Lost Ones v-3

by Christopher Golden

  “I certainly do,” replied a nattily dressed man with wispy white hair and a thin mustache. The others called him Professor, though Grin didn’t know what had earned him the title.

  A portly fellow with several days’ growth of beard slapped one hand on the bar. “That is shit. Traitors talk like that, Professor.”

  The professor’s eyes narrowed and he stared at the man. “So I am a traitor, now, Enrique? On the contrary. I am a patriot. I have taught the children of kings. Government is never perfect, and there are things they do in secret that we are all better off not knowing. I understand this. It isn’t our king or our government I’m speaking against, but our enemies. Our true enemies.”

  “Atlantis,” Grin said.

  All eyes in the bar turned on him. For a moment, he felt sure they could see the northern Borderkind that they would all call enemy, but then the professor just nodded.

  “Precisely.” He gestured around the room, first toward Paola, the bartender, and then to some of the other men and women gathered there. They were no longer quite so interested in their drinks. “You have all seen them. I know that you have. The Atlanteans were here in Palenque before good King Mahacuhta was slain. On the day of his murder, some of you were in the plaza. There were giants on the palace steps, fighting the northern intruders. Atlantean giants.

  “Why? What were they doing here?”

  Enrique grunted. “Guarding the diplomats. Don’t you read the newspaper, Professor? The giants and the others were guarding the diplomats from Atlantis. They were already working to forge an alliance with us-that is why the dog Hunyadi sent his assassins to murder Mahacuhta.”

  From a small table in the back, a woman spoke up. She might have been fifty and her face was weathered. She sat with a younger man whose face bore the scars of battle, yet who sat up straight and had about him the air of a soldier.

  “Don’t believe everything you read, sir,” the woman said.

  Eyes narrowed again, and this time they were focused on the woman and her son.

  “My son was a captain in the King’s Guard. When Ty’Lis began to put Atlantean soldiers into their ranks, he questioned the order. They whipped him, beat him, and cut out his tongue. They stripped him of his rank and threw him in the dungeon for thirty days.”

  Even the professor blanched at these words. “Atlanteans in the King’s Guard?”

  After a moment, Enrique cleared his throat. When he continued, some of his confidence was gone. “So, what are you suggesting?”

  The professor sighed. “You know what she’s suggesting, Enrique. Don’t be obtuse. We’ve spoken of the rumors before. Why did the entire city of Palenque stand by and let the northern Borderkind pass when they came to challenge the king? Hunters had been sent out to exterminate the Borderkind all over Euphrasia, and some in Yucatazca as well. But they left Palenque alone. Why? So that the Borderkind here would not rise up and fight beside their kin against the Hunters until it was too late.”

  “Conspiracy shit,” Enrique muttered.

  “Hush,” said the bartender. She looked troubled, almost sick, but she nodded to the professor to continue.

  “He’s right,” said the woman. Her son looked as though he would have spoken, had his tongue not been cut from his mouth.

  “The whole city let it happen, that terrible day,” the woman went on. “Some of us hid in our houses and pulled the shutters. Others lined the streets and cheered them on, thinking that Mahacuhta had betrayed the truce and sent the Hunters north. But we should have known better. The Atlanteans had been infiltrating for months. Ty’Lis is behind it all.”

  Enrique stood up and took two steps toward her, glancing at the door that led to the patio. “Watch yourself, woman. Talk like that could cost your life.”

  The professor smiled, but there was no humor in it. “There. You’ve said it yourself. If she speaks against Ty’Lis, an advisor to the king, she is doomed? Is that the kind of kingdom this has become?”

  “That’s enough,” said another-a disheveled, bearded man who’d been drinking with Enrique. “You are all traitors. Prince Tzajin is going to be crowned soon enough, but already he rules in his father’s place. He has declared war against Euphrasia. He has issued edicts calling the legendary and many Lost Ones to enlist in his army. Tzajin leads us, now, and to question his rule is treason.”

