But this wasn’t daydreams, see. That’s exactly what made it so hard. This wasn’t movies or books. It was my life. Just like Rich said, it was my only life. And the truth was, I didn’t want to spend my only life in failure and frustration. I mean, that’s fine in books and movies, where the audience cheers, and in daydreams where you’re your own audience and can applaud the courage of your own crucifixion. No one sells his soul in his daydreams.
But to live my real life that way? With no one watching? With all my ambitions thwarted? With every avenue closed to me, every door shut in my face? And that’s if I was even allowed to live, if I didn’t die one day in a car accident or a fall from a building or in a botched robbery that left me riddled with bullets with no suspects to take the blame. A funeral in obscurity and then forgotten.
Hey, what would it cost me to keep my mouth shut? Nothing. What would I gain from it? Success. Money. Everything. I knew what was right—of course I did—but I’m telling you, the choice was hard. That was the big surprise, how very hard it was.
Rich leaned over me, loomed over me, breathed over me. I looked down at the table. What would it cost me to do what he wanted? Nothing.
I rubbed my mouth with my hand, wrestling with the temptation.
And again, on my hand, I caught the scent of Lady Betheray. I breathed it in, a deep breath. I saw her face in my mind. I saw her face turned up to me in the torchlit corridors of Castle Eastrim. Depending on me. Expecting me to be—what?—her hero.
I closed my eyes. I leaned back in my chair. I laughed.
Startled, Rich straightened up off the table. “What?” he said. “What’s so funny?”
I shook my head. I laughed again. I laughed because the choice wasn’t hard, was it? Not really. Really it was easy.
I pushed out of my chair. I stood. I shook my head. I laughed.
“God damn it, Austin!” Rich said. His cheeks flamed red with anger.
“Tell Orosgo,” I said. “Tell Orosgo I laughed.”
And I walked out of the room.
BACK I WENT through the mazelike hallways hung with fliers and bustling with police. As I went, some of the cops—some of the uniforms and some of the detectives—stopped whatever they were doing to watch me pass. Every moment, I expected one of them to shout out or grab me. No one did. They just stopped whatever they were doing. They just watched.
Now up ahead, I saw the door to the outer lobby. Beside the door, there sat a uniformed woman in a high perch in a glass booth. She was the woman who had to buzz the door open in order for me to get through, to get out.
I reached the door. I stopped. I looked at the woman in the glass booth.
The woman hesitated, uncertain. I saw her lift her head and look over me from her high perch. I looked back over my shoulder to see what she saw.
There, behind me, were Detectives Graciano and Lord. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, gazing at me with those hard, cynical stares of theirs. Rich came up behind them as I watched, standing between them. He stared at me too, balefully. So did my mother and father, who joined them on their left and right. They all stood there in a cluster, a knot of hostility, staring at me. I didn’t know what they were going to do: arrest me or let me go.
I turned back to the woman in the booth.
As I did, a large man came up beside me as if from nowhere. He took me firmly by the elbow. Startled, I looked up. It was the big, swarthy plainclothesman who had cuffed me back in the mall, the one with the Spartans sweatshirt and the mustached, hard-guy face. Holding me by the elbow like that, like I was in his custody, he raised his eyes to the woman in the booth. He nodded almost imperceptibly.
The woman buzzed the door. The plainclothesman pulled it open and led me through.
We walked together across the outer lobby. We headed over the grimy tiled floor straight for the glass doors that opened onto the street outside. It wasn’t far, just a few steps, but the whole way the plainclothesman was talking to me in a low, rapid-fire murmur that seemed at first like little more than a hum of sound.
But then I listened more carefully.
“Get out of the city,” he was saying. “Now, today, before nightfall. Ditch your phone. Don’t use credit cards or ATMs. Go where you need to go, but go and go fast and keep moving, don’t stop. You’re a dead man in LA. You’re a dead man anywhere they find you. Don’t say anything. Don’t look at me. Don’t ask any questions …”
At that point, we reached the door. And despite his instructions, I couldn’t help it, I did look at him. I looked up into his hard-guy face, into his glittering hazel eyes. He didn’t even glance down at me. He gazed out the door at the street beyond.
“Just go your way,” he said.
I blinked, startled. Had he meant to say that? Had he meant to say it in just those words? I couldn’t tell. His expression was blank, unreadable.
I hesitated another second. Then I said softly, “Let wisdom reign.”
He didn’t react. He didn’t even lower his eyes to me. He went on looking straight out the door, straight at the street.
I licked my lips. I faced the door. I pushed it open. I drew in a harsh, rasping breath of surprise.
Beyond the door—there was Galiana! I could see it! A soft, dim, faded image just beneath reality like pentimento. I could make out the torchlit corridors of Castle Eastrim. I could discern the blurred figure of Lady Betheray moving away from me down the hall.
My mouth wide, I glanced back at the plainclothesman again. Still—still—he was looking out the door of the police station at the street. Did he see Galiana there too? Impossible to know.
I faced the scene in front of me.
Go your way, I thought.
I stepped through the door.
