Lives of Kings

by Lucy Leiderman

  We ran for about twenty minutes until we just couldn’t anymore. It felt like all the air had been sucked out of the mountainside, and we huddled by the road under a tree. Even with the branches bearing most of the ash, I was blind.

  I didn’t have long to think about whether we could keep going, and I didn’t know what to do. My magic was spent. So was everyone else’s, and our choices appeared to be die on the road or by the road.

  We waited for the ash to pass, but it didn’t. Breathing was nearly impossible. I couldn’t see anything. Finally, I felt Seth squeeze my hand on the right. I was leaning against Michael on my left. I felt his body go still. And as I thought about Kian and felt a tear roll down my cheek, leaving a muddy trail, I took my last breath.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I flung open my eyes, realizing I hadn’t been breathing.

  I sat up but could barely see anything around me. Footsteps were coming closer. Someone cupped the back of my head, tilting my face up as cool glass met my lips. I drank the water willingly, for the moment putting aside the million questions floating through my mind. As the water began to pour over my face, I coughed up clumps of ash.

  It took a minute for me to relax. Drinking soothed my throat. Garrison’s voice instructed me to close my eyes before a damp cloth cooled my forehead. I was finally able to see the room around me — it was the same one we had rented for our stay.

  A hand gripped mine and I turned to find Kian by my side. He smiled at me, though he was paler than ever. I flung myself at him with all the energy I had and felt truly able to breathe again when I felt his arms wrap around me in return.

  Then a thought occurred to me. I opened my mouth to speak, but all that came out was a croak. I tried again, clearing my throat painfully for several long moments.

  “The town’s still here,” I said. “I thought something was going to happen — an earthquake, or landslide, or something. The volcano …”

  The words trailed off as I saw Michael, Seth, and the girl whose name I still didn’t know lying on their own beds around the room. The place looked more like a hospital than ever. We had all been changed into clean clothes — I’d have to ask about this later — but dirt and ash covered the windows. Seth’s wound had been washed and bandaged.

  Michael turned to me and smiled weakly. His eyes were bloodshot. He pointed at his throat and shrugged, which I took to mean he couldn’t talk. Seth and the girl were still out.

  It occurred to me that this was the second time I had gone against the Godelan and woken up some time later having been unable to save myself from the consequences. But at least this time two of them were gone — no longer our problem. But so was Moira.

  “What happened?” I asked. Each word made my throat drier. Kian saw me wince and gave me some more water. As I drank, I watched them exchange looks over the glass. “What?”

  “Kian woke up a little after you left,” Garrison said. “You healed him. We were just getting out of that damn museum when we felt the first earthquake. I knew you needed help, so we … borrowed … a car and went to find you.”

  Kian stroked my hair. “It was amazing that you managed to climb down as far as you did,” he said, “considering all the ash in the air. And you fought off the Godelan after healing me and escaping their trap.”

  Somehow I felt he was telling me all of this as a cushion for a blow.

  “We found all three of you pretty quickly,” Garrison said. “You probably shortened your life by about ten years by breathing in all that stuff, but you were fine once we got you into the car.”

  Kian jutted his chin at Garrison, which I took as urging him to shut up. I could see a bright red line stretching across his throat. The scar was so bright, it looked like blood still flowed underneath just a thin layer of skin. I reached out to touch it, but he brushed my hand away.

  “Don’t even think about it. You need your energy right now.”

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “It’ll heal more. Give it time. It was only a few days ago.”

  “A few days?” I tried to sit up as they both jumped to keep me down. “We’ve been asleep a few days?”

  “You all used up a lot of your energy, doing … whatever it is you did up there,” Garrison told me. “So now you need to rest before dealing with everything else.”

  I lay back down, trying to relax by imaging how difficult it must have been for both of them to wait before finding out what actually happened. I knew it was taking everything Garrison had to not grill me about every little detail of what happened with the Godelan.

  When I thought about his words again, I frowned. “What do you mean, deal with everything else?”

  When neither seemed willing to answer and instead exchanged knowing looks, a feeling of foreboding settled over me.

  “What else?” I insisted.

  Michael was sitting up, leaning on one elbow, also interested. He glanced at me nervously, and I could nearly read his mind. Really, I just knew he was thinking the same as me. Did we do something worse than what the Godelan had been doing? Was it our fault?

  “There was a volcano,” Garrison began, slowly, choosing his words. “It erupted. There was a lot of ash. The town here is covered in it. A few towns around are, too. There were some fires….”

  While unfortunate, this wasn’t enough to warrant his tiptoeing around the subject.

  “And?” I asked.

  Again, a pause as Garrison considered what to say.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Kian squeezed my hand. “You were right,” he said. “They hid the names somewhere they thought we wouldn’t disturb, because the space was too vulnerable. These mountains, they’re linked all up the coast. There was some concern about a tsunami or tidal wave. And more earthquakes.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  Garrison opened his laptop to a news site and turned it to show Michael and me. My jaw dropped.

