Still, she hesitated, clutching her knife, as her knees began to ache and her palms became sticky with sweat.
“Why?” she whispered, watching Da’s eyelids twitch. “Why did you have to be this way?” Even more than she wanted to kill Da, she wanted answers, wanted to call him to account. Killing him seemed far too easy, particularly when he was unconscious. It was no punishment.
Several childish shrieks echoed up the hallway, making Aisa jump. For a moment, she had forgotten why she was here: the children. One day, less than a year ago, she had walked into the kitchen and found Da with his hand up Glee’s dress, and Glee not three years old.
“Too easy,” she muttered. “Just too easy.”
The Caden had the manacles, but she didn’t know when they would be back. Using her knife, Aisa cut the sleeves from Da’s shirt, being careful not to touch him. She wrapped his wrists and ankles, tying the knots as securely as she could. Da stirred and groaned as she tightened the bonds, but his eyes remained closed, and Aisa stared down at him for a long moment, wishing she were older, old enough to get past it all.
Someone was coming back up the tunnel now, and Aisa straightened, raising her knife. But as the noise resolved itself into many footsteps, walking at a steady pace, she relaxed and slipped the knife out of sight. The other part of her job was about to begin, and she was determined to do it well.
The group of children came around the corner, followed by all four Caden, holding torches. Christopher and James were each hauling a prisoner as well, men whose faces had been badly beaten. The children were frightened; many of them were crying, and they looked fearfully up at the four red-cloaked men. Aisa held up her hands.
“Listen to me,” she said. “These men are good men. They’re here to help you, I swear it. We’re going to take you out of the tunnels.”
She said this last as gently as possible, for they had already discovered that this news alarmed the children more than anything else. Many of them had lived their entire lives down here, and had no concept of the world above.
“We have plenty of food,” Aisa continued, and saw their eyes brighten with interest.
“We’ll get sick if we go up the stairs,” one of the older girls announced. “My pa said so.”
“Your pa lied,” Aisa told her, glancing down at Da, whose chest still rose and fell in the easy rhythm of unconsciousness. “I have lived up there my entire life.”
The girl still looked faintly mutinous, but said nothing else.
“You should follow us, and stay together. If you stray, you may get lost down here in the dark.” For the first few days, this possibility had haunted Aisa as well, but Daniel always marked the walls well, with special chalk that did not dissolve under the drip of water. As long as they didn’t run out of light, they were fine.
Christopher had bent to Da now, examining his bonds. “I’ll have to teach you to tie a knot, girl. If he’d woken, he would have been out of this in seconds.”
If he’d woken, I would have killed him.
But Aisa didn’t say it. She didn’t want to alarm the children, but even more, she didn’t want the Caden to know Da was her father. Coryn had told her that the Caden, like the Guard, allowed new recruits to wipe their pasts clean. But she didn’t know what status she really held with them, and besides, did that leeway include a past as ugly as this?
Christopher snapped a pair of manacles on Da’s wrists before hoisting him to his feet. Da’s eyes opened, bleary and red, and they wandered the room for a moment before finding Aisa and locking on her.
“Want to do the honors?” Daniel asked.
Meeting his eyes, Aisa froze, because she saw that he already knew. They all knew. It was the audience, the damnable audience, where she had revealed her shame to the entire world. Merritt was looking at her with poorly concealed pity, and James had put his hand on her shoulder.
“Go ahead,” he murmured. “It will do you good.”
Aisa took a deep breath. The children’s faces calmed her, reminded her of how much was at stake here, and her own shame receded. She did not even need to dig for the words; she had heard them so many times in the past week that they were right there, within easy reach.
“In the name of Her Majesty, Queen Kelsea Glynn, you men are under arrest for pandering, trafficking, and facilitation of assault. You will be held in the New London Jail until such time as you account for yourselves before a judge. You will not be harmed further unless you attempt to escape.”
