Queen of All Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Anya Josephs

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations and other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to publisher at [email protected].

  Supervising Editor: Emily Oliver

  Associate Editor: Aleshia Scogin

  Cover Designer: L. Austen Johnson, www.allaboutbookcovers.com

  Contents

  Preface

  Prelude

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Glossary

  Cast of Characters

  Thank you for reading Queen of All.

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  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  To all the kids out there who’ve been told there’s something wrong with how you look, or who you love, or who you are: this book is for you. You deserve to be the hero of your own story and to have the chance to tell it.

  Preface

  After all these years, it's you.

  How I have waited.

  How I have prayed.

  How I have—forgive me—begun to doubt that you would ever come back to me again. To stand before me, in a new guise but still so certainly yourself. To love me as I love you. To hear this story.

  My dearest one, you must understand my doubts. You must forgive them. For even when I doubted, I never gave up the last of my hope. I never gave up waiting for you.

  I have waited like trees, having shed their leaves, wait for spring to come and breathe new life into their cold roots. I have waited the way flowers wait, their faces upturned to the sky, for rain to drown them in life. I have waited as a bird waits, tenderly watching her unhatched egg, keeping that sweet seed of life in perpetual possibility for one day longer.

  I have waited as patiently as the Earth. And as long.

  You slept, unknowing, and I waited, counting every breath like an eternity until you would return. How fast and slow at once the time went, perhaps I can never tell you. Perhaps there are no words, in this tongue or any other, that can tell you how I ached to see you again. How I longed to hear your voice. How I loved you, all alone.

  And now here you are. With me again.

  When I had all but given up on the dream of ever seeing you return.

  But then, a part of me knew this was how things were meant to be for us.

  My mother once told me that the Goddess made the Earth round because that shape shows us the nature of the universe. The Earth, like a womb, circles back in on itself, holding us within the warm embrace of Her body. Time, she told me, is a circle too. Everything we lose comes back to us again.

  Everyone we lose comes back to us again. Just, she said, as I lost you, and just as you returned to me. As, one day, your father will return to me, too, in this life or in some other.

  Everyone we lose comes back to us again.

  These words are all that has sustained me while I have waited. Not the knowledge, for not even I can pretend to know such mysteries, but the hope: that time would flow back into itself like waves returning to the ocean, like blood pumping through a heart, like a child curling up to sleep.

  It is not vanity when I say I know more of the Earth’s secrets than anyone else who has ever lived, with the exception, perhaps, of the Goddess herself. I know the rhythm of the passing years as only She and I could, each season no more than the pattern of breath in and out of my eternal lungs. I know the names of Her most hidden children, the zizit in their mountaintop retreats and the tannim on their forgotten isles and the behemoth in the breathless depths of the sea. I know love and loss more deeply and feelingly than anyone who has ever lived.

  But I did not know that it was true. I could only hope, not ever be certain. Not until I saw you here, again, at last.

  My own…

  Oh, I know you don’t remember. You don’t even know me, not yet.

  That's all right. That's all right, my love. I have told myself our story again and again, so that even the vastest expanse of time could not wear the memories thin. I have readied myself for this, for the day when I could finally tell you everything.

  Would you like me to start with our story, or at the very beginning?

  Prelude

  She pushes the Sending away for as long as she can. For days it haunts her, whispering to her in her dreams, standing behind her at the loom while the morning sun through the window turns her skin golden in its gentle light. It murmurs her name as she smears a thick layer of rich schmaltz onto her bread at breakfast, touches her shoulder with ghostly fingers as the baby nurses at her breast, follows her to the stream as she carries the washing down, calls her name aloud as she and her husband join together at night.

  At first, she means to accept or ignore it. Others have been haunted before and lived a number of happy years before the madness set in. Better to do that and let her life come to an almost natural end than to hear what this voice has to say. Her man will bury and mourn her, and maybe, if she can hold on long enough, the baby will be old enough when her mind goes that it will remember her as something other than the sickly shadow that she will no doubt become in the end.

  She’s ready to endure a whisper in the night, a face reflected in the stream, a disembodied rage bristling behind her. She’s ready to lose her mind in the fight to keep the life that, though destiny and her mother may have sent her to, she ultimately chose for herself. She should have known that would be only the start.

  The great ruak arrives with a storm. She’s still unsure, even at her great age, if all the thunder and lightning is really necessary, or if it’s just for show. Her mother still keeps some secrets to herself. To yield them up would be to yield her power, and the great Adirialaina will never do that—not until the Goddess Herself comes to claim her.

