Ellen Datlow - After - Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia

Master Roland put out his arm to encircle Tor, to lead him back to the dormitory. A Knight of the Order must learn to sleep and wake on command.

“So do you think you can do it?” he murmured. “Be her one true knight?”

That night and every night, that day and every day, before the first bit of food or first prayer passed his lips, Tor looked up at the queen. Rosamond, rose of the world.

He could do anything, for her sake.

His answer was yes, and yes, and yes.

Rosamond was nothing but trouble. Yvain had known that from the time he was fourteen, from the first moment he’d seen her face stamped on gold.

He’d dreamed about that day every night for the next three years.

He’d hooked a wallet from the lining of a man’s expensive coat. Rosamond bless the fancy designer who’d had the idea of custom-made coats that fit wallets in the lining as a preventative against theft. It meant that all the rich guys now kept their money in the same place.

Then he’d reached the Nests, and opened the wallet, and saw the queen’s face carved on a gold coin.

Rosamond’s face was only put on sovereigns. Sovereigns were only carried by members of the Court. The Court used them as passes into exclusive clubs, as markers of identification. They were worth more than a thousand drachmae—were enough to buy a real house and not just an apartment lower down outside the Nests. They were too valuable ever to spend.

Anyone not of the Court who got caught with one was dead.

Yvain had been a stupid boy. He’d laughed and tossed the coin through the air to Persie, who’d caught it in both hands and gazed at it with awe.

“Rosamond,” she’d said, drawing out the word in disbelief, as if she’d seen the sun rise in a night sky. “There has to be a way we can spend it.”

Then she’d turned it over and over in her hands, watching it gleam.

Yvain and Persie had been together in the Nests since they were little. They’d gotten married when Persie turned fourteen, as soon as it was legal to wed, and had been married for less than two months. Yvain was a boy from the Nests, after all, and one with a criminal record. Marriage was the only way to escape the Trials. And Persie was an orphan girl, with no family to set a brideprice that a boy from the Nests could not afford.

They had planned it like that, to keep each other safe. Yvain could skim the skyscrapers and pick any pocket in the City. He’d promised Persie that she would never regret marrying him.

“Believe me,” Yvain had said, winking at her. “I know when a lady is too much trouble.”

It made him impatient even to think about the Trials. As if their lives weren’t difficult enough, being born with nothing on the horizon but blood and waste, and all for some woman. A face on a useless coin.

Without Persie, he didn’t like to think about what would have happened to him when it was time for the Trials.

He took the hand that didn’t hold the sovereign, and kissed it. Persie smiled, but kept her eyes fixed on the coin in her palm. It caught the multicolored lights of the city below, and the golden lights from the palace up on the hill beyond the city, where the queen lived.

“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world, remember,” Persie told him. “And there is the question of a life of luxury. Nothing but gold and sherbet and the veil of Rosamond’s hair between you and the world, if you win the Trials. That would be worth something. Like this coin is worth something. A collector would be interested.”

“Oh, let it drop,” said Yvain. “I’m going to sleep.”

The Nests were called the Nests because they were so high up, the peak of every building, and so many birds lived there. There were not many trees left in the city, so the top of every skyscraper was crammed with the filth and noise of the birds.

Yvain liked to lie on his back and watch the birds wheeling. He never turned his head to the side to look at the mountain where Rosamond had lived for centuries. He had no interest.

He’d gone to sleep like that a hundred times as a child, watching the birds, hearing Persie breathe near him.

When he woke up this time, Persie was gone.

Yvain had launched himself from the Nests, slid down the material awning of the sixty-ninth floor, snagged at the statue on the fifty-first to check his fall, grabbed at the iron pipe that ran around the thirty-seventh, landed on one knee on the balcony of the twenty-fifth. He heard the scrape of the balcony door and a shout, but he didn’t look behind him as he vaulted over the railing to the slanted little roof over the next balcony.

He’d landed on top of one of the market stalls, breathing hard and blinking sweat out of his eyes. It had stung like tears.

Once, long ago, criminals were hanged and quartered. In these more enlightened times, criminals were still publicly punished. That was a deterrent to other prospective criminals.

But the body parts weren’t wasted, as they had been in the past. Machines cut open the criminal and removed their organs, harvesting them for law-abiding citizens.

And the criminal was punished with a live dissection.

Yvain had sat on the stall and watched Persie die in the market square, blood vivid on screens set on various buildings around the square, his small bright-haired wife’s pain interspersed with advertisements for the latest virtual sports equipment.

All for asking around about a buyer for a sovereign.

That night, once harsh daylight and those images of blood were gone, Yvain melted down the sovereign in a glow of fire and bright metal. He saw his reflection cast in the shining surface of a skyscraper wall, saw the light of the fire make the tears on his face look as if they were burning, as if he were crying gold.

The sovereign wasn’t pure gold after all. It had all been a lie.

After Persie died, for the three years of nights between Persie’s death and the Trials, Yvain did not go to sleep watching the birds. He turned his eyes to the golden mountains where the queen lived in her palace.

Persie had been right. Yvain had been able to make some money selling the metal of the melted-down sovereign. Rosamond was worth something.

Not enough. Not anything like enough.

Roz could not leave the palace until the Trials, but she was allowed to go anywhere she wanted inside the palace.

She always asked to train in the Hall of Mirrors.

There were no mirrors in the hall, of course, for anyone but Roz. It was lined with pictures of all the Rosamonds who had ever been made.

It was also the place where she and Miri learned hand-to-hand combat—what to do if a man broke into the palace, how to use the things that surrounded them as weapons—where she and Miri had learned lessons they would probably never put into practice. Roz could do backflips down the hall, seeing her own image upside down and blurred, repeated a hundred times.

Rosamond: carefully constructed by the finest technology to be the most beautiful of them all. Every Rosamond who had ever lived, and she was just the Rosamond who was living now. The only Rosamond who was living now, since the old queen was dead.

Except no Rosamond had ever learned to fight before.

Roz had read the books. The city council had wanted to make a prize people couldn’t pass up: setting every young man in the city a series of tasks—the Trials—that, if won, would mean the kingdom and the hand of the princess.