Canes of Divergence (Dusk Gate Chronicles)

by Puttroff, Breeana

  His fear only grew when Ben didn’t speak for almost a full minute.

  By the time he did, Zander’s hands were so slippery he was having a hard time holding on to the apple he was still carrying.

  “That was the second time.”

  The apple hit the ground with a thud.

  “I don’t know what things are like in your world, Zander. Her Majesty has tried to tell me about some of the differences, and I understand you live somewhere where there are no kings and queens. But here, insulting my queen – implying what you just did against her character – that’s very serious.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “I hope you didn’t. The prince is the legitimate child of King William and Queen Quinn, conceived after their marriage. He is the much-anticipated heir to the throne of Philotheum, and the proof of the strength of our alliance with Eirentheos.”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t understand half of what Ben was saying, but he got the message.

  Ben stared at him for another long moment before finally nodding. “Come.”

  Zander was perplexed – and still nervous – as he followed the guard across the dirt yard and through a set of double doors that led into a very large room. The floor here was still tightly packed dirt, but they were inside. He wondered what the guard was going to do to him in here.

  At first, he couldn’t understand the purpose of the room. There were bales of hay stacked all along one wall, and wooden crates full of various – odd – things stacked on shelves along another. He saw a crate full of strange metal balls, another with what looked like dull swords – were those knives in a third?

  It wasn’t until he looked into the corner and saw an enormous box filled with leather balls that it began to dawn on him that this was some kind of gym.

  Ben was already pulling out a wooden crate and carrying it to some kind of platform in the middle of the floor on one side of the room. The why-are-you-just-standing-there look that Ben shot him sent Zander jogging over to join him.

  The crate was filled with what looked like long metal cylinders in varying sizes. Zander had no idea what any of it was for, or how it worked. Ben didn’t explain anything to him; he worked without speaking to set up the cylinders on the platform.

  The platform was about two feet off the ground. Ben stood two of the longest cylinders up on either end of it. These cylinders each had a piece of metal protruding out to the side, turned toward the center, and a second later, Zander saw why. Ben balanced a square-shaped bar on those protrusions, making an H shape.

  Then, he took the smaller cylinders – five of them in all – and arranged them in a pattern, one in the center, and the other four flaring out to the side, like a triangle missing one side.

  “What are you doing?” Zander finally asked.

  “I thought maybe we’d play a game. Our version of what you were telling me about last night.”

  A game? All of this and now they were going to play a game? What had he told Ben about last night? “Bowling?” he asked, remembering.

  Ben shrugged.

  “This doesn’t look anything like bowling.” Maybe the arrangement of the cylinders, but not really.

  “Well, it’s not your world. Maybe it’s not anything like your sport. This is what we call bar drop.”

  That was … original, Zander thought, thinking he could see the object of the game. “How do you play?”

  Ben walked to the other side of the gym and came back with two leather balls. They were small – bigger than softballs, but not by much. Just large enough that they’d be really awkward to throw with one hand.

  Ben handed one to him. It was surprisingly heavy for such a small ball.

  “Now we throw it at the…”

  “Pegs.” Ben nodded. “But carefully. You get five points for every peg you knock to the ground, but zero if you drop the bar that’s hanging there.”

  He frowned. “If it drops at all?”

  “No, only if it drops to the ground. If it drops and stays on the platform you lose ten points.”

  It sounded easy enough, but it wasn’t. They had to stand behind a line several feet back from the platform. The balls were just large and heavy enough to be too awkward to throw with one hand, and throwing with two made it difficult to aim only for the pegs. On his first throw, Zander hit the bar hard enough to knock the two sides of it down, and sent the whole thing crashing to the ground.

  “So what were you hoping to accomplish with that remark to Quinn, anyway?” Ben asked as he reset the pegs.

  It wasn’t “Her Majesty” now – it was Quinn. He almost commented on it, but quickly decided not to. “I don’t know if I was trying to accomplish anything. I was shocked.”

  “You were angry.”

  Zander watched as Ben carried the ball back behind the line and drew it back to his chest with both hands, and then threw it in a perfectly straight line, sending it right under the bar, knocking all of the pegs to the ground without disrupting the frame. Twenty-five points.

  “All right. Yes, I was angry.” This time, he went to reset the pegs himself. “Wouldn’t you be angry if a girl broke up with you, and then two months later you found out she had a baby with someone else?” The bar wouldn’t stay balanced on the top of the frame for him. He knocked down the whole thing twice before he stepped back and allowed Ben to do it.

  The bar didn’t move an inch when Ben placed it. He made it look effortless.

  “I courted a girl a couple of cycles ago, Mila. She was – is – the daughter of one of the other castle guards. We were friends for a long time and then… Anyway, I could see all of it, asking her to marry me, a wedding, all of it was there in my head. I was getting close to speaking to her father about it.”

