“You shouldn’t drink water,” Zander said, still pressing his blood-soaked shirt against the gushing wound.
Ben ignored that, and Zander suddenly understood that he didn’t actually want the water anyway. “Thank you for killing Rahas,” he said. “You sacrificed everything for that – if you hadn’t … this would have turned out much worse.”
“What’s worse than this?” he asked.
But Ben’s thoughts had shifted. He had a faraway look in his eyes. “Linnea’s pregnant,” he said. “She doesn’t know that – I didn’t know that until just now. Don’t do it tonight … not for a little while yet … but will you tell her for me that it’s a girl? A perfect little girl – just like her – and that I love them both so much?”
Zander couldn’t remember having cried since he was young, but he couldn’t stop the tears that flowed down his face now as he nodded. “I would, if you were going to die, but you’re not going to die.”
“Don’t, Zander, please.”
For a moment, he almost continued, almost told Ben to keep fighting, to wait, but then he realized the arguing would be a waste of the precious time left. Though Ben was bleeding profusely from the front, there was no blood underneath him – the bullet hadn’t gone through. He wasn’t a doctor, but he knew that was bad news.
“Fine. But what if it’s a boy, and I’ve lied to her, then?”
Ben gave him a weak smile. “She won’t be mad – she’d love him just as much, and so would I. But I see my girl pretty clearly.”
“I’ll tell her, Ben. I will.”
“Good. And I need you to please make sure she doesn’t spend her life being sad and alone forever. She can grieve, but if she takes it too far, then someone needs to talk some sense into her. Wherever I am, when I look at her, I want to see her smile. Can you do that, too?”
“I can try,” he said. “I think you overestimate my ability to get her to listen, though.”
“I think you’ll manage. Thank you, Zander. I wish I was going to be around to see the great man you’re going to become, but I’m glad I got to be here at the beginning.” His voice was growing weaker now and his hands were trembling from the pain.
Marcus was back with the water, and Luke had the bandages. The water was abandoned, but they worked together for a moment to get the clean cloth against the bloody mess without taking pressure off of it for a second. Once Marcus was holding the bandage, Zander and Luke backed away, leaving him to be alone with his son.
Zander headed for the river to wash his hands and face and continue his cry.
* * *
The thundering of hoofbeats roared down the path much sooner than Zander expected. Some of the castle guards must have been perpetually equipped to leave instantly if they were needed.
Luke walked over to meet them.
“What happened here?” one of the guards asked. “What were you doing, Luke?”
“I don’t have time to answer questions right now, but the men who attacked us – Tolliver and at least two of his soldiers went that direction,” he pointed. “We need to find them.”
“Do you need help here?”
“Yes. But not the kind you can provide right now. Just … find Tolliver.”
Nathaniel came riding up only moments after the first set of guards disappeared, with several more guards behind him. He dismounted while his horse was still moving, running over to Marcus, already holding his large leather medical bag. “Who is it? What happened?” he was yelling.
But it was too late.
Zander was still curled in a ball at the edge of the river when Nathaniel came over to him.
“You stayed.”
“I thought I could help Ben.” He swiped angrily at a belated tear that made its way down the side of his nose.
Nathaniel just nodded and sat down next to him, resting his hand on Zander’s shoulder while the two of them stared out over the moonlight reflecting on the black swirling water. Nathaniel was unapologetic about the flow of tears down his own cheeks. “You’re bleeding,” he said after a few minutes.
“Yeah.” He pulled back the hand which had been pressing another of Luke’s bandages against the gouge on his neck, at the same time using his other hand to peel back his bloodied jacket, revealing another long cut on his side. “Tolliver’s sword,” he said. “At least on my neck. I’m not sure about the other one. It’s all just a blur. I didn’t even notice the blood until after I came over here to clean myself up. It didn’t even hurt.”
“Does it hurt now?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll bet. It doesn’t look very serious, but I want to get it cleaned up and get the bleeding stopped.” He was already digging around in his bag, pulling out some kind of leather pouch.
“I’m fine,” Zander said. “Don’t we need to get Ben back to the castle or something?” Most of the guards had followed the first group, spreading out into the woods to search for Tolliver and his men, but three of them had taken places around the little clearing, standing in uniform next to their horses, their swords drawn, their stances protective.
“No. They’ll send a wagon. Ben is officially a royal as well as a guard. He’ll be given his proper due. We’ve got some time, let me take care of you.”
~ 34 ~
Firelight
“COME IN,” ZANDER called when there was a knock on his door. The sound had startled him – everyone was so preoccupied, he hadn’t expected anyone would need to talk with him tonight.
“Hey,” Quinn called from the doorway.
“Hey.”
“Can I come in?”
Though he stayed where he was, he held out his hand toward the couch across from him.
“It’s dark in here,” she said once she’d closed the door behind her.
“You can light some lamps if you want to.” Even as he said it, he knew he’d prefer she didn’t. The low flickering of the fire in the grate was enough for him; it was comforting – and dark enough to hide the random tears that had occasionally been escaping. That hadn’t happened in a while, though. Now he was mostly numb.