“THIS WAY! QUICKLY!” Lady Betheray whispered. She took my arm as I stepped up to her, the same arm the plainclothesman had been holding. It was as if I had been passed from him to her.
We were in a grand hallway now hung with tapestries, their images alive with fluttering torchlight. Betheray was moving surely and swiftly, as if she knew her way well. I hurried along beside her. We reached a corner, an intersection with another corridor. I could hear the voices of the guards down there. As I reoriented myself, it came back to me: these were the guards who had just gone by us. Their voices faded as they retreated.
Lady Betheray pushed back the ermine-lined cowl of her cape, her black hair tumbling around her ivory cheeks. She peeked around the corner to watch the guards go. Then she held a finger to her lips and beckoned me to follow.
We went on beneath the torches in their sconces on the walls. We passed from one corridor to another. We came upon more guards, but Beth always seemed to know how to elude them. She seemed to have a sense of their schedules, habits, and routines. She seemed to be able to time our movements to sneak through the gaps in their patrols.
There was only one close call. It was awfully close though. We’d traveled a ways without incident and had gotten overconfident and careless, I guess. We’d begun moving very quickly and were heading full tilt down a hall toward an intersection when suddenly, a pair of swordsmen stepped out right in front of us.
If they had turned our way—if they had even glanced our way like people do sometimes when they come around a corner—if they had even caught a glimpse of us from the corners of their eyes, we’d have been done for.
But they didn’t. They were moving as quickly and as recklessly as we were. They simply turned their backs to us and marched on without ever noticing we were there.
Lady Betheray and I stood frozen, holding our breaths, watching their backs as they walked off chatting together, their hands on the hilts of their swords. The second they passed the next intersection, Beth grabbed my elbow and we tiptoed down the hall at full speed, ducked around the corner, and hurried away.
At last, we came to a short hall that ended with a rounded protrusion of stone. There was a small wooden door set in the bend of it. Lady Betheray brought a heavy iron
key from somewhere within her cape. She checked over her shoulder for patrols, then unlocked the door. We went through.
We came into a high circular room. I understood. This was the base of the tower.
There was a narrow stone stairway here. It wound up the curved surface of the wall to another door above. We climbed the stairs together to the higher door. Lady Betheray unlocked it with the same key.
I peered through and recognized the place. A broad, winding staircase, hung with faded tapestries and dimly lit by a torch or two. These were the steps to the tower room, the room where I had first come to myself in Galiana, the room where Lady Kata Palav had died alone with me behind the locked door.
“The only way to reach the moat without meeting the guard is through the window of the high room and down the wall. There’s a path along the jutting stones. Like a ladder. You’ll find it.”
She pressed the heavy key into my hand. I looked down at it, surprised.
“You’re not coming?” I said.
She shook her head. “The guards pass through here on patrol. I can’t make the climb down the wall, so I’d be in plain sight the whole time. I’ll wait for you here.”
I nodded. I gave her one last glance—that is, I meant to give her one last glance. But when I saw her, her valentine face, her bright, clear eyes eagerly looking up at me, when I caught the scent of her and remembered the scent of her on my fingers and how it had cleared my mind in the police station with Rich, I took her by the shoulders, pulled her to me, and kissed her—kissed her and breathed her in, that same perfume, and the same courage that came with it.
When we broke apart, I tried to think of something to say to her, something worthy of the moment, you know, but I had nothing. I tried to put the meaning in my eyes. She smiled up at me. She touched my face.
“Go!” she said.
I went.
I CLIMBED THE tower stairs quickly.
“What have I done? What have I done?”
It began to happen again. I don’t know what triggered it—Betheray’s kiss, the scent of her, or just the fact that I was in the tower—but memories that were not memories, images of that last time I had climbed these stairs, though I had never climbed these stairs, of that time I met with Lady Kata before the time I came here at all—all these scenes began unspooling in my mind like a movie I had never watched before.
“What have I done?”
We were in the tower room together. Lady Kata was crying.
“What have I done?”
She was already brandishing the dagger at me. She was frantic, her eyes wild, her beautiful face flushed, her cheeks streaked with gray tears, her golden hair in disarray. The knife flashed in the torchlight. Was she going to kill me?
“It’s all right,” I kept saying to her. My hands were lifted to her, palms out. I was trying to steady her, comfort her. “It’s not your fault, Kata. Lord Iron seduced you.”
“How is that not my fault?”
“He bewitched you! He stole your will. That wizard of his. Curtin.”
A febrile light came into her eyes. Her wild gaze seemed to fix on a spot in eternity.
“Yes! Yes! That’s it! The wizard. He enchanted me! He stole me from myself!” But even as she said the words, her voice broke. She shook her head. Her eyes glistened with guilty tears. “But I was the one who did it. I loved him. I needed him. I wanted him. I always had the power to resist, but I didn’t.”
“You did resist, Kata. You held on to the talisman.”
“I betrayed my queen!”
“We can still make this right. We can bring the talisman to the emperor. Anastasius has armies. He’ll restore Elinda to her throne.”
Lady Kata looked around her, her eyes darting crazily here and there as if a thousand invisible demons were jeering at her from all directions.
