Bedtime Story (71 page)

“You?” the Queen snarled, rounding on him. “What did you do?”

The magus spoke. “The King did nothing, My Lady,” he said.

She stormed toward the bed. “Then why doesn’t it work?” she shrieked.

“Because the Stone is not yours,” the magus said, no satisfaction in his voice. “It belongs to the rightful rulers of Colcott.”

“But I am the Queen,” she thundered.

“And the King is still the King,” the magus said.

“Then let the King be no more,” she cried, reaching for the sword in the captain’s belt. With a single motion she drew it, turned, and
drove the point deep into the King’s chest. The wound gushed blood onto the bedsheets, the King’s head snapping forward with the ferocity of the blow.

“My Lady—” the captain gasped, but he was interrupted by a voice from the doorway.

“Dafyd!”

David turned. His mother. Dafyd’s mother. Her hands pressed to her mouth, face twisted in anguish.

Mareigh rushed into the room, not toward her son but to the side of the man dying in the bed, the King of Colcott, the only man she had ever loved. “Oh gods,” she cried, leaning over him. “Oh gods, Dafyd, what did they—?”

“Who are you?” the Queen commanded, heaving the sword from the King’s chest.

Mareigh turned at the sound of her voice, her face stained with tears, her eyes flickering between the Queen’s cold gaze and the bloodstained sword in her hand.

“You?” she whispered.

“Me,” the Queen said, as she thrust the sword into Mareigh’s chest.

“Mother!” Dafyd cried out.

David felt the full force of the other boy’s will spill free of whatever had been holding it back, the sheer power of his thoughts, his emotions, his memories and his anguish, pushing David out, forcing him loose of the body he had begun to feel was his own.

With a sudden shock, David jerked, just once, his body snapping against the seat belt.

The world came dizzyingly back into focus. It was like waking from a dream.

With a cautious, shaking hand, he reached for the buckle, pressing the button to release himself.

As he opened the van door, he heard a sound, faint, like a firecracker, borne on the sea wind.

“Mom!” He ran toward the dark house.

My heart surged in my throat as Jacqui fell to the floor. I called her name, and started to step forward. The room lurched around me.

“Don’t move,” Cora Took said, swinging the barrel of the gun back toward me.

The stone floor seemed to move under my feet. My vision swam, and I stumbled, putting my hand down on the bed to keep from falling.

“Jacqui,” I whispered.

“Mother!” Dafyd cried out, running to the bed and falling to his knees.

Mareigh had fallen on her side across the foot of the bed. He turned her gently onto her back. Her eyes were open, her face a mask of pain, her hands clutching the wound as it billowed blood from just below her ribs.

“Leave her!” the Queen commanded.

“Dafyd,” she whispered.

Dafyd looked at her, his eyes blurring, his stomach lurching as the room seemed to shift and move around him.

The door swung open at David’s touch, and as he stepped into Lazarus Took’s house his feet felt unsteady under him. He had difficulty walking. Not surprising, considering how long it had been since he had used this body, since he had moved his own legs, walked with his own feet.

He turned to the left, the way he knew, somehow, that his mother had gone.

“Mom,” he said breathlessly, moving through the shadowed rooms.

“Your pretty wife?” Cora asked, her tone mawkish for a moment before the gun wavered in her hand. Her eyes darted around the room, and she stumbled, as if trying to keep her footing on a moving boat.

It was all I could do to hold onto the bed and not fall. I tried to focus on the gun, watching as it lurched and bobbed in her hand, but I couldn’t. Cat seemed to shift in and out of focus, not blurring, exactly,
but fading somehow, the barrel stretching and bending, then snapping back into sharp clarity.

The Queen glanced around the King’s bedchamber, and Dafyd followed her eyes. The stone walls seemed to curve, bulging outward, then twisting the other way, pulling away from the room. The floor followed the motion of the walls, sometimes stretching, sometimes rippling.

She turned sharply toward the magus. “Stop this,” she sneered, letting the point of the sword sag.

The magus, however, looked as confused as she did.

She dropped the sword to the floor with a clatter, raising her right hand toward the old man, the Sunstone still clutched in her left. “I command you,” she began, then stumbled as the floor moved under her.

