Kelsea took the plate, feeling this lock into her mind, another solid piece of information: her mother was a dressmaker.
“Go, go! You’re going to be late as well!”
Her mother pushed her toward the table, and Kelsea sat down. She felt herself drifting, almost becoming untethered. No one would have recognized Queen Elyssa . . . because there was no Queen Elyssa, never had been. Kelsea had never felt less like eating; she could only watch her mother bustle around the kitchen, putting things away, occasionally vanishing through an open door that, Kelsea knew, led to the cold pantry.
A dressmaker, her mind whispered. Kelsea could accept that, but she felt the rest of it, the world beyond this house, looming over her, a vast unknown. Who was her father?
“Time for me to run,” her mother said. “Give me a hug.”
Kelsea looked up at her, stunned and angry. As though she would embrace this woman, this woman who had done so many selfish things . . . or had she? Kelsea felt suddenly lost, wandering the vast gap inside herself, the chasm between the world she had always known and this kitchen. Queen Elyssa had wrecked the Tearling, but this was not Queen Elyssa. The woman before her was vain, perhaps; Kelsea sensed that this had been a point of contention between them for a long time. But she was no destroyer of kingdoms.
“Kelsea?” her mother asked, frowning, and Kelsea knew that some of what she’d been feeling must have shown on her face.
“I know you’re anxious to move out, Kel. I was at your age too. But I will miss you. Can I have a hug?”
Kelsea stared at her for a long moment, trying to push the past away, or at least make some peace with it. She had never been a forgiving person; it was too easy a journey from anger to resentment. But her mind demanded a basic level of fairness, and that fairness said that her mother was no danger to anyone. Could Kelsea really hold her responsible for that other life, when this mother made no decisions, only clothing?
Moving stiffly, as though she were manipulating someone else’s limbs, Kelsea stood up and put her arms around her mother, her mother whom she knew so well . . . and yet not at all. As they hugged, she was inundated with a bright scent, something like lemons.
“Have a good day, love,” her mother told her, and then she dashed from the kitchen, leaving Kelsea staring at her full plate. A clock hanging over the sink chimed, telling her that it was nine o’clock. She had to be at work at nine thirty.
“But where do I work?” she asked the empty space.
She couldn’t remember, but she knew the way to go.
On the street outside, Kelsea had to pause.
The houses, for one thing. They were so . . . neat. Clean, new-painted wooden houses, set close together, a forest not of trees but of white cupolas and gables, climbing the hillside above. No fences bounded them; many of the yards boasted oak trees, and several had been laid with flowerbeds, but otherwise they shared space. And here, here was something Kelsea had only seen through Lily’s eyes, in the falsely cheerful neighborhoods of pre-Crossing New Canaan: mailboxes, one in front of each house.
Stunned, almost dazed, Kelsea wandered down their front path to the street. She noted their mailbox, bright yellow, with the number 413 painted on it in red. The street was busy; horse-drawn wagons passed every few seconds, and people hurried by, clearly on their way to work as well. Everything seemed tidy and prosperous, but that made Kelsea think, again, of New Canaan. She saw many good things here, but were they real?
Without thinking, she turned right and hurried up the street along with the rest of them, the same route she took to work every morning, but her eyes searched everywhere, looking for answers. She felt as though something had eluded her, something so elementary that her mind refused to acknowledge . . .
She had walked more than half a mile before it hit her. She had passed many people on this street: laborers, dressed in stained clothes and dragging their tools; well-dressed men and women who seemed to be heading for some sort of office; haulers, transporting all manner of goods covered with canvas in their wagons . . . but nowhere did she catch a glint of armor, not even the telltale bulkiness of a cloak that told of armor concealed beneath. And on the back of this realization came another: she had seen no steel. No swords, no knives . . . Kelsea peered at the people who passed her, looking for the hint of a hilt, of a scabbard. But there were none.
What did we do?
