by Lucia Ashta
Nineteen
I imagined this was what it must feel like for children with overbearing parents, or in my case, parents that cared. Lila hadn’t stopped berating us since we half fell, half jumped out of the tunnel, distracting me from any possibility of relief that just she, and not a royal army, awaited us at the rendezvous spot next to Kai.
“Of all the foolish things,” she was saying. “You could’ve been caught! It’s a bloody miracle that you weren’t. After all our efforts. You could’ve ruined it all. And for what? A sword? A bloody sword, something that is easily replaceable?”
Only someone that had never relied on a sword to defend her life would say that, I thought. Lila must have never stared down the glimmering blade of a sword knowing that it was all that separated her from death. A good sword might be replaced. But a great sword? A great sword was irreplaceable. And that’s why we’d taken the risk we had, because Dolpheus and I both understood the value of a great sword, even if Lila didn’t.
At first I found humor in Lila’s reaction to our escapade, just as Dolpheus did. His eyes were bright with amusement, his lips tilted upward at the corners, his dark brows at an angle that demarcated incredulity. But the humor in it wore off for me before it did for my friend.
I attempted to bring an end to it before irritation arrived, accompanied by its eager companion, anger. I knew both would come soon if Lila continued in such colorful fashion, and she had every appearance that she would unless one of us said something to stop her tirade.
“Lila,” I said, with purposeful light-heartedness that I only half felt, “we did what we needed to do. There were no problems. Now we’re back.” I had no intention of defending our actions more than this. I already thought it ridiculous that I was explaining myself to an irate woman who had no claim over us.
“Yeah, there were no problems because every single available guard was dispatched to find you. Lord Drakos has ordered a manhunt, and you’re the man they’re hunting. The upper levels were swarming with guards, tearing the place apart.”
So that’s why Dolpheus and I had moved undiscovered through the guards’ living quarters. It didn’t matter that it was nighttime, no guards were allowed to rest or otherwise go off-duty until I was found.
“They think that you must’ve hidden somewhere in the palace after your escape from your cell because they don’t believe you could have gotten past the guards and their scanners at the exits. As they think those are the only choices you have for exits, they’re shaking the whole palace down, looking for you.” Lila glared at me as if all of this were my fault. Maybe she believed it was. Would she have preferred it if I’d died for a crime I didn’t commit? I didn’t ask aloud because I didn’t want to know her answer. Her nostrils flared in anger. She might have chosen my death as a matter of simple convenience.
Uh-oh, I thought, ignoring her look, meant perhaps to kill me and save everyone the trouble. I hoped they wouldn’t discover the tunnel system in their shakedown. Once they didn’t find me trying to blend into the crowds in the upper levels, it would be logical for them to direct their attention down below. The tapestry could easily be moved aside, and the tunnel entrance discovered, not to mention the other entrances to the tunnel network spread throughout the palace. I very much hoped that I wouldn’t be responsible for the violation of Kai’s place of solace and safety, yet I didn’t hold much hope for the continuation of his secret. Surely there was someone else in the palace that was aware of the tunnel system, and that someone could alert the guards to this place to search for me.
“Don’t worry about it,” Kai said, reading my thoughts with precision. “They were bound to be discovered at some point, anyway. I couldn’t believe no one had yet. If a child could find them, certainly a whole troop of guards can.”
I didn’t comment that I often had more confidence in intelligent children than in the Royal Guard. Instead I said, “Sorry, man.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay. Really.”
I nodded and smiled. He meant it. He was at least a thousand times easier to deal with than Lila.
“Have you boys finished with your little love fest? Because you might have put us in danger pulling that crazy prank.”
