I stoked a fire, though the smoke was stifling. It refused to rise up through the roof. Evergreen sprigs were the only dry things I could find during the particularly wet winter, and they did not lend themselves to burning well. I coughed and eventually gave up, leaving a small, cold house and stepping out into the chill night.
While my magic could start the fire, I could not spend all my energy burning it. Firewood was particularly hard to come by as Romans cut their way through our lands, using our wood for their furnaces as the other tribes encroached on our lands from the north. At least winter was almost over.
The entire village was dark. Even the moon was hidden behind clouds, covering everything in shadow. I couldn’t rest. Despite riding the perimeter of our lands all day, I was too agitated to let exhaustion take me over. Several people, including past-Seth and past-Michael, had gone to scout our lands. It wasn’t safe to ride at night anymore. I hadn’t seen past-Garrison in months. I felt like the last survivor of a settlement that didn’t stir.
After wandering in the cold, a flicker of light caught my attention. A lantern shone out of the window of the main hall, where the king would return. I rushed forward, my heart torn between assuming the worst and hoping for the best. A thousand scenarios of attacks and ambushes ran through my mind as I crossed the village and burst through the heavy wooden doors.
I stopped, surprised.
At first I thought there was no one there. Then, in the darkness, I saw a woman sitting on the throne.
“Close the door, you’ll let in the chill,” said a voice. It was as cold as the winter, and delved just as deep into my bones. I recognized past-Moira.
My past life flared with a dozen emotions at once. I was awkward and resentful, ashamed and proud at the same time. Despite a solemn belief that she should not be on the throne, my first instinct was to turn and leave. As I began walking out without a word, her voice called me back.
“Don’t leave,” she said. “Please.”
I sighed, regretting coming here in the first place. I had nothing to say to her. Still, I turned and walked toward the end of the long, dark room. Now I could see she had not only taken her place on the king’s throne, but also draped herself in his cloak. She saw me looking.
“It’s cold,” she explained.
I said nothing.
“You know I am loyal to the king,” past-Moira told me. “Tell me you know.”
I had to speak through gritted teeth to say something I wouldn’t regret.
“Why do you need my confirmation?”
“Because I am queen,” past-Moira said. “If I let you carry a sword, I need to know you are loyal to me.”
I nearly choked on my disbelief. That was some gall. My earlier resentment was replaced by sheer angry amusement.
“You are not queen yet,” I told her.
“I am as much a queen as my husband is a king, and his father is a king, and his brother is a king.”
I was shaking my head with incredulity. “Are you lonely,” I asked, adding, with what I hoped was a voice laced with sarcasm, “my queen?”
Past-Moira’s face immediately contorted to something between rage and pride. She thought she knew where I would take this conversation.
“Why?” she asked, her voice like a whip.
I smiled politely. “Because you are musing on fantasies that perhaps ought to be told to another before they meet the ears of anyone who may object.”
Snickering sounded from behind the big throne. She turned to peer behind her, but I didn’t have to look. I knew who it was.
“Come on, Kian,” I called to him, reaching out.
The small boy came scurrying forward, skinny arms and legs flapping. Past-Moira tried to grab his collar and pull him back, but he dodged her outstretched hand and took mine.
My past self walked away briskly, hoping that the queen would not call me back, because I would be forced to obey. And what I had just said already bordered on dangerous.
Still, modern Gwen marvelled at the little boy who jogged alongside me. His head was a mop of black and every few feet he would gaze up at me with perfectly round blue eyes, as if checking that I was still there.
I woke up to the same face, though twenty years older, shaking me awake.
“What is it?” I asked groggily.
I was having trouble letting go of the dream. In my mind’s eye, the little boy still ran next to me, trying to keep up with my fast pace, gripping my hand and looking up at me, smiling.
With what I now knew, I felt bad for him. I didn’t want to leave him in the past. I didn’t want him to grow up to be Kian. But I knew I had no choice. A little saddened by the dream, I let him go, leaving him to his fate two thousand years ago.
“I had a dream,” Kian said.
Seth and Michael were just waking up. Garrison was on the couch, turning on the TV.
“You had a dream?” I repeated.
Kian, lacking magic and still living his first life, had never expressed any kind of dream or memory before. I was skeptical, but he seemed excited so I asked him about it.
“It was a memory, actually,” he said. “I remembered something the Godelan said after they took their names.”
Now everybody was interested. Garrison even muted the TV.
“It was a conversation I overheard one night,” Kian said. “They decided they would leave the names in plain sight. It is just like them, assuming no one would notice. I remember the name of the place. I think it’s a museum.” He rushed around the room until he found a piece of paper and pen by the phone and wrote something down. It looked like Spanish.
Seth took the piece of paper and typed something into his computer. “Looks like we’re going to Peru,” he said. The word Kian had spelled out was written across a website that looked like it had been created two decades ago.
While everyone was getting excited about finally having some direction, I was stuck on the memory.
“Hang on,” I said. “We’ve asked you the same questions a hundred times, but you never remembered this before?”