“Come on,” Daniel said brusquely. “Let’s get them topside. You keep an eye on the children, girl. Make sure they don’t stray.”
They started back the way they had come, James and Christopher in the front and Aisa, Merritt, and Daniel bringing up the rear. Aisa’s arm throbbed, and she saw that the long scratch, which had sealed itself yesterday, was beginning to swell beneath its reddening seam. As adrenaline wore off, the pain from this scratch became difficult to ignore, but Aisa swallowed it as best she could, holding a child’s hand in each of hers.
After more than an hour of walking uphill, they came to a broad intersection of six tunnels. Aisa recognized this place; they were only some thirty minutes from regaining the surface. Blue light filtered down, diffused through several layers of gratings, and Aisa realized that up there, topside, it must be dawn already. The idea of sunlight seemed almost fanciful; down here long enough, one forgot that there was anything more than the amber glow of torches.
The children were tired; one little boy, who could not be more than five, had begun to lag every few steps, and Aisa had to lightly jerk his hand to bring him along. The entire group walked without speaking, no sound but their staggered footfalls echoing against stone, and it was this void that allowed Aisa to hear a man’s voice, low and urgent, somewhere behind her on the right.
“Please God.”
Aisa halted. The acoustics in these tunnels were strange; sometimes she could hear distant voices clearly enough to understand the words, while at other times she could not hear Daniel’s murmured commands from ten feet away. The voice she had just heard had been clear, with no peculiar quality of distance or dead air. The speaker must be very close.
“What is it, girl?” Merritt asked, turning back to wait for her.
“Give me your torch.”
“Hold!” he shouted to the Miller brothers, then handed his torch to Aisa. Holding it high, she wandered a few feet down the tunnel, examining the walls. The intersection was now at least a hundred feet behind them, and she didn’t think the voice could have been so far off as that. A hidden nest, perhaps? They had found one of those already, cleverly concealed under a drainage grate. The Caden had been forced to kill the six men and women who ran that particular pod, but Aisa counted them no loss; one woman, realizing she was cornered, had put a dagger to the throat of a young girl, little more than a toddler. But Daniel could throw a knife just as well as he could wield one, and the woman went down with the blade planted squarely in her jugular, the child not even scratched. Aisa ran her fingers over the uneven surface of the tunnel, working her way backward, and her breath halted as she felt a gap in the stonework, not more than ten inches wide.
“Light!” she shouted up the tunnel. “More light!”
The Caden ushered the children and prisoners backward, crowding close to examine the gap. It would barely admit a thin man, but would certainly admit children. Aisa fancied she could hear—not with her ears, perhaps, but with her mind—a rapid heartbeat on the far side of the wall.
“There’s someone in there,” she told Merritt.
“Can you squeeze through?”
She gave him the torch. Her own heartbeat had increased, for there was certainly danger here, but she was pleased that none of them protested sending her in, on her own, where they could not follow.
Holding her knife in front of her, she bent down and eased through the crack. It was a squeeze, but not too tight. At any moment she expected to meet resistance: adult hands, grabbing her.
But nothing came, and then she was on the far side of the wall, reaching back through so that Merritt could hand her the torch.
“Be on your guard, child!” Daniel called outside.
Aisa held the torch high, looking around. She was in a narrow room, almost a tunnel itself. The smell was much, much worse in here, enough to make her eyes water. The walls dripped with mold. Trash littered the floor, and in the near corner Aisa saw what appeared to be a pile of human waste. She jumped, gasping, as a rat’s thick body scuttled over her foot, and for a moment she wanted to simply flee, flee this room and these tunnels and run the long road back up to the Keep. Her arm ached, her mind ached, and she was only twelve years old.
Pain. The voice was little more than an echo, deep in her mind, but still it made Aisa stand up straight, for it belonged to the Mace. Pain only disables the weak.
A killer of children, her mind returned, but that thought had no power here. What happened in the Creche was worse than murder. Far worse.
