pair that might one day be reunited. That was his dream. That was why he had given her the other one.
McGitney tried with great patience to maintain order and take in the facts presented to him. It would not be long before the blinded vigilantes were found by their co-conspirators and, come the dawn, the tribe of Quists needed to be on the move. But they could not leave without knowing what their night visitor-savior had to tell them.
“Lloyd, are you who we think you are?”
The boy shook his head. “I’m not a prophet or your holy one. But you should listen to me just the same.”
“Because of your power?”
Lloyd dodged this. “Because I speak the truth.”
McGitney opened his arms to the group, as if calling for their opinion.
“You spoke the truth about the sacred markings. You helped save two of our own. I think you are the one Saint Kendrick foresaw. I know I speak for all the Quists when I say we want you to join us, to lead us to the promised land we know awaits us beyond the wilderness.”
Lloyd thought of his parents asleep in their coffins and shook his head. If he could not join the ranks of the Spirosians or the Vardogers, he certainly could not take up with the Quists—and he felt a great weight upon his shoulders when he thought of what he had to tell them, before any more of them were hurt or killed at the hands of night riders.
“I am not your messiah,” he said again. “And your faith … your theology—”
He was trying to think if that was the right word. To him, religion was what people who lacked magic and science had to fall back on.
“Go on,” McGitney encouraged. “We trust you, Lloyd. We would follow you if you would lead us.”
“Well, first I think you should stop this following business,” Lloyd began (which perhaps showed that, in spite of his prodigious mental faculties, his grasp of human nature was still weak or at least self-deceiving, for he himself was an avid follower—the only problem was that he was devoted to a phantom). “Not all can lead, but no one necessarily must follow.”
“What would you have us do?” a pretty young woman, who nestled a sleeping baby to her breast, implored. “Flounder blind like those men Brother Drucker says you left yonder?”
“Those men accosted us—and their blindness is a punishment,” Lloyd replied, not mentioning that he had no idea how that particular form of punishment had been inflicted. “The kind of blindness you mean is just not knowing. Uncertainty. Doubt. If you are not able to face that and keep on seeking, you will never find anything worth trusting.”
He thought of the Clutters, seeing a riddle in the simple, albeit esoteric instruction on the bottom of the Vardogers’ music box.
“You will build a church of meaning and procedure upon a mystery you have mistaken. Your church, even if it is a cathedral, will be a house of cards, and the genuine mystery will be missed.”
McGitney scratched his red beard. If this boy was not the Enlightened One that had been promised, he sure sounded like him.
“All right,” he said. “Supposing you are not he whom we have been expecting. Nevertheless you say you have a truth to tell us about the sacred markings and what we believe. Tell us your truth.”
“I’m afraid you won’t like it,” Lloyd answered, shuffling his feet on the sod floor to wipe off the mud he had accumulated.
“It is written that the truth will set you free. This must be why you have found us tonight. There can be no other explanation. And if, as you say, there are things about the Headstones that exceed your understanding, too, then perhaps there is a larger truth at work than any of us knows—or can ever know. But tell us the truth you came to tell, whoever you really are, wherever you really come from. It must be important. After all that has happened tonight, that much is clear.”
Lloyd looked McGitney in the eye, then scanned the faces around the room. Then he held up the box the professor had given him, in what seemed another life.
“The markings on this box, which you can all see are exactly like the markings on the strips of wood you carry, were not made thousands or even a hundred years ago. They were made in recent times by twin brothers. Wild, sad creatures. Freaks of nature, you