“It looks like one,” Garrison agreed.
“There’s a place here that’s about a thousand years old,” Moira said.
“Kian’s still a thousand years older than that,” Garrison reminded her. He was right. I sat next to a relic.
“It’s not a competition,” I told him.
“But if it was,” Garrison said, “Kian would win.”
All of a sudden the sound of rain hitting the windows changed. The difference wasn’t obvious at first, but the entire room quieted as many voices stopped to listen. Then the noise got louder until it sounded like rocks were smashing against the windows, and the glass broke.
Screams filled the room, half drowned out by the rattle of ice falling from the sky. Broken glass showered down. The scratching of the long benches as everyone scrambled for cover at once was barely audible, even in the big room.
The five of us ducked under the table. Using magic hadn’t even occurred to me — I was too surprised. As we put our arms over our heads, I couldn’t help but feel a little useless. One of the things that had smashed the windows rolled near the table.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. I had to touch it to see it was real. I crawled toward it without even looking where I was going.
“Gwen!” Seth called.
“Gwen, come back!” Kian yelled.
I got distracted and looked back at them. My hand landed directly on a piece of broken glass, and I hissed in pain. Still, I managed to retrieve the thing that had fallen through the window and retreat back under the table.
The cold soothed my hand. Seth helped me get the piece of glass out of my palm while I handed the ice ball to Kian.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It looks like freakishly large hail,” Seth said.
Kian passed the piece around to the others. It was eerily round, as if someone had formed and solidified a snowball and then sent it crashing down to earth.
“Oh no!” Moira pointed out to the aisle.
There hadn’t been enough space under the tables for everyone. Some students who had gotten stuck and lost in the dining hall during the chaos tried to shield themselves as best as possible. But the hail kept pummelling the room as it broke through the windows, and I counted at least two people unconscious.
“Is it them?” I asked no one in particular. “Are they trying to kill us? Do they know we’re here?”
Seth shook his head. “I can sense magic in this, but it’s like it’s an echo of something,” he yelled over the noise. “A chain reaction.”
Moira nodded.
“Garrison.” I grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him close to me. “See those paintings? We’re going to use them to cover the windows while the others get everyone out. Okay?”
Garrison briefly stuck his head out from under the table to look around at the paintings. “You mean the very expensive, historic-looking ones?”
“Yes!” I yelled.
I tried to block out the noise and reached for my magic. To my surprise, it was right at the edge of my senses, like something in my peripheral vision. I still couldn’t direct it without gestures, though, so I swept my arms out from under the table as if I were gathering a pile of cushions, dragging the paintings from their long-held places on the wall. Garrison did the same as our friends watched nervously for the instant the chaos died down.
With hail the size of my fist raining down on people’s heads, the chaos kept us from notice. The canvases provided surprisingly strong resistance against the assault from outside, though, and it wouldn’t take long for people to notice the strange behaviour of the paintings and look for its source.
When the noise dissipated somewhat and people began to come out from under tables, albeit hesitantly, Kian, Seth, and Moira led the way out of the dining hall. It didn’t take a lot of convincing. Garrison and I went last, letting the paintings fall to the ground behind us as the hail chased us out.
In the end, our first day in Oxford wasn’t ideal. My hands throbbed again where my old wounds had barely healed. The weather kept us in our room the whole time, because even though the common area windows had been smashed in and it was freezing and destroyed, our own room’s windows faced the other direction and were fine.
We lay on our bunks, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the strange weather to cease. There wasn’t much else we could do since we couldn’t take on the whole sky. Whatever the Godelan were doing was having effects around the whole world, upsetting nature and putting everyone at risk. And all we could do was wait it out.
My strange dream circled over and over in my head. The scenario of the burned-out ships hadn’t come up in any text I read about the tribes in ancient Scotland, England, or Wales. I was just as clueless as I had been in my dream.
I looked across the room to see that only Kian wore a smile as he lay on the bottom bunk with his arms folded behind his head. I climbed down and went over.
The events of the day were so unexpected that our adrenaline rush had been followed by a total crash. Seth and Garrison were passed out, while Moira had fallen asleep while reading. It was barely evening. The sound of sirens passed by our building every few minutes.
“What are you so happy about?” I asked.