Our retrieval of my sword had been neither a prank nor crazy, but Lila didn’t get hung up on details. Not even the fact that the guards had already been searching for me before we returned to the palace to get my sword gave her reason to pause. The guards probably hadn’t even realized that my sword and knives were gone yet. I thought to ask her what it was about the manhunt for me that bothered her as much as it did. Had she been somehow inconvenienced by it? Did she want me dead, plain and simple, even though she’d gone into the palace to help me, supposedly? I was going to ask, but then I didn’t. Better to bring her rant to a fast end.
By now, the humor had drained from Dolpheus’ face. It was time to shush the she-dragon. “Were you successful in getting the mind merge cables?” I asked, as if she didn’t aim to continue yelling at us.
“I was, no thanks to you.”
“So can we proceed with the mind merge, or whatever it is, with the King’s memories?”
Her scales were clearly ruffled. She huffed and complained with almost every audible expression that didn’t involve words. In the end, her curiosity as a scientist won out. She’d never done a mind merge quite like this one before. The process was different than that required for filling a splice with the memories of its intended owner. I would be perusing the memories with no intention of adopting them as my own. The process varied enough that the researcher in her wanted to see what it would be like.
“Yes, we can proceed,” she said.
I ignored her sarcasm. “What do I need to do then?”
“Well, first we need to find a better spot to do it. I imagine that once the guards can’t find you in the palace that they’ll have to turn outside of it, even if they don’t understand how you escaped the palace’s security.”
“Over there,” Dolpheus said, pointing to an outcropping of large boulders a decent distance from where we stood and from the palace. “We can conceal ourselves behind the rocks.”
“Will that work?” I asked Lila, even though I didn’t need to. Sometimes, with unreasonable women and capricious children, it was simply faster and easier to allow them to think they were in control, even when they weren’t.
She put her nose in the air and replied, “That will be fine,” and stomped off in that direction.
The three of us men shared a look of commiseration about the stereotypes attributed to difficult women. As if planned, all at once, we let out a simultaneous sigh of relief. Just the distance she was putting between us was enough to feel like a sip of cool stream water on a scorching hot day.
Dolpheus sheathed his sword, crossed his hands in front of him, and whistled a long drawn-out tone of disbelief, just once, before falling into stride well behind her, careful not to close the distance between them.
I unsheathed Kai’s sword and handed it to him. “Thank you for letting me borrow it.” I put my sword in its place; it slid into the sheath that had been tailored to its measurements perfectly.
“It’s not a good sword, not like yours,” Kai said.
“It’s a fine enough sword. It does its job, does it not?”
He shrugged, orange hair flopping once to accentuate his motion. “I guess it does.”
I patted him on the shoulder and began moving behind Dolpheus. He followed. “You’ll find the sword meant for you, when the time is right. Most things arrive when the time for them is right,” I said, even though I didn’t believe it for a second. There were several situations—people—in my life that were long overdue. I had no true idea of how the world worked, just that it ran through its motions whether I liked them or not.
Kai nodded as if my advice were sage, as if he were trying to memorize my words for future use. Then he grew thoughtful. By the time we’d caught up to Dolpheus, while careful to retain the space that sepa
rated the men from the lone woman, he asked, “When Dolpheus said you guys were going to get Ilara back, was he referring to Princess Ilara? The dead Princess?”
I avoided Dolpheus’ look so as not to acknowledge the guilt I knew I’d find there. It wasn’t his fault he’d revealed my secret about Ilara. Not really. Only a little. I was the one that chose to bring Kai into our group. My choices were the ones that had led us down the winding path of this never-ending day. After all we’d been through since he and I last woke, I couldn’t blame him for a lack of discretion. Even if I could, I wouldn’t have. He and I’d been through too much together to point fingers.
“Well, Kai,” I began, “not everything is as it seems.”
“In fact,” Dolpheus added, as if this were how we began all of our stories, “most things are not.”
Twenty
By the time we reached the outcropping of rock meant to shield us from the prying eyes of any guards that might emerge from the palace to extend their manhunt outside of it, the bewilderment and shock had begun to fade from Kai’s face. After I revealed that Ilara did indeed live, although on another, unknown planet, and that she and I were lovers, he’d sputtered a series of unintelligible responses before he regained some of his composure.