  Yet she doesn’t fear her mother’s might, even as the sky flashes sickly white with a bolt too powerful to be of any natural origin. She does not weep, or scream in frustration, or call out for mercy. She takes a single shuddering breath and goes inside from the garden to clean up for supper.

  Her sister-in-law has made a rich dish of lentils and rice—mujadra, they call it, in their Common Tongue that is still so strange to her—and the whole kitchen smells of frying onions and braised herbs.

  She washes her hands and sits at the table next to her husband. She’s quiet throughout the meal, but then, she’s often quiet. No one notices. And no one is much surprised when she urges them all to go to bed early.

  “The storm will be bad. Best get some rest,” she says, and they take her advice, as they are wont to do.

  A strange girl, but a clever one, they say about her. She knows things, and sure enough it’s best to listen.

  If only they knew.

  Her husband locks the cottage’s shaky door against the gusts of wind. She watches as the rest of the family goes into their bedrooms, shutting themselves away. She could do the same, she supposes
, but a locked door is no refuge against what she knows is coming.

  Instead, she hands the baby to its father and murmurs an excuse before ducking back into the main room of the house, quickly, matter-of-factly, as though she’s going to douse a pot left on the fire and not as though she’ll never see the little one again. The baby knows, though, its fat fist tangling in her hair before it settles its heavy head against its father’s chest and returns to sleep.

  Its magical intuition is already powerful for a child not even a year old. The ruak in its tiny, perfect body will grow as it does. One day, it will be strong enough to shake the Earth.

  She is proud to think of such a bright future for this child, for the only child she will ever have. She tries not to think of the suffering that the weight of destiny will demand from this soft and helpless babe. She does not yield the child up to her mother’s machinations, not in her own mind, though it was by Adirialaina’s will that it was conceived and born and will go on to save their people.

  I will see you again, one day, she promises the child fiercely. She wonders if its ruak is already strong enough that it can hear the words of her mind. She hopes so. She hopes that the dream she cannot put into words will settle into the babe’s consciousness; that, somehow, it will remember this moment—not as an abandonment, but a temporary separation.

  She strokes the baby’s dark hair and kisses her husband briefly so that he won’t realize anything is wrong, and then she readies herself.

  Of course, her mother still makes her wait. She sits down at the kitchen table as though anticipating a more ordinary type of family visit, and carefully does not allow herself even a quick glance at the empty door behind which her husband and child are now peacefully sleeping.

  She knows she’ll never see them again. One last look will spare her nothing. It will not unwidow her husband or give her child a mother’s love to remember. It will not let her keep her family. Nothing will.

  When it arrives at last at the stroke of midnight (for Adirialaina has never been accused of lacking a flair for the dramatic), her mother’s voice comes in like a crack of thunder. It has been three long years since she heard her mother speak, but the power in that voice still makes all the little hairs on her arms stand at attention, makes her stomach churn, makes her jaw set with something like fury.

  She knows what she has to do, Adirialaina’s voice tells her. She knows who she is. She has played this game long enough, and her part in it is finished.

  She could rage at the unhearing sky. She could scream and wail out her grief until the timbers of the cottage shatter around her and break as her heart is breaking.

  She could even refuse. That’s never happened before, and there’s no knowing what would come of it, but she could try, for the sake of her small family, her real family.

  Instead, wearily, obediently, she walks out into the night. As the single lighted window of the cottage where she has spent the only two happy years of her long life disappears into the gloom of the night, over the heavy pounding rhythm of the storm, she hears the baby start to cry.

  Chapter One

  The most beautiful girl in any of the Four Corners of the Earth kicks me awake in the middle of the night.

  Through my half-open eyes and by the light of the moon, I can see her perfectly sculpted face looming over mine. Her ruby-red lips, so entrancing that a passing bard once wrote a lengthy ode in their honor, blow hot air directly up my nose. The bard, for obvious reasons, did not mention the stench of her morning breath. As she begins to wake up, I cough, try to turn over, and fumble for our shared blanket with the intention of pulling it over my head and going back to sleep. It’s gone.

  As I reluctantly blink my way awake, our bedroom comes into focus: the white-washed walls, the low rafters, the ladder down into the main room, the trunk where we keep our clothes, and then Sisi, grinning triumphantly, holding the blanket over her head.

  “What do you want?”

  “And good morning to you too, my beloved cousin,” she says, her dark-rose cheeks dimpling in an extremely winsome fashion. Most people can’t stay mad at beautiful Sisi for long. Luckily, I’ve had plenty of practice. I was still only a baby when Sisi and her brother came to live here, so for fourteen years, she and I have been making each other, and driving each other, mad.

