Lives of Kings (14 page)

I had meant to distract the ghosts, holding on to the cushion so as not to bring the whole hotel down. My own hands seemed immune to the flames. But my magic had the opposite effect. The ghosts didn't seem to notice, while my friends panicked even more and started to scream at me.

Something strange happened. As soon as everyone was distracted enough to think that I was going to kill them all in a fiery inferno, the ghosts simply vanished. Utensils, scissors, and other knick-knacks clattered to the floor.

I stomped on the fire I had created, and it disappeared. We all sat around in shock, gasping for breath. Moira put a hand to her chest.

“I nearly had a heart attack!” she exclaimed.

“Are you trying to burn this place to the ground?” Garrison yelled.

“Well, it worked, didn't it?” I yelled back.

“Whose memory was that?” Moira demanded.

“Yeah, who got attacked in the past by zombies?” Garrison added.

Everyone quieted as I remembered my own encounter with the past. We each held stories inside of us, some of which we might never know. There had been important people to us in the past — some who had benefitted from our magic, and some who had been our victims.

“They weren't zombies,” I said. “When I saw my past life's husband, he had a little statue sticking out of his neck — because I put it there. That was a memory that I felt guilty for. If those were ghosts, then whoever was remembering them killed them.”

“I know who it was,” Kian said.

He was confined to the floor but trying to clamber up. I went over to help him.

“What happened to you?” Garrison asked him.

“It's nice to see you, too.” Kian gave a strained smile. “Gwen kicked me.”

“Wow, Gwen,” Garrison replied without skipping a beat. “I didn't know you were still so mad.”

“I wasn't!” I began. I had to keep myself from launching into an argument. Instead I turned to Kian. “So who was that?”

I helped him onto the couch as he winced.

Kian turned to Seth. “Gwen told me you took a sleeping draught from a woman in order to remember your past life and gain magic.”

“It was Garrison's idea,” Seth said immediately.

“Of course it was,” Kian replied, pursing his lips.

He was still unhappy about it, and I could tell he fought the instinct to start chastising us.

“Going so deep into your magic often has consequences,” Kian said. “Just as when Gwen kept losing control and ghosts from her past that still haunt her memories began to appear. Those were yours.”

“I don't remember fighting them,” Seth said immediately.

“Maybe,” Kian agreed, “but you did kill them.”

“I don't remember that,” Seth said immediately. “Why would I kill them?”

“Because they're Romans,” Kian replied calmly, as if killing a Roman was a daily occurrence. “But that's how I know it was you. You spied among them. And though you've remembered a lot about your lives by now, you'll probably never remember everything.”

Kian spoke as if Seth and his brother were two different people. Perhaps in his mind they were. He would have never remembered the old Seth being this age. His brother was always a man to him.

“So that was me?” Seth asked, stunned. “But I had no idea. I had no control over them.”

“Neither did I when it happened to me,” I told him. I was trying to be reassuring, but the memory gave me chills. “The only thing you can do is take power away from it by pushing it to the back of your mind, getting distracted, and not letting your ghosts take over. I tried to do it with magic and nearly ended up killing myself.”

While everyone calmed down enough to welcome Kian back and demand his story, I began to clean. I considered whether or not to put the utensils in the dishwasher. They were clean but had technically stabbed several corpses. In the end I opted for the heavy wash.

Seth helped to bandage my hands and Moira's head. She had hit it against a picture frame when one of the ghosts threw her into it. While Kian spoke, we managed to at least pile the ruined, broken things together and sweep up the mess. The ghosts had luckily taken the mud with them when they disappeared.

The others had plenty of questions for Kian, and to his credit he answered them all as honestly as he could. When we got to the part where he grabbed me in the alley, he glossed it over and I told the others we had bumped into each other.

“What a coincidence,” Moira remarked sarcastically.

I ignored her.

Having forgotten to bring food home, we ordered room service and ate on the couch, reminding me of our time in England before things got complicated.

“So the big answer,” Garrison said. “What is it? How do we defeat them?”

