Lives of Kings (16 page)

I think it happened at the same time for all of us. Moira gripped the desk in shock as Seth and Garrison leaned forward. I could only stare. The animals began to take on shape and meaning in my mind. I could practically feel my brain expanding to learn this new language. My eyes felt out of focus and then were taking in the information across the pages like I was reading a book.

My heart skipped a beat.

“What is it?” Kian asked. “What do you see?”

“Can't you read it?” asked Garrison.

Kian's face was a mixture of anger and disappointment. “No,” he said. “All I see are pictures.”

“Do you know what this is?” Roger asked, confused. To his credit, we were probably the strangest visitors he had ever had. He looked at our faces, realizing there was comprehension there.

Garrison began to open his mouth. I knew he would tell Kian what was written on the pages, but I hit his elbow and motioned to Roger. The man was looking at all of us, his mouth ajar in anticipation. Seth stood and gripped his arm.

“Sorry,” Seth said to Roger. I sensed a light touch of magic travel through the room. “This wasn't what we were looking for.”

For a moment we all watched nervously to see what the curator would do. Then he seemed to notice we were there for the first time.

“Oh, hello,” he said cheerfully. “Did I get a little spacey there? I'm sorry this wasn't what you were looking for. Let me know if I can be of any more assistance.”

“We will,” I told him. “Thank you.”

We gave him back his gloves and piled out of the library, waiting until we were outside to speak.

“What did you do to him?” Garrison asked.

“Just took the last memories,” Seth said. I glanced at Moira, remembering the woman in the airport bathroom, but she didn't meet my gaze and only stared at the ground. “It's easy when they're fresh. They're just sitting top of the mind.”

“Would you be able to get old memories back?” Kian asked. We all turned to him. “I can't remember anything of our old language. It's like knowledge of this one replaced it. I feel so disconnected.”

Seth frowned at his younger brother, who towered over him. “I can try.”

Kian wanted to know what the stone said, but we decided to wait until we were back in our room.

Passing the main hall of the college, I glanced into the dining room. There were no students in today, and cleaners swept up the broken glass. There were patches of blood in places where people hadn't been able to duck for cover quickly enough. Torn and broken paintings lay all over the floors by the walls.

When I spotted a cleaner by the entrance, I couldn't resist.

“What happened?” I asked him. “This looks like an awful disaster.”

The man shook his head, resting his broom against the wall. “Could have been worse,” he said gravely. “Hailstorm did a world of damage, but the drafts in these old buildings might have saved some lives.”

“Drafts?”

“Pulled the coverings right to the windows,” he explained.

“Oh.”

It clicked. They thought air currents had somehow sucked the paintings clear off the walls and covered the windows with them. Any reasonable person could have seen that made no sense, but what was the other explanation? Magic?

I nodded politely. At least there was no video of us, as there had been with the tsunami. As we piled back into out little room, Seth closed the door.

“Right,” he said, with an air of command. “We need to break into that museum and destroy that rock.”

As we nodded our consent, Kian just looked confused.

“Why? What does it say?” he asked for the tenth time.

“How to kill us,” Seth told him.

“K
ill
you?” he asked. “But I thought you couldn't be killed without coming back again?”

“So did I,” I said. “Once we're in the ritual. We never figured out how to get out, apart from having our souls and magic enslaved to others.” Which wasn't a very appealing option. “This describes how to stop that ritual, but there's a pretty big catch.”

We needed to destroy that rock as quickly as possible without anyone finding out about it. The thought that the Godelan could have beaten us to it and already seen it made me itch to just run out and smash the thing.

“What did it say?” Kian asked again.

“The whole thing sounded like it was written for us,” Seth said. “As if the Riada realized that even when we found the Godelan, we might not know what to do with them. It said there are many deaths. The sacrifice of magic, that thing they tried to do to Gwen, was one of them.”

Kian glanced at me, another apology in his eyes.

“Or we could die like anyone else,” Seth said. “But then we would still continue somewhere in the future. The ritual starts the pattern and it's hard to break. Then there was something written about the ring of fire that trapped our souls.”

Yeah, I remembered that ring of fire.

“But,” Seth continued, “it said that we can only be set free, I take that to mean made officially dead, by the same ritual and the same blood that trapped us in the first place.”

This seemed to mean something serious to the others, but I was clueless. I hadn't thought this last part actually held meaning for them until I saw their grim faces and suddenly felt left out.

“What?” I asked. “What does that mean? What blood trapped us?”

“There's blood used in the ritual,” Seth explained. “Just a little bit. You were … late. You didn't see.”

In our past lives, Seth and I had been due to run away together. We were going to abandon our tribe and live out the rest of our lives in exile just to be together. It hadn't been my finest moment as a champion.