“Only the weak,” Aisa whispered to herself. “Only the weak.”
She held the torch higher and stepped forward, seeking the far end of the long, narrow room, and as the light hit the far wall, she halted, instinctively raising her knife.
Two men sat there, leaning against the wall, their clothing so streaked with mud and filth that it told Aisa nothing. One man’s eyes were closed; he appeared to be asleep, but Aisa knew instinctively that he was dead. The other simply stared with wide, distant eyes. His face was smudged with mud and he was bone-thin, gaunt hollows beneath his cheekbones. His wrists looked like sticks where they emerged from his sleeves. He stared up into the light, his pupils dilating, and Aisa gasped as she recognized the Keep priest, Father Tyler.
“All right in there, girl?” one of the Caden called from the tunnel outside.
“Yes.”
“Well, hurry it up! These children need food, and we need sleep.”
The priest opened his mouth to speak, and Aisa put a finger to her lips. Her mind was moving, not sluggishly as before, but lightning-quick. Father Tyler, who had helped her to find books to read in the Queen’s library. The Mace wanted Father Tyler returned to the Keep, but had not been able to find him. The Arvath had laid a bounty on Father Tyler’s head, ten thousand pounds, the last Aisa had heard. Of course, the Mace had laid a bounty too, but the two amounts were constantly in flux. The Mace would surely match the Arvath’s offer, Aisa knew that, but the Caden might not. If Aisa told the Caden that ten thousand pounds lay behind this wall, would they help her return Father Tyler to the Keep, just on her say-so? Not a chance.
As quietly as possible, Aisa dug into the pockets of her grey cloak. She had half a loaf of bread, only two days old, and some dried fruit, and these she placed at Father Tyler’s feet. He grabbed the bread and began to wolf it down. She produced her canteen and handed it over as well, and then, placing her finger to her lips again, she backtracked toward the gap in the wall.
“My mistake!” she called. “Rats, a good-size nest.”
“Well, get out here!” James shouted, irritated. “We’re tired.”
Aisa flattened her palm at Father Tyler, indicating that he should stay where he was, and then worked her way back into the main tunnel.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I thought I heard a voice.”
Daniel shrugged. “Good to check every corner. Let’s get going.”
For a moment in there, Aisa had forgotten about Da, but now, as she emerged, his voice echoed across the tunnel.
“Aisa girl.”
She looked up, and a part of her hated herself for it, for the fact that Da’s voice was still the voice of God inside her head, impossible to ignore.
“What, Da?”
“Surely you won’t let them do this to me?”
“Shut up!” Christopher snapped, shaking Da like a rag doll.
“I’m speaking to my daughter.”
Aisa stared at him, sickened. His hair was mussed, his beard soaked with blood, but beneath these things he looked just as he always had. Manacles or not, Aisa was suddenly frightened, for she remembered this exactly: Da’s voice, wheedling, full of slippery oil.
“Aisa? You don’t want to see me in jail?”
She clouted him across the face. “I’d like to see you in a hole, Da. But prison will do for me. You’ll never see any of our family again. I hope you die in the dark.”
She turned back to Christopher. “Do me a favor and gag him.”
“Do us all a favor,” Merritt echoed, his voice disgusted. The group of children around them stared wide-eyed at this exchange, and the little boy wormed his hand back into Aisa’s, staring up at her, as Christopher anchored a length of cloth in Da’s mouth. The gag brought Aisa no relief; she could only stand there miserably, wishing that she were the child of someone else, fighting not to look backward at the hole in the wall. She would have to come back down here, slip the Caden somehow and return with more food . . . alone, down here in the dark. The idea terrified her, but she saw no way around it; the priest must be returned to the Keep. She felt much loyalty to these Caden, who had taken her in and put her to work. But her loyalty to the Mace, to the Queen, these were greater, and both the Queen and the Mace wanted Father Tyler back.
Which am I? she wondered. Caden, or a Queen’s Guard?