  “No, you see, morning happens after the nighttime. Which is what we’re having now. Nighttime. Morning is later.”

  “Well technically, it’s after midnight. Thus, good morning.” She smiles at me again.

  “And before dawn. Thus, good night.” I make another futile grab for the blanket, but Sisi has a good six inches of height on me and is quicker than I am even when I’m not drowsy from sleep. Defeated, I slump back against the frame of our bed. “Come on, you didn’t just wake me up in the middle of the night so that we could debate the finer points of timekeeping. Are you up to something? You already know I won’t want to be a part of it.”

  “Listen.” She points down at the floor of our bedroom. Because we sleep up in the attic, I can just barely hear a low rumble of voices through the floorboards, coming from the main room below. “What are they doing awake at this hour? There must be something interesting going on.” Question and answer, all in one. As usual, I seem to be altogether unnecessary in this conversation Sisi is having with herself.

  “Yes. I’m sure the price of grain has gone up fifteen milar a tonne, or something.”

  “You have no spirit of adventure,” Sisi accuses.

  “Another of my many faults.”

  “Fine, then I’ll go by myself, and I shan’t tell you what I find.”

  “Have fun. Do try not to get caught,” I advise.

  She turns to face me fully, batting her long, dark eyelashes at me. It’s a trick that would certainly work on any of her many admirers among the local boys, but I’m immune to that kind of flattery. “Please, Jena? Sweet cousin, my dearest friend, it’ll be ever so much better if you just come with me.”

  “Come where? Down the stairs? It’s not much of a valiant quest, even if I were inclined to be your brave companion.” After a moment’s thought, I add, “And I’m reasonably sure that I’m your only friend.”

  But Sisi has no trouble continuing her conversation with herself, with or without input from me. “I’m sure you saw that carriage coming up the drive today?”

  “I thought that was a delivery of new cider jugs from the potter.” We ran out two days ago, on Fourthday.

  “No, it was a horse-drawn carriage!”

  Now, that’s a decent bit of news, I must admit. People around here use pushcarts, or occasionally mules and donkeys. Horses are unofficially reserved for the Numbered, as anyone without noble blood is unlikely to be able to afford their feed and upkeep. I carefully arrange my expression so Sisi won’t see that she’s caught my interest, but she continues on unabated. “Anyway, Aunt Mae might have said that, but I know for a fact that wasn’t the potter's lad."

  “So, Daren’s finally got himself fired, and the potter’s found someone new. I don’t see why that’s such a big deal.” The potter’s apprentice is famous around town for his clumsiness, and it would be no surprise to anyone if someone more suited to such a delicate profession replaced him. Daren is a good-hearted lad, as Aunt Mae always says, and he does work hard, but he likely breaks more pots carrying them in from the kiln than he sells in one piece. This is especially true when he delivers jugs for the cider press on our farm, since his infatuation with Sisi makes him nervous. Of course, everyone fancies Sisi—he’s not alone in that, just a little more hopeless than most.

  “It wasn’t anyone from the potter’s. Nor anyone else from Leasane. It was a man around your father’s age. Better dressed, though, in some sort of gold-and-purple uniform. He gave Uncle Prinn a sheet of paper. I couldn’t quite see what was on it, but it was stamped with a golden seal and I’m sure it was the Sign of the Three Powers itself. So, I can only assume that your father has been given a message from the
Royal Court in the Capital. How often do you think a messenger from the King’s own home rides across half the Earth to seek out an apple farmer? And what could be in such a message?” She looks about ready to faint as she finishes her speech, her cheeks flushed with the effort of having so much to say so quickly.

  I have to concede that this is indeed a good point—but I have a few good points of my own to make. “Sounds too good to be true. Which means it probably is. Perhaps this messenger just wanted a cup of cider and directions back to the High Road. If it was anything more than that, we’ll hear about it soon enough. In the meantime, why not go to bed? Or at least lie here and speculate so as to spare ourselves the inevitable results of snooping into what’s none of our business: we sneak out, we get caught, we get beaten, we get sent right back where we started no better off but for sore backsides.”

  “You are becoming frightfully dull lately. Ever since that incident on market day—”

  “Which was all your fault, I might add, though it was me who took all the blame. Here’s an idea, Jena, let’s not do our chores today! Oh, let’s steal the apple cart and ride it into town! It’ll be fun! We’ll meet boys! We’ll buy candies at the market! We won’t get caught! And when we do get caught, I certainly won’t run away home and pretend never to have left my sewing and not say a word when Jena’s getting thrashed for it!”