The Waking Land Read online

  The Waking Land is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Callie Bates

  Map copyright © 2017 by Laura Hartman Maestro

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bates, Callie, author.

  Title: The waking land / Callie Bates.

  Description: New York : Del Rey, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016040904 | ISBN 9780425284025 (hardback) | ISBN 9780399177392 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fantasy fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | FICTION / Action & Adventure.

  Classification: LCC PS3602.A8555 W35 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016040904

  Ebook ISBN 9780399177392

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Kathleen Lynch

  Cover illustration: © Ben Perini

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  I felt safe that night in Laon, safer than I had any night before in the city. My nurse and I were eating dessert in the nursery. I never knew her name; I called her Nursie. Downstairs my parents were hosting a dinner party. It was the first time I had ever been in Laon, in the townhouse my family kept for state occasions, aired out only once every year or two. On the newly crowned king’s invitation, we’d come south for the Harvest Feast from our country house in the north, and every noise of the city still seemed foreign. So that must have been why we didn’t hear them at first: the screams, the clicks as the muskets caught.

  I remember cradling my wooden doll, a Harvest Feast gift from my parents, made by a wood-carver in the city. I was feeding her pretend bites of the caramel pudding the servants had brought up earlier, baked in a dish until the sugar on top was crackling hot. Nursie drew the chintz curtains over the wide, sashed windows. My doll and I sat snug and certain in the glow of candlelight. Safe. We were supposed to go home the next day.

  Nursie sank down into the armchair across from us and began to tell my bedtime story—our nightly routine with its well-worn words—and I chimed in on my favorite parts. “Wildegarde came, bearing a flame in her heart and her hair crowned with the pale light of stars. Where she placed her foot, the earth trembled; when she raised her hand, mountains moved.”

  A burst of voices echoed from downstairs. Nursie stopped mid-word, her hands braced on the arms of the chair. Her lips were parted. I giggled, then stopped. Her fear breathed out like a living thing. Beneath us, the house shook down to its foundation. Floorboards squeaked outside the nursery door.

  Nursie was on her feet before I was aware of her moving, a gilt-handled butter knife in her hand. Her cheeks went scarlet, but her lips were pressed together into a grim line. Her eyes were fixed on the door.

  More footsteps squeaked in the corridor. “El,” Nursie said in a tight, contained voice, “do you remember Brigit?”

  Brigit: my ancestor, who hid beneath her bed when the Ereni soldiers came to kill her. I slid out of my chair, trying to find my slippers with my bare feet. I was wearing a nightdress, a new one Mother had made for me, white, with ruffles cascading down the front.

  The door flew open. Men tramped in: big men in blue coats with bayonets strapped around their backs. The royal guard.

  Nursie lashed out, catching a man in the face. He staggered back. “Brigit!” Nursie shouted. I finally understood. I leapt for my bed, scrabbling at the frame so I could crawl under the embroidered cream skirt, but a hand tore into my hair from behind me until the roots screamed, and then I was flying up, my feet kicked out from under me, the breath knocked out of my body as I landed on a man’s high shoulder. My doll fell; his boots crushed it. I tried to scream but no sound came out.

  Nursie was screaming—terrible, bone-shaking screams. I couldn’t lift my head around high enough to see her. My heartbeat pounded between my chest and the man’s shoulder. I had to be like Brigit, I had to do something, but I could think of nothing.

  “Caerisian bitch,” another man shouted, and an enormous noise exploded through the room, leaving shards of sound ringing in my ears. The acrid smell of gunpowder tainted the air.

  Nursie was no longer screaming.

  I glimpsed her as the man holding me began to walk out of the room. She sagged on the flowered carpet, her face remade in blood that looked black in the dark shadows near the floor. The man with the pistol—still smoking—stepped over her legs to throw open the wardrobe door.

  Then we were out of the room, in the corridor. The scream that had been building in my chest burst out as a shrieking gasp. The soldier shook me as if to knock me quiet and we jolted down the stairs, my head jostling. Though I knew I was supposed to fight, I didn’t dare move. What if he killed me, too?

  We reached level ground, and I reared up enough to see the side tables in the lower hall swinging by. The carpet changed to neat, checkered parquet, covered in a snowfall of crushed glass.

  “Elanna!”

  My mother. The soldier swung me down, gripping me by the neck, and I saw her on the other side of the long polished table. In the tableau of dinner guests, frozen behind their chairs with their hands raised, she was the only person who moved. Then the guard squeezed my neck and I saw my mother stop. I saw her lower her hands, but her eyes did not leave me.

  The soldier then twisted me the other way, to face the two men who stood to my left: my father, and the new king of Eren, Antoine Eyrlai. We’d come here for his coronation before the Harvest Feast—a solid month of parties I was too young to attend and ceremonies I found bewildering. And now the king, his wig askew, was pointing a pistol at my father.

