Lives of Kings

by Lucy Leiderman

  “Would you rather stay here?” Garrison asked.

  “No.”

  “Then London it is,” he said.

  My teeth chattered. I wasn’t against a warm place to sleep and streets that weren’t so eerily deserted.

  “And we start training again tomorrow,” Garrison said.

  I could hear excitement in his voice. When Kian had forced us to do the archaic drills of sword and archery fighting, only Garrison had remotely enjoyed them.

  As Seth turned off the light and the room went dark, my mind drifted to how much had happened today. I had destroyed one of the last pieces of my people’s history. I found out that Seth had never meant to spend the rest of his life with me. I hadn’t changed the future. He had. The knowledge was still stirring in my mind as if my past self processed it and decided what this meant.

  Suddenly I felt a presence in my thoughts. It was unsettling, and I lay in the dark trying to feel it move through my mind. Was I imagining this? Kian touching my cheek suddenly was brought to the front of my mind, but I hadn’t called up the memory.

  My time with Kian began to flip past my memories like an open book, and I wasn’t doing any of it. There was definitely a presence there. Beginning to panic, I fought back. I caught a brief glimpse of someone else’s memories, but it was dark and hazy. I couldn’t make anything out.

  It felt similar to when Seth had gone too far when trying to locate the Godelan with his magic, and I tried to find him through his mind to bring it back. But this was not a nice presence, and it wasn’t welcome. Too confused to move, I pushed the presence out of my mind and eventually felt nothing but my own thoughts again. I surfed through my memories, making sure everything was still there.

  Though I knew I was alone in my own head now, I held my guard up as long as I could, worried that whatever had just helped itself to my innermost thoughts would come back. Eventually, though, the night got a hold of me.

  I hovered above a fire. My initial thoughts were worry that I would burn myself, but I soon realized I was the wind again. This was a dream. I smelled smoke. I knew that through the trees the ships of the strangers still burned.

  Unable to do much but hover, I listened to the stories being told around the fire. People guessed about the origin of the people from the ships, what they wanted, and why they refused to go back to where they had come from.

  There were stories about men who had found islands of immortality, men who had lost their crews to sirens and were now doomed to sail alone, and other stories all involving grand adventures at sea. I had no opinion. All I knew was that there were foreigners in my land, and I could feel their every footstep as if someone walked over my heart.

  Suddenly I was sucked out of the dream and into darkness. I panicked and tried to scream. I could feel something pulling me. I was moving so quickly that I anticipated hitting something, and at this speed it would surely kill me. My fear made me forget that I was in a dream.

  Despite feeling only like a presence, not a human being with a body, I just tried to breathe while being dragged through what felt like hot wind and freezing water at the same time. What surrounded me was unlike anything I had ever experienced, and though I was not in pain, I could not bear it any longer. I tried to scream again, but it stifled me. When I was nearing complete and utter terror, it finally came to an end.

  I was resting at the top of a red, sandy cliff. The sun beat down over the landscape. Below me a prickly forest fanned out as far as the eye could see. Similar cliffs to the one I sat on dotted the landscape. I was perched next to some metal rings embedded in the earth. Each ring held a rope, though one of them had been dug in too close to the edge. As the ropes moved, the tension forced it to create more space around the stake, shaking away the earth. It would soon loosen.

  Still in my ethereal dream state, I peered over the edge. At the end of all those ropes, a young man dangled. It took me a moment to realize he was climbing, which suggested he had put himself into this situation. All I could see was the top of his helmet as he struggled across the side of the cliff.

  As if from far away, I began to understand that he would soon have to let go. There was nowhere for him to go, and he was struggling. And when he let go, he would fall the hundred metres back into the forest. The stake would give out.

  I could do nothing but watch as he looked in vain for something to hold on to, but when he tried to reach too far, his feet slipped from their perch and he was left dangling in the air again. For a second, he floated. Then, as if feeling his mistake, he looked up. Our eyes met.

  I saw understanding in his grey eyes. For a split second I could have sworn he knew me and that he was one of us — one of the seven. And then he fell.

  Being my dreamy self, I swooped down over the cliff and flew after him, suddenly full of panic once more. I dropped straight through the air and into the tree canopy. A deadly thing for anyone else was nothing for me; in my dream I was nothing but ether. I passed it all without even shaking a leaf.

  Then I saw him. Barely two feet above the forest floor, he floated much like I had when I had fallen into the ocean. He looked scared and worried. I wished I could help him. Talk to him. Explain it to him. But this was only a dream.

  He gasped for breath, arms and legs bleeding from the many cuts he had received while falling. He would have cracked his head open on a branch if it weren’t for his helmet. Still, he floated until he looked over his shoulder, realized what had happened, and then fell to the ground with a thud.

  I smelled smoke before I opened my eyes. Seth was shaking me awake. I brushed him off, wanting to make sure I hadn’t set the whole room on fire.

  As I jumped up, I hit my head on the ceiling above the top bunk. Hard.

  I sank back into bed, holding my head and groaning.

  “Gwen?” Seth asked. I could tell he was trying not to laugh.

  Good. If he had time to laugh at me for making a fool out of myself, I had probably not burned someone.

