The crystal swords met with a resounding boom and a shower of sparks, but neither knight relented. They pressed into one another, pulled back, and struck again, swords connecting in an exact parry.
“Stop!” yelled both Murlands. “I’ll settle this.” They squared off on each other, pulled out their wands in unison, and shot identical spells. They were incantations meant to stun, and stun they did, sending both spinning head over heels and landing, groaning, in the sand twenty feet away.
The two Brannons squared on each other, as did both Willows, but rather than fight, the two ogres asked each other if they had any food.
“This is insanity,” said both Sir Eldricks.
“Enough of this!” said Murland’s double, pulling himself up from the sand and stalking toward them.
Everyone realized that only one Murland had spoken, and all eyes turned to the one who hadn’t.
“How…how did you do that?” said Murland, getting up as well.
“How did you do that?” Sir Eldrick’s double asked the Murland doppelganger.
“Okay. This is getting confusing,” said the real Willow.
“They have decided to stop mimicking us, that is all,” said Sir Eldrick. “Do not let down your guard.”
“What he said,” said his double, glancing back at the fake companions.
Sir Eldrick noticed then that they too had marked their hands with a big X. He took a step back. “They have marked their hands as well. Do not get mixed up with them.”
Everyone, even the doubles, all took a collective step back.
“How do we remedy this?” said Sir Eldrick’s double.
“Since we are the real champions, you can bugger off and leave us to it. Go and play your tricks on someone else.”
“Why does he keep saying that they are the real ones?” asked Gibrig’s double, studying his own hands and looking quite frightened.
“How do we know we are…ourselves?” the real Willow asked.
“Shut up, you idiot,” Brannon hissed.
“Hey, that’s not nice!” said both Gibrigs, and then they smiled at one another shyly.
Sir Eldrick drew a line in the sand with his boot and eyed the doppelgangers. “You just stay on your side. Got it?”
He turned back to the others and ordered them to make camp, and sure enough, so did his double.
There was no firewood, and no tent, and so camp became everyone lying down in a circle and shivering in the cold. Some food went around, but little was said, for both camps were listening to what the others might have to say, and soon, a cold silence settled over them all.
Sir Eldrick was up before the sun, as usual. He had spent enough time in the Eternal Ice to easily handle the cold of the desert. Indeed, the frigid temperature didn’t bother him half as much as the doppelgangers did. He knew that magic was behind it, but he had yet to determine if these were simply trickster fae or something worse. Either way, they would have to be dealt with.
It was no surprise when his double rose for the day at the same time that he did, and like Eldrick, his doppelganger stretched and did a short routine of calisthenics to get the blood flowing. Sir Eldrick got down on his hands and feet and started doing quick push-ups, determined to outdo his counterpart. His double paced him thrust for thrust, however, and soon Sir Eldrick had counted to fifty. His shoulders burned, his arms shook, but he refused to lose to the imposter. His double was visibly tiring as well, and together they grunted out ten more. Sir Eldrick struggled on number sixty-one, arms quivering and muscles screaming. He saw his double struggling thusly, and together they finished and fell face first in the sand, panting.
Sir Eldrick pulled himself up and strode over to his counterpart, who predictably did the same.
“If you are impersonating me, then you must be the leader of your group. I will ask one more time. What do you want?” Sir Eldrick asked, standing tall and confident.
“I want what you want. For I am you.”
“Enough of your dragonshit!”
“That temper,” said the doppelganger before clucking his tongue. “Just like our father.”
“You don’t know shit about my father,” said Sir Eldrick. He realized quickly that he was letting the doppelganger under his skin much too easily.
“I know everything that you know. How our father used to drink, how we took the beatings to spare our younger siblings.”
Sir Eldrick ground his teeth, warning himself against falling for the imposter’s games. But the bastard went on, speaking of things that Sir Eldrick had never told anyone.
“I know as well as you do what happened that night.”
“That’s enough,” said Sir Eldrick.