  A chill went through the bar. Waitresses hurried from the kitchen out onto the patio with drinks and trays of food. The woman tending bar stared at Enrique, but he did not meet her eyes. Even the professor seemed frightened by the prospect.

  Leicester Grindylow turned on his stool. He tipped his beer glass back and took a long sip, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “How can it be treason,” he asked, “when the throne is here in Palenque, and Prince Tzajin is issuing his edicts from Atlantis? The boy is the guest of the High Council of Atlantis, surrounded only by the scholars who have been teaching him. The edicts are released here in Palenque by Ty’Lis, who has been behaving like a regent instead of an advisor. Only a blind fool would not at least ask the question, my friends. How do we know that Tzajin declared war, or issued those edicts? How can we be sure the prince even knows that his father is dead?”

  They stared at him in horror. Some shifted uncomfortably and looked away, but the mute soldier only nodded in dark approval.

  “There’s a more horrible question,” the professor said. “How do we know Tzajin is still alive?”

  The soldier knocked on the table to get everyone’s attention.

  “He wants you to consider another question,” the mute man’s mother said. “Who really killed King Mahacuhta?”

  “Now that is enough!” cried the bearded man who’d lectured them about treason.

  Enrique shook his head. “So now you want me to believe the Atlanteans murdered the king?”

  “How can you not believe it?” the woman asked, her voice weighted with grief. “You’ve heard all of the rumors. The only reason that you haven’t made that connection is because you don’t want to. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, why hasn’t the prince come home, yet? We are at war, for the gods’ sake! Where else should he be, if not in the palace, commanding our fate?”

  Her dark-eyed son stood, arms crossed. He opened his mouth and even in the gloom the vacant hollow inside was evident.

  “Then what of the assassins in the dungeon?” the bartender asked. “If they weren’t sent by Hunyadi to murder Mahacuhta, then who are they?”

  Grin stood and set his glass down on the bar, drawing their eyes one last time. He turned to take in every man and woman in the bar-twenty-two souls; he had counted.

  “Why did Ty’Lis send the Hunters out to slaughter Borderkind if not to cut off all contact with the ordinary world, to separate the Lost from our ancestral home forever? Maybe the so-called assassins in the palace dungeon are exactly what all of the whispers say they are. Maybe they’re the Legend-Born, come to take us home.”

  He turned and strode through the door, out onto the patio. The laughing beauties of Palenque took no notice, but he felt the attention of those inside the bar until he had vanished from their sight.

  As they infiltrated the city, Grin and the other Borderkind had found just what Blue Jay had hoped and predicted. Many of the Lost Ones of Palenque were not blind or stupid. They might be afraid to make unpleasant connections, or speak up, but they were not fools.

  If they could be forced to face their own suspicions, the Borderkind would have more allies than they could ever have imagined.

  CHAPTER 8

  O liver could not sleep. He had tried, fidgeting awkwardly on the mat, searching for the least torturous position. Then he had gone to the window and stared out at the wall across from his cell, wishing he could see the sky. A view of the stars would have lifted his heart.

  At length, he walked across the cell and stood in front of the door. Out in the corridor, nothing stirred. Torchlight flickered somewh
ere down the hall, giving the walls a wet glow. Beyond the grate in the door to Julianna and Collette’s cell, there was only darkness. He might have heard a low, troubled snore, but that could as easily have been his imagination.

  He pressed his forehead against the cool metal of the grate and peered into the corridor. No one stirred. Idly his fingers brushed over the stones in the wall and traced the mortar grooves, just as he’d been doing almost since the moment they’d been locked up. Collette had been doing the same.

  How many people believed they were Legend-Born? Thousands? Millions? And if all of those people believed, did that make it true? Once, humanity had believed their world was flat, but they had been proven wrong. How disappointed all the Lost Ones would be if they found out it was all bullshit.

  And it had to be bullshit, didn’t it? They’d been in these cells for going on nine weeks and hadn’t been able to summon up a single bit of magic. If their mother was Borderkind-if they were supposed to fulfill some kind of prophecy-why did he feel so damned ordinary?