Kian put away his plate and limped from the kitchenette to the couch. He smiled. “That can wait until tomorrow,” he said. “It's late.”

“Where are we going tomorrow?” Moira asked.

“The university,” he replied.

“I called it!” Garrison clapped his hands. “I knew you were around there. How did you find us anyway? Do you have some kind of magic tracking us?”

Kian raised his eyebrows. “You're using my credit cards.”

“Right. That.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, exhaustion setting in. My palms pounded in sync with my heartbeat. The deep slices wouldn't heal quickly. I tried to send my magic through to the pain, but it only dulled somewhat.

As Moira and Garrison eventually left for bed, I was left alone with Kian and Seth.

Seth made eyes at me, wordlessly asking me to leave. I understood. He wanted some time alone with his brother, with whom he had been living but hadn't recognized. Having recently relived our past, I could only image that Seth's connection to Kian had gotten stronger. It was a strange dynamic, their roles reversed as older and younger brothers, but as I made my own way to bed, I found falling asleep was a lot easier now that we were all together again.

Kian briefly showed us around Dublin in the morning and then took us to the university residence where he had been staying. My palms felt as if weeks had passed when I awoke the next morning, the cuts having turned into angry red welts. Kian still limped, but at least no more ghosts had come to bother us.

The school looked ancient and imposing. Tall stone columns were built into the façade, and dozens of windows hinted at immeasurable numbers of books.

Kian first led us to smaller houses on the grounds to pick up his things. I noticed he was travelling with a little new suitcase, except this one was bright green, unlike his old silver one.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing.” I smiled. The green was exactly like my suitcase, which he had made fun of when we first met.

We made our way into a grand hall where open staircases led to the upper floors, each decorated with its own emblem on the bannister. Polished wood lined the walls, covered the floors, and made up the decadent frames of the oil paintings of important people.

The windows I had seen from outside allowed light to flood in and reflect off stained glass, bathing everything in a variety of colours. Still, the wood somehow seemed stifling.

Down a hall and around a corner, we finally came to a set of double doors. We weren't the only ones coming for an early morning visit. Entering the large library, we stared at the huge amount of books the university had collected. They sat atop the wooden shelves as if patiently waiting for someone to come and pick them up.

A few other people had come in with us but turned left and walked into a curtained room next to the main entrance.

“What's in there?” I asked Kian in a hushed tone. He was about to lead us in the opposite direction.

“A very famous old book,” Kian replied. “It is also from our land, but compared to what we need, it's practically futuristic.”

I didn't have time to wonder. Kian led us into the library, and I had to tear myself away from eyeing every single spine. I was a terrible person to bring into a library or bookstore. Not only did I have to read every single title, but I also loved to touch the books. All the different textures, not to mention age and dust and jackets, made it an adventure. Even now I ran my hand along the shelves we walked past.

Kian came to a small section comprised of only a few books, titled
Early Celtic Mythology, Pre-Christian.
He pulled down a few books and brought them to an old table that was pushed up against a back wall. No one was in sight.

We huddled around as Kian opened the book to a page where a sketch depicted a woman lying next to a man. He pointed to it.

“Goram and Eila,” he said. “Do those names sound familiar?”

We thought about it. They did. Vaguely.

“They were our gods,” Kian explained. “The ones from whom you get your magic. They created the first men and women. And I found the answer to beating the Godelan in the same story I had heard since I was a child. I just hadn't made the connection.”

Garrison sat. “All right,” he said. “Tell us the story.”

I was skeptical, but a hunch was better than nothing, and I felt us approaching another standstill in our progress in defeating the Godelan. Kian took a deep breath as if he was about to share a secret.

“Goram and Eila lived in the Otherworld with all the other gods. They were a tribe, much like our people,” he began, “but they were not allowed to be together because they were both promised to someone else. So they found a new world to run away to. It became the world of mortals.”

He was right. I had heard this story a hundred times. We all had. Still, we listened intently, drawing as much of our past memories from it as possible.