That day went horribly wrong, however, or right — depending on how you looked at it. After my husband began to suspect what I was about to do, he tried to stop me. I had to kill him. Maybe. Either way, I had fought him off and ended up stabbing him with a gift from Seth.

I was late to meet Seth; he had thought I couldn't go through with it, and I realized too late that he had gone back to our tribe to die. Not being able to stand the thought of living without him, I dove into the ritual through the circle of fire at the very last moment, inheriting fire as a new magic.

“Our father,” Kian told me, “provided his own blood to perform the ritual.”

“Well, we're two thousand years away from your father,” Moira said. “How can he kill us?”

“That can't be what it means,” I reasoned. “The stone was written for the future. It must mean something other than blood.”

“Kin,” Seth said suddenly. “It means Kian's blood, or my blood, can be used in a ritual to kill us. Kill us dead, I mean. No coming back.”

“The ritual can only be done once every five years, though,” Garrison added. “Something about a cycle.”

“Magician once told me that,” Kian said. “It's how we got here. The magic only works every five years.”

“Well, how long has it been since you got here?” Seth asked him.

Kian considered for a moment. “Ten years, last December.”

“Great,” Moira muttered. “So they can kill us for the next eight months?”

“Or we kill them,” Garrison said.

“You forgot the big catch,” I reminded them.

“What is it?” Kian asked.

“It says that we cannot kill or be killed by anyone born of the same land as us,” I told them. “How do you suppose we get around that?”

“It must mean tribe,” Seth argued.

I shook my head. “Tribe was used as another word. This says
land
. They can't kill us and we can't kill them.”

Everyone went quiet, thinking of alternate meanings for the word.

“Then what's the point of the stone?” Seth asked. “We have to be able to get around that somehow.”

We continued arguing until hunger forced us to seek out food in what seemed like a storm-ravaged town. Most places were damaged in some way, but a few tucked-away pubs had been spared the wrath of hail. We took our food to go in order to observe the library and find a way to get into it after it was closed.

“The Godelan all want different things,” Kian said while simultaneously trying to eat a sandwich and sneak around the back of the library.

“Like what?” asked Garrison.

I was behind Kian and saw him shrug. Garrison led the way as if well versed in sneaking.

“Stone, the silver-haired one, wants power. Now. He likes how much of it he would have if he could be the most powerful person in this world,” Kian said. “Donald, that's the one who isn't Magician, he holds a grudge against the Romans and our tribe for letting them win. He wants the world back to the way it was.”

“And Magician?” asked Garrison. “The man you came with?”

I saw his pace faltered. The man I had called Third Magician, the one who looked out of place in the modern world, had caused him all of this heartache. When Kian had rescued me from them, he broke free from their hold on him. Still, talking about the man who had tricked him away from his family was hard.

“I don't know what he wants,” Kian said. “He doesn't know much of this world, but he's obsessed with status. He'll side with whoever will win. I'm not surprised they tried to kill you instead of going after you again — they probably couldn't agree on what to do with you.”

“But killing us can mean we'll be back again,” I reminded him. “That's not ideal.”

“No,” Kian replied, “but they really can't agree on anything.”

“You mean you think the other two will fight with each other?” Seth asked.

“There is no way they can both have what they want,” Kian reasoned.

“But they needed our magic,” I said quietly. “What will they do without it?”

“My guess,” Kian said, finishing his lunch, “is that they've used a considerable amount of their power setting the destruction of the Earth in motion and, probably, hiding their names. They must be low on magic — that's why they don't want to face you anymore. Or,” he paused, “it could be the other thing, but I don't want to think about that.”

I caught his arm, forcing him to stop and face me.

“What other thing?” I asked urgently.

“Don't worry, Gwen,” he told me reassuringly. “I spent a while watching them, and I don't think it's the case.”

When I continued to stare at him, silently demanding answers, he relented.

“They could have captured one of your kind and used their magic,” he said.

Damn. The thought hadn't even occurred to me.

“But we would know. They'd be much more powerful. Your magic is pure.”

I don't know how much more powerful they could get. Every time I saw a TV, it played images from some disaster around the world. They had caused the tsunami, seemingly effortlessly. What would they do if they had even more power? The droughts in Africa had caused death tolls that I couldn't even fathom.

Continents were slowly being submerged under water. Staving off a tsunami had taken almost everything I had, and it included surrendering to my old self. I was starting to feel anything short of giving up on modern Gwen would not be enough to save anyone.

Kian's eyes read my face as if he could see every thought that ran through my mind. He brushed the hair away from my face, and I tried to push all of my worries down, focusing on that sensation. I hadn't even thought of the Godelan capturing someone we hadn't reached yet. It created a whole new anxiety inside me.

“Hey, are you coming?”

Kian and I both jumped. Seth had rounded the corner.

“Garrison found a way up through the roof,” Seth said, and then disappeared around the corner.

