The Fate of the Tearling Read online

  Katie nodded slowly, thinking of the book beside her bed, in which men shot other men with guns. There were no guns in the Town, only knives and arrows, and those were used for hunting and trades. No one was even allowed to carry a knife in the streets.

  “Before the Crossing, your mother and I were both trained as weapons,” Aunt Maddy murmured, her gaze fixed on some far-distant place. “We had guns, but we didn’t need them. We learned to kill with our bare hands.”

  “Kill people?” Katie blinked, trying to wrap her mind around this idea. Such things happened all the time in books, but they were only stories. She tried to picture Aunt Maddy or Mum killing someone, and found that she had no idea what that would even look like. To her knowledge, only one man in town had ever died by violence, and he had been killed by a marauding wolf out on the plains, years ago. There had been an argument about it at meeting, though Katie had been too young to understand at the time. Several people had demanded that guards be posted around the edges of the Town, guards with bows. Such decisions were always made by democratic vote, but William Tear had spoken against the motion, and when William Tear said no, there was only one way for a vote to go. Katie looked down at Aunt Maddy’s hands, then at her arms, muscular and dotted with scars.

  “Is that why you always follow William Tear around?” she asked. “In case you have to kill someone?”

  This time, it was Aunt Maddy who blinked. “Of course not. We just want to be there in case he needs anything.”

  Aunt Maddy had just lied to her, Katie thought. She did not take offense; adults lied all the time, their reasons often as silly as those of children. But it was odd that, in a conversation that had contained so many other surprising bits of honesty, Aunt Maddy would feel the need to lie about this.

  “We want to start your apprenticeship early, Katie. Next month. We want to train you, just as your mother and I were trained, to meet violence when it comes.”

  “Why? What violence?”

  Aunt Maddy’s face seemed to shutter. Even her eyes became blank with concealment.

  “Probably no violence at all, Katie. This is just a precaution.”

  Another lie, and Katie felt anger stir inside her now, a crouched animal, waiting.

  “Does it have something to do with the graveyard?” she asked, thinking of those torn-open graves, their contents strewn pitifully across the grass. They said it was an animal, but privately, Katie had wondered. Wouldn’t animals have torn up the entire place? Whatever had dug into the ground had apparently targeted three or four specific graves.

  “No,” Aunt Maddy replied. “But there may be other dangers. Consider yourself a preventative measure.”

  “Just me?” Katie asked, thinking of her size. She wasn’t tiny, but she wasn’t tall either, and she was slight. If she had to fight a man with her bare hands, she would probably lose, training or no.

  “No. We’ve chosen several young people. Your friend Virginia. Gavin Murphy. Jonathan Tear. Lear Williams. Jess Alcott. A few others.”

  “But not Row?”

  “No. Rowland Finn won’t be a part of this, and he’s to know nothing about it.”

  For a moment, Katie felt her anger begin to uncoil. Row had so many gifts; why couldn’t the adults recognize them, at least once? The lack of acknowledgment hurt Row, though he did his best to hide it, and Katie felt that hurt as though it were part of herself.

  “Do you want to do it?” Aunt Maddy asked.

  Katie swallowed, trying to tame the animal inside her. She did want to do this, but it would mean keeping a secret from Row. Could she even do that? They had no secrets. Row knew everything about her.

  “Can I think about it?”

  “No.” Aunt Maddy’s voice was kind, but implacable. “You need to decide now.”

  Katie stared at the ground, her thoughts racing. She did want to do this. She had never hidden anything from Row, but she thought she could, just this once. She wanted to be in on the secret.

  “I’ll do it.”

  Aunt Maddy smiled, then crooked her finger toward the house. Katie turned and saw William Tear striding toward them. Without thinking, she hopped off the bench to stand up straight. Aunt Maddy gave her shoulder one final squeeze before she left, but Katie barely noticed her go. The only other time she could remember being alone with William Tear was last year at dinner, when they had both gone to the kitchen for seconds at the same time. Katie had waited, frozen, not knowing what to say to him, relieved when he took his plate back to the table. Now was no better.

