“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.