“Stonecoats?” Trina asked. “I’ve heard of them. But I’ve never seen one before. They’ve never come to the Gorge.”
That much was true. Ovid started across the plateau toward the far ridge. As he passed between the other two platoons, LeBeau touched his arm. Ovid turned to look at him, barely aware of anything but the sight of those rough creatures on the slope.
“They are legends, not Borderkind,” LeBeau said. “How do you know they are not in league with the southerners? They might have come to destroy us.”
“Two of them?” Ovid said. “I don’t think so. But if they kill me, destroy them before they can get down into the Gorge.”
LeBeau’s reply was a grim nod.
Ovid did not spare another glance at the rest of his recruits as he strode up the slope toward that ridge. As he drew near to the Jokao, he realized that their outer husks were the same texture and color as the stones that thrust up from the ground. They were called Stonecoats because their bodies were entirely covered in a rocky armor. Their eyes were like pure quartz crystal. Whether there was flesh beneath their Stonecoats was the subject of great conjecture. Ovid himself had only ever seen Jokao once before, and then from a distance, while he’d been on a trade excursion for his mother.
“What do you want?” he asked. Perhaps he ought to have been more courteous, but that was not his way.
One of the Stonecoats—whose chest was scored with three deep furrows that had been painted a deep red ochre—raised his chin imperiously.
“Stories travel far,” the Jokao said, with a clacking of rock jaws. “We have heard that you prepare an army to fight Atlantis.”
Ovid frowned. How could these creatures have heard of his militia, and how had they gotten the truth so skewed?
“Not an army,” he replied. “Only a small force of soldiers. Soon, we’ll march south to join the king’s forces. But we aren’t going to fight Atlantis. We only wish to stop the invaders.”
The Jokao cocked his head. Stone scraped upon stone. “To stop the invaders, you must fight Atlantis. The Truce-Breakers.”
“I’d thought that only a rumor.”
The stone warrior shook his head. He reached out and touched one of the rocky projections that jutted like teeth from the ground.
“No. The stones know. Stories travel fast. The Jokao pass them through the ground. The invaders have Atlanteans commanding their armies. Once we were slaves, and Atlantis our master. When you march south, we will be with you. We will not be slaves again.”
Before Ovid could begin to reply or even to make arrangements, the Stonecoats turned and started across the plateau. He considered calling after them, explaining that it would be days before his militia was ready to march. They were storekeepers and fishermen and carpenters, and they were not ready yet.
But then he realized that the Jokao knew precisely what Ovid had been doing, there in the Gorge. Somehow the stones had told them. And when the militia marched south, the Stonecoats would know.
Unnerved and confused, he turned and went down the slope to where his recruits and lieutenants all waited. The questions began immediately. They wanted to know what the Jokao had said.
“We have allies,” he told them. “Continue your training. If we want to make a difference in this war, we must leave soon.”
And with that, he departed, descending the stairs and ladders into Twillig’s Gorge. So many of the homes were empty, now. Some of the shops had been closed up. He missed the smell of fresh fruit that had always risen from the market, and the delicious aroma of spices and roasting poultry from Taki’s restaurant.
He crossed the Sorrowful River on a footbridge twenty feet above the water and then scrambled down a ladder to the promenade on the east bank. This time of day, the café normally would be alive with patrons sitting on the patio and sipping coffee, sharing gossip from throughout the Gorge. Now only a single, older couple—Giovanni Russo and his wife, Lucia—sat at a table, eating pie and drinking black coffee. Ovid nodded to them as he stepped inside the café.
His mother stood behind the counter, moving sweet rolls from a hot baking tin onto a tray in the display case. When she looked up, Virginia must have seen something in her son’s face, for her brow creased with worry.
“Ovid? What is it?”
How could he explain without offending her again? He still did not believe in the Legend-Born. The idea that some predestined figure could deliver the Lost Ones seemed so much like a dream. Besides, wouldn’t such beings have appeared long before now? Other legends were solid and verifiable.
No, the Legend-Born were nothing more than a story. But his mother believed in them with all her heart. He could not challenge her faith again, and had no desire to spend the few days they had left together arguing.
Yet he had been wrong once already. He had not believed the rumors that Atlantis was behind the invasion of Euphrasia, the murder of King Mahacuhta, and the shattering of the truce between the Two Kingdoms. The Stonecoats were legends themselves. Ovid knew he should not simply take their word for it, but still he found himself believing the Jokao.
And if the Atlantis conspiracy turned out to be true, then it seemed Oliver Bascombe had not assassinated Mahacuhta after all. That did not mean he and his sister were Legend-Born, but it was curious, indeed.
“What is it?” his mother asked again. She looked almost frightened.
Ovid smiled and reached over the counter to take her hands. He raised them to his lips and kissed her fingers.
“Nothing, Mother. Only that I love you. No matter how we disagree, that will never change.”
Virginia nodded. “You have always been a good son, Ovid. Too serious, sometimes, but good. The Lost need to rise. The future depends upon it. I’m proud that you will help to lead them.”
“Only a few.”
“A brave few. And more will follow. They must.”
