Lives of Kings

by Lucy Leiderman

  I understood. Moira was gone. A twinge of sadness for the girl I had met in England not long ago — a brief mourning — touched my heart before I was back to the problem at hand. I should have realized. I’d have plenty of time to blame myself later, but for now I had to deal with the fact that this person was the embodiment of the past, and it looked like we couldn’t coexist.

  It took a great deal of effort to control my anger and not just smash her with the bricks from the wall. Instead I pulled forward the ones around her, trapping her in a silhouette of brick.

  The fear in her eyes brought me satisfaction for only a second — and then I hated myself. I felt someone take my hand. I turned and was surprised to find it was Garrison, not Kian.

  He gave me a look of understanding, and I remembered his own story. His family was murdered. He had lived a life of war and death. And though he relished the training, I knew in an instant from his face that he would never choose that life for anyone else. I had to let the anger go.

  I heard the bricks fall to the ground behind me before I turned back to Moira. She was still pressed to the wall, though my trap was gone.

  “You’re not going to stop her?” she asked Seth breathlessly.

  He shrugged, his face coldly indifferent. “She’s right to be angry. You may think that you’re the most powerful here because you’ve managed to escape the past and destroy the innocent girl who has given you a second life, but I am your king. And you still answer to me.”

  There was hate in Moira’s face. Again the grief touched my heart. Could I have saved the girl?

  “So you don’t deny any of it,” Moira accused.

  “It’s none of your business,” Seth said.

  “I am your wife!” she exclaimed.

  “You were my wife,” Seth agreed. “And my cousin. From an arranged marriage. Despite the fact that I loved someone else.”

  “And you would have married her.”

  It was another accusation, as if there was something fundamentally wrong with that.

  Seth briefly glanced at me. How different would our lives have been had we been allowed to be together? Would we even be here? If an alternate past flashed before his eyes as it did mine, he didn’t show it. Instead, he glanced over my shoulder at Kian, and then turned back to Moira.

  “Why does that matter?” he asked. “This is the world now, but I haven’t forgotten our world before — or our laws. You know the punishment for using magic against one of your tribe.”

  “You’re banishing me?” Moira said indignantly. “From what? This isn’t your land. You aren’t king here.”

  “We are the last of the Riada,” Seth said. His voice was like stone — cold and firm. “Where we go, our tribe is, and I will be the king I was meant to be. You are banished from us. Leave.”

  As we all stood and watched, my heart still beating wildly and hands shaking, Seth stood his ground. Moira, still casting looks of hatred at each of us, but especially me, walked away. It had taken two thousand years to get Seth to finally stand up to her.

  It was a heavy, surreal moment, and I was in shock at everything that had happened. I hated how blind I had been, how I didn’t have time to notice anyone else’s problems, and now we were all paying the price.

  Moira rounded the corner into the market and blended into a group of pedestrians. I lost sight of her in seconds.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Yout really weren’t going to stop me, were you?” I asked Seth breathlessly.

  “I didn’t have to, did I?”

  I guess he didn’t.

  None of us had moved in a while. I wanted to make sense of things, and frankly, I wasn’t sure how seriously Moira had taken Seth’s banishment. Sure, he was king and it looked like she had listened to him, but would she be waiting for us around the corner? Would she try to get into my mind again?

  I couldn’t stand the fact that I was actually frightened, but the mind magic was something I didn’t have on my own. I could only tap into someone else’s, as I had when I pulled Seth back from the Godelan trap in Central Park. That feeling of claws digging through my memories and knowing more about me than I did myself was terrifying. It felt like my mind had gone through a blender and was now oozing out of my ears.

  As my heart rate eventually slowed and the cold began to sneak into my limbs, the physical pain of what she had done to me made me wince. I leaned on Kian again and realized Garrison had let go of me. When I looked at him, he was nursing his hand.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  Garrison gave me a tense smile. “Nothing I can’t handle,” he said, showing me a very pink hand. I thought I saw some magic weaving its way over it, helping it to heal.

