“But I’ll bank my sword we know where she’s going,” Coryn murmured. “Jesus, look at that.”
Aisa shook herself from the bloody wreck on the floor. Brenna’s room was clean and comfortable, not luxurious, but with plenty of space and several decent pieces of furniture. The remains of a meal, some hours old, sat on the table, drawing its own share of flies. But it was the far wall that Coryn meant, and the sight of it made Aisa draw a deep, pained breath. The wall was covered with strange symbols that seemed to dance over the stone, a constellation in sickly orbit around a single word, all of it drawn in blood.
GLYNN
Chapter 2
The Town
The group of committed utopians who made the original Crossing with William Tear shared a grand dream of a great society, peaceful and egalitarian. Numbering nearly two thousand, they settled in the shadow of the Clayton Mountains, on the bank of high foothills that would become modern-day New London. They learned to farm, voted by town meeting, and took care of each other. In this idyllic setting, the town grew by leaps and bounds; the population exploded, nearly doubling in the generation after the Crossing. Religion was a strictly private matter, and violence was forbidden. To the outward eye, William Tear had brought his grand vision to life.
—The Early History of the Tearling, as told by Merwinian
The trip up the hill was a slog.
Katie Rice had made this journey times without number, up the winding path that switchbacked the hillside, all the way from the river to the Town. She knew each landmark along the path: the broken rock whose face greeted her like a signpost after the third turning, the stand of young oaks just beginning to hunch over the curve halfway up, the spot on the windward side where the path had eroded after years of taking the brunt of the winds that blew off the plains. At meeting last week, William Tear had talked about this spot; he said that they would have to shore it up, fortify it somehow. He had asked for volunteers, and a hundred hands had shot into the air.
Katie knew this path, but she still hated it. She hated the long walk, nothing to do but think. But the sheep farm was at the bottom of the hill, and Katie loved wool as much as she hated walking. She had been three years old when Mum first put a pair of knitting needles into her hands, and now, at fourteen, in addition to being the finest knitter in the Town, she was also one of the best spinners and dyers. To make and dye her own wool, this walk was the price.
She emerged from the treeline and there was the Town: hundreds of small wooden houses covering the gently rounded hilltop. The spread of houses dipped into the depression between hills as well, coming right up to the edge of the river where it curved in toward town before wending away again, south and then west. Mum said they had originally found this place by following the river up from the ocean. Katie tried to picture how it must have looked to Tear’s settlers: just a group of hills covered in trees. Sixteen years had elapsed since the Crossing, which seemed like a long time to Katie, but she understood that it was really very short.
She turned around to walk backward, for this was her favorite view: the rows of trees carpeting the hillside, then the bright blue river fronting the green and gold of the farming plain. From here, Katie could see the growers, some fifty of them, working the wide rectangle of planted rows on the far side of the river. The growers would work right until sunset, and if the work wasn’t done, they would continue by lamplight. Before Katie was born, there had been a terrible couple of years: the starving time, Mum called it, when the settlers couldn’t figure out how to make crops grow. More than four hundred people—nearly a quarter of the population—had died. Now farming was the most serious business in the Town.