The Fate of the Tearling Read online

  Next year, Katie would finally be of age to become an apprentice after school, and she could work at the farm if she chose, but she didn’t think she would. She didn’t like manual labor, lifting and carrying. But in September and October everyone worked at the farm, except the babies and the old people with arthritis. They didn’t have enough career farmers yet, and the harvest had to be brought in before the frost. If anyone complained—and someone always did—the adults would inevitably bring up the starving time, and out would come all of the old stories: how they had to slaughter and eat all of the dogs except the puppies; how several groups fled in the night, seeking food elsewhere, and presumably perished in the snow; how William Tear had given away his portions to others until he became so painfully thin and malnourished that he caught pneumonia and nearly died. Now they had plenty of crops, potatoes and carrots and strawberries and cabbage and squash, as well as a healthy population of chickens, cows, and sheep, and no one starved. But every fall Katie was forced to relive the starving time, all the same, and now even the thought of the harvest made her sick to her stomach.

  At meeting last year, William Tear had said something Katie would never forget: that someday all of the plains would be covered with farmland, as far as the eye could see. Katie couldn’t imagine all of that wide grassland tamed into rows. She hoped the day wouldn’t come in her lifetime. She wanted the view to remain just as it was.

  “Katie!”

  She turned and saw Row, about a hundred yards up the path. Katie hurried to meet him, feeling something thrill inside her. Row would make the walk interesting; he always did.

  “Where are you coming from?” she asked.

  “The south slope. I was looking for metal.”

  Katie nodded, understanding this instantly. Row was a metalworker, one of the best in town. He apprenticed in Jenna Carver’s metal shop, and people were always bringing him jewelry to fix, as well as more practical items like teakettles and knives. But repair was just Row’s job. What he really loved was making his own pieces: ornaments and bracelets, ornate fire tools, utility knives with elaborate handles, tiny statues designed to sit on tables. For Katie’s last birthday, Row had made her a little silver statue of a woman sitting beneath an oak tree. The carving on the leaves alone must have taken him days, and the statue was Katie’s most treasured possession; it sat on her bedside table, right next to her stack of books. Row was a gifted artist, but the metal he loved to craft was hard to come by in the Town. Often Row would leave, sometimes for days at a time, and go prospecting outside town, in the woods and plains. One time he had hiked north for a week and found a great forest, the edges of which had yielded an impressive amount of copper. Row longed to return to the forest, and had even asked William Tear for permission to lead an expedition northward. So far, Tear had given him no answer.

  They passed the graveyard, a one-acre patch of flatland beneath a stand of pines. Its perimeter was bounded by wooden fencing, a recent development. Something had been getting into the graveyard, wolves or perhaps just raccoons; in the past few weeks, Melody Banks, who was in charge of the yard, had found several graves torn open, their contents scattered across the yard. Melody would not say whose graves, and the corpses had already been reinterred. Katie was not particularly scared of graveyards, or of corpses, but even she didn’t like the idea of animals digging into people’s graves. She had been relieved when the Town had voted at meeting to fence the place off.

  “Someday,” Row said, “when I’m in charge, I’m going to dig this place up, cremate the whole lot.”

  “What makes you think you’ll be in charge?” Katie asked. “Maybe I’ll be in charge.”

  “Maybe both of us,” Row replied, grinning, but Katie sensed a vein of seriousness beneath that grin. She had no interest in being in charge of the Town, in handling the eight hundred duties that William Tear juggled on a daily basis. But Row’s ambitions were real. Even at fifteen, he was offended by the inefficiency of the Town, certain that he could run it better. He longed for responsibility, and Katie thought that he would be good at it; Row was a born problem solver. But so far, none of the adults in the Town seemed to have recognized this quality, and lack of recognition was a sore spot for Row.

  The root of Katie’s dissatisfaction was slightly different. She loved the Town, loved the beautifully simple idea that they all took care of each other. But in the past few years, she had sometimes felt hemmed in by her community, by its very niceness, the fact that everyone was supposed to watch out for everyone else. Katie didn’t like many of her neighbors; she found them boring, or stupid, or, worst of all, hypocritical, feigning kindness because that was what was expected of them, because Tear was watching. Katie preferred honesty, even at the expense of civility. She longed to have everything out in the open.