Obeying the habit of her feet, Kelsea followed the road to its end, then turned left onto a broad road that she recognized as the Great Boulevard. There were the same rows of shops with their cheerful awnings: milliners, chemists, shodders, grocers . . . but something was different, and again, the difference was so fundamental that at first Kelsea could not identify it, could only move forward, footsteps wandering, mind far away. She glanced to her right and came to a dead halt.
The window in front of her was full of books.
Someone ran into her, and for a moment Kelsea lost her balance, before a man grabbed her arm, holding her up.
“I’m sorry,” he called over his shoulder, hurrying away. “Late for work!”
Kelsea nodded numbly, then turned back to the window.
The books were arranged in an artful display, several risers ascending in a pyramid shape. Kelsea saw books she recognized—Filth, The Great Gatsby, We Have Always Lived in the Castle—but many more she had never heard of: In This Burning World, by Matthew Lynne; Legerdemain, by Marina Ellis; a host of other books that had never sat on Carlin’s shelves. The hand-lettered poster above the display simply read: “Classics.”
Kelsea backed up a few feet, being more careful now to avoid the oncoming rush of people heading to work, and was rewarded with another hand-painted sign, this one hanging beneath the awning that covered the shop.
“Copperfield’s Books,” the sign read.
The shop was closed; the room behind the display was still dark. Kelsea walked up to the door and tried to peer inside, but she could see very little; the door was made of some sort of tempered glass, designed to block light. She had seen such glass in Mortmesne, in the Red Queen’s chambers, but nothing like it had ever made its way into the Tearling before. Kelsea backed away and returned to staring at the display. It was a bookshop. Her favorite bookshop. Most of the books on her shelves at home had been purchased right here. It was her favorite place to come on a Saturday afternoon.
A clock chimed somewhere, several streets over, startling her. It was already nine thirty. She would be late for work, and despite her wonder, longtime instinct kicked in and got her moving again; she was never late for work. She hurried up the boulevard, keeping hold of her bag so that it would not bounce against her hip, just as she had done every day since she had graduated school at the age of seventeen . . . and yet something was different here, something so different that—
“Great God,” she whispered.
She was standing in the middle of the Great Boulevard, staring down more than a mile of road. She had been here once before, in this very spot, on the day she and Mace first came to the city, and she remembered how the Keep had loomed over them as they approached, titanic, casting its long shadow down the boulevard.
But now there was no Keep.
Kelsea stared down the road for a long moment before she could fully confirm this fact for herself. Where the shadow of the Keep should have been, there was nothing, only the distant silhouette of more buildings where the boulevard rolled over the hilltop. Seeing this, Kelsea turned her head to the right, searching automatically for that other bulwark of the New London horizon . . . and found no Arvath.
Kelsea stared at the empty horizon for a long time.
“Carlin, do you see this?” she whispered. And somehow, she thought that Carlin did.
She began walking again, trying to work out what this meant. No Keep, no Arvath . . . what did these people have? Who was running this city? She dug in her mind, hoping that it would come up with this answer as well, but nothing came. She would have to fill the blanks in
as she went.
“Fine,” she muttered. “I will.”
Her steps took her to the right now, off the boulevard and onto a narrow street that should have led to the outskirts of the Gut. But even a glance was enough to tell Kelsea that the Gut had changed as well. The warren of run-down, leaning houses and smoking chimneys now appeared to be a thriving commercial district. Neat copper plaques hung outside each door, advertising professional services: an accountant, a dentist, a doctor, an attorney.
What did we do? her mind asked again, and now the voice was Katie’s, demanding answers, demanding assessment. But Kelsea felt as though she needed to be very careful here. Demesne, after all, had also looked like a pleasant, prosperous city from the outside.
She was at work.
Kelsea looked up at the structure in front of her, a brick building several stories tall. Each floor had many windows—Kelsea couldn’t get used to the sight of all this glass—and the front door was accessed by broad steps, made for many people to climb. Kelsea looked down and found another sign, this one bolted to the ground.
