“Failure means little in this ring,” Tear told Alain. “But in the real world, the real fight, failure is swift death. This is a thing to understand and remember.”
From the corner of her eye, Katie saw Virginia nodding grimly. They were friends of a sort, though Virginia was a bit too fierce to ever be a real friend. Last week, at the big argument over the distribution of the harvest, Virginia had actually grabbed Mr. Ellis by the throat, and if several adults hadn’t pulled her off, Katie was quite sure that Virginia would have strangled him with her bare hands. In the Town of Katie’s childhood, there had been no fighting; if people had problems, they argued them out. Now, it felt as though there was an incident every week, and Katie often wondered whether they were training for peacekeeping, whether this was the trouble that William Tear had foreseen.
Next to Virginia, Jonathan Tear was staring at the two figures in the center of the ring, his eyes clocking and learning. Everything about Jonathan was William Tear in duplicate, except for his eyes, large and dark. Lily’s eyes; Katie had often noted the resemblance. Jonathan was neither a good nor a bad fighter; Katie had beaten him before, though he was a year older than she was. But that hardly mattered. Every moment of his life, Jonathan was learning. Katie could see it, see those dark eyes recording information and sending it to be processed back in the enormous room that was Jonathan’s brain. Room? Hell, it was an entire house.
“Gavin, swap out. Lear, you have a go at Alain.”
Lear scrambled up from his place, and Katie almost saw Alain groan. Lear was not the best fighter among them, but he got the most respect, because he was smart. His father, who had died in the Crossing, had been one of William Tear’s most trusted people, and Mum often said that Lear had gotten his father’s brains. He was apprenticing with old Mr. Welland, the Town historian, and Lear was working on his own history of the Town. Not the Crossing; none of them knew enough about that period, and the answers they got from adults were maddeningly vague. But according to Gavin, Lear meant to chronicle the history of the Town for his entire lifetime, before publishing the document at his death. No one wanted to fight a boy who was capable of thinking so long-term.
“Close the circle a bit,” Mum ordered. “Less room for error.”
They all scooted inward.
“Go.”
Lear circled Alain, who stood nearly frozen. He was a weakness among them, and Katie resented that weakness; there was no room for it here.
That’s Row talking.
She scowled, wishing she could force her mind to be quiet. There was an almost schizophrenic quality to her thoughts these days; it seemed as though each discrete idea could be categorized as belonging to either Row or Tear. Alain was not a great fighter, no, but, like so many Crossing children, he had other skills, particularly a phenomenal gift for sleight of hand. You never played Alain at cards, not for anything more than bragging rights; he had won several skeins of Katie’s best marled yarn before Katie learned to stop betting. Each fall, at the harvest festival, Alain would put on a magic show that impressed the adults and absolutely thrilled the smaller children. He might not be much of a fighter, but Katie recognized the great value of having so many different people in one community, each of them singular, each with gifts and faults and interests and oddities. They created a tapestry, all of them, just as the characters in a book might. It was the lesson of the Town, taught to children before they could even walk: You are special, everyone is special. But you are not better. All are valuable.
But Row couldn’t quantify the value of that tapestry. Katie often tried to explain it to him, but she wasn’t sure she was getting through. Row had no patience for inefficiency, and sometimes his thoughts would entwine with Katie’s, strangling Tear’s voice, killing it off.
Lear stopped circling and moved in, quick and silent. In moments, he had slipped behind Alain and wrapped his arms around his friend’s neck, headlocking him.
“Hold.”
William Tear stood with crossed arms, his eyes pinned on Alain. Those eyes were not without pity, but they were cold, and Katie suddenly knew that Alain was on thin ice.
“That’s enough for today. All of you go to your regular apprenticeships.”
Lear released Alain, who stumbled away, rubbing his throat. Lear placed a hand on his back and Alain smiled good-naturedly, but there was grimness there as well; Katie felt certain that he, too, knew he was on some sort of probation. Gavin began to give him a hard time, but that was Gavin, so convinced of his own gifts that he sometimes tipped into cruelty by accident. Gavin had asked her to the summer picnic last year, and even though he was good-looking, Katie had said no. There was something relentless in Gavin, ready to crush everything on the path to his objective. Katie didn’t trust him to put anything before himself.