  I gasped again, too horrified to scream. My whole body was trembling. The day before, when the king made our carriage go last during the Harvest Feast procession even though my father was the Duke of Caeris and should have been second after the king, I knew I hated him for embarrassing my family. Now he’d sent the men who killed Nursie. And he was pointing a gun at my
father.

  Papa didn’t look afraid, though. He looked angry. And it gave me courage.

  “Don’t you hurt my papa!” I shouted at the king.

  Everyone seemed to turn at once. They were all staring at me—including the king. His rage stood out around him, an inhuman thing. In one powerful step, he crossed the room, seized me in his arms—I inhaled the sweaty, perfumed odor of him—and jammed the cold hard end of the pistol against my temple.

  I gasped. A hot trickle ran down the inside of my thigh. I smelled the gunpowder from my nursery. I saw Nursie fallen on the floor, the blood black on her face.

  “Well?” the king said to my father.

  Papa stood there with his hands open. The anger was gone. He looked defeated. Broken. “Don’t kill my daughter.” He stammered the words. I thought he was going to fall to his knees. I thought he was going to beg.

  The trickle of urine reached my toes and dripped to the carpet. A crushing shame welled up in me—for myself, for my father and mother, for my dead nurse. Into the silence, as all the adults were waiting for the king to speak, I began to cry.

  The pistol jabbed into my temple. “Stop that,” the king commanded. His wig swung against me as he looked at my father. “You’re lucky, Ruadan. Your pretender king hasn’t yet landed on Eren’s shore, so I don’t have the evidence to condemn you. I could still have you executed without trial—it would be nothing more than you deserve—but I’m going to be merciful.”

  He pressed the gun harder into my skin, the lace on his cuff tickling my cheek. I squirmed against him. I didn’t want to die like Nursie, crumpled like my doll on the floor.

  “Get out of this house,” the king ordered. “Get out of Laon. Go back to Cerid Aven and your Caerisian backwater. And if I ever hear you’ve set foot outside its property, I’ll have the child eliminated, and you will be put on trial.” He paused, then added, “And you won’t be acquitted.”

  He shoved me off into the soldier’s arms. “In the meantime, she’ll be well treated, provided you don’t make any further attempts to ruin my country. Take her outside.” As I was marched off, I looked back for my mother, but the soldier’s head blocked my view.

  The courtyard was wet and blustery and dark. Horses stamped and snorted. The soldier set me on the ground while he talked to another man holding the horses—“The girl’s to be a hostage”—and I looked back at the light spilling from the house, waiting for my mother to come after me, to crush me in her arms and sing our song into my ear, to tell me Nursie wasn’t dead and we were going home tomorrow.

  She didn’t come. Nor did my father. Instead the king came, with the rest of his guards. I was made to walk across the streets to the palace, a barefoot girl in a soiled nightdress, the cold cobblestones burning my feet.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It’s been fourteen years, last night. Fourteen years since King Antoine took me hostage; fourteen years since I’ve seen or heard from my parents. It’s the only night I allow myself to remember them, and the only night I dare to look my fear in the eyes and remember why I’m here. And as usual on this night, I haven’t slept at all.

  I dress in the dark, dragging breeches over last night’s silk stockings. Beyond the wooden paneling separating my bedroom from the alcove, Hensey snores. I wish she’d sleep in the servants’ quarters, but she protests that I still need her, even though it’s been fourteen years and, most nights, I sleep without fear.

  I pull my weathered greatcoat over a shirt and waistcoat, tugging its wool collar up high. I look nothing like a boy, but this early no one will look past the bulk of my clothes to see my face. Through the mullioned windows, a gray light penetrates the gloom, revealing the strip of garden beyond the palace. I can’t see the drive well from here, but most of the coaches seem to have gone. Eren’s courtiers have finished their celebration—not that I stayed to toast Princess Loyce and her favorites, especially after she mocked the trailing silk vines and embroidered flowers wound into my hair. “Lady Elanna, you seem to have a plant growing out of your head,” she crowed. “Have you potting soil there as well? Caerisians! You can never get them out of the dirt. Like hogs.” I didn’t answer her, even though she made me flush with anger; it never does any good to respond to her jabs.

  Denis Falconier, her favorite, answered instead. “Why, don’t you know that the earth is alive, according to the Caerisians? That’s why they’re always dirty. Rolling about in the dirt. Making love in it.” He smirked and Loyce laughed and, because she laughed, so did almost everyone else.

  Sometimes I think Loyce would be less cruel without Denis goading her on. But maybe he just says what she’s already thinking.

