Lives of Kings

by Lucy Leiderman

  “Then what’s the point of the stone?” Seth asked. “We have to be able to get around that somehow.”

  We continued arguing until hunger forced us to seek out food in what seemed like a storm-ravaged town. Most places were damaged in some way, but a few tucked-away pubs had been spared the wrath of hail. We took our food to go in order to observe the library and find a way to get into it after it was closed.

  “The Godelan all want different things,” Kian said while simultaneously trying to eat a sandwich and sneak around the back of the library.

  “Like what?” asked Garrison.

  I was behind Kian and saw him shrug. Garrison led the way as if well versed in sneaking.

  “Stone, the silver-haired one, wants power. Now. He likes how much of it he would have if he could be the most powerful person in this world,” Kian said. “Donald, that’s the one who isn’t Magician, he holds a grudge against the Romans and our tribe for letting them win. He wants the world back to the way it was.”

  “And Magician?” asked Garrison. “The man you came with?”

  I saw his pace faltered. The man I had called Third Magician, the one who looked out of place in the modern world, had caused him all of this heartache. When Kian had rescued me from them, he broke free from their hold on him. Still, talking about the man who had tricked him away from his family was hard.

  “I don’t know what he wants,” Kian said. “He doesn’t know much of this world, but he’s obsessed with status. He’ll side with whoever will win. I’m not surprised they tried to kill you instead of going after you again — they probably couldn’t agree on what to do with you.”

  “But killing us can mean we’ll be back again,” I reminded him. “That’s not ideal.”

  “No,” Kian replied, “but they really can’t agree on anything.”

  “You mean you think the other two will fight with each other?” Seth asked.

  “There is no way they can both have what they want,” Kian reasoned.

  “But they needed our magic,” I said quietly. “What will they do without it?”

  “My guess,” Kian said, finishing his lunch, “is that they’ve used a considerable amount of their power setting the destruction of the Earth in motion and, probably, hiding their names. They must be low on magic — that’s why they don’t want to face you anymore. Or,” he paused, “it could be the other thing, but I don’t want to think about that.”

  I caught his arm, forcing him to stop and face me.

  “What other thing?” I asked urgently.

  “Don’t worry, Gwen,” he told me reassuringly. “I spent a while watching them, and I don’t think it’s the case.”

  When I continued to stare at him, silently demanding answers, he relented.

  “They could have captured one of your kind and used their magic,” he said.

  Damn. The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.

  “But we would know. They’d be much more powerful. Your magic is pure.”

  I don’t know how much more powerful they could get. Every time I saw a TV, it played images from some disaster around the world. They had caused the tsunami, seemingly effortlessly. What would they do if they had even more power? The droughts in Africa had caused death tolls that I couldn’t even fathom.

  Continents were slowly being submerged under water. Staving off a tsunami had taken almost everything I had, and it included surrendering to my old self. I was starting to feel anything short of giving up on modern Gwen would not be enough to save anyone.

  Kian’s eyes read my face as if he could see every thought that ran through my mind. He brushed the hair away from my face, and I tried to push all of my worries down, focusing on that sensation. I hadn’t even thought of the Godelan capturing someone we hadn’t reached yet. It created a whole new anxiety inside me.

  “Hey, are you coming?”

  Kian and I both jumped. Seth had rounded the corner.

  “Garrison found a way up through the roof,” Seth said, and then disappeared around the corner.

  I sighed. I could only handle one problem at a time. I made a mental note to speak with Seth tonight before our little adventure into the world of breaking and entering.

  On the rainy weekday, I realized we didn’t really need to sneak around. Any students left on the campus after the storm had classes far way. Still, Garrison’s way into the library was spy-worthy.

  He stood in an impossibly narrow alleyway filled with pebbles that were nearly washed away by rain. Piles of garbage, and I was sure a few carcasses, were trapped in the alley as well. The other wall belonged to a college. He squinted into the sky as he observed the climb.

  “Easy,” Garrison said. “The walls are close enough for us to —” He climbed instead of finishing his sentence. With his back pressed against the library and his feet climbing up the wall of the college next door, he went up a few feet. There was only about eighty feet to go until the roof.

