Lives of Kings (15 page)

We pulled up to the building after taking so many twists and turns down narrow, cobblestoned streets that I lost track. The college we were staying at was named after some saint, or something else religious that I forgot as soon as it was told to me. It certainly looked old and Gothic, with tall spires and impressive panel windows.

The taxi driver practically threw our bags at us, wanting to get out of the terrible weather as quickly as possible. After an elderly man showed us to our room — all the while sticking his nose up as if it was beneath him to help us — I was beginning to regret coming here.

The room itself was nothing fancy, with three bunk beds and some night tables. There was a common living room area that made me feel like I was in some movie about college kids or a reality TV show.

Surprisingly, no one was around.

“Where is everyone?” I asked the man.

He looked down his nose at me for the hundredth time, as if I was bothering him.

“Supper,” he said loudly. “If you follow the hall and go down the stairs, you'll come to the main hall. The dining hall is beyond that.” He enunciated every word as if we didn't speak English.

As soon as he left, Garrison burst out laughing. “I think your American offended him.”

I rolled my eyes, deciding everywhere that looked this fancy came with a price. And a rag-tag group of teenagers with one misfit adult really stood out.

Hungry, since all Seth and Garrison had managed to get on the train were chocolate bars and potato chips, we followed his directions.

The college was bigger than it appeared from the outside, with intricate carvings everywhere and stained-glass windows. Through a large set of heavy wooden double doors, we followed voices into the dining hall.

Just like in a movie, everyone sat along long benches in dark robes at tables that ran the length of the room. Portraits of fancy-looking men hung all over the walls. A few people turned their heads when we entered, but the looks that lasted were mostly girls eyeing my friends. Garrison smiled stupidly while Seth and Kian simultaneously took a step back as if each gaze was a shove.

Finding some seats in the middle of one of the tables by ourselves, we were served our meals by unhappy-looking students. They moved around the room practically invisible to the others. When I thanked one for bringing me water, she didn't even reply.

“This place is weird,” Seth said, digging into a mixture of mashed potatoes and French onion soup.

“Everyone in robes,” Kian shook his head. “It makes me nervous.”

“And they all talk and look down at you as if they have big boats,” Garrison added.

Moira rolled her eyes at them. “That's what Oxford is,” she said as if it was obvious. “Everyone knows. You grow up with an awe of the place, as if it's a fortress.”

“It looks like one,” Garrison agreed.

“There's a place here that's about a thousand years old,” Moira said.

“Kian's still a thousand years older than that,” Garrison reminded her. He was right. I sat next to a relic.

“It's not a competition,” I told him.

“But if it was,” Garrison said, “Kian would win.”

All of a sudden the sound of rain hitting the windows changed. The difference wasn't obvious at first, but the entire room quieted as many voices stopped to listen. Then the noise got louder until it sounded like rocks were smashing against the windows, and the glass broke.

Screams filled the room, half drowned out by the rattle of ice falling from the sky. Broken glass showered down. The scratching of the long benches as everyone scrambled for cover at once was barely audible, even in the big room.

The five of us ducked under the table. Using magic hadn't even occurred to me — I was too surprised. As we put our arms over our heads, I couldn't help but feel a little useless. One of the things that had smashed the windows rolled near the table.

I couldn't believe my eyes. I had to touch it to see it was real. I crawled toward it without even looking where I was going.

“Gwen!” Seth called.

“Gwen, come back!” Kian yelled.

I got distracted and looked back at them. My hand landed directly on a piece of broken glass, and I hissed in pain. Still, I managed to retrieve the thing that had fallen through the window and retreat back under the table.

The cold soothed my hand. Seth helped me get the piece of glass out of my palm while I handed the ice ball to Kian.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It looks like freakishly large hail,” Seth said.

Kian passed the piece around to the others. It was eerily round, as if someone had formed and solidified a snowball and then sent it crashing down to earth.

“Oh no!” Moira pointed out to the aisle.

There hadn't been enough space under the tables for everyone. Some students who had gotten stuck and lost in the dining hall during the chaos tried to shield themselves as best as possible. But the hail kept pummelling the room as it broke through the windows, and I counted at least two people unconscious.

“Is it them?” I asked no one in particular. “Are they trying to kill us? Do they know we're here?”

Seth shook his head. “I can sense magic in this, but it's like it's an echo of something,” he yelled over the noise. “A chain reaction.”

Moira nodded.

“Garrison.” I grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him close to me. “See those paintings? We're going to use them to cover the windows while the others get everyone out. Okay?”

Garrison briefly stuck his head out from under the table to look around at the paintings. “You mean the very expensive, historic-looking ones?”

“Yes!” I yelled.

I tried to block out the noise and reached for my magic. To my surprise, it was right at the edge of my senses, like something in my peripheral vision. I still couldn't direct it without gestures, though, so I swept my arms out from under the table as if I were gathering a pile of cushions, dragging the paintings from their long-held places on the wall. Garrison did the same as our friends watched nervously for the instant the chaos died down.

With hail the size of my fist raining down on people's heads, the chaos kept us from notice. The canvases provided surprisingly strong resistance against the assault from outside, though, and it wouldn't take long for people to notice the strange behaviour of the paintings and look for its source.

