All I can do is tell the story. What they do with it is up to them.”
“If we gave you another story to tell,” I said, “you know it could be dangerous for you.”
“That’s for us to decide,” Eva said.
Piper and Zoe didn’t say anything, but Zoe stepped forward to stand beside Piper. Piper took a deep breath, and began to talk.
The bards put down their instruments while they listened. Leonard’s guitar lay on its back across his knees, and as we talked I imagined that it was a box we were filling with our words. We didn’t tell them about my link with Zach, but we told them everything else. We told them about the tanks, each one a glass case filled with terror. The missing children, and the tiny skulls in the grotto beneath the tank room at Wyndham. And the expanding refuges, and the machines that we’d destroyed with the Confessor.
When we’d finished, there was a long silence.
“There’s good news in there, too,” Leonard said quietly. “About the Confessor. We passed near the Sunken Shore last week. She was from around there, they say, so there was a lot of talk about the rumor that she’d been killed. But I hadn’t dared to believe it.”
“It’s true,” I said, looking away from him. I didn’t want to see Leonard’s answering smile. He didn’t know the price Kip had paid for this good news. The price I was still paying.
“And the rest of it—about the tanks. Is it really true?” said Eva.
Leonard answered her before we could.
“It’s all true. Hell on earth, it’s too far-fetched to make up.” He rubbed at his absent eyes. “It explains everything. Why the Council’s been driving up the tithes and the land restrictions, these last few years. They’re pushing us toward the refuges.”
“And do you think you could put it in a song?” I said.
He reached down to place a hand on the neck of the guitar. “There’s a song in your story, that’s for sure, though it won’t be a pretty one,” he said. He hoisted up the guitar, stroking along the top with his thumb, as if waking it gently.
“Like Cass said: it’ll be dangerous, spreading the word,” said Piper.
Leonard nodded. “True enough. But it’s dangerous for all of us, if word of the tanks and the refuges doesn’t spread.”
“It’s a lot to ask of you,” I said.
“You’re not asking it of me,” Leonard said. There was no music left in his voice as he spoke—his words were grave and quiet. “But you told me what you know. And now that I’ve heard it, I have an obligation.”
Ω
For hours, while I took my shift at the lookout post, I could hear Leonard and Eva working on the song. First they built the tune itself. The occasional word reached me: No, try this. Hold off on the chord change until the chorus. How about this? But mainly they didn’t talk. It was a conversation that took place in music. He’d pluck out a tune, and Eva would echo it, then play with it: varying the melody, adding harmonies. For hours they sat together, passing the tune back and forth between them.
Even when Eva had settled down to rest, Leonard kept working, adding the words now. He sang slowly, trying out different versions of the words. He was stringing them onto the growing melody like beads on a string, sometimes unthreading and rearranging. When Piper relieved me at the lookout post, I fell asleep listening to Leonard’s singing, the graveled edge of his deep voice.
When I woke later, the moon was rising in the darkening sky, and Leonard was still playing. I walked down to the spring. The music followed me all the way to the water, which might be why Zoe didn’t hear me coming. I saw her standing close to where the stream burst from the rock, about twenty feet ahead of me. She was leaning against a tree, one arm wrapped loosely around it, her head resting on the trunk as she tilted her face upward. She swayed slightly to the music that filtered through the trees. Her eyes were closed.
I’d seen Zoe naked, when we washed at rivers. I’d seen her asleep. I’d even shared her dreams, her sleeping mind a window onto the sea. But I’d never seen her as unguarded as at that moment. I turned away, as if I’d seen something shameful, and began to retreat. She opened her eyes.