  Much of Mexico’s west coast was a disaster zone. A tsunami had wiped out entire towns and cities. Southern California was a crumpled mess. People were photographed in the streets, fleeing every which way. Headlines shouted about death tolls, illegal border crossings, and ultimate chaos.

  The earthquakes had echoed all the way up the coast. A small box held a picture labelled “Seattle.” Half the city was flooded.

  As my throat constricted and it became harder to breathe, a tear rolled down my cheek. I had done this. How could I have done this? It was worse than anything the Godelan had done.

  “It’s not your fault,” Garrison told me quickly. “They had this all planned. It was their way to get everything they wanted, whether or not they got you.”

  I held up my hand, wishing he would stop talking. No one could ever make me feel better about this. For long moments they watched me, silently waiting for a reaction. When I found my voice, it shook.

  “They couldn’t get our magic, so they used it anyway,” I said.

  “Exactly.” Garrison snapped the laptop shut. “There’s no way you could have known.”

  “Yes, there is,” I told him. I felt icy inside. The only thing keeping me human was Kian’s hand in mine. “I could have thought about it. I could have been more careful. Been stronger.”

  I lay back, closing my eyes, trying not to think of the repercussions.

  “Stone got away,” I said finally. “And Moira.”

  I turned to Kian, wondering how he felt about her. She had ultimately stood by and done nothing while they killed him.

  “She saved me. But I don’t think she meant to. She looked surprised.”

  When he glanced at Garrison again, I could see he was hiding something.

  “What?” I asked. “Moira?”

  “No,” Kian said with a wince. “Stone.”

  Garrison opened his laptop again, though I could tell it was the last thing he wanted to do.

  If I didn’t think my heart could sink lower, I was proven wrong.
Headlines about governments collapsing and ultimate chaos flashed before my eyes.

  “The world is going to be different,” Garrison said. “At least for a while.”

  “This is the opportunity he wanted,” I told them, my insides churning with regret.

  “He hasn’t won yet.” Kian gave me a reassuring half smile.

  There was a lump in my throat, but I forced myself to talk.

  “He got everything he was working for all these years,” I said. “All these centuries. We even did him a favour by getting rid of the others.”

  “No,” Garrison told me. “He didn’t get us. Or our magic. He hasn’t won everything.”

  I wanted to argue with him and tell him that it was pretty damn near close to everything. But with each word my energy seemed to wane. Kian helped me lie back and then went to see Seth. Before I could fall asleep, I turned to find Michael looking at me. His eyes were bright. Another tear rolled down my cheek.

  Trapped in a town that was covered with ash and lacking anything to do, I had little to distract myself with other than the dark hole that kept me going around in circles about what I could have done differently.

  Each of us handled our mistakes in different ways. Garrison was still trying to convince us, and maybe himself, of why it couldn’t have gone any another way, and that doing what we had done actually saved people.

  I wasn’t ready to believe him.

  Michael got his voice back but remained unusually quiet.

  Seth, of all people, was the one who truly shocked me. I thought I knew him better than anyone. He always handled things head-on, calmly, with precision, just like he did at the top of the volcano. But there was no breaking the news to him gently.

  He was so angry that his bed began to shake, which put him back to sleep for another day. He felt responsible for our journey — our mission — and while I didn’t blame him, I also couldn’t see how this was anything but a failure. Not only had the Godel won, but we had also gotten rid of two of his rivals for him.

  Our new friend was an Irish girl named Diana. I had expected her to be hysterical, but she was so happy not to be tied up or gagged anymore that she didn’t have trouble believing we were the good guys. Though I had nearly as much trouble understanding her accent as I did Michael’s, I generally felt she was a good addition to our group, and the direct opposite of Moira.

  Diana was like a ray of sunshine. With bright blue eyes and tightly curled blond hair, she practically bounced with each step. She was curious about everything to the point of exhaustion, and Kian spent long hours explaining to her about our past and what we had been doing for the last eight months.

  She wasn’t as hurt by Stone’s victory as we were. She didn’t feel the responsibility yet that came with all that power. But I caught Garrison mooning over her a few times, so I was perfectly happy to deflect her questions over to him.

  Our group slowly regained harmony, but in the mornings when I would wake up, I’d have a few seconds of hope that everything making my heart so heavy was just a dream. And then I’d realize it wasn’t.

  Moira was missing and still a threat. Maybe. Every time I looked out the window, I remembered being so hopeless in the mountains and causing all this devastation.

  I tried to avoid looking outside altogether.

  I watched Kian intently in the days after I woke up. Despite his reassurances, the bright red line on his throat wasn’t healing. Almost every night I would catch him wandering around. If his mind was as unsettled as mine, he didn’t mention it. Instead he’d crawl into bed with me and I’d find him asleep, sharing my pillow, in the morning.

  Most nights I’d wake several times and listen to him struggling to breathe, as if in his dreams his breath was being cut off. I could only hold my own breath until it stopped, knowing I couldn’t follow him into his nightmares, no matter how much I wanted to.