  I told him I was fine and rolled over to check the damage. Luckily, only the sheets were a bit scorched. Seth blew on the hand he had used to wake me up. Behind him, Garrison and Kian looked at me expectantly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You were yelling in your sleep,” Garrison said. “Screaming.”

  They were looking at me for an answer, so I gave them the only one I could think of.

  “I saw him — the next one like us. I think I know where he is.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Kian said.

  It was about the seventh time he had repeated it. He shook his head like clues would fall out of it.

  “To be there, you’d have to have some kind of connection with him. Who was it?”

  We were waiting for the bus to London. Without any direction, it seemed like as good a place as any to wait for a memory, as frustrating as that was.

  The station was pretty empty, seeing as how so many people left after the storm when classes were cancelled. We stood apart from the other few people waiting to go to London.

  Every time I set foot outside, it reminded me of why I hated winter. The cold, blustery weather made every task harder than it should be. My teeth chattered.

  “Maybe we’re related,” I guessed. “You said everyone with magic came from the same source, right? Maybe he’s kind of reaching out to me.”

  It was my turn to shake my head. I had recognized his eyes, so similar to mine, and there was something familiar about him, but I had no other ideas.

  Kian sank deep into thought. I wasn’t expecting an answer when he huffed. “I can’t remember if you had anyone close to you,” he said. “I was so young.”

  I patted his arm to show him it was okay.

  “I don’t remember the others, either,” Seth said. He and Garrison had been playing memory games to try to figure out who I had dreamed about. The only person who seemed to have nothing to say was Moira. I kept eyeing her, wondering if I should say so
mething. She seemed like a ticking time bomb, and I had made a resolution to eventually propose she go home.

  Apart from Moira, who looked to have her own stuff going on, I felt like I was the only one not going crazy about who I saw in my dream. It looked like he was using magic and was fine for now, and I somehow was confident I would see him again. I wasn’t even concerned about my dream with the burning ships. I had bigger problems.

  I hadn’t told anyone about feeling something in my mind. I didn’t want to worry them in case it was the Godelan, who might have discovered a new trick to get into my head. Or maybe I was going crazy. I tried to tell myself it was okay to crack under this pressure. Still, having memories I didn’t summon pop up in my mind was scary.

  Over the next few days, I lived in my own mind most of the time. I was on constant alert for intrusions into my memories, which happened sporadically. Each time things I hadn’t thought about would be pulled up like pictures being dug out of the album that was my brain. It was random and unpredictable, and I felt like I was going insane.

  Having my magic always close at hand to defend myself was exhausting, which led to numerous naps. That meant I was right back to either finding burning ships or being pulled away to the life of some guy I didn’t know but who looked familiar. The stranger reappeared in my dreams in various situations as he discovered magic and experimented with it. Life began to feel like an endless routine of things that unsettled me.

  It didn’t help that London is a bustling city, and we quickly figured out that to gather our thoughts and do any kind of training whatsoever, we’d have to stay indoors. Plus, March weather had brought a new onslaught of snow and ice unseasonable for England, so the whole country basically shut down.

  My friends had to pull me out of bed on the grey days, while Kian had left some paper and a pen next to my bed. Every night when I woke up sweating and disoriented I had to write down everything I had seen in order for us to find the person I was dreaming about.

  After four nights I had pages of scribbles about office buildings, highways, deserts, dogs, and a lot of spiky-looking plants. Since it was winter in the northern hemisphere and quite hot wherever he was, we were guessing he was somewhere far away.

  A week passed. The little jabs into my mind were getting stronger, hesitant at first but now gaining confidence. I was beginning to think of it as an entity of its own, like something resurfacing. Sometimes I considered that maybe it was all in my head, and my fond memories of Kian were popping up because I needed them. But then less than happy memories came up, too — images of how he had kidnapped me flashed through my mind, and how I had been tied up and left to the Godelan. All the rage and disappointment bubbled to the surface of my mind like a geyser, and I had to fight not to be angry all over again. I was so busy controlling my thoughts that everything around me started to float by unseen.

  We rented a house close to the city centre. It was a little eerie because while everything was pristine, much of the furniture had sheets draped over it. We had to walk around the sizeable brick townhouse uncovering sofas and beds as if they were artifacts.

  We each had our own room, and as much as I enjoyed the privacy, sometimes when I woke in the middle of the night I would come downstairs and sit on the couch, reminding myself that Seth, Garrison, and Kian slept in the rooms that surrounded the living room.

  I eventually found the courage to tell Kian about what Seth said to me, and how I had been wrong all the time. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact that it seemed to make Kian happy. He reined in his emotions and sympathetically patted me on the head, rubbing my arm and telling me it was better to know the truth. Still, I knew he was happy that his brother hadn’t betrayed the tribe — he really was the hero Kian had always imagined him to be.

  When it wasn’t hurting my pride, it seemed kind of funny that no matter how we had plotted or planned, we had both ended up here in the end.

  The daily intrusions of that force into my mind made me keep my distance from Kian. I’d sit on the couch in the middle of the night, staring at his door, worried that at any moment I’d feel that presence again and it would bring up old feelings that would make me furious. I was so angry, I worried about what I could do to him with my magic. I couldn’t allow myself to let him in while something I didn’t understand was riffling around my mind.

