“The crown. He liked to try it on when no one was looking, and even when I was deep under the spoon, I would think: it’s not his; it belongs to the Queen. He shouldn’t get to wear it.” She blinked slowly; the Fetch thought that she must be very close to sinking into unconsciousness. “When the old man came, I saw my moment, and I jumped.”
The Fetch needed to ask her more, but his time was running out. “This crown. What did it look like?”
“Silver. A circle. Blue sapphires. In a pretty box.”
“And the Keep priest took it away?”
She nodded.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. They said he got away, took Father Seth with him. When Anders found out, he cut my face.”
The Fetch frowned, his stomach twisting. Few in the Tear knew that the silver circlet the Raleighs had worn for centuries was only an imitation. The real crown had disappeared completely, along with its cherrywood box. The Fetch suspected that Katie had taken it with her, but he had never been sure. Regardless of where the crown was now, for at least a brief moment it had been here in the Arvath, and he had lost it. Two cloistered Arvath priests, on their own, in New London? The thought made him shudder.
“Do they feed you?” he asked Maya.
“Yes. Every day a tiny dose, not nearly enough . . .”
The Fetch grimaced.
“You will not stay, keep me company?” Maya asked. “I’m not afraid of your mask.”
“Then you would be the first,” the Fetch murmured. Even he himself had become afraid of the mask, for he no longer knew which was the real man beneath. The outlaw? The rueful traitor who had been forced into hiding, donning the mask only because he could no longer stand the idea that he might be recognized? Or was it a boy named Gavin, a boy who had wanted so badly to be right, to be clever, that he had been easy pickings for the cleverest manipulator of them all?
Which are you?
He didn’t know. He had been walking the Tear for more than three hundred years, and sometimes he felt that he was not one man, only a collection of phases, several different men with their own lifetimes.
But which are you now? his mind hammered relentlessly. Which man have you become?
Ah, there was the question. The boy, Gavin, would have left the mutilated woman before him on the bench, her purpose served, information extracted. The man, the Fetch, might have rescued her, but only to increase the glory of his legend, as when he had once stolen an unhappy concubine from right under Thomas Raleigh’s nose.
He dug deep into the inner pocket of his shirt and came up with a cloth-wrapped packet. Inside were several needles and a good quantity of high-grade morphia. He had not expected to need these things, but had brought them along just in case. Now he unwrapped the cloth and snapped his fingers before Maya’s face.
“Listen.” He pressed the vials into her hand. “These are for you. Hide them away, and hide them well.”
Her gaze sharpened as she focused on the needles.
“For me?”
“Yes. Just in case.” He patted her cheek to make her look at him. “This is the Grandmile grade. Powerful, far more powerful even than what you were getting from the Holy Father. If you took it all at once, you wouldn’t live out the night.”
She looked up at him steadily, clenching the packet in her fist.
The Fetch tiptoed backward, leaving her on the bench. Briefly, he considered going upstairs and ending the Holy Father once and for all, but then he realized that he could not; he might need the man in the end, and even if not, there were ranks of eager priests, perhaps worse, waiting behind him. No, better to simply fade away, vanish, as he had always done. And yet he couldn’t help loathing himself.
“Dear God,” he whispered, and even though he was currently walking through the oldest house of worship in the new world, he knew he was talking to no one at all. If God had ever been in the Tearling, he was long gone.