  The day came when we were finally supposed to get our ride back to the capital and then escape to somewhere that wasn’t destroyed. Diana talked Michael’s ear off, guessing where we were going next and where our seventh could be found. My mind was still on our fourth.

  Moira was queen, and as queen I worried about the kind of control she could have, despite her action in saving me.

  We packed and I took the opportunity to have a last bit of their South American tea that wasn’t really tea. The round cup was nestled in my hand when I turned to see the sun hit Kian just right through the windows so that he was illuminated like an angelic statue. One thing was off — the sunlight nearly poured through his pale skin, and as it hit him, the bright, searing red line across his throat made it look like his head had been severed and reattached.

  I dropped my cup, and as it clattered to the ground, he turned and saw me staring.

  “Gwen?” he asked, coming toward me. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  I tried to say nothing, that everything was all right, but I couldn’t. My hands shook. Maybe my mind had finally come around to acknowledging that everything was wrong, and I could finally handle asking him what I had held back for fear that it would be the final blow that destroyed me. My eyes couldn’t leave that scar. While I had closed the skin over top of it, it looked like blood flowed freely underneath.

  “Tell me the truth,” I told him quietly.

  The way he looked at me made me want to reach into the air and take the words back. I immediately wanted to pretend that nothing was wrong — but it was too late.

  He took my elbow and led me outside the room into the hall, placing me against a wall as if he was worried I would topple over.

  “I think I know what’s happening to me,” Kian said. “Remember that story I told you? About our gods, the first ones of our tribe, Eila and Goram?”

  I nodded.

  The two gods lived in the otherworld and were forbidden to be together, so they took the shapes of animals and travelled to our world to be free from the constraints of theirs. When Eila’s father learned of this, he struck Goram down and he broke apart to become our land.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Kian searched for the right words for so long that I became thankful for the wall behind me, holding me up.

  “There is more than one version,” he told me finally. “Revolving around a truth we know — magic, whether it is real, like yours, or stolen, like the Godel’s, cannot die. It doesn’t disappear. It lives on.”

  His eyes were bright.

  “What’s the other version?”

  “The story goes that Eila was one of the gods, but Goram was just a man — the first man. She would escape the Otherworld to be with him, and they were very much in love. But when her father found out, he challenged Goram to a dual to show just how weak a man was against the gods.”

  Kian took my hands in his. He was burning up and I fought the urge to feel if he had a fever.

  “Eila’s father wounded Goram, but in the end Goram succeeded in defeating her father and killed him,” Kian continued. “But before they could start their lives in the new land, Goram died.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Magic doesn’t die,” Kian repeated. “In killing a god through battle, the magic passed into the human — but he could not sustain it. Men are not built to hold such power. It killed him.”

  I was starting to put the pieces together in my head. Still, I had to hear it.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying,” Kian said slowly, as if he couldn’t believe it himself, “I think Donald’s magic came to me when you killed him. You used my blood, so technically it was me who ended his life. Now it’s like a constant presence in my body. I feel the magic changing me, and I don’t know how to control it. I was never meant for this.”

  “Well, hasn’t this ever happened before?” I blurted out.

  “No,” Kian said, looking past me as if trying to remember. “Warriors like you or magic thieves like the Godelan are rare enough. I can’t remember one ever being killed.”


  “But the Godelan gave you magic before,” I protested.

  “Not like this. It was a loan. Something small enough for me to work with.”

  I reached out to feel his forehead. He was hot to the touch.

  “What can we do?” I asked. “Can’t we just train you to use magic like you trained me?”

  I was trying to keep the situation from getting worse, but the tears that sprang into my eyes weren’t helping. He took my hand from his forehead, shaking his head.

  “Maybe, but I don’t know if my body can fight it long enough for me to learn how to use it.”

  I opened my mouth again to ask what we could do, but he silenced me with a look.

  “For now, we do nothing. Please don’t say anything to the others. They have enough to worry about. I only know of one person who can possibly know more about magic than anyone we’ve encountered so far.”

  “Who?”

  “Your seventh. He kept our history,” Kian said. “If he gets his memory back and if we can find him, maybe he can tell me how to control the magic.”

  There were too many “ifs” in there for my liking.

  “Don’t worry,” Kian said. “There’s always something stronger. Something bigger. Your seventh may know what it is.”

  “What if we don’t find him? Who else can help?” I asked.

  “Stone.”

  “But we don’t know where he is either.”

  Kian nodded.

  This didn’t sound promising.

  “We need to find him soon. I don’t know how long I have.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to comprehend the words. It was as if they stopped just short of where my mind could make sense of any of this.

  Kian took a deep breath and I heard, not for the first time, the struggle it truly was. It had worsened over time, and suddenly a great pressure urged me forward into action, though I didn’t know where to start.

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “What happens if we don’t find our seventh or Stone soon?”