“When Eila's father found their secret world,” Kian continued, “he suspected why his daughter had escaped there and he began to watch it, waiting for her and Goram to appear. But Eila was much more clever than her father and knew about his plan. When she would want to be with Goram, they would disguise themselves and change into various animal forms so that they could enjoy the world they created.”

Here, Kian flipped to another page with strange animal symbols that also looked vaguely familiar.

“That's why our language was often written in the shapes of animals. Each curve had a meaning to honour them,” he said. “Eila's father grew more and more suspicious. One day, as she and Goram flew over their land, her father struck him down. When Goram fell to earth, he was broken into a million pieces, and that became our land. Eila's father then banished her to our world and never let her return home. Which was just as well, since she was so grief-stricken, she could never leave Goram. She stayed by his side and gave birth to the first people.”

“I remember the story,” I told him, “but what does that have to do with how we defeat the Godelan?”

Kian smiled. He'd been waiting for this question. This was his big reveal. “The man you call Third Magician, the man I called Magician, once told me that in fact we are all made from earth,” Kian said. “We are earth before we are born and we are earth after we die. What binds us to our human selves during life is our human name.”

Seth sat up quickly, as if having realized something. “Their names,” he said. “We need to find out their names.”

Kian broke into an even wider grin. “Exactly. Magician told me that the right person could control someone by his or her name. I figured out the right person is the High King. As their ruler, the king of kings and of our people, you can find a way to make them obedient to you as our father once did.”

“They disobeyed our father,” Seth reminded him.

“Because being king isn't all-binding,” Kian said. “Magician once hinted that I may have power with the names, but without magic, I cannot bind them. Our father didn't have magic either. But you are the rightful High King now, and you could do it.”

The magic was familiar, and somehow, though it would sound crazy to anyone else, it made perfect sense to me.

“I can't believe I didn't think of it before,” Kian said. “Though you do need magic to truly wield that power. Father couldn't keep them obedient, and neither can I.”

“One problem,” I said. “How do we find out their names?”

“I haven't thought of that,” Kian admitted. “But this is their weakness. If you find the names, you can undo them.”

W
e
stayed in Dublin for another few days researching what the libraries had to offer and cleaning up our hotel room as best we could. I dreaded finding out how much they would charge us for the damage.

Two days into our search for information on name magic, a librarian told us a library in Oxford had another text that could be useful. She warned us, however, that no one had succeeded in reading it. The strange animal symbols didn't mean anything to anyone. Hopeful that perhaps being near it or touching it would give us something, anything, to go on, we decided to give it a shot.

While Garrison was enjoying what he called time off, and Moira disappeared for hours, Seth and Kian finally got to spend time together. They were becoming brothers again, and I liked watching them becoming more reconciled with whatever mistakes had torn them apart in the past.

The downside of this was that I had a lot of alone time in huge libraries with their dusty books, reading gory myths and wondering what the Godelan had in store for us if they did happen to find us first. After all, they had tried to kill us by wiping a whole island off the map.

We weren't getting any closer to finding the other three people of our kind, and the fruitless search for the Godels' real names soon became frustrating.

I got back to the hotel after midnight the night before we were setting off for London. Our flight was the next afternoon, and I just wanted to bury my head under a pillow until we were due to leave. Finding no information about the Godelan or our own tribe, the Riada, felt like I was moving backward every day.

My head ached from straining to read old, confusing books, and my eyes were so heavy I could feel my eyelids. My feet hurt from walking down dozens of aisles of shelves and sifting through hundreds of books. I knew it was my own fault — I had thrown myself into the work. No one forced me. But I craved doing something, even if that something was, apparently, redundant.

I dropped my coat and bag on a chair in the dark and headed to my room.

“Hey!”

As my foot hit something solid, I flew forward onto my knees, nearly missing smacking my head on the coffee table. I scuffled with the thing on the floor for a few seconds until Kian turned on the light. He winced, holding his side.

