Another Kingdom

by Andrew Klavan

  “No men …” I said in an ashen whisper.

  “The knights have all been corrupted by Lord Iron,” Tauratanio explained with a tone of sorrow that sounded strangely not-so-different from his tone of joy. “Just as Lord Iron has been corrupted by the wizard Curtin.”

  The wizard Curtin? I thought in a daze. Who was he, now? I didn’t remember that name from the character list in my computer. But I did remember that spooky, raisin-faced guy in the night-blue robe who had stood behind Lord Iron during my tribunal, whispering in his ear. I guessed that must’ve been the wizard Curtin.

  “And as for the men of the land, well, you saw them,” Tauratanio continued. “Iron seduced them into rebellion with promises of a perfect country, good and nice and fair, where each is equal in all things to another.”

  He echoed the very words swimming in my swimming brain.

  And Magdala, with her own majestic sorrow, added, “They tried to kill the wisest queen in all the world in the name of that illusion. They would have succeeded too, if my husband had not used his magic to transport her to another kingdom.”

  More echoing words. Another kingdom. Like the book? And this illusion of a perfect country—was it anything like the Age of Orosgo? Was it possible the story of my life in LA and the story of my life here were the same story?

  Tauratanio went on. “I would have done more. But Curtin draws his magic from the minds of men and grows stronger in cities where men congregate. My magic is of the woods, and I did not have the power to defeat him on his own ground.”

  I remembered my escape through the dungeon sewers, how I had to focus my mind to receive the power of Tauratanio’s magic in order to keep the fairy lights glowing. I remembered how Maud had sparkled from time to time in the dungeon and grew powerful as the magic came through her. Now I understood. The king had used us somehow to cast his power from a distance, but its source was here.

  Abruptly, the expression on Tauratanio’s face—and Magdala’s expression too—were transformed from sorrowful gravity to gladness and even celebration. It was as if, in spite of the poverty and meanness and cruelty I had seen on the toxic streets of Eastrim, the horrors of its torture chambers, and the injustice of its counsel, all was suddenly right with the world. And why?

  “But our hero has come!” Tauratanio declared—gesturing with his light-made hand toward me.

  I swear: toward me.

  “AND NOW, AUSTIN Lively,” the king continued, his tone still joyful. “To give heart and hope to my people, prove to them you are the one Queen Elinda sent to us by claiming the gift she left for him, as only he can do.”

  Uh oh, I thought.

  But the truth is, I didn’t know whether to be terrified or relieved. I mean, obviously, if they were looking for a fighting man of brave heart and right belief, they had missed their target by about a mile. So whatever test I was supposed to pass now was going to result in some sort of low comic moment of total failure. And on the one hand, that would get me off the hook for whatever the hell quest I and my brave heart and right belief were supposed to get ourselves killed over. On the other hand, some of those saber-carrying centaurs looked like pretty rough characters, and I hated to think what their reaction was going to be when they found out they had the wrong guy.

  As Tauratanio spoke, he shifted the hand with which he was majestically gesturing at me in order to majestically gesture at something behind me. I turned around to see what it was.

  It was an oak tree. A big one. The kind you find growing for, like, a thousand years in some forest in England or someplace. I hadn’t noticed it before, which was kind of odd, given the size of it. But there it was now anyway, near the edge of the grove. Its trunk was as thick around as … well, as the trunk of a gigantic oak tree. I can’t actually think of anything thicker around than that. Its branches sprang from it in all directions and rose into the forest night and fell to the forest floor like the legs of an alien spider in a science fiction film. Lit by the rainbow light of the fairies and the silver glow that emanated from the king and queen, its leaves showed themselves a rich copper gold that touched me somehow with their perfection and loveliness.

  This was the gift Elinda had left for her chosen hero? A big tree? What was I supposed to do with it? Hug it? Put it in my pocket with thanks all around?

