This is a sample of my handwriting.
Rachel read it and then nodded, puzzled.
“Take a look at this.” Blackie drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to her. Rachel unfolded it.
Blackie watched her. “Found that when I woke up in the lab without my memory. First thing I remember seeing.”
The note on the folded paper was written in Blackie’s handwriting. It read:
I, Blackie Moth, attest that my memory was removed with my permission. Furthermore, I charge myself not to investigate the reason it was taken or to continue my current line of research.
Some things are too dangerous to know.
Coracinus Nefarious Moth
Chapter Three:
Ye Shall Know the Truth
“Your middle name is Nefarious?” Gaius asked after Rachel, stunned by the content of Blackie’s note, handed it on to him. He looked extremely amused.
Blackie shrugged. “Pop’s humor runs dark.”
“Nefarious is as nefarious does, eh?” Gaius drawled, his eyes sparkling with humor. “Except when you’re Nefarious, regardless.”
Blackie snorted dryly, “Think you’re the first person to mock my name?”
“I’m not mocking you!” Gaius protested, spreading his hands. “I’m envious. We both have Latin names, but Gaius means ‘Boy’ or perhaps “Man of the Earth’ and was the name of practically every single Roman ever born, while yours means ‘Black Nefarious!’ Clearly, I received the short end of that stick.”
Blackie’s lips twitched slightly, but he stopped short of actually smiling.
“Though I guess you need a distinctive first name to go with Moth,” Gaius continued airily. “Isn’t just about everyone and his neighbor named Moth in the World of the Wise? Dean Moth. Nurse Moth. Your family. That singer whose son goes to our school, what’s his name, Marble Moth? Isabella Tiger Moth and her siblings? That super-tall proctor with the cowboy hat at Roanoke, Coal Moth, and his younger siblings, also named after rocks, except for Ignatius—who was probably originally called Igneous.”
“Marigold Merryweather Moth,” murmured Rachel, thinking of her classmate, Rowan Vanderdecken, who was a descendant both of Merry-Merry Moth and, as it turned out, of her now-departed ghostly friend, Old Thom.
“Who?” Gaius asked. “Oh, right! That girl who married the captain of the Flying Dutchman. And there’s the one we learned about in Math, Easterly Moth. And we covered so many Moths in True History that I couldn’t list ’em if my life depended on it. Truly. I’d die a Mothless death! I’d wager that over nineteen percent of the people we’ve studied in that class have been named Moth—most of them named after mist or sea foam or some other physical object. What’s it with all these Moths?”
“We’re the most far-flung family in the World of the Wise,” Blackie replied dryly.
“Weird that you are so common, yet I’d never even heard of the Moths before I came to school,” said Gaius.
“That’s because the Unwary branches of the family have other names,” replied Blackie, “like Smith, Wright, and Brown.”
“Wha—” Gaius’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You mean the Smiths are a branch of the Moths?”
“Yup,” replied Blackie.
Gaius turned to William, as if he thought the older boy would confirm that Blackie was pulling his leg, but William merely nodded.
“Is Sigfried Smith a Moth?” asked Gaius.
Shaking herself free of the shock of Blackie’s note, Rachel murmured, “I’m pretty sure Siggy made up his name.”
Gaius drawled, “I understand Smith and Brown. But what is so great about little flying night insects?”
Rachel and the older boys all laughed.
“You’ve got it backwards,” Rachel giggled. “The night insects are named after Moth, because they are his creatures. Lord Moth is the right hand man of Elf King Oberon, along with Puck, Lord Mustardseed, Lady Peaseblossom, and Lady Cobweb.”
“Ooooh,” Gaius’s eyes grew wider. “From Shakespeare.”
All her dissembling training failed to keep Rachel from laughing in her boyfriend’s face. “To the degree that King Henry the Fifth and Richard the Third are ‘from Shakespeare’, yes.”
“Moth is a real person?” asked Gaius.
“He’s a real elf,” Rachel nodded.
