Bedtime Story (38 page)

David had a moment of crisis as they broke camp. One of the men tacked his horse and packed his saddlebags, leaving David to stand next to the mount, with no idea what to do.

I’ve never ridden a horse
, he whispered in his mind.

What?
Matt responded, sounding shocked.

Well, have you?

The other boy was silent for a moment, and David reached out, tentatively touching the saddle.

Matt
, he called out, increasingly desperate.
What should I—?

Just do it
.

But I can’t
.

Dafyd can, so you can. Just … don’t think about it
.

David wondered for a moment, as he put his foot into the stirrup, if Matt was as confident as he sounded. But then he was in the saddle, his other foot finding the other stirrup, the reins comfortable in his hands.

See
, Matt said.

David thought he could hear relief in his voice, though.

They rode out of the dry, rolling hills and into rougher terrain of valleys and sharp rises, the forests growing thicker on either side of the narrow roadway. The forests were different here from those around Colcott Town, the trees taller, the air lacking the sweet coolness of the sea air he was so familiar with. The trees seemed to swallow up the sound of their passing and a stillness settled over them, despite their speed. Captain Bream drove them hard.

When they finally stopped to make camp, David all but fell off his mount, stumbling onto the soft ground just off the road and falling onto his back. His vision swam with flashes of light.

“David?” the magus asked, looming over him.

“Just trying to catch my breath.”

The old man half smiled. “That was a hard ride.”

David glanced over at Captain Bream, who was methodically unpacking his saddlebags. “It doesn’t seem to have affected him too much.”

The magus shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t, would it? He didn’t nearly drown yesterday.” He held out his hand, and David allowed himself to be helped to his feet.

The river was just a short distance through the forest, and David knelt beside it and drank from the clear, cold water before filling several skins to bring with him.

When he arrived back at camp, one of the soldiers from the first company was talking to Captain Bream, their voices hushed, their faces grim.

The magus stepped toward them. “There’s news?” he asked, ignoring the angry look Bream shot him.

The young guardsman was out of breath. He had obviously just ridden in. “There is, sir. We’ve found a Berok encampment just ahead. We almost rode right into them.”

I waited until I had walked over to the Metropolitan Museum of Art before I dialled my cell. I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Tony Markus as possible, and I wanted to be out in the sun, in the warmth, anything to vanquish the chill I was feeling.

“Hello?”

“Sarah?” It was hard to tell over the shaky connection.

“Yes?” Obviously the difficulty went both ways.

“It’s Chris. Chris Knox.”

“Do you have it? Already?”

“No, no. The library isn’t open until Monday. I do have a question, though.”

“All right.” Her voice suddenly guarded.

“I just had lunch with someone,” I began, then decided to skip the preamble. “What would happen if someone published
To the Four Directions?”

She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Oh, Chris.”

“That bad.”

“I think so,” she said. “Mom’s here, though—let me ask her.” She put her hand over the receiver, and for almost a minute I listened to a muffled thud and hiss, and then she was back on the line. “Actually, Mom says it probably wouldn’t be a problem—”

“Oh, thank—”

“—so long as they didn’t use the cover. That’s where the first stages of the spell are set, so …”

The cold, sick feeling that I had been trying to walk off came back in a rush, and I almost doubled over. “And if they did use the cover? Would the spell still work, even though it’s being mass-produced?”

“I don’t see why not,” she said. “All the recipes in
The Joy of Cooking
work, right? Why are you asking, Chris?”

My silence seemed to say enough.

“Someone isn’t publishing it, are they? Chris? How did that—?”

“It’s a long story,” I said weakly.

“They can’t,” she said, with certainty. “It’s too dangerous. You can’t let them.”

“I won’t,” I said, my confidence undermined by the memory of the smile on Tony Markus’s face as he described the millions of Harry Potter readers, all eager for a new author to read.

 … a whole generation of children …

“Berok?” the captain snarled, stepping closer to the guardsman. “We should be out of their territory by now.”

“It looks like a patrol group,” the young guard said.

“Are they tracking?” the captain asked. “Are they searching for us?”

The guard shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. They were making an awful lot of noise for a scouting party, sir, as they were making camp. That’s how we noticed them.”

The captain nodded thoughtfully. “They don’t know we’re here,” he said.

The thought chilled David’s blood: the attack on the road, the way the arrows had seemed to come from nowhere. He could almost feel eyes upon him, even now.

