Lives of Kings

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Lives of Kings Page 13

by Lucy Leiderman


  He told me how he first met the man I had called Third Magician, and how he had used Kian to get to this world.

  As Kian talked, tears shone in his eyes and his voice quavered. I couldn’t imagine the life he had lived, and for the first time I understood what had driven him to do what he did. His actions during the entire time I had known him took on a new light. I began to appreciate how I must have confused him and frustrated his plans. When he finished, I took his hand again.

  “Ten years?” I asked. “You’ve been with the Godelan for ten years?”

  He nodded. “On and off. Fruitless searches led me away, but I would always return like to a tether. Or like a dog on a leash.”

  “Don’t say that,” I told him. “You were trapped for so long.”

  “And now I’m not,” he said. “Thanks to you. And I’ve had time to finally discover what happened to my people, and to the Romans.”

  “And?”

  Kian shrugged. “Time did what no man’s army could do. Erased all of it. It’s all gone.”

  I thought back to ten years ago. I was seven years old. Nearly eight. I was living in San Francisco with my parents, whom I was now really starting to miss.

  “Hey!” I suddenly realized something. “You said you came here ten years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “It must have been Garrison that brought you here. He started getting his memories at seven.” I thought about it some more. “If it wasn’t for him, you might not have shown up until we were all grown up. Until I had to stop that earthquake at home.”

  “I guess so,” Kian said thoughtfully. Then he looked up from the table as if he was bracing himself for bad news. “So what do you think, now that you know what happened?”

  It would be premature to decide anything, though I was doing my best to put my own biased feelings aside and see things from his perspective. He might have drastically changed my life, but I had changed his as well.

  “I think the truth helps,” I said. “It’s a start.”

  Kian nodded. “So will you tell me your story?”

  Committing to my promise, I delved into what we had done upon leaving England, leaving out all the parts about my moodiness over his departure. I told him how we got to the islands just to hide, and how fear had blocked off our magic.

  We had stifled ourselves to the point of regressing to the people we were before Kian found us, but with the knowledge that we could be so much more.

  I told him about the witch doctor and the sleeping potion. Kian gripped my hand harder and interrupted several times during this part of my story, turning into his old protective self. His questions seemed to involve repeating exactly what I had just said, as if he had misheard.

  “You went into the jungle with strangers leading you somewhere?” he asked, his voice rising.

  “Yes,” I told him, and went on with my story.

  “You drank a sleeping potion?” he asked a few minutes later, voice getting even louder.

  “Yes,” I said again.

  “Those have terrible consequences, Gwen! Have you had any lasting effects?”

  I stopped missing the overprotective Kian as soon as I realized he was back.

  “A few headaches, but I’m fine. We’re all fine,” I reassured him, leaving out the vivid dreams of the past.

  At least he quieted while I tried to recount as much of my past life as I could remember living through. And when he heard the sleeping potion had worked and worn off quickly, he relaxed a bit — until I told him about the goddess woman who appeared in the jungle.

  “You spoke with one of their gods?” Kian asked loudly.

  “Hush,” I told him, looking around at the few other customers in the shop. “Yes.”

  When I got to the part about the earthquakes and tsunami, he kept interjecting that he should have been there. My first reaction was to remind him he had no magic and he therefore couldn’t have helped, but I changed my mind and simply told him it had worked out fine. I didn’t mention anything about how I had become strong enough nor about my connecting to Seth.

  “I saw you on the news,” Kian said, showing me the first smile since I started my story. “They called you daredevils. Said you were the luckiest people on Earth.”

  Eventually, we knew we had to go and meet the others. Kian had made things as right with me as he could, given the circumstances, but I knew why he was procrastinating.

  “Relax,” I told him. “The others will understand. Seth will understand.”

  Kian nodded, and I slowly helped him limp back to the hotel.

  Though it was a cold winter night, supporting his weight on my shoulders all the way back to the hotel left me breathless. I seriously regretted kicking him, and not just because of the pain he was in.

  The lobby was deserted, so at least I was spared having to explain whom I was bringing up. We stepped into the tiny elevator and made it up to our floor, where strange noises made us both stop and listen. My stomach dropped to my feet. It sounded like a fight.

  From behind the double doors to our suite, something scratched across the floor. A glass item shattered and a thud sounded like someone was pushed into something. Only one explanation came to mind — the Godels must have found them.

  My heart beat so quickly that it ached for my friends as we rushed to the door.

  “Wait here,” I told Kian, trying to lean him against a wall.

  “No way.”

  I didn’t have time to argue. I threw open the doors and rushed in. But when we saw the intruders, we both tried to backpedal so quickly, I nearly toppled to the floor with Kian in tow. I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing.

  Our hotel room was completely trashed. Chairs and the table were smashed into kindling, cushions had been stabbed, and the stuffing littered the floor. One sofa was turned over. The remains of broken plates littered the floor and random cutlery was thrown around the room. Seth, Garrison, and Moira were backed against a wall, their hands up in surrender.

  Seth saw us. “Run!” he yelled.

  Too late.