  While he talked, he demonstrated for Zander the correct way to hold the ball before throwing it. This time, when Zander tried, he knocked down a couple of the pegs on the side. The bar still fell, but not to the ground.

  “And then one day, she came to me. She told me that she still cared about me, but that she didn’t want the kind of life she’d grown up with – didn’t want a husband who was on duty all the time or who had to travel for weeks at a time with the king. And she didn’t want to live in the castle.”

  “Ouch.”

  “At the time, yes. I hadn’t even proposed to her yet, but there I found myself, telling her that we could always get a little house in the city – that I could ask for a transfer into a regular regiment, instead of guarding the king or his family.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been a demotion?”

  Ben nodded as they worked together to set the pegs again. This time, when Zander set the bar on the frame it wobbled, but stayed. “At that time, I didn’t think I cared. It would have been worth it not to lose the girl I thought I loved. But it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to be married to a soldier at all – the idea of never knowing whether I’d come home at night or not was too much for her. She talked about it like it was all hypothetical, but … she married one of Queen Charlotte’s nephews eight moons later.”

  “And you’re telling me you weren’t angry?”

  “The day we heard the announcement of her betrothal, yes, I was. I thought about going and finding her – confronting her and asking her if she’d lied to me, if she had broken things off between us because of him. Fortunately, my father was around to stop me from doing that.”

  Ben’s second turn resulted in another perfect score.

  “Why fortunately?” Zander had to know. “Don’t you think you deserved to know whether she left you for that other guy or not?”

  “No.”

  “No?” This time, Zander got the bar to stay on the rack with almost no trouble.

  “No. My father pointed out – correctly – that Mila didn’t owe me anything. She ended it with me. What else was she supposed to do? Ask my permission for every relationship she wanted to have for the rest of her life?”

  Ben wasn’t talking about his ex-girlfriend
now. They both knew that.

  “She just barely broke up with me, Ben.”

  “Even if time worked the same in both of our worlds – and it isn’t Quinn’s fault that it doesn’t – so what? How does her relationship with William – her marriage – have anything to do with you?”

  “Well if she cheated on me…”

  “Then what? Then she’s obligated to walk away from him and marry you instead?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “So, then it just means you get a free pass to hurt her? To wound her as deeply as you possibly can with your words or your actions? Now you can undermine her relationship with William, insult her, question the legitimacy of her child?”

  Zander was silent.

  “Because how you treat her is not about her. It’s not about whatever you think she did to you. How you treat her is about you. And I don’t know exactly how old you are, but you look old enough to start being a man rather than a boy.”

  Zander launched the ball at the pegs again, this time, missing completely and hitting the platform. The pegs fell and rolled, and the bar dropped in front of the platform.

  Ben chuckled, and went to go start picking up the pegs. “I did go and see Mila eventually. I congratulated her, and brought her a gift. My father and I attended her wedding. Linnea and I invited her to ours. She didn’t come; apparently she’s just had her second child.”

  “Maybe you’re just a better person than me,” Zander said.

  “I doubt it. Whoever you are, you were friends with Quinn. You were someone she thought it worthwhile to try and have a relationship with. Just because it didn’t turn out to be the right one doesn’t mean you’re not the person she thought you were. And it doesn’t mean you won’t find the right relationship with someone else.”

  “You managed to find a princess, right?”

  “No.” The withering look Ben gave him made his insides all wobbly.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. I managed to find a girl who loves me, and is willing to make the sacrifices that she has to make to follow me in my work. A girl who shares my values and wants the same things I want – and who understands and accepts the potential sacrifice my calling entails. The right girl, in other words. She also happens to be a princess. Which is not somehow magically easier, by the way. For her to follow me to Philotheum and be the wife of a guard means giving up a lot more than if she’d been someone more ordinary, like Mila.”

  “Sounds like you were very lucky.”

  “I am lucky, very much so, but I believe there’s more to it than just that. If I had married Mila, I wouldn’t have been the person I’m supposed to be. And she wouldn’t be as happy as I know she is, either.”

  “So, what, like, fate or something?”

  Ben shrugged, just before throwing the ball again. This time, the last peg on the right side didn’t fall right away. It fell a few seconds after the others, and nearly bumped the frame when it hit the platform, but the bar stayed up.

  “Not fate, really. Over time, as I’ve had the chance to look back at it, I see it more as Mila being brave enough to make a decision that had to be hard on her – and braver still to do the right thing and tell me about it. I would probably have given up everything I cared about for her if she hadn’t had the courage to do that.”

  “You don’t think it’s worth giving things up for someone you care about?”

  “That’s not it at all. You always have to give something up to make a relationship really work. That’s in the definition, I think. But they have to be the right things, and you have to be able to be happy with those choices outside of the other person. Eventually, I wouldn’t have been happy taking that kind of demotion, or with not being able to take the job I have now – this is who I am. Sometime down the road, I wouldn’t have been able to keep her happy, because I would have been pretending to be something I’m not actually, and it would have shown.”