She didn’t know, but whichever she chose, it would be dangerous work. Her arm throbbed insistently, and when they got topside, Aisa saw that the seam of her wound had begun to weep clear fluid. The surrounding flesh burned an angry shade of red.
Infected, Aisa’s mind whispered, and her stomach tightened. At their little house in the Lower Bend, they’d had a neighbor named Mrs. Lime who had cut herself with a dirty blade. No one in the Lower Bend could afford antibiotics, and Mrs. Lime had finally simply disappeared from the landscape, her house standing empty until some squatters took it over. Aisa had always remembered the word, which rang like a death knell in her mind.
Infection.
Chapter 8
The Tear Lands
My tables—meet it is I set it down—
That one may smile and smile, and be a villain.
—Hamlet, William Shakespeare (pre-Crossing Angl.)
In her more selfish moments, Katie wished only for the harvest to be over. She hated the farm, the smell of manure, the backbreaking work of picking vegetables only to reap the reward of food that would simply be eaten. She hated manual labor. Sometimes she wished that the fields would catch on fire.
She was not alone. She seemed to hear complaints all around her, more than she had ever heard before, and most of it was directed toward the people at the top of the hill: those too old or sick to work, or parents with children too small to be left. These people were always excused from the harvest, but this year such exemptions were causing more ill feeling than usual.
Maybe Row’s right, she thought, late one afternoon, when her back was screaming and her hands blistered from lugging her basket of corn down the row. Maybe none of us are selfless enough to live here.
Row and Katie had not been assigned as harvest partners this year; Row had been stuck with Gavin on the squash patch, more than an acre away. Katie wondered if Mum had interfered to bring about this result; lately, Katie had begun to feel as though Mum were actively working to disengage her from Row, to keep them apart.
“Good luck, Mum,” Katie snarled quietly, digging into the corn plants. Her friendship with Row was very different than it had once been; Row had never admitted what he had done that night, and between them they maintained the polite fiction that Row had simply lost her in the dark. But they both knew that wasn’t so, and the knowledge had changed their friendship irrevocably. No longer did the two of them seem bound in a magic circle, inviolate by the outside world. They were still friends, but now Katie was one of many, perhaps no more special to Row than Gavin or Lear or anyone else. Sometimes that hurt, but not much. The memory of that night in the woods was too strong.
/> “Did you say something?” Jonathan asked, leaning around the cornstalk.
“Nothing.”
He ducked out of sight again. Katie didn’t know why they had been assigned as partners, but she could have done worse. Jonathan was a hard worker, and he didn’t disappear—as Row so often did—when it was time to lug the full baskets back toward the warehouse. For the first few days of the harvest, Katie had waited to see if Jonathan would fall into another trance, but when nothing happened, she gave up. Two years had passed since that day in the clearing, and she had kept her word, telling no one, not even Row. But she wasn’t even sure whether Jonathan remembered. He was unfailingly serious, keeping all of his attention on the task at hand. He reminded Katie of his father.
Several rows over, someone was talking to himself. Katie listened for a moment, and the words resolved themselves into a prayer. Here was another new development. Katie had never heard anyone pray in public during her childhood; there was no penalty for doing so, but William Tear discouraged it, and Tear’s disapproval had always been enough to shut down any behavior. Now Katie seemed to hear prayer constantly, and it irritated her no end. Mum was death on religion, and her views on the topic had shaped Katie’s as well. She wanted no invisible sky fathers hanging over the Town, mandating irrational behavior. She didn’t want to hear prayer around every corner.
Jonathan was listening too; he had paused in picking, cocking his head.
“—and God protect us from all demons and spirits, thieves of children, God bless us and keep us safe—”
“Shut up!” Katie shouted, louder than she had meant to. Her voice echoed over the rows, bringing silence in its wake. Jonathan peered at her around the corn plant, his eyebrows lifted.
The Fate of the Tearling Page 23