  Or maybe not completely ordinary.

  He chewed on that for a second. Ever since coming through the Veil for the first time, he’d felt the way he always did when giving a closing argument in court, or acting onstage. Like what he did was fulfilling some role in a grand plan.

  Just a little full of yourself, aren’t you?

  Maybe he was. But that didn’t change the way it felt.

  And what if it’s true? That was a question he’d asked himself a thousand times ever since Ty’Lis had first talked about the Legend-Born. If it was true, that changed everything.

  Could their mother really have been Melisande, a beautiful creature with dragon wings and a serpent’s lower body? Oliver had photographs of her and his memories, and she had always seemed ordinary. She had been sweet and kind, with a light of joy in her eyes. But he had seen Blue Jay and Kitsune and other legends transform themselves easily enough, and it might be possible that Melisande could do the same.

  He had also thought about what Julianna had said about his father. If their mother had indeed been Melisande-if he and Collette were half-human and half-Borderkind-that went a long way toward explaining the way Max Bascombe had treated his son. Oliver had longed for magic, all of his life. And yet…

  Dad didn’t want you to reach for it. He was afraid of what you might find. Or of what might find you.

  Oliver drew in a long breath and bit his lower lip. All his life, all he’d wanted was for his father to love him and for himself to be able to put his resentment aside long enough to return that love.

  But his father was dead, now, and that would never happen.

  If only the old man had told them the truth, when they were old enough. Yet he’d kept it from them, trying to protect them. Otherwise he might still be alive.

  Oliver froze, staring out into the corridor. A frown creased his brow. If Melisande had been his mother, and they had inherited some kind of magic from her legendary blood, what would that be? How did Collette’s escape from the pit at the Sandman’s castle make sense? She had torn the wall of her prison apart, but that didn’t seem like their mother at all. If their mother had magic in her, it wasn’t a magic of destruction. Yet whenever he had tried to dig at the mortar, he’d been thinking about pulling the wall apart with magic. Obviously, that wasn’t working.

  The stones beneath his left hand shifted.

  Oliver held his breath, then glanced over at his hand. Mortar sifted like dust from the grooves between stones.

  “Holy shit,” he whispered.

  It’s not about destruction. No, it wouldn’t be. Not if they were their mother’s children. Which wasn’t to say that they would have magic similar to hers. From what he’d heard, there seemed no real pattern to the magic that developed in the offspring of legends, and no known precedent to indicate what magic might occur in a child half-human and half-Borderkind. Still, instinct told him that his mother’s magic would not have been cruel or terrible.

  All creatures had delighted her. She had loved her garden, right down to every beetle. Her magic, he felt, must have been in beauty and life. In growth. Yet when autumn came and the garden began to wither, she had seemed equally as content as she’d been when the flowers were in full bloom. Oliver hadn’t learned the word entropy until he was in high school, but later, he’d understood it. Things fell apart, lost their cohesion. Everything had its season.

  And if you could speed that process along…

  Slowly, but firmly, he pushed his left hand forward, and dry, discolored mortar sifted down like powder. The stones began to fall outward.

  Oliver drew back his hand and watched as the wall collapsed into the corridor.

  He heard Collette and Julianna talking in low voices and knew they didn’t have long before the noise of the collapsing wall summoned the guards.

  “Jules! Collette! We’re going now.”

  “Oliver?”

  Julianna’s face appeared at the grate.

  He jumped into the corridor and went up to their door.

  “What’d you do?”

  “It worked.” His eyes sought his sister in the darkened cell. He saw Collette pulling on her shoes. She stared up at him.

  “How?”

  “It’s all real, Coll. Melisande was our mother. I went over it a million times, and it’s the only thing that could be true. We crossed the Veil, sis. All the legends are real, here, and we’re one of them. No way would the Atlanteans have gone to such trouble to deal us out of the game if they didn’t believe we were Legend-Born.”

