now, but as the Caddell continued to dry up and the harvest failed, more would surely come. It didn’t matter that they were leaving their homes behind, for it was better to be homeless in the city than starving in the plains. And yet even scraps were becoming a luxury; most people were hoarding their refuse for another meal. As Niya watched, the publican shooed the father away from the pub door, banging it angrily shut behind him. The family huddled in miserable disappointment, and for a rogue moment Niya longed to go to them, tell them that they should not despair, that there was a better world out there, so close they could almost touch it. But what good would words do these people? Men could not eat belief.
“What is that?”
The Fetch had stopped behind her, tipping his head. Listening for a moment, Niya heard a roar of voices, muffled by the buildings on their left.
“West,” she told him. “The Circus.”
“Come on.”
Niya followed him through the crowd, keeping her eyes on the back of his neck, which was tanned dark from his recent trip to the Almont. The Fetch went out there personally at least once every few months, even though it might slow down operations in New London. Niya didn’t know why he made such a point of it; even now, after ten years under the Fetch’s tutelage, she understood him little better than she had on that long-ago day when he grabbed her arm and yanked her hand from his pocket. No one knew where the Fetch had come from; he claimed to have been born a street rat, but Niya had her doubts. The Fetch sought the better world as doggedly as any of them, but he was no bright-eyed optimist like Gareth, or even a cautious optimist, like Niya herself. The Fetch did not dream freely, as the rest of them did. Rather, he seemed compelled, driven independently of his will to take on the evils of the kingdom as he found them. “Repairing the gap,” the Fetch called it, and the grim tone of his voice seemed to suggest regret. Culpability.
That was nonsense, of course; the Tearling had fallen into decline centuries before the Fetch was even born. If any single person was to blame, it was Matthew Raleigh, the first king of the line, who had dismantled William Tear’s system of collectivized land ownership and dispensed most of the kingdom’s acres in private grants to his friends and followers, progenitors of the modern-day nobility. There was no blame anymore, except for the ubiquitous guilt that lay across the breadth of the Tearling, the vast multitude too busy scrabbling for scraps to look up and act.
He takes too much upon himself, Niya thought now, watching the set of the Fetch’s shoulders, the tension of muscles in the back of his neck. She loved him, not in the silly way of men and women, but something much more important. She loved the Fetch the way she loved Gareth, Amelia, Lila, Dylan, all of them. They saw the better world, and they saw it together; hope had welded them tighter than blood. But the Fetch felt every new setback deeply, as though a boulder had landed upon him. Niya only wished that she could pull him free, take some of the weight.
At this late hour, the New London Circus should have been clearing out, for most of the food vendors usually closed down shop after dark, and street preachers ran a real danger of being beaten once drunks began to stumble from the pubs. But tonight some sort of mob had gathered in the vast open-air market, a mob of so many people that they overflowed down the side streets. Apollon Road was so crowded that the Fetch was forced to literally shoulder people aside, Niya worming her way through behind him.
“What—” she began to ask, and then the words were cut from her in a harsh gasp as the Fetch pointed, directing her gaze upward.
Elyssa was walking up the steep staircase that wound around Preacher’s Seat, the tall, rickety platform that sat in the center of the Circus. The Seat was some twenty feet tall, and it overlooked the entire expanse of the marketplace. Every morning the street preachers would get together, draw straws or deal cards to decide who got to have the Seat that day; the rest of them would be relegated to stumps or chairs or tabletops.