“Where are they camped?”

“Close to the river, sir, a few miles ahead, where the floodplain starts to narrow into a gorge. They’re on the flats, pretty open, but they’ve got the river on one side and a rock wall on the other.”

“So there’s no way around them.”

“We could go up, sir. Ride back until we can take the higher ground, come around them on the rise. They’d never know we were there.”

“That’s almost a full day’s ride back,” the captain said, considering it.

David became aware of the magus shifting uneasily next to him.

The captain paced slightly, his jaw set, his eyes looking out at the darkening middle distance of the forest.

“Ride out,” he said, his voice firm. “Bring the third company forward. We’ll muster here.”

Tony Markus waited by the phone until 11 that night, giving the Canadian a fair chance to call. He was almost happy when the phone
didn’t ring. He had no reason to expect Chris Knox to get back in touch with him before he left New York and some opportunities needed to be seized before they disappeared altogether.

At 11:01 he picked up the phone. He had called the number so often he was able to dial it from memory. Martine answered after the second ring.

“Allo?” Her voice was still heavily accented, despite her having left the Ukraine more than five years ago.

“Martine, it’s Tony Markus calling.”

“Little Tony.” Her voice was warm and expansive, almost nurturing. It was that strange combination—earthy compassion and understanding wrapped in a six-foot-two, bleached blonde, voluptuous vixen—that had kept the customers at the strip club where she had first worked when she arrived in New York desirably off balance, and had earned her a dedicated clientele when she was working as a call girl.

Anthony Marcelli had fallen in love with Martine the first time he laid eyes on her. “Like a bolt from the blue,” he had told Tony. “I saw her and—boom—that was it.”

In his book, Marcelli’s journey from mob enforcer to government witness was all about making one right choice after a lifetime of bad, the sort of story that sells a lot of books. The truth was a little more complicated: his wife, Angela, had ordered him to choose between her and his “Russian whore.” He had chosen Martine, had taken her into witness protection with him, and there they had been living, happily ever after.

“Everything is okay, yes?” Martine continued.

“Everything is good. And you? How are you?”

“I think I’m getting fat,” she said. “Tony says no, but he likes his women a little fat, so he can’t be trusted.”

“I think you probably look as good as you ever did,” Tony said, the words feeling thick and ungainly as they fell off his tongue.

“You men and your lies.” He could tell that she was smiling.

“Is Big Tony around?”

“Where else would he be?” she asked. “All day he’s around. Never leaves house. Never goes out. People always coming to him and he
sitting around the house all day. You think I’m getting fat, you should see him.”

“Can I speak to him, please?”

“Ya. I get him.” She dropped the phone on the counter with a sharp rattle and click.

“Little Tony.” His voice boomed on the line a few moments later. “I thought I told you never to call me here.”

They both laughed at the traditional greeting.

“How’s it going, Uncle Tony?”

“It’s fuckin’ Utah,” he said, not even pausing for a breath. “It’s a hundred and fifty degrees, I’m surrounded by Mormons and deserts, how the hell do you think I’m doing?” His uncle hung up the phone without another word.

Tony Markus paced around his cramped apartment, waiting for his cell phone to ring. It wouldn’t happen right away—Tony would need to get to his office, pick one of the cell phones out of his desk drawer, double-check that it was fresh, punch in the number from the call display of his legit line, and then call.

It was convoluted, but it wouldn’t do for it to be discovered that a star government witness, a man who had claimed redemption and illumination in the pages of a bestselling book, was still doing business via anonymous cell phones with the boys back east from his Utah rancher, bought and sponsored by the U.S. government.

The cell phone—which Tony had bought with cash at the scuzzy bodega two subway stops away that afternoon—rang. The sound startled him and he pressed the Answer button.

“I’m starting to feel like Marlon Brando,” Big Tony said, without preamble.

“Martine said you were getting fat,” Tony said, in what he hoped was a sufficiently jocular manner.

Big Tony choked out a laugh. “I meant the way people are always asking for favours. So why the call? You want to write another book and put my name on it?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Too bad.”

“I need something, Uncle Tony.” He could picture the novel in his hands, remembered the weight of it, the texture of the cover. He remembered how reluctant that journalist had been to even let him hold it.

Tony Markus—born Anthony Marcelli, named after his father’s grandfather, just as his uncle Tony had been—had far too much riding on this to let some hick journalist, some fucking Canadian, get in his way.

“I need a book.”