Alcatraz (80 page)

It should be stressed that Bastille and I are certainly
not
directly related.
At least, we weren’t at that point.

‘All right,’ I said.
‘But I don’t know anything about running a war.’

‘Fortunately, I do.
Troop morale and logistics were part of my training as a princess, and I have practice with battlefield tactics as part of my Crystin training.’

‘Great!
You can take over for me, then!’

She shook her head, eyes going wide, face getting a little white.
‘Don’t be stoopid.’

‘Er, why not?’

As I think about it, that was kind of a stoopid answer, which was fitting, if you think about it.
Me, I try not to think about anything.
Oooh .
.
.
shiny .
.
.

Bastille grimaced.
‘You need to ask?
I’m not what this people need.
I’m not inspiring.
You
are.
You’re a king.
I’m a general.
They’re different, different sets of skills.’
She nodded toward the Mokian soldiers standing atop the walls.
A lot of them didn’t look much like warriors.
Oh, they had war paint and spears.
But not many of them were muscular.

‘Mokia is a kingdom of scholars and craftspeople, Alcatraz,’ Bastille said softly.
‘Why do you think the Librarians attacked here first?
They’ve been besieged for months now, their country at war for years.
Many of the trained soldiers have already been knocked unconscious or killed.
Do you have any idea what the loss of both the king and queen could mean?
They’re demoralized, wounded, and beaten down.’

She lifted her finger, tapping me in the chest again.
‘They need someone to lead them.
They need someone
spectacular
, someone miraculous.
Someone who can keep them fighting for just a little longer, until your grandfather arrives with help.’

‘And, uh, that someone is me?’

‘Yes,’ she said, almost grudgingly.
‘I told you a few months back that I believed in you.
Well, I do.
I believe in what you can be when you’re confident.
Not when you’re
arrogant
, but when you’re confident.
When you decide to do something, really decide, you do amazing things.
I wish you could be that person a little more often.’

I scratched my head.
‘I think that person is a lie, Bastille.
I’m not confident.
I just get lucky.’

‘You get lucky a lot.
Particularly when we really need it.
You saved your father, you got the Sands back, you rescued the kings.’

‘That last one was mostly you,’ I said with a grimace.

‘The idea that got us free was yours,’ she said, ‘and you spotted Archedis.’
I shrugged.

‘It seems that when I get desperate, my mind works better.
I’m not sure if that’s something to be proud of or not.’

‘Well, it’s what we’ve got,’ Bastille said, ‘so we’re going to work with it.
I’ll organize the troops.
You
be confident, give the Mokians the sense that someone’s in charge.
Together, we’ll hold this city together until the Old Smedry gets here.’

‘He’ll probably be late, you know.’

‘Oh, I’m certain he will be,’ Bastille said.
‘The question isn’t, “Will he be late?”
The question is, “How late is he going to be?”’

I nodded grimly.

‘You ready to be a king?’
she asked.

I hesitated just briefly.
‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ she said, spinning as screams erupted from the center of the city.
‘Because I think another group of Librarians just tunneled in.’

070706

D
on’t yawn.

I shouldn’t have agreed to be king.
If you’ve been following these books, you know that my early experiences set me up to fail.
Being a celebrity made me think that I was much more important than I really was, and success led me to take more responsibility than I should have.
That all meant I fell really far when I did fall.

You yawning yet?
No?
Good.
You most definitely
don’t
want to part your lips, suck in that sweet air, and feel the relaxing release as you stretch and let your mouth open wide.
You itch to do it; you’ve been reading for a while now, and you’re getting a little groggy.
But don’t yawn.
Really, don’t do it.

Accepting the crown of Mokia, if even for a short time, was the culminating peak of my spiral to fame.
The events of this siege became infamous.
In fact, I didn’t realize what I’d done until long afterward.
(After leaving Mokia, after all, I returned to the Hushlands.)

Some Hushlanders think we yawn to increase oxygen to the brain, but researchers have recently discounted this theory.
In this case, they’re right.
In the Free Kingdoms, it’s been known for a long time that yawns frighten away bloogynaughts.
You know what bloogynaughts are, don’t you?
They’re those things that sneak up on people while they’re reading books, lurking just behind them, watching them, edging closer and closer until they’re right there.
Behind you.
Breathing on your neck.
About ready to grab you.
A yawn would scare it away.
If only you could yawn .
.
.