Kian shrugged. “I guess I never put it together with their names,” he said. “I figured they could have been talking about anything, but it has to be that, right?”
“Of course,” Garrison agreed.
They all watched my face as I tried to believe this was more than just Kian being hopeful. Seeing how happy they all were, I couldn’t deny them this small victory. If anything, at least it was something to do to avoid going stir crazy in Oregon.
“Well?” Seth asked me after a few moments.
“We’re going to Peru.”
Chapter Sixteen
I hadn’t known what to expect, but after relaxing in Oregon for a month, my senses weren’t prepared for South America. Arriving in Lima, Peru, I realized I didn’t know anything about the country other than where it was located and that it had famous ruins.
As I surveyed the postcards in front of every store, bleached by the sun, I couldn’t imagine how a civilization from so long ago had managed to build something so huge.
My summer clothing from Australia came in useful, and I quickly bought a pair of sunglasses to shield myself from the hot sun. It was blisteringly hot and very dry. The altitude was slightly higher, but it felt like I was halfway closer to the sun based on how heavily it cloaked me like a stifling blanket.
Apparently the country was also having one of the hottest winters on record. From what little I remembered of Spanish, I understood some signs posted around the city asking people to wait to use more water than absolutely necessary. Other signs asked people to pray for winter.
The city was unlike any place I had ever been, so despite doing my best to stay in Michael’s shadow just for some respite from the extreme weather, I tried to take in as much as I could. People were cooking or roasting things in the street, though the city felt urban and developed — in places. Whenever anyone spoke, they seemed to yell.
Buses, cars, and even bicycles bee
ped at each other, the sounds of screeching brakes ringing out every few minutes. It took a while before I stopped jumping every time I thought there was going to be an accident. People here must have developed extremely quick reflexes.
As we dragged our bags across town to a car rental location, I was praising my decision to leave the big green suitcase at home and opt for a carry-on. We were soaked, sunburned, and exhausted by the time we finally made it to a little office that barely had room to accommodate us. A lone metallic fan blew onto a bored-looking woman.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
Her eyes drifted curiously over us.
“We’d like to rent a car, please,” Kian said. He began taking out his documentation before he noticed the woman shaking her head.
“The bus is the best way to get to Machu Picchu,” she said in a thick accent. “You buy tickets over there. Tour group leaves every day, three time per day.”
“Oh, we’re not going to Machu Picchu,” Kian said. “We need to get to here.” He took out a map he had been studying on the plane and showed her what looked like nothing.
There was no city where he was pointing. He tried to tell her what it was called, but she didn’t understand. Seth tried to, but she just continued to look at them as if they were making things up. Finally, Seth wrote the word on a piece of paper and showed it to her. Her eyebrows shot up and she looked us over one more time, this time really trying to figure out what we wanted. I could see her wondering whether to ask then deciding not to.
“Oh, that’s five hours away,” she told us, as if the news would be discouraging enough for us to leave the office and stop bothering her.
“Okay,” Kian said. “Can we have a car?”
Again, she shook her head. I could see him starting to get annoyed and stepped in.
“How can we get there?” I asked the woman.
She ducked under the desk and began looking for some pamphlets. About a minute later she surfaced again, holding material that looked like it had been printed on a home computer.
“There is a bus that goes to this region. It takes five hours,” she repeated.
“Where can we get the bus?” I asked.
“No bus in winter,” she said.
I took a deep breath, trying not so sound as annoyed as I was. “And why can’t we have a car?”
She flipped the page she had shown me to a black-and-white map. There she drew a road in red along the coast.
“This is the road the bus takes,” she said. “Construction here,” she drew a circle along the route, “so no bus, and no road to where you want to go.” Then she drew another, longer and more winding road that looked like it went through the mountains. “This is another road. Not paved. Many earthquakes and landslides. Mudslides. Not safe to drive if you don’t know the area. It will take seven hours. And we have no cars left.”
I sighed. Seth and Garrison looked like they were about to start arguing. Kian was scanning the barren map as if he could make another route appear. Michael had buried his head in his hands and looked as if he had just come from a shower. We weren’t going to last much longer outside, searching for some way of getting to this small town.
As a last-ditch effort, I reached into Kian’s pocket, pulling out his wallet. He turned to me in surprise. I took out all the cash he had, about five hundred American dollars, and put them on the desk in front of us.
“We need to get here,” I repeated, pointing to the same spot on the map that Kian had. “Can you help us?”
After thinking about it for a few moments, the woman nodded. “My brother can take you there,” she said. “Tomorrow morning. You can come here, he will pick you up.”
“Great, thanks,” I replied. “Do you know where we can stay tonight?”
She pointed us toward a hotel down the street.
The hotel wasn’t too bad, if I adjusted my expectations accordingly. The lights in the hallways were out, the bathrooms looked untouched since the seventies, and the beds were basically box-spring mattresses. Still, inside the peeling wallpaper and faint dampness, we were out of reach of the sun for a while.