  Kian made us train in the living room. This time we had actually moved all the furniture in hopes of keeping our deposit, and the rest of the house became our entire world while snowed in. One of our first purchases was a computer. Seth and Garrison spent hours chatting with their families, to whom Kian hadn’t had to lie.

  I heard them tell their families plenty of tall tales about school trips, but the lies came easily and I could hear two sets of proud parents exclaiming in awe about all the places we had been. I was too nervous about being face to face with my own parents again. Would they remember the lie? Would they remember me? Would they be angry?

  I couldn’t catch my breath. It took me longer this time to realize I was in a dream. I panicked as deep greens and browns sped past my face. Huge men surrounded me. There was no feeling as the branches whipped my face or the ground rolled underneath me. I couldn’t feel the thick fist holding my collar and pulling me forward. This wasn’t my life — either of them. This was something else.

  Then the smell reached me, and I knew I was about to round the corner and see the burning ships again. The dream was back. Resigning myself to it, I looked for any details that might be new. But the dream was always the same — various bits and pieces about finding burning ships.

  The forest gave way to a rocky shore at the foot of the grey ocean. It could have been a lake for all I knew, but it was immense. I couldn’t see land on the other side, but then again, fog blanketed the horizon. For the tenth time, I noticed how everything seemed so big — the people, the trees, the ships.

  As I watched the thick smoke shade the fog drifting nearby, the ships, four that I could see, began to give way to the flames. The crackling was like an oversized hearth fire, and suddenly beams began to fall apart and snap.

  People ran to stop the fire from spreading to the forest, but the ships hadn’t run aground very far. I couldn’t even figure out how they came on land, but being up close made it look like giants had picked them up like toys and placed them there.

  The clips became repetitive, as if time sped up. I braced myself. I knew this routine. Suddenly I was sucked up and away as if something was pulling me from the inside out. When I could tell up from down and left from right again, and the world had stopped tumbling around me, I knew I was with him — the stranger who kept pulling me out of my dream.

  Like Kian had taught me, I began to look around. It was a hot, sunny day as I drifted nearby. He was my age — I knew it must be the case, though he looked older than any of us. A short blond beard obscured the lower part of his face and his brown hair was held back with a sweatband. With his broad shoulders and determined, bear-like scowl, he could have passed as older than Kian.

  As my consciousness hovered, he climbed a bike in a quiet parking lot. I stayed with him while he rode down a winding path with parks on one side and trees on the other. I could tell he was deep in thought. Something was bothering him, and I bet it had something to do with magic.

  Then, as he rounded a corner and the bushes opened onto a broad harbour, I had my answer. Across the water, near a golden bridge that reminded me so much of my home in San Francisco, a white landmark stood out like one of the pointy plants I had seen. I knew immediately that it was an opera house. I had seen it in books and postcards since I was young. He was in Sydney.

  I woke up halfway out of my bed. The clock read four in the morning, but I didn’t care. As I raced to the stairs, I paused outside Moira’s room. She had been growing more reserved, and it made me uneasy being around her. Still, she was as much a part of this as any of us.

  Hesitantly, hoping she wouldn’t want to come out, I knocked on he
r door. Then I sped downstairs, knocking on Seth’s, Garrison’s, and Kian’s doors and waiting impatiently, hopping from foot to foot in the living room until they came out.

  As sleepy people began to shuffle in, including Moira from upstairs, I could barely keep it in.

  “He’s in Sydney,” I told them before they had even joined me in the living room.

  No one needed an explanation. Garrison’s face lit up immediately.

  “We’re going to Australia!” he announced. “Good job, Gwen.” He gave me a pat on the back. “Just two more to go.”

  “How’d you do it?” Seth asked.

  I was about to answer when I noticed Kian hadn’t come out. I ran to knock on his door again, but Garrison pulled my hand back.

  “He’s not here,” he said.

  I could feel the panic growing on my face before Garrison rushed to explain.

  “Don’t worry!” he said, gripping me by the shoulders and holding me steady as if I was about to run screaming into the street. “He’ll be back in the morning. He went last night up to the cottage we stayed at to pick something up.”

  I hated to admit that I had, in fact, been about to run screaming into the street. Kian wasn’t like us. He had no magic, and he had made our enemies his enemies by taking our side. Having him disappear in the middle of the night was panic-worthy.

  “Why didn’t he tell me?”

  The question was directed to Seth. Since they had become as close as brothers again, I didn’t believe Kian would go without letting Seth know exactly what he was doing.

  “Because he had to do this alone,” Seth said.

  I opened my mouth to ask another question, but he silenced me with a pleading look.

  “He’ll be back in the morning, Gwen,” Seth said. “Wait to speak to him.”

  I took the hint and shut up, letting Seth and Garrison discuss the things they could do in Australia while looking for our fifth. Moira only mentioned that she would look forward to nicer weather and then went back to sleep.

  I must have fallen asleep while they talked because I woke up to Kian’s face. He was staring at me as I slept and didn’t stop even after I frowned at him.