Ovid nodded. “On that, at least, we can agree.”
CHAPTER 7
The cell door swung open.
Oliver stood leaning against the opposite wall beneath one of the grated windows. A light rain had started to fall, and even those few droplets that the breeze blew in were refreshing. The coolness of the dungeon could not compete with the heat of the day.
“You’re late this morning, guys. Breakfast is to be served promptly at eight A.M. on the Lido Deck.”
Two guards stepped inside—both Atlantean. One carried a tray of something that resembled gruel and a piece of crusty bread. Two other guards waited in the hall. They wouldn’t open the door to Julianna and Collette’s cell until Oliver’s was locked up again. Since the escape attempt, he hadn’t seen a single Yucatazcan guard in the dungeon. Only the pale, grim bastards from Atlantis.
The one carrying the tray sneered.
The other stormed across the cell and reached for Oliver, who did not bother trying to elude him. Where could he hide in this cell? The guard grabbed him by the front of his shirt and backhanded him across the face. His lip split, stinging in the warm air, and fresh blood dripped down his chin. It happened regularly. The guards didn’t leave him alone long enough for the lip to heal properly.
“And good morning to you,” he mumbled over his swollen, bleeding lip.
The Atlantean sneered at him. Either he was bald or his hair had been shorn almost to the scalp, for not a single strand poked out from beneath his helmet. Like many of the soldiers of Atlantis, he seemed an entirely different breed from the sorcerers—taller and broad-shouldered, but his features still had that narrow sharpness and his skin the greenish-white cadaverous hue. His eyes were dim and cruel.
Oliver did not react. He simply returned to his position against the wall, and waited while the other guard set down his tray and the two of them withdrew from the cell. During the last skirmish, he had given a good accounting of himself.
When the guards had locked him in once again, the keys jangled as Julianna and Collette’s cell was opened. Oliver tensed inwardly, hoping that
there would be no beating for them. On the day after they had tried to reach Frost, Julianna had been groped by a guard. Had she been raped, Oliver would have attacked the next Atlantean to come into his cell, even knowing that it might mean his life.
But they hadn’t raped her. Yet.
She and Collette had both reassured him that they were okay. But that night he had heard Julianna crying and forged a new hate inside him.
Today neither his fiancée nor his sister met the guards with wisecracks, the way Oliver had. That was for the best. He did it because he couldn’t help it, and because the pain they gave him in return helped to keep the furnace of his hate burning. But Collette and Julianna kept quiet and the guards did nothing but leave their food and lock the door to their cell again.
Boots scuffed the stone floor as the soldiers marched back up the corridor, then up the stairs out of the dungeon. And they were alone again.
Oliver sucked on his split lip and spat some blood onto the floor. He pushed away from the wall and walked to the door. Atlantis had bred strange people, some of them stealthy and cunning. The guards did not normally fall into this category, but he had learned caution. Oliver peered through the grated window but saw no one. He heard his sister and Julianna speaking to one another quietly but could not make out the words, nor could he see any sign of them through the grate in their door. They were still choking down their food.
He ran his fingertips along the mortar grooves between the stones that made up the wall of his cell. Eyes closed, Oliver cleared his mind. Sometimes he tried this trick on the outer wall, tempted by the sunshine. But if Collette was right—if what she’d done at the sandcastle hadn’t been some strange fluke—then just getting outside wouldn’t solve their problems.
If Collette was right… Oliver knew his doubt had to be a problem, but he could not seem to put it behind him.
“At it again, huh?”
He opened his eyes. Julianna was peering at him from the cell across the corridor. Oliver smiled, drawing a sharp pain from his split lip. A flicker of concern passed over Julianna’s features. Her face was filthy, her hair tangled and wild, but her eyes had a light that woke something in him, just as it always had. With just a look, she could remind him of all the things he had always dreamed of being.
“Yeah. Not much else to do.”
Julianna looked back into the gloom of her cell. Her fingers wrapped around the grate.
“Collette, too. She’s getting frustrated.”
From within the cell, Oliver heard his sister’s voice. “Of course I’m getting frustrated. This is bullshit. We can do this. We can get out of here.”
Oliver grinned, hissing with pain and touching his bleeding lip. “Yeah. We’re so out of here.”
Julianna frowned, angry with him. “Maybe it’s your attitude that’s keeping us here.”
“Hey—”
“Hey, nothing, Mister Bascombe. You two are special. Your mother was a legend. Borderkind. All your life, your father tried to drum that out of you. He pretended magic didn’t exist to try to convince you of the same thing.”
Oliver scratched his fingers against the mortar. “But it does exist.”
“Of course it does!” Julianna replied. “Don’t you get it? That’s why he acted the way he did. To protect you.”
A knot of ice formed in Oliver’s gut. This was nothing he had not already considered, but to hear Julianna talking about it, to have the thoughts spoken out loud, troubled him.
Nobody who had known Max Bascombe before the death of his wife could ignore how drastically the man had been changed by his loss. As young as Oliver had been at the time, he could still recall his parents laughing together often. He cherished the memories he had of them together, dancing at the New Year’s Eve party they’d thrown at the house, picnicking on a blanket on the back lawn with the Atlantic Ocean stretching endlessly in front of them, and a handful of times he had entered a room to find them embracing or locked in a kiss.