  I must have been burning up when Moira was either digging through my mind or when I was angry. I hadn’t even noticed.

  “It’s okay,” Garrison said. “It’s like your defence mechanism. You’re like a skunk. But with fire instead of smell.”

  His remarks elicited a few smiles, but I wasn’t sure if I liked the comparison. I would take smelling over nearly charring my friends any day.

  Eventually, we just couldn’t take the cold anymore and Seth led us back into the market. I was watchful and hypersensitive for anyone who had noticed the commotion, but no one looked our way.

  By the time we got back to our rented house, Moira was gone and so were her things. Seth made us wait while he scouted around the house to see if she had left any magic behind — magic that could become potentially dangerous. It was another cold reminder of our new reality.

  “She wouldn’t really do that, would she?” Garrison asked. “I mean, she’s pissed at your love triangle or whatever, but she wouldn’t hurt us?”

  In hindsight, I can’t believe I didn’t just drown in embarrassment that day. It was like someone digging through all your dirty laundry and insecurities and waving them in front of the people who matter most to you.

  “I don’t know,” Seth said, ignoring the second part of his comment. “We can’t assume anything anymore. Did you see her eyes? It was like a different person. And I knew that person.”

  Their interaction had seemed familiar. Certainly the disdain between them felt more natural than any attraction between Seth and myself. I wondered about that, trying not to get myself too down. Had the past Seth disliked her more than he had loved me?

  “She brought out something in me I don’t like,” Seth said. He shook his head as if he could get the memory out. “It was like I had my mind totally made up. I felt so closed to everything else.”

  It certainly had looked that way.

  As he went inside to check the house, Garrison, Kian, and I stood in silence outside. I could tell Garrison was uncomfortable with what he had seen, but we would just have to put it behind us. And Kian? I could only imagine what was running through his mind. Moira’s words about him being a child stuck with me, each one stabbing me in the heart.

  I looked at the man who had been left to deal with the consequences of our decisions, who had made his own mistakes, and who had come so far just to help us. I didn’t know how to answer Moira’s question. With Seth, our relationship had spanned a lifetime. With Kian, I felt responsible for him. Just as I knew he felt responsible for me. We were tied to each other in a way I couldn’t figure out.

  Seth didn’t find anything, and for a day we unofficially pretended we didn’t notice Moira’s absence. That night, as Kian and Seth pored over the best ways to get to Australia — there weren’t many since it was really far — Garrison came to sling an arm around me while I stared blankly at a fake fire on the television.

  “You okay?”

  “Well …” I thought about the day. “Considering I had all my deepest, darkest secrets and personal moments pulled out in front of the people I’d least like to see them in some kind of brain torture, which resulted in the loss of one of the seven people in this world who is like me and whom I need in order to fulfil our ultimate destiny, I’m only somewhat okay.”
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  “Yeah.” Garrison nodded sympathetically. “I figured that would be the case.”

  “Thanks, though.”

  “For what?

  “Reminding me what’s important.” I rested my head on his shoulder. “It felt horrible not being able to defend myself, or even to be able to do the same to her. It made me want to …” I looked for the best word. “Win. Do something worse to her. Just to end it.”

  I was ashamed just saying it. It was as if I had been attacked with a sword, but I didn’t have one, so I was on the verge of being okay with picking up a boulder and squashing my enemy.

  “That’s the warrior in you talking,” Garrison told me quietly.

  “You know?” I was surprised.

  “I know,” he replied. “The feeling of always having to just end things. Knowing that if something hurts you, it will hurt you again and again until you win. Feeling like nothing’s enough until you are the only one standing … I know all of those feelings.”

  I looked at him disbelievingly.

  “Oh yeah,” he confirmed. “I was a pretty aggressive seven-year-old. No magic, but a lot of heart.” He smiled.