“I like it like this,” she said. He couldn’t see her face very well as she sat down across from him, but the rough sound in her voice and the white cloth clenched in her hand told him that she’d done her fair share of crying tonight.
“Did they send you in here?” he asked.
“I’m a queen, Zander. Nobody ‘sends’ me anywhere.”
He half-smiled to himself. She was still capable of indignation.
“I did tell them I was coming to talk to you. William asked me to bring you this.” Withdrawing an object from her pocket, she stretched her arm to the little table between them to set it down. It was a little brown glass bottle. Or it looked brown in the firelight, anyway. “For the pain.”
“The physical kind, anyway,” Zander said, sighing and reaching for the bottle. Pills rattled against the glass.
“How are you feeling?”
He ignored the deeper meaning in her question. “The numbness is starting to wear off in both my neck and my side.”
“Want me to get you a glass of water so you can take some of those?”
“I’m all right. I’ll do it in a little while.” Truthfully, he sort of welcomed the pain – it was real and there, and it reminded him that tonight’s events had really happened. Pain was better than being completely numb inside and out.
“Okay.” The tone in her voice told him she understood.
“How is Linnea?”
“Thomas and William are with her. I think she’s in shock. All of us are; it doesn’t seem like it could be true.”
“It doesn’t see like it could be true, but it is. I saw the whole thing.” He’d ridden behind Marcus and Ben in the wagon all the way back to the castle.
“I heard you were a hero. That you killed Rahas, and you tried to save Ben.”
“I didn’t do anything for Ben. I couldn’t help him. I was useless. Worse than useless. This whole th
ing is my fault.”
“Your fault how?”
“If I hadn’t come here, if I could have just let things be, and not insisted that I had to have answers that were none of my business, then Ben would be alive right now.”
“Don’t be stupid, Zander.”
“Excuse me?”
“Seriously. If I wasn’t a queen, and you weren’t injured and a hero, I would walk over there and physically knock some sense into you. This isn’t your fault. You didn’t kill Ben. Rahas and Tolliver did.”
“They wouldn’t have been able to if I hadn’t come here.”
She paused, the silhouette of her head looking down toward her lap, wiping at her eyes with the white cloth. “Learning to take responsibility is a powerful thing, Zander. But you have to be careful to only take the amount that actually belongs to you. You didn’t kill anyone by coming through that gate. If you’ll remember correctly, you saved at least one person’s life – and you possibly saved Ben’s, too.”
“All for nothing. I jumped down off of that bridge thinking I could do something – he said I did, you know, Ben, before … that if I hadn’t killed Rahas… And now, what? Rahas is dead, but so is Ben and I’m homeless in another universe.” There were the tears again.
She was quiet for several minutes before she spoke. “You’re not homeless, Zander.”
“Where am I going to live, then?”
“That’s up to you. William and I would be happy to have you in Philotheum, if you want. We have plenty of room in the castle.”
“You’d be happy with that, Quinn? Your husband would be happy with you inviting your ex-boyfriend to live with the two of you?”
“This isn’t a situation anybody planned for. I’m sure it’s not an offer you ever considered in any way. If you’re really uncomfortable with it, then you should know that Stephen has offered the same to you here. He would come to you and tell you himself, but he figured tonight wasn’t the best night.”
“He offered that, really?”
“Yes. Of course, you are an adult. You’re free to live and work wherever you’d like – in either Eirentheos or Philotheum. But neither kingdom has any intention of turning a hero out onto the streets. We’re all more than happy to provide for your needs until you get settled – or beyond.”
“I’m not a hero, Quinn.”
“Do you have another word for someone who would sacrifice his entire life in defense of a kingdom? Because I don’t.”
He didn’t know what to say for that; he ended up settling for rambling. “The money was in the backpack with Owen – everything of mine was, except for what I’m wearing. I don’t even have a shirt.”
“We’ll get you clothes, Zander. And everything you need. Nobody here is going to let a hero run around with nothing. You’re entitled to full military benefits for your service to the kingdom tonight. We have more cash from the other world, but the money is useless here anyway – we have plenty of other kinds of paper if you need some.”
He chuckled, which surprised him. It didn’t feel like he should be able to react with any emotion at all. “What was Nathaniel doing with that kind of cash here then, anyway?”
“Traveling between universes is risky. He always had enough money with him to be able to cover an unexpected emergency in case something weird happened. At some point, someone could have figured out that his birth certificate wasn’t real, or who knows, so he didn’t want to leave everything in a bank – and leaving that kind of cash in an empty house is probably a bad idea, too, so… Plus, there was always enough here for someone else to have cash in case they needed to make a trip to the other world.”
He nodded, not really interested in the topic anymore. It didn’t matter. “I can’t ever go home.”
“No. At least, not in the foreseeable future.”
“Not in the ‘foreseeable future’, Quinn? We just told Owen to close the gate permanently. I’m sure he did, even when I didn’t show up. He better have.”
“I’m sure he did. There are rumors, though, of other gates that existed and people knew about in the past. Even Alvin admitted the other gates are real. It’s always been our hope that we would find one.”