  We had a gathering in the Diamond Salon instead, my best friend, Victoire, and I—leading the celebration with the latest gossip from Ida, drinking sweet mead, and laughing. Even the king joined us for a brief time, our disagreement the other day forgotten as we talked about my latest botanical work. I don’t think he’s actually angry; he wants to protect me. I’m almost as much a daughter to him as the princess is—more, maybe. Antoine takes an interest in my work and life, and he’s always generous, though I ask for little. Maybe that’s why he’s so kind to me. Loyce is always demanding more things: new gowns, a better chef, a larger allowance, a new jewel she’ll wear once and forget.

  Strange to think of him holding a pistol to my head when I was five years old.

  I carry my boots out into the corridor before putting them on. Hensey doesn’t wake.

  I take the side door that slips out below my rooms and head down the maids’ stair, out into the vegetable garden. A dim racket echoes from the kitchen. I make my way, unseen, along the hedge to the gate, and out onto Laon’s cobblestone streets. The city lies quiet around me—the whole kingdom of Eren lingers under the spell of good food and wine. The people who have food, anyway. Not those who clamor at the palace gates—and are set upon by the palace guard—claiming that King Antoine Eyrlai has stolen their grain for his own bread.

  But even the poor aren’t out scavenging after last night’s celebration. The brisk autumn air is sharp in my lungs as I approach the Hill of the Imperishable. The ground steepens and the elms and oaks cluster together, dense with undergrowth. A trickle of birdsong fills the air.

  The great old circle of stones sits silent on the hilltop, overlooking the river and the Tower on its distant hill, lit by a burning autumn sun. No one else ever comes up here. They’re afraid someone will accuse them of practicing magic, that they’ll be seized and interrogated by witch hunters. When they invaded our lands centuries ago, the emperors of Paladis called our stones nests of witchcraft. They couldn’t drag the stones out of the earth, so they set up guards to kill anyone who came up here, sorcerer or no. The imperial army’s two hundred years gone, the empire’s shrunk due to corruption within, and Eren is the empire’s ally now, not her subject. But the fear still lingers. After all, though the inquisitions have ended, some people still practice magic, and witch hunters still capture and imprison them.

  I ought to be afraid, too. But no one’s watching me—not this morning, nor any morning. I haven’t been under guard since I was five years old, once I proved myself a tame hostage.

  So there is no one to see me taunt myself with the magic I cannot have.

  I stride to the center of the circle, where a flat stone lies buried halfway into the earth. I drop down onto its cold surface. The chill seeps up through my greatcoat and breeches. There was a stone circle in Caeris, I think, that I visited as a child. I seem to remember my father taking my hand in his. People singing while he cut a gentle drop of blood from my palm and let it fall to the stone at my feet.

  But maybe I’m imagining it. Maybe I’m inventing what happened when the stone drank my blood. I was just a child; what do I truly remember?

  I slip the dagger out of my pocket, balance it in one hand, and throw it into the circle instead. It clatters off the closest stone, loud in the empty morning. Would my mother scold me for doing this?
Would she call it disrespectful, sacrilegious? The savage gods they still worship in Caeris, the gods Denis Falconier mocked—the old gods of earth and wood and mountain, not the civilized deities we’ve adopted from Paladis—would not approve.

  I don’t remember what my mother looks like. But when I throw the dagger, I remember the warmth of her hand on my wrist, stopping me.

  Or maybe it’s just my imagination.

  I snatch up the dagger and hurl it at another stone. What’s the use in thinking of my mother or father? I’m glad they never tried to rescue me; I’m glad I didn’t grow up a scrawny, backwoods Caerisian rebel, speaking in a wretched accent and hating the crown. The Caerisians are shepherds, cattle-raiders, fishermen, poor farmers tilling rocky soil; they’ve scarcely heard of Paladis and the philosophers of Ida. Caeris itself has hardly changed since the conquest two centuries ago, still a land of drunk, querulous half-savages. They’re so disorganized that it took the Ereni one day to overtake their capital during the conquest. Think how easily Antoine put down my father’s foolhardy rebellion! By capturing me, he stopped the rebellion and destroyed my father’s hopes for a new king in a single stroke. Imagine what it would have been like if the Caerisians had succeeded! Would we be speaking their barbaric language now, expected to practice their backward customs, bowing to the Old Pretender instead of Antoine? The entire world, and not just Denis Falconier, would deride us as earth-worshipping pigs.

  Thank all the gods I live at the court in Laon, where I have friends and my work in the greenhouse, salons and theater and dancing—the sophistication that the north can’t even conceive. Thank all the gods Antoine put a stop to a rebellion that wouldn’t have benefited anybody except my father, the man who fancies himself a kingmaker. King-mocker, more like.