The Fate of the Tearling

  She knew that two more children had disappeared: Annie Bellam, while walking up from the dairy, and Jill McIntyre, who had been playing hide-and-seek down by the schoolyard, both of them gone without trace. These disappearances were bad, but because of Jonathan, Katie also knew that the depredations in the graveyard had begun again, that fifteen graves had been dug up over the past fourteen months, all of them belonging to children. The Town at large did not know about the graveyard—Katie herself had filled in several of the graves, tamping them down with extra dirt to hide the settling and covering them with leaves—but after the McIntyre girl’s disappearance, the Christers had gotten much worse. Paul Annescott, or Brother Paul, as he now styled himself, claimed that the disappearances were a judgment on the Town, a punishment for weak faith. This did not surprise Katie; what floored her was the number of people who listened. It was just as she’d feared: with William Tear gone, there was no voice strong enough to counteract the increasingly hysterical flow of religious rhetoric. Mum and Jonathan were working on it; Jonathan did not quite have his father’s ability to sway a crowd, but he could talk a good game when he needed to, his voice quiet and logical, the voice of a man who only wanted what was best for everyone. But it wasn’t enough. Eight months earlier, some hundred people had begun construction of a church, a small white clapboard building on the southern end of town, and now that the church was finished, Annescott held sermons there every morning. He had given up his day job of beekeeping, but no one dared remonstrate with him, not even Jonathan. Katie knew many things now, but she didn’t know how to fix what was wrong with the Town. She hoped Jonathan did, but couldn’t be sure of that either, and she had an uncomfortable feeling that the rest of Jonathan’s guard was riddled with doubt as well.

  Gavin was the worst. He complained constantly about the shifts Katie assigned him, how they interfered with his duties to the church. If she had known he would turn out so devout, she would never have chosen him, but she couldn’t let him go now. He was still the best knifeman in the group, and Morgan and Lear looked up to him almost as much as they did Jonathan. (More, perhaps, Katie’s mind often remarked, and she shuddered, feeling that nothing good could come of that.) This in turn swayed Alain and Howell, who followed wherever the majority led. Virginia remained Katie’s staunch ally, but even this felt like a failure to Katie, that she had been able to retain the loyalty of the one woman in the group, but not the men. She didn’t know whether it was sexism or not, but either way, she thought that William Tear would have been disappointed. Sooner or later, she knew, Gavin was going to challenge her for leadership of Jonathan’s guard, and Katie had no idea how she would fight off such a challenge. Jonathan himself would back her, but Katie shouldn’t need Jonathan to intercede; that would only confirm her lack of authority. The problem went round and round in her head, but she could see no answer that didn’t include throwing Gavin out of the guard.

  Of course, all of these disagreements had to be hushed up outside their circle. To the Town, the seven of them were merely Jonathan’s friends, and one of them was with him at all times. At night, a member of the guard slept on the spare bed they had moved into Jonathan’s living room. There was much grumbling about night duty, and Katie knew that most of them—Gavin and his people, at least—thought she was being alarmist. Katie didn’t care. There was still no sign of the violence that William Tear had foreseen, but she didn’t doubt that it was coming, and she was determined to spot it far in the distance. She had made Tear a promise, and that promise seemed to mean infinitely more now that he was dead. Some days she still felt as though she and the others were children, merely playing at adult business, but they had no alternative. There was no one else.

  She knew that Row Finn had completed two expeditions with Jen Devlin’s team of mountaineers and that, a month ago, he had left on a third. As Row’s friend, she also knew that he was no more interested in exploring than she was. But it was only from Jonathan that she learned what Row was seeking up there in the mountains: sapphire, the same sapphire that lay around Jonathan’s neck. Everyone had found small chunks of the stuff from time to time; it seemed to underlie the bedrock of the Town. But in the mountains, the sapphire was much easier to get to, much easier to chip out in large, unbroken pieces. Jonathan knew this, and so Katie knew it as well, but she didn’t understand precisely what Row would want with that sapphire, or what he meant to do with it if he could bring some back. She did know Row well enough to know that if there was something of value in the world, he would certainly want it for himself, and so in the past two years she had found herself looking at her old friend with something worse than regret: suspicion.

  When Row was not off exploring mountains, he went to church every day. He was popular there, so popular that sometimes Paul Annescott let him give sermons. Katie had listened in a couple of times, though she was forced to do so from a stand of oaks across the road; Row’s sermons were so popular that people spilled out the back door and onto the porch. Katie would listen, biting her nails, while Row’s voice boomed through the packed doorway, talking about chosen people, people who were better and more deserving. He did have an excellent voice for a preacher, even Katie had to admit, deep and imbued with emotion that Katie suspected was wholly ersatz. There was an undertone of ruthlessness in Row’s sermons that Katie was not sure others would catch; after all, she had once known him better than anyone. He had always been a consummate actor; the question was how much of the boy had filtered into the man. From Gavin, Katie knew that the church accepted Row’s trips to the mountains as a pilgrimage, forty days’ wandering in the wilderness or some such thing, and this, too, made her uneasy. Row would enjoy the parallel with Christ; always, he had felt cheated by his lack of status in town. If Row wanted to gull his church, Katie would shed no tears for them, but the idea of so many gullible people at any one man’s beck and call seemed inherently dangerous.

