Lives of Kings

by Lucy Leiderman

  We sat in silence for a few moments, listening to the waves. At first the noise had kept me up at night. Now I felt it make its way into my body, syncing with my breathing. I considered how much Seth had matured in the past few weeks. The role of older brother, now that we knew it to be the case, suited him.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he suggested, motioning toward the loungers. “These death traps have already gotten me once today.”

  I spotted his outstretched hand in the moonlight and took it, his cold, smooth palm gripping my fingers and pulling me up.

  The sand on the beach was fine as powder and warm under my feet, even though the sun had set hours ago. We made our way along the water.

  “Did Garrison tell you I was here?” I asked.

  Seth shrugged in the moonlight. “He said you left in a huff.”

  “A huff?”

  “I’m paraphrasing. He used words I’m not going to repeat.”

  In the past month we hadn’t had much time alone together, and while I had been recovering in the cottage, everyone only approached me with kid gloves, as if I could snap at any moment.

  “I’m …” I gritted my teeth, knowing what my words would truly admit. “Sorry.” I couldn’t seem to raise my eyes from my feet.

  “For what?” Seth asked innocently. I wasn’t getting off the hook. He was going to make me say it.

  “For …” I waved my arms in exasperation. “Holding us back. For moping and pining and not really being myself.”

  I could feel him shrug again, his shoulders brushing up against mine. I hadn’t realized he’d been walking so close.

  “We need to help each other right now,” Seth said. “My magic …” it was his turn to gesture, looking for the right words. “I can feel your energy inside of you like knot. You’re all … tangled up. And I can’t do much either. It’s frustrating, I know.”

  His metaphor made me smile. It perfectly described how I felt. The hate flowing through me during the last time I had used magic felt raw, like it had grated through my insides to turn into the storm that nearly killed us all.

  Inside of it, I could feel my real emotions. I was angry, but I was mostly scared. I feared the magicians and I feared for my friends. I had felt I needed to compensate for the fear, helplessness, and insecurity with magic. And it put us all in danger.

  “I overdid it.”

  “You need to let it go.”

  “Stop reading me,” I said half-heartedly and gently nudged him. When I looked back, he was smiling.

  “I don’t need to read you,” he said. “I know you.”

  “Ouch!”

  I stepped on a broken shell half-buried in the sand, sharp edge up toward me — of course. I sat heavily on the sand to examine my poor foot. My wrap-dress quickly filled with sand, and I sighed. I wasn’t meant for beaches.

  After I became fully convinced that the damage to my foot wouldn’t lead to some deadly Pacific disease, I looked up to find Seth staring at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  He ran a hand through his hair.

  “You look like silver,” he said, smiling.

  I looked down to find my hair falling over my shoulders, normally a mousy dark blond, was even paler in the moonlight. I suddenly felt like that broken shell, blending in with the sand, invisible until someone got hurt by me.

  Seth knelt next to me. Suddenly the beach fell away. My stomach dropped into the sand and I felt rooted there. My vision went hazy and I could have sworn it was the grown Seth from the past who looked back at me. Something in my chest pulled to be closer to him. It scared me and I tried to pull back, but couldn’t.

  Uh-oh.

  Magic gripped me and I felt like I was at the top of a rollercoaster, knowing I was about to experience a terrifying fall. I had no time to either celebrate or rue its return. Seth reached toward me and I took his hand.

  Suddenly he was much farther away. He drifted out of reach from my hand as an invisible force pushed me down to the floor, where I knelt. I wanted to cry out but I had no voice. My heart was racing, panic gripped my lungs, and I braced my hands on the dirty earthen floor to keep from shaking. The bitter cold seemed to rise from the ground and cling to my bones.

  I dared look up to see Seth, as he once was, standing next to an old man covered in cloaks of different colours and patterns, his bearded jaw set in a grim line. The king. His father. Emotion flooded into me as I saw him. I wanted to grab him, hold him, protect him, but knew I couldn’t. Somewhere my second life’s mind forced me to focus. I tore my eyes away and took in my surroundings.

