The Eyes of a King (53 page)

A long way away, Ryan looked up from his desk. He stared out into the dark, his hand on the silver eagle at his neck. Then he let it go again. He bent his head over the page and signed his name, Cassius Donahue, above the capitals HIS MAJESTY KING CASSIUS OF MALONIA. The ink glittered. He pushed the pile of letters away and again stared out over the city.

Aldebaran had said he would forget England soon enough; everyone did, once they left it. And England had blurred to him already, like a memory from his childhood or a familiar dream. But that was not the same as forgetting. He could not forget.

I
was trying to strangle someone. I could not see his face; he was just a soldier. We were struggling on the ground, and in a circle around me were faces I knew—Grandmother and Stirling, Maria, Father Dunstan, even Aldebaran—all of them shouting at me to stop. And I wanted to stop—I was trying to—but my hands would not release him. I could not force them to let him go. Then I was trying desperately to wake up. I knew that if I could wake myself in time, I would be able to stop myself from killing him. But my eyes would not open either. Ahira’s face was close to mine, bleeding white and staring at me lifeless.

I woke suddenly and almost threw up with fear. I would not sleep again after that dream. I got up and stood in front of the window. There were still stars in the lightening sky, and the moon was weak and pale. Everything was silver outside. The first frost of autumn had come that night, creeping onto the roofs of
the city and into the shadows of the houses. I stood at the window until the sun rose.

I had dreamed of the same thing many times and would dream about it many times again. But I remember how I woke that morning, because that was the day you came back.

There was a knock on the door soon after the building began to stir. I had not heard anyone come up from downstairs; I had been thinking and had forgotten that I was here at all. Grandmother was sleeping, so I went to open it. Standing on the step was a gray man. He smiled, and when he did, he looked like a skull. “Leonard? You must be Leonard.” I didn’t answer. “The last time I saw you, you were hardly more than a baby.”

I just looked at you. Then you took a book from your pocket and said, “Is this yours?”

The smile and the formal greeting were just a pretense. You knew about us. I stared at the book in silence. A black leather book, shabby and scratched now, and fastened together roughly down the spine with glue and steel staples. “I tried to put it back as it was,” you said. “But even the great ones cannot mend what is broken.”

I took it from you and turned over the pages. They were all there, some of them faded now and others muddy and torn. “Do you want this back?” you said. “Should I have brought it?”

I did not answer, but I let you in. In the next room I heard Grandmother stir. A moment later she was hurrying through the door, still in her nightdress, saying something about Harold and Arthur in the same distant way she always did. Only this time it was not madness, because you were really there. “Margaret,” you said, and then she was crying and throwing her arms around you, and you were saying, “It’s all right. It’s all
right.” But she would not let you go. You said, “Margaret, it’s all right. I’m back to stay now.” And I think you were crying too, but I am not certain. I understand why you were crying, Aldebaran, if you were. Grandmother is the same to you as Stirling was to me.

When Grandmother had gone to lie down, much later, you turned back to me. I was still clutching that book in my hand; I had not put it down since you had given it back. You sat down at the table and called me over. I put the book down and sat awkwardly opposite you. “I have missed too much,” you said. “I have missed your whole life. Leo, tell me what has happened here since I have been gone.”

The voice in my head was shouting. But I didn’t really answer. I just stared at you. Then I realized you could hear that voice.

“What is it?” you said. I shook my head. “If you will not speak, write. I want to know.”

You got me to write. Maybe it was because I was scared of you—I don’t know. Maybe you used your powers. I hated you for it then. Everyone was trying to save me: Anna, who had sent me back home from the hills; Maria, picking me up from the floor when I cried; even Grandmother, as much as she could. And you. Were you the Voice that spoke to me across the worlds, that brought me back from Ositha and told me stories of another place? Aldebaran, you never confirmed it, but I am almost certain that you were. And now you had searched the Royal Gardens for every page of that story and gathered them and put it back together. You knew about me, even if only faintly. You always had.

“What has happened, Leo?” you said. “I have been away a
long time. I should have been here; I did nothing to help you. And Stirling—”

You ran your hand over your face and kept it there. And then I wrote,
I have done a very bad thing. Please let me tell you. I can speak to no one.

You looked at me in silence. I was startled at what I had written. I did not want to tell you this; I closed my eyes and prayed that I would not. I had swallowed this secret, and it had become unreal, because the days had passed and I had not told it. I was afraid of what would happen if I told a single person what I had done. But I had to, suddenly. I picked up the pencil again and wrote.