New London Public Library
She stared at this sign for a long time, until the clock chimed another quarter hour and she realized that she had to get moving, that she really was late for work. She went up the stone steps, opened a glass door, and found herself in a cool, cavernous room. These windows must be tempered as well, she realized, to keep out the heat. Everywhere she looked she saw high, stacked shelves of books . . . she could not even begin to guess how many there were. Dimly, Kelsea realized that this was the most extraordinary thing she’d seen today, but she could not wonder at it. It seemed that her capacity for astonishment had been exhausted. She loved this library, but it was her workplace.
She passed behind the checkout desk, which was unmanned—the library didn’t open until ten—and went downstairs into the labyrinth of offices on the basement floor. Her coworkers waved to her as she passed, and Kelsea waved back, knowing each of their names, but she did not want to talk to them. She only wanted to sit down at her desk. She was in the middle of an enormous project, she remembered now; a wealthy man had died, leaving the library all of his books, and they needed to be cleaned and categorized. It was soothing work.
“Kelsea!”
She turned, and there was Carlin, standing behind her. For a moment, Kelsea thought it was simply another phase of a dream—with some bemusement, she saw that Carlin was wearing the exact same pair of reading glasses that she had always worn in the cottage—but the disapproval on Carlin’s face was too familiar, too sharp.
“You’re late,” Carlin said. Her tone implied that it would have been preferable for Kelsea to be dead.
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, it’s only the first time. But you don’t want to have a second. Understand?”
“Yes.”
Carlin disappeared back into the nearest office, closing the door behind her, and Kelsea was not at all surprised to see another plaque on this door: “Carlin Glynn, Head Librarian.” After a moment, she continued down the hallway with uncertain steps. She wondered whether she had gone mad. Perhaps this was simply another fugue, another reality that lived somewhere on the far borders of the Tearling she knew.
What if it isn’t?
She halted in the middle of the hallway, arrested by this thought. Was it possible? What if the three of them—Kelsea, Lily, Katie—had actually done it, taken past, present, and future and somehow welded them into this place?
Mankind’s oldest dream, Kelsea thought, and deep in her mind she heard Tear’s voice, William Tear who had seen this place in visions, long before anyone else even knew that the Tearling might be real.
No guns, no surveillance, no drugs, no debt, and greed holds no sway at all.
But was that this place? The idea seemed impossible to Kelsea, to whom even small victories had always come with a price. Even if the world before her eyes was not a dream but solid, surely there would be a downside, something to undercut everything she had seen. Surely there would be a cost?
She reached her office—“Kelsea Raleigh, Junior Librarian”—and when she opened the door she found the far wall piled floor-to-ceiling with books. Old, new, all kinds of books, and at the sight of them something in Kelsea loosened for the first time. She had seen more books today than in her entire lifetime in the Tearling, and surely a world with so many easily accessible books could not be so terrible. But still, something inside Kelsea, that dark twinge of warning, made her grab a battered volume from one of the piles and open it wide. Finding the pages covered with words, she breathed a sigh of relief. Everything she had seen around her today said that she had done it, achieved more for her small kingdom than she could ever have hoped for. Even Carlin would have been proud, if she had only known, but Kelsea did not need Carlin’s praise any longer. The Tearling was safe, and Kelsea could be content with that.
And for a while, she was.
The more Kelsea saw of the new Tearling, the better it looked to her eyes. Perhaps it was not William Tear’s unattainable dream come to life—there were still subtle gradations of wealth, and human nature made personal conflicts inevitable—but the community was extraordinarily open, with seemingly none of the corruption that had marked the Tearling or its neighbors. There was no traffic, not in drugs or people or anything else. If a man wanted to carry a weapon, there was no law against it, but Kelsea did not see so much as a single knife, except at the butcher shops, and violence appeared to be limited to the occasional fistfight brought on by too much ale.
