by Buck, Alicia
I gulped. “Jealous?” My mouth spoke against my brain’s wishes.
Breeohan took a deep breath as if to fortify himself. “I was tormented with the thought that he loved you and that you loved him in return.” Breeohan’s eyes seared through mine until I felt at any moment I would burst into flames. “I know you may not care, Mary, but I love you. I fell in love with you the first time we met. You were alone, hurt, and scared, but you refused to let anything cow you. I’d never met anyone so full of determination. And then you looked at me with those defiant golden eyes. I was lost. I’ve been lost ever since,” he whispered, reaching up to trace the curve of my face.
My breath stuck in my throat. The hand he’d freed trembled uncontrollably. Breeohan leaned forward into the striped sunlight between us. I watched in frozen fascination as the strips of light moved across his face, highlighting chocolate skin and refracting purple and gold as though his eyes really were crystal amethysts.
“But I thought you loved Avana,” I stuttered while trying to fend off a cacophony of jumbled emotions. I wanted to bolt out the door. I wanted to never move. The thing I most feared was my wish that the four-inch gap between our lips would disappear.
“No,” he said, his eyes grave and unwavering, and then his lips met mine in a soft, hesitant brush that tingled like fire through my frame. I shivered.
Breeohan noticed the shudder and pulled back. “I’m sorr—” he began, but I put my finger to his lips. His feathery touch had scrambled my brain, and it took me several breaths before I could form a halfway coherent thought. His lips had been like a drug, heady and intoxicating.
“I’m afraid,” I said, my breath fast with more than fear.
“Of me?” he whispered.
“Yes. No. I’m scared if I let myself . . . You’ll leave. Everyone in my life has either left me, used me, or been taken from me. I can’t . . .” My eyes stared at my hand worrying the fabric of my pants.
He caught my fingers and turned my face to his. “I won’t ever leave you.” There was a tremendous pause where something was supposed to happen but didn’t. “And I won’t ask from you more than you can give.” His right hand released mine, his left caressed my cheek before it dropped to his side.
No. No. I wanted to catch his hand and bring it back to my face, but I couldn’t move so much as a finger. A scream of anguished frustration caught fast inside, all the more painful for being trapped. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just let go, let myself . . . But I couldn’t even finish the thought. They might as well take me to the loony bin right now—that’s where I belong, I thought angrily at myself.
Breeohan regarded the floor. I felt no better than slime oozing through the cracks in the brick. To see his pain was like being stabbed all over again, but every time I opened my mouth to say something, only silence emerged.
“We need to devise a way to escape the city and warn the king,” Breeohan said quietly to the dust-layered ground.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, repeated in my head, but my mouth stayed cemented shut. He looked up and, seeing my anguished expression, curved his lips up in a pained but compassionate smile and shrugged. I was staked anew, feeling like a villain.
“It might be difficult to climb over the wall even with the chameleon lacing since, as you say, they know all our tricks,” he said, smoothly keeping the conversation from uncomfortable territory.
I cleared my throat and tried to think rationally. “Just because they know all our old tricks doesn’t mean they’ll be able to stop us from using new ones,” I suggested.
“Such as?” His eyebrows rose in inquiry, but I still couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Well, the chameleon lacing isn’t as effective as it used to be, but it’s still useful if we don’t have to move around much. So what if instead of climbing over the wall, we go through it? The wall is made of sandstone right? Sandstone’s lacing is really similar to the sand lacing. We could make our own doorway through the wall. That way we could be virtually invisible, except for when we make a run for it through our new door.”
“I think that could work. We would have to time our movements carefully, but it’s better than what I was thinking.” He sighed in relief. I wondered what he’d been thinking, but he leapt to his feet in one smooth motion and cracked the door, looking cautiously both ways before signaling me to follow him outside. I had a bad moment when I stood up and saw the world narrow into black before it gradually expanded back into Technicolor. I realized that I hadn’t eaten for so long, my stomach wasn’t even complaining anymore.