  “What happened?”

  “I got beat up a lot,” he replied casually. “I was a pretty small kid, always antagonizing the bigger guys. My parents may have home-schooled me for a reason. But I know how hard it is to rein those feelings in. We’re strong. Very strong. And you may be the strongest. But if you start to become entitled and take advantage of that — well, you become like the Godelan. Or Moira.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said.

  The guilt was still fresh.

  “Okay, not Moira,” Garrison said. “But her past life. You become a tyrant. And then the villain. Your story becomes just waiting for a hero to take on the quest of bringing you down. And no one remembers that you were once the hero yourself.”

  “I’m worried I can understand her,” I said. “At least how she feels about everyone else, and our own strength. When I couldn’t fight back … when she was in my mind, I was ready to do anything to stop her.”

  “Don’t be worried,” Seth said, coming with Kian to sit across from us. “You’re better.”

  He had our printed tickets and handed them out. “We leave in the morning, and I’m going to teach you how to keep someone like Moira out.”

  After shaking off the encounter with Moira, Seth was back to his normal self.

  We awkwardly discussed what had happened with her, and I finally told them about the airport. I was expecting anger for not telling them sooner, but everyone seemed to understand that I had made a promise. I was just trying to help her deal with the past.

  At least that’s what I told myself. My guilty conscience pushed me into thinking it was just my own aversion to realizing something bad was happening in front of me, because I didn’t know how to deal with it.

  “How do you know how to stop it from happening again?” I asked Seth.

  “I don’t,” he replied. “But you can’t succeed until you try.”

  I’d rather have Seth riffling around my mind than Moira. I didn’t think there was anything about me he didn’t know. Except my feelings for Kian. Or did he? Crap. Well, that was one good incentive to learn how to keep him out.

  “What will happen to her?” Kian asked. He still glanced worriedly at me as if Moira hid inside my mind.

  “Don’t worry, little brother,” Seth told him. “I’m ready to be king now. If it happens, I’ll handle it.”

  The flight was long. Somehow going to Tahiti had seemed blissfully far, as if the more miles we put between ourselves and what happened with the Godelan, the safer we’d be. Now Australia seemed like a trek that wouldn’t end.

  By the time we got to our stopover in China, I had drool all over my face and my entire body felt as dry as a raisin. I was groggy and tired, dragging my carry-on into the terminal and planting myself in the first chair I could find at our gate. My friends didn’t fare much better.

  In addition to the uncomfortable plane, I was still having the dreams with the burning ships. I tightly clutched the little notebook Kian had given me, writing down every street and shop sign I came across when I dreamt about our fifth so that we could find him faster.

  The airport was loud and busy. I had thought of China as being much more unique than the typical shiny, uncomfortable chairs, fancy stores, and glass windows showing all the airplanes parked beyond. But it looked just like the rest of the world. The news was set to BBC, though it must have been a Chinese version because they spoke about floods and landslides in places I couldn’t pronounce, with death tolls in the thousands. I closed my eyes.

  The desire to believe none of this was my fault, or my responsibility, was immense. There were a million reasons for any of these disasters to be happening — reasons that were discussed and hypothesized about by people far smarter than me. I wanted to believe them, but all I saw when I closed my eyes were the Godelan.

  I imagined them standing around a globe, seeing where they had to turn magic against itself to shift things into chaos. They wouldn’t stop at anything, but now they knew we were strong enough to fight. I had always thought they underestimated us, but I guess drawing their own names away and hiding them somewhere as soon as they knew we were here was not the act of someone who is underestimating the situation.

  My eyes flew open.

  “Hey,” I said to Garrison. He sat next to me while Kian and Seth had gone to find food. “If you were a Godel, where would you hide your name?”

  Garrison looked at me as if I were stupid. “If I knew that, I’d have mentioned it earlier.”

  “No, I mean what type of place.”