“We came back on first leave from the academy, and found our little brother with a blackened eye, sister Susie with a split lip, and poor Mother—”
“Shut your damned mouth!”
“Mother with that blank stare, lying in bed, head wrapped, bandage bloody, and the drool glistening at the side of her mouth. Susie was crying, she was always crying. Queen’s sake, how many times did we take a flogging due to her wailing?”
Sir Eldrick could only shake his head. His eyes were fixed on that long-ago morning. The sun had just come up. He had picked a bundle of wild flowers for his mother. He was proud to show his father that he hadn’t quit like he said he would. It was fall, and the trees had begun to turn. In a month, he would be eighteen, and in two years he would graduate. He would begin getting paid after that, and as promised, he would take his family far from their hateful patriarch.
Just two more years…
“Father’s mammoth frame took up the doorway. He was drunk, just coming home from an all-night bender, no doubt.”
“Stop,” said Sir Eldrick.
“‘What happened to her?’ we said. ‘Fell and hit her head,’ said Father, unable to meet our eyes.”
Sir Eldrick was shaking now, fists balled at his sides. The doppelganger did not seem to relish in the memory or Sir Eldrick’s reaction. Rather, he appeared to be shaken up, and just as angry. “All the years of beatings, all the bloody lips, broken noses, chipped teeth, all the anger, all the rage…it all came out that morning.”
Sir Eldrick was there in the bedroom. He saw not the endless desert or the blazing, tiger’s eye sunrise. Instead, he saw the guilt in his father’s downward eyes, the desperate nothingness in his mother’s, and the terror in his siblings’. His father, who had always seemed such a thick, towering man, seemed small, weak, and cowardly.
Without consciously deciding to do it, Sir Eldrick rushed across the room and tore through his father’s feeble defenses. He went straight for the throat, ignoring his father’s attempts to fend him off. His father scratched his face, but Sir Eldrick held firm. He felt thumbs press against his eyes, but he continued to squeeze. His ears were boxed by his weakening father, and he ignored the ringing in his ears, squeezing harder, harder…
The visions came in quick flashes. He remembered his father’s desperate, bloodshot eyes, the faint protest of his brother, those dirty hands trying to fend him off. He saw his father weakening. The eyes rolled back. The windpipe gave way with a sickening, muffled crunch. Then there was shocked silence, the smell of urine, and a sudden, terrible lucidity.
Sir Eldrick stood there in the desert, staring at his own hands—hands that had dealt death to the man who had given him life. He was shaking violently, as if the cold of the desert night had finally creeped through his clothing and thick façade, lovingly caressing his tired bones.
He dropped to his knees, weeping.
The doppelganger remained standing.
“You did what you had to do,” said his double, laying a hand on Sir Eldrick’s head.
Sir Eldrick wanted to punch him in the face, he wanted to choke him to death…
His shoulders shuddered with his sobs, and he turned in his mind’s eye to see the shocked faces of his brother and sister. Susie was holding her corn husk doll, the one with a missing
eye that she refused to allow to be fixed, and Breck was holding her defensively beside him, wide eyed and staring, not at Eldrick, but their father.
Sir Eldrick realized that he was still choking the dead man, and released him as one might a snake that has been mistaken for something else in the dark of night. He reeled back, tripped over his father’s foot, and fell. He scuttled on hands and feet across the room until he hit the corner, and he stared, speechless, at what he had done.
“Papa?” came Susie’s sweet, cherubim voice.
“Come on, Suze,” Breck had said, taking the girl who was half his age in his arms.
“Papa?” She was beginning to cry again.
Breck carried her out, careful not to step on his father.
Sir Eldrick wanted to say something to them, but he could only stare. He suddenly lurched to his feet like a drunkard and swiveled, looking this way and that, mind racing—how to get rid of the body, how to cover up the crime…
Surely someone had heard the ruckus. He hadn’t realized at the time, but he had been cursing his father, screaming like a feral beast caught in a snare.