  To Jonathan?

  She didn’t know. In some ways, Jonathan was the biggest mystery of all. Katie often wondered why he should need a guard, when he knew so much more, saw so much more, than the rest of them. Sometimes it felt as though their guard was entirely for show, but Katie didn’t know who they were trying to fool. Sometimes she even wondered whether William Tear had had any plan at all, or whether he had assembled them and trained them simply on a whim. Katie had the ability to kill a man with her bare hands, but how did that benefit anyone, when she couldn’t even see the enemy she was fighting?

  “What’s wrong with this place?” she demanded of Jonathan one day, on their way to the library. People waved and smiled at them, but even Katie could feel the great vacancy behind these greetings, sensed the smiles melting the moment they turned away. Something in the Town had become twisted, and until Katie could find the end of the thread, there was no way to unravel it.

  “They forgot,” Jonathan replied. “They forgot the very first lesson of the Crossing.”

  “Which is what?” Katie hated when Jonathan talked about the Crossing. He knew plenty about it, more than anyone else their ages, but he would only parcel out the information in tiny nuggets.

  “We take care of each other.” Jonathan shook his head. “Even the original members of the Blue Horizon seem to have forgotten.”

  “Not Mum!” Katie snapped. “She knows.”

  “Much good it does.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Unexpectedly, Jonathan took her hand. Katie thought about pulling away, but didn’t. Jonathan’s hand was warm, not unpleasant, and after all, what did she care if people saw them holding hands? Half the Town thought they were sleeping together anyway; it was a source of great amusement to the rest of the guard.

  “Your mum is broken, Katie,” he told her. “I’m sorry to say it, but her life was wrapped up in my father, and without him, she has nothing to keep her running.”

  Katie began to protest, but something silenced her, a voice inside that no longer allowed her to argue with the unpalatable
truth. Every year that voice became stronger; Katie resented it sometimes, but it was often useful, particularly in a town where so much now depended upon the politics of pragmatism. Mum wasn’t right, hadn’t been right since William Tear had left. She went through the motions of her everyday life, but Katie almost never saw her smile anymore, and it had been months since she had heard Mum laugh. Mum was broken, and she wasn’t alone. Tear’s departure had torn the guts from the Town, and the longer he failed to return, the more Katie saw her community as a pack of wolves, fighting over the carcass. At the last meeting, Todd Perry had called for a vote to allow people to carry knives in town. Jonathan, Katie, and Virginia had weighed in heavily on the other side, and the motion was defeated by a narrow margin. But they couldn’t deceive themselves about which way the wind was blowing.

  “I hate them sometimes,” Jonathan remarked quietly. “It’s not how my father would have felt, but I do. Sometimes I think: if they want to walk around armed and build fences and let a church tell them what to do, let them wallow in it. They can build their own town of closed thinking, and live there, and find out later what a shitty place it really is. It’s not my problem.”

  For a moment, Katie was too shocked to reply, for Jonathan had never expressed such ideas before. With his guard, he was the eternal optimist; there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed, and now she was alarmed by the hopeless tenor of his words. She had promised William Tear that she would protect Jonathan, and she had always assumed that such protection, if it came to that, would be an act of knives. But now she wondered whether Tear might not have meant this moment, right here. Memory overtook her: sitting with William Tear in the backyard, five years ago now, the sapphire clutched in her fist. Had Tear known, even then?

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s not how your father would have felt.”

  “I’m not my father.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Jonathan. You’re all we have left.”

  “I don’t want it!” he snapped, dropping her hand. They were in front of the library now, and at the sharpness in Jonathan’s voice, several children on the bench looked up, their eyes keen at the prospect of an argument.

  “Too bad,” Katie replied. She felt for Jonathan, she truly did—and, some nights, lying in her narrow bed, she thought that she might feel for him quite a bit—but this wasn’t the time for sympathy. A guard was like a stone wall, and good stone didn’t yield. Good stone cracked right down the middle before it would give an inch. She lowered her voice, mindful of the children listening in: perfect little receivers, ready to carry the conversation back to their parents.

  “No one ever wants the fight, Jonathan. But if it comes to you, and it’s a righteous fight, you don’t walk away.”

  “What if we’re destined to lose?”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Don’t I?” he demanded. His hand had crept up toward his chest, and Katie knew that he was clutching the sapphire that lay just beneath. The desperation in the gesture, the dependency it revealed, made Katie suddenly furious, and she snatched his hand away, feeling like a hypocrite as she did so, for she understood Jonathan’s hatred, his contempt for these people who were too stupid to know that their future danced on the edge of a knife, a future of rich and poor, of violence and swords, of people bought and sold—

  How do you know that?

  I don’t know, but I do.

  This was true. It was as though someone else were inside her head, knowing it for her. The knowledge made her sick, but she thrust it away, focusing on Jonathan.

  “You don’t know anything,” she hissed. “I don’t give a fuck about magic, or visions. The future isn’t set. We can change it at any time.”