Breeohan led us through the narrow roads and alleyways. There was a tense moment when we both had to dart into the lee of a doorway to avoid a woman patrolling the streets. Until she passed, my heart did an Irish jig in my chest.
Breeohan whispered, “I think we’d better keep the chameleon lacings on, even if they know how to spot us moving. It’s still better than being as visible as we are now.”
I nodded in complete agreement.
“It will mean that we will have to hold hands. Losing each other here would be . . . dangerous.” His eyes were fixed on the street where the woman had disappeared, but his voice was tentative, as if he expected a sound verbal slap.
My heart wrenched with guilt, and I shivered at the thought of being on my own again in Kerln. My hand shot like a bullet to connect with his, and I squeezed it tight. Breeohan turned to me with swift surprise before we both tweaked the chameleon lacing active. Then we moved again.
We had to stop five more times to avoid the eyes of patrollers, but we made it safely to some houses near a section of wall that seemed to be less crowded. For a long time we just sat in the shadows of the nearest building, observing how often someone passed by, above and below, for there were patrollers along the bottom of the wall as well as the top. We found that they spaced their walks to about every five minutes. It wouldn’t give us much time, but I was hoping it would be enough.
After the ground guard made another pass, Breeohan and I scuttled quickly against the base of the wall. I focused on an area of the sandstone and tweaked the lacing in my mind to make the stone turn to sand. At first I thought it hadn’t worked because the small archway I’d concentrated on looked no different, but then the sand shifted so that some spilled away from the wall. There was a slight indent at the top of the arch, but the sand still blocked our way. I kicked myself for not thinking my plan through. Sand might be less solid, but it was still very much in the way.
Breeohan quickly got on his hands and knees and shoveled sand as fast as he could. I followed suit. We managed to shift the sand so that a piece of sky shone through at the top. But there was no way we’d be able to make the hole big enough to crawl through before the next guard was due to walk by.
“Stand back and shield your eyes.” My forehead dripped sweat, and I impatiently brushed it away before causing a concentrated wind to blast through the small opening, clearing the sand away in a whipping frenzy. Sand bounced back in our faces, clinging to my sweat in a gritty mask. Too late I realized that much of the sand was hitting the wall and shooting upward in a cloud, making a puffy yellow beacon in the sky. I stopped the lacing when I’d created a big enough space for us to crawl through, but guards were already running in our direction.
I cursed myself, pushing Breeohan into the opening.
“You go first,” he insisted.
“We don’t have time to argue. Just get moving.” With protective desperation, I shoved him in the right direction. He followed my lead and began crawling quickly through the hole. I noticed that even with the chameleon lacing, the sand sticking to his face and body made him more visible. Looking down, I saw that I was in the same state. I crouched down to follow right at his heels.
I was almost completely in the shadow of the tunnel when someone grabbed both of my ankles and heaved. My hands scrabbled for something to stop my progress backwards but grasped only sand that slid through my fingers. Something between a shout
and a scream emerged from my throat. Breeohan looked behind him, but there was no room for him to turn, so I watched his eyes track me helplessly during the second it took to drag my body out of the hole.
“Keep going,” I yelled before rough hands flipped me by the ankles to my back. Big mistake, I thought as I bent my knees into my chest and kicked out savagely. The man holding me flew backwards and landed with a thud on the ground. I turned and tried to dive back into the tunnel, but a body slammed into my back and weighed me down before I could. Another man added his weight to the first, and I saw through my writhing struggles that a woman was trying to get past us and into the tunnel to stop Breeohan’s escape.
Praying that Breeohan was already through the wall, I created a wind to catch the sand still in the tunnel and whirl it about, then changed the sand back into sandstone. The stone would be more brittle than what it once was, but it was solid. With that accomplished, I stopped struggling against my captors. My insides felt cold, remote. The people smashing against me became unimportant, not even worth the attention I would give a fly. When a sharp explosion of pain cracked through my head, I welcomed it with a near-hysterical relief. I fled into the dark oblivion that enfolded me.
