Bedtime Story (62 page)

As David was trying to process the words, the magus took a step forward.

“Disloyalty? The Queen told you to kill the boy?”

“I swore,” the captain said, trying to pull himself farther up against the rock. “The boy can never return. I swore. Moment of weakness.”

“Mercy,” David said, correcting him.

“Mercy is weakness,” the captain said, before his head fell forward again.

David and the magus waited, but this time he didn’t move. The only sound was his ragged breath.

“Even after trying to purge the tinctures, he’ll sleep for hours,” the magus said, after waiting a few moments. “Enough for us to get safely downriver.”

“With the Stone,” David said, stepping closer to the captain. He kicked the sword off the captain’s lap. “If the Queen wants the Stone badly enough to kill for it,” he said, leaning over the captain. “Then it’s probably best we don’t just give it to her.”

Where did that come from?
Matt asked, but David ignored him.

“A wise course of action,” the magus said.

“He probably kept it close,” David said, reaching into the open front of the captain’s tunic.

As his fingers touched the softness of the leather sack, the captain jerked and his fingers closed tightly around David’s wrist, pulling him off balance with a surprising strength.

“Not yours, boy,” he muttered.

David was close enough to feel the man’s fetid, sweet breath on his face.

David pulled his hand away. At first, the captain held fast, but his grip released with David’s second tug, and he pulled the small leather sack away from the captain. He stepped out of reach, extending his knife.

“I have more right to this than you do.”

The captain’s eyes turned up until all David could see were whites. He didn’t move again, though they waited several minutes, smoke from the dying fire drifting around them.

“He will hunt you down,” the magus said, finally. “Captain Bream is not a man to forget an enemy. Or to forgive.”

David remembered the Berok bodies in the dirt, the metallic smell of blood in the air.

He’s right
, Matt said.

“Nobody would have to know,” the magus said simply.

David looked down at the unconscious man, slumped against the rock. “I would know,” he said, slipping the knife into the sheath and tucking the Stone into his tunic. It felt warm against his skin.

Despite the blue sky and the bright sun there was a chill to the air on the beach and a breeze coming off the water. We were already too far from the hotel for me to go back for my jacket.

“Are you sure?” Jacqui asked again, as I rubbed my hands on my upper arms, which were crossed over my chest.

I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

Truth is, I was better than fine.

We were just strolling down the shore, moving slowly for David, well away from the crowds, probably miles from the hotel.

But it was the fact that it was the three of us, just walking, that made the day feel so special.

The day hadn’t started out well.

David had had another rough night—three seizures after I had finished the book. His worst night since he had come out of the hospital. Jacqui handled the first two with the cool control I had come to expect from her.

With the third seizure, I was in motion before I even realized that I was awake, before Jacqui had turned the light on. Suddenly I was down on the floor where we had made a bed for David. He was strong, and I whispered soothing words to him as his body surged and snapped with a mechanical, electrical force, coiling and uncoiling.

I noticed Jacqui looking down at me, her face pale from sleep. “Go back to sleep,” I whispered. “I’ve got him.”

She looked at me for a long moment, then lowered her head back to the pillow, still facing us, her eyes watching, then slowly closing.

As he calmed, I took him into my arms, rocking gently back and forth, murmuring to him, my voice pitched low and soft. I kept thinking,
If we make it through this … if we make it through this …

I waited until his breathing had slowed before I lowered him back to the pillow, untangling his legs from the covers and smoothing them over him.

Standing up slowly, I paced in place to burn off the pins and needles in my legs. According to the digital clock on the bedside table, it was 5:47. I had slept in.

I turned off the bedside lamp. Jacqui moaned and shifted in her sleep. In the sudden darkness, the patio door was a rectangle of pale blue-grey, shrouded by the curtains. I settled into the easy chair, pulling my jacket off the back of the desk chair and draping it over myself.

There I sat in the slow-dissolving dark, listening to my family sleep.

When I woke with a start, momentarily not sure of where I was, the clock on the bedside table read 10:17. Jacqui was smiling at me, her eyes dark and shining in the soft light, still nestled into the pillow.

“You never used to hear him at night,” she said. “He’d be crying and you’d sleep right through it.”

“You were nursing,” I said. “I didn’t really feel equipped.” It felt like nostalgia, not like she was accusing me of anything.

She smiled. “I’d be worrying about him waking the neighbours and you’d be there, snoring away.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Not that long.” She shifted under the covers. “You’re not writing,” she said, matter-of-factly.

I shook my head. “No. It just doesn’t seem that important right now.”

Her response surprised me. “That’s too bad.”

I was speechless.

“I hope that’s not a permanent change,” she said. “That would … that would be a shame.”

We were slow to get moving. I made a pot of coffee while Jacqui showered and brought in the copy of that morning’s
Oregonian
from outside our door, laying it face up on the desk so she would see it when she came out of the bathroom. Jacqui, who normally avoided the
newspaper when we were at home, loved to read the local paper when we were travelling.

I changed into fresh clothes and ran a comb through my hair. I figured I’d have a chance to shower sometime before my meeting with Cat.

