She shook her head. “No. No. I don’t matter.”
“You matter to me,” I said.
“Austin, I love you, you know I do, but … I’m nothing. We’re nothing. The kingdom is at stake. The people. Their freedom. The queen.”
A high, noble enthusiasm flushed her cheeks, and she was beautiful. With the fresh hope and passion stirring her, she took hold of the locket that even now hung between her breasts. She lifted it to her lips and kissed it fervently.
Curious, I reached out and took the locket from her. She looked at me, her eyes shining.
“Is this the queen?” I asked her.
She nodded. She looked fierce and proud. “I’ve never taken it off. Not once. Even when my husband suspected what it was. I’ve worn it always. I’ve always known she would come back to us. And now she will. You’ll bring the talisman to the Eleven Lands. The emperor will come. Oh Austin, he has to come. He loves her. And he’ll restore her to the throne. The kingdom will be free again.”
While she spoke—her voice trembling with love and patriotism—I took the locket in my hand and pressed the button on its side. The locket sprang open to reveal the miniature portrait within.
“Oh my God!” I said. I sat up quickly, propped on one hand, holding the locket before me with the other.
“What? Austin, what?” Betheray said.
But I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I just went on staring—gaping—at the portrait in the locket’s frame. It was the queen, all right. No one could think that she was anyone but the queen. She was young—in her thirties—but everything about her—the golden crown around her golden hair, the expression on her face, the look in her eyes—everything spoke of majesty and serenity and greatness. In the facing half of the locket, a coat of arms was engraved into the gold: a sword across an open hand. A motto: Let Wisdom Reign and Each Man Go His Way.
My gaze moved from the portrait to the words and back to the portrait.
“What is it?” Betheray asked me again.
But I shook my head. How could I explain? How could I tell her that the face in the locket and the face in the photo in Sean Gunther’s phone were one and the same?
Queen Elinda was Ellen Evermore, the author of Another Kingdom.
HOW COULD IT HAPPEN? WHAT DID IT MEAN? WAS IT—was she—the link between these two worlds, LA and Galiana? Had she somehow created this bizarre disturbance in the fundamental truth of things that had me ping-ponging back and forth between one reality and the other?
Staring at the portrait in the locket, the same face I had seen in Gunther’s phone, I had the sense that I had stumbled onto the explanation for this whole insane experience. I couldn’t figure it out, not just then, but the logic of it seemed to be all around me, an amorphous cloud of unconnected fact waiting to resolve itself into an answer.
But there was no time to work through it now.
Betheray took the locket back from me. She snapped it shut and held it against her chest. “It’s late. If Sir Aravist doesn’t send word to Eastrim by morning, my husband will come for us here. We have to be gone. We have to hurry,” she said.
And we did.
NOW I WAS dressed in the plain brown clothes of a stable hand, and she was draped in a great cape lined with ermine. Her hood shadowed her face so that she could’ve been any fine lady with any attendant traveling beside her. Lord Iron had taken care to leave us with no horses. We were going to have to travel on foot to reach Eastrim, a journey of days. This was our disguise.
We left the house and hurried away together through the moonlit night, the pile of Netherdale looming behind us. We came into that haunted garden where the shrubs and flowers seemed to have died of some poison in the air. We were halfway across it when I heard an ominous sound. I took Beth’s arm to stop her. We both stood still amidst the scraggly, barren stems and branches. Staring into the moonlight, we listened.
Betheray whispered, “Horses!”
I listened a little longer. I shook my head. A small hope rose in me. “No. Just one horse.”
Then I saw it. The black stallion thundering down from the ridge of the hill and crossing the valley to us. It seemed a thing out of legend or dreams—a literal night mare charging out of the invisible imaginary into the real world.
“It’s mine!” I said, surprised—and relieved beyond telling.
The moon was rising up the arc of the sky, and all the dark was gray. As the stallion drew near, I could make out the shape of my rodent friend, Maud, sitting on the saddle pommel.
The horse drew close and stood above us. The rodent-woman looked down at us, her eerily human face disdainful as ever. But I was crazy glad to see her.