Chapter 20
I woke to total darkness, feeling thoroughly tired of being repeatedly whacked on the head. But the thought of being unconscious again was a new and manic temptation. Such dark thoughts, so foreign to me, were enough to snap me out of my despair. I pushed the thoughts aside and held still, refraining from healing myself. I must have made a movement or noise, however, because I heard a ruffle of fabric. Instead of a blow, a soft hand stroked my face.
“Mary, honey, are you awake?” a sweet smooth voice asked. I would know that voice anywhere. I tried to sit up quickly only to fall back in a swamping wave of pain and nausea.
Swallowing down something nasty, I finally croaked, “Mom?”
“Lie still. I’m really worried about you. You’ve been asleep for a whole day, and I was starting to feel frantic,” Mom’s beautiful, wonderful voice said. Just hearing her made the shooting stabs in my head lessen.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” I slowly brought the lacing required into the forefront of my mind and plucked the string for healing. The hand stroking my face twitched, then hesitantly brushed my hair back, a gesture that sent a rush of childhood memories through my mind. They were comforting, and I had to struggle to hold the waterworks at bay.
“So you can do this magic stuff too, huh? I guess that gives us a better clue as to why we’re here.” The hand brushing through my hair began to tremble.
“Kelteon hasn’t told you anything?”
“Is that his name? I thought it was Kelson. He isn’t a young man at all. Did you know? He changed from a boy into a middle-aged man right in front of my eyes.”
“I know.” I wished bitterly that I could see her face. I almost slapped myself when I realized that I had again overlooked a simple solution. I lit the room with a globe of golden light, or at least, I thought I had, but my vision stayed black. The blindfold lacing had been placed on me again, but this time, because of Breeohan, I knew how to undo it. The room’s round contours quickly became clear, lit by my golden ball. The ground was sand, and as I lay looking up, I saw that the round ceiling thirty feet up had a square door. We were in a closed-up well.
I sat up to look at Mom. Wet streaked her cheeks. I found that the sand on my own face was being washed away in the same manner.
“Are you really all right, honey? I can’t see you too well. It’s like your face is only where the dirt is.” Her voice wavered.
“Oh, I forgot.” I undid the chameleon lacing.
Mom sighed in relief, and we hugged each other fiercely. I found myself sobbing into her shoulder, gulping out wet apologies. Mom massaged my back until we were calm enough for her to hold me at arm’s length and look me over.
“Now, what’s this about being sorry? You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said.
“Yes, I do,” I said, trying to get my breathing under control. “It’s because of me you’re here at all.”
“It’s not your fault, sweetie. It’s Kels—Kelteon’s fault. He’s the one who tricked you, and he is the one who brought us here.”
“He didn’t bring me here,” I said absently, distracted by the bandage wrapped around her arm. “Do you want me to heal you, Mom? I could fix that if you give me permission.”
Mom sat back and regarded me steadily. “My arm is fine for the moment. I think you’d better tell me what’s happened to you.” So I told her about the first time Kelteon, or Kelson, had shown me lacing magic by making a ball of light, and how it had flashed through my mind so clearly, how I’d stupidly copied the magic to find that I could make the light too and revealed to Kelteon that I could see whole lacings, a feat almost unheard of in Iberloah. I told her how I’d tried to copy what Kelteon had done when he disappeared with her but had gotten the place in Iberloah wrong, making it necessary for me to travel to the capitol for the king’s help to find her.
I skipped as many of the dangerous parts as I could, but I could tell my story was making her anxious by the way she clasped my fingers and unconsciously rubbed her thumb back and forth over the back of my hand. I watched especially closely when I explained how King Verone and Sogran, as well as at least two others, had been to Earth before the traveling lacing was lost to them.