Someone will come!
Sir Eldrick rushed to his mother’s side and took her lifeless hand. Those green eyes that smiled so when she laughed were now as still and dark as grass after the frost.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I should have never left.”
Neither her eyes nor her mouth answered.
He kissed her on the head and turned from the sick bed. Seeing his father there in the doorway suddenly made his stomach turn, and he vomited in the corner. Wiping the burning bile from his stubbly chin, he lurched out of the room.
Breck was sitting with Susie on the front porch. Eldrick’s fifteen-year-old brother looked to him as he never had. There was wonder and respect, perhaps gratitude, but there was also fear. Sir Eldrick met his sister’s eyes, and there too he saw terror.
“I’m…” said Sir Eldrick, but he wasn’t sorry, and that was the worst part. “I love you both. Take care of Mother.”
With that, Sir Eldrick ran, and he never looked back.
“You think that changing your name and settling in another kingdom will change who you really are?” said Sir Eldrick’s double. “You think that it will change what you have done?”
Sir Eldrick couldn’t meet the man’s eyes, for they were his eyes, but unlike a mirror, he could not shatter the illusion standing before him.
“You can pretend to be Sir Eldrick all you want, but you will always be Henry Miller, son of a madman, and a madman yourself. Until you embrace Henry Miller, you will never know peace.”
“Enough of your cursed tongue,” said Sir Eldrick, but there was no bluster behind the words, only tired resignation. He got to his feet slowly and began to walk away.
“You ran from your father, you abandoned your mother, brother, sister,” said his double behind him. “Would you so easily abandon yourself?”
“I did that long ago,” said Sir Eldrick, and he returned to camp as the others began to stir.
***
Brannon was shivering uncontrollably in his sleep and awoke with aching, tired muscles. The sun hit his eyes—the glorious, bright sun. He rose from the cold sand and took in the warmth, rubbing his hands together and hopping up and down to get his circulation going.
Then he remembered the doppelgangers.
His was standing a hundred yards away with the other imposters, mimicking Brannon’s actions—that made him shake even more.
Sir Eldrick was standing off to the south on top of a dune, looking west.
“Wake up, you guys, we’ve got to get going before the sun starts to fry us all to a crisp,” said Brannon, and he heard his counterpart say the same thing to the others. Sir Eldrick’s double was standing off to the north, and he too stared west stoically. The two looked to Brannon like sentinel knights made of pure sunlight, so brightly did the rays reflect off their dusty armor.
“I’m so cold,” said Gibrig.
“I’m so hungry,” said Willow.
Murland said nothing, but wiped his bleary eyes and absently felt for his backpack. He lumbered to his feet, took a drink from his flask, shouldered Packy, and was in the air in ten heartbeats.
Soon they were all marching west at a quick pace, trying to get the most out of the mild morning. The two Sir Eldricks walked far ahead of the groups, though they remained a good distance from each other. The other doppelgangers, however, seemed to get closer to the companions by the minute, and soon Brannon’s double was walking but a few feet away from him.
Brannon glanced at him sheepishly many times, and the double did the same. He was about to speak when the doppelganger beat him to it, and what he said nearly stopped Brannon in his tracks.
“I know what you went through, for I went through it as well.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The inquisitors, the torture, the witches, the potions, everything our father did to try to rid us of our…condition.”
Brannon was speechless. Images of the dark chamber flashed before his mind, and he hurried to outpace his double.
“You think that he is right, don’t you?”
“Leave me alone,” said Brannon.
“You cannot run from yourself.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Brannon, brother, I have cried as you have cried. I have lived in a world that I wanted to leave as well. I too have…cut myself.”
Brannon stopped, looking to the ruffled material covering his delicate wrists. “Get away from me,” he said to the doppelganger.
His double stared back, eyes pooling with tears. “Don’t push me away.”
Brannon marched on bravely, though he had the urge to run.
