"She's drawn blood!" a woman on the front row yelled. "The governor will have the Scourge now!"
"I won't!" the governor yelled. "I don't!"
"You said it yourself," a man cried. "If you are around people with the Scourge, you will get it too!"
I stepped forward. "We ask you to follow the law--the governor's own law. We ask your permission to bring the governor back with us to the Scourge Colony, there to live out what little remains of her short, pathetic life."
"No!" the governor yelled.
But the crowd was no longer on her side. She had made them afraid of the Scourge, and if there was any chance she was sick, they were afraid of her too.
"Any wardens who try to stop us must also come to the Colony," Weevil yelled. "Protect your families from them!"
Led by those who had come with us from the ship, there were scuffles on the ground, bringing into control the few wardens that our men had not already taken down.
The crowd parted while Della, Weevil, and I took the governor's arms and began pulling her off the platform. She was trying to fight us off, but the three of us were managing her just fine.
"Take the doctor too!" a man from the crowd yelled. "If the governor has the Scourge, the doctor might also have it!"
"No, wait!" Hoping to avoid the crowd, Doctor Cresh ran onto the platform with us, his eyes darting about in full panic. "Governor Felling does not have the Scourge. I do not have the Scourge. Neither of us will ever get the Scourge."
"Are you sure?" I asked. "You were in the examination room and had to test me by cutting into my arm. You did this to me." I showed the audience where it had happened, with the wound now opened again. The crowd gasped in response.
"Don't say anything," the governor said, still struggling against Weevil and Della's hold on her. "We can fix this later, when we're alone."
"You won't be alone ever again," I said to Doctor Cresh. "We'll escort you all the way to the Colony. We want Keldan to be safe from you."
"The governor has medicine--" Cresh's uncertain tone wouldn't earn him much sympathy.
"Is it the same medicine we received at the Colony?" Della asked. "Or are there different medicines for the special people, like you?"
The crowd grumbled at that, becoming increasingly angrier. Doctor Cresh was forced to admit, "We know a way to heal the Scourge, to completely cure a person."
"So there is a cure?" I asked.
"Yes," Doctor Cresh said. "I mean, no. I mean, for me, and the governor ..." He was giving up. He was breaking.
"It's not enough to cure the disease," Weevil said. "We don't want anyone to get it in the first place. How can you guarantee that the governor did not just get the disease from us?"
"Don't say anything else," the governor warned.
"They'll take us both to the Colony if I don't say something!" Doctor Cresh shook his head, and then he faced the people. "Three hundred years ago, the Scourge passed through Keldan. It was terrible and real. Then almost two years ago, the governor got word that Dulan was planning an invasion of our country. What could she do? We had no defenses, no money to build an army. Our defeat was certain."
"Stop talking, you fool!" the governor screeched. Then she brought her own appeal to the people. "I did it for you, for all of us. Dulan would've destroyed us, don't you understand? So to buy us some time, I told them we'd had an outbreak of the Scourge."
"I started researching ways to create symptoms similar to what the Scourge had once been," Doctor Cresh said. "There is a plant called spindlewill that, when ingested, will do this, but it's hard to find in Keldan. We were running out."
"We sent an exploration north," the governor said. "We hoped to discover more spindlewill, or something like it."
Beside me, Weevil lowered his eyes, no doubt thinking of his father again.
Silence fell across the audience, as if they couldn't quite absorb the shock of what they were hearing. Governor Felling seemed to take it as a sign that she had won. She glared back at me, then stepped forward, looking for her wardens, who by now were nowhere to be seen.
Then a woman from the audience yelled, "People have died from what you've done!" The crowd grumbled in response, sending loud jeers forward.
"But fewer people than if we had a war!" the governor countered. "Don't you see? I had to sacrifice a few to save everyone else."
That plea fell on deaf ears. Sacrificing a few had quickly turned into sacrificing far too many of our people.