by Shea Berkley
“I’m not so sure my father would agree.” Actually, I’m absolutely certain he wouldn’t.
“Your father was once a great man until he lost his way.” Shadows gather in his eyes as he looks at the door to Baun’s chambers. “Though he may not agree, your father has much to learn from you.”
He squeezes my arm. “We know you have lost a good friend. This war has touched all of our lives. It needs to end.”
I agree, but before I can ask him if the council has any new ideas, he moves back toward the others. The most powerful men in Teag huddle close, like a group of nervous sheep outside a wolf’s den. They’re scared, and knowing my dad and the speed at which he’s been collecting new magic, I can just imagine how afraid. Even if Baun is a changed man, as every indication implies, the memory of who he’d been and what he’d done will never go away.
The soldiers guarding my father’s rooms open the double doors for me. I see the same respect in their eyes, the same willingness to please that I haven’t seen before, and I’m not sure how I should behave. I simply nod and walk through the doors.
Though Baun is technically king, I am the acting ruler until he’s declared fit enough to reclaim his throne. I can’t let what Destril said change the way I view the future. My job is to protect Teag until Baun can take over. The end.
When I enter, I notice Dad’s been decorating again. His taste leans more toward Paris Hilton glitter than kingly splendor. There’s so much shine I have no doubt when the sun pours through the windows this place acts as a beacon. I can see myself in nearly every surface. Kera mentioned the firsts can be a bit vain, but my dad could give Narcissus lessons.
Even though he’s expecting me, he doesn’t see me. His back is to the doors as he looks up at a huge tapestry I’ve never seen before. It’s a rudimentary map of Teag and acts much like the maps in the map room, giving up-to-date information on the health and welfare of Teag. Unlike those maps, the tapestry colors are smudged, its borders blurry, and on the whole, not very appealing. My dad sweeps his hand over the countryside and stops. An especially nasty fire springs up under his fingers and engulfs a village near the eastern border. He pulls his hand away and the tapestry stops moving.
The door closes behind me, and he whips around, alarm widening his gaze. He’s holding a glass filled with a cloudy green mixture. A dark bottle is open on his desk and more than half of its content is gone.
My father’s greeting is short and not very friendly. “There you are. I sent for you ages ago.” He motions to the bowl and pitcher of water beside the door. “Wash. I have news.”
I splash water in the bowl and rinse the blood from my hands and forearms as best I can. He calls. I come like an obedient dog. I have better things to do than be at his beck and call. Who does he think is defending the city and cleaning up the mess left behind? He’d know if he ever bothered to look out the window. My human friends and I have kept the Ruined City from being overtaken. I dry my hands with a scented towel, toss it beside the bowl, and turn to face him. “I have news, too. Three hundred and eighty of your people are dead. Countless more are wounded. I came when I got the chance.”
He nods, and it’s then I see worry heavily line his face. “Thanks to you, we have won this fight.” He stares up at the tapestry and the muddied picture it has become. “Though not the battle.” In one quick, hard motion, he tosses back the contents of his glass. “Our enemies have retreated, but not for long.”
Maybe not, but I stopped the Nightmare Men from creating a bloodbath. All Dad did was sit shivering in his tower surrounded by reflections of himself. Granted, he’d been poked full of arrows, but it looks like the magic he recently collected had him regenerating like a lizard on Neosporin. It would explain why he wasn’t too concerned about his wounds. “You’ve collected new magic.”
“A few believe I need more than the trace I’ve been allotted to do my job.”
Only Kera is supposed to give him magic. How did he manage to find firsts to go against the edict? “That’s cheating.”
“A necessity in times of war, but I don’t expect you to understand.”
I understand more than he thinks.
He sighs and changes the subject. “I heard Wyatt sent out riders to insist our people come here where it’s safer. That’s an illusion now.”
One thing I’ve learned, firsts are stubborn, and most will stay to defend what’s theirs. “Some will come. Not all of them.”