Why did I agree to be king?
I should have said no.
And yet I didn’t.
I let them make me king.
I let Bastille persuade me.
I let them set me up high.

Why?
Well, perhaps for the same reason that – when reading the paragraphs above – you had a powerful urge to yawn or even glance over your shoulder.
Talk about something long enough, and people will start thinking about it.
It’s kind of like a twisted, funky kind of mind control.
Bastille was a princess, my family had once held thrones, and I was related distantly to pretty much every monarch in the Free Kingdoms.
I guess I wanted to feel what it was like to be king.

(In the end, I discovered that being a king feels pretty much like being a regular person, only people shoot at you more often.)

Bastille and I charged through the city, racing toward the screams.
Mokian men and women threw down the things they had been working on and rallied to the breach.
Bastille slipped her sunglasses on, and I nodded to her.
She took off at a much faster speed, leaving me behind as she used her enhanced Crystin speed to dart toward the disturbance.

I ran much more slowly, but I made a fair showing of it.
The last half a year or so had been very good for my constitution.
If you want to practice for a footrace, I’d highly recommend the Alcatraz Smedry training regimen.
It involves being chased by Librarians, half-metal monsters, evil apparitions, sentient romance novels, fallen Knights of Crystallia, and the occasional evil chicken named Moe.
Our success rate in training footrace winners is 95 percent.
Unfortunately, our survival rate is about 5 percent, so it kind of balances everything out.

A group of Mokians filled in around me, running at my same speed.
At first I thought they were joining me to rush to the scene of the disturbance.
However, they were keeping too close.
I realized with shock that they were an honor guard, of the type that run around protecting kings and saying, ‘Who dares disturb the king?’
and stuff like that.
That made me feel important.

Even running as fast as we could, we arrived too late to help with the fighting.
The Librarians had come out of a large, gopher-hole-like pit in the ground of a large green field near what I’d later learn was Mokian Royal University.
Some bodies lay on the ground, and it made my stomach twist to see how many were Mokian.
At least they weren’t dead.
Of course, being in a coma was even worse, in many ways.

You may be shocked at how ‘civilized’ war is out in the Free Kingdoms.
However, realize that they do what they do for a reason.
If the Librarians could capture Tuki Tuki, they could get the antidote for the sleeping sickness – and they’d get nearly their entire army back to keep fighting, moving inward, to conquer more of the Free Kingdoms.
It made sense for the Librarians to encourage the use of the coma-guns and coma-spears.

This latest group of Librarian infiltrators, strangely, looked like they’d surrendered soon after climbing out of the hole.
Why hadn’t they fought longer?
They stood with their hands up, surrounded by ragged Mokian fighters.
Bastille watched nearby, arms folded, looking dissatisfied.
Likely because she hadn’t gotten a chance to stab anyone.

The Mokians should have been happy to have won the skirmish so easily.
But most of them just looked exhausted.
The field was lit by torches on long poles rammed into the ground, and boulders still struck the dome protecting the city.
Each one seemed to crack it a little bit more.

‘We can’t hold out!’
said one of the spear-wielding Mokians.
‘Look!
They know they can surrender if we rally to fight them.
There are so many of them that they’re content to lose an entire team to knock out a few of us.’

‘It’s probably a distraction,’ another soldier said.
‘They’re digging in other places too.’

‘They’re going to overrun us.’

‘We’ve lost.’

‘We—’

‘Stop!’
Bastille bellowed, waving her arms and getting their attention.
‘
Stop being stupid!
’ She folded her arms, as if that was all she intended to say.
Which, knowing Bastille, might just be the case.

‘We
haven’t
lost,’ I said, stepping forward.
‘We can win.
We just need to hold out a little longer.’

‘We can’t!’
one of the soldiers said.
‘There are only a few thousand of us left.
There aren’t enough people to patrol the streets to look for tunnelers.
Most of us have been awake for three days straight!’

‘And so you’d give up?’
I demanded, looking at them.
‘That’s how they win.
By making us give up.
I’ve
lived
in Librarian lands.
They don’t win because they conquer, they win because they make people stop caring, stop wondering.
They’ll tire you out, then feed you lies until you start repeating them, if only because it’s too hard to keep arguing.’

I looked around at the men and women in their islander wraps, holding spears that burned.
They seemed ashamed.
The field was shockingly quiet; even the captive Librarians didn’t say anything.