“I assumed you’d deserted me,” I said.
“I assumed you’d be dead by now,” she told me.
“It was your faith in me that kept me going.”
She snorted. I grabbed hold of the pommel beneath her and tried to swing myself up into the saddle. Eventually I made it.
“For crying out loud,” the rat-girl muttered.
“Oh, shut up,” I said.
I stretched my hand down to Betheray. Maud averted her eyes as if she were embarrassed to see such a grand lady take the hand of the likes of me. But the lady did. I swung her up into the saddle behind me. She slipped her arms around my waist.
“Don’t bother to introduce us,” said the rodent.
“Lady Betheray, this is Maud,” I said. “She’s … what are you anyway?”
“I told you, long story.”
“Hello, Maud,” said Betheray gently.
The mutant rat nodded, mollified. I snapped the reins and shouted, “Ho!”
Off we rode toward Eastrim.
THE MOON ROSE high and the blighted land grew bright. The tortuous shadows of ruined towers appeared in the distance and then passed by. We cantered I don’t know how long, and after a while, I saw the dark mass of the forest on the ridge to the right of us.
At that point, my friend the rodent-woman began to glow again. That rainbow confetti of light came off her and then quickly faded away.
Over the noise of the horse’s rapid fire hoofbeats, the squirrel-girl called to me: “Pull up.”
I drew back on the reins, and the stallion slowed.
“I have to leave you here,” she said in her high buzzy voice. I looked at her, surprised and uncertain. But she added only, “Tauratanio …”
Then, before I could ask more, she leapt off the horse, flying, four legs akimbo, till she hit the earth and scampered away through the grass.
I sat astride the stallion and watched her go. I could see her glowing from time to time as she headed for the forest. Then she was lost in the dark and the grass and the shadow of the trees. I was sorry to see it. It felt as if more than just some odd creature had left me. The whole power of the forest and its magic seemed to have been withdrawn from our endeavor. I told myself I was just imagining it.
“It’s all right,” Lady Betheray said—as if she could hear me worry. “The forest king is always with us.”
I sighed. “Let’s hope.”
I spurred the stallion and we were off again.
THE MOON HAD reached the top of its arc and begun descending through the white-washed sky when the city of Eastrim appeared ahead of us on a not-too-distant hill. The place seemed very quiet in the night, but I remembered the guards patrolling the walls, and I knew they would have orders to watch for me.
I slowed the horse.
“Won’t the gates be shut?” I asked.
“Approach from the south,” said Lady Betheray. “I have allies there.”
I did as she said, but it was nerve-wracking, let me tell you. As the city’s stone walls rose darkly above us, as the shapes of the guards became visible moving along the castellated battlements, I felt my mouth go dry and my stomach go sour.
I dismounted and led the horse by the reins, hoping to appear more like her servant. We came closer to the wall and then …
“Who goes
there? Name yourself or die!”
The shout made me pull up under the walls. I could see the large, bearded guard looking down on us from directly above. I could see the shape of his spear and the shapes of the two men coming to flank him on either side with bows drawn and arrows pointed at my chest.
My immediate instinct was to turn and hoof it out of there. That’s what Los Angeles Austin would have done for sure. But me—hey, I had never been anything but Betheray’s hero. So I held my ground more or less heroically.
Lady Betheray called back to the guard over my head. “We only want to go our way.”
I remembered the words in her locket—the words Maud had told me to whisper to the blacksmith who had given us the stallion. I understood now that this was the queen’s password.
And it seemed to work. The atmosphere on the battlements seemed to change. The guard with the spear murmured to the archers. The archers lowered their bows.
“Are they your friends?” I whispered nervously.
“We’re about to find out,” she whispered back. “Go to the door beside the gate.”
I tugged the horse forward. With every step, my fear grew stronger. I imagined a dozen scenarios of sudden disaster. Each scenario ended with me and Betheray dead in the dust. But at the same time, I was intensely aware of Beth’s vulnerability up there in the saddle, of her ladylike frailty in the face of all these thuggish men. I couldn’t have run away if I wanted to. I know this because I wanted to and I couldn’t.