After the flight and gruelling expedition through the loud city, we all retired to our individual rooms and promptly fell asleep. I didn’t even laugh at Seth and Garrison’s faces when they saw that a room for two people obviously meant one two-person bed.
Exhausted, I barely noticed that Michael had a room to himself again. I was happy for Kian’s company, but happier to sleep.
I woke up in darkness. I lay on top of the covers, fully clothed, staring up at the ceiling like some kind of vampire in a coffin. My body was rigid, and I couldn’t help but groan as I moved. The day had taken a toll on me.
According to the over-bright alarm clock on the nightstand, it was nine o’clock at night. Leaving Kian asleep, I went to examine the shower. I was lucky I didn’t mind a cold shower after the day’s heat, since that seemed like all the hotel was able to provide.
By the time I was done, Kian had turned on a dim nightlight and stood looking out at the city lights. Our balcony was really a sliding door that led out onto nothing. It was a sixteen-storey fall.
From our view, the capital city of Lima was actually quite a bustling metropolis. Office building lights were still on, brake lights flooded the highways and roads below, and I could still hear people yelling, even from this height.
I sighed without meaning to. Despite this other rare quiet moment alone with Kian, my heart felt tight, as if someone had plastic-wrapped it. I came to look out the window, wrapping my towel tighter.
“What’s the matter?” Kian asked. He let me step in front of him and rested his cheek against my wet hair.
“I’m worried.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know.”
I tried to take another deep breath, but again felt restricted. He turned me around to face him. What I was about to say made no sense, but I couldn’t help it.
“What if you and Seth stayed here?” I said.
Kian’s brow furrowed as if he didn’t understand.
“I could go with Garrison and Michael. We know where to look for the names,” I explained, “and the Godelan can’t know we’re here, right?”
“Right,” Kian answered. “So why does it matter if we come with you?”
I couldn’t tell which Gwen was fighting to keep Seth and Kian away from anything that might hurt them. Or cause them to hurt us. Was my concern grounded in the fact that they were the only two kings we had, or because it was their blood could kill us?
I took too long to answer, so Kian started guessing. “Is this about the stone?” he asked.
I guessed it was. I nodded.
“We know that they can kill us,” I said.
But they needed his blood.
“And we can kill them,” he said.
“So it’s fifty-fifty,” I reasoned.
Kian gave me a look that told me I was trying his patience. “They don’t know about the ritual,” he reminded me.
“Right, so they can just kill us. Or Seth. To get him out of the way and never have anyone be able to order them. They didn’t hide those names when they heard we were here. They did it so that Seth could never be king over them.”
Kian briefly considered the logic. I was expecting him to argue, but instead he just gave me a hug. I let myself become absorbed in it and took some comfort. Still, my heart pounded with anxiety.
“You’re still worried,” Kian said, tucking my head under his chin. I nodded. “We’re coming with you, my noble warrior. Make your peace with it.”
I nodded again, but I wasn’t happy about it. Just as I raised my face to tell him so, he used the opportunity to kiss me. For a moment my worries were forgotten as I forced myself to be in the moment. Not the past. Not the possible future.
Our kiss lasted long enough for me to start to shiver by the window. Though the day had been hot, and standing by the window in just a towel and wet hair made me co
ld. Though being in Kian’s arms was definitely helping. I couldn’t tell if the goose bumps on my arms came from the chill wind or the warmth spreading through my cheeks, into my chest, and down my spine.
Kian held me closer as his kisses deepened and we began to move backward. It was hard to tell who was leading the initiative. The backs of my knees hit the bed before I was expecting it, and I fell backwards, Kian rushing to keep up with me. The bed let out such a powerful creak that I thought we’d wake up the whole floor.
We froze.
My heart was doing all kinds of somersaults. I was both cold and hot. Kian’s face was still close to mine as we listened. Within a few seconds, I heard a familiar voice.
“Gwen?” It was Garrison. “What’s going on?”
I sighed and then laughed. Kian chuckled with me, resting his head on my chest. It didn’t even sound like Garrison was yelling. I could hear him perfectly through the wall, as if it were made of paper.
“Nothing,” I told him. “Go back to bed.”
Kian and I lay together, waiting for the conversation to continue. Garrison would never be satisfied with that answer.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“Is Kian with you?”
I paused before answering. “Yes,” I said finally.
“Oh.”
Silence again for a few seconds until Seth’s voice spoke through the wall.
“Do you really think we shouldn’t come?”
I could have buried my face in the pillows from embarrassment thinking they had been listening to our whole exchange. Glad the bed had interrupted, I looked to Kian for guidance. He still lay, hugging me, and shrugged when he saw me looking.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What do you think?”
“I think without our blood they can’t kill you,” Seth agreed. “But without it, you can’t kill them either.” I could always trust Seth to try to reason something out. “And they probably don’t know about the ritual anyway, so we need to be there.”
Kian raised his eyebrows at me. The king had spoken. We’d all go together. After I didn’t respond for a few moments, Seth and Garrison said their goodnights. We listened until all went quiet again.
Lives of Kings Page 24