“What were you doing on the floor?” I whispered angrily.

Really, I was mad at myself. I felt like my hurting him accidentally could eventually be misconstrued as bottled-up anger. Which, I was nearly sure, it wasn't.

Kian had been lying on the floor between the couch, chair, and coffee table. He had actually chosen the only part of the living room that wasn't even carpeted. The floor must have been cold and hard.

“It's more comfortable,” he said quietly, still rubbing his ribs. I knew he was lying.

Things had changed since we were together the previous year. I felt more grown up — like we were equals. Now that I knew how clueless he was as a teenager brought to this world, his mystique was gone, dissolved into a kid who had been saddled with too much responsibility and tragedy and had made a mistake.

“I don't believe you,” I said. “I've seen you sleep in a lot of soft beds. Why are you on the floor?”

“It reminds me of home,” he said. But he phrased it more like a question.

“Nope,” I said. “Try again.”

Kian sighed. “I like this sometimes. I started sleeping on the floor when Magician brought me here.”

“Why?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

Kian shook his head. “I don't know.”

“Yes, you do,” I told him. “You're punishing yourself.”

“Because I failed,” he admitted. “I got too comfortable with this life — with you. I forgot how much I hated them, and I did exactly as they asked. The situation is being repaired slowly. But I can't let myself forget again.”

Maybe it was because it was late and I was exhausted, or because my fruitless searches had brought up nothing and my sadness mixed with his was too much to bear, but I stepped forward until I stood directly in front of him.

It was all I could bring myself to do. I stood and waited. Slowly, hesitantly, Kian wrapped his arms around me and rested his head on top of mine. I breathed in, trying to take in this moment and make it a part of me.

“You're not going to do it again,” I said into his neck. “You'll never forget who you are, and you won't give up on us. After all, we need you.”

I felt him take a deep breath and nod.

“How long have you been sleeping on the ground?”

Kian, still hugging me, shrugged. “Since I left you,” he whispered.

“Come on,” I said, pulling away.

I took his hand and headed to my room. In hindsight, exhaustion made me braver than I ever could be during a reasonable hour.

I was surprised he didn't ask questions, protest, or do anything to stop me. We seemed to understand each other. Having lost his shell-like exterior that he'd worn on and off since I met him, Kian was human and vulnerable.

He followed me into the room. I was too tired to do anything but kick off my shoes and climb under the covers. Kian stood over the bed for a moment.

“What?” I asked him sleepily.

“This is more than I deserve,” he said.

“You don't know what you deserve. Everyone's done bad things in the past, myself and your brother included.” Seth had only told him the full story a few days ago. “Dishonourable things. Cowardly things. But you move on and try not to repeat them. That's what separates us from the Godelan.”

In the darkness I could only see his shape, considering. Finally, he climbed under the covers and lay next to me, staring up at the ceiling.

“How is it?” I asked. “Being in bed?”

He turned to me and I saw a small smile. “I like the company,” he said. “Reminds me of New York, when I could reach out and hold your hand while you slept.”

That caught me off guard. “Did you?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “You'd be turning in your sleep. Mumbling. Sometimes you'd cry. Your nightmares woke me up, and I held your hand.”

I propped myself up on one elbow to look at him. “Why didn't you ever tell me that?”

I felt Kian shrug. “I guess there's never been the right moment.”

I lay back down but got closer and rested my head on his chest. While this was a bolder move than I had ever taken, tiredness and comfort pushed all other thoughts away. Kian's silence and warmth lulled me to sleep almost immediately.

Wind whipped by me, but I didn't mind. This was summer wind, and I rejoiced in it. I felt light and free — like magic itself. I was not past Gwen. I was not anyone. I was a wisp in time and I let my soul soar, looking out to a vast sea that was the richest shade of dark blue I had ever seen. My heart felt freer and more hopeful than I had ever experienced in any of my memories.

