The Fate of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  Footsteps pounded on the stone above Tyler’s head, causing him to shudder. It might be the Caden, or another group of the lost and damned souls Tyler had seen down here. But the footsteps continued, many of them, and Tyler could not help thinking of another piece of information he had heard in the pub: mobs now roamed the streets of New London, carrying swords and carpentered crucifixes, praising God and threatening violence to all who would not do the same. There was nothing explicit tying these mobs to God’s Church, and yet Tyler smelled the Holy Father’s stink all over them. He would have bet his Bible that these people took their orders from the Arvath.

  It was a good Church once, Tyler thought, and that was true. After the Tear assassination, God’s Church had helped to keep order. The Church had worked with the first Raleighs, kept William Tear’s colony from scattering to the four winds. In the second century after the Crossing, an enterprising preacher named Denis had seized on Catholicism, recognizing the great value of theatricality and ritual in capturing imaginations. Denis had overseen the design and construction of the Arvath, a life’s work that had drained the Church coffers and made the man old before his time. Denis had died only three days after the final stone was laid, and the Church now recognized him as the first true Holy Father, but there had been plenty of men before him, guiding God’s Church along the same path. Tyler, who had gathered as much oral history as he could, knew that his church was far from perfect. But not even the darkest chapter in its history approached the state of the Arvath now.

  Of course, the Holy Father would not have dared to do any of this with the Queen in residence. Anders feared Queen Kelsea, feared her so greatly that, not so long ago, he had handed Tyler a vial of poison and ordered him to a terrible purpose. The Queen had surrendered herself to Mortmesne—that news had been impossible to miss, even in Tyler’s briefest trips to the surface—and the Mace was in charge of the kingdom. But the people of the Tearling did not love the Mace, only feared him, and fear was not nearly so dangerous. In the Queen’s absence, the Holy Father was emboldened.

  She must come back, Tyler thought, almost in the form of a prayer. She must.

  New footsteps echoed in the tunnel outside, and Tyler pressed back against the wall. Several men ran by the tiny opening, but they made no sound beyond their steps, and even through the wall Tyler could sense the military efficiency that underlay their movements, all of them unified in purpose.

  Caden, his mind whispered. But in search of what? Were they here for Tyler and Seth, or someone else? It hardly mattered. All it would take was one sharp pair of eyes to spot the narrow opening in the tunnel wall, and they would be discovered.

  The footsteps passed without slowing, and Tyler relaxed. Seth huddled against him, shivering, and Tyler wrapped his arms around his friend. Seth was dying, slowly and painfully, and Tyler could do nothing for him. He had helped Seth to escape the Arvath, but what good was escape to them now? All hands were turned against them.

  Dear God, Tyler prayed, though he felt certain that the words were going nowhere but around and around the dark chasm of his mind. Dear God, please show us your light.

  But there was nothing, only darkness, an endless drip of water, and, somewhere nearby, the fading footsteps of assassins.

  Chapter 5

  Tear’s Land

  The mistake of utopia is to assume that all will be perfect. Perfection may be the definition, but we are human, and even into utopia we bring our own pain, error, jealousy, grief. We cannot relinquish our faults, even in the hope of paradise, so to plan a new society without taking human nature into account is to doom that society to failure.

  —The Glynn Queen’s Words, as compiled by Father Tyler

  William Tear was deeply worried about something. Katie was sure of it.

  Even after almost a year of working with him, she didn’t know Tear well. He wasn’t a man one came to know, for he guarded himself too closely. Katie didn’t think even Mum completely understood him. Some days Katie felt as though she could almost see the thing, weighing on Tear, bowing his shoulders and making him age, and because he was worried, Katie was worried as well.

  She was seated on the ground in the middle of the Belt, the narrow strip of dense woodland that bordered the northern side of town. The tree cover was thick here, allowing only rare patches of sunlight to dapple the dry grass.

  “Push!” Tear barked. “His footing is weak, you see? This is the moment when you use the weight of your body to close on him and put him down. Get a man solidly beneath you with a knife in your hand and you’ve already won.”

  Katie wrapped her arms around her knees, trying to concentrate on the sparring area in front of her, where Gavin and Virginia were locked, straining. Each had a knife in hand, but right now weapons were secondary; this lesson was about leverage. Katie wasn’t fantastic with a knife, and she didn’t have the size to overpower anyone, but she was one of the quickest among them, and she had an easier time trusting her own body, her reflexes and balance. Virginia was taller and better muscled, but she couldn’t find the place to push, and a few seconds later Tear called a halt and began to point out what she had missed. Virginia looked disgruntled, but Katie didn’t think it would be counted against her. There were nine of them in training here: Katie, Virginia Warren, Gavin Murphy, Jess Alcott, Jonathan Tear, Lear Williams, Ben Howell, Alain Garvey, and Morgan Spruce. They all had different strengths, but Virginia’s was the most valuable: she feared absolutely nothing. Katie had learned much in the past year, but fearlessness couldn’t be taught, and she coveted the quality.

  “Virginia, sit and watch. See if you can spot it this time.” Tear snapped his fingers. “Alain, have a go at Gavin.”

