by Amanda Witt
On the fourth—with the moonlight shining on it—was the sea.
Chapter 29
“We scare because we care,” Ezzie said. “Unless the berries are ripe.” He muttered something else, turned on his pallet, and grew quiet.
I looked at Sir Tom.
“We treated his wounds immediately,” he said. “This will soon pass.”
The scratches from the wild man’s claws oozed a foul-smelling pus that Shawna kept drawing out and wiping away with a cloth soaked in warm water and some sort of reddish orange cleanser. The bucket sat beside the fire, on the stone hearth, staying warm.
Shawna’s ankle was swollen, but she didn’t seem to notice. She kept talking soothingly to Ezzie as she tended his wounds, wiping away pus, rinsing the cloth in the bucket, wiping away more pus. She was wearing long green surgeon’s gloves from Sir Tom’s medical supplies, and disgusting though Ezzie’s injuries were, she’d stayed perfectly calm the whole time, even when Ezzie had screamed wildly and accused her of being a secret warden. Seeing her now, I couldn’t believe she had panicked in the tree.
“Do not ever touch the wall,” Ezzie said. “It will eat your fingernails.”
“He’s completely off his head,” I whispered to Sir Tom.
Sir Tom shrugged. “Delirium isn’t dangerous,” he said. “As long as he doesn’t do himself any harm, and we won’t let him do that.”
The others—warm, fed, doctored, and wrapped in Sir Tom’s blankets—all seemed to be asleep despite Ezzie’s ravings. All save Cline, who was taking the first guard shift. He sat just outside the threshold alone, facing the slope, a gun in his hands.
Though the cabin was too small for this many people, it really was a remarkable thing for one man to have built alone. Or maybe this had been built long ago, before all the other Guardians had fallen asleep or become less than human.
The cabin had two small windows covered at the moment with waxed cloth. It contained a table and chairs, and plenty of supplies stacked along the walls—metal cans that, I now knew, held food, boxes of medicines and ammunition, and folded piles of blankets and clothes. There was even plenty of water. Sir Tom had rain barrels, but he’d also rigged a bucket on a pulley system to catch the fresh water from a spring he’d discovered trickling out of the cliff below.
Most importantly, situated as it was, no one could get to the cabin easily, and certainly not without making noise when leaping onto that rocky ledge. That was the only possible way up, and a pile of large rocks at the top of the slope showed how Sir Tom intended to deal with trespassers.
It was perfect. It was the refuge we needed. I should have been thrilled.
Actually, I should have been asleep, like the others. But I was too worried.
“Ten little Indians,” Sir Tom said now, taking another puff on his pipe. His chin was speckled with gray stubble, just like his head, and his eyes had a faraway look. He and I were sitting at the table, sleeping bodies lining the wooden floor between us and the fire. Judd was lying right at my feet.
“Red Chief has brought me ten little Indians to fight Custer,” Sir Tom said, “and we can hope she shall never need ransoming.”
I shut my eyes. I was so tired. If my mind would stop spinning, I was sure I could fall asleep sitting bolt upright, even with Sir Tom talking to himself and dropping unsettling little remarks into the conversation every little bit.
“But among all the little Indians, I have none named Meritt.”
My eyes flew open.
Sir Tom was looking at me intently, puffing away at his pipe. The smoke curling blue around his face, the smell of tobacco, recalled to my mind the scarred warden smoking in the prison house the night Meritt ran down the electric blue streets, that night when we last were as we had always been.
“Red Girl is worried about him,” the old man said.
I nodded, blinking hard to keep the tears from forming in my eyes.
The old man studied me, his face inscrutable in the firelight. After a long moment of silence he tapped his pipe on the hearth and shook his head.
“There are more things in heaven and earth than you have dreamt of in your philosophies,” he said.
Impatiently I lifted my hands. “What does that mean?”