I urged her back to herself. “The talisman, Kata!”
“The talisman …” She breathed the word to herself as if only now remembering. And then, as if fighting against some force that constrained her, she struggled to lift her hand and extend her finger. “There! I hid it there!” A wild, desperate expression of defiant joy came over her features. “No matter how he bewitched me, I would not give it to him!”
I followed her gesture. Low on the curving tower wall, just below the window, there was a tile mosaic. It showed a scene of a queen enthroned. Men and women in various forms of dress were moving toward her to bring her tributes: grain, wine, a lyre, and so on. I didn’t know if it was a picture of Queen Elinda or an allegory of some sort or both at once, but there was no time to worry about it. Because now, the distraught Lady Kata cried out—words that sounded as if she had forced them from her throat.
“Behind the throne!”
I went to the mosaic. I knelt before the image. My fingers traced the tiles that made the throne. The slab of stone that held them wobbled, unsteady. I worked my fingernails between the tiles and pried the stone away.
And there it was! There, in a small niche: the talisman. A glittering pendant with an S-shaped bolt carved into its golden center.
My heart sped up as I put my fingers on it. I had risked my life half a dozen times to get this. I had worked my way into Lady Kata’s confidence, praying all the while that she would not betray me to her lover, slowly talking my way through the spell that had taken over her will.
Now I had what I had come for. I could bring it to the Emperor. Anastasius would restore the queen and save the kingdom.
I stood up. I turned around.
I saw the dreadful thing.
While I had retrieved the talisman, Lady Kata had plunged the dagger into herself, plunged it in to the hilt. Her mouth was open. Her eyes were wide. But in her expression, I thought I saw something like relief. She had finally freed herself—from her desire for Lord Iron, from the spell his wizard had cast on her. She had taken her life but reclaimed her soul.
I rushed to her. I grabbed the hilt of the knife. Even as I did, she fell to the floor, dropping away from me with so much force that the blade came out of her. I stood there, staring at the dead woman, the bloody knife in my hand.
And I heard the thundering footsteps of the guards on the tower stairs.
I knew I only had a second. I knew there was only one thing I could do.
I leapt to the window and threw the pendant toward the moat. I watched it turn and fall, glittering in the air. Then, even before it hit the water, I swung back to the door with the bloody dagger still in my hand, swung back just in time to see Sir Aravist and his guards come bursting through …
NOW I REACHED the tower room. I used Lady Betheray’s key to unlock the heavy door. I pushed in. As soon as I crossed the threshold, the memories crowded in on me like hungry beggars desperate for a scrap of bread. I only had a second to take in the place where it had all happened. The bloodstain on the stone floor. The tapestries on the wall. The mosaic with its empty hiding hole …
Lord Iron and his men had not found the talisman and so they had tried to use the law to torture its location out of me. If Tauratanio had not sent Maud to help me, I would’ve died in the executioner’s chamber with no one to protest or care. Or maybe they would have locked up what was left of me in one of those cages so the guards could spear me to death there while the people cheered.
I crossed quickly to the window. I felt full of energy and daring. I had not realized until now how heavily Lady Kata’s death had weighed on me. I could never quite believe I had murdered her, but I could not figure out how she had died. Now I knew, and the freedom from my own suspicions made me feel light and high, like a kite carried on the wind.
I reached the window and climbed over the edge. The moon was low. Its light lay in a broken silver line over the water of the moat. It whitened the outer stones of the tower. I could see where the stones jutted. As Lady Betheray had said, they made a ladder almost to the ground.
I lowered myself from the window to the first step then began to make my way down, crawli
ng over the surface of the tower swiftly and surely. It was a long way, but it only took a few moments. I dropped the last few feet onto the soft, damp earth.
I moved toward the water’s edge, panning my eyes over the surface of the moat as I approached. I was looking for any signs of the talisman, but what was the use? How would I ever be able to see it where it lay deep beneath the night-dark surface, far below the blurred gleam of the moonlight?
And yet, I did see it! How weird! The moment I stepped to the edge of the moat, I saw it through the murk. It lay at the bottom, half sunk in mud. But it was glowing. Its jewels, its gold, its S-shaped bolt—all were illuminated by a light from within.
When I knelt in the grass and bent over the water, that light grew brighter. It was responding to my presence. It was glowing for me. I was meant to find it.
I held my breath. I was afraid the light would go out, afraid the thing would vanish before I grabbed it. I couldn’t tell how deep it was. Would I have to swim down for it?
I reached an unsteady hand toward the moat. Even before my fingers touched the surface, the talisman trembled. It broke from the mud. It rose up through the water.
It burst out into the air, shedding moonlit droplets as it flew.
It leapt on its own power right into my hand.
LADY BETHERAY THREW her arms around me when I came back to her carrying the pendant.
“God bless you!” she whispered in my ear.
She took the talisman from me and slipped it over my neck, tucking it inside my shirt. Then she drew back. I could see there were tears in her eyes, tears of gratitude and admiration. They caught the yellow glow of the torchlight coming through the open door. I felt my heart grow inside me until it seemed too big for my chest. I wished every moment in life could be like this one.
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