As he started to climb the stairs on the far side of the kitchen, David realized that his legs weren’t the problem. The house seemed to be moving around him, the steps like Jell-O under his feet, shimmering and bouncing.

Matt
, he whispered urgently, inside his mind.
What is this? What’s going on?

He stopped halfway up the stairs. Matt didn’t answer, and there was no sense of him inside David anymore, no niggling presence in his thoughts.

He took the last stairs more slowly, trying to stay quiet. He tried to push down the fear he was feeling, tried to ignore the fact that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he was completely alone.

Cora looked at the desiccated body on the bed. “Lazarus,” she hissed. “What is happening?”

I glanced down at the old man, looking for the same answers. He didn’t have any. His eyes were filled with fear.

I was dizzy, the room seeming to spin, the walls seeming to breathe. I could hear my breath, taste bitterness in the back of my mouth.

I had to close my eyes against the nausea.

As the Queen stumbled, the captain stepped behind her, his body rocking with the motion of the room. He didn’t try to fight it, just rode the movement as he reached for his bloodied sword.

Dafyd flinched and pulled his mother close to him, his stomach pushing up toward his mouth as he watched the Queen’s hand, waiting for the crackle of power he knew was to come.

David would have known it was a writer’s study even if he hadn’t known the first thing about Lazarus Took. It looked like his father’s office, in a way, with a chair for reading and a desk and—

He had to blink, shake his head. For a moment, the room had seemed to shift somehow, the desk replaced by a flickering image—thrones. A tapestry behind them.

He blinked again and the study was the way it had been: a heavy wooden desk, an open door behind it, voices rising from inside. The air, though, the air seemed thick, gelatinous somehow, and moving through the room felt almost like swimming. He had to fight his way forward, his body seeming to pull and stretch with every motion.

He blinked—

I opened my eyes, hoping that the nausea had passed, then closed them again as quickly as I could. What I had seen, it couldn’t be real.

The Queen lowered her hand. “You lied,” she screamed at the magus. Her mouth seemed to stretch and pull, as if it were melting. “You told me it would work.”

The magus was pale, and unsteady on his feet, his hands extended to keep his balance. “No,” he said, his voice rough. “I said it would only work for the true steward, the rightful heir.”

The Queen whirled toward Dafyd. “You.”

—and when he opened his eyes again, David was in the throne room in Colcott, the two thrones on the dais a short distance away. He shifted his direction slightly to go around the dais—
blink

—desk, to get to the doorway—

blink

—the tapestry behind the thrones. He could hear voices. They were all familiar, but too distorted to make out what they were saying, like he was hearing an echo.

I struggled to rise to my feet.

Reality was coming apart at the seams. The house was shaking now, our every motion slow and distorted. I could barely see, images flickering past like a film caught in a projector, twisting and doubling over one another. Two beds, two old men, two women, each pair seeming to occupy the same space, and no space at all.

Cora lowered her gun. “What …?”

The room lurched again, and I lost my balance.

The Queen’s face seemed to melt from her bones. “You.” She pointed at him. “Her …”

Dafyd glanced toward the magus, who nodded slowly.

“That whore,” she spat.

Mareigh’s body jerked in Dafyd’s arms. There was a sound like a cough, or a sharp laugh. When he looked down at her, blood trickled from her lips.

“You knew all along,” the Queen accused Loren.

He nodded. “He was my oldest friend. My Lord. My King. When he summoned me …”

A look of dawning horror and understanding seemed to rise in the Queen’s face.

“He told me he was being poisoned. That the Queen was killing him, just slowly enough to gain control over the kingdom before he died. I did not want to believe him, but I made plans with him. And then the handmaiden was poisoned … Why did you kill the girl?”

The Queen looked scornfully at the magus. “I needed to get you out of the castle. My brother had men waiting on the road. What matters the life of a servant?”

As Dafyd glanced between the Queen and the magus, trying to
follow what was going on, the room shifted again. Everything flickered like torchlight.

“So you went to your books, your prophecies …” the Queen continued, lurching with the room.

The magus shook his head. “King Dafyd and I made up the prophecies about the chosen one, to allay your suspicions. There were no prophecies, no mystical signs. We knew where the heir was. We had known his entire life.”

