The Ask and the Answer

Sure don’t feel no different, tho.

All that reaching for it, all that importance on the date, and I’m still the same ol’ stupid effing Todd Hewitt, powerless to do anything, powerless to save myself much less her.

Todd effing Hewitt.

And lying here in the dark, Mayor Ledger snoring away over on his mattress, I hear a faint pop outside, somewhere in the distance, some stupid soldier firing off his gun at who knows what (or who knows who) and that’s when I think it.

That’s when I think getting thru it ain’t enough.

Staying alive ain’t enough if yer barely living.

They’ll play me as long as I let ’em.

And she coulda been out there.

She coulda been out there today.

I’m gonna find her–

First chance I get, I’m gonna take it and I’m gonna find her–

And when I do–

And then I notice Mayor Ledger ain’t snoring no more.

I raise my voice into the dark. “You got something to say?”

But then he’s snoring again and his Noise is grey and muzzy and I wonder if I imagined it.

{VIOLA}

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

I don’t take the cup of root coffee he offers.

“Please, Viola,” he says, holding it out towards me.

I take it. My hands are still shaking.

They haven’t stopped since last night.

Since I watched her fall.

First to her knees, then onto her side down to the gravel, her eyes still open.

Open, but already unseeing.

I watched her fall.

“Sergeant Hammar will be punished.” The Mayor takes a seat across from me. “He was by no means and under no circumstances following my orders.”

“He killed her,” I say, hardly any sound to my voice. Sergeant Hammar dragged me back to the house of healing, pounding on the door with the butt of his rifle, waking everyone up, sending them out after Maddy’s body.

I couldn’t speak, I could barely even cry.

They wouldn’t look at me, the mistresses, the other apprentices. Even Mistress Coyle refused to meet my eye.

What did you think you were doing? Where did you think you were taking her?

And then Mayor Prentiss summoned me here this morning to his cathedral, to his home, to God’s house.

And then they really wouldn’t look at me.

“I’m sorry, Viola,” he says. “Some of the men of Prentisstown, old Prentisstown, still bear grudges against women over what happened all those years ago.”

He sees my look of horror. “The story you think you know,” he says, “is not the story that’s true.”

I’m still gaping at him. He sighs. “The Spackle War was in Prentisstown, too, Viola, and it was a terrible thing, but women and men fought side by side to save ourselves.” He puts his fingertips together in a triangle, his voice still calm, still gentle. “But there was division in our little outpost even as we were victorious. Division between men and women.”

“I’ll say there was.”

“They made their own army, Viola. They splintered off, not trusting men whose thoughts they could read. We tried to reason with them, but eventually, they wanted war. And I’m afraid they got it.”

He sits up, looking at me sadly. “An army of women is still an army with guns, still an army that can defeat you.”

I can hear myself breathing. “You killed every single one.”

“I did not,” he says. “Many of them died in battle, but when they saw the war was lost, they spread the word that we were their murderers and then they killed themselves so that the remaining men would be doomed either way.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say, remembering that Ben told us a different version. “That’s not how it happened.”

“I was there, Viola. I remember it all far more clearly than I want to.” He catches my eye. “I am also the one most keen that history doesn’t repeat itself. Do you understand me?”

I think I do understand him and my stomach sinks and I can’t help it– I start to cry, thinking of how they brought Maddy’s body back, how Mistress Coyle insisted I be the one to help her prepare the body for burial, how she wanted me to see up close the cost of trying to find the tower.

“Mistress Coyle,” I say, fighting to control myself. “Mistress Coyle wanted me to ask if we can bury her this afternoon.”

“I’ve already sent word that she can,” the Mayor says. “Everything Mistress Coyle requires is being delivered to her as we speak.”

I set the coffee down on a little table next to my chair. We’re in a huge room, bigger than any place indoors I’ve ever seen except for the launch hangars of my ship. Too large for just a pair of comfortable chairs and a wooden table. The only light shines down through a round window of coloured glass showing this world and its two moons.

Everything else is in shadow.

“How are you finding her?” the Mayor asks. “Mistress Coyle.”

The weight on my shoulders, the weight of Maddy being gone, the weight of Todd still out there, sits so heavily I’d forgotten for a minute he was even there. “What do you mean?”

He shrugs a little. “How is she to work with? How is she as a teacher?”

I swallow. “She’s the best healer in Haven.”

“And now the best healer in New Prentisstown,” he corrects. “People tell me she used to be quite powerful around here. A force to be reckoned with.”

I bite my lip and look back at the carpet. “She couldn’t save Maddy.”

“Well, let’s forgive her for that, shall we?” His voice is low, soft, almost kind. “Nobody’s perfect.”

He sets down his cup. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he says again. “And I’m sorry it has taken this long for us to speak again. There has been much work to do. I look to stop the suffering on this planet, which is why your friend’s death grieves me so. That’s been my whole mission. The war is over, Viola, it truly is. Now is the time for healing.”

I don’t say anything to that.

“But your mistress doesn’t see it that way, does she?” he asks. “She sees me as the enemy.”

In the early hours of this morning, as we dressed Maddy in her white burial cloths, she said, If he wants a war, he’s got a war. We haven’t even started fighting.

But then when I was summoned here, she said to tell him no such thing, to ask only about the funeral.