  The nicer half of herself she ascribed to Mum, who was one of William Tear’s closest advisers and a true believer and a half. Katie didn’t know who her father was; Mum liked women, not men, and Katie was almost sure that Mum had recruited some willing man to be the father, then forgotten him. Katie wasn’t fussed over her father’s identity, but she often wondered if this unseen, unknown man wasn’t the source of her dissatisfaction, of the rising tide of impatience she sensed inside, an impatience that sometimes bordered on spite.

  “Wobbling again?” Row asked, and Katie chuckled.

  “Not wobbling, just thinking. It doesn’t hurt.”

  Row shrugged. Her need to look at both sides of an issue, to be fair in her thoughts—wobbling, as Row called it—was an impulse that he simply didn’t share. Whatever Row thought was certainly right, and he had never needed to look any deeper than that. It maddened Katie sometimes, but there was also a relief there. Row never needed to gaze backward, wondering whether he had screwed up, whether he had been unfair. The tiny mistakes he made didn’t haunt him at night.

  They turned the corner onto the High Road, passing the library, where the librarian, Ms. Ziv, was just shooing the last people out of the door. The library was a huge building, the only two-story structure the Town could boast. Unlike most of the Town’s buildings, which were made of oakwood, this one had been built of brick. The library was Katie’s favorite place, always dark and quiet, with books everywhere. Row liked it as well, though his taste differed from Katie’s; he had already gone through the small section of books on the occult, but that didn’t keep him from checking them out a second time, and a third. There were strict rules for touching and handling the books, and Ms. Ziv would descend like a hawk if she caught anyone bending the pages or, heaven forbid, taking a book out of its plastic dust jacket. Katie had once asked Ms. Ziv how many books there were, and Ms. Ziv had told her in a hushed voice that there were nearly twenty thousand. She had clearly meant for Katie to be impressed, but Katie wasn’t. She went through two or three books a week. If that held true for her lifetime, she would have enough to read, but what if she didn’t like most of them? What if the ones she hadn’t read yet were checked out by other people? There were no more books, but there would surely be more people, plenty of them. Only Katie seemed to understand that twenty thousand was not many, that it was barely any at all.

  Ms. Ziv finally got rid of the last stragglers. Katie waved to her, and the harried-looking librarian raised a hand in turn, then disappeared inside, shutting the library door behind her.

  “Row!”

  Katie turned and found Anita Berry heading toward them, nearly barreling down her porch steps. Katie didn’t have much use for Anita, but she smiled all the same, for Row’s effect on other girls never failed to entertain her. Row was extremely good-looking, even Katie knew that; it would occur to her sometimes, on those rare occasions when she looked at Row outside the lens of their friendship. Nature had gifted him with the face of an angel: high cheekbones with soft hollows beneath them, and a wide, somehow beautiful mouth. His thick hair, so brown it was almost black, fell over his forehead, nearly obscuring his black eyes. He had a magnetism that attracte
d a string of admirers, not all of them teenagers. More than once, Katie had seen older women flirting with him, and sometimes older men.

  “Hi, Anita,” Row replied. “We’re in a rush; talk to you in school.”

  Katie smothered a grin as they walked off, leaving Anita looking crestfallen. Row elbowed her in the ribs, and she grinned at him. Row knew what he did to women; it was a game to him. Katie took a strange pride in all of this attention, a pride she didn’t wholly understand. She and Row had bypassed attraction completely, moving on to something finer and stronger than sex: friendship, tight and loyal and bound, nothing like the friendships Katie saw among other girls her age, who seemed only interested in gossiping and backstabbing. Katie had never had sex—some quick, clumsy groping with Brian Lord was the nearest she had come—but her friendship with Row was such that she felt certain sex could only divide them.

  When they reached Row’s house, he paused, staring with distaste at the front door, where his mother waited. Despite Row’s popularity, no one liked Mrs. Finn. She was a nervous, weepy sort of woman, constantly saying the wrong thing. Row could do no wrong in his mother’s eyes, but he did not love her for her loyalty; the most he appeared to feel for her was contemptuous indifference.