A bubble of heat formed in Dafyd’s chest, building, until it seemed to burst, a sob racking him. The King … his father. He glanced up, toward the body on the bed, then down again at his mother’s face, bloody and slack.

“The only prophecy was that of the Stone. And as you see, the boy has more than proven himself. He is the true heir. The true steward of Colcott.”

A steely calm seemed to come over the Queen, a resolve that was terrifying in its simplicity. “Ah well,” she said. “Easy enough. Kill a king. Kill a prince. A small price to pay.”

Her eyes scanned the ground, searching for her dropped sword.

As she turned, Captain Bream brought the blade up, set the point level with the centre of her chest, his eyes focusing on her with a savage intensity. “No, My Lady.”

As I caught myself on the edge of the bed, Cora raised the gun again, held it unsteadily toward us. A flicker, and another woman seemed to be standing in her place.

“Make it stop,” she cried out, and I couldn’t tell who was speaking, and if she was talking to me or to the husk of her husband in the bed.

My head throbbed with a concussive force. I tried to breathe through it, and—

“Mom!” David cried out, pushing through the thick air as he crossed the study to where her body lay in the doorway. He fell to his knees beside her. He didn’t know if he should touch her, and all he could do
was watch as her chest shuddered, as blood bubbled at her lips. “Mom,” he whispered, his voice breaking—

“Mom.”

The word echoed through the King’s bedchamber like thunder. Dafyd and the Queen both looked to the doorway, where shadows shifted in and out of focus. It seemed like there was a fallen body, there one moment, gone the next, and a small figure bending over it.

David
. The voice in Dafyd’s head was a desperate shout, and only a moment later he realized that he had cried the name out loud.

I looked up at the sound of David’s name, a shout in a young man’s voice I didn’t recognize. A shadow at the end of the bed, human shaped, turned its head toward the doorway.

I glanced up, and my eyes met David’s. He was crouched over Jacqui’s body but staring into the room, his eyes seemingly locked on the shadowy figure that had spoken his name.

David’s eyes met Dafyd’s, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. Two lifetimes of memories seemed to swell inside his head, and he rose slowly to his feet, stepping through the doorway and—

—everything seemed to solidify. The throbbing in my head dissolved, and the room stopped moving, my stomach settling almost instantly.

I rose carefully to my feet, not yet trusting the stability of the floor. “David,” I called out, and as he looked up at me, Cora Took whirled toward him, levelling the gun, now solid and unwavering in her grip.

Then she caught sight of two figures who had been behind her, a woman in rich formal dress, and a strong-looking man in some sort of uniform, the tip of his sword almost touching the woman’s chest.

The hand holding the gun fell limply to her side.

“Reg?” she said.

As David stepped into the room, Dafyd turned from his mother’s limp body and rose slowly to his feet.

They stepped toward each other haltingly, cautiously, each wet with his mother’s blood, seeing each other for the first time.

His sword point drifted slightly from the Queen’s breast as Bream turned to the sound of a name he had never expected to hear again.

“Cora?” he said, his voice thick with an emotion that Loren had not heard from the man in the more than twenty years he had known him.

Cora’s face was wide with wonder.

The captain stepped toward her, his sword lowering.

As he turned, the Queen fumbled at her dress.

The magus cried out, “Bream!” as a knife flashed in the space between the Queen and the soldier.

I looked around the room—rooms. We were still in the room where Cora had imprisoned Lazarus Took, and I could see the circle of his blood, the symbols, on the floor around me. But at the same time, we were in a much larger, older room.

It took me a moment to place it, like something from a dream. It was the King’s bedchamber, where Dafyd had gone at the end of the book, where he had used the Sunstone to heal the old man, where he had knelt to be knighted. It was different than I had imagined it, but I knew I was right.

And if this was the King’s bedchamber, then …

Bream sidestepped the knife almost effortlessly, and turned in the same motion, his sword coming up again and catching the Queen above the neckline of her dress. Her momentum, the thrust that should have been a death-blow to him, instead buried his sword deep in her. There was a crunching sound, a hiss as blood sprayed the captain’s face, and her eyes went wide, disbelieving. She fell.