  We were in a dark wooden room. Wooden pillars held up the tall ceiling and the thatched roof let slivers of sunlight shine through. There was a hole in the middle through which smoke escaped.

  On the other side of the old man’s perch stood Kian, a small and skinny child with a dirty mop of black hair and blue eyes wide with fear. He clutched his tan tunic and stared at his father, the king. Nearby, a woman with black hair and sad eyes stroked the head of another dark-haired woman, who sobbed quietly into her shoulder.

  My hair hung loose around my face and fell away as I turned to look around me. I was kneeling with three people on my right, and two on my left. I spotted Moira and Garrison but didn’t know the others. I forced my past self to stare into their faces, remembering every feature. Behind us stood five men in cloaks with different designs stitched into them.

  “The fog has come over our land,” the king said, and my eyes went back to him, “and has shrouded the truth between good and evil, right and wrong.”

  His voice struggled, and I couldn’t decide if it was due to emotion or age.

  “In any future, lives will be lost. Blood will be spilled. Pain will echo through our lands. We have been blessed by the gods with their kin.” His arm swept out to us and rested on Seth’s sleeve, gripping it tightly. He clutched it as if steadying himself, though he sat. “And they will help us decide our own fate, and turn the future for the good of the world.”

  The crying woman sobbed louder, and the dark woman holding her, who I knew to be the queen, let her tears fall silently to the floor. There was movement to my left. A man kneeling next to me, his chestnut hair flowing past his shoulders, sat back onto his heels looking stunned but determined.

  I realized this was it. This was the moment the king had decided to have us killed. My stomach turned. In less than a day, I would die. The thought didn’t frighten me as much as losing Seth. My past self was terrified of it.

  The panic and grief she felt at being without him formed a lump in my throat that turned into a throbbing pain. My heart stopped when Seth turned and his eyes met mine. I knew then that I was ready to lose everything except him. I would betray my husband, my king, and my home. All I wanted was to reach out.

  I came back to my body with the force of falling onto the beach from above. Sucking in the night air, I coughed up sand that burned upon touching my skin. Seth instinctively came toward me to help, but I could feel the magic building. I had experienced this once before, but I had meant it to happen. Now it was beyond my control. My past self was still caught in the dream, and I couldn’t stop it. The pain was too much.

  The grief of losing him didn’t subside with time. Every time she remembered life without him, how her husband had found her out and made her late, how Seth had gone without her to be sacrificed, how she wanted to die rather than to live without him, a new wave of anger and sadness would roll over me.

  I did the one thing she would never do. When Seth reached for me, I used all my strength to push him away. It was for his own good. I added magic to my strength, and he was thrown backward into the sand, right before flames engulfed my vision and I felt the pure heat of my magic leave my body in a wave of fire.

  Chapter Two

  Kian kept low to the ground, making his way through the forest as quietly as possible. Though he already carried several dead rabbits in his bag, the deer would be welcome at home in the settlement. He w
as so focused on the hunt that he hadn’t noticed how far into the forest he crept or how high the sun rose above him.

  Finally, the deer stopped to drink from a pool and Kian lay on the hard ground, reaching to pull his bow from his back. An unwelcome but familiar vibration in the earth made him freeze.

  The deer looked up, feeling it as well. Hooves carrying heavy loads were quickly coming his way. He looked back just in time to see the deer bolt. Kian sighed.

  The Kaligan refused to accept their new surroundings. Coming from a land over the sea, they valued heavy armour and leather, even if it was high summer. They outfitted their horses with metal buckles and donned so many layers that they were practically roasting on horseback. The Romans had come far but refused to believe they were somewhere different.

  The people of Kian’s tribe had started calling them the Kaligan after the big boots they insisted on wearing. Calling them what they were, Romans, soldiers of the empire of all empires, made them strong and intimidating. Nicknames helped to make the threat less real.