  “No need to be frightened, Katie.” Tear settled himself into Aunt Maddy’s spot on the bench. “You’re not in trouble. I just want to talk to you.”

  Katie nodded and sat back down, though a muscle in her leg was shaking and she had to fight to keep it still.

  “Do you want this apprenticeship?”

  “Yes.” Perversely, Katie felt her mouth wanting to open and let words tumble out: how she could keep a secret, how she would be a good fighter, never do anything to hurt the Town.

  “I know,” Tear said, making Katie jump. “That’s a large part of the reason we’ve chosen you for this. It’s not all fighting and knives, Katie. All the training in the world is worth nothing without trust. I’ve watched you for years. You have a gift, one we’ve all observed, a gift for seeing through artifice. The Town will need that, and I won’t always be here.”

  Katie stared at him, bewildered. She had never given much thought to Tear’s age, as she might do, idly, about the other adults in the Town. Tear had to be at least fifty, but that was just a number; Tear had no age, he simply was. But there was no mistaking the tone of his words.

  “Are you sick, sir?”

  “No.” Tear smiled. “I have years left in me, Katie. Just being cautious. Which brings us to this.”

  Reaching beneath his wool sweater, Tear pulled out a tiny drawstring pouch that had been tied with a strip of deer thong. Katie had never noticed this pouch before, and she watched, interested, as Tear thumbed it open and dumped the contents into his palm: a sparkling, deep blue jewel—sapphire, Katie thought—its many facets reflecting the waning sun. Plenty of people in town had jewelry, brought with them in the Crossing, but Katie had never seen a gem of this size. Tear held it out to her, but for a moment she could only stare at it.

  “Go on, take it.”

  She took the jewel and found that it was warm. Probably from Tear’s chest, but Katie couldn’t escape the odd idea that the stone was alive somehow, almost breathing.

  “I want you to make me a promise, Katie. And be warned, it’s quite a serious promise, not to be made lightly. The jewel you’re holding has a way of making people regret their lies.”

  Katie clenched the sapphire in her fist and felt her hand heat around it, everything in her veins moving faster now. She looked up and saw something terrible: a drop of water trickling down Tear’s cheek, incongruous with the world that Katie had always known.

  “Promise me, Katie. Promise to do what’s best for this town, always.”

  Katie’s shoulders sagged in relief, because that wasn’t such a hard promise to make. But Tear was so clearly upset that she forced herself to speak slowly and solemnly, as though thinking through every word.

  “I promise to do what’s best for the Town.” She paused and, because those words didn’t seem like enough, continued, “If anyone ever tried to hurt the Town, I’d stop them. I would . . . I’d kill them.”

  Tear’s eyebrows rose. “A fierce animal. Your mother said so. But no more talk of killing, all right?” He held out his hand, and Katie dropped the sapphire back into it. “I’m hoping it will never come to violence. This wasn’t supposed to be a killing place.”

  “Sir, can I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  Katie screwed up her courage. “You have visions sometimes. Everyone says so.”

  “Yes.”

  “If the Town is in danger, then from who? Don’t you know?”


  Tear shook his head. “My visions are often little better than shadows, Katie. It may even be nothing at all.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “No. Even when I only see shadows, they’re usually true shadows.” He held up the sapphire, letting the last of the dying sun gleam through it. “This jewel is a powerful thing, but it has its limitations. It doesn’t function on command. I can use it, but can’t control it.”

  “Where did you get it? From the old world?”

  “Yes and no.”

  She stared at him, confused.

  “Someday, perhaps, I will tell you the story, Katie. But for now, just know that you’ve made a promise. A serious promise. We’ll start next week, but until then, I’ll ask you not to discuss this with anyone, not even your friends. We haven’t spoken to everyone yet.”

  “Can I talk about it with Mum?”

  “Of course. But no one else.”

