Lives of Kings (17 page)

“Like I said,” he told me, taking my hand. “I love you more than I understand.”

“You were going to leave me alone,” I accused.

“But at least you would be alive,” Seth told me. “I couldn't leave. I couldn't abandon my people. They were
my
people, Gwen. If I abandoned the Riada, I would be disobeying my father and leaving my family. I just couldn't do that. But knowing you'd live was consolation for me.”

I took a deep breath. “How long have you known?”

“Since we got out memories back on the hill,” Seth replied. “It made sense. When I first saw you in New York I was so happy, but also surprised. It didn't make sense to me until later. And then you remembered your version of things, and I just didn't see the need to take that away from you.”

I processed the information, embedding this new version of events into my memory.

“You okay?” Seth asked again.

He looked into my eyes with absolutely no hint of ill intent. It was the only reason I let him get so close. My instincts told me to be defensive, to take out my anger for being so wrong on him and not let him know just how strange it all felt. But he meant what he said, and I made a point of showing the feelings washing over me. He didn't know me like Kian, though. He couldn't tell what I was thinking.

“Gwen,” he asked again. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “I'll be fine.”

I was surprised to find a tear running down my cheek. I hastily wiped it away.

Kian and Garrison emerged from our room down the hall. It was time for our heist, or rather, vandalism.

“Gwen, are you okay?” Kian asked when he saw my face.

I did my best to force a smile, though my mind still felt like putty.

“Why does everyone keep asking me that? Yes, I'm fine.” I looked down the hall, but the dorm door was closed behind them. “Isn't Moira coming?”

Garrison and Kian exchanged looks.

“She said she trusted us to handle it,” Garrison said shortly. He ended the conversation by walking out the door before I could ask any more questions. We had to follow him, though I had time for one quick glance back at our room. I could see Moira's shadow move under the door.

Climbing that stupid wall was one of the least pleasant things I have ever done. My back felt raw by the time I got up there. It was still wet and slippery. My feet kept threatening to give way underneath me, and the uneven bricks made everything hurt.

My legs were trembling by the time I reached the top and Seth pulled me up. Kian came up shortly after me, and I couldn't help but feel he had waited patiently while I struggled.

We slipped into the library with surprising ease, Garrison undoing an inside latch through the glass.

“I amaze myself,” he said as the small knob flew to the other end of the window, seemingly of its own accord.

Seth scoffed at him. “You held off a tsunami, but this is amazing?”

“Smashing the glass would have been a lot easier than flicking a switch with magic,” Garrison said as if it were obvious.

I looked at Kian. He had taught me to target my magic in the early days of our travels. I was always learning new ways he had helped me.

We wandered through the library, sneaking though there were no cameras and no alarm system.

“It's weird how they keep all of these priceless books in here and don't guard the place,” I remarked.

“Who'd want to destroy this old stuff, though?” Garrison asked. There was no hint of sarcasm in his voice.

“Well,” I said. “Us, for one.”

We soon found that the truly expensive books, first editions and other valuables, were held in locked cases that were in fact guarded with alarms. Garrison was right — no one had a reason to come in here and destroy old books and artifacts. Except us.

We had torn up the paper the librarian gave us right after we left the library, but the rock still existed. And as long as it did, anyone could figure out how to kill us.

It took an hour to find it, even after we retraced Roger's steps exactly as we remembered them. At last, leaned against a wall next to a series of paintings, we found the two thousand-year-old rock standing unceremoniously.

Garrison, Seth, and Kian looked to me, and I suddenly realized we hadn't brought mallets.

“We're not going to smash this, are we?” I asked.

The others shook their heads. They wanted me to destroy it.

Now that I stood in front of this relic — the only thing left of my former home — it was hard to think of destroying it. Thoughts of hiding it began to float through my head.

“Gwen,” Kian said, putting a gentle hand on my shoulder. “It was created to deliver a message to us by our people. It's done its job. Let it go.”

He was right. Still, with Seth's confession about what had really happened in the past, I felt like I was losing too much tonight.

I took a deep breath, and with a heavy heart, I put my hand on the cold rock. Feeling the words inscribed on it as if they spoke into my hand, I felt for magic inside. It was very faint, but still there. Wanting to keep something of it, I drew it into myself and then felt magic trickle through my fingers back into the stone.

When I opened my eyes and looked, it had crumbled underneath my fingers, and nothing remained but a pile of dust. It made me inexplicably sad to see it like that. Perhaps I was comparing it to my own past.

Kian draped an arm over my shoulders and placed a kiss on the top of my head. “You did the right thing,” he said.

I sighed. “I know. But I'm not convinced it was all that harmful. Even if someone else figured out how to kill us, they couldn't do it without you. And you would never do that.”

“No,” Kian agreed. “I wouldn't. But because I would be against it doesn't mean they couldn't get my blood, or Seth's blood, some other way.”

When I thought about it that way, I pushed my sadness about the stone to the back of my mind. If it kept Seth and Kian safe in the case of someone trying to kill us, then it was worth it to get rid of it.

“Our other problem,” Garrison said in the darkness, “is that we are still no closer to finding out the Godels' names.”

“I think I can actually help with that,” Kian said.

I looked up at him.