I sighed. I could only handle one problem at a time. I made a mental note to speak with Seth tonight before our little adventure into the world of breaking and entering.

On the rainy weekday, I realized we didn't really need to sneak around. Any students left on the campus after the storm had classes far way. Still, Garrison's way into the library was spy-worthy.

He stood in an impossibly narrow alleyway filled with pebbles that were nearly washed away by rain. Piles of garbage, and I was sure a few carcasses, were trapped in the alley as well. The other wall belonged to a college. He squinted into the sky as he observed the climb.

“Easy,” Garrison said. “The walls are close enough for us to —” He climbed instead of finishing his sentence. With his back pressed against the library and his feet climbing up the wall of the college next door, he went up a few feet. There was only about eighty feet to go until the roof.

“Why don't we just blow in a window or something?” Moira asked, crossing her arms over her chest, annoyed.

Seth and Garrison both ignored her.

“We don't want to create more trouble,” I told her. “If it looks like someone broke in, they'll probably check to see what's gone or broken and will find what we did faster. It would be better if we are gone by the time they figure it out.”

Moira made a sound between acquiescence and further annoyance. Kian shot me a glance of confusion. He hadn't witnessed her transformation quite like we had — especially how I had, for that matter.

“That'll do it,” Garrison said, jumping down to where he started.

He walked back to our dorm with a limp, and I hoped it wasn't a testament to how hard the wall was to climb.

The afternoon quickly passed into evening while I worried about Seth, Kian, my future friends I hadn't even met yet, and anyone else falling into the hands of the Godelan. I needed air and to be alone with my thoughts, so I put on my jacket and went out. Everybody was thinking too loudly in there.

I didn't get far, though. The dark and abandoned hall was like a warning about the outside world. Leaving alone seemed unwise. An hour later, I stood in the abandoned kitchen of our student housing building, where rain had soaked into the wooden floors. No one had even bothered to put plastic over the big hole in the wall where a window used to be before it was smashed by ice pellets.

“You okay?”

Seth came in to get a soda from the fridge. I took a breath.

“Thinking of home,” I said. “I'll be fine.”

He nodded.

“Do you miss home?” I asked.

“Of course,” Seth replied. “But we have to do this right now. When we win, we can go back, have lives, and not look over our shoulders.”

“Use magic?” I asked him.

“Don't know,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

A few moments of silence passed while I worked up my courage.

“I appreciate your understanding,” I told him finally. “Really.”

“About?” Seth asked.

I felt a blush coming on. It was hard for me to speak about my feelings. He was the one person I felt strongly enough about to take this giant risk for. All I could do was nod in the direction of our room.

“You know,” I said.

Despite myself, my eyes focused solely on my feet.

“Kian?” Seth asked.

There was a silence that made me nervous. I looked up to find Seth deep in thought, staring out the would-be window as if he could see anything in the early evening darkness.

“You are okay, aren't you?” I asked.

To my relief, he broke out in a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I feel like for the first time my past isn't yearning for something. Don't get me wrong — I love you more than I even understand. It's just a part of who I am. It's something I was born with. You're woven into everything. But having Kian here …” Seth shook his head, looking for words. “You don't know how happy I am. I've always wanted a little brother in this life.” He laughed to himself. “I didn't think he'd come in that … form … but what'll you do?”

“What happened on the island …”

We had still never spoken about it.

“We had to let ourselves go,” Seth said. Had he always been so much wiser than me? Probably. “And I don't regret anything. I'd do anything to protect you.”

I smiled and took his arm, leaning in to hug him. Suddenly his words gripped me, and pieces of our history clicked together in my mind as if pieces of a puzzle. I stepped back, stunned.

“What?” Seth asked in the half-light.

I could only stand and stare at him, waiting for my mind to find something wrong with my logic. But I couldn't.

“Gwen?” Seth stepped toward me, concerned. “Are you okay?”

A dull ache was rising in my heart, but it wasn't mine. It was past Gwen, having realized her mistake.

“You would do anything to protect me,” I repeated.

Seth nodded. “Anything.”

I let a few moments pass as the words bubbled up in my throat.

“I was wrong,” I asked quietly. “Wasn't I?”

“About what?” he asked, lost. It somehow surprised me that he couldn't see my thoughts like Kian could. Maybe he didn't know me as well as he thought.

“The way things happened on the day we died,” I told him. “I was wrong.”

Seth looked about to argue, then sighed. Confirmation made the dull ache grow.

“You were never going to meet me,” I said. “You were never going to run away with me. This isn't the first time you're letting me go.”

My words held no emotion. Past Gwen was too stunned, and I was just trying to keep up with the revelations that would ultimately unlock my magic and free me from the past.

I waited for Seth to speak. It took a minute of silence before he offered an explanation.