  She hesitated, wanting to ask about Row, why he wasn’t included. Row was surely the smartest teenager in town, except perhaps for Jonathan Tear . . . but Aunt Maddy had mentioned Jonathan too, Katie recalled now. He was only a year older than Katie, but three years ahead of her in school, and far more distant than his age would suggest. Jonathan never accompanied his parents when they came over for dinner, and though he lived next door, Katie hardly ever saw him. He was fearsomely intelligent; Katie had heard that even after advancing him several grades, they’d been forced to create a special math class for Jonathan, some kind of calculus that no one else was ready to learn. But he didn’t have any friends, and the word around school pegged him as some sort of misfit. No one bullied him, because he was William Tear’s son, but the fact remained that he was different, apart. Surely Row would be no more strange a choice.

  “Katie?”

  She turned and found Tear smiling at her, a bit sympathetically, as though he had read her confusion. The jewel and its little pouch had already disappeared back under his sweater, but Katie barely marked these things. Rather, she was struck by Tear’s eyes, which were not grey or even light grey, but bright and translucent, almost silver in the fading sun.

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me anymore,” Tear told her. “All right?”

  Katie nodded, unable to stop herself from smiling back at him. She thought of all of her own sniping thoughts about Tear and Tear’s sycophants, and felt suddenly ashamed. He was a good man, innately good; for a moment, Katie felt that goodness so powerfully that it almost seemed there was a rope binding them to each other, and she suddenly understood why Mum had followed this man across the ocean.

  He only wants the best for everyone, she thought. Beneath all of the whispering and idol-worship, that’s the truth. I wish I could tell Row.

  “Thank you,” Tear said, and for the rest of her life, Katie would never forget that moment: the tall man smiling at her, the hillside and river stretched out behind, and the bloodred sliver of sun hanging over them. She did not smile back this time, understanding somehow that it would undermine the gravity of the moment, in her own memories if not in fact.

  “We’ll go in now.”

  She walked beside him, listening to their feet scruff through the thin, scratchy grass, but her mind was elsewhere. Tear was right; this business needed to remain secret. Fighting and weapons . . . these things were so far outside the rules of the Town that Katie couldn’t even imagine what would happen if people found out. Virginia Warren, Lear Williams, Gavin Murphy, Jess Alcott, Jonathan Tear, herself, a few others. But not Row.

  Why not? she wondered, glancing sideways at Tear’s long legs, his thick wool shoes. What does he know that I don’t?

  Mum was waiting for them, leaning against a wall just outside the kitchen door, her hands tucked behind her back.

  “Done,” Tear told Mum, settling a hand on her shoulder. “Fierce animal indeed, Dori. Just like her mother.”

  He went on inside, and Katie looked up at Mum, not sure what came next. Mum was unpredictable; she could be surprisingly rational about Katie’s mistakes, but then the oddest things would set her off sometimes. Mum was smiling, but her eyes were watchful.

  “You’ve never kept a secret in your life, Caitlyn Rice, that was as important as this one.”

  “I know.” Katie debated for a moment, then blurted out, “Mum, Row’s so smart! Why didn’t they pick him too?”

  “Ah.” Mum leaned back against the wall, and Katie saw her searching for words. “Row is . . . an unpredictable boy.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Come in and set the table.”

  Katie followed silently, still trying to puzzle this out. Row had a mischievous side, she knew that; he took delight in confounding others. But there was nothing malicious in it, nothing that the two of them couldn’t look back and laugh at later. She wanted to be angry on Row’s behalf, but all she could seem to feel was sadness. Only she got to see Row’s real value, and part of her liked that; it was like a secret between them. But in this moment, she would have traded all of that carefully guarded intimacy to have the rest of the Town know him, see him clearly. And speaking of Row, how was she going to hide all of this from him? An apprenticeship took up a lot of time. How was she supposed to keep Row from finding out?

  Tear will take care of it.

  The voice came from somewhere deep inside her, a place that felt disturbingly adult, but Katie recognized the truth of the thought. Tear would take care of it. There was more than one secret being kept here; Katie sensed rings of concealment far outside herself, widening ripples in the deceptively smooth surface of the Town. She thought of the enormous sapphire, and shivered. She had promised to protect the Town, and she had meant it, but deep down, that other side clamored, the part that was tired of worrying about others, the part that longed only to look after herself.

  I can do both, she insisted, but it was a shrill sort of insistence, desperate, as though something inside her knew even then that such equivocation was false, that one day she would have to choose.

