The Fate of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  He had hoped that the sight of Yusuf would wipe the pity from Tear’s face, but here again, he was disappointed. Jonathan merely stared at the child for a long moment, then said, “So this is what you’ve been doing in the dark. Even my father didn’t think you would stoop this low.”

  Row clenched his fists. Even now, after all these years, he hated this idea, that William Tear would have talked about him, behind his back, talked about him in the very bosom of that family from which Row had always been excluded. Tear, Lily, Jonathan, Katie, the Rice bitch, all of them had been on the inside, and he had been out.

  He turned back to Katie, who continued to appear almost catatonic. She had stolen his crown; she knew where it was, but Row knew he would not get that information without a fight. Jonathan’s pain would be doubly useful here, but now, staring into Katie’s muddled eyes, he wondered if she was even capable of understanding that Jonathan was being tortured. Would she even notice?

  It wasn’t supposed to work this way, damn it! he thought again. She was supposed to cry! Both of them were supposed to be afraid!

  He snapped his fingers in front of Katie’s face, but she ignored him. Instead, she turned to Jonathan, extending her hand, and Jonathan took it. Jealousy, kitten-clawed, scratched its way down Row’s spine. He didn’t like the way Katie and Jonathan were looking at each other, communicating without talking. Once, that had been the two of them, Row and Katie. In a town that had forgotten him, only Katie had seen him clearly. The longer she and Jonathan kept looking at each other that way, the more uneasy he became, until he finally told Lear, “Break them apart.”

  Lear grabbed Katie and tugged her away. Katie looked up, and Row took a step backward. Her face was a wild bloom of color, and her eyes had narrowed to bright green slits. In the next moment she leapt across the room and attacked Jonathan.

  Row stared at this development, too shocked to respond; he had ordered Gavin to keep an extra close watch on her, assuming that if she went for anyone, it would be himself. But now she was grappling with Tear, climbing his back. Lear and Gavin and the others stood frozen, their mouths gaping, as Katie gritted her teeth and wrapped her arms around Tear’s neck. Tear didn’t even fight her off, only stood there, gasping for breath, and at the last minute Row realized what was happening and jumped forward, but it was too late. The snap of Tear’s neck was almost deafening in the high, hollow emptiness of the church. Katie dropped him, and the body slumped to the ground, eyes wide open and staring.

  “God help us!” Gavin shouted, and Row wanted to tell him to shut up—only a fool like Gavin would still believe in God, at this of all moments—but he bit his tongue. He might need Gavin now. Katie stared down at Tear’s body, her shoulders heaving, and Row watched her, feeling as though he had never seen her before.

  “Katie?” he asked.

  She looked up, and Alain began to shriek.

  Katie’s mouth was open wide, so wide that she appeared to be screaming herself. As Row watched, the hole opened wider and wider, growing in circumference until it seemed that her mouth must swallow her head. Her eyes and nose tipped backward until they seemed to be first on top of her head, then behind it. The open mouth grew into a black hole, and Row watched, frozen in horror, as first a hand emerged, then an arm.

  Alain bolted from the room, still screaming, Howell and Morgan right behind him. Gavin and Lear stayed put, but Gavin had drawn into the corner of the pulpit, wrapping his arms around himself, his eyes wide and bruised as he watched Katie transform. Now a shoulder had emerged, and while Row watched, the edges of the hole rippled and a head pushed its way through, and as he glimpsed the face, Row screamed himself. The dead didn’t frighten him. He had been dealing with corpses for years. The dead didn’t frighten him, but this was no corpse.

  This was a ghost.

  Lily Freeman had emerged from Katie’s form, shedding it as easily as a snake sheds its skin, leaving Katie’s behind, a small heap discarded on the floor. Lily was naked, her body streaked with black, like smears of earth, her long dark hair unbound, not the woman Row had known but someone much younger. He had seen this Lily before, in the portrait that hung in the Tears’ front room. Several times, Row had snuck in to explore the Tear house when no one was home, and the portrait of Lily had always struck him, though he couldn’t say why. However little use Row had for his mother, he had always been able to feel her anger when he looked at that picture, at the wildly happy Lily who had ruined everything, taken everything that the Finns should have had.