“I finally feel like I helped,” Kian replied. “You were great today. You have your magic. You have your memories. And you’re not in the hands of the Godelan. That’s the best-case scenario — it’s all I could hope for.”
I couldn’t help but smile in return. “Don’t get too excited,” I told him. “You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
“That’s tomorrow,” Kian said seriously. “Not today.”
I was hesitant to return to my bunk but forced myself to walk away. Sleeping with him next to me the previous night made my dreams and panic not seem so bad. He was right — it was all about the company.
In the morning we found the fanciest library I had ever seen. Surrounded by a courtyard, its windows had been shuttered to keep the light off the precious old books inside. Because of this, it was also spared from the hail.
At least nothing was falling from the sky today — it was overcast, but I’d take cloudy dryness over baseball-sized hail any day.
A narrow set of steps led us to a desk, where an elderly woman sat typing slowly into a computer that looked as old as I was. I was beginning to think that everyone hired at the university had not changed jobs in about fifty years. She politely asked us what we wanted. We told her. She said no.
“I’m sorry,” Garrison said, turning on the charm. “We travelled a long way to see this specific item.”
“I’m sorry, too,” the woman said primly. “There is no one to show you in today, and there are far too many of you anyway.”
Just then a man came in behind us. Dressed in a tweed coat and shiny round glasses, he was a walking library stereotype.
“It’s all right, Margaret,” he told the woman from the door. “I don’t mind visitors today.”
They exchanged brief pleasantries, making us feel invisible, though we stood awkwardly between them. I found out his name was Roger and he wasn’t supposed to be in, but he had come to check on the books. He put a hand to his chest in exaggerated relief when he found out that nothing was broken. Apparently half the campus was smashed to pieces.
“Hello,” Roger said, turning back to us. “I am one of the curators here; how may I help you?”
“We’re looking for a text,” Kian said. “It would have been something from Scotland, about two thousand years ago.”
Rogers gave out a short laugh. When he saw we weren’t joking, his expression turned to pity. “I’m afraid there’s no such thing,” he told us. “Written language did not exist in that area until Christian times, and even then we’re looking at twelve hundred years in the past. Maximum.”
Kian frowned. “We were told it would be here.”
“But they did warn us it would be unreadable,” I added, trying to be helpful.
R
oger stared at us for moment. I could practically see the wheels turning in his mind. “Come with me,” he said finally.
Before we could agree, he led the way through a narrow door and up some stairs to a floor where manuscripts lined shelves in the thousands. We hurried to keep up with him until he came to a long desk with glass on top like a sneeze guard and handed us gloves.
“Please put these on,” he told us. “And do not touch anything.”
“What’s this screen for?” Garrison asked.
“To preserve the manuscripts,” Roger answered.
“Reminds me of a sneeze-proof window at a salad bar,” Seth murmured quietly enough for Roger not to hear.
The man disappeared for over ten minutes while we sat awkwardly in stiff white gloves, afraid to touch anything for fear that it would just turn to dust if we breathed on it. At least that was the impression given to us by the way the library protected its manuscripts.
Finally, Roger reappeared. But to our surprise, he carried fairly modern-looking white pages with some scribbles on them.
“I only have one item like what you describe,” he said. “And it’s not quite a text. It’s a slab of rock in our basement. There are only hieroglyphs on it. Completely unreadable.”
Roger laid the white printer pages in front of us. They looked like an art project I had done in school many times as a child. You lay a page over something with texture and then run a pencil over it until an imprint of the image begins to come up. Except now, instead of the leaves and pennies I had used, these images were far more intricate. Animals and decorative spirals were lined up and repeated in an order that was too neat to be meaningless.
“Where did this slab come from?” Garrison asked.
As Roger arranged the pages in front of us under the sneeze screen, even though they were new, I was watching Kian. Surely he would be the best person to be able to read this. But he only squinted at the drawings as if trying to remember something that had escaped him.
“It was an old discovery,” Roger said. “From the eighteenth century, when the north was quite in fashion. There was a lot of funding invested in learning about the culture there, and they found this just shy of the border between England and Scotland, on the west coast.”
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.
Chapter Eleven
“Kill 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.
Lives of Kings Page 15