“So Tolliver could go through one of those ones instead? Fabulous idea.”
“You’re right. We have to take care of the Tolliver problem before finding another gate.”
“Yeah, you could call it that – the Tolliver problem. Did they catch him?”
“No. They’re still searching.” She stood and began pacing the room, casting long shadows up the walls as she passed the fire. “The only good thing – not good, but … I don’t have the right word for it – about Ben’s death is it gives me a solid crime for which I can have Tolliver charged. When we catch him, he will be executed for the murder of a royal. I really don’t care what anybody else says.”
“Good. Because if you don’t have him killed, Quinn, I will find a way to make it happen. And I’m not the only one who feels that way.”
“Trust me, I’ve had the same thoughts. I’ve lived in fear of something like this for eleven moons. But it’s hard to execute a prince who is also your uncle when he hasn’t actually committed an executable crime. Particularly when you’re the first queen to ever be the ruler of a kingdom, and a good number of your people still support him. But now he’s done it – he’s given me an iron-clad reason.”
“I was personally hoping he’d make it through the gate just in time to be run over by a semi.”
“Well, if we ever find another gate, you’re welcome to push him.”
“I just might.”
She sat back down and they were both quiet for a while, staring into the fire.
“Do you think Owen is okay?” he asked. “There, in Bristlecone all alone? Nobody’s there. I’m not sure when either of our families will be back – mine will before yours probably, but I don’t know if he’d go there.”
“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “He knows his way around, he knows how to get home, or ask for help, or something. It sounds like all of the danger was on our side, so I’m just going to have to believe he’s okay. That somehow, somewhere, someone is watching out for him.”
He nodded. “I’m the one the police are going to be looking for.”
“Yeah, probably. But they won’t find you. Nobody will. I’m sure Owen will tell my parents, and they’ll figure out some way to tell yours. It sucks we’re leaving them to do that, but … if I’ve learned anything in my experience of leaving that world and trying to live in this one, Zander – you can’t worry about it. You just have to believe that everything will work out how it’s supposed to there, and live your life where you are.”
“And that’s here now.”
“That’s here. And we have enough of our own troubles and worries here.”
~ 35 ~
Answers
Rosewood Castle, Eirentheos
“THERE YOU GO, little man,” Thomas said, fastening the last pin on the diaper. “Does that feel better?”
The infant cooed in response as Thomas lifted him into his arms, carrying him over to the window. A light snow covered the grass outside the castle, which seemed appropriate for today. “Someday soon, Uncle Thomas is going to teach you how to throw snowballs,” he whispered to the baby.
The creaking of the half-open door behind him made him look up. “Mia.”
Her whole face went white when she saw him. “I’m sorry … I was looking for Quinn and William … I … I have the baby’s outfit.” She held up the tiny green velvet jumper, embroidered in gold with the crest of Philotheum.
“Quinn and Will are with Marcus and Linnea, making some of the last-minute arrangements,” he said, taking the outfit from her. He looked at it, shaking his head. “This was not supposed to be the first occasion we dressed him up for.”
A shadow passed over her eyes, and she nodded and sighed. “At least Quinn got to have a say in this one. Lady Sophia messaged that the one for his Nam
ing Ceremony is ready and waiting.”
“Well, Lady Sophia is going to have me and Linnea to contend with over taking decisions from Quinn like that from now on.”
“While you’re there for the ceremony, anyway,” Mia said, her voice shaking and her face going several shades paler.
Thomas closed his eyes for a long moment, calming himself and the baby at the same time by rocking slightly back and forth. “Mia, where have you been for the past week?”
“What do you mean Thomas? We’ve been planning a funeral, and I thought you were mad at me.” A tear was already sliding down her cheek.
“So mad that I didn’t want to see you? That I didn’t want to hug you? Do you think I don’t know how close your family and Marcus and Ben were when you were growing up? How hard this must be on you, too? I wouldn’t have minded being there for you – or to have you there for me. Or was your telling me that you’re moving to Philotheum your way of breaking things off between us without actually telling me?”
The tears were dripping off her chin now, and he almost felt bad, but he didn’t – he was angry now.
“I didn’t want to end our courtship, Thomas. I was going to tell you – I meant to tell you everything, and then, that afternoon, you walked into my room, and you saw … I didn’t mean. I just don’t want to fight with you anymore, Thomas. I can’t. This is too hard.”
“Not fighting seemed harder to you than trying to avoid me while we’re packed in carriages together for five days, Mia? You’d rather leave me hanging out here alone dealing with this than have me be mad at you?”
She looked down at the floor.
“I don’t understand.”
Her eyes stayed down, and the tears just kept going. “I didn’t think you would want to have anything to do with me after what I did, and since I’m leaving anyway…”
And then he knew. She’d already ended it without saying a word to him. “Let me see your wrist, please.”
Her shoulders were shaking, but she did it. She lifted her sleeve enough for him to see that it was empty – she wasn’t wearing her courtship bracelet.
Canes of Divergence (Dusk Gate Chronicles) Page 35
