone. We should compromise with Thorn. We should beat Thorn. We should pull up everyone’s sleeves. We should not invade others’ privacy.

What was right, and what was wrong?

I thought of all those afternoons I had sat with Cartier in the library, when he had seemed so cold and aloof and stern, and how I had finally challenged him to stand on a chair with a book on his head. I remembered the first time I had heard him laugh, how it had taken the room like sunlight.

“If I were trying to start a war, you would not have to ask me. You would know it,” I stated coldly. “Now go and do as I request of you, before you test the last bit of my patience.”

“Here falls the House of Lannon. They are no longer fierce. In fact, they never were. Rather, they were cowards, and they will be turned into dust; they will be reviled. And Declan Lannon’s children will become Morganes. Once a Lannon? Never again. Your offspring will become the very thing old Gilroy tried to destroy, and failed. Because the light always overcomes the darkness.”