  Three large men turned to face us. Dressed in plain brown tunics that resembled something from our past lives, they had trodded mud all over the floor from their big boots. Their faces and heads showed deep gashes, as did their arms. In fact, the wounds smelled putrid and looked torn, as if animals had been picking at them.

  Still, the most shocking thing was the random assortment of improvised weapons sticking out of them at all angles. Forks, knives, scissors, and other random sharp things stuck out everywhere. My friends had put up a fight. I spotted heavy candlesticks and picture frames on the ground, blood around the edges.

  The men advanced. I hopped across the overturned couch, but Kian couldn’t move. One of the men clumsily stumbled toward him as I dodged another, took a mirror off the wall and doubled back to smash it across the head of the man reaching for Kian’s throat. The glass shattered and cut my hands. Garrison leapt at the third man and pinned him to the ground.

  “Ugh, he stinks!”

  For a second, I thought it had worked. The man who had reached for Kian stumbled forward and collapsed across him. Kian was pinned to the floor, his bad leg rendering him helpless. At least the body on top of him went still. But after a moment, the zombie-like man woke up again and turned to me, angrier than ever.

  “What are these things?” I yelled to no one in particular.

  In the melee, Seth had grabbed the arms of one of the men and pinned them while Moira tried in vain to stab him with some scissors. It would have been quite gruesome if the man had been hurt. Defying all reason, he didn’t even bleed.

  “Zombies!” Seth yelled.

  “Not zombies,” Kian corrected. He was trying to keep one off him by kicking with his good leg. “Ghosts. Gwen, I told you that sleeping potion would have side effects!”

  I really didn’t think this was time for I-told-you-so. Garrison danced around me, leading one of them on a chase while he thought of what to
do next.

  “Ghosts?” he asked nervously, continuing to run.

  They did have the eerie quality similar to the time I had seen my former husband. Was one of my friends bringing them back from the past? No matter what we did, we couldn’t kill them.

  “Trust me,” Kian grunted, stabbing a fork into the eye of his attacker. The man, or whatever he was, didn’t even flinch. “They’re magical. Whoever is conjuring them has to will them away.”

  All three of my friends paused. It was clear from their faces that they had no idea who was doing it, just as I wouldn’t have recognized my own husband if I hadn’t seen him in my memories.

  Having the ghosts walking around and trying to hurt us didn’t leave a lot of time to think. I took a cushion and felt the fire, always burning inside of me when I had magic at my disposal, extend through my fingers and creep into the material. It was engulfed in flames in seconds.

  I had meant to distract the ghosts, holding on to the cushion so as not to bring the whole hotel down. My own hands seemed immune to the flames. But my magic had the opposite effect. The ghosts didn’t seem to notice, while my friends panicked even more and started to scream at me.

  Something strange happened. As soon as everyone was distracted enough to think that I was going to kill them all in a fiery inferno, the ghosts simply vanished. Utensils, scissors, and other knick-knacks clattered to the floor.

  I stomped on the fire I had created, and it disappeared. We all sat around in shock, gasping for breath. Moira put a hand to her chest.

  “I nearly had a heart attack!” she exclaimed.

  “Are you trying to burn this place to the ground?” Garrison yelled.

  “Well, it worked, didn’t it?” I yelled back.

  “Whose memory was that?” Moira demanded.

  “Yeah, who got attacked in the past by zombies?” Garrison added.

  Everyone quieted as I remembered my own encounter with the past. We each held stories inside of us, some of which we might never know. There had been important people to us in the past — some who had benefitted from our magic, and some who had been our victims.

  “They weren’t zombies,” I said. “When I saw my past life’s husband, he had a little statue sticking out of his neck — because I put it there. That was a memory that I felt guilty for. If those were ghosts, then whoever was remembering them killed them.”

  “I know who it was,” Kian said.

  He was confined to the floor but trying to clamber up. I went over to help him.

  “What happened to you?” Garrison asked him.

  “It’s nice to see you, too.” Kian gave a strained smile. “Gwen kicked me.”

  “Wow, Gwen,” Garrison replied without skipping a beat. “I didn’t know you were still so mad.”

  “I wasn’t!” I began. I had to keep myself from launching into an argument. Instead I turned to Kian. “So who was that?”

  I helped him onto the couch as he winced.

  Kian turned to Seth. “Gwen told me you took a sleeping draught from a woman in order to remember your past life and gain magic.”

  “It was Garrison’s idea,” Seth said immediately.

  “Of course it was,” Kian replied, pursing his lips.

  He was still unhappy about it, and I could tell he fought the instinct to start chastising us.

  “Going so deep into your magic often has consequences,” Kian said. “Just as when Gwen kept losing control and ghosts from her past that still haunt her memories began to appear. Those were yours.”

  “I don’t remember fighting them,” Seth said immediately.

  “Maybe,” Kian agreed, “but you did kill them.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Seth said immediately. “Why would I kill them?”

  “Because they’re Romans,” Kian replied calmly, as if killing a Roman was a daily occurrence. “But that’s how I know it was you. You spied among them. And though you’ve remembered a lot about your lives by now, you’ll probably never remember everything.”