He grinned, showing his gapped teeth. “It means you never know, Red Girl. Young Meritt could be alive, or he could be sleeping. It is not up to us. It may not even be up to the ones who think they hold his life in their hands, though there we run into deep water—destiny, freedom, fallen man and fallen angels, sleeping and waking, the quick and the dead and the quickening dead . . .” I stared at him blankly, and he laughed.
Judd threw out an arm and cried out in his sleep. I leaned over, pulled the blanket more snugly around him, and kept my hand on his chest until he sank into calmer sleep. When I sat back up in my chair the old man spoke as if there had been no interruption.
“Until we know for certain what has happened, it’s best to think and act as if young Meritt is living still.”
I had just begun to feel a little heartened by that comment when he added, “Otherwise you may grieve when there’s no time for grieving.”
“He is still alive,” I said flatly.
When he saw my expression he smiled again, this time a bit wryly. “That’s the spirit,” he said. “There will always be time to grieve later on.”
This was very frustrating. I wanted to argue that he wasn’t making sense, that I couldn’t act as if Meritt was fine unless I really believed he was fine. But Sir Tom was still rambling on. “By grieving too soon when there is no need,” he said, “you may create the need to grieve later. Self-fulfilling prophecies have a way of fulfilling themselves.”
While I tried to untangle that, wondering whether he was very wise or very crazy, he got to his feet and handed me a blanket. “Try to sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow is a busy day.”
* * * *
Judd spoke in my ear. “You must choose,” he said.
Farrell Dean spoke the same words. “You must choose.”
Then Meritt. “You must choose.”
Then Angel. “You must choose.”
And Rafe shook his head. “There is no map,” he said. “You’ve lost my map.”
Someone stroked my hair away from my forehead and the sea came in, the tide rising, the tide falling, and I sank into its waves and drifted away.
* * * *
It was black, black as the darkest night I’d ever seen. Then a thin slice of pale light split the darkness. A form went out; another came in, felt cautiously around, lay down. The changing of the guard.
* * * *
Warden Karl shook his head. “Promises are promises,” he said.
* * * *
“They’re too young to remember, these children.”
I lay still, trying to orient myself, sorting out dream from reality.
Sir Tom laughed softly. “They’re too young? You’re only a youngster yourself, Alice, and a most lovely one at that.”
This must be reality. I’d never have dreamed the head Guardian flirting with Farrell Dean’s mother. He must be forty years older than she was, at the very least. I opened my eyes just a slit and peered up at the table where they sat.
Alice smiled gently at Sir Tom’s comment, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge it. “Those were terrible times,” she said. “The ash was so thick, some days, we could barely breathe. And dirty! Everything was filthy all the time. We gave up trying to wash sheets; wetting them down just made matters worse, made mud. The crops hardly grew—our stores dwindled away to nothing—and so many fell ill. Some who lived still aren’t the same; you can hear them rattle when they breathe. Pregnant women miscarried. I lost my second baby then, and never conceived after. That was a terrible, terrible time.”
Sir Tom nodded.
“What was it like out here in the wilderland?” Alice asked, and I looked at her more sharply. Her expression was just as always, serene and matter-of-fact. She sounded like she was
chatting with an old friend, not with a Guardian, that creature of legend and mystery.
“Oh, it was bad for us, too,” Sir Tom said. His voice was level but his eyes seemed to be looking far away. “And because I couldn’t leave it alone, because I couldn’t stand not knowing what had happened, I made matters worse. Curiosity didn’t kill the old cat, just his men. Or worse.”
Alice said nothing, just sat there patiently with her hands in her lap, and eventually Sir Tom went on.
“I sent troops to reconnoiter,” he said. “Should have known better, but didn’t. Didn’t know what it was, the black cloud, the dust. And the ones I sent, the ones who went to explore, they came back sick. Sicker by far than those of us who stayed.”
Alice murmured sympathetically. “Sick in their lungs?” she asked.
“In their minds,” Sir Tom said. “Heart and spirit.” He began to fidget, tapping his fingers on the table, on his knees, and I hoped Alice’s questions wouldn’t provoke him into one of his fits of insanity—or into playacting insanity. I was beginning to suspect that sometimes he exaggerated his confusion.
“It doesn’t sound like the same thing that affected us in the city,” Alice said thoughtfully. “The ashes and dust affected us physically, but not in any other way. Did your men tell you what they’d seen? What they’d found?”
He shrugged. “Devastation. Death. Not that they explored exhaustively. They felt themselves sickening, and they came back.”
“So they picked up some sort of illness, in the place the ash came from.”
“An illness, a contamination, something,” Sir Tom said. “But something not that simple, either. I’ve come to think of it like this: You know when you’re sick with something minor, a cold or a little virus, and the muscle you sprained weeks before begins to ache again?”
Alice nodded.
“The virus didn’t cause your muscle sprain,” Sir Tom said. “But when the virus came, it sought out weaknesses in your body. That’s what I speculate happened. Whatever it was, this contamination, it found their weaknesses. It nurtured seeds that had been planted long before.”
“Seeds of wildness? Of violence?”
Sir Tom would say no more. “I can only speculate,” he said. “It’s not for me to judge. All I know is, my lieutenant was the best of my men. Even with the illness, he still is. He’s confused, but he’s never taken to preying on people, like the others who got sick did. Some bit of him remembers that he’s human even now.”
He looked back up at Alice. “That was when the Watchers sealed the wall,” he said. “Just in the one place, right behind their compound. They laid traps for my poor men, too, though they never caught a one of us. Bureaucrats versus trained soldiers? They were always more likely to blow themselves up than to do us any harm.”
“The place the ashes came from,” Alice said. “Where was that?”
He looked at her uneasily, jiggling one foot up and down. “The mainland,” he said. “A big place. Could be someone still there, somewhere, though I doubt it. Since the time of the ashes we’ve never heard a single word. It’s just been my men and me, going here and there in our little worlds, listening to the clock tick slower and slower each day.”
The main land? I mouthed the strange phrase. What was it to be a main land? As opposed to what? A minor land?
I wanted Alice to ask about the mainland—who else and what else was out there?—but instead she changed the subject.
“This afternoon—is there no other way?” she said.
Sir Tom sat silent for a moment. “You don’t like it,” he said. “I don’t like it myself, but I do believe it is the best way to ensure her safety. Perhaps the only way. And the time of year is right—gentle winds, no sudden storms.”
Beside me on the floor Farrell Dean muttered something, and I shut my eyes and made my breathing steady and deep, lest his mother look at him and see I was awake.
“Still, it’s very dangerous,” Alice said.
“But she is very brave. And she’s in danger regardless. She’s what he wants, Alice my dear. What he thinks he deserves, what he thinks he requires. And that is not an envious position to be in. Do you remember Rosella?”
My heart began to pound. Why did he always have to bring up Rosella?
“Oh, yes. Of course I remember her.” Alice’s voice was sad. “She had the most beautiful long dark curling hair. And she was a sweet woman. Sweet, and a bit fey somehow.”
“As if she knew she’d never make old bones?”
“That’s exactly it. She told me once that she didn’t expect to grow old.”
“People who feel that way can be a little headstrong.”
“I suppose they think that if their time is short . . . yes, Rosella could be a little reckless. Obviously. She went to the wilderland, after all.”
“With that in his background—you see my point, I’m sure. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the stakes are terribly high. We need to get the girl away.”
“My son will want to go with her.” Alice’s voice was steady, but I heard the competing undercurrents. Pride.Worry. Relief.
“If he could climb that tree last night, he can do it. He can row. And if I had my druthers, he’s the one I’d choose to go with her, because I can count on him to protect her.”
Row? It was too much. I sat up and opened my eyes. They both were watching me, and Sir Tom was smiling.
“Even with his injuries, the two of them can row around to the other side of the island,” he said, still speaking to Alice as if I couldn’t hear. “It won’t be easy, but I’ll medicate him first, and they’re both young and strong. And there’s no other boat, so there will be no pursuit. You can see, dear woman, that ultimately they’ll be safer.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Alice said.
Sir Tom shrugged in acquiescence.
I got up and went to the table. “What’s the plan? Where are we going?”
Sir Tom reached out and took my hand. “Come away, oh human child, to the waters and the wild.”
A chill went down my spine and I pulled my hand away. Those were Louie’s words, but different. Fairy child, Louie always said.
Sir Tom nodded at me. “You’ve heard it before, have you? ‘With a fairy, hand-in-hand, from a world more full of weeping than you can understand.’”
His eyes fill with tears. Then he laughed, too loudly, and around the room people began to stir.
Chapter 30
“Hunting, they called it,” Sir Tom said, rubbing a hand meditatively across his grizzled chin. “When they could still talk. They made no distinction between animals and humans.”
He was briefing us, telling us where the stockade was located, telling us about the Guardians who had gone rogue after the time of the ashes and begun mauling and killing at random. I still didn’t know whether one of them was the chicken vandal, or whether that was Jensen.
“Main thing is, you want to avoid them,” Sir Tom said, as if any of us needed that particular warning. “It isn’t all that hard to do. They aren’t really dogs, even if they try to run around like them. They only have a human sense of smell and hearing.”
As for the stockade, Sir Tom had not seen inside of it since he’d lost control of it six years earlier. “I came down with a bad bout of flu,” he said. “Angel couldn’t take me down, but a little bitty bug could and did, and Angel seized the moment.”
Based on its earlier state, though, Sir Tom thought the stockade should still be well stocked with everything we would need—weapons, medicines, food.
“It was intended to support thirty-plus Guardians for five years at a time,” Sir Tom said. “Not that we ever had to go that long between supply drops. And Angel and I both live off the land as much as we can, so the canned goods and MREs should be largely intact.”
“Exactly who dropped the supplies?” Farrell Dean asked. “And why? And from what?”
“That’s a fascinating tale for another day,” Sir Tom said,
frowning. “Today we focus on our plan. That’s rule number one: Focus on what is at hand. Distracted leads directly to dead.”
He was going to teach us to shoot. Then we would retake the stockade. Once we had the stockade, we’d have a fortress from which to launch our attacks, and a refuge for the old and the weak if we needed to bring them out of the city before emancipating it. We would have a nearby place from which to send out spies to locate and persuade sympathizers in the city, perhaps even among the wardens. We might even have functioning communication devices and monitoring capabilities, if Sir Tom could fix what he’d undone, or if Farrell Dean could bring something he’d learned from Meritt to bear on the problem.
The only barrier was Angel.
I cleared my throat. “Do you think we could negotiate with him? Maybe he’d join forces with us.” I looked at Sir Tom, trying not to see the bandage on his leg. “I know you don’t get along with him, but—maybe he’s lonely, out here with no one to talk to. And what if he ever got sick, like you got sick, or injured? He could die out here, with no one to help him. Maybe we could persuade him that he’d be better off in the long term, if he’d agree to work with us now. And it would definitely better for us if he were on our side.”
Cline snorted. “Red’s always had a weakness for a pretty face,” he began.
Farrell Dean shook his head, and Cline subsided.
“It’s a legitimate question,” Farrell Dean said. “We can use all the help we can get. Sir Tom, what do you think? Red can be pretty persuasive.”
A look passed between Liza and Shawna that I couldn’t read, but which nevertheless made a slow flush crawl up my neck.
Sir Tom seemed uncomfortable; he looked everywhere but at me. Obviously he didn’t like my suggestion, but surely it was a reasonable one. Angel very well might help us. We hadn’t exactly had a chance to establish what he was like, what his intentions toward us were—Sir Tom kept sweeping in, talking about Rosella, preventing me from even having a full conversation with the man.