She walked beside him, listening to their feet scruff through the thin, scratchy grass, but her mind was elsewhere. Tear was right; this business needed to remain secret. Fighting and weapons . . . these things were so far outside the rules of the Town that Katie couldn’t even imagine what would happen if people found out. Virginia Warren, Lear Williams, Gavin Murphy, Jess Alcott, Jonathan Tear, herself, a few others. But not Row.
Why not? she wondered, glancing sideways at Tear’s long legs, his thick wool shoes. What does he know that I don’t?
Mum was waiting for them, leaning against a wall just outside the kitchen door, her hands tucked behind her back.
“Done,” Tear told Mum, settling a hand on her shoulder. “Fierce animal indeed, Dori. Just like her mother.”
He went on inside, and Katie looked up at Mum, not sure what came next. Mum was unpredictable; she could be surprisingly rational about Katie’s mistakes, but then the oddest things would set her off sometimes. Mum was smiling, but her eyes were watchful.
“You’ve never kept a secret in your life, Caitlyn Rice, that was as important as this one.”
“I know.” Katie debated for a moment, then blurted out, “Mum, Row’s so smart! Why didn’t they pick him too?”
“Ah.” Mum leaned back against the wall, and Katie saw her searching for words. “Row is . . . an unpredictable boy.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. Come in and set the table.”
Katie followed silently, still trying to puzzle this out. Row had a mischievous side, she knew that; he took delight in confounding others. But there was nothing malicious in it, nothing that the two of them couldn’t look back and laugh at later. She wanted to be angry on Row’s behalf, but all she could seem to feel was sadness. Only she got to see Row’s real value, and part of her liked that; it was like a secret between them. But in this moment, she would have traded all of that carefully guarded intimacy to have the rest of the Town know him, see him clearly. And speaking of Row, how was she going to hide all of this from him? An apprenticeship took up a lot of time. How was she supposed to keep Row from finding out?
Tear will take care of it.
The voice came from somewhere deep inside her, a place that felt disturbingly adult, but Katie recognized the truth of the thought. Tear would take care of it. There was more than one secret being kept here; Katie sensed rings of concealment far outside herself, widening ripples in the deceptively smooth surface of the Town. She thought of the enormous sapphire, and shivered. She had promised to protect the Town, and she had meant it, but deep down, that other side clamored, the part that was tired of worrying about others, the part that longed only to look after herself.
I can do both, she insisted, but it was a shrill sort of insistence, desperate, as though something inside her knew even then that such equivocation was false, that one day she would have to choose.
Kelsea jerked to consciousness and found herself in darkness. The shadow of her jailor loomed nearby, making her tense up, but after a moment she saw that his head and chest swayed in time with the motion of the wagon. He was asleep. The sky over their heads was a deep, velvet black; Kelsea sensed that it was early morning, but there were no signs of dawn.
I saw.
Light flared above the wagon. Kelsea looked up and saw an ornate streetlamp passing over her head. At the same time she realized that the ragged, bumpy motion to which she had become accustomed had transformed into an easy glide. They were back on smooth ground. The night air was nearly freezing, and Kelsea tucked the ends of her cloak back over her shoulders. Another streetlamp danced by, a myriad of conflicting firelit shadows drifting across the floor of the wagon as it went. She should sit up, try to figure out where she was, but instead she merely lay there, frozen.
“I saw,” she breathed, as though words would make the thing real. “I saw.”
On impulse, she placed a hand on her chest, exploring, but of course there were no sapphires there. They were long gone, and yet when Kelsea closed her eyes, there it was, laid out before her: the Town, the forest, the Caddell, the Almont in the far distance. How was that possible? Even Lily’s world had never been so clear.
She’s not Lily.
No. This was a different girl, a child growing up in the Tearling, long before the kingdom had ever held that name. Her mother was Dorian Rice, who had once tumbled into Lily Mayhew’s backyard with a bullet in her gut. The girl was Katie Rice. Years after the Crossing, this scene, Jonathan Tear only fourteen years old. The idea made Kelsea’s heart ache, for she knew that, only five or six years later, Jonathan Tear would be murdered and William Tear’s utopia would be plunged into chaos.
So little time. How could everything have come apart?
A puzzle, that, one with no solution, unless Kelsea went back and found the answers for herself. But she had learned through bitter experience that these little jaunts into the past could carry a terrible price.