Books were indeed everywhere, and the city boasted six different newspapers. There were no homeless; though some were wealthier than others—doctors in particular commanded a good living—everyone in the city was housed, fed, clothed, tended, and Kelsea heard none of the grumbling that had characterized the later years of the Town. This baseline of care had been the true heart of William Tear’s dream, the engine that had driven them all to board the ships, and it hummed merrily along here, unquestioned, enshrined in the community.
Nor was New London the only such city; replicas of William Tear’s prototype now stretched across the new world, loosely governed by a parliament that seldom convened. There was no Mortmesne, no Cadare. Even if Evelyn Raleigh had once existed, she could never have become the Red Queen.
In the days that followed, Kelsea visited the parliamentary building, which was seated not far from the old site of the Arvath; the University of New London—from which she herself had graduated, not so long ago; and, last and most strange, the Tear Museum, a two-room exhibit, open to the public, which was housed near the old warehouse district. There Kelsea listened to an overenthusiastic tour guide tell the story of the Crossing; of William Tear, who had led them across the ocean; of Jonathan Tear, who had been murdered by a traitorous adviser, Row Finn. This adviser had been subsequently hacked to death by Jonathan Tear’s guards, putting a quick end to his rebellion.
Kelsea was only half listening. On the wall of the first room hung a row of portraits, many of which she recognized: William Tear, looking as though he would rather be anywhere else; Lily in the field with her bow, looking backward even though the future was still ahead of her, wide open; and Jonathan Tear, his face impassive, dark eyes dim with worry. Only the last portrait was new to Kelsea, and she hung back from the group, staring at the picture for a long while, as the tour guide’s bright, merry voice poured over her.
“Caitlyn Tear, first and only Queen of the Tearling! She ruled for a very long time, until the age of seventy-seven.”
The portrait was not the same one Kelsea had seen in the Keep, not even close. This Caitlyn Tear was older, her face prematurely lined, her mouth taut. Her hair was still as long and lustrous as ever, hanging loose down her back, but she wore no crown. A forbidding woman, Kelsea thought, one who laughed very seldom, if ever.
“Queen Caitlyn helped to write the Tear Constitution, and many of our current laws come from the time of her reign. It took h
er more than fifty years to design and build the Tear Parliament, but when she was seventy-seven, she finally handed over her government to Parliament and stepped down from the throne. The Tearling hasn’t had a monarch since!”
Kelsea absorbed this information quietly; it was not the ending she might have foreseen, but in hindsight it made perfect sense. A constitution and a parliament . . . it seemed a marriage of the best of pre-Crossing England and America. Katie might not have known that, but Lear would have, Lear who was a student of history. Katie would have needed all five of them, Gavin and Howell, Lear and Alain and Morgan, all of them with their different gifts. Kelsea found that she liked that, liked the thought of the five of them spending the next sixty years atoning for their crimes. Not many lifetimes, only one. It seemed fair.
“Her jewels are still right here!” the tour guide said breathily, indicating a display case that ran the length of the room. Kelsea peeked over her shoulder and saw them there: two sapphire necklaces, lying on a field of blue velvet. Unreality washed over her, and she had to clutch the edge of the glass case for a moment before she backed away.
When the tour ended, Kelsea followed the tour guide from the room, glancing uneasily back at the glimmer of sapphire in the sunlight, but it was already too late. Somewhere inside her, an alarm had gone off, the same alarm she had felt that first morning in the library. In her long history with these two jewels, they had always been double-edged, and though they no longer belonged to her—might never have belonged to her—they remained an uneasy reminder that nothing was easy. There was always a cost, and for the first time in many days Kelsea thought of Mace, of her Guard. Were they out there, somewhere? Some of them might never have been born; she had absorbed enough of Simon’s talk on the butterfly effect to understand that. But if Carlin was alive, perhaps some of her Guard might be too. Mace and Pen, Elston, Coryn and Kibb . . . she would give anything to see them again.
The Fate of the Tearling Page 44