  Alain got up from his spot across the circle and approached Gavin warily. The two were good friends, but Alain was the weakest fighter among the group, and Gavin knew it; a gleam of overconfidence had entered his eyes. Katie shook her head. Gavin was a good fighter, but he tended toward arrogance, and it had gotten him in trouble more than once.

  “Shrink your size, Garvey!” Aunt Maddy called from beside Tear. “Or he’ll knock you flying!”

  Alain tucked his shoulders toward his chest and pulled a knife from the sheath at his waist. Their knives were crude, little more than pointed spears with handles, the same tools that workers used to slaughter cattle. But Katie had overheard Mum talking to Aunt Maddy, who said that Tear had made them all real knives, fighting knives. Such weapons had to be made in secret, and carried in secret—sometimes it seemed to Katie that, in the long year since she had sat on the bench with William Tear, her life had filled up with secrets, like a pot beneath a leak—but they would receive the knives when they were ready. Katie could barely wait.

  Alain was taller than Gavin, but Gavin was the best knife handler among them, and he could move like a tree lizard to boot. Within only a few seconds, he had maneuvered behind Alain and grabbed his knife hand, rapping Alain’s wrist over his knee, purposefully and methodically, trying to make Alain drop his knife.

  “Hold!” Tear called, stalking into the ring. Mum came with him, her eyes snapping with disapproval.

  “What would happen in a real fight, Gavin?” Mum demanded.

  “I would have kept hold of him,” Gavin replied, his voice toneless. “I would have broken his wrist and then busted his knee.”

  “Failure means little in this ring,” Tear told Alain. “But in the real world, the real fight, failure is swift death. This is a thing to understand and remember.”

  From the corner of her eye, Katie saw Virginia nodding grimly. They were friends of a sort, though Virginia was a bit too fierce to ever be a real friend. Last week, at the big argument over the distribution of the harvest, Virginia had actually grabbed Mr. Ellis by the throat, and if several adults hadn’t pulled her off, Katie was quite sure that Virginia would have strangled him with her bare hands. In the Town of Katie’s childhood, there had been no fighting; if people had problems, they argued them out. Now, it felt a
s though there was an incident every week, and Katie often wondered whether they were training for peacekeeping, whether this was the trouble that William Tear had foreseen.

  Next to Virginia, Jonathan Tear was staring at the two figures in the center of the ring, his eyes clocking and learning. Everything about Jonathan was William Tear in duplicate, except for his eyes, large and dark. Lily’s eyes; Katie had often noted the resemblance. Jonathan was neither a good nor a bad fighter; Katie had beaten him before, though he was a year older than she was. But that hardly mattered. Every moment of his life, Jonathan was learning. Katie could see it, see those dark eyes recording information and sending it to be processed back in the enormous room that was Jonathan’s brain. Room? Hell, it was an entire house.

  “Gavin, swap out. Lear, you have a go at Alain.”

  Lear scrambled up from his place, and Katie almost saw Alain groan. Lear was not the best fighter among them, but he got the most respect, because he was smart. His father, who had died in the Crossing, had been one of William Tear’s most trusted people, and Mum often said that Lear had gotten his father’s brains. He was apprenticing with old Mr. Welland, the Town historian, and Lear was working on his own history of the Town. Not the Crossing; none of them knew enough about that period, and the answers they got from adults were maddeningly vague. But according to Gavin, Lear meant to chronicle the history of the Town for his entire lifetime, before publishing the document at his death. No one wanted to fight a boy who was capable of thinking so long-term.

  “Close the circle a bit,” Mum ordered. “Less room for error.”

  They all scooted inward.

  “Go.”

  Lear circled Alain, who stood nearly frozen. He was a weakness among them, and Katie resented that weakness; there was no room for it here.

  That’s Row talking.

  She scowled, wishing she could force her mind to be quiet. There was an almost schizophrenic quality to her thoughts these days; it seemed as though each discrete idea could be categorized as belonging to either Row or Tear. Alain was not a great fighter, no, but, like so many Crossing children, he had other skills, particularly a phenomenal gift for sleight of hand. You never played Alain at cards, not for anything more than bragging rights; he had won several skeins of Katie’s best marled yarn before Katie learned to stop betting. Each fall, at the harvest festival, Alain would put on a magic show that impressed the adults and absolutely thrilled the smaller children. He might not be much of a fighter, but Katie recognized the great value of having so many different people in one community, each of them singular, each with gifts and faults and interests and oddities. They created a tapestry, all of them, just as the characters in a book might. It was the lesson of the Town, taught to children before they could even walk: You are special, everyone is special. But you are not better. All are valuable.

  But Row couldn’t quantify the value of that tapestry. Katie often tried to explain it to him, but she wasn’t sure she was getting through. Row had no patience for inefficiency, and sometimes his thoughts would entwine with Katie’s, strangling Tear’s voice, killing it off.

  Lear stopped circling and moved in, quick and silent. In moments, he had slipped behind Alain and wrapped his arms around his friend’s neck, headlocking him.

  “Hold.”