  Lily was wearing his crown. Row stared at its glinting blue and silver, horrified; he had been ready to commit murder to get it back, even to torture Katie, if it came to that, but he could no more snatch the thing off a ghost’s head than he could have taken the jewel from around Jonathan Tear’s neck. It might as well have been on the moon.

  She turned to look at him, and Row screamed again. The face was Lily’s, but the eyes were gaping ebon pupils. Her mouth was hard, a black-edged grimace, as though the lips were lined with soot.

  “You were right, Row,” she whispered, and that was the worst of all, for the words were Katie’s, Katie’s voice echoing from the mouth of this filthy apparition. “We don’t have room for special people here.”

  She lurched forward, and Row scrambled away, stumbling behind one of the ten pews that lined the right side of the church.

  “No saved people,” Lily rasped. “No chosen people. Only everyone, all together.”

  A shadow darted forward into the light: Yusuf, snarling, his hands up and hooked into claws, and Row felt a wild burst of relief, because even though he didn’t understand everything about the child, he knew what it was capable of—

  Lily turned on Yusuf and snarled, a sound with no more humanity than the grunt of a pig. Yusuf flinched, as if struck, and fell to the ground, twitching. In the corner, Gavin gave a low moan and wrapped his arms around his head, covering his eyes. Lear was nowhere to be seen; he had collapsed in one of the pews.

  “We were such good friends,” the apparition whispered, its voice sibilant, the sound of an animal carcass being dragged across stone. “Why do you run away?”

  Row turned and dashed down the row of pews, but when he glanced behind him, there she was, at the end of his row, even closer than she had been before. She smiled at him, and he saw that her teeth were needles.

  “Katie?” he asked, and then, his mouth full of dark horror, “Lily?”

  “Katie? Lily? Ah, Row.” It giggled, raising its arm, and Row saw that it was holding a spade, not one of the small gardening tools the Town used at harvest but a broad, flat spade, tall as a man, its head dripping blood.

  He fled then, toward the doorway, where blessed sunlight poured in, thinking God, get me out of this, please, and I’ll be the man they think I am, Brother Row, Father Row, anything, only—

  He was no more than five feet away when the doors slammed shut, and he ran into them full speed, bouncing off and falling to the ground with blood seeping into his left eye, a swirl of blackness over the vision in his right.

  How can this be? his mind demanded, wild and hectoring. We planned it so well! They performed so well! How can this be?

  Nearby, he heard the dragging crunch of feet coming closer, and squeezed his eyes shut. When he was a child—he hadn’t thought of this in so long—he had been afraid of monsters in his room at night, but if he closed his eyes long enough, they always went away. What he wouldn’t give to be back there, curled up in his bed, five years old!

  Fingers grabbed his shoulders, their tips like claws, and Row was jerked to his feet. He opened his good eye and found those deep black pupils staring directly into his. When it spoke, its breath wafted through those needle teeth, and it was the smell of the crypts that a thirteen-year-old Row had pried open, looking for treasure, not sure yet what he meant to do but he knew he had the will to get it done, even then—

  “I defend this land, Rowland Finn. No one wants to know how I do it, but I do.”
r />   Row began to scream.

  Katie woke up gradually, with the sense of having slowly broken free of an unfathomable dream.

  She was lying on the floor in the middle of the church, just in front of the pulpit where Row had given so many of his sermons over the years. Something cold lay against her chest, and after a moment she realized that it was the silver chain, Jonathan’s sapphire around her neck.

  Raising her head, she saw a body lying several feet away. It looked like Jonathan, but it couldn’t be; the two of them had just come up the staircase. She dragged herself to her knees and crawled over to him, turned him over.

  Jonathan’s dead eyes stared up at her.

  Katie barely felt surprised. A dim corner of her mind murmured that she had always known it ended this way, of course she had, William Tear had told her . . . but lack of surprise did not mute her grief.

  A choking sound came from the far side of the church. Katie looked around wildly and saw Gavin, crouched in the corner, his wide eyes upon her.