Raised in the palace, he’d mourned the Princess along with the rest of the staff. It had come as a shock to him that someone as vibrant and lively as the Princess could be taken from the world in such abrupt and violent fashion. Even though Kai had suffered the death of his mother and that of the Queen in a similar way, both victims of assassination as he’d thought the princess, it was somehow different when the person who died was youthful and so filled with the possibility of an entire future ahead of her.
Lila was sitting on a rock and leaning against another when we reached her. “What the hell happened to him?” she asked, staring straight at Kai and his stupefied expression.
A bright pink rose up his neck to flush his entire face. Then, embarrassed by his blushing, he turned red. I tried to turn away, to give him some semblance of privacy as he got hold of himself. But I couldn’t; it was fascinating. His face was pink overall, red in parts. His hair orange, his blue eyes the only thing to stand out in contrast to the otherwise monochrome tones.
Finally, he turned his back to us, pretending to be absorbed by the panoramic view of the palace, even though he must have known we didn’t believe it.
“What happened?” Lila asked again.
Ordinarily, I would have said something neutral that revealed little of the true answer she sought but that was nevertheless enough to appease her. But she sat with a crystalline cable already out on her lap as a vivid reminder that soon I would have to place my life—and at the very least my sanity—in her hands. I would take all the goodwill I could get. I chose complete honesty.
“I told him that Princess Ilara lives and that all of this is about my attempt to bring her back to Origins, for her well-being and that of all Oers.”
She studied me, as if unsatisfied by my answer, even though it was the truth. But then her dissatisfaction passed. “I understand. It was a shock to me too. That you two would be lovers…” she said as she turned her attention to the sparkly cable in her lap that looked as if it didn’t quite belong in this world.
I let her snarky comment pass, pretending I hadn’t noticed it. “Where do you want me?” I walked past her to a mostly level area of rock. “Will this work?”
She didn’t even look up as she removed her kit—of madness, or genius, or perhaps of mad genius—from the pouch in her lab coveralls. “Wherever you want. It doesn’t matter to me. You’re going to be the one laying on the rock.”
“All right. Should I go ahead and lie down then?”
“Sure. Unless you’d prefer to dillydally until the guards find you.”
I wasn’t even looking at Dolpheus. Still, I caught him rolling his eyes. I could imagine what he was thinking: Why do some women choose to make things so melodramatic? I’d heard him express a version of this question at least a thousand times. There were some women who appreciated simplicity and straightforwardness as we did, and then there were all the others.
I moved to the spot I’d chosen and sat down. “Is there anything you need me to do to prepare? Or should I just lie down?”
“Well, if there are any last words you’d like to say, you know, just in case. Maybe to your dear friend, Dolpheus.”
I stared at her as she broke into grating laughter, a cacophony of riotous sound that didn’t seem as if it could originate from this petite woman that looked innocuous enough in her lab suit and pulled-back hair. “I’m just messing with you,” she said and slapped me on the shoulder. “Go ahead and lie down.”
Before I did, I swapped a look with Dolpheus. If she was still hoping to bed my friend when this was all over, she was doing little to endear herself to him. He looked ready to lash out in my defense if she were to say just one more crass or thoughtless thing. As chances were high that she would if she continued to speak, I hastened the process along.
I laid down, adjusting my body side to side, accommodating my belt of weapons. Even if my weaponry would do me little good in the expanse of my mind where the dangers were far greater, with the potential to be far more permanent than any currently posed to my physical body, I felt better with my weapons within reach for ready draw.
I sat back up to brush away a few stray pebbles and rocks that stuck me. As soon as I settled myself back down into relative comfort, I urged Lila onward. “I’m ready. Let’s do this.”