‘This is how they win,’ I repeated.
‘They
need
you to give in.
They
have
to make you stop fighting.
They don’t rule the Hushlands with chains, fire, and oppression.
They rule it with comfort, leisure, and easy lies.
It’s easy to accept the normal and avoid thinking about the difficult and the strange.
Life can be so much simpler if you stop dreaming.

‘But
that
is how we defeat them.
They can never win, so long as we refuse to believe in their lies.
Even if they take Tuki Tuki, even if Mokia falls, even if
all
of the Free Kingdoms become theirs.
They will never win so long as we refuse to believe.
Don’t give up, and you will not lose.
I promise you that.’

Around me, the Mokians began to nod.
Several even smiled, holding their spears more certainly.

‘But what will we do?’
a female warrior asked.
‘How will we survive?’

‘My grandfather is coming,’ I said.
‘We just have to last a little longer.
I’ll talk to my counselors .
.
.’
I hesitated.
‘Er, I have counselors, don’t I?’

‘We’re right here, Your Majesty,’ a voice said.
I glanced backward, to where three Mokians stood in official-looking wraps, wearing small, colorful caps on their heads.
I vaguely remembered them joining me as I ran for the disturbance.

‘Great,’ I said.
‘I’ll talk to my counselors, and we’ll figure something out.
You soldiers, your job is to keep
hoping
.
Don’t give up.
Don’t let them win your hearts, even if they look like they’ll win the city.’

Looking back on that speech, it seems incredibly stoopidalicious.
Their kingdom was about to fall, their king and queen were casualties, and what was I telling them?
‘Just keep believing!’
Sounds like the title of a cheesy eighties rock ballad.

People believe in themselves all the time yet still fail.
Wanting something badly enough doesn’t really change anything, otherwise I’d be a Popsicle.
(Read book one.)

Yet in this case, my advice was oddly accurate.
The Librarians have always preferred to rule in secret.
Biblioden himself taught that to enslave someone, you were best off making them comfortable.
Mokia couldn’t fall, not completely, unless the Mokians allowed themselves to be turned into Hushlanders.

Sounds impossible, right?
Who would
let
themselves be turned into Hushlanders?
Well, you didn’t see how tired the Mokians were, how much the extended war had beaten them down.
It occurred to me at that moment that maybe the Librarians could have won months ago.
They’d kept on fighting precisely because they knew they didn’t just have to win, they had to
overwhelm
.
Kind of how you might keep playing a video game against your little brother, even though you know you can win at any moment, because you’re planning the biggest, most awesome, most
crushing
combo move ever.

Except the Librarians were doing it with the hearts of the people of Mokia.
And that made me angry.

The soldiers rushed off to get back to their other duties.
I eyed the Librarian captives.
Had they surrendered too easily?
The Mokians didn’t seem terribly threatening.
Perhaps Bastille had surprised them; facing a bunch of soldiers who hadn’t slept in days was one thing, but a fully trained Crystin was another.

I turned to my advisers.
There were three of them, two men and a woman.
The first man was tall and thin, with a long neck and spindly arms.
He was kind of shaped like a soda bottle.
The woman next to him was shorter and had a compact look to her, arms pulled in at her sides, hunched over, chin nestled down level with her shoulders.
She looked kind of like a can of soda.
The final man was large, wide, and thick-bodied.
He was husky, with a small head, and kind of looked like .
.
.
well, a large two-liter soda bottle.

‘Someone get me something to drink,’ I barked to my honor guard, then walked up to the soda-pop triplets.
‘You’re my advisers?’

‘We are,’ said soda-can woman.
‘I’m Mink, the large fellow to my right is Dink, and the man to my left is Wink.’

‘Mink, Dink, and Wink,’ I said, voice flat.
(Like soda that’s been left out too long.)

‘No relation,’ Dink added.

‘Thanks for clearing that up,’ I said.
‘All right, advise me.’

‘We should give up,’ Dink said.

‘Good speech,’ Mink added, ‘but it sounded too much like a rock ballad.’

‘That jacket looks good on you,’ Wink said.

‘Er, thank you, Wink,’ I said, confused.

‘Oh, Wink got caught in an unfortunate Librarian disharmony grenade,’ Mink added.
‘Messed up his brain a little bit.
He gives great advice .
.
.
it’s just not always on the topic you want at the moment.’