“My mother was one of the elven Moths, a great-granddaughter of the original Lord Moth,” said William. “My father met her at Blackie’s father’s wedding, when the Old Branch of the family showed up.”
Now it was Rachel’s turn to go wide-eyed. “You mean, showed up…from Under Hill?”
William nodded calmly.
“Blimey,” Rachel whispered softly. No wonder he had pointed ears: William’s mother had been a fey creature. “Does she live here in Detroit?”
“The mortal world is a difficult place for those accustomed to faerie,” William replied without any change of expression. “She returned to her homeland soon after I was born.”
“I’m s-so sorry.”
“It’s something William and Vlad and I all rather have in common,” Gaius quipped merrily, though a shadow haunted his eyes, “being motherless.”
“Even if William has merely misplaced his,” Blackie observed dryly.
William spread his arms, unruffled. “I will try to do better next time.”
Gaius handed the note back to Rachel, who read the words again. Their full meaning struck her. Her hand, holding the note, began trembling with wrath.
“This is total rubbish!” Her voice snapped with righteous fury. “Nothing can be too dangerous to know! If it were, how could I know everything?”
Blackie asked, “Who wants to know everything?”
“I do,” raged Rachel, waving the note about.
“No value to that,” opined Blackie. “No one needs to know the total number of eyelashes on all the fruit-flies in the Amazon.”
Rachel blinked. “I’m not sure fruit-flies have eyelashes.”
“Not my point,” Blackie took his note back and folded it. “And you know it.”
Rachel turned away, seething. As she gritted her teeth, she remembered something—an event that had never occurred. She had been standing in the Memorial Gardens gazing down at the Comfort Lion, the house cat-sized lion that was the familiar of her roommate Kitten Fabian—That part had happened. Then, in her recollection, the little tawny beast gazed up at her with his intense golden eyes and said, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.”
That last part had never happened. But she remembered it. A shiver ran up Rachel’s spine. How could that be?
Spinning around, she addressed the three young men. “I have a question for you scientific gentlemen. What’s the difference between knowing everything and knowing the truth?”
All three looked intrigued.
“That is interesting!” Gaius leaned against the wall and rested his jaw on the palm of his hand. “Up until now, I had thought your desire to know everything was an excellent goal. But Blackie rather does have a point about fruit flies and their eyelashes—or lack thereof. At the very least, knowing about Amazonian insect eyelash numbers definitely sounds rather less important than knowing the truth.”
“Knowin’ the truth tells you which falsehoods to avoid,” stated Blackie. “Truth is power. Know the truth about an enemy, the whole truth, and you can destroy him, leavin’ no clues.”
Rachel’s eyes grew big as Blackie spoke. Talking to him was almost as disorienting as talking to Sigfried, only Siggy always looked delighted whenever he advocated violence. Blackie looked deadly serious. She sneaked a glance at Gaius, but he was merely nodding his head.
“I must disagree with our friends,” William said dryly. “I believe that knowledge is valuable for its own sake. What you do with the knowledge is an entirely different matter.”
“Fair enough,” agreed Gaius.
William added, “How you use your information is a measure
of your intelligence. A man of sufficient brilliance can make use of anything—even the number of eyelashes on Amazonian fruit flies.” He paused, considering. “Well, maybe not that, but…most things.”
“I’m sure William could think of a use, even for that,” grinned Gaius.
Gaius now stood beside William, his shoulders resting on the wall, his back straight, just like his older friend. The two young men, one short, one tall, standing side-by-side in identical poses, looked so cute that Rachel had to struggle not to sigh wistfully.
Blackie grunted, unconvinced. “Even if you could know everything, Cousin Rachel, you wouldn’t have any use for all that knowledge.”
“I jolly well would!” Rachel shot back. “I would put it in a library. My dead Elf friend predicted that I might someday build something called the Library of All Worlds—where information from many worlds could be collected.”