As we neared the large gate, I spotted the smaller door she’d told me about. I brought the stallion right up close to it and stopped. The horse nosed the earth as we waited in the black shadow of the wall.
My breath caught as a bolt was thrown back with a loud clunk. The door came open. I swallowed hard. A guard emerged, the one who had held the spear. He towered over me, almost a giant, with a giant black beard beneath grim eyes. Instead of a spear, he gripped a torch in his hand now. He held the flame out toward us. He studied my face, his expression grim.
With no urging from me, the stallion shifted. He turned sideways to the guard, showing him Betheray. Beth drew back the hood of her cape—not much, just a little, just enough. I saw the guard’s eyes narrow as he examined her, his face flickering under orange torchlight. It was impossible to read his expression, impossible to guess whether he would let us pass or sound the alarm.
An endless moment passed and then another moment just as endless. Finally the guard stood aside.
“Let wisdom reign,” he murmured.
I led the horse through the doorway into the city.
ONCE WE WERE out of sight of the wall, I hoisted myself back into the saddle. In tense whispers, Lady Betheray guided me around the edges of the sleeping streets and up the hill toward the castle. A cold mist, eerie with moonlight, gathered around us as we climbed an old cobbled path. The stallion began to make nervous, snorting noises. I could feel the beast’s reluctance in the movement of his flanks against my thighs.
“What is this place?” I whispered.
“Don’t you recognize it?” Betheray whispered back.
Weirdly, I did recognize it then. It was that strange sensation again of remembering what I did not remember. There were events that were not in my mind one moment, and the next moment, they were there, and I knew: this was the old castle cemetery where she and I had met in secret, where we had conspired to restore the queen, where we had fallen in love.
It was a field of monuments and steles and crypts from Galiana’s ancient days. The place now stood abandoned and untended, the grass high where there was grass, the earth dank where there was only earth. The gravestones were moldy and slanted and so antique that whatever words had once been on them were now nearly worn away. Elsewhere in the mist, faceless saints and mourning angels stared at us empty eyed as we rode past in the silver darkness. Now and then—most terribly—as the horse snorted and tossed its head and stalled and then went on—the luminescent mist seemed to swirl into a drifting shape like a woman or a man. A clammy breeze would rise and the mist would thin and spread and the shape would soon be gone.
“What was that?” I asked the first time it happened. And when Betheray didn’t answer, I asked, “Was it a ghost?”
“An emanation,” she told me. “Don’t you remember?”
And just like that, I did remember, though I didn’t know how I knew. These shapes were shadows of the dead—those dead who lingered beneath the earth and yearned to live again. Their yearning manifested itself in these brief misty exhalations of being. They searched the air for life. They fed on souls.
The emanations kept appearing as we moved slowly across the field of graves. The sight of them sent a deep chill through me. I could feel the ache of the dead’s desire as it shaped the mist, then sank away, unsatisfied. I remembered—remembered suddenly in chaotic flashes—how I would wait here for Betheray, hunkered in the chill mist with the yearning of the dead all around me. An unpleasant experience—very. All in all, I sided with the black stallion: I wanted to get away from here as much as the horse did.
“Here,” Lady Betheray said.
The stallion stopped, still fretting and huffing steam. Lady Betheray took my hand and slipped off the saddle, dropping soundlessly to the ground.
“Follow me,” she said softly.
I dismounted. By the time my feet touched the muddy earth, Beth was already gliding away from me in the twisting mist. I saw misty tendrils take the shape of hands and reach for her, but they could not seize her. She passed through them fearlessly, and they broke apart and were gone.
I hesitated where I was a moment, holding the horse’s reins, uncertain where to tie him. Finally, I simply patted his flanks.
“Wait here,” I commanded softly.
I released the reins. The stallion stood very still. Then his whole body stiffened, alert. He tilted his head in an unmistakable posture of listening. A second later and he snorted, lifted his head as if in a gesture of goodbye—and then trotted off through the mist the way we’d come.
“Wait! Stop!” I hissed after him desperately. How would we ever escape from here without the stallion?
But the damned horse never looked back. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I couldn’t blame him.
