The Fate of the Tearling

  Jonathan asked his father if they had found any trace of Yusuf Mansour yet, and Tear shook his head wearily. The shadow that Katie had seen over his shoulder, years ago, seemed more pronounced than ever now, as though he was somehow starting to fade. She wondered, again, whether Tear might be ill, but shelved the thought just as quickly. The Town without William Tear . . . that was nothing to think of. Fever usually traveled through entire households; if Lily was ill, chances were that Tear had been too.

  “Wherever Yusuf is, he’s hidden well,” Tear told them.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” Lily asked.

  “No,” Tear replied. He looked about to say something else, but he firmed his jaw and remained silent. Fading sunlight slanted through the open kitchen window, glinting off the silver chain that hung around his neck, and Katie remembered something else from that long-ago night: Tear had said that his visions were often no more than shadows. Were Jonathan’s visions the same? She looked between the two of them, seeing a few differences—eye color, the red cheeks that Jonathan had gotten from Lily, in contrast to his father’s pale complexion—but far more similarities. Both tall, both lanky, but even more, Jonathan had his father’s air of observation, of sitting quietly and watching until it was time to make a decision, a decision that would undoubtedly be correct.

  It was a pity that no one else saw this side of Jonathan. He barely came to school anymore, but he was still an object of distance. If people would only talk to him, he would get more respect. Not as much as his father, perhaps, but at least as much as he deserved. This sense of hidden value was familiar, and a moment later Katie identified it: it was the same way she’d always felt about Row.

  The talk turned to the mountain expedition, which would be leaving next week. So far, there had been two expeditions to chart the vast land outside the Town, and on the second, they had come upon mountains, but not small mountains like those to the west. According to Jen Devlin, who had led the previous expeditions, the northern mountain range was vast, with peaks so massive that they appeared impossible to cross. But Jen was champing at the bit. She meant to climb.

  “Sounds dangerous,” Lily remarked.

  “It is,” Tear replied, and a shadow seemed to cross his face. “But you know Jen. She never met a challenge she could ignore. It’s not the worst thing in the world, I suppose. The Town needs people like that, people who aren’t daunted by the unknown.”

  Katie frowned, trying to decide whether she was such a person. Disgruntled, she was forced to admit that she wasn’t. She liked things to be certain, decisive.

  “I’ve made my decision,” said Jonathan, and Katie looked up, surprised. He had an annoying habit of guessing her thoughts, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was speaking to his father.

  “Have you?” Tear asked.

  Jonathan pointed to Katie, who jumped as though she’d been pinched. All three of them were looking at her now, and that was too many.

  “What decision?” she asked her plate.

  “Katie, didn’t you ever wonder what I was training you for?” Tear asked.

  Katie nodded mutely. She never had reached a satisfactory answer about that, but over the years the question itself had begun to seem unimportant. They were learning to fight, because someone had to know how, and that knowledge had gradually become its own reward. But Tear was waiting for an answer, so she said, “I thought we were meant to be some kind of police force.”

  “If only that would solve our problems,” Tear replied.

  “Why won’t it?”

  “Police forces are designed to protect the many, not the one.”

  Katie digested this for a moment, but reached no understanding. She didn’t think the Tears meant to speak in riddles; it was merely their way. She considered pretending to understand, then shrugged and asked, “Who’s the one?”

  “Jonathan.”

  Katie looked up, her eyes widening. She glanced to her right and found Jonathan watching her, his gaze coolly amused.

  “Protect him from what?” she asked.

  “That’s the bitch of it. No one knows.” Jonathan threw a wry glance at his father, who smiled back. “Magic is wonderful, but it never works when you need it.”

  Katie frowned, feeling slightly disillusioned. What good was magic that didn’t work on command?

  “There’s a knife out there, hanging over Jonathan’s head,” Tear replied, “but I can’t see it, and neither can he. Jonathan needs protection. He needs guards.”

  Katie sat back in her chair. She wondered if Tear was having her on, but there was no joke in his eyes, and beneath Jonathan’s smile, she sensed a dark pocket of worry. Jonathan was a great one for gallows humor, but even in their brief conversations, Katie had observed that he used such humor defensively.

  “All of us?” she asked.

  “As many as you choose.”

  “Me?”

  “A guard needs a leader, Katie.”

  “I thought you were our leader.”

  Tear paused, looking to Lily, who shrugged and poured herself another glass of water. Tear turned back to Katie, and she saw something grim and hopeless in his eyes, the look of a doomed man with his fingers full of straw.

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Leaving where?”

  “Leaving the Town.”

  Katie gaped at him, once again sure that he must be joking. But Lily and Jonathan were both staring at the table, and in their downcast gazes, Katie sensed the ghost of many arguments, already lost.

  “This community is a good one,” Tear continued. “I believe in it. But the White Ship was a terrible loss. We have medics and midwives, and they’re doing hero’s work, but we need doctors. We need medicine.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re running out of diaphragms, for a start.”

  Katie blushed, dropping her gaze so that she wouldn’t have to look at Jonathan. Mum had taken her to Mrs. Johnson, the midwife, when she was fourteen, just like every other girl in town, and Katie had come out with a diaphragm and instructions on how to use it. It had never occurred to her that there wasn’t an inexhaustible supply of such things.