  I glanced Maud-ward for help. But all the rodent-woman did was tilt her head toward the big tree, indicating I should approach it. I approached it. Got a closer look. It was a big old tree, all right. I glanced around me. From every nook in the glowing forest, eyes looked back at me. The eyes of the forest king and queen, yes, and the eyes of the martial centaurs and their ladies, the eyes of the imps and elves and the trolls with their peaked caps held humbly in their gnarly hands, the eyes of buzzing fairies hovering all aglow in the sable air, the eyes of fauns and satyrs with their pipes of Pan, and most moving of all, the tender eyes of nymphs with their forms and faces of heart-melting beauty—what would I not have done to please them? All those eyes were staring at me in hope and anticipation, waiting for me to do … what? To do the thing that would assure them I was who they so desperately needed me to be.

  And what the glorious hell was that?

  I glanced at Maud again. Her womanly eyes urged me on: Do it. Do what? I turned back to the tree. It was still a tree. I stared at it. The moments passed. Nothing happened. I felt all the eyes of the forest on me, all their hopes in me, and I did not know what I was supposed to do. Well, of course I didn’t. I was not the guy! It broke my heart to admit it to myself, but I just wasn’t the one they were waiting for. You only had to look at me to know it.

  More moments passed. More nothing happened. It was excruciating. I was about to turn to them all and confess the truth. But unable to bear the thought of destroying their hopes—unable to face, most especially, the thought of seeing the disappointment in the eyes of the nymphs—I hesitated another second and another. Finally, in pure panicky desperation, I tried the only strategy I could think of, the only trick I’d learned since I had come here.

  I let go of myself. That is, I opened up my mind like opening a hand and let every thought of who I was fly free. And do you know what came to me then? What came into that empty space where my thoughts of myself had been? That child came, that child that I once was. Remember? That boy of five or six or so? Sitting on the floor in the back room of my parents’ house, sitting there while my parents and my brother talked and my sister explored her secret spaces, sitting there and arranging plastic figures in stories and tableaux. That little boy, lost in his own imaginative universe, in an act of creation, in a stillness of complete delight. For a moment, just a moment then, I not only remembered that little child, I became him.

  And in that moment, I saw a light—a bright pinpoint of white light shining out at me from deep within the giant trunk of the giant oak. Just a pinpoint at first, but then it grew into a dragon-toothed star, a pulsing gleam in the core of the wood, and then that gleam grew—grew and spread and became a cloudy glow that flooded up through the trunk and out to the very tips of the great oak’s branches. And as the oak filled with that ghostly light, its bark and wood seemed to lose their substance. They became transparent so that standing there, amazed, I could see right into the oak’s heart.

  I saw a sword.

  It was held there, hanging there, right in the center of the oak’s trunk. Oh, it was a wonderful weapon! Compact, yet lithe and graceful, silver-white and gleaming like the light that revealed it. My eyes filled looking at it, not just because of how beautiful it was but because I could see it. I—I could see it!

  The wisest queen in all the world had left it there for me.

  Before I really knew what I was doing, I took a slow, mesmerized step toward the oak, and then another, as if the glowing sword in the glowing tree were a magic magnet pulling me to itself. I lifted my hand. Reached out to the oak.

  And then, impossibly, my fingertips, my fingers, my hand, my arm passed directly through t
he bark and into the wood. I grasped the sword’s hilt.

  I gasped as a shock of energy went through me. I heard a gasp … a dozen … a hundred gasps in unison all around me: a collective sound of relief and gratification, one single sigh of joy. Openmouthed with shock, frozen with surprise, trembling with wonder, I watched as the light of the sword began to spread up over my arm like quicksilver. It reached my shoulder in a second, and in another second bathed my whole torso, sped down my legs and up over my head at once, until I was all clothed in it as in a suit of luminous liquid armor.

  Then—with a great electric swish and another shock of energy—all that silver light was sucked as if through my pores up into my body. There was an enormous flash—and the light went out.

  I was hurled back from the tree. I staggered on my heels, my arms pinwheeling for balance. I almost fell before I managed to steady myself.

  I stood there, dazed a moment, marveling. Then, my mouth still hanging open, I turned to look around me at the king and the queen and the waiting creatures of the wood.