  “What did you do?” she demanded, though the venom in her voice was buried beneath tears. “What did you do to him?”

  Gavin shook his head, his face whitening with panic. “Not me! I swear!”

  She pushed herself to her feet and strode over to him; as she came, Gavin wrapped his arms around himself and drew into a tiny ball in the corner, his voice breaking with panic.

  “Please, Katie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  For a moment she hesitated over him, thinking how good it would feel to kill him, how easy and pleasurable and fair—but the thought of Jonathan’s corpse, lying behind her, held her back.

  She turned and found that the church doors were wide open, a beautiful summer day pouring into the aisle. Outside, she could hear the distant shouts of children at the park. None of it seemed to connect to what she saw in here: Jonathan’s body, Gavin cowering in the corner.

  We were coming up the stairs, she thought, and then?

  At the far end of the aisle, near the doors, she saw a wide, dark pool that looked like oil. But when she ventured closer, the smell hit her like a slap, and she saw the lift and buzz of innumerable insects around the puddle, flies and gnats. Near the puddle lay a glimmering object; when Katie drew closer, she saw that it was a blue jewel on a silver necklace.

  She turned back to Gavin and asked, “Where’s Row?”

  Gavin began to sob, and this made her so angry that she strode over and slapped him in the face.

  “It’s all well and good to cry now, you little shit. What are we supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Disgusted, she left him and picked up Row’s necklace. The chain was sticky with blood, but she wiped it clean with her shirtsleeve, her movements almost absent, clutching the sapphire in her hand. Row should never have had it anyway; it wasn’t his to begin with. He had cheated to get it. Her eyes fell on Jonathan’s corpse again, and she felt tears leak down her cheeks, not only for Jonathan but for all of it, the Town’s ruined potential, so far sunk as to allow whatever had happened here. She bent to Jonathan’s body, stroking his hair from his forehead. All those years of keeping him from harm, and this was how it ended. And yet deep down she was confused, for beneath the clear outcome she saw here—Row vanished, Jonathan in a heap on the floor—she sensed that nothing was right. This was not how it ended. Just beneath this, almost seen, was a different ending: Jonathan dead, yes, but she had never seen his body. She had fled, fled and gone, leaving Row and Gavin to whatever hell might await traitors to the Town . . . but even as she tried to make it come clear, this second vision vanished, dissipated in smoke. She had not fled; she was still here, and in the thought Katie felt responsibility descend upon her like a mantle.

  “Gavin. Get up.”

  He looked up at her, his eyes wide and fearful. He was only twenty, Katie thought, and it baffled her that an age that had once seemed so ancient now stood revealed as almost unbearably young. In that moment, Katie thought that she could even have pitied Row, who, after all, had been nearly as young and stupid as the rest of them.

  “Get up.”

  Gavin bolted to his feet, and Katie saw that he was afraid of her. Well and good.

  “You helped break this town, Gavin.”

  He gulped, his eyes flicking involuntarily to Jonathan’s body, and Katie nodded as she read his unspoken thought.

  “No room for Tears, you said. But I’m not a Tear, and neither are you. Neither is Lear, or Howell, or Morgan, or Alain. You helped Row break this place. Now you’re going to help me fix it. Do you understand?”

  Gavin nodded wildly. His fingers crept up toward his forehead, as though he meant to cross himself. But at the last moment, his hand dropped away, and he stood bewildered.

  Waiting for instructions, Katie thought contemptuously. Well, Gavin had always needed someone to tell him what to do. She finished cleaning blood from Row’s necklace, using her spit where it had begun to cake, polishing until the sapphire looked good as new. She considered putting the chain over her head, but at the last moment she paused, not sure why; some long-buried fear that demanded caution, that spoke of ghosts . . .

  After another moment’s thought, she slipped the sapphire into her pocket. In the long years afterward, Caitlyn Tear would think often on this necklace, and sometimes she would draw it out and stare at it. Once or twice, she even considered putting it on.

  But she never did.

  Kelsea woke to a bright, sunlit room.

