When her brother said nothing, South turned away and took the king’s arm. Down the steps they went, their footsteps heavy in the dark. West stayed behind and watched as the water tumbled in around their feet and swallowed them alive.
Baba Laza cracked his knuckles before he took the clay platter into his spotted, wrinkled hands and carried it to the table in the next room. The children were already seated, with mugs of herbal tea, and he took his place at the table’s head. He watched without comment as Shawn loaded plates for Rebecca and Megan and guided their hands to the food. Laza waited for Shawn to take some for himself, but the boy only folded his hands over his wooden plate and looked down the length of the table into the old man’s face.
“How can I get their eyes back?”
Laza’s laugh came out sharp, like a dog’s bark. “You think you can? So arrogant now. Like your mother.”
Shawn hesitated, struck silent. His sisters also stopped moving; Rebecca’s hand hovered in midair, a piece of flatbread halfway to her mouth.
“You know our mother?” Shawn asked.
“She came through with the Small Queen’s boy. Thought she knew everything. Stole his knife while he was sleeping. It must be you who she was looking after. He forgives her. Fool of a boy. Just like his fool father and fool brothers. In that blood, I think.”
“When did they come through?”
“I could never tell you. It all runs together after a while. Not too long ago.”
Rebecca opened up her blank eyes and turned to Laza. “How was she?”
“Dead.” He shrugged. “How is anybody who comes over the lake? You’re the first three I’ve ever seen to cross alive, and the girls might as well be dead.” Laza smiled when Shawn threw him a sharp look. “I won’t lie for my benefit,” he said. “So why should I lie for yours? You aren’t any better than a rogue who comes through after giving up their eyes instead of their tongues, and I certainly would not lie on their behalf. I don’t know what you were thinking.”
“That’s enough,” Shawn said.
“Snap, snap, snap. Learn better manners before you open your mouth.” Laza took a piece of sesame candy from the plate and pointed at Megan. “Her,” he said. “I think that I can help the little one. Alecto cannot use four eyes.” At that, Rebecca perked up. “But she can use two,” he said, giving her a knowing look, “so it is absolutely no go to get both pairs.” He popped the candy into his mouth and shook his head, gesturing now at Rebecca. “She doesn’t belong here,” he said. “None of you do. You’ll lose more than your eyes on your way to the Kingdom.”
“We’ve made it this far,” Shawn said.
“Barely. And if you think that this is far, then you truly will be dead before you make it out. There’s only one road through here, and it is never marked.”
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Shawn replied.
“You’re a liar if you say you’re sure of anything, but have your way about it.”
“Can we sleep here for the night?”
“Sleep wherever you want,” Laza said, waving his hands above his head. “But if by ‘night’ you mean ‘dark,’ then you’ll have a time. The sun never sets on this side. But windows shut, and there are sheets in the cupboard. I am working outside if you need someone to bother.” He pushed himself to his feet and tottered out of the house, moving on joints that seemed to have stiffened just from holding still.
The passageway led to a stone room at the heart of the lake. Shelves lined the curved walls, each stuffed with books and glass bottles. The air smelled of moldering leaves and damp parchment, and the only light seeped, cold and green, from the fishing net suspended across the ceiling. Near the far wall was a cauldron on a bed of dying coals. In the middle of the floor, a shallow silver bowl sat on a wooden podium. South brought the king to this table and let go of his hand. As she walked away, she tapped the bowl with her knuckles and turned her yellow eyes back on him.
“And what does the Reaper King come to ask of South?”
He felt his pockets for coins.
By the time he found one, South was already at one of her shelves, shuffling through the crowded vials. She paused to appraise the clatter of his offered gold.
“Shall I guess?” she asked, her voice echoing softly back against the stone. “Five sons there have always been in the house of middling kings. No inheritance, then, for the unlucky sixth?”
“No.”
South slid over to the cauldron and sunk her arm, nearly to the shoulder, into the simmering broth. She came up covered in what looked like mud, thick and gray-brown, and, holding her arm away from her body, padded back to the king. When she opened her hand above his, a baby bird tumbled out, warm and shuddering; he could feel, beneath the sticky feathers, its heart pounding against its chest.
South watched it flounder against the nest of the king’s palm. “A rogue must learn to see the dead for what they really are.”
“A Caladrius?”
She turned away. “A promise parting,” she told him, “which says that, by some, the boy will not be forgotten. In life, the eyes of death, and, in death, those of life. So tells fate.”
The king tucked the bird into his pocket. “And my wife —”
South’s glance cut him. The bowl clicked as he laid down another coin, and she softened.
“The slighted queen will live unhappy while her greatest shame lives at all. So it must be.”
“But he —”
Another look, another coin.
Water dripped from the walls and ceiling, pattering against the shelves and floor. “Jeremiah, king’s son,” South cried, as if announcing the name to a full court. “Child of myth.” She slit her eyes coyly at the king and dropped her voice. “The boy who never feels wanted.”
She turned away, seemingly finished, and wiped the cauldron’s mud onto her dress. The last of it, she licked from her fingers.