  “Why don’t we just blow in a window or something?” Moira asked, crossing her arms over her chest, annoyed.

  Seth and Garrison both ignored her.

  “We don’t want to create more trouble,” I told her. “If it looks like someone broke in, they’ll probably check to see what’s gone or broken and will find what we did faster. It would be better if we are gone by the time they figure it out.”

  Moira made a sound between acquiescence and further annoyance. Kian shot me a glance of confusion. He hadn’t witnessed her transformation quite like we had — especially how I had, for that matter.

  “That’ll do it,” Garrison said, jumping down to where he started.

  He walked back to our dorm with a limp, and I hoped it wasn’t a testament to how hard the wall was to climb.

  The afternoon quickly passed into evening while I worried about Seth, Kian, my future friends I hadn’t even met yet, and anyone else falling into the hands of the Godelan. I needed air and to be alone with my thoughts, so I put on my jacket and went out. Everybody was thinking too loudly in there.

  I didn’t get far, though. The dark and abandoned hall was like a warning about the outside world. Leaving alone seemed unwise. An hour later, I stood in the abandoned kitchen of our student housing building, where rain had soaked into the wooden floors. No one had even bothered to put plastic over the big hole in the wall where a window used to be before it was smashed by ice pellets.

  “You okay?”

  Seth came in to get a soda from the fridge. I took a breath.

  “Thinking of home,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you miss home?” I asked.

  “Of course,” Seth replied. “But we have to do this right now. When we win, we can go back, have lives, and not look over our shoulders.”

  “Use magic?” I asked him.

  “Don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe.”

  A few moments of silence passed while I worked up my courage.

  “I appreciate your understanding,” I told him finally. “Really.”

  “About?” Seth asked.

  I felt a blush coming on. It was hard for me to speak about my feelings. He was the one person I felt strongly enough about to take this giant risk for. All I could do was nod in the direction of our room.

  “You know,” I said.

  Despite myself, my eyes focused solely on my feet.

  “Kian?” Seth asked.

  There was a silence that made me nervous. I looked up to find Seth deep in thought, staring out the would-be window as if he could see anything in the early evening darkness.

  “You are okay, aren’t you?” I asked.

  To my relief, he broke out in a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I feel like for the first time my past isn’t yearning for something. Don’t get me wrong — I love you more than I even understand. It’s just a part of who I am. It’s something I was born with. You’re woven into everything. But having Kian here …” Seth shook his head, looking for words. “You don’t kno
w how happy I am. I’ve always wanted a little brother in this life.” He laughed to himself. “I didn’t think he’d come in that … form … but what’ll you do?”

  “What happened on the island …”

  We had still never spoken about it.

  “We had to let ourselves go,” Seth said. Had he always been so much wiser than me? Probably. “And I don’t regret anything. I’d do anything to protect you.”

  I smiled and took his arm, leaning in to hug him. Suddenly his words gripped me, and pieces of our history clicked together in my mind as if pieces of a puzzle. I stepped back, stunned.

  “What?” Seth asked in the half-light.

  I could only stand and stare at him, waiting for my mind to find something wrong with my logic. But I couldn’t.

  “Gwen?” Seth stepped toward me, concerned. “Are you okay?”

  A dull ache was rising in my heart, but it wasn’t mine. It was past Gwen, having realized her mistake.

  “You would do anything to protect me,” I repeated.

  Seth nodded. “Anything.”

  I let a few moments pass as the words bubbled up in my throat.

  “I was wrong,” I asked quietly. “Wasn’t I?”

  “About what?” he asked, lost. It somehow surprised me that he couldn’t see my thoughts like Kian could. Maybe he didn’t know me as well as he thought.

  “The way things happened on the day we died,” I told him. “I was wrong.”

  Seth looked about to argue, then sighed. Confirmation made the dull ache grow.

  “You were never going to meet me,” I said. “You were never going to run away with me. This isn’t the first time you’re letting me go.”

  My words held no emotion. Past Gwen was too stunned, and I was just trying to keep up with the revelations that would ultimately unlock my magic and free me from the past.

  I waited for Seth to speak. It took a minute of silence before he offered an explanation.

  “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 i
n 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.