Amazon Queen by Lori Devoti Page B

the slit in my thumb . . . the blade had been sharp enough to cut it. I’d missed it, somehow, but it made sense. Thea had known this council’s plan and hadn’t told me. She’d been using me to find the child so she could do as the council asked . . . so she could kill him.
    I wasn’t a queen; I was a tool.
    The realization was like a physical blow, and I couldn’t stand next to Mel now, couldn’t look at her.
    A piece of me was dying and the only thing I could do was run.
    I left Bern at Mel’s. I needed to be alone and I didn’t know what waited for her back at camp. I didn’t know what waited for either of us, but this felt like my fight.
    After being forced to see the truth, I’d walked from the room in a fog. I knew from the outside I’d appeared to be under control. I always appeared under control, but inside, my knees were buckling and my heart was thrashing around inside my chest.
    I’d walked through those damn babies without looking down. If I’d thought they were watching me when I entered, when I’d left, the feeling had been one hundred times worse. They weren’t just watching, they were judging.
    And I came up lacking, severely lacking.
    The Jeep’s engine roared as I barreled down the highway. I zipped past two semis and a car full of teenagers before thinking to glance down at the speedometer—eighty-five. I tapped on the brake.
    Amazons didn’t speed. Speeding invited troopers to stop you, which led to questions. We avoided questions.
    When the vehicle was back under sixty-five, I shoved my back against the seat and tried to think.
    But I couldn’t—or I was thinking too much. Images from my life as queen and my life as Mel’s friend swirled through my head. Images of Bern and Lao: Thea asking Bern to give up her
givnomai,
Lao telling the girls to put down the bowl.
    All of them part of the tribe.
    None of them completely seeing things the same way.
    When did that happen? When did we stop all agreeing?
    Then I thought of Bubbe. Before my birth, she had fought the high council, gone against the old ways and stopped Amazons from killing and maiming their sons. After that we had simply deserted them, left them for humans to find and adopt.
    But since then the high council had grown, not in size but power. They had fought every change since all the harder until there had been no change, no independent thought at all.
    My job as queen had always been to follow blindly, like a sheep.
    I slammed my fist into the steering wheel.
    Like a sheep.
    Damn the wolverine son for seeing that when I couldn’t.
    Angry with myself and my tribe, I pulled off at a rest stop just past the Illinois border. I parked in the area for semis. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with mothers and toddlers or old people walking their dogs. Truckers tended to mind their own business; I liked that.
    Actually, there was only one semi in the lot. I parked as far away from it as I could and got out to do my business and walk a bit.
    My mind was a swirl. Thea had talked with someone from the council. I believed that. What I didn’t know for sure was if she knew that someone wanted the child killed. I suspected she did—suspected she’d taken the child to the woods to do the job herself.
    But the council . . . they were still out there. Mel had said the council had split. That didn’t mean the council was gone . . . it meant there were two now.
    Which meant I had a choice of which one to listen to or, as Mel had suggested, the choice to listen to no one at all, to think for myself.
    It was strange to realize I hadn’t been doing that all along.
    So which was it? After the shock of realizing I’d been manipulated wore off, did I understand why some of the council might want the child dead? He was the son of a son and a high council member. The potential power in that combination was unsettling.
    But he was also just that . . . potential. He was an infant; he had done nothing good or bad. Who were we to condemn him?
    The