Jacqui stopped me at the door as we were heading out for breakfast—David was already standing out in the hall. “Are you sure you don’t want your jacket?”

I glanced back into the room, thinking about the way the sun had felt on my shoulders as I smoked on the balcony. “No, I’ll be fine.”

After having breakfast at the café where I would be meeting Cat later, we started walking up the boardwalk. It wasn’t quite as excessive as Coney Island or Venice Beach, but it had some of the same carnival feel to it. Even on a supposedly quiet weekend in early June the boardwalk was packed with people, the air heavy with the smell of hot dogs and cotton candy.

We took it slow, content to drift along, Jacqui and me holding David’s hands between us, pointing things out as we passed. The tide was coming in, and a cool breeze skated along its surface, riffling the sand, bringing up gooseflesh on my arms.

The crowds thinned out as the boardwalk became a sidewalk along the upper edge of the beach. We turned onto the beach, continuing our slow amble in the fine sand.

David had always been impossible to contain whenever we went to a beach, racing to the water’s edge to play games with the incoming waves, dropping to the sand to examine castles left behind, relics from children earlier in the day, or to start building his own, or just exploring every nook and cranny, every shell and piece of seaweed.

To see him there, in that bright afternoon light, walking an unflagging straight line, his footprints perfectly uniform and regular behind him, cut through me like the wind.

Jacqui was obviously feeling the same way.

I tried to look at her, but she had turned, perhaps deliberately, to gaze out at the water, her hair playing softly around her face. I wanted to freeze the moment, of her looking away, unreadable. It touched me with a sadness I did not fully understand.

It all came down to this, today. There was nothing left to read, no more forestalling the inevitable. Whatever was going to happen would happen soon. How would David fare tonight, now that the book was done? I thought of Matthew Corvin, and the lines of care on Carol’s face. Was that the future? Or would Cat Took be able to help?

We walked up the beach in silence, our steps slow, falling a little behind our beautiful boy, watching him in the sun. Jacqui’s fingers slid between mine.

Somehow, the hours slipped away.

“Shit,” I muttered as I glanced at my watch. It was already 3:37.

“Late?” Jacqui asked.

“A little,” I said, starting to panic. “I have to—”

She smiled. “You go,” she said. “We’ll take our time back.”

I wasn’t sure if I’d even be able to make it back to the restaurant in twenty minutes, never mind get the shower I had been planning, or take some time to collect my thoughts and plan my strategy. “I’ll meet you at the hotel?”

“That sounds good,” she said. Her smile grew strained. “Bring good news.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll see you later, sport,” I called up the beach after David.

He was still walking.

“Not much longer now,” the magus whispered, his voice barely audible over the creaking of the oars and the waves buffeting the side of the boat.

David was lying as flat as he could against the hull, covered by the blanket that the captain had left him, and by the magus’s cloak. He had almost laughed, about an hour before, to see the old man in just his grey tunic and trousers. The magus had seemed practically naked, tiny and grey. Like a mouse.

They had been rowing two full days, through the bright of the sun and the dark of the waning moon, taking turns at the oars. The distance had passed more quickly than the magus had anticipated, and despite
his exhaustion David felt his spirits lifting as the landscape took on the familiar, lush green of the coast. He almost wept when he sniffed a trace of the sea on the breeze.

“None will stop or question a magus,” Loren had explained at their last landfall, home now so close that David could almost taste it.

He wondered where this familiarity, this desperate yearning for a place he had never seen, was coming from.

It’s Dafyd
, Matt guessed.
You’re in his body—they’re his memories. His emotions
.

That makes sense
, he thought.
But then—

“…  but a boy who was last seen riding off with a company of the King’s Men will draw undue …” the magus was saying.

David shook his head, trying to catch up. “Are we going to the abbey?” he asked, hoping that the magus hadn’t already discussed this.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I’m concerned, though, that the Queen might have observers in place, in the event that her plan went somehow awry.”

“Because that’s where you would most likely go, if you had the Stone.”

“Which means it’s the one place we cannot go,” the magus concluded. He was silent, thoughtful.

“We could go to the tavern,” David said quietly, tentatively making the suggestion as an image of Arian flashed through his mind, a sudden yearning tugging at his heart. David tried to shake off the sudden onrush of emotion.

Dafyd is coming home
, Matt said quietly.
Maybe he’s getting stronger. His thoughts coming more to the surface
.

David tried not to think about the possibility, about what it might mean when Dafyd was home. Would his memories, his feelings, his life, crowd out David’s?

“Isn’t that where Captain Bream found you?” the magus asked.

David nodded. “So the Queen will think we would never go back there.”

“Nonetheless, they are probably watching it.”

“There are ways in where we won’t be seen,” he said, surprised at the words coming from his lips.

The magus thought for a moment. “It’s likely no more dangerous than any other place we might hide ourselves. And we can send someone to the abbey to alert them of our return.”

David felt like cheering.

They had agreed that David would hide while they were still on the water, and lead once they reached the streets of Colcott.