  “I had hoped that the doctors would be able to find a substitute for birth control here, something in the local plant life, before we ran out. But now we have no doctors, no chemists. We have no one who knows how to perform an abortion. Think on that for a moment.”

  “Where can you find doctors?”

  “Across the ocean.”

  Katie was already shaking her head, because this was a mistake. Tear shouldn’t leave the Town now, not when there was so much whispering and muttering, so much discontent.

  “Can’t someone else go across the ocean? Why does it have to be you?”

  Tear and Lily looked at each other, almost furtively, and then Tear replied, “No. It has to be me.”

  “Why?”

  Tear took a deep breath, then turned to Jonathan and Lily. “Leave us alone for a moment.”

  The two of them got up from the table and disappeared into the living room, Lily closing the door behind them.

  “You know the Crossing as a simple matter of sailing across the ocean,” Tear murmured. “But it was more complex than that. I have to be on the ship.”

  Katie didn’t understand this, but she thought it explained at least one thing: why, in the large, illustrated atlas in the library, she had never been able to find the new world, the Town. From all she understood, the new world should have been right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but there was nothing there, only tiny archipelagos. None of the adults would talk about it, and Katie knew now that she’d been right: the Crossing was a secret, deliberately kept.

  “A long time ago,” Tear continued, “I made a great mistake, an error of judgment. I didn’t even know how large it was at the time.”

  “What error?”

  “We put all the medical staff on the same ship,” Tear replied. The pallor that Katie had noticed earlier had deepened now, a
nd his face looked ghastly, almost skeletal, in the candlelight. “I assumed that all of the danger would come before the Crossing, not after. When the storm hit us, I knew. I knew. But it was too late. We all watched the White Ship go down. I couldn’t save them.”

  Katie nodded. Everyone knew about the White Ship.

  “Now the Town suffers for my mistake.”

  “We’re not suffering!” Katie protested. All her life, Mrs. Johnson had taken care of her, through illness and injury, and she had done fine. People died of illness sometimes, but they were usually old. The Town’s population had doubled since the Landing.

  “We suffer,” Tear repeated, and Katie wondered if he had even heard her. His hand gripped the tablecloth, twisting it. “I failed, and my mistake has come back to haunt me.”

  “What do you mean?” Katie demanded. Normally, she would not have dared to demand answers of William Tear, but in this moment he seemed almost like a child in a daydream. If he had been anyone else, she would have slapped him to snap him out of it.

  “Lily’s pregnant.”

  Katie stared at him, startled. She had always thought of Jonathan’s mum as young, but she had to be at least forty, maybe more. That was old to have a baby, but not impossible. Many women in town had done it.

  “Nyssa says she’s three months along,” Tear continued. “She’s healthy right now, but it’s going to be a difficult birth, and dangerous.” He swallowed. “She may not survive it, either way. But she’ll have a better chance if we have an obstetrician.”

  Katie narrowed her eyes. The Town didn’t need a doctor; Lily needed a doctor, and now William Tear—the same William Tear who had always told them to think of community before themselves—was going to charge off in search of one, leaving the Town behind.

  Selfish, she thought, watching him narrowly. And do you know it? Are you lying to me, or to yourself?

  Tear didn’t answer, but Katie thought that some of what she’d been thinking must have gone through, because he dropped his gaze.

  “I see what you’re thinking,” he told her. “You think this is about me.”

  Katie wanted to say yes, but she couldn’t bring herself to go so far.

  “You don’t understand, Katie. The White Ship has been with me for almost twenty years. You’re young, but smart enough, I think, to understand the need to right a wrong.”

  Katie didn’t, but strangely, in that moment, her anger faded. It was no small thing, to see an idol teetering, but Tear’s lessons were still true, and no one had the right to judge the pain of another. Katie had learned that long before she ever stepped foot in Tear’s classroom.

  He doesn’t need to be perfect, she decided suddenly. The idea is perfect, and the idea is bigger than the man.

  “Don’t go,” she begged for the last time. “Not now, not when the Town is so weak.”

  “I have to go.”

  “The religious people . . . they’re getting worse—”

  “I know that.”

  “Why don’t you stop them, then?” she blurted. “Why don’t you make them stop?”

  “Then I would be a dictator, Katie. I can discourage, but no more.”

  Katie paused, furious. Her first thought was that the Town needed a dictator, needed someone to step in and stop the bad behavior . . . but that was Row’s voice again. She swallowed the words, looking down at her lap.

  “When will you leave?”

  “Next month,” Tear replied. “As soon as the harvest is finished.”

  “Alone?”

  “No. Madeleine will come with me. I’m leaving your mother in charge.”

  “Then let me come too.”

  “No. You need to stay here. Stay here and protect Jonathan.”

  Katie frowned. She didn’t like to think of Jonathan in danger, but the idea of many people protecting only one, or even two, seemed to go against the very grain of the Town.

  “You pick your own people,” Tear told her. “Anyone in our classes. I would say five or six at most; any more will be unwieldy.”

