Katie halted. That last thought hadn’t been her own, but someone else’s, as though there were a stranger inside her head. Not Row, not Tear, but a third party, a voice she had never heard before.
Hearing voices. You’re about two steps from crazy.
But Katie didn’t believe that. She turned to look at Row, to see whether that voice had been correct, whether she could find destruction in his face.
The road behind her was empty.
Katie turned in a slow circle. She was at the very edge of the Lower Bend, just where the road inclined sharply to begin switchbacking the hill toward the center of town. The area was lit with sporadic lamplight, but this only served to highlight the many pools of shadow behind her. On either side, long-weathered buildings creaked and groaned under the assault of the wind. This end of the Lower Bend was the closest thing to an industrial row that the Town could boast: Mr. Eddings’s forge; Ellen Wycroft’s flour mill; the ceramics shop, which held ten potter’s wheels and two kilns and was open to all via a sign-up sheet; and Mr. Levy’s all-purpose art store, full of leads and canvas, homemade paints, and plain, well-made oak picture frames. These were good buildings, friendly buildings, but now they leaned and groaned in the darkness, and Katie felt a trickle of unease at how different they were, how easily certainty became uprooted in the dark. Where was Row? If he was playing a trick on her, she would make him regret it.
“Row?” she called. The wind picked up her voice and carried it; it seemed to slip down the street, around corners and into shadows, places she didn’t want it to go. She thought of the graveyard, bones strewn every which way by an animal that thought nothing of tearing into graves and carrying off corpses. Her imagination, so vivid that Mrs. Warren often read her creative writing assignments to the class, was coming to life, sparking and popping. She sensed movement all around her, behind her, in each pool of shadow.
“Row!” she cried out, her voice cracking mid-syllable. She didn’t care if they both got caught now; in fact, she would welcome it, welcome some disapproving adult to escort her back up to the Town for a talk with Mum about being out after curfew. Ahead of Katie were deep woods, broken only by the almost imperceptible glimmer of the path. She would rather face getting caught than enter those woods alone.
“Row!” she screamed, but the wind grabbed her voice and seemed to shred it to tatters. No one lived down at this end of town. All of the buildings were closed up and empty at night, but that very emptiness seemed suddenly terrible to Katie, a void waiting to be filled. She would never forgive Row for this, ever. He had snuck past her, taken one of his secret ways through the woods, and now he was probably halfway home, laughing all the way. They both liked to read horror stories, but the stories didn’t frighten Row the way they did Katie. He probably thought nothing of leaving her stranded here in the dark, thought it was a wonderful joke.
Don’t you think he knows you better than that?
Yes, he did. Row knew Katie’s imagination, knew that she wouldn’t like to be alone in the windy dark. He had done this on purpose. Katie had behaved badly at Jenna’s shop; she knew it. She had meant to apologize. But what Row had done here was deliberate, spiteful.
Katie heard something.
Beneath the high, cold cry of the wind, her ears picked up the stealthy sound of something moving. Not behind her, but in front, somewhere beyond the mill and the ceramics shop. There was plenty of movement out there; the wind on this slope was so strong that the trees were always talking and rustling in their own secret language, but these were not tree noises. Slow and clumsy, but purposeful, the sounds getting closer. Katie heard the sharp crack of a disturbed branch snapping back into place.
“Row?” she asked faintly. The sound barely left her lips, and she was glad. She might not have any gifts; she couldn’t see in the dark, like Gavin, or move with the quick, animal silence of Lear, but her intuition worked as well as anyone’s, and what she heard out there was bad. Not Row’s kind of bad, charming and seductive, but something terrible. Katie thought longingly of her knife, still sitting on her dresser next to a pile of clothing. They weren’t supposed to wear their knives anywhere but practice, but Katie would have given anything to have a blade with her now.
There was no hope for it. She turned and began walking up the path into the woods, tucking her head, trying to step quietly, determined not to look backward. The woods would be bad, but she could manage; she was fifteen years old. The path was longer than Row’s shortcut, but at least it was a way that Katie knew; she wouldn’t get lost. She would walk back up to town and crawl into her own bed, and the next time Row came knocking, she would keep her window shut.
Even in the dark, she made decent progress; the tree cover was thick, but enough moonlight shone down through gaps in the branches that Katie could pick her way along. Despite her best intentions, she kept glancing behind her, but she saw nothing. Whatever it had been—and she had no intention of dwelling on that question, not until she was safe in her bed and the sun had risen and flooded the Town with light—it hadn’t followed her up here.
The path curved. Ahead of her, Katie saw a wide break in the trees, giving on to a broad, leveled field. Moonlight limned the field clearly, revealing the dark, rounded shapes of tombstones. The graveyard. The Town, worried about contaminating the water supply, had always buried its dead near the bottom of the hill. William Tear encouraged cremation—he and Row agreed on that, at least—but there were too many people whose religious faith demanded that they go into the ground. The last time the subject had come up at meeting, Paul Annescott had rallied a large contingent of Christians; they had won the vote to keep the graveyard, and won it fairly, but for a moment, Katie hated them all. That wide expanse of field glowed ghostly in the moonlight, but it was the markers that bothered Katie most. Bad enough to put people in the ground to rot; did they have to commemorate it as well?