Briefly, Rachel described the idea that her Elf had suggested for a cross-world library. All three young men gave her their undivided attention. She spoke to them in a calm, business-like manner, cool and collected, but, inside, her heart soared. It made her feel so grown up—being here, away from school, and speaking so seriously with these older boys.
“So that is the idea, though I have no idea where to put the library itself,” she finished, “but I guess that will sort itself out in time. Maybe, since Gaius wants to help me, we could ask Vlad to house it in Bavaria.”
“Might work,” said William with a smile. “Or you could put it here at O.I.”
“Maybe branches in both places?” suggested Gaius.
“Don’t really matter, till the library exists,” said Blackie without much interest.
The animation that had appeared in his face while she was describing the Library of All Worlds had vanished, and he was back to his cold, uninterested new self. Rachel sighed and gazed out at the laboratory. Frowning, she recalled the last time she had seen Blackie.
It was her family’s annual Yule party, nearly three years ago, the year that she was ten. The event had been her first after the death of her beloved grandfather, and since all her favorite Yule traditions had, up until then, involved the late duke, she had felt quite lost. The noise and cheer had suddenly become too much for her, and she fled out the back door of the manor and into the yew maze.
The maze at Gryphon Park was larger on the inside than the outside might strictly allow, but because she could see it from her bedroom window, she knew every twist and turn. She had sat on a bench near the center and watched the sun grow red in the western sky. When it dropped beneath the level of the hedge, she rose to leave.
Ahead, she heard footsteps. Blackie came strolling around a corner, humming to himself and carrying a piece of mistletoe dangling from a stick. When he saw her, he dangled the mistletoe above her head. As she squeaked in surprise, he leaned down and given her a friendly kiss on the cheek.
“Taking this home to amuse my gal,” he explained.
“You have a young lady?” Rachel exclaimed with childish delight.
“Sure do. Look what I got her,” he replied, his Americanisms, such as ‘sure do’ and ‘got’ with no ‘have’ before it, sounding exotic to her young ear.
Reaching into his pocket, Blackie pulled out a small black velvet box. Then, he squatted down and popped it open. Inside twinkled a diamond ring. Rachel’s eyes bulged until they were as large as saucers.
“Are you planning to propose?”
“Sure am.” Blackie’s eyes twinkled as brightly as the gem on the ring.
Without another word, he stood up, snapped the box shut, and stuck it back in his pocket. The two of them walked back to the manor together.
Back in the present, Rachel glanced surreptitiously at her second cousin. Where was that twinkle now? And what had happened to that ring? Had the young lady accepted? And if so, had she left him when he lost his memory? Or had he forgotten her?
The whole thing left her feeling sick to her stomach. She wanted to rush off and help him, but there was nowhere to rush to, no target at which she could direct her wrath—other than the Raven, and that was no good. If only she knew whom to hate.
She glanced back and forth between the three young men. “Rather bizarre, isn’t it, that all three of you have lost your memories.”
“All three of us?” asked Blackie, looking from Gaius to William
“You have forgotten your recent life, Blackie. William and Gaius have forgotten the life they had before they came to our world.”
“Quite true,” Gaius nodded, “and I admit I’m now obsessed with my past. The vague hints I have gleaned from the vision of your friend the princess and from the comments of the fetch girl that inhabits Magdalene Chase’s china doll have been tremendously tantalizing. ‘The Destroyer of Star Yard’? ‘The Doom of the Galactic Confederacy’? What deadly mistake did I made that earned me those titles? It is rather frustrating not to have some way to discover more.”
“The two cases are not equivalent,” Blackie crossed his arms. “Locke and Valiant have forgotten details they do not need in order to carry on the life they’re living now. I, on the other hand, cannot recall stuff I knew two years ago. I can’t even remember who has a claim on my affections, folks such as yourself. The effect on my life is catastrophic.”
