Canes of Divergence (Dusk Gate Chronicles)

by Puttroff, Breeana

  “I thought Quinn’s dad was killed in a car accident in our world.”

  “He was – or at least that’s what we always thought. When Samuel was still a teenager, he realized that his stepfather intended to have him killed. He managed to escape Philotheum and come here, to Eirentheos. He lived with my grandparents for a while, but when they learned how to use the gate to the other world, he went to go live there. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that’s the basic story.

  “Nathaniel, who was also aware of his stepfather’s intentions also left Philotheum and ended up going there too, when they saw the advances your world had – the electricity, the medicine. He believed his life to be in danger as well, and I don’t think he was wrong.”

  “So why did Quinn tell me that she killed the man who killed her father? A car accident isn’t murder.”

  “Unless it was – somehow. For all of these cycles, ever since Samuel died, that’s what everyone believed – he was accidentally killed in your world when he was hit by a car. Nobody ever really questioned it, I guess. After all, there was nobody in your world who would have wanted him harmed, and everyone was certain the gate was a well-kept secret here.”

  “Except it wasn’t. Was it?” Zander shifted in the saddle, wondering how the rest of them still seemed so comfortable after riding for so long.

  “Apparently not. About ten moons ago, shortly after William and Quinn’s wedding and after her family had returned to your world, Quinn began having some very vivid dreams about the gate. Dreams that convinced her the gate needed to be permanently sealed before something terrible happened.”

  “What would be so terrible?”

  “Look around you, Zander. Our world is behind yours in so many ways. In power, in communication, in medicine, and – perhaps most significantly – in weapons.”

  A little thrill of fear slithered down Zander’s throat and settled in his stomach. “You don’t have guns here.”

  “We don’t have many of the weapons I’m told exist in your world, but yes, guns are one of our greatest fears. If someone brought your world’s weapons into ours, especially in any quantity, it would change everything. An imbalance of power in the hands of a few would easily disrupt hundreds of cycles of peace.”

  “So why don’t you bring the weapons first?”

  “Even if my father wanted to rule that way – by force and by fear – and he doesn’t, there are bigger issues with the gate. Having it open and using it was always risky. What do you think would happen if the wrong people from your world found out about the gate? Do you know how many untapped resources we have here? Gold. Silver. Probably a thousand other things that aren’t nearly as valuable to us as they are to people in your world. What could happen if the wrong people found out about the world on this side of the gate?”

  He shuddered, not wanting to imagine that.

  Thomas nodded at his reaction. “Exactly. That possibility alone was enough to make Quinn decide that we needed to close the gate – permanently, if we could. She made that decision even knowing that it meant it was likely she would never see her family again.”

  He didn’t really want to imagine that, either. How could she have ever brought herself to do it? Her loyalty to this world was stronger than he could really comprehend. “But I thought Owen closed the gate.”

  “Yes. We tried, here on this end. We searched the banks of the river for days, digging up every rock we could find, but we never found the magnet. William and Nathaniel think maybe it’s buried in the bedrock under the river itself. It doesn’t matter; the point is we weren’t able to do it. The search went on, right until dusk, right when the gate should have opened, and that’s when he showed up – Hector.

  “He knew about it?”

  “Apparently he’d known about it for a long time. I don’t know how, we never got a chance to find out. But that’s when he confessed to Quinn that he’d killed her father. That still doesn’t make sense, but that’s what he said. He had a gun, somehow, and he told Quinn he was going to kill her, too. He tried to shoot my brother and missed, and he tried to escape through the gate, but it didn’t work. The gate wasn’t open, even though, timing-wise, it should have been.”

  “Because Owen closed it.”

  “We always suspected he had. But we never knew for sure until he came back here with you and told us. William and Quinn were standing with him when Alvin described the location of the magnet on the other side.”

  “But how did he know to close it?”

  “I don’t know. Dreams again, I think. Whatever it was, it was the right thing to do. I’m obviously grateful that Owen opened it to bring that medicine – that he saved William, and possibly Ben and Emma too, but it scares me. I’m worried about what the consequences of opening it will be. You have to promise me, Zander, when the two of you go back home, you’ll help Owen close it again, and you’ll make sure it stays closed. Break the magnet into a thousand pieces if you have to.”

  Zander swallowed hard as images from the last few days played in his head – of Quinn and Owen curled together on a couch, whispering secrets – of the way Owen looked at his tiny nephew.

  “But if Hector is dead…”

  “Hector might not have been the only danger. If he knew about the gate, chances are he wasn’t the only one. His son is still alive.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Tolliver is in prison – sent there for kidnapping Linnea and putting a knife to her throat.”

  “Jeez. What happened with that?”

  Thomas smiled – though probably only at Zander’s choice of words – the memory didn’t seem like a happy one. “During the rescue attempt, Ben slipped her a knife and she stabbed Tolliver in the leg. Severed an artery – he could have died. I don’t know what it says about me that I wish he had.”

  “I think it says you’re protective of your sister.”

  “Protective.” Thomas shrugged. “Angry.” He was rubbing the leather of Storm’s reins between his fingers. “Before that, he’d once had me kidnapped by one of his – I don’t know, followers? Minions? It was me that nearly died that time. When I was in the hospital in your world – when you were angry with Quinn for coming to visit me – I was having surgery to repair the damage done to my leg. If I hadn’t had the option of traveling to your world then – well, I wouldn’t be riding horses now. Maybe not ever.”

  Zander let out a deep sigh. “And there was me – mad at Quinn.” He thought back, remembering that day. “That was the night she broke up with me.”

  Thomas nodded. “That was the day she realized how unfair she was being to you – that she understood how wrapped up in this world she had become – even though we still didn’t know the truth about her inheritance – and she knew she was never going to be able to give back to you what you were trying to give to her. She’d never be able to share all of herself with you.”

  Zander suddenly felt … old? young? lost? He couldn’t define it. Here he’d been obsessing over the end of the school year and nursing hurt feelings over his girlfriend breaking up with him and Quinn had been dealing with this? And here was Thomas, younger than him, and yet so much wiser.

  He didn’t know what to say now, not to any of it, but Thomas seemed to understand. They rode in silence for a long time until they came to a clearing near a river, and Ben and Linnea – who’d gotten quite a bit ahead of them – brought their horses to a stop and dismounted.

  When Zander tried to climb down from Chestnut, he realized he had a problem. He could not get his right leg to move up and over the saddle. It would barely budge. He tried the left, but the result was even