“Bitter,” she whispered, and then paused again. “Your last child is stronger than you, Highness. He will fly, like his gift, until they pin him to the wall.” She shook her head and turned back to the king. Looked him dead in the eyes. “But passion breeds passion,” she went on, “and so your son will burn. You, great Reaper King, have condemned that boy to a life consumed by fire.”
Jeremiah brushed a handful of hair out of Erika’s face.
“It’s your turn to purge yourself,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Are you really sure you want this?”
She faltered.
“Your children,” he said. “I’m talking about your children. Are you sure that you want them here?”
“Can you take me back to them?”
He clicked his teeth together in deliberation. “No,” he said at last. “I can’t.”
“Then you have to do this. I need them.”
“There are millions out there who would say that they need their own families.”
“I know,” Erika said. “And look how they’re living. They’re empty. Hardly human anymore. I don’t want to be like that.”
“Erika, your children can’t help you there. Only you can.”
She bit her lips. “I need them.”
Jeremiah rose from the bed and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his suit jacket.
“I sometimes wish that my own mother had been more like you,” he said.
Erika gave him a sad smile.
“Where’s that coming from?” she asked. “The angel or the rogue?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Not the rogue. My mother didn’t love me because she couldn’t. She didn’t want me because she couldn’t. I can’t hate her for that, but how can I love her?”
“Maybe your father cared enough for both.”
He laughed softly to himself. “Of course,” he said. “And I guess that disowning me is just a birthday present. No, Erika, I’ve been alone for a long, long time.”
He knew that she would touch him before the words left his mouth, and he hated himsel
f for saying them anyway. Her fingertips crept up his wrist, his forearm, and jumped to the side of his face. She barely had to press to make him turn, but he focused on the soft, pale inside of her wrist. He feared looking at her face and seeing something there that he couldn’t fix.
“Jeremiah.”
“Erika, please.”
“Jeremiah.” Her voice was a whisper, pleading. “I need to know,” she said, “how much of this is you, and how much of this is a lie.”
He risked a glance at her eyes and saw that they were sad, scared.
“What are you talking about?”
“Are you leading me on because you can’t help it, or because you want to use me?”
“Erika.” Now he reached out too, cupping her face in his hands, rubbing the corners of her eyes with his thumbs. “You’ve been through too much to let me make you look this heartsick.”
She allowed him a small laugh but didn’t answer.
“I got you into this, and I’m going to get you out.”
“Stop,” she said. “This is not your fault.”
“It is,” he said. “More than you realize.” He sucked in a sharp breath as the pressure of her needs crushed against his chest. “I know that you don’t want to hear that,” he said, “but sometimes we have to believe what hurts us.”
“Am I dead, Jeremiah? Did you do this?”
He concentrated on the bedspread, because he knew that if he looked at her, she would know. She would catch the answer in his eyes, and she would fall to pieces. If he could heal her, he would much rather do that. Take this burden off both their backs.
“Do you remember what I told you before?” he asked, reining himself in enough to look her in the eyes.
“That I’m waiting,” she said.
“I would never lie to you.” He gave her a smile to cheer her up. “I can’t, remember?”
Now it was Erika’s turn to examine the coverlet. She smoothed a piece of it against her thigh, and then let her fingers run along Jeremiah’s leg, tracing his knee.
“Then I don’t understand,” she said. “Why can’t I leave? Why am I here in the first place?”
Jeremiah brushed handfuls of hair from her face and tucked them behind her ears.
“I don’t always understand, either,” he said. “There’s no sin in that.”
She studied his face, searching him out, sinking straight into his eyes.
“We can’t do this, Erika.”
She put her palm against the back of his neck, drew him close, and let her mouth hover there.
“Just once,” she said, her words brushing hot across his lips. “If you mean it — if you aren’t just reflecting for me — prove it just once.”
Jeremiah looked at the face that he’d stared at for so long the day he killed her. At the person whose soul he’d lifted up, careful as if afraid of waking her, from a crash that he’d orchestrated. He hadn’t even noticed her smile until later, and the way it rose a little higher on one side of her mouth, or the way she rubbed her hands when she got nervous, or laughed when determined not to cry. He hadn’t even noticed the way she said his name, so smooth it polished him, or the way she pulled her sleeves down to cover her palms, like a girl wearing clothes too big for her.
He slipped one hand around to cradle her head, as he had that night in the rain, and he kissed her, deep, vowing that he never would again.
Shawn woke up with a stream of sunlight across his face, let in through a crack in the wooden shutters. He wiped his mouth and ruffled out his hair as he got to his feet. His eyes scanned the room with the same unfamiliarity that was fast becoming custom. He kept replaying the timeline since the fire, but nothing could make this feel less like a dream. A ridiculous dream that made him sick and frightened and excited, but a dream nonetheless.
A canvas shoulder bag sat just inside the door, and with it a white blindfold rolled up alongside a tiny bird’s nest. Inside the nest waited two glass beads, each the size of a hummingbird egg. On top of them lay a note, rolled up and tied with string. Swallow. Shawn looked at his sisters, arms wrapped together in sleep, and silently thanked Laza.
He knelt down beside Rebecca and nudged her. She gave a half scream that woke Megan.