  “And you think Quinn was courageous, too?”

  “I’m not saying she’s perfect, Zander. I don’t know everything that happened between the two of you – and it’s none of my business, really. But I am saying she made her choice, and she told you about it, which is all she owed you. And she married William – committed to him for the rest of her life. She had to give up a lot – the entire world she grew up in, her family, just about everything.”

  “She didn’t have to give all that up. If she would have stayed with me, she wouldn’t have given up any of it.”

  “And that’s exactly what makes you the wrong man for her.”

  Zander had almost managed to make the bar stay on the stands again, but it fell at Ben’s words. “And William’s the right one because she had to give up all of those things for him?”

  “She didn’t give up any of those things for him, Zander. She gave them up for herself. She gave them up to free her hands to take hold of the things that really matter to her, to her birth family, to an entire kingdom. William is the man who didn’t make her give up anything in either world. He’s the man who sacrificed the things in his own hands so that they would be free to put under hers, to support her and work with her. More importantly, he’s the right one because he’s the one she chose.”

  “And you think I need to just get over it.”

  Ben was silent for several moments as Zander threw the ball again. This time, he managed not to drop the bar, but he didn’t drop any pegs, either. The ball went right through the space in the middle.

  Ben nodded and went to retrieve the ball. “Here’s what I think, Zander. I’m just going to say it. I think you’re probably a good guy. Like I said before, at one point, Quinn was willing to vouch for you. I don’t care if you get over her or not in your own mind. But you absolutely need to stop, right now, thinking you have some right to hurt her. It won’t be allowed.”

  He threw the ball, landing another clean, perfect score. The frame didn’t even twitch.

  If anyone else had talked like this to Zander, he would have probably gotten angry, he might have lashed out and argued, but somehow Ben – this strange guard he’d met only yesterday – had the opposite effect on him. Right now, he felt small and ashamed.

  This time, Ben didn’t go immediately to reset the frame. He stood in front of Zander, making eye contact with him. “I also think that you really care about Quinn, and you would find yourself able to still have a friendship and be at peace with her if you decided to accept her decision with grace. There’s not any reason it has to be like this between you. You have ten days here. You can either spend them being angry and thinking this is all about you and whining about how hurt you are, or you can experience something new.”

  The words stung – mostly because he knew how true they were. “There’s a reason Quinn trusts you, isn’t there?”

  “I hope so.”

  ~ 21 ~

  Quinn

  Rosewood Castle, Eirentheos

  ZANDER AND BEN were kneeling on the ground, stacking the pegs back into the wooden crate when Ben suddenly looked up, over toward the entrance to the gym. Zander followed his gaze.

  Quinn and William were both standing there, just inside the door.

  “Excuse me, Zander,” Ben said, standing and walking toward them.

  Zander’s insides slithered down toward the pit of his stomach.

  The door was too far away to hear what the three of them were saying to each other, but he could see them chatting and nodding, and then, making his insides drop further, this time to his feet, Quinn started walking toward him, alone.

  He silently counted to ten, wiling himself to be calm, to not say anything to her – anything else to her – that he was going to regret.

  “Hey,” she said, when she finally reached him.

  “Hey.”

  “We didn’t know you guys were out here. It took us a while to find you.”

  He shrugged, not knowing what to say to that. It surprised him they’d been looking – he was grateful they hadn’
t found him before he finished his conversation with Ben.

  “Look, Quinn. I’m sorry for what I said to you earlier … upstairs. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “Yes you did.” She didn’t look as angry as he expected her to.

  He chuckled under his breath. “Yeah, I guess right at that moment, I kind of did. That was a pretty big shock. I am sorry, though. It was a mean thing to say.”

  “It wasn’t as bad as what I imagined I’d hear if you or anyone else from school found out I had a baby.”

  “Abigail would lose her…”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “Where is the little squish, anyway? You have a nanny and everything, too?”

  “I don’t. Apparently I have to find one. I am a queen, I need help. I’ve been ‘borrowing’ one of the ones who works for William’s parents for the last couple of days. She’s a friend of mine, too, and she’s amazing. Wish I could take her back with me.”

  “Maybe you should ask. Offer her a raise. I’m sure she’s dying to leave here and go live somewhere without electricity.”

  She laughed. “It’s not quite as simple as that, Zander.” Her expression told him she was thinking about it, despite her words.

  “People can’t change jobs here?”

  “Yes, they can. She’s not a slave or anything.”

  “Well … you’ll never know if you don’t ask.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Does the baby have a name? How old is he, anyway?” He’d looked tiny, not much more than a newborn. Now that he wasn’t in quite as much shock and he was looking, he could see the small changes in Quinn’s body, too. He didn’t know how he’d missed it yesterday, actually – though her clothes were different today, too. Her long skirt and dressy blouse had been replaced by much more normal-looking clothes today – soft gray cotton pants and what he could only describe as a t-shirt. She looked like she belonged here in the gym.