Her death had extinguished a light inside Oliver’s father. From that time on, he had become more sentinel than parent, grimly watching over his children, but seeming to take little joy in them. Oliver, in particular, had vexed the man. His father had steered him away from fanciful movies and discouraged cartoons. On one birthday, Julianna had given him a magic set. Oliver had played with it for hours, but when he woke in the morning it had vanished. He had ransacked the house searching for it, thinking Friedle or the cleaning woman had put it away, but no one could recall having moved it at all. It had taken Collette to make him see the truth—their father had gotten rid of it.
Later, other items vanished in similar fashion. Neither father nor son would say a word, but the gulf between them widened. His complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia disappeared a week after Christmas, the year he turned fifteen. When his high school English teacher had assigned Charles Dickens’s Hard Times to the class, Oliver had found a distressing echo of his own relationship with his father. The diatribe that opened that book had remained with him all of these years: Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: Nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
Oliver had taken to hiding away in the town library, reading mythology and fantasy and all sorts of other things his father would never have approved of. And whenever he had a part in a play in school, or with the Kitteridge Civic League, his father would never be in attendance. More than once, he had forced his son to quit the drama club, only to relent when teachers intervened on Oliver’s behalf.
And Julianna thought his father had done all of those things to protect him?
“It’s true,” a softer voice said.
Collette had stopped trying to take the wall apart. On tiptoe, she looked at him through the grate.
“She died because of what she was, Oliver. It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Collette said. “Dad was afraid we’d end up dead, too. He feared what we were because he didn’t want to lose us.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“Do you remember when I gave you Phantastes?”
As painful as the memory was, Oliver laughed softly.
“How could I forget?”
As cold and distant as his father could be, it had given him a certain amount of pleasure to piss the man off. Any kind of emotion revealed that his father was still human, even anger.
Collette had read George MacDonald’s nineteenth-century fairy tale—about a man who slips from the ordinary world into one full of magic and fairy courts, a tale that now resonated powerfully with Oliver—for a college course, and had brought it home for her brother on a break from school. One morning, Oliver had come down to the kitchen to find his father standing by the table, reading the back cover of Phantastes. Oliver had left the book there the night before, forgetting to return it to his room.
His father had glanced up at him, his expression almost bewildered. Anger had flashed in his eyes and he had held the book up and begun to tear pages in half.
“Enough,” he had said. “Haven’t you learned by now? That is enough of this shit. You keep your head in the real world, son, or you’re never going to have much of a life. No more of this dreck in my house. I’m telling you now, and you’d better believe I’ll tell your sister as well. No more.”
Oliver had snapped, then. Years of hurt and rage over things that his father had made vanish bubbled over. He had screamed at the man and called him a dozen vile names. When he ran out of steam, his father dropped the book—in two halves now—onto the table, crossed the room, and grabbed Oliver by the front of his shirt.
“You may not like it, but I’m your father. I’m all you’ve got. You curse and shout all you like, but a father’s supposed to look out for his children, and that’s what I’m doing for you and your sister. If you want to hate me, there’s little I can do about it, and it won’t keep me from doing what I think is best for your future. Take your he
ad out of the clouds. Wake up, Oliver.”
Collette called his name.
Through the grate in his cell door, he stared at her.
“All this stuff about Melisande…it gives that morning a different perspective, don’t you think?” Collette said.
“Maybe it does,” he admitted. Julianna and Collette were right. It would be foolish for him to try to deny it, especially to himself. All his life, he’d nurtured bitterness and resentment toward his father, and loved him in spite of it. Now he knew his father had had reasons they never could have guessed, and that only made both his love and his resentment grow. There must have been a better way for him to protect his children.
“Keep trying the wall,” he said.
Julianna smiled at him. Oliver closed his eyes, fingertips finding the grooves between the stones again.
Night fell. Damia Beck went on foot into the Oldwood. Sprites and pixies flitted up in the branches of trees, giving off glimmers of light like multicolored fireflies. The colors were soft and lovely, a bright bouquet of butterfly wings that danced through the darkness and then disappeared.
Things snorted in the undergrowth, rustling in the tangled branches, but did not emerge. Her hand gripped the pommel of her sword, but it seemed as though the creatures that lived in the Oldwood had been warned away from her.
Dark shapes watched from the branches and from the darkness of the thick wood. Some were low to the ground and misshapen—little goblin things with gleaming eyes—and others were clearly animals, or legends in the skins of beasts. Many of the animals in the Oldwood were not what they seemed. Some were legends, but others would be ancient demigods, wood deities. In a world full of legends, many were little more than names to her, and there must be countless things on this side of the Veil that she had never heard of at all.
But the master of the forest—that legend was quite familiar.
Damia tried to ignore the lurkers in the dark. She had set off at a steady pace, working her way through the woods on a westerly course. At some point, she would meet the one she had summoned, but when? Damia had begun to grow impatient.
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