A branch snapped behind her.
Katie whirled around. Through a tiny hole in the foliage, almost impossibly distant, she could see the dim lights of the Lower Bend, but the portion of path she had just traversed was a long carpet of shadow. Her heart thundered in her ears, but even over its wild pounding, she could hear that sound again, the stealthy push of branches being moved out of the way. Something coming toward her. But on the right, or the left?
“Row!” she screamed into the woods, her throat raw with fright. “If this is you, I’ll fucking kill you!”
There was no answer, only that same sound of approaching progress, measured and deliberate. Katie dropped to the ground and began scrabbling, digging through the dirt until she found what she sought: a good-size rock, smooth and rounded but heavy, a rock she could wield. One side was jagged; a geode, perhaps, its crystals broken through the rock’s cracked surface. Katie straightened, clutching the rock in her hand, then froze as something moved on the path, perhaps thirty feet away, covering a patch of moonlight and blocking it out.
It was big, whatever it was, the height of a tall man. Katie could just make out a hint of silhouette, rounded shoulders and the protrusion of a head, but the shape, the posture, were wrong, slumped over, almost as though it was crouching. In desperation, her mind tried to convince her one last time that it was Row, having her on, but Katie knew better. Her gut knew better. She could smell the thing, dank and rotten, like vegetables gone bad in the cooler.
It stood still, regarding her silently, and in that silence Katie felt menace, not the charged, barely contained menace of a wolf or other wild animal, but something much worse: a thinking menace. Katie was suddenly certain that it knew who she was, that it had come looking specifically for her.
It knows my name, Katie thought, and her nerve broke. She turned and fled.
Whatever it was, it was quick. Branches whipped and cracked behind Katie with the speed of its passage. Katie heard her own gasping breath, tearing in and out of her throat, but beneath that, she heard the thing behind her, not breathing but snarling, a low buzzing noise
like the wind made when it crossed the pinwheels in front of the school. Katie wasn’t used to running uphill. She sensed that it was gaining.
She ran through the lumber site, sprinting now, laying herself out, hearing a clatter of metal and wood as the thing behind her knocked aside one of the logging stations. She chanced a look back, hoping that it had gone down, but the thing was still behind her, even closer than before, a black shadow that loped along, bent low to the ground. The tree cover thinned and Katie bit back a scream as she glimpsed white flesh and staring eyes, hands that felt along the ground like those of an animal. It was a man, but not a man, not with its spine bent that way and that inhuman buzzing in its throat.
Bad, Katie thought. I know what bad looks like and there it is and will it eat me? Is that where this ends?
Then the trees closed again and Katie was back into the deep woods. Her breath rasped inside her throat like sandpaper. She leapt over the trunk of a fallen tree, its branches reaching up to scrape at her legs, but she barely felt it. She kept her eyes on the path, dimly visible ahead of her, knowing that if she blundered into the woods she was lost. The line of the path was becoming clearer in front of her, a long, light groove in the night, limned in blue. Yes, now she could see everything! If she hadn’t been so scared, she might have laughed, because Gavin wasn’t the only one who’d received night vision in the Crossing. But a moment later she realized that it wasn’t night vision. The light was coming from her right hand, which was still clenched around the rock she had picked up. Tiny blue lines of light gleamed between her fingers, bright enough to illuminate the path.
The thing behind her snarled and Katie screamed because it was right on her, its voice had been right there, behind her left ear. Something grabbed her hip and squeezed and she shrieked, a sound like the town firebell, and now she broke free through the treeline and there glimmering in the distance was the Town in all of its dull communal glory, but now Katie was dying to embrace that dullness; if she could have found the Town’s stolid, thudding heart she would have kissed it right now—
She chanced another glance behind her and came to a halt, such an abrupt halt that she fell sprawling in the dirt, scraping the skin from her left elbow.
Nothing was behind her.
The treeline was perhaps one hundred feet back from where she had fallen, right at the bottom of the High Road, where the houses began and streetlamps glimmered merrily in the dark. The trees at the edge of the woods were rustling, but it was only the natural sound that Katie had heard all of her life, leaves and branches rubbing together in the wind that came off the plains. There was no sign of anything moving.
“Katie?”
She rolled, gasping, drawing the rock back, prepared to throw it even though she was on her belly. The blue light had faded now—had it even been there at all?—but the lamps were still flickering, and she didn’t need extra light to recognize Row, standing several feet up the High Road, not a hair out of place.
“Katie, what happened to you?”
“Row!” She pulled herself to her feet, sobbing, and flung herself at him. “Where were you?”
“I went back up on my shortcut, and all of a sudden I looked around and you weren’t there. What happened?”
Crying, Katie told him. Row kept his arms around her, but there was something distant about the embrace, and a few minutes into her story, Katie realized that he wasn’t giving comfort. He was simply listening, his face turned away.
“—and then I got out of the trees and turned around and there was nothing, it was gone, Row, but it was there and—”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Row replied mildly.
“What?”