She’d removed the black vial from her kit. The Auxle Sun flickered and gleamed across its shiny surface as she examined it in the sunlight. I still could make out nothing more of its contents than a nebulous wisp of smoke-like substance. It seemed impossible that such a small vial could contain all the memories of a lifetime as long as King Oderon’s.
I didn’t like the thought of a life, with its range and depth of experiences, with all of its concomitant emotions, being reduced to something that looked this insignificant. The unease I’d experienced since first running into Lila continued to fester in the pit of my stomach, where the growling had little to do with how long it had been since I’d eaten and everything to do with this woman I preferred not be in league with, and all the things I preferred not do that I’d had to do since meeting her.
“All right then, cowboy,” she was saying. “Hang on tight. I have a feeling it’s going to be a wild ride.”
And I had the feeling that this was an understatement. I steeled myself for whatever might come, knowing that I wouldn’t allow myself to turn away from it. Even if it had been the maws of a mowab that I was contemplating entering, I would have driven right through them. Ilara lay on the other side of this threshold. I required little courage to pass through it. As it had been with Ilara and me, almost from the start, an undeniable momentum carried me toward her. No matter what I had to traverse to get to her, the force that pulled me toward her was as strong as any magnetism or gravity; similarly, it would not be denied.
Dolpheus came closer so that he would be within sight before I began. He said nothing. I stared straight up at him, blinking against the brightness of the sun. He nodded his encouragement. I pretended not to notice the fear for me that he couldn’t fully conceal in his eyes, those honey-colored eyes that couldn’t lie to me. He pretended not to notice that I registered his concern. We understood that there were times when there was little choice in upcoming action, and that no matter who the man was, there were times when he had to do what didn’t feel right to accomplish what he knew he must.
The life we’d shared thus far had been littered with these times and their forced decisions. He knew as well as I that there was nothing to do but to move forward, even under the spell of apprehension that we were both experiencing. All that was left to us now was to hope for the best and to accept the outcome whether that hope was rewarded or not.
When Lila said “Close your eyes,” I smiled at
my best friend, sought out Kai to offer him another smile of encouragement, and gave Lila the most genuine smile I could. Whatever my impressions of her, I couldn’t achieve what I needed to just then without her, at least not as easily. I reached a hand to cover hers. I squeezed the hand that held the vial. “Thank you,” I said, and I knew that she experienced the true gratitude in my statement by how quickly she brushed it off, as if what she were about to do were nothing at all. Then I closed my eyes and Lila’s suddenly uncertain gaze out.
Where I was going, I had to go alone.
“I’m going to attach only one of the crystal strands to your head. I imagine that when you did the mind merge with the King, several of the crystal strands were used, is that right?”
I nodded without opening my eyes. I was already distancing myself from the reality Lila occupied. I would need to access an entirely different one to do what I needed to do. I’d already begun to remove myself from the outcropping of rocks, even if my body hadn’t moved at all.
“I’m only going to use one of the strands since the King’s memories are entirely contained within the vial. I will attach one end of the strand to your head, and I’ll fit its other end inside the mouth of the vial.”
Again, I nodded. Again, far away, each second farther.
I felt her move closer toward me. Her body touched mine. It might have been a leg that pushed against my torso. I thought it probably was, with a thought that felt so remote as to be barely mine, of a body that I experienced as if it were someone else’s.
She leaned over me. Breasts brushed my face, just once. I wondered abstractedly if it had been intentional, this brushing of breasts that seemed avoidable. Then, fingers pushed lightly against my forehead. Something cool against the point between my eyebrows, just a bit above them. Another brush of breasts contained in the fabric of a lab suit, and then her body moved away, though not entirely. Her fingers remained, as did their light touch.
Three fingers held the crystal strand in place at the exact spot that the Devoteds claimed to be the center of connection to that Something Greater force. That place, they said, was the center of a different kind of eye, one that could see what the two physical eyes often did not. That spot and the heart, they said, were the center points of all connection to the Something Greater that had created every one of us.