“I admit to some scientific curiosity on the subject of my previous life,” William said thoughtfully. “But I am not convinced that the matter is significant. What does it mean that ‘I’ was someone else? In what manner am I the same person? A great deal of what I call myself is my thoughts, my memory, my relationships, what I know, what I chose to do. How much of this was the same before? How much changed? Was that previous person the same ‘me’ that I currently think of myself to be? Or was it merely a different individual with whom I share some common but unidentified qualities. Talents, perhaps?”
“But…aren’t you burning to know?” asked Gaius. “Who you were, I mean?”
“That depends,” William responded evenly. “Can my memories be returned? Does any of my old property still belong to me? If the answer to such questions is no, what good would such information do me?”
“I guess there’s also the question of: Do we really want to know?” murmured Gaius.
“Do you mean…” Rachel glanced from one to another, “what if you used to be beastly? What if you don’t like who you once were?”
All three young men fell silent.
After a time, Gaius tapped his foot impatiently against the wall he was leaning against. “I want to know, but, Rachel, you seemed to imply…I don’t know how much I can say…that even just knowing could bring danger.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Rachel bit her lip, thinking of how it had nearly damaged the whole world when her classmate Sakura Suzuki had recalled her previous life. “Yes. My father told me that just knowing too much about Outside can cause harm. And then…well, there’s what happened to Blackie.”
“Why didn’t the Guardian just remove the specific memories regarding what you had discovered?” asked Gaius.
“No idea,” stated Blackie.
“That’s the sixty-four million dollar question, isn’t it?” mused William.
“I’m not sure I believe what this says.” Blackie shook the folded note. “But I know myself. So I suspect I believed it when I wrote it.”
“What do you deduce from that?” asked William curiously. He pushed off the wall and stood up.
Blackie shrugged his shoulders and then rolled them, stretching. “That I found out something that someone—probably the Guardian—convinced me would cause harm to people who mattered to me. So, I agreed to give up my memory—for their sake.”
That was interesting. She had also offered to give up her memories to save the world. Why had the Raven rejected her offer and yet taken Blackie’s memories?
Rachel gazed up at Blackie’s impassive face. “It nearly happened to me, too, you know. I…can’t talk about it. But…I offered.”
&n
bsp; Blackie met her gaze. This time, he did not seem blank-faced and indifferent. A kinship that had nothing to do with being second cousins bridged the distance between them. They nodded at each other.
Suddenly, William and Blackie turned their heads simultaneously, as if listening to a voice Rachel could not hear.
William nodded and said, “Understood. We’ll be right there.”
“Some folks waitin’ to see you,” grunted Blackie.
• • •
Rachel thought little of Blackie’s final words, until they reached a large, wood-paneled chamber. People dressed in suits, mainly men but there were a few women among their number, stood in a semi-circle. One of the young women held a bouquet of lavender and white roses, the perfume of which scented the air. Another held a wooden plaque.
At the front of the group was her father’s cousin, Iron Moth. He looked like a harsher version of Blackie carved from unyielding stone. Next to him stood an older version of William, if William were more easy-going, with heavy jowls and a ready smile. Rachel knew from the news glasses that this was Leonard Locke, William’s father. These two men were the owners of Ouroboros Industries, the largest company in the World of the Wise, and one of the most powerful corporations in the Unwary world as well.
The men and women gathered in the chamber began to clap. The clapping kept rhythm with the tap of a cane against marble, somewhere down the hallway. As Rachel looked around to see for whom they were clapping, her gaze fell on William. He smiled and took a step back, gesturing for her to go forward. Startled, Rachel looked at the gathering anew.
They were clapping for her.
The athletic young woman with the plaque stepped forward and spoke. “Rachel Griffin, we would like to present you with this token of our appreciation for your bravery in facing the demon that threatened us in Tunis. Our efforts would have been for nothing without yours.”
Rachel blushed. Too many people were looking at her, too many expressions to track. A familiar, crushing panic overcame her—the terror that gripped her whenever she became the center of a crowd’s attention. It seized her chest like a vise. Frightened, she covered her face with her hands.
The Awful Truth About Forgetting (Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 4) Page 4