“I didn’t mean to!” Shawn said.
Rebecca pressed a hand against her chest. “Scare me to death.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What d’you want?”
“I’m supposed to blindfold you,” he said.
“Right,” Rebecca scoffed. “Because I can see so well. Just be sure to make the knot tight enough so it doesn’t slip off and show me everything.”
“Laza got Meg’s eyes for us. I don’t want you to scare her.”
Rebecca closed her mouth. Her fingertips traveled up to the bridge of her nose and paused, hovering over the blank sockets of her eyes. When she finally found her voice again, it came out rough.
“Fine,” she said. “Do it.”
Shawn wrapped the cloth around her face and tied it at the back with a sharp tug. Rebecca’s hands drifted up again, feeling the span of fabric that went from her brow bone to the tip of her nose.
“Is it too tight?”
She shook her head. “It’s fine.”
“I’m sorry about this.”
“Help Meg.”
Shawn picked up the nest and went to kneel across from his little sister.
“It’s me, Meg,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m going to help you, okay? If you swallow these, you’ll be able to see again.” He dropped the glass beads into her palm.
“Okay.”
“It’s like a vitamin, okay?”
“Can I drink something with it?”
“Right.” He crawled back to the satchel and flipped it open. There was a wool blanket packed inside, two loaves of bread wrapped in cloth, and a few animal-skin flasks of water. He brought one back to Megan and unscrewed the lid.
“Here.”
Her hands shook a little as she took the flask, but she put the beads onto her tongue, one by one, and then tipped her head back and drank the water. She opened her lips when she finished, showing off an empty mouth as her mother had taught her to do.
“Good job, Megan,” Shawn said.
Megan fluttered her lashes, as if testing the air. Then her lids flew open and she grinned, flashing rows of clean white teeth.
Shawn threw his arms around her. He’d never been so happy to see that smile in his life — the wrinkles around her eyes that made her look older, the color that rushed into her cheeks, and her black lashes that fanned out as she tipped up her head, laughing.
Rebecca stumbled over and joined in on the hug, smiling with her little sister.
“Why are you wearing that, Becky?” Megan asked, reaching for the mask.
Rebecca quickly brushed her hand away. “Don’t worry about it, Meg,” she said, and pulled her sister against her chest. “It doesn’t matter now. It doesn’t matter.”
Jeremiah stood in his study, hands clasped behind his back. He stared through the eastern window, at the light that spilled down over the bowl of wilting flowers.
Either way, he was lost; it was now just a matter of how soon and how painful the going would be. Jeremiah wasn’t even sure that the call was still his to make.
He held his pocketknife in his left hand, running his thumb down the side where the family crest had been carved into the handle all those years ago.
A trumpet for the first son, a sword for the second, a scepter for the third, a quill for the fourth, a chalice for the fifth, and a sickle for the father. Relics of the old Kingdom, the king and his five princes. It was how it had always been. But with Jeremiah had come a bird, for the sixth son.
Jeremiah knew that his father held the blame for all of this, and if the king of souls had made war on history’s legends, then who was he, a runaway prince, to preserve them now?
He flipped out the knife blade and held it up to the light of the window. The sun played against
the worn edges, growing brighter as he took his father’s letter from the desk beside him. He touched the tip of the knife against the paper, and waited. The lick of fire searched its way along the decree, the flames making the stiff line of Jeremiah’s jaw glow faintly. He held the paper until the fire licked his fingers and then let the last scrap drift down to float alongside his brothers’ thirsty bouquet.
“Et factum est proelium in caelo,” Jeremiah whispered, conjuring up the verses that he’d memorized while guided by the great masters. “And there was war in heaven.”
The scattered keys of the Kingdom. The last blood of the monarchy. The laws set in broken stone. Who was he to preserve them now?
The children found an empty house when they finally decided to leave. Dust stirred and settled as motes in sunlight, tripping on table legs and skimming the tops of kitchen counters.
They stepped into the front yard and were greeted with the smell of jasmine and a shock of color — a tropical garden in the middle of the woods. It would have been impossible to miss the day before, but somehow they must have, because no plants grew that quickly. The lush blanket of ferns was spattered with dahlia and rainbowed gladiola spears. Diving anthurium hearts poked through tangles of snapdragons and birds of paradise. Nearby, trees were choked with bougainvillea and honeysuckle, whose flowers dripped into the blazing mouths of amaryllis blossoms. Shawn wanted a moment to appreciate the color before they headed back into the slate green and gray of the woods, but he knew that they should move on. He walked with the satchel over one shoulder, while Megan trailed behind, guiding Rebecca with a quick and unrelenting commentary.
Shawn found the forest pretty, at first, and a welcome change from the dark woods that he was now used to. The light and warmth chased away the fear that they’d suffered through before. The fact that they now had a destination, whether or not they knew where it lay, was also comforting.
But then a few hours passed, and doubt began to creep back into their footsteps. Shawn broke off tree limbs, trying to mark their way. He began to worry that he was leading them in long, pointless circles. The sun never wavered, but only gave off the same warm, high-noon light. Time had stopped, and they were the last ones left alive, left moving, left guessing.
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