Row turned toward her, and Katie saw that his mouth was crimped upward in a smile, triumphant and cruel. She had seen that smile on Row’s face, many times, but never directed at her, and it hurt so much that she pulled free of his arms and backed away, looking up at him with wide, wounded eyes.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Row continued. “In fact, Katie, I’d say you were probably just having a delusion.”
She gaped at him, but Row had already turned and trudged away, up the hill.
Kelsea broke from the past and found herself trapped in the dark. For a moment she could not escape her vision, and she rolled, gasping, until she recognized the hard stone floor beneath her. She was still in her cell, and for a long minute all she could feel was blessed relief that she was not back there, with Katie, out in the woods.
There was no one outside the bars, which was a relief as well; the Red Queen knew about her fugues, but still Kelsea didn’t like the idea of being observed. Through the wall at her back, she heard her neighbor working, shuffling paper and what sounded oddly like the scratching of a pen. She still hadn’t gotten him, or her, to say a word, but there were occasional silences over there that suggested he might be listening when she spoke. Now, though, there was nothing but that scratching. The rest of the dungeon was silent. Kelsea thought it might be the middle of the night.
There was something in her hand, hard and rounded. She blinked for a moment, trying to think what it might be, but she was stumped. She was receiving special treatment now; the page, Emily, had given her a candle and a few matches. Kelsea hesitated to waste one of them, but curiosity was too strong. She felt around on the floor until her fingers encountered the candle, and after a bit of fumbling, finally lit it. The flame was weak, at hazard from the many drafts that crisscrossed the dungeons, but it was enough for Kelsea to see, and she stared at the object in her hand for a very long time, her mind working, trying to grasp what it meant.
She was holding a smooth, oval stone, shot through with blue quartz.
Book II
Chapter 6
Aisa
The future cannot be divorced from the past. Trust me, for I would know.
—The Glynn Queen’s Words, as compiled by Father Tyler
“Hellcat. Time to go.”
Aisa looked up from her saddlebags. Venner was in her doorway, his long, dour face shadowed with concern.
“You have everything?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, say good-bye to your mother.”
She scrambled up.
Maman was in the Queen’s chamber, changing the bed linen. She did this every two days, though no one slept there. For a moment, Aisa hung in the doorway, watching Maman work. She would miss Maman, yes, but she longed to be out in the world. The Mace had already told her that she was not going all the way to Demesne; she would stay in the Almont, with General Hall, and be relatively safe. But she had still been surprised that Maman had given her permission to go. A small, nagging voice inside her even wondered if Maman wanted her gone.
“Maman. I’m leaving.”
Maman dropped the pillowcase she was fighting with and came around the corner of the four-poster bed, her arms open. Maman’s face was as composed as ever, but Aisa was shocked to see that her eyes were sorrowful. Maman had not looked that way since before they had escaped Da’s house.
“Have you seen something, Maman?” she asked. “Have you seen whether we’ll bring the Queen back?”
“No, love. I don’t know.”
“Have you seen something about me?”
Maman hesitated, then said, “I see many things about you, Aisa. You have grown up too quickly already, but I would be a poor parent if I kept you from a course you’re clearly meant to follow.”
“I’m meant to rescue the Queen?”
Maman smiled, but Aisa sensed bitterness behind it. “You’re meant to fight, my girl. Just be careful. You go to a dangerous place.”
Aisa sensed Maman hedging, but could make no sense of these dodgy answers. For a rogue moment she wished that Maman could go with them. But no, that would be disastrous. A woman with Maman’s sight would command a heavy price in Mortmesne; the Mace had said so more than once.
“Andalie!”
Elston’s voice roared outside, making them both j
ump. Aisa grabbed her knife and they hurried out into the hallway, where Elston beckoned.
“It’s your little one. She’s having a fit.”
Maman broke into a run. Following into the audience chamber, Aisa found Maman bent over Glee, who was in one of her trances. Aisa had seen this phenomenon so many times that she found it routine, and was almost amused by the reactions of the men around her, who had drawn back from Glee, their faces mirroring a nearly identical superstitious dread.
“Poppet?” Maman asked. “Will you come back to us?”
But Glee shook her head vigorously. Her wide eyes roved the room for a moment before fixing on the Mace, staring at him so long and raptly that even he looked unnerved.
“You seek a prize,” Glee murmured, her tone musing, as though she were working out a problem in her head. “But you will not find it in Demesne.”
One of the new guards, whose name Aisa did not know, crossed himself.
“Look to Gin Reach,” Glee told the Mace.
“Poppet!” Maman put her hands on Glee’s shoulders. “Poppet, can you hear me?”
“Gin Reach,” Glee repeated. “But we cannot know—”
“Glee, wake up!”
“Get her out of here, Lie,” the Mace growled. “Before she spooks us all.”
Maman gathered Glee up in her arms and carried her down the hall. Aisa thought of following them, but did not. She had already said good-bye to Maman.
I’m ready to leave, she thought, marveling. Really ready now.
The Mace turned to Arliss. “Are you sure our intelligence is sound?”
“It’s sound!” Arliss replied, exasperated. “You handpicked the girl!”
“What if they’ve moved the Queen in secret?”
The Fate of the Tearling Page 17