  He smiled, then glanced at Julianna, who gazed at him in wonder.

  “Now, stand away from the wall. We’re out of time.”

  Oliver placed both hands on the stones, ran his fingers and palms over them, and again thought about entropy. About the loss of cohesion. More than anything, he thought about his mother, and wished he could have known her true self.

  Once again, the mortar sifted down. He gave the wall a shove and the stones tumbled into the cell. Oliver stepped over the rubble and into the cell.

  “I’ve tried,” Collette said.

  Their eyes met. He took her hands. “It isn’t about breaking things. It’s about letting them rest. Making them surrender.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Julianna asked.

  But Oliver kept his focus on Collette. “You did it before, when you weren’t thinking about it, or when you were so exhausted you couldn’t think straight. Now you’ve just got to…no, believe isn’t enough. You’ve got to know what you are.”

  He went to Julianna and slid one hand behind her head, fingers tangling in her hair. They kissed, and he felt like he could just crumble into her arms.

  “You ready to go?”

  Julianna stiffened, eyes full of pain. “I can’t cross the Veil. You know that.”

  “Screw that. We’re out of here, one way or another.”

  He turned to Collette. Pointed to the wall behind her. “You take care of that wall. We’ve got maybe thirty seconds, if that, to do something. I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going?” Julianna asked.

  But Oliver had already jumped back into the hall. His heart raced and he could not erase the grin on his face as he sprinted down the corridor. He ran so quickly that when he had to slow down to make the turn toward the stairs, he nearly lost his footing. But he recovered, and a good thing, too, for as he went through the arch toward the bottom of the stairs he heard the iron gate slam open above and the shouts of Atlantean soldiers berating the Yucatazcan guards.

  Oliver ran to the stairs. He took them two at a time, and made it halfway up before a guard rounded the curving stairwell above him and shouted. Oliver heard the scrape of metal upon metal as the Atlantean drew his sword.

  He laughed, crouching, and reached out to lay his hands on the stairs just above him. They started to shift and crack immediately. Oliver scrambled backward down the stairs, dragging his hands over the stones as he
went.

  And the stairs gave way, leaving an empty pit behind.

  Oliver leaped the rest of the way to the bottom, but the soldier fell through the gap. The others rounded the corner on the stairs and stopped short, staring at the chasm that separated them from Oliver. He grinned and shot them the middle finger, then ran back down the corridor toward the cells.

  Julianna and Collette weren’t there, but the rear wall of the cell had collapsed. Oliver whooped with joy and ran through the opening into the next cell. That one had been opened as well, but in this case it had not been the wall that Collette had taken down. It was the door.

  Oliver stepped into the far corridor. The hall was filled with a cold mist, and the stone walls were rimed with ice. He shivered, teeth chattering, as he turned to see Collette and Julianna standing in front of a door that glistened with ice crystals.

  Frost.

  Collette put her hands on the door and hissed, pulling away from the ice that must have seared her. Julianna glanced at Oliver-past Oliver-and he knew she was remembering the last time she’d been here, and the horrid promises that Ty’Lis had made if they were ever caught again.

  Collette tried again, putting her hands against the wall of the cell instead of the door. Oliver ran to join her. The guards would figure out a way to reach them soon, he was sure.

  He put his hands on the door. The ice was so cold it burned. His eyelashes stuck when he blinked and his breath plumed in front of him. But the metal bands on the door fell off, and the bolts holding the hinges on pulled loose from the frame. Where Collette touched the wall, the stones began to shift.

  “Push,” Oliver said.

  Together, they brought down the whole front wall of the cell, door and all. Stones and wood crashed inward. Ice shattered. Frigid air rolled out, and then the three of them stood staring at the winter man. Frost had been placed in a kind of stasis within a dark sphere of magic. At least three quarters of the sphere had been covered with an outer layer of ice and snow. Deep within, where the sphere was not covered, they could see Frost. From what Oliver could tell, he did not look shattered anymore.