You sat looking at my words for a long time without speaking. And then you glanced up at me, and I thought I saw the same fear in your eyes that must have been in mine. You shook your head. “Leo, I—” And then you handed the paper back to me. “Tell me everything from the beginning. I cannot understand; Leo, explain to me why you did it.”

I did not take the paper from you. I opened the book instead. There were gaps in the writing—there had always been—enough pages to begin to explain. Without knowing what I was doing, I started to write on the first page. I began when I thought all this began: with the snow. Four months back—that was all it was. You watched me write. Then, after a while, when I could not see how to go on, I put the book aside.

“I had no idea how you were suffering,” you said. “I was so far away from the real world that I could hardly see. Leo, the struggles you must have had, both of you, since Stirling—”

It is not your fault
, I wrote in the margin of the newspaper.
We cannot blame you for being exiled.

“I blame myself,” you said. “I was always in a dangerous situation; I got what had been coming to me for a long time. I never thought Margaret would be left alone, or that you would …” You looked at me as though I was your own son. “If only I had been here. If only—”

Then I did not want to talk about that anymore.
Tell me about the book
, I wrote instead.

You went to the window and spoke to me from there, without turning. “Those stories,” you said, “the stories you wrote in the book—they were the things I tried to show you. I was far away, but I thought you and Stirling would like to see into another place. An English fairy tale, if you like. I wanted to speak to you.” You shook your head then, sadly. “Perhaps it was useless. I have failed you all; I should have been here. All I could do was try to show you what my own life was like. And I did not give you the words. The words are your own.”

I opened the book and looked at the handwriting properly then. It was half mine and half someone else’s. It cut deep into the paper like my own had, long before, when I used to go to school, but it sloped forward also. “Here,” you said, and wrote a few words yourself on the margin of the newspaper. The slope of the letters was yours.

Why did you throw it away, Leo?
you had written.

I thought about that.
What did an English fairy tale mean to me anymore?
I wrote eventually.

And then I thought of what Maria had asked me.
Was it real?
I wrote.
Did these things really happen in England?

You shook your head. “I don’t know. It is hard to explain. Doesn’t anything begin to look like a dream after it is past?”

I shook my head at that. Not to me. To me what was past
was still here. It was not dead and gone. The night when I shot Ahira, the moment when I came back and Stirling was lying there so still, Grandmother crying and crying with mud on her face. All those things were real. And the days before that, the days when things were still all right. When we walked to your false gravestone and the sun shone on the east of the city, or that day with Maria and Stirling and the baby when they thought we would go on a picnic. These things were still real.

After you had left, when darkness fell, I picked up the book again and went on writing. You had asked me to explain, and I had started something now that I could not set aside.

M
aria goes to confession every week. She told me once that I should go. She did not know what I had done, but she knew there was something. She could always tell. Anyway, I never went there, to kneel in the darkness of the church and repent of my sins. But I wrote in the book; I went on until it was quite dark, and rose again the next morning and went on writing. I went on even after the winter set in, and through the spring, and into the next summer. Every time I ran out of space, I would skip forward to the next blank page. I didn’t read what I had written. I just went on. I counted the days by the words I wrote, and learned to survive.

I went on writing even after you had lost all hope of an explanation and stopped asking me, even after everyone had accepted that I
did not speak. Everything found its way into the book—the old words that I had read to Stirling, the recent dreams that I had to write again from memory, my own life. Aldebaran’s story, Anna’s, the prince’s, and mine.

I stopped thinking about England after that day you came back, Aldebaran. In the end, it did not matter to me anymore. I could no longer find the magic that had once surrounded that place. The prince’s return passed me by. Whoever ruled the country, Stirling was still gone—Ahira too. But I did not say that to you.

Because I knew it like a theory: things had changed. Even if the revolution came too late for me, it altered things. Maria’s father returned from the border. His leg was damaged forever and he was no longer smiling, but he is alive now, not buried out there in that graveyard at Ositha. Anselm goes to Sacred Heart Infant School rather than the West Kalitzstad Military Academy—and even if they have bullet marks in the outside walls and too few books, he will learn to read and write, not fire a gun. They closed down the high-security schools and sent the children with powers home. If I had wanted to, I could have trained in magic. Grandmother grew frailer, but no one came to take her away. She cannot walk far now, so sometimes we carry her old chair down to the yard. It is still a dark place. The yard has not changed; nothing about this building has. They say when the king returned, he planned to put running water in all the houses. He has not done that yet.

And they opened the Royal Gardens. People who are better at living than me, better at forgetting, go there for picnics.