  It was a decade since the Kaligan came to Kian’s homeland and gave it foreign names. Britannia. Caledonia. The land was really called Alapa, but it was now only said in hushed whispers.

  Kaligan settlements were built and surrounded by tall walls of imported stones, while the tribes who had made peace with them were closely monitored. Men on horseback, weary to be so far from home, patrolled the forests around their villages. While the current general was a decent man, the legions were getting restless and the tribes knew war would come if anyone with a less firm hand succeeded him.

  Kian’s life had been a delicate balance between war and waiting for war. The Kaligan had come when he was just a child, but his father, the high king of Alapa and king of the Riada, had already been engaged in another battle.

  The Godelan, a tribe to the north who captured slaves and stole magic, had committed a ritual forcing the Riada warriors to sacrifice themselves. Kian remembered little of the tribe whose name was no longer spoken, but to him the Godelan were more than just an extinct group — they were the reason he no longer had a brother, and the Riada had no king. While his father had believed slavery and corrupt magic were enough to make the Godelan the greater evil, the Kaligan had slaves in other countries, too, and Kian often wondered if his father had made the right decision.

  The years after the Riada had lost their only magical warriors, descendants of the gods themselves, were difficult for the tribe. Always bowing to Kaligan demands, they had given up their homeland to move closer to Kaligan settlements so that the governors and generals could keep an eye on them. Other tribes, which had opted to fight, had either been killed off or moved north and died from cold during the winter. Kian’s world had fallen apart. And though he hated himself for it, he had learned to speak the language of the Kaligan and adopted their ways.

  Only a year after his older brother was sacrificed to put an end to the Godelan, his father died. His mother followed the year after that, though he suspected the cause was a broken heart.

  With the Kaligan, Kian was king of nothing. Other men and women had stepped forward to organize the tribe, and he welcomed it. They were stronger and wiser. They had been kind to him, but the Kaligan had taken away his only home. He could not blame the Godelan magicians or hate them — he had never known them.

  Kian placed his ear to the dirt to listen for the hooves. They were getting closer. Still low to the ground, he made his way to the small pond in the clearing. Silently, he left his bow and hunting bag under a large root, hidden from view, and slipped into the water. It was cold against his skin and he fought not to suck in breath from the shock. To keep still, he sank low until only the top of his head remained above water.

  Kian breathed through his nose, taking long, steady breaths to calm himself. He had gone too far into their land without noticing. As soon as he thought it, he hated himself. It was his land, and if not his, then his brother’s or the Riada’s. Not theirs.

  The sound of boots and hooves was closing in, and he slowly moved to stand with his back to the pond’s edge. The mud sucked him in. With long grass hiding him, Kian observed the Kaligan coming into view.

  The amount of dirt on the horses and leather suggested this group had been on the road for a while. The Kaligan took exceptional care of their shiny things, with some of the Riada going so far as to call them the Crow People for their love of metal.

  Kian tried to find the faces under the deep helmets. It was a new type of helmet, and that was problematic. He still had his brother’s stolen Kaligan uniform from when he used to spy on them from within their own ranks. If it was out of style, Kian could never hope to do the same, even if he did eventually grow into it; at only seventeen, he was smaller than his older brother.

  He did not recognize any of the faces. They were new, come to relieve some of the other Kaligan living in the fort. More than anything he wished to know their plans. Women and families were slow to come. Farms were erected as if made to be pulled down at a moment’s notice. Would there be more war, or would the Kaligan leave them alone?

  A leader, his chest and shoulders bearing the most metal Kian had seen on anyone, spoke quickly in their language. Kian understood it to mean they were setting up camp. Slow panic began to creep up his neck. How long could he stay in the freezing water? Not even summer in Alapa turned the water warm. For the millionth time, Kian wished to have been born like his brother, with some kind of magic that could have helped his tribe.