“Many will die.” He says that so calmly, it sends a chill through me. He picks up the bottle and waves it near me. “Forgive my manners. Would you care for a drink?”
Warning bells sound in my head. “What is it?”
“La fée verte or little green fairy.” He laughs at the name. “Appropriate, don’t you think? Absinthe is the only thing our kind can consume that will give us a rosy outlook on life…and I need a rosy outlook right now.”
“You’re getting drunk?”
As he prepares himself another drink, he clicks his tongue and says, “Getting inspired.” He places a sugar cube on a fancy slotted silver spoon and dribbles water over the cube until it dissolves, turning the clear mint-colored drink a milky green. “It’s said to give power to the powerless.”
Great. All I need right now is a delusional, vain drunk who’s wallowing in self-pity. My anger gets the best of me, and instead of diverting his attention from himself—like that’s even possible—I poke the beast.
“What’s going on?” I point to the tapestry. “Weren’t you just out there? Looks like the area is still under attack.” A thick haze of smoke covers most of the east and part of the west. Only the center of Teag is fairly clear. “I guess your last visit didn’t instill much fear in our enemies.”
“Powerless kings tend to get ignored.” A look of confusion crosses his face. “I heard the cheers when you made your way here. Our people love you.”
Yep. Definitely pouting.
I wonder all the time how different my life would’ve been if he hadn’t gone all “human slayer” on everyone. I would’ve been a normal messed-up kid instead of acting like the Hamlet-sized head case I’ve become.
“I thought the only maps were those in the map room.”
“Gone. All of them.” He nods and lifts his newly filled glass toward the tapestry. “Until I created this.”
“You have a loom?” I stop beside him and look up at the massive hanging. “Isn’t weaving your own textiles a little beneath you? But this is really nice. I mean it. You have a future in interior design if being king falls through.”
His nostrils flare as if he smells something rotten and he roughly puts down his glass, sloshing a good portion of green liquid over his hand and onto the desktop. I guess he doesn’t share my humor.
“I didn’t make it. Someone else did a long time ago,” he says in a tight voice and wipes his hand dry. “I enhanced the tapestry’s function.”
I’ll give him credit for thinking outside the box. I rub my fingers over the thick threads. Nothing happens. “It’s not working.”
He motions me away. “It only works for its creator.”
“A little technical glitch?” Sounds more like his usual control issues surfacing. My father was, and will once again be, the king of the firsts though he still struggles with a few unwanted personal issues. Shedding his elitist attitude has been a challenge for him.
“You could say it’s due more to my limited knowledge of mapmaking. The maps in the map room were made hundreds and hundreds of years ago using a technique no one remembers. Mine is a poor imitation.”
Okay, that sounds plausible. Hell, he made a living map. I’d say that was pretty awesome…but I won’t tell him that. I move to one of the north-facing windows and look out over the city. I’m so tired, my bones ache. Even my hair hurts when I sweep a hand through it. Off in the distance, I see small fires spring up in a field, lighting the night like fireflies.
Dad joins me. “Funeral pyres.”
A lump sits
in my throat and my heart grows heavy. “Wyatt’s dead.”
“I heard.” Dad clamps a hand on my shoulder. “Teag will miss him. We all came to depend on him.”
To Dad, Wyatt was just another soldier to order around. To me, he’d been a friend. I shrug off my dad’s hand and face him. “Why’d you call me?”
He motions me toward his desk. “Look again at the tapestry and tell me what you see.”
“I know it’s a map of Teag,” I say, “but it looks like someone dropped it in a mud puddle and stomped on it. It’s hard to tell what I’m looking at.”
“Teag is burning, and smoke is obstructing our view. The Dark Souls are roaming at will. They’re staying clear of the Ruined City, but they’re attacking the outlying areas with vicious frequency. Our enemies line our borders, and it’s only a matter of time before they come here as well.”