  They were gone. My sword and armor were gone. I was dressed as I had been. And the forest was empty. Dark. The spectral music had ceased and the sounds of peepers and crickets filled the night. I was alone.

  Or not quite alone.

  “You better get some rest,” Maud said, her nasal squeak coming from somewhere nearby. “We’ll have to get an early start in the morning.”

  Rest? I thought. Rest? Are you kidding me?

  But before I could even finish the thought, exhaustion washed over me like a great wave. I wilted under the weight of it, sinking down to the earth beneath the branches of the giant oak. I lay down there. I curled up on my side.

  In another second, I was fast asleep.

  I WOKE TO FIND THE FIRST LOW BEAM OF THE RISING sun piercing the autumn foliage to touch my face. And the horse—the black stallion—he was touching my face too, nuzzling me to get me up.

  I sat up quickly, stiff and shivering from sleeping on the cold earth. I blinked and looked around me at the morning forest, bright with light, loud with birdsong. My mind was blank for a second and then—then, the memories of the night before crowded in on me. You want to talk about some crazy, crazy shit? Try my memories. Serge Orosgo landing in his helicopter … the king and queen of the forest escorted to the dance of fantastic creatures by ranks of armed centaurs … a gender-bending assassin shooting a drunken author dead … me pulling the sword out of the oak …

  And if all that weren’t nuts enough, a giant rat with a woman’s face was looking down at me from the pommel of the stallion’s saddle.

  “We better get going,” she said.

  I leapt to my feet, my heart pounding. I remembered the rest of it, in LA. I had to find the book or the assassin would kill me, and here in Galiana I had to find the queen’s talisman, whatever the hell that was.

  “Going where?” I asked the squirrel-girl groggily. “Where are we going?”

  “You’re the hero,” she said drily. “It’s your quest. You tell me.”

  I stared up at her on the pommel. She stared back—a droll, sarcastic stare. Never mind that I had pulled the silver sword out of the oak tree. Maud no more believed I was the hero sent by the queen than … well, than I believed I was the hero sent by the queen. Because the truth was: I had absolutely no clue what I was supposed to do next.

  And then—then strangely enough—I kind of did.

  Out of the jumbled craziness of my impossible memories, one memory suddenly stood out. It was that moment when Lady Betheray had left the witness stand at my tribunal. She had just finished testifying that her friend Lady Kata, the woman I was accused of murdering, had told her I had gotten her pregnant. She had descended from the stand and walked past me. And she’d looked at me. It was a look full of betrayal and wounded love. And it came to me in that instant—it came to me like a memory from someone else’s life—that I had kissed her sometime in the past, I had held her in my arms and kissed her, and we had loved one another.

  “We have to find Lady Betheray,” I said. “She thinks I betrayed her with Lady Kata. She thinks I killed Kata.”

  “Well, didn’t you?” said the rodent-woman.

  I felt a flash of anger and was about to bark at her. But had I? I didn’t think I had. But if I couldn’t remember my love affair with a lady as spectacular as Betheray, what else had I forgotten? It seemed in coming to Galiana I had walked into a story about myself that was already half over. What else had happened to me—what else had I done—before I arrived? Murder? I didn’t know.

  Well, I wasn’t going to discuss it with a big girl-rat. A man has some dignity, after all.

  “Do you know where we can find her?” I asked her.

  Maud sighed and looked away and shrugged her rodent shoulders. “I know her home is Netherdale. We can look for her there.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go to Netherdale, then.”

  And after a few pathetic attempts to swing myself heroically into the saddle, I finally crawled up over the horse’s side and dropped into place, and off we rode.

  LONG BEFORE WE reached Netherdale, whatever courage I had—and it wasn’t much—began to fail me. We had been riding for hours, out of the woods and through the open country. I’ve never had a good sense of direction, but as near as I could tell, we were traveling at a narrow angle to the line between the city of Eastrim and the point where we’d entered the forest. That meant we were getting closer to the dangerous city precincts where the guards would be hunting for me, looking to bring me back to the torture chamber. The ruined Galianan landscape with its broken towers and abandoned villages, its withered plains and lonesome, leafless trees, its staring phantoms of once-human beings—a landscape that had held some small measure of ghostly charm when we were escaping—just seemed threatening now as I felt the Eastrim castle and its dungeons growing near.