  Several boys no older than him ran to start pitching tents and looking for firewood. The rest of the small unit began cutting down trees. It was late in the afternoon, but it would be hours until sunset. Kian knew he could not stay in the water that long. He was far too skinny not to feel the effects of the cold within minutes. Already, moving his muscles was becoming difficult.

  He waited for the Kaligan to become busy, then, as stealthily as possible, he slid into the tall grasses behind him on the bank. Though he had not thought it possible, the cool breeze initially made him even colder. Covered in mud, he lay in the grass willing the sun to heat his back and bring some life back to his body. He could never escape in his current state.

  As night fell, the Kaligan lit lanterns and torches. Kian averted his eyes as much as possible and stared into the night, preparing his eyesight for the dark forest beyond. He refused to grow accustomed to the light like the visitors in Alapa. The dark forest was part of his heritage and to navigate it ran in his blood. He fought to hold on to what he could of his Riada past.

  Finally, with the moon to guide him, Kian waited for the Kaligan guards to walk past his hiding spot and ran to fetch his bag and bow, slipping into the forest. A minute later, he stopped to listen. No one had spotted him.

  He was still damp and shivering, and the hours-long journey back to the new Riada village was gruelling. Running in the cold made his lungs ache. His side felt like a knife was stabbing into it and his body still shook. After a short while he abandoned all stealth and crashed through the forest, not noticing as branches cut into his skin. He felt his energy waning, but spending the night among the patrolling Kaligan or wild animals was not a good idea.

  Kian finally ran into the small Riada village before dawn. Only a few structures had been built in the past years since heavy winters made it difficult to repair many buildings. A steep, sloping thatched roof marked where most of the village’s adults slept. Smoke still rose from the fire pit.

  The night had taken its toll and Kian could barely make it to the low building. He stumbled and fell.

  “Kian!”

  A man’s voice called his name. Someone was on watch and had seen him approaching. Kian briefly considered it lucky he hadn’t been shot at. The same man called someone else over.

  “What happened to you, boy?”

  It was a rhetorical question. The man who spoke it was in the process of turning Kian over and laying his bag and bow to the side. Kian came face to face with the last p
erson he wanted to see.

  Eched was his mother’s younger brother. After his two older sisters died and there was no one to rule the Riada, he had taken on the role. Though he was kind to Kian, he was also stern. Now Eched stared at Kian in a mixture of anger and worry, black, bushy eyebrows knitted together over a long nose.

  “Where have you been? I was near telling the watch to go out and look for you!”

  So that was why they hadn’t shot him. Kian was now feeling terrible in every way possible. His uncle made him feel guilty for losing track of the day. He tried to speak, but nothing came out.

  “Look at you! Practically dead at the door. Bring him inside,” Eched instructed.

  Kian only vaguely protested as he was carried into the shelter. He had a small room to himself off the main room, and he was surprised to see someone had unskilfully started a fire. The room was filled with smoke.

  Eched barked orders as they gently laid Kian on his low bed. Someone opened a window in the roof to let the smoke escape. Kian was left with a view of the night sky as his eyes shut. His uncle’s voice was the last thing he heard before complete exhaustion won out.

  When he woke, Kian wasn’t sure what had forced him into bed in the middle of the day. The gap in his roof was still open and the sun was directly above. He squinted until the sunshine felt like it sat atop his eyelashes.

  From the throbbing pain in his head, his first guess was that someone had knocked him unconscious. Trying to remember the night before, he looked around the room and spotted his bow. The bag with the rabbits was gone, but the hunt had come back to him. He had spied the new Kaligan men and had gone too far. It was stupid and had proven his uncle right once again — he wasn’t ready to lead the Riada. In fact, he wasn’t even ready to contribute.

  The fire crackled as someone fed it another log. Someone was in his room. Kian sat up with such a flourish that the pain in his head increased tenfold and he doubled over in pain.

  “Are you all right?”