When the noise dissipated somewhat and people began to come out from under tables, albeit hesitantly, Kian, Seth, and Moira led the way out of the dining hall. It didn't take a lot of convincing. Garrison and I went last, letting the paintings fall to the ground behind us as the hail chased us out.

In the end, our first day in Oxford wasn't ideal. My hands throbbed again where my old wounds had barely healed. The weather kept us in our room the whole time, because even though the common area windows had been smashed in and it was freezing and destroyed, our own room's windows faced the other direction and were fine.

We lay on our bunks, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the strange weather to cease. There wasn't much else we could do since we couldn't take on the whole sky. Whatever the Godelan were doing was having effects around the whole world, upsetting nature and putting everyone at risk. And all we could do was wait it out.

My strange dream circled over and over in my head. The scenario of the burned-out ships hadn't come up in any text I read about the tribes in ancient Scotland, England, or Wales. I was just as clueless as I had been in my dream.

I looked across the room to see that only Kian wore a smile as he lay on the bottom bunk with his arms folded behind his head. I climbed down and went over.

The events of the day were so unexpected that our adrenaline rush had been followed by a total crash. Seth and Garrison were passed out, while Moira had fallen asleep while reading. It was barely evening. The sound of sirens passed by our building every few minutes.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked.

“I finally feel like I helped,” Kian replied. “You were great today. You have your magic. You have your memories. And you're not in the hands of the Godelan. That's the best-case scenario — it's all I could hope for.”

I couldn't help but smile in return. “Don't get too excited,” I told him. “You never know what's going to happen tomorrow.”

“That's tomorrow,” Kian said seriously. “Not today.”

I was hesitant to return to my bunk but forced myself to walk away. Sleeping with him next to me the previous night made my dreams and panic not seem so bad. He was right — it was all about the company.

In the morning we found the fanciest library I had ever seen. Surrounded by a courtyard, its windows had been shuttered to keep the light off the precious old books inside. Because of this, it was also spared from the hail.

At least nothing was falling from the sky today — it was overcast, but I'd take cloudy dryness over baseball-sized hail any day.

A narrow set of steps led us to a desk, where an elderly woman sat typing slowly into a computer that looked as old as I was. I was beginning to think that everyone hired at the university had not changed jobs in about fifty years. She politely asked us what we wanted. We told her. She said no.

“I'm sorry,” Garrison said, turning on the charm. “We travelled a long way to see this specific item.”

“I'm sorry, too,” the woman said primly. “There is no one to show you in today, and there are far too many of you anyway.”

Just then a man came in behind us. Dressed in a tweed coat and shiny round glasses, he was a walking library stereotype.

“It's all right, Margaret,” he told the woman from the door. “I don't mind visitors today.”

They exchanged brief pleasantries, making us feel invisible, though we stood awkwardly between them. I found out his name was Roger and he wasn't supposed to be in, but he had come to check on the books. He put a hand to his chest in exaggerated relief when he found out that nothing was broken. Apparently half the campus was smashed to pieces.

“Hello,” Roger said, turning back to us. “I am one of the curators here; how may I help you?”

“We're looking for a text,” Kian said. “It would have been something from Scotland, about two thousand years ago.”

Rogers gave out a short laugh. When he saw we weren't joking, his expression turned to pity. “I'm afraid there's no such thing,” he told us. “Written language did not exist in that area until Christian times, and even then we're looking at twelve hundred years in the past. Maximum.”

Kian frowned. “We were told it would be here.”

“But they did warn us it would be unreadable,” I added, trying to be helpful.

Roger stared at us for moment. I could practically see the wheels turning in his mind. “Come with me,” he said finally.

Before we could agree, he led the way through a narrow door and up some stairs to a floor where manuscripts lined shelves in the thousands. We hurried to keep up with him until he came to a long desk with glass on top like a sneeze guard and handed us gloves.

“Please put these on,” he told us. “And do not touch anything.”

“What's this screen for?” Garrison asked.

“To preserve the manuscripts,” Roger answered.

“Reminds me of a sneeze-proof window at a salad bar,” Seth murmured quietly enough for Roger not to hear.

The man disappeared for over ten minutes while we sat awkwardly in stiff white gloves, afraid to touch anything for fear that it would just turn to dust if we breathed on it. At least that was the impression given to us by the way the library protected its manuscripts.

Finally, Roger reappeared. But to our surprise, he carried fairly modern-looking white pages with some scribbles on them.

“I only have one item like what you describe,” he said. “And it's not quite a text. It's a slab of rock in our basement. There are only hieroglyphs on it. Completely unreadable.”

Roger laid the white printer pages in front of us. They looked like an art project I had done in school many times as a child. You lay a page over something with texture and then run a pencil over it until an imprint of the image begins to come up. Except now, instead of the leaves and pennies I had used, these images were far more intricate. Animals and decorative spirals were lined up and repeated in an order that was too neat to be meaningless.

“Where did this slab come from?” Garrison asked.

As Roger arranged the pages in front of us under the sneeze screen, even though they were new, I was watching Kian. Surely he would be the best person to be able to read this. But he only squinted at the drawings as if trying to remember something that had escaped him.

“It was an old discovery,” Roger said. “From the eighteenth century, when the north was quite in fashion. There was a lot of funding invested in learning about the culture there, and they found this just shy of the border between England and Scotland, on the west coast.”