  “Don’t want to go in yet?” Katie asked.

  Row grinned ruefully, lowering his voice. “Sometimes I want to just move out, you know? Just build my own house, across town . . . except I think she would follow me there, knock on my door all day and night.”

  Katie didn’t reply, but privately she thought that Row was right. Row’s father had been one of William Tear’s good friends, but Mr. Finn had died just after the Landing, and Mrs. Finn clung to Row with a desperation that was downright embarrassing. Mrs. Finn put things in perspective for Katie; Katie’s own mother brooked no nonsense, but she was tough and fair, one of the most respected women in town. Mum gave Katie very little leeway, but she also didn’t smother or humiliate her in front of other people.

  “We could run away,” Katie proffered. “Just run out into the plains and make camp. She would never find us there.”

  “Ah, Rapunzel.” Row placed a hand on her cheek, and Katie smiled involuntarily. The first time they met, she had been crying behind the schoolhouse, because Brian Lord had pulled her hair, pulled it hard, and she didn’t want to go back after recess because Brian would be there—he sat right behind her, and he pulled her hair all the time. Mrs. Warren had talked to him about it, but he would only wait until she wasn’t looking before doing it again. The unfairness of this situation, the cruelty of it, had made six-year-old Katie weep, and she was just considering chopping off all of her hair, making it as short as Aunt Maddy’s, when Row sat down beside her against the schoolhouse wall. Katie had been afraid of him—he was a third-grader—but he listened carefully to her complaint, inspected her head, and then told her the story of Rapunzel, whose long hair had allowed her to escape from prison.

  If only we could, Katie thought now, an echo of her earlier impatience with the Town. If only.

  “Row!” Mrs. Finn had come all the way out on the porch now. She was a gaunt woman, with wide, needy eyes, the corners of her mouth pinched downward in disapproval. Katie, who had been thinking of inviting herself to dinner, suddenly decided to go home. “Row, come in now!”

  “My mother might not find us,” Row continued. “But yours would.”

  “You’re right. Mum’s a bloodhound.”

  “Row!” his mother called again. “Where have you been?”

  Row smiled, trapped, and trudged away up the path to his porch. Katie turned and continued up the lane. Row lived on one of the higher slopes of the hill, but Katie’s house was at the very top, right next to William Tear’s. He was well protected, Tear was, with Mum’s house on one side and Maddy Freeman’s on the other. No one in town wanted to tangle with either of them.

  “Katie!”

  Mrs. Gannett, calling from her porch. Katie wanted to keep walking—Mrs. Gannett was nothing but a gossip—but that sort of thing always got back to Mum. She halted and waved.

  “He’s over at your house,” Mrs. Gannett told Katie.

  “Who?”

  “You know.” Mrs. Gannett lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “Him. Tear.”

  With an effort, Katie kept from rolling her eyes. She knew she was supposed to worship Tear, as everyone did, but whenever she heard someone speak Tear’s name with reverence, a rogue part of her longed to call Tear names and prove that he wasn’t much. But she didn’t dare. There was something about Tear, perhaps only the way he had of looking at her, grey eyes piercing. Those eyes scared Katie. They seemed to see right to the core of her, things she didn’t want anyone else to know. She tried never to speak directly to him.

  She liked Lily, Tear’s wife—not wife, her mind reminded her; William Tear and Lily had never been married—but then, everyone liked Lily. She was one of the few genuine women in Katie’s acquaintance, but Katie sensed that Lily’s honesty had been hard-won, for there was something sorrowful about her as well, a melancholy that Katie glimpsed from time to time when Lily didn’t think anyone was watching. Did William Tear see it too? He must, for he seemed to see everything.

  The sun was just beginning to set as she crested the hill, but all of the lamps were already lit, flickering gently as the candles inside were buffeted by the light evening wind. That was another apprenticeship Katie could choose: learning to make candles. She had no interest in going anywhere near the Town beehives, but Mum had told her that beekeeping was separate, that candle makers only had to deal with the wax. Katie didn’t know why the apprenticeship was so much on her mind today; it was still months away. Maybe because it would be a sure sign that she was growing older. She was so tired of being young.