I surveyed the horizon. Suddenly, something was wrong. The dream went from being pleasant to terrifying as a deep-rooted fear took over. A row of ships sailed toward me. These ships were new to me, the kind that could bring many men over large bodies of water. But now they approached. Something glinted in the sunlight. A reflection. They had metal. They had weapons.

I ran to the village. As I struggled for breath but urged myself forward, my vision blurred. Life sped until I had used all of my energy, and it was still not enough. The Riada dressed for battle. I tried to scream at them to stop, to wait, to learn whom they were dealing with, but they couldn't hear me. The ships landed. We went to meet them, ready for war.

Suddenly, I stood in front of only the burned-out shells of ships. The invading people were gone. They had set their own ships on fire and trespassed on our land. How would we know them now from our own?

I awoke with a gasp.

The movement of the train had seemed unnatural at first, as if my whole world was moving. I was still tired from the delay at the Dublin airport and had fallen asleep on our way from London to Oxford. Kian sat next to me and took my hand reassuringly. He smiled, but there was worry in his eyes. He put a hand to my forehead.

“You're sweating in January,” he told me with a frown. “Are you okay? Did you have that dream again?”

I nodded.

The dream had visited me in my sleep last night, forcing me to get up early in the morning, leaving Kian in my bed. When my friends awoke and found me in the kitchen while he still slept, I avoided answering any questions by making myself busy packing my things. The others had so far not commented on the new sleeping arrangements, though I watched Seth carefully for any sign that he minded. So far, nothing.

I found the dream exhausting. This time I had known what was going to happen, but still I felt confused, scared, and desperate, just like I had the first time. It wasn't a memory, like my other strange dreams — this was something more, and I felt blind for missing the meaning in it.

Rain hammered the window of the carriage. The delay of our flight had been due to extremely bad weather. While it seemed typical of England, even locals shook their heads at how much rain had fallen.

At the same time as people ditched their soaked and turned-out umbrellas in the aisles, a screen in front of me played terrifying images of a drought in Africa. Apparently it was the worst in years, and a ring of experts argued about who was responsible for global warming. I could have told them. The Godelan wanted the world — their own version of it.

“I'm going to go find Seth and Garrison,” Kian said, getting up. They had left to get lunch.

I nodded, but as soon as he was gone, I met Moira's cold gaze.

“What?” I asked, taken aback.

“I know what you're doing,” she said.

There was anger behind her look that I hadn't seen before. She hadn't been herself in the last week, but when I thought more about it, I realized that I didn't know what “herself” actually was anymore. If the Moira we met in England was gone, who was left?

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Yes you do,” she fired back.

I thought about how I could possibly have offended her.

“I didn't tell anyone about what happened at the airport,” I said defensively.

I was mad at myself for being so apologetic when I had done nothing wrong, but I was tired, the weather was miserable, and I didn't feel like a confrontation.

“I know you didn't,” she said. “You don't need to get rid of me by turning the others against me; you already have.”

I was at a loss for words. “What?” I fumbled for something to say. “I haven't turned anyone against you!”

Moira's gaze softened. Her mouth opened slightly in surprise, as if she hadn't expected her own behaviour. “It's not your fault, Gwen. I know that,” she said earnestly, the animosity gone.

I was confused and worried. Her behaviour was catapulting between angry and whatever the alternative was. I never got to ask her what she meant because Kian came back with Seth and Garrison in tow, and Moira shone a smile in their direction then went directly back to reading her magazine.

“What's the matter?” Kian asked me, sitting down. “You look stunned.”

I continued to stare at Moira but she wouldn't meet my gaze.

“Nothing,” I said, not wanting to drag anyone else into this.

She had had problems with me from the start, and considering our histories, I didn't blame her. What worried me was if she had her magic back, she was powerful and wanted revenge. She was obviously of two minds. I just had to watch out for which one would win.

Oxford was probably a lovely city. Certainly, judging by the postcards, I would have loved to look around. But we didn't get to see any of that. As the train pulled into the station, we piled into an old-fashioned taxi and went directly to the student residences. Since the new winter semester had just begun, it was our only option.