Translation: it’s only a matter of time before someone comes after him. “You called me because you want me to eliminate all those threats? I have more power than you right now, but even I’m not that powerful.”
He slumps into his chair and rubs his bloodshot eyes. Though his vision is fully restored, his eyes still bother him at times. He sighs, picks up his drink, and stares up at the tapestry. “I have another task for you. Ever since you rescued me and I saw the devastation threatening Teag, I’ve searched for a particular magical object that has the power to trap the Dark Souls and send them back to the underbelly of Sheol.”
“You’re kidding?” I fall into the chair in front of his desk. Shock, excitement, and disbelief all clash inside me. If such an object exists, we have to find it. “You’re sure something like that is real and not a rumor?”
“Very real.” He slowly spins the glass in his fingers, watching the liquid swirl, though I’m not sure he even sees the glass anymore, just memories. Bad ones. “I used it on the Dark Souls the first time they escaped the Unknown. I thought sending them back into the bottomless pit where they belong would see them gone forever. This time I intend to make sure they never find their way out again.”
Several questions pop to mind. “You had the magic but now you don’t? Where’d it go?”
“Magic is fickle. I couldn’t let something that powerful just lie around. I had to keep it safe.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You mean keep it away from anyone else who might want to use it.”
He downs the rest of his drink, turns his intense gaze on me, and says without an ounce of guilt, “Exactly.”
I’m getting good at translating what he doesn’t want to say.
Still, I can see his point in keeping it safe. If whatever the object is has the power to trap the Dark Souls and send them to hell, what else can it do? “What is it?”
“Telling you, I’m afraid, is problematic. The first who made it was far and beyond the most powerful ruler we firsts have ever known. His magic could rip mountains in two. Spin the earth backward. Turn enemies into friends. Create hope out of the ashes of burned dreams. Can you imagine a magic so powerful, nothing you wished for would be out of your reach?”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“To some. To others it sounds like freedom.”
Dad takes another sip of absinthe and rests his head on the back of his chair. “When the king grew old, he feared his son, who was not a good man, would abuse the powers he would inherit once his father died. So the king created the very first Keeper of Life, making it look like an ordinary salter’s coin, the least expensive coin we use, to store his magic and then access it when the need arose. No one knew what he had done, and sadly, the son had his father assassinated—”
“And I thought we had problems.”
Dad ignores me and continues his story. “But before the king died, he bestowed his gift of unending power to his daughter.”
“Nice gift.”
Dad senses the sarcasm I can’t keep from my voice and frowns. “When she accepted his gift, the Keeper of Life changed into what she wanted it to be, thus hiding the magic from her brother.”
I clear my throat and ask, “So you’re saying it changes its appearance with every new owner, and you don’t have any idea what it looks like?”
“It would make your job easier if I did. I only know it will be close at hand for its new owner. When I had it, the magic became a timepiece I tucked in my vest. I have heard tell it has been a snuffbox, a cat, a fake eye, and a key. I can only imagine what else it has been.”
“Great, that narrows it down to everything. So where did you hide it?”
“I gave it to your grandfather. Faldon.”
“This just got a whole lot more complicated,” I mumble. The two of them aren’t on the best of terms at the moment. “Did he know what it was?”
“Of course he did. I know your grandfather can be difficult, even in the limited form he is in now, but he was always a man I could trust with that kind of power and to do what is right.”
“What he feels is right, you mean.”
“Don’t we all?” He waves his hand in the air as if he’s wiping clean a whiteboard. “Still, he gave it away long before he died.”
Well, there’s a cheerful note on that bad history. “Why would he give it away?”
“He had his reasons, I suppose.”
A son who had turned into a killing tyrant comes to mind. “Who did he give it to?”
“Someone in the human realm.” My dad presses his fingers together, and slowly raises his gaze to look over the tips and straight at me. I hate how he feeds every moment with drama. I sit back, acting as if I don’t notice the sudden spike in tension, and wait for him to get on with it.