  Not her room in the Keep; she had never seen this place before. It was a room of white-painted walls, small, but neat, with a desk and chair and two bookshelves filled with books. The light came from a large glass window over the desk. A small, exploratory wriggle told Kelsea that she was lying in a narrow single bed.

  My room.

  The thought came from nowhere, from a distant corner of her brain that seemed to still be half asleep.

  Kelsea sat up, pulled the covers back, and swung her feet onto the floor. Sheets, pillows, floors . . . everything in this room seemed incredibly clean. She was so used to the Keep, where boots tracked mud and everyone was too busy to be bothered about it. But someone clearly cleaned this room.

  I do, Kelsea thought. Again the thought was odd, alien, accompanied by a flash of memory: sweeping the floor with an old, serviceable broom.

  What happened? she wondered. How did it end?

  “Kelsea! Breakfast!”

  The voice made her jump. It was a woman

  —Mum—

  but the sound was muffled, as though she were calling from a floor down.

  Kelsea pushed herself up from the bed, and as she did so, she felt the familiarity of this place solidify in her mind. This was her room, ever since she was little. Over there was the door to her closet, which was filled with the sort of clothing she favored: a few dresses for fancy occasions, but mostly comfortable pants and sweaters. This was her desk, these were her books. She lingered beside the bookshelf, looking over the titles. Some of these books she knew, and she pulled them down and opened them, relieved to find words on each page—here was Tolkien, here was Faulkner, here was Christie, Morrison, Atwood, Wolfe—but she did not recognize the editions. They were in good condition, clearly well cared for. She knew these books, even their spines. Some of them she had loved since childhood.

  “Kelsea!”

  The voice sounded closer, and she cast an almost panicked look at the doorway. Her mind drew a blank.

  My name is Kelsea, she told herself. At least I know that much. My name hasn’t changed.

  She hurried over to the closet and pulled out pants and a blue sweater. The floor of her closet was littered with empty boxes, and Kelsea stared at these for a moment before she remembered: of course! She was getting ready to move out, but to where? Her mind felt as though it were filled with mineshafts, tunnels that hid this life from her gaze. She was supposed to be packing up her room, but she had been dawdling for the past couple of weeks, not wa
nting her belongings to be boxed away where she couldn’t get to them.

  When she was dressed, Kelsea opened her bedroom door, cautiously, as though expecting to find dragons on the other side. She saw a short hallway with several closed doors, and, ahead of her, a descending staircase. On the wall near the top of the stairs hung a floor-length mirror, simply constructed of glass and wood. She smelled eggs cooking.

  “Kelsea Raleigh, get down here this minute! You’ll be late for work!”

  “Raleigh,” she murmured to herself. That was right. There was no Glynn here, no Barty or Carlin, because she had never been fostered; she had grown up her entire life right here in this house, and now she was tired of it, tired of having Mum wake her up in the mornings, tired of having Mum know all of her business. She loved Mum, but Mum drove her crazy. Kelsea wanted a place of her own. That was why she was moving out.

  She moved toward the stairs, still half in a dream, but a glance in the mirror brought her to another halt.

  Her own face stared back at her.

  She put a hand on the smooth surface of the mirror, her eyes searching hungrily. Here was a girl of nineteen, with a round, good-natured face and bright green eyes. A step backward showed that she had a solid, well-fed figure. Not Lily, this woman, her appearance neither pretty nor remarkable . . . and yet Kelsea could have stared at her forever.

  My own face.

  “Kelsea!”

  After a last look, she went on down the stairs.

  At the bottom, she found an open doorway leading into a dining area. There were plates on the table, not bulky stoneware but fine ceramic work, blue on white. She touched the edge of one plate and found it smooth.

  “There you are!”

  She turned and saw Elyssa Raleigh standing in a tiny kitchen that opened off the dining room. She had a spatula in one hand and a plate in the other. She looked frazzled.

  “Here, have breakfast!” She shoved the plate into Kelsea’s hand. “I’ve no time this morning. I have to be over at Mrs. Clement’s; her daughter’s getting married and she wants the most ridiculous dress . . .”