“What does that mean?”
Unexpectedly, Jonathan took her hand. Katie thought about pulling away, but didn’t. Jonathan’s hand was warm, not unpleasant, and after all, what did she care if people saw them holding hands? Half the Town thought they were sleeping together anyway; it was a source of great amusement to the rest of the guard.
“Your mum is broken, Katie,” he told her. “I’m sorry to say it, but her life was wrapped up in my father, and without him, she has nothing to keep her running.”
Katie began to protest, but something silenced her, a voice inside that no longer allowed her to argue with the unpalatable truth. Every year that voice became stronger; Katie resented it sometimes, but it was often useful, particularly in a town where so much now depended upon the politics of pragmatism. Mum wasn’t right, hadn’t been right since William Tear had left. She went through the motions of her everyday life, but Katie almost never saw her smile anymore, and it had been months since she had heard Mum laugh. Mum was broken, and she wasn’t alone. Tear’s departure had torn the guts from the Town, and the longer he failed to return, the more Katie saw her community as a pack of wolves, fighting over the carcass. At the last meeting, Todd Perry had called for a vote to allow people to carry knives in town. Jonathan, Katie, and Virginia had weighed in heavily on the other side, and the motion was defeated by a narrow margin. But they couldn’t deceive themselves about which way the wind was blowing.
“I hate them sometimes,” Jonathan remarked quietly. “It’s not how my father would have felt, but I do. Sometimes I think: if they want to walk around armed and build fences and let a church tell them what to do, let them wallow in it. They can build their own town of closed thinking, and live there, and find out later what a shitty place it really is. It’s not my problem.”
For a moment, Katie was too shocked to reply, for Jonathan had never expressed such ideas before. With his guard, he was the eternal optimist; there was nothing that couldn’t be fixed, and now she was alarmed by the hopeless tenor of his words. She had promised William Tear that she would protect Jonathan, and she had always assumed that such protection, if it came to that, would be an act of knives. But now she wondered whether Tear might not have meant this moment, right here. Memory overtook her: sitting with William Tear in the backyard, five years ago now, the sapphire clutched in her fist. Had Tear known, even then?
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s not how your father would have felt.”
“I’m not my father.”
“That doesn’t matter, Jonathan. You’re all we have left.”
“I don’t want it!” he snapped, dropping her hand. They were in front of the library now, and at the sharpness in Jonathan’s voice, several children on the bench looked up, their eyes keen at the prospect of an argument.
“Too bad,” Katie replied. She felt for Jonathan, she truly did—and, some nights, lying in her narrow bed, she thought that she might feel for him quite a bit—but this wasn’t the time for sympathy. A guard was like a stone wall, and good stone didn’t yield. Good stone cracked right down the middle before it would give an inch. She lowered her voice, mindful of the children listening in: perfect little receivers, ready to carry the conversation back to their parents.
“No one ever wants the fight, Jonathan. But if it comes to you, and it’s a righteous fight, you don’t walk away.”
“What if we’re destined to lose?”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I?” he demanded. His hand had crept up toward his chest, and Katie knew that he was clutching the sapphire that lay just beneath. The desperation in the gesture, the dependency it revealed, made Katie suddenly furious, and she snatched his hand away, feeling like a hypocrite as she did so, for she understood Jonathan’s hatred, his contempt for these people who were too stupid to know that their future danced on the edge of a knife, a future of rich and poor, of violence and swords, of people bought and sold—
How do you know that?
I don’t know, but I do.
This was true. It was as though someone else were inside her head, knowing it for her. The knowledge made her sick, but she thrust it away, focusing on Jonathan.
“You don’t know anything,” she hissed. “I don’t give a fuck about magic, or visions. The future isn’t set. We can change it at any time.”
Jonathan stared at her for a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, he smiled.
“Are you laughing at me?” she demanded.
“No,” he replied. “Just remembering something my father said before he left.”
“What?”
“He said that I had picked the right guard. That you were the one to carry us through.”