His gaze narrows on me. “Your grandmother.”
There is no way I heard him right. “Grandma Newton has it?”
His nod is slow and heavy. “I believe so.”
I lean forward. “Is she a first?”
A short, harsh laugh erupts. “No. She’s human. Just like your mother.” The bitter way he always talks about Mom makes it clear he still blames her for all his troubles. Carrying a grudge seems to be his specialty. “That’s how powerful this magic is. Anyone can use it, though I doubt your grandmother knows the power she holds.”
“Wow.”
“Wow, indeed.”
We sit there, neither of us talking. I can’t believe my grandmother possesses something that powerful and never told me. Not once.
“We need it back.” My dad’s voice slices through the silence and brings me out of my thoughts. “You have to find it, Dylan.”
Even I can see the importance of retrieving a magic so powerful, it can do whatever it’s asked to do. If it’s really as all-powerful as he says it is, I could use it to help Kera control the darkness within her.
If I wanted it before, now I’m desperate to find it. “I’ll try.”
His old nature flares. “That’s not good enough.” He closes his eyes and breathes deeply until the tension eases from his body. “We are in serious trouble. Finding that magic is our only hope. If you do this, and I truly believe you are the only one who can get your grandmother to hand it over, you can’t give up. You must do whatever you can to bring it back.”
I clench my teeth. He really is a jerk.
I stand. My jaw aches holding back the harsh words I want to hurl at him. “I get why you want it back. We need it. You may be my dad, but you don’t know me. I don’t give up. I’ll find it.”
“Good, and this is between you and me. No one else must know where you’re going or why. No one.”
I’m not interested in attracting every power-hungry warlord in Teag and beyond either. I get the importance of keeping this a secret. “I go home all the time, and since I don’t even know what I’m looking for, I don’t see how anyone else will know either.” I turn to leave.
My dad stops me at the door. “It has a name, and when you call it, it will answer.”
Magic. It’s all about the weird. “What’s its name?”
“Álainn,
but you must say it exactly.”
My dad makes me say it over ten times and then nods when he’s satisfied. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more information.”
I know he can’t lie, but that’s the first thing he’s said that I actually believe 100 percent. He stands and stares up at the map. I’m as good as gone, a dutiful servant he’s sent on a mission.
Though I believe he’s right and I’m the only one who can find the magic we need, I still don’t fully trust him. “While I’m gone, what are you going to do?”
He doesn’t turn toward me; he just continues to stare at the tapestry. “Times are desperate. Teag needs help, and I’ll give it all I have…which isn’t much.”
He touches the tapestry and it comes to life. Fire erupts. An inkblot widens to the north. He jerks his hand away and curls it into a fist. “Hurry, Dylan. We’re running out of time.”
Used Magic
I’ve never been so aware of time. It’s something I always took for granted. My motto’s always been, If not today, there’s always tomorrow. That’s no longer true.
I go looking for Kera. Not to tell her what I’m about to do, but because I have to see her, to hold her one more time before I leave. All I want is to drag her back to the human realm and find a way to close the barrier, but she won’t come with me. I know it. Teag is everything to her.
I check her room. She’s there, sitting on her bed. Her fingers poke through her long dark hair as she holds her head in her hands. She had undone her braid and let the heavy mass of hair fall over her bent knees. I push the door wider. “Kera?”
She looks my way, sweeping her hair back to reveal restless dark-violet eyes. I step inside and close the door. “Are you okay?”
Her tongue darts over her full lips and she bites down, her teeth worrying at the corner of her bottom lip. She shakes her head and looks away.
“What’s wrong?” Seeing her like this makes it difficult to leave.
“Am I a good person?”
I sit next to her on the bed that’s princess-large and slip a section of her hair behind her ear to get a better look at her. “Of all the people I’ve ever known, you are the kindest, the sweetest…the coolest”—I gently tilt her face to mine—“the most amazing person. Ever. Good doesn’t even begin to describe you.”