  “Somewhere we wouldn’t go?”

  “What if we’d go anywhere?”

  Garrison huffed. “I feel like you’re driving at something here,” he told me. “Do you maybe want to tell me?”

  “I think they must have hidden their names somewhere vulnerable,” I said. “On the planet. Somewhere where even if we went we’d be too scared of changing anything in order to extract the names.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  I thought about our earlier conversation about winning. Beating the enemy. Destroying them.

  “We’re not villains,” I said. “We’re the heroes. We won’t hurt people. They see that as our weakness.”

  When I told the others, I was surprised at how readily everyone accepted my hypothesis, even though Kian warned me to keep an open mind. He said that the man he called Stone, which I found fitting for the silver-haired magician, thought like a snake — all winding, roundabout schemes.

  “He’s like the pin laced with poison,” Kian told me as we boarded our flight to Sydney. “An invisible evil that you may not even suspect. Donald, the other one, is more like the battering ram at the gates. That makes him easier to predict, though just as dangerous.”

  We were in the middle of a huge plane. I’d never been on one so big. Just the row in the middle between two aisles that held more people on either side was ten people wide. The four of us, with Seth at the aisle, sat next to a family of loud British vacationers.

  “And Magician? The one who brought you here?”

  I hadn’t ever really asked much more than this, because I could tell Kian’s decisions still haunted him.

  “I suppose he is a little bit like I was,” Kian said, sliding into the seat next to me. “Holding on to a fantasy.”

  Late March in Australia was actually fall for them, but as soon as we walked out of the air-conditioned airport and into the street, I felt like I was going to melt. Was it just because we were coming from winter? No. Our taxi driver confirmed the entire south was experiencing abnormal heat and a drought.

  Overall, I found Sydney like any nice American downtown. A little like San Francisco, even, though without all the hills. The wide boardwalk we could see in the distance allowed people to walk along the water, enjoying the fresh breeze coming from the ocean. This helpe
d deal with the smoggy weather.

  Our hotel, luckily, was down the road from a shopping mall, so one of the first things we did was to go buy summer clothes. We got back just in time for checkin and found someone had already brought our bags up to our rooms.

  The three rooms were linked by a middle room, in which my ugly green bag was placed neatly next to the desk.

  “Is this in case I set myself on fire while I’m asleep again?” I joked, waving to the adjoining doors that would allow them to rescue me if necessary. Enough time had passed for me to joke about it.

  “Pure coincidence,” Seth promised.

  That evening we pored over the information I had collected. We looked up the restaurants, street signs, and any other markers I could identify in my dreams. I didn’t have much except for the fact that this guy was incredibly active.

  “Gwen,” Seth said, trying hard not to get angry, “a bunch of trees is not a point on a map.”

  “I was talking about a bunch of rocks, this time,” I told him.

  He gave a terse huff.

  Our best bet was a rock-climbing place I had seen numerous times. It took me a while to figure out what it was since I had never set foot in one myself. When I first saw the strange walls, hanging ropes everywhere and a clientele that was mostly men, I thought it was some kind of military facility. When I caught sight of the logo, I woke up, reaching for my little notebook.

  As far as I could tell, he went there several times a week. All we had to do was wait.

  Our first night in Australia was difficult. I was tired but couldn’t sleep. The time difference — and a number of other unsolved issues — weighed on my mind.

  A few days passed as we visited all of his favourite places. Perhaps they weren’t his favourites at all and he barely went there, but we didn’t have much else to go on. I was on full alert for that feeling of connectedness, like when I had found Seth and Garrison, or when we had found Moira, but nothing happened.

  Four days after arriving in Australia, we were back at the rock-climbing place, sitting in a rental car like creepy detectives. Seth decided he was going to look inside, but we argued with him. If this person saw us, he might get scared and leave, or go into hiding, and we’d never find him. But we were all restless, so we agreed to sneak around back and peek through the windows.