  Jonathan stared at her for a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, he smiled.

  “Are you laughing at me?” she demanded.

  “No,” he replied. “Just remembering something my father said before he left.”

  “What?”

  “He said that I had picked the right guard. That you were the one to carry us through.”

  For a moment, Katie couldn’t reply. Her anger vanished and she was suddenly moved, moved beyond description, to discover that after all these years she had not been found wanting in William Tear’s eyes. He had chosen her to guard his son.

  “Crisis over,” Jonathan muttered, and shook his head ruefully. “But not for long. You might not believe in my visions, but I know when trouble’s on the way, and there’s bad trouble coming down the pike.”

  He did know, Katie admitted reluctantly to herself, but she shrugged it off and took his hand again, tugging him toward the library. “Not this afternoon, sibyl. Now hurry up.”

  Three days later, Row Finn walked back into town, alone.

  He must have been thirty pounds lighter, his clothing torn and ruined and his carrying pack barely in one piece. His steps were stumbling, and he appeared to be delirious. When he saw Ben Markham and Elisa Wu, who were fishing on the banks of the Caddell, he collapsed.

  The story passed like quicksilver through the Town. According to Mrs. Finn, who jealously guarded her son from visitors, the expedition had become lost in the high mountains and they had succumbed, one by one, to exposure and starvation. Row had lasted the longest, and it was only by barest chance that he had found a narrow natural trail that led him down a pass. He had survived the journey home by eating such roots and berries as he was able to forage in the great forest.

  The Town believed this story. Katie did not.

  She had not seen Row yet, but she had heard plenty. His church flocked to him, determined to fatten him up. Virginia, who had gone over to see Row two days before, said the house was full of food, baked goods and soups.

  “Women too,” Virginia told Katie grimly. “Awful lot of women in that church like seeing Row Finn bedridden, I can tell you that.”

  For the rest of the mountain expedition, the Town had a rare united moment of genuine mourning. Jen Devlin in particular was an enormous loss. They held a single service for the eleven dead, a service through which Katie stood dry-eyed, watching not the various people who spoke in memory of the dead, but the Finn house, clearly visible two streets down the hill. She was desperate to question Row, but she didn’t want an audience when she did so. The conversation would not be a good one. She didn’t want to suspect her old friend, but she couldn’t help it.

  In the end, it took her more than a week to find him alone. Row’s church was off on some sort of prayer retreat in the plains for two days, and his mother had gone to a card party. Row’s tale had made Mrs. Finn a much sought-after guest, and Katie liked the woman even less for the grasping and desperate embrace of her fleeting popularity. The sight of her happily following a group of women, women who’d wanted nothing to do with her until now, made Katie want to shake the woman awake.

  Katie didn’t bother to knock before entering the Finns’ house. When she reached Row’s room, she found him on his side in bed, his eyes closed, his face that of an angel in repose. The weight he had lost only made him better-looking, his cheekbones like carved marble. Katie couldn’t help wondering who Row would have been if he’d been born without that face.

  “I know you’re shamming, Row.”

  His eyes popped open, and he smiled. “You always know, don’t you, Katie?”

  “About you, I do.” She dragged up a chair; there were several spread around the bed. “Hiding from all your guests?”

  “They do wear me out.”

  She looked around the room, taking in the homemade bouquets and boxes of baked goods, and gave a derisive snort. “I suppose that’s the price of being the new messiah, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not the messiah,” Row replied, smiling pleasantly, but his eyes held their same old devilry. “Just a devout man.”

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened to you out there?”

  “That story is all over town by now.”

  “It is.” She smiled, but her smile wasn’t as ge
nuine as Row’s; it felt like winter on her mouth. “But I’d like to hear your story.”

  “Don’t you trust me, Katie?”

  “Don’t play with me, Row. What happened?”

  He told her substantially the same story she had already heard: lost in the mountains, the expedition dying slowly of starvation and cold. He had outlasted them by rationing his food carefully, and by huddling for warmth with the two horses until they too succumbed. There were only two points where Katie sensed Row fiddling with the truth: the food rationing, and the trail he had found down the mountain. But Katie couldn’t make him shake his story, and finally she gave up and leaned back in the chair, unsatisfied.

  “Didn’t you miss me, Katie?”

  Katie blinked. She had missed him, though she hadn’t realized it until this moment. Things were more interesting with Row around; that hadn’t changed, even if everything else had. But at the same time, the Town felt safer with Row gone.

  “I missed you, Katie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you know me. It’s useful to have everyone think I’m good, I suppose, but it’s tiring too.”

  “I knew your church nonsense was a lie.”

  “Brother Paul is dying.”

  Katie blinked at the abrupt change of subject. “Of what?”

  “Cancer, Mr. Miller thinks. Brother Paul should live out the rest of the year, but not much longer, and the pain may force him to end his own life long before that.”

  “Is he allowed to end his own life? I thought that was a sin.”

  “Maybe, but for most people, faith is a pretty flexible business.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  Row grinned. “It doesn’t have to be a bad thing, Katie. The faithful are easy. Easy to convince, easy to direct, easy to discard. When Brother Paul dies, he’ll hand the church off to me.”