“What do they look like, the training general and the king?” she asked, stroking her thumb faster over my hand.
I placed my palm over hers to stop her from scouring the skin off. “They both have similar looks: tall with cinnamon skin, dark brown hair, and light brown and gold eyes.” She stiffened. I hated to get her hopes up only to have them dashed, and I felt a need to dampen my own hopes for the same reason. “I don’t think we should assume one of them is ‘him,’ Mom. I don’t know when they went to Earth, and others traveled there too. We’re on a whole different world here. It’s bursting with magicians. I’m sure there are people from other countries who’ve also traveled to Earth. For all we know, Dad could still be there.”
Guilt swamped me for being such a cynic to my kind and sometimes flighty mom. I haltingly continued my tale until I concluded depressingly that I was once again a captive in what I assumed was Kerln.
“You’ve been through quite a lot, it seems,” Mom said. She gathered me into a hug again, and we held each other in silence.
Finally I pushed away. “But what about you? It’s been so many days, I’ve lost track. Have you been in a dark room by yourself the whole time?”
“No. I was put in a comfortable room with a light and given regular meals.” She looked around at the small well, no more than five feet wide. “Well, until I was carted out of the mountains in a wooden box and brought here. The biggest problem was the boredom. Kelson—Kelteon didn’t visit often at first, and all he wanted to do was taunt me with hints about capturing you. He also asked for permission to heal me, but I refused. Then he changed from looking like a boy into a man and tried to woo me. But I’ve had enough of men like Joe and Kelson. How could I fall for him when I’ve finally seen what my bad choices have done to you? Joe had to hit you before I realized how abusive and manipulative he was. And worse, you had a crush on the same type of guy yourself. I taught you that,” she said sadly.
I felt indignant. “First of all, okay, yeah, you’ve made a lot of lousy boyfriend decisions, but I’d like to point out what you just told me about being brought here. You aren’t responsible for other people’s actions. And second, I’d like to state for the record that Kelteon was weaving an enchantment on me. I didn’t really have a crush on him. Just so we’re clear about that.”
Mom’s lips curved up slightly, her sad expression morphing into amusement. “Okay, we’re clear. I’m so glad I have such a wise daughter.”
“You’re probably the only one in all of Iberloah that would express that opinion,” I said, thinking of all my stupid blund
erings since coming to this alien land. “So are you going to let me heal your arm or what?”
“Oh, it’s mostly healed already. Don’t trouble yourself.”
“Mom,” I warned.
“See for yourself.” She unwound the bandage to reveal a scabbed-over gash. “I only keep the bandage on so the scab won’t get scraped off.”
“I can still heal it completely, scar and all.”
She waved me away, and I gritted my teeth, but let it drop. If she wanted a battle scar, who was I to stop her?
Then I noticed there was bread, cheese, and water in the opposite curve of the well. My throat was instantly parched, and my stomach whined in hunger. “How often do we get food?” I forced myself not to snatch it up.
“Three times a day. Go ahead and take all that. You need it far more than I do.”
Forcing myself to chew each bite ten times before swallowing, I tried to save some of the water for later. But everything disappeared more rapidly than was probably healthy as my hunger overpowered my self-control. Feeling better, I jumped up to look around and to determine the best way to get us out. I paced around the circle, looking up at the small door. It was a given that someone would be guarding above, possibly several people. I’d have to move quickly. Maybe if I got Mom to allow me to put the gecko lacing on her, she could climb as well.
I looked at her skinny limbs pensively, sure that several weeks of inactivity would not have improved her already nonathletic arms. She’d never been one for going to the gym. I’d have to go up myself and find a way to haul her up after overcoming the guards. I didn’t like all the unknown variables.
I became aware that Mom was watching me with a look of pride, mixed with sadness. “You never give up, do you, sweetheart? You’ve always been my little problem-solver, out to save the world one paid phone bill at a time. You’ve been my rock whenever I’ve been weak.”