  “When do we start?”

  “When I leave.”

  “What about the people who don’t make the cut? How do we keep it a secret?”

  Tear began to reply, but Jonathan cut him off; he had returned to stand in the doorway. “It’s too late for that. Everyone will know, sooner or later. An armed guard is hard to hide.”

  “Why me?” she asked, looking between the two of them. “I’m the smallest of us. Lear is smarter. Virginia’s tougher. Gavin’s better with a knife. Why me?”

  “Because I trust you, Katie,” Jonathan said simply. “I’ve been watching all of you for years, and you’re the one who doesn’t change course with the wind.”

  This was news to Katie, who thought she changed her mind all the time, and sometimes for the most ridiculous reasons. She wanted to disabuse Jonathan, but Tear was nodding agreement, and the idea that they saw her so differently from the way she saw herself stunned her into silence. Later, she would think that it was as if she’d known that this was coming all along, that there had always been something much larger here than nine children in a clearing, playing with knives. The past three years had only been preparation for the next phase.

  Jonathan moved forward, extending a hand across the table, but for a moment, Katie could only stare at him, this odd unknown, her eccentric classmate, strange sometimes friend who didn’t get along with anyone and didn’t want to. At times she sensed William Tear’s grandeur in him, masked, carefully hidden because being a Tear was dangerous, because in the days to come all of the Tears would have a target on their backs—

  How do you know that?

  Jonathan’s hand closed over hers, and Katie blinked, her mind suddenly filled with a vision: she and Jonathan, alone in a lightless place. He released her hand and, mercifully, the vision faded. But the feel of his hand did not; Katie felt as though she’d been branded.

  What happened to me?

  Her mind returned an answer immediately, unbidden, as though from a deep well that stood outside Katie’s control. She was bonded to Jonathan now, and she suddenly understood that she had taken on much more than an internship, or even a career. A tiny, cowardly voice spoke up inside, protesting that this was too much, that she was only seventeen, but Katie fought the voice, furious. She had always known this was a serious business, even at fourteen, sitting with Tear on the bench in her backyard. She had promised to protect the Town, but William Tear and the Town had always been inextricably intertwined. Now Tear was leaving, and all the Town would have left was Jonathan, an unknown.

  I’m a guard, Katie thought. Jonathan might reject the title—and he wouldn’t be the only one—but she was a guard protecting a prince. She thought of the incessant whispering she heard everywhere now: discontent, avarice, judgment. Superstition creeping into the Town like tendrils of mist. The air of trust and goodwill that had been an omnipresent part of Katie’s childhood seemed to have drained away from the Town, little by little, and now it was almost gone.

  “You’ve made a good choice,” Tear told Jonathan. “If she guards your back half as well as her mother guarded mine, you should be safe as houses.”

  He smiled at Katie, but Katie couldn’t smile back, for a terrible premonition was suddenly upon her, a certainty she could not shake, and it seemed to seize her heart.

  “Katie? Are you all right?”

  She nodded, forcing a smile, but she wasn’t all right. She knew, and Jonathan knew too; his dark eyes were grim as he met her gaze across the table.

  William Tear wasn’t coming back.

  “Katie.”

  She looked up from her book. She had come out into the middle of the woods to read, in a quiet area that she and Row had discovered as children: a small, relatively flat clearing, ringed by oaks, on the western slope. But she hadn’t seen Row here in ages.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  Katie lifted her book to show him the cover. She had just been gett
ing to the good part, but she was just as happy to put the book down for a while. King’s work could always scare her, even on a bright sunny day. Row dropped down beside her, and as he sat, Katie caught sight of a flash at his throat.

  “What’s that?”

  Row held the pendant up, and she saw that it was a crucifix, bright silver on a fine chain. Katie felt a tremor of disquiet; it had been so long since she and Row had actually talked. Even though Row had finished school, they ran into each other often. But the days when the two of them would spend an entire weekend together, out of sight of the rest of the Town, were long gone.

  “What’s that for?”

  Row shrugged. “I’ve been saved.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Nope. I’m a bona fide believer.”

  Katie looked up sharply, but relaxed as she saw the twinkle in his eye.

  “It must have taken quite a while to save you, Row.”

  “Oh, it did. I had to confess my sins.”

  “To who?”

  “Brother Paul.”

  “Brother Paul?”

  “I’m part of his congregation.”

  She stared at him, waiting for a sign that he was joking, but none came, and her relief melted away. Brother Paul was undoubtedly Paul Annescott, who fancied himself a Bible scholar. He had reading groups in his home every week, but they were supposed to be academic, not religious. Katie wondered what William Tear would think if he knew there was an active Christian congregation in town . . . but no, Tear had said he would not intercede.

  “You’re no more Christian than I am, Row. What is this?”

  “I’ve been saved,” he repeated.

  “Does that mean you’ll stop sleeping with half the town?”

  “I’ve left my impure ways behind,” he replied, with a grin that Katie couldn’t decipher. She felt as though he were inviting her in on a joke that she couldn’t identify. When was the last time they’d been together, just the two of them? It had to be at least six months gone.