  “Katie!”

  She looked up and found Mum waiting for her on the porch, her hands on her hips. Her hair was tied up into a messy bun and her shirt was splattered with bits of what looked like stew. Some days she drove Katie crazy, but on other days, like today, Katie was swept with a sudden wave of love for her mother, who was so stubborn that she even refused to wear an apron while she cooked.

  “Come on, rags,” Mum told her, giving her a hug and ushering her inside. “We’ve got company.”

  All of the lamps in the house had already been lit, and as Katie’s eyes adjusted to the low light in the living room, she saw William Tear and Aunt Maddy by the fireplace, talking in low voices.

  “Katie girl,” Aunt Maddy said, turning around. “How are you?”

  Katie hugged her happily; even though Maddy Freeman wasn’t her real aunt, Katie loved her almost as much as she loved Mum. Aunt Maddy knew how to have fun; for as long as Katie could remember, she had always been the one who could think of a good game, or a way to pass a rainy afternoon indoors. But she was also a good listener. It was Aunt Maddy who had told Katie about sex when she was nine, two years before Mrs. Warren broached the subject at school and long before Katie could bring herself to raise the topic with Mum.

  Aunt Maddy’s hug nearly crushed her. She was strong enough to work on the farm, or in the stockyards for that matter, but if Aunt Maddy had any job, it was advising William Tear. Mum, Aunt Maddy, Evan Alcott . . . Tear never went anywhere without at least two of them along, and despite Katie’s ambivalence about the man himself, she couldn’t help being proud when she saw Mum or Aunt Maddy at his side.

  “Come on out to the backyard with me, Katie,” Aunt Maddy told her, and Katie followed, wondering whether she was in trouble. Aunt Maddy didn’t have kids of her own to worry about, so she had far too much time to spend keeping an eye on Katie.

  Their backyard was wide open, separated from the other houses only by a roundpole fence that Mum had built in order to keep out the Caddells’ dog. The sun hung low over the houses, a blinding ball of orange just touching the horizon. Katie could still hear the shouts of other children, several houses over, but they would soon quiet down. The Town was always quiet at ni
ght.

  Aunt Maddy sat down on the broad wooden bench under the apple tree and patted the space next to her.

  “Sit down, Katie.”

  Katie sat, her anxiety increasing. She hardly ever misbehaved, but when she did, it was usually Aunt Maddy who caught her.

  “You start as an apprentice next year,” Aunt Maddy remarked.

  So this was to be a discussion about her future, not her past. Katie relaxed and nodded.

  “Do you have any idea what you’d like to do?”

  “I want to work at the library, but Mum says everyone wants to work there and it’s a fight to get in.”

  “That’s true. Ms. Ziv has more helpers than she knows what to do with. What’s your second choice?”

  “Anything, I guess.”

  “You don’t care?”

  Katie looked up and found, to her relief, that she was not speaking to Aunt Maddy the disciplinarian. There were two Aunt Maddies, and this was the sympathetic one, the one who had helped Katie hide a dress she’d ruined in a mudfight when she was seven years old.

  “I’m just not interested,” Katie admitted. “I know there are some apprenticeships I’d hate for sure, like beekeeping. But even the ones I wouldn’t hate, I just don’t care about.”

  Unexpectedly, Aunt Maddy smiled. “I have an apprenticeship for you, Katie girl, one I think you’ll like. Your mother has approved it, but it needs to be a secret.”

  “What kind of apprenticeship?”

  “You can’t tell anyone.”

  “Not even Row?”

  “Especially not Row,” Aunt Maddy replied. Her face was deadly serious, and the protest Katie had been formulating died on her lips.

  “I can keep a secret,” she replied.

  “Good.” Aunt Maddy paused for a moment, clearly choosing her words. “When we crossed the ocean, we left behind weapons, and therefore much of our ability to defend ourselves from violence. We didn’t believe we would need such things here. You’ve read about weapons, haven’t you?”