  Kelsea jerked to consciousness and found herself in darkness. The shadow of her jailor loomed nearby, making her tense up, but after a moment she saw that his head and chest swayed in time with the motion of the wagon. He was asleep. The sky over their heads was a deep, velvet black; Kelsea sensed that it was early morning, but there were no signs of dawn.

  I saw.

  Light flared above the wagon. Kelsea looked up and saw an ornate streetlamp passing over her head. At the same time she realized that the ragged, bumpy motion to which she had become accustomed had transformed into an easy glide. They were back on smooth ground. The night air was nearly freezing, and Kelsea tucked the ends of her cloak back over her shoulders. Another streetlamp danced by, a myriad of conflicting firelit shadows drifting across the floor of the wagon as it went. She should sit up, try to figure out where she was, but instead she merely lay there, frozen.

  “I saw,” she breathed, as though words would make the thing real. “I saw.”

  On impulse, she placed a hand on her chest, exploring, but of course there were no sapphires there. They were long gone, and yet when Kelsea closed her eyes, there it was, laid out before her: the Town, the forest, the Caddell, the Almont in the far distance. How was that possible? Even Lily’s world had never been so clear.

  She’s not Lily.

  No. This was a different girl, a child growing up in the Tearling, long before the kingdom had ever held that name. Her mother was Dorian Rice, who had once tumbled into Lily Mayhew’s backyard with a bullet in her gut. The girl was Katie Rice. Years after the Crossing, this scene, Jonathan Tear only fourteen years old. The idea made Kelsea’s heart ache, for she knew that, only five or six years later, Jonathan Tear would be murdered and William Tear’s utopia would be plunged into chaos.

  So little time. How could everything have come apart?

  A puzzle, that, one with no solution, unless Kelsea went back and found the answers for herself. But she had learned throu
gh bitter experience that these little jaunts into the past could carry a terrible price.

  It’s not like you’re doing anything else right now.

  Kelsea smiled tiredly at the thought, a bit of pragmatism that reminded her of Mace. There was certainly very little she could do from this wagon. The cavalry had crossed the border and descended from the Argive Pass yesterday, leaving the bulk of the Mort army far behind. She didn’t know whether the Red Queen had remained with her army or passed ahead in the night. She stared up at the sky, just beginning to lighten from black to deep blue, and for a moment she missed her country so badly that she thought she would weep again. She had left the Tearling in Mace’s hands, yes, and that was a comfort. But she couldn’t escape the feeling that her kingdom was in terrible trouble.

  Above her head, another streetlamp passed, swinging slightly in the early morning wind. Even this bit of Mort organization galled Kelsea. Streetlamps had to be lit at night and doused in the morning, or they were a waste of oil. Who came out here, in the middle of nowhere, to tend to all of these lamps? Again Kelsea mourned her lost sapphires, for the streetlamps seemed to tell their own valuable lesson: fear bred efficiency.

  Not lost.

  The words made Kelsea jerk in surprise, for the voice deep in her mind was unmistakably Lily’s. True, the sapphires weren’t completely lost, but they were in the keeping of the Red Queen; they might as well be on the moon. The Red Queen couldn’t use them, but neither could Kelsea.

  Why can’t she use them? Lily’s voice was miles distant, buried in her mind, but still Kelsea registered the urgency there. Think hard, Kelsea. Why can’t she use them?

  Kelsea thought hard, but came up with nothing. Row Finn had said something about Tear blood; she struggled with the memory, which made her head ache. The Red Queen had Tear blood, Finn had said, but Kelsea’s was stronger. She had given the sapphires away, so how could she still be seeing the past? She suddenly remembered the dream she’d had a week ago: the Crossing, the ships and the dark sky with a bright hole in the horizon. William Tear had opened a doorway through time, and in her own limited way, Kelsea had done the same thing, prying open an aperture and peering into the past. Was it possible that the aperture had stayed open, even now when the sapphires were lost? If the Crossing she had seen was real, it aligned neatly with what she had just seen here: Maddy Freeman, Lily’s sister, years older but alive and well.