  Kian spoke as if Seth and his brother were two different people. Perhaps in his mind they were. He would have never remembered the old Seth being this age. His brother was always a man to him.

  “So that was me?” Seth asked, stunned. “But I had no idea. I had no control over them.”

  “Neither did I when it happened to me,” I told him. I was trying to be reassuring, but the memory gave me chills. “The only thing you can do is take power away from it by pushing it to the back of your mind, getting distracted, and not letting your ghosts take over. I tried to do it with magic and nearly ended up killing myself.”

  While everyone calmed down enough to welcome Kian back and demand his story, I began to clean. I considered whether or not to put the utensils in the dishwasher. They were clean but had technically stabbed several corpses. In the end I opted for the heavy wash.

  Seth helped to bandage my hands and Moira’s head. She had hit it against a picture frame when one of the ghosts threw her into it. While Kian spoke, we managed to at least pile the ruined, broken things together and sweep up the mess. The ghosts had luckily taken the mud with them when they disappeared.

  The others had plenty of questions for Kian, and to his credit he answered them all as honestly as he could. When we got to the part where he grabbed me in the alley, he glossed it over and I told the others we had bumped into each other.

  “What a coincidence,” Moira remarked sarcastically.

  I ignored her.

  Having forgotten to bring food home, we ordered room service and ate on the couch, reminding me of our time in England before things got complicated.

  “So the big answer,” Garrison said. “What is it? How do we defeat them?”

  Kian put away his plate and limped from the kitchenette to the couch. He smiled. “That can wait until tomorrow,” he said. “It’s late.”

  “Where are we going tomorrow?” Moira asked.

  “The university,” he replied.

  “I called it!” Garrison clapped his hands. “I knew you were around there. How did you find us anyway? Do you have some kind of magic tracking us?”

  Kian raised his eyebrows. “You’re using my credit cards.”

  “Right. That.”

  We sat in silence for a few moments, exhaustion setting in. My palms pounded in sync with my heartbeat. The deep slices wouldn’t heal quickly. I tried to send my magic through to the pain, but it only dulled somewhat.

  As Moira and Garrison eventually left for bed, I was left alone with Kian and Seth.

  Seth made eyes at me, wordlessly asking me to leave. I understood. He wanted some time alone with his brother, with whom he had been living but hadn’t recognized. Having recently relived our past, I could only image that Seth’s connection to Kian had gotten stronger. It was a strange dynamic, their roles reversed as older and younger brothers, but as I made my own way to bed, I found falling asleep was a lot easier now that we were all together again.

  Kian briefly showed us around Dublin in the morning and then took us to the university residence where he had been staying. My palms felt as if weeks had passed when I awoke the next morning, the cuts having turned into angry red welts. Kian still limped, but at least no more ghosts had come to bother us.

  The school looked ancient and imposing. Tall stone columns were built into the façade, and dozens of windows hinted at immeasurable numbers of books.

  Kian first led us to smaller houses on the grounds to pick up his things. I noticed he was travelling with a little new suitcase, except this one was bright green, unlike his old silver one.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” I smiled. The green was exactly like my suitcase, which he had made fun of when we first met.

  We made our way into a grand hall where open staircases led to the upper floors, each decorated with its own emblem on the bannister. Polished wood lined the walls, covered the floors, and made up the decadent frames of the oil paintings of important peo
ple.

  The windows I had seen from outside allowed light to flood in and reflect off stained glass, bathing everything in a variety of colours. Still, the wood somehow seemed stifling.

  Down a hall and around a corner, we finally came to a set of double doors. We weren’t the only ones coming for an early morning visit. Entering the large library, we stared at the huge amount of books the university had collected. They sat atop the wooden shelves as if patiently waiting for someone to come and pick them up.

  A few other people had come in with us but turned left and walked into a curtained room next to the main entrance.

  “What’s in there?” I asked Kian in a hushed tone. He was about to lead us in the opposite direction.

  “A very famous old book,” Kian replied. “It is also from our land, but compared to what we need, it’s practically futuristic.”

  I didn’t have time to wonder. Kian led us into the library, and I had to tear myself away from eyeing every single spine. I was a terrible person to bring into a library or bookstore. Not only did I have to read every single title, but I also loved to touch the books. All the different textures, not to mention age and dust and jackets, made it an adventure. Even now I ran my hand along the shelves we walked past.

  Kian came to a small section comprised of only a few books, titled Early Celtic Mythology, Pre-Christian. He pulled down a few books and brought them to an old table that was pushed up against a back wall. No one was in sight.

  We huddled around as Kian opened the book to a page where a sketch depicted a woman lying next to a man. He pointed to it.

  “Goram and Eila,” he said. “Do those names sound familiar?”

  We thought about it. They did. Vaguely.

  “They were our gods,” Kian explained. “The ones from whom you get your magic. They created the first men and women. And I found the answer to beating the Godelan in the same story I had heard since I was a child. I just hadn’t made the connection.”

 

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