  Then we came up over a low rise and I saw Netherdale.

  It stood alone amid blasted trees and weedy gardens: a big, looming, gloomy place. A great gothic manse of gray-brown stone with frowning gables and louring turrets and ivy clinging dark around black windows that suggested a soulless emptiness within. A road of dirt and broken cobbles with brown grass growing in between ran from the overgrown cul-de-sac before the house’s front door and wound off to the vanishing points on the left and right. On the right, under a blue-and-white sky of swiftly moving clouds, a greenish pall hung over the low hills. I figured that must be the hellish smoke of Eastrim, the smoke of burning heretics and traitors.

  Instinctively, I drew back on the reins. The stallion came to a slow stop, whiffling. I looked down over the scene of tortuous, naked black branches and tangled weeds. I admit it: I wanted to turn around and ride out of there as fast as I could. I was afraid.

  I glanced at Maud to see if she had noticed. She had. Of course she had. She was looking off into the distance, shaking her head with disgust, as if she couldn’t believe she’d gotten stuck babysitting such a wimpish weakling.

  You and me both, sister, I thought.

  “Let’s …” I started to say. But I didn’t know what to say. “Let’s … wait here awhile,” I finished lamely.

  The mutant rodent snorted. I felt ashamed. But I wasn’t just going to charge down there like some gung-ho idiot to prove my manhood to a giant deformed squirrel. If Lady Betheray was there, her husband, Lord Iron, might be with her. And even if he wasn’t with her, she wouldn’t be unguarded. She thought I had slept with Lady Kata and then murdered her to cover up our affair. So the minute she saw me coming, she’d have me under arrest and on my way to the Eastrim dungeon, to torture and death.

  I dismounted and led the stallion back down the rise a little way so it wouldn’t be visible from the house. Then I returned to the crest and lay down to watch the place, waiting for … what? Well, I guess to see if I could get a sense of just how much trouble I was walking into. That’s what I told myself anyway.

  For a long w
hile, nothing happened. The autumn sun angled down the far arc of the sky, and the shadow of the gothic manse grew long and dreadful on the stark face of the landscape. Now and then, I thought I saw a movement at one of the windows, but the place was so dark inside, I couldn’t be sure.

  Maud, meanwhile, sighed and snorted and rolled her eyes and ran back and forth down the hill for exercise and basically did everything she could to make me feel like crap, thank you very much.

  As the sun sank lower and lower, I grew more and more convinced that this whole adventure was a bad idea—very. I was just wondering how humiliated I would feel if I got the hell out of here when the front door of the dismal place swung open—and out stepped Sir Aravist.

  “Shit!” I hissed, pressing myself as close to the earth as I could.

  Maud scampered up beside me, sitting on her hindquarters to see what was going on.

  “Get down! Get down!” I whispered.

  She gave me a glance full of scorn and stayed right where she was.

  I watched through the weeds. Sir Aravist’s red dragon vest blazed bright against the drab stone of the house. His black hair stirred in the autumn breeze. With his bright eyes and his handsome young face and his trim, sharp beard, he was the very image of a warrior. Even though the lump he’d given me had been healed by the nymphs, I thought I could feel it throbbing on my forehead.

  My heart thundered against the ground. “What’s he doing here?” I said.

  “He’s the captain of the castle guard,” said Maud. She didn’t even bother to whisper. “He’s smart and loyal to Iron, who’s given him everything he has. And he’s deadly with a sword. My guess is he’s waiting for you.”

  “What?”

  “Ssh. Do you want them to hear you? Look.”

  Now, two other guards stepped out of the house and flanked their captain. Aravist gave them instructions, the wordless sound of his voice carrying to us on the breeze. The guards moved off to walk around the house, checking the windows and doors and looking into the distance to see if anyone was nearby.