“Hurry!” came Lady Betheray’s whisper.
She was now a mere shadow in the heart of the fog, getting fainter by the second. I could see the mist making figures all around her. I could see the figures waiting to grab me when I came.
I drew an unsteady breath and went after this brave lady.
I CAUGHT UP with her. We moved through the mist, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder. A little ways and we came upon a tomb.
To me, it looked like nothing so much as a piece of scenery from a gothic horror film. It was a small house-like structure of streaked gray stone, gloomy and forbidding. It was fronted by a columned portico. Two cowled figures of bronze flanked the bronze doorway, which was itself cowled in fog. The morbid statues stood taller than me. Their heads were slightly lowered to reveal only ghostly emptiness underneath their hoods. The door between them had been carved with burial scenes which were green with verdigris and faded almost beyond recognition—they were just a suggestion of ceremony and grief. The inscription on the pediment was barely visible: Here End All Things That Live.
Lady Betheray, still moving fearlessly, approached this grim place. She lifted her hand and let her slim, white fingers play over the surface of the door. She found the spot she wanted and pressed it. The door clicked and swung in with the cheesiest creak of its hinges. As corny as the sound effect was, I have to admit it filled me with dread.
Lady Betheray slipped through the opening. I swallowed hard and followed her.
It was dark inside—black dark away from the moonlit mist. It was a moment or two before I could make out Beth’s figure.
“Come on,” she said.
“I can barely see my—”
Before I finished, there
was a scraping noise, stone on stone. A spark. A blinding flame. She had a torch. I remembered: it was stored here for use during our trysts.
The flame illuminated a dreadful house of bones. Skeletons grinned at me out of low niches. Carved faces stared from the tops of tombs. Even Beth, in the firelight, in her cape, beneath her hood, seemed another monument, white faced, staring. It was almost startling when she moved again, as if she were a statue come to life.
She went to stand by a marble sarcophagus. Raising her torch with one hand, she touched a mechanism beneath its lid with the other. The lid sprang ajar. She raised it.
“Hold this.” She handed me the torch.
As I watched with a feeling of mingled awe and disgust—awe at her courage and disgust at what I knew I was going to have to do—Lady Betheray climbed into the coffin. As her hooded head lowered out of sight, I moved to the edge of the box. My gorge rising, I looked down.
There was an open trap door in the bottom. Through the hole, I saw the gleam of Beth’s living eyes looking back up at me. A superstitious aversion filled me. All the same, wincing with discomfort, I put my hand on the stone edge of the sarcophagus, took a deep breath, and climbed in.
Gripping the stone, I lowered myself through the trap until my feet found purchase. I was on a narrow, winding flight of stone stairs. Betheray was already descending below me. I carried the torch down after her.
Despite what Beth had said to me in the graveyard above, I was not prepared for what I saw down there. Nothing could have prepared me for such ghoulish malevolence.
WE STOOD IN an underground passage walled with dirt and stone. Lady Betheray led the way, and I followed close behind her with the torch. My eyes were so wide they must have looked like lanterns. I was flabbergasted by what I was seeing.
There were dead men down here. Dead men, and women too. Not skeletons as in the crypt above or “emanations” as in the mist, but figures of solid darkness—lost souls. As we hurried through the dank corridor, through a suffocating stench that came off the moldy stones, I caught sight of these creatures every few steps or so. I’d see one in the corner of my eye. I’d gasp and swing around, the torch held out in front of me. The thing would just stand there, staring back at me, holding me with its gaze. I would smell the rank smell of the grave on it. I would start to make out its features. And I would feel its hunger. That was the worst of it—the hunger. It came off the male dead as a kind of tremulous aggression and off the female dead as a hateful mockery of seduction. They wanted me—the men and women both. They wanted my life, my spirit, like a thief wants money. I could feel the men trying to seize it from me by force. I could feel the women trying to lure it out of me. It didn’t matter how they did it. They would do whatever worked. They just wanted it, wanted the life-stuff of me, wanted to make my life their own and return with it to the world while I was left behind here to hunger forever as they did now.
Another Kingdom Page 25