“I know what it was like to be strapped to the wizard’s table, to be probed by the telepaths. I felt the same shame when our thoughts were broadcast before the cleansing committee.”
Suddenly, by some terrible dark magic, Brannon was there. He could smell his own cold sweat and the dank earth, could hear the creaking of the giant sequoia, whose roots made up his earthen prison. He felt the metal cap on his head, and the cold clamps that kept his eyes peeled open as he stared at the mental projection of his most perverted and lurid thoughts playing out before him. The psychics gave a nod to the elf holding the chain attached to the metal cap, and when Brannon reacted to the images favorably in the deepest, darkest parts of his mind, electricity was shot through the chain, shocking him until he was drooling.
Through all of it, his father watched.
“Stop,” he mewled.
But the doppelganger did not stop. He showed Brannon other tortures that he had tried to repress, until Brannon was a sobbing mess.
“You think that you deserved it. You wish more than anything, in your heart of hearts, that you were the elf your father wanted you to be. You hate him for wanting you to change, and you hate yourself for not being able to.”
“No more…”
“You have to forgive yourself, Brannon. Or else you shall never know peace.”
“Enough!” Brannon screamed, and he reeled back from the doppelganger.
“Brannon?” said Gibrig, touching his shoulder.
Brannon whirled around and pushed the dwarf to the sand. “Leave me alone!” he screamed.
Willow came to help Gibrig up, and Brannon spun, looking for the doppelganger, but his double was walking with his group a stone’s throw to the north.
Had he imagined it?
He could still hear his own pleading screams.
He shivered.
“What’s wrong?” said Gibrig, true sympathy shimmering in his eyes.
Brannon felt the lump in his throat grow. “I just want to be alone,” he said, and he hurried off ahead of them all, following in Sir Eldrick’s solemn footsteps.
***
Gibrig gave a sigh as he watched Brannon storm off ahead of the group. He wished that he could make the elf feel better, but the
heat made his mind move slow, and he found that he didn’t have the energy to go running after Brannon.
Instead, Gibrig trudged through the sand, absently thinking how much it resembled trying to walk through deep snow. The sand seemed to be endless, and stretched as far as the eye could see. Dunes rose and fell, but as the companions crested one, there awaited another.
Thoughts of snow led Gibrig to think of how his brother had loved winter. As young dwarves, they had spent hours sliding down the mountainside on sleds built by their father. Dwarven mountain sledding was a very popular sport, and they prided themselves on their skill. Competition was fierce among the dwarves, and the annual sled race brought thousands from all around. Gillrog had often dreamed of one day winning the coveted golden flask.
And Gibrig thought that his brother might have done it, if only…
“Ye thinkin ‘bout Gill too?” his double asked.
Gibrig was startled that the imposter was suddenly so close. He turned back and looked to Willow, but the Ogre seemed not to notice either of them.
“I think ‘bout him all the time,” said the double with a sigh.
Gibrig waved a hand in front of Willow as she trudged by. Nothing.
“I oft think that there must’ve been somethin’ we coulda done to help him, to stop him.”
“We?” said Gibrig apprehensively.
“Ye and me, we.”
“Ye couldn’t o’ helped him,” said Gibrig. “’Cause ye ain’t me, and me ain’t ye.”
The doppelganger smiled, but there was a forlorn quality to that smile, as though he felt pity for Gibrig. “Ye feel guilty ‘bout what happened to poor Gill, ain’t ye? An’ now he be trapped in the In-Between. Ye feel like it shoulda been ye.”
Hot tears spilled down Gibrig’s cheeks, and he angrily wiped them away. “What ye be doin’, eh, ye falsifier? Why ye playin’ these cruel games?”
“This ain’t no game,” said his double, and for a moment Gibrig was lost in his mirrored eyes, for they were the eyes of Gillrog. Looking closer, he realized how much he looked like his brother. They were twins, but not identical. Still, Gibrig saw the resemblance where he had not seen it before.
Beyond the Wide Wall Page 23