“I remembered something that I hadn't really thought of in a long time. The first night all of them where together again, I saw them do some magic that removed something from them. I think it must have been their names.”

“Would they actually do that?” Seth asked. “Would they take their own knowledge and names just because they found out we're here, in this time?”

Kian nodded gravely. “To keep power, they would do anything.”

“Well, where do we start?” I asked. I motioned to the pile of dust that used to be the stone. “We've looked for clues to our history, but I'm thinking it might take a long time to find.”

“This isn't something books can tell us,” Garrison said. “We have to think about who they are as people and what they would do with such a big secret.”

Coming back to our little dormitory was easier than getting into the library. Knowing that no one watched or guarded the place, we took our time, examining all the books that were hidden away in sections closed to visitors. I felt rebellious as I dragged my finger along their spines, knowing I would never be allowed to touch them otherwise.

We eventually had to make the climb down the narrow passage between buildings (I mostly fell rather than climbed) and limped back to our accommodations shortly before midnight.

Moira looked to be asleep, her back turned to the room, though a small light was still on.

The college felt like a war zone in some ways. The windows, blown out in winter, made everything cold. I climbed into bed fully clothed, wishing, inappropriately, for some company.

“We're leaving tomorrow, right?” I asked no one in particular. Now that we had gotten as much as we could from Oxford, it was time to move on. They had a lot of cleaning up to do, and I was perfectly happy to leave them to it.

“Yes,” Garrison replied. “London, right?”

“Right,” Kian replied.

“Why London?” I asked.

There was silence.

“Would you rather stay here?” Garrison asked.

“No.”

“Then London it is,” he said.

My teeth chattered. I wasn't against a warm place to sleep and streets that weren't so eerily deserted.

“And we start training again tomorrow,” Garrison said.

I could hear excitement in his voice. When Kian had forced us to do the archaic drills of sword and archery fighting, only Garrison had remotely enjoyed them.

As Seth turned off the light and the room went dark, my mind drifted to how much had happened today. I had destroyed one of the last pieces of my people's history. I found out that Seth had never meant to spend the rest of his life with me. I hadn't changed the future. He had. The knowledge was still stirring in my mind as if my past self processed it and decided what this meant.

Suddenly I felt a presence in my thoughts. It was unsettling, and I lay in the dark trying to feel it move through my mind. Was I imagining this? Kian touching my cheek suddenly was brought to the front of my mind, but I hadn't called up the memory.

My time with Kian began to flip past my memories like an open book, and I wasn't doing any of it. There was definitely a presence there. Beginning to panic, I fought back. I caught a brief glimpse of someone else's memories, but it was dark and hazy. I couldn't make anything out.

It felt similar to when Seth had gone too far when trying to locate the Godelan with his magic, and I tried to find him through his mind to bring it back. But this was not a nice presence, and it wasn't welcome. Too confused to move, I pushed the presence out of my mind and eventually felt nothing but my own thoughts again. I surfed through my memories, making sure everything was still there.

Though I knew I was alone in my own head now, I held my guard up as long as I could, worried that whatever had just helped itself to my innermost thoughts would come back. Eventually, though, the night got a hold of me.

I hovered above a fire. My initial thoughts were worry that I would burn myself, but I soon realized I was the wind again. This was a dream. I smelled smoke. I knew that through the trees the ships of the strangers still burned.

Unable to do much but hover, I listened to the stories being told around the fire. People guessed about the origin of the people from the ships, what they wanted, and why they refused to go back to where they had come from.

There were stories about men who had found islands of immortality, men who had lost their crews to sirens and were now doomed to sail alone, and other stories all involving grand adventures at sea. I had no opinion. All I knew was that there were foreigners in my land, and I could feel their every footstep as i
f
someone walked over my heart.

Suddenly I was sucked out of the dream and into darkness. I panicked and tried to scream. I could feel something pulling me. I was moving so quickly that I anticipated hitting something, and at this speed it would surely kill me. My fear made me forget that I was in a dream.

Despite feeling only like a presence, not a human being with a body, I just tried to breathe while being dragged through what felt like hot wind and freezing water at the same time. What surrounded me was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and though I was not in pain, I could not bear it any longer. I tried to scream again, but it stifled me. When I was nearing complete and utter terror, it finally came to an end.

I was resting at the top of a red, sandy cliff. The sun beat down over the landscape. Below me a prickly forest fanned out as far as the eye could see. Similar cliffs to the one I sat on dotted the landscape. I was perched next to some metal rings embedded in the earth. Each ring held a rope, though one of them had been dug in too close to the edge. As the ropes moved, the tension forced it to create more space around the stake, shaking away the earth. It would soon loosen.

Still in my ethereal dream state, I peered over the edge. At the end of all those ropes, a young man dangled. It took me a moment to realize he was climbing, which suggested he had put himself into this situation. All I could see was the top of his helmet as he struggled across the side of the cliff.

As if from far away, I began to understand that he would soon have to let go. There was nowhere for him to go, and he was struggling. And when he let go, he would fall the hundred metres back into the forest. The stake would give out.

I could do nothing but watch as he looked in vain for something to hold on to, but when he tried to reach too far, his feet slipped from their perch and he was left dangling in the air again. For a second, he floated. Then, as if feeling his mistake, he looked up. Our eyes met.