  William Tear stood with crossed arms, his eyes pinned on Alain. Those eyes were not without pity, but they were cold, and Katie suddenly knew that Alain was on thin ice.

  “That’s enough for today. All of you go to your regular apprenticeships.”

  Lear released Alain, who stumbled away, rubbing his throat. Lear placed a hand on his back and Alain smiled good-naturedly, but there was grimness there as well; Katie felt certain that he, too, knew he was on some sort of probation. Gavin began to give him a hard time, but that was Gavin, so convinced of his own gifts that he sometimes tipped into cruelty by accident. Gavin had asked her to the summer picnic last year, and even though he was good-looking, Katie had said no. There was something relentless in Gavin, ready to crush everything on the path to his objective. Katie didn’t trust him to put anything before himself.

  Come on now! her mind mocked. Is Row any better?

  No, but Row knew he was worse, harbored no illusions about himself. That made a huge difference. Row might be unkind, but Gavin was a fool. He didn’t even like to read.

  Tear, Aunt Maddy, and Mum left the clearing, heading west, back up toward town. Mum nodded to Katie as they went, a subtle signal that Katie had done well today. Gavin, Howell, Alain, and Morgan disappeared into the trees, heading eastward, around the hill and south, down to the cattle farm. Jess went downhill, toward the lumber site, and Virginia followed; she was part of a large group that was just beginning to explore and map the vast land outside the Town—Tear’s Land, they were calling it now, though Katie knew from Mum that William Tear didn’t like that at all. They all had apprenticeships to camouflage these sessions; even Jonathan Tear had a day job, working at the dairy. But no apprenticeship could match Tear’s lessons. He was teaching them to fight, but that was only half of it. In some indefinable way, Katie felt that Tear was also teaching them, not by word but by example, to be better. Better people, better members of the community. During their sessions, Row’s voice was still present in Katie’s head, but muted. In Row’s world, Alain would have been booted a long time ago, but Row’s ideas of exceptionalism, his dog-eat-dog vision of the world, these things seemed to have no place in this clearing.

  Katie waited a minute before she got up, brushing the prickly grass from the bottom of her pants. She could afford to be a bit late to the sheep farm; she worked hard, and Mr. Lynn, who was in charge of the spinners and dyers, thought she practically walked on water. She could probably ditch for a week before he would say something.

  Across the clearing, Jonathan Tear was still sitting on the ground, staring straight ahead. His face was clouded and dull, almost sleepy, and Katie walked away, leaving him alone; Jonathan was so damned weird! Even in a community that valued individuals, Katie wasn’t sure what place Jonathan held. He was his father’s son, and that could have given him a great status, but Jonathan would accept none of the adulation the Town longed to shower upon him; he didn’t seem to know how to handle it. He spent all of his free time in the library, curled up with a pile of books in a dark recess on the second floor. Even in their practice sessions, Jonathan was isolated, shut out of the jocular familiarity that the rest of them enjoyed, that happy sense of group-elite that defined them. He was odd, simply odd, and Katie’s first impulse was to simply leave him alone.

  But as she reached the edge of the clearing, her steps slowed until she came to a halt. Mum’s voice was in her head, the voice of Katie’s childhood, the voice that said when you saw your neighbor in trouble, no matter how much you disliked him or disagreed with him, you stopped. You helped.

  Jonathan Tear didn’t look at all well.

  With an exasperated sigh, Katie turned and marched back to him.

  “Are you all right?”

  Jonathan didn’t answer, merely kept staring straight ahead. Katie squatted down on her haunches and stared at his face, realizing that the look she had mistaken for dullness was really fixation, as though Jonathan saw something in the distance. Katie looked behind her, but there was only the wall of trees on the far end of the clearing.

  “Jonathan?”

  She snapped her fingers in front of his eyes, but he didn’t blink. His pupils were dilated, and Katie wondered if he was having an attack of some kind, if she should call someone. But the rest of the group had disappeared. Even the sounds of their passage had gone, and there was only the melody of the woods, birdsong and the low rustle of the tree branches as early afternoon wind sighed through their leaves.

  Slowly, hesitantly, Katie reached out and placed her hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. He jumped, but his pupils did not contract, and when he turned to look at her, his gaze was just as blank and distant as before, staring straight
through her, making Katie shudder.

  “It’s gone bad,” he whispered. “Bad town, bad land. You and me, Katie. You, me, and a knife.”

  At the last word, Katie jumped, her hand reaching automatically for the knife at her waist. Jonathan reached out and grasped her wrist with ice-cold fingers, the edges of his mouth lifting in a ghastly grin.

  “We tried, Katie,” he whispered. “We did our best.”

  With a low cry, she tore her wrist free. Jonathan blinked, his pupils contracting in the sun-dappled light. He stared at her, brow furrowed.

  “Katie?”

  She scooted backward. Her heart was still racing, and she didn’t want to be so close to him. She felt danger coming from him, radiating off him, almost like heat.

  “You were dreaming,” she ventured.

  Dreaming, her mind replied mockingly. He was in a trance, some kind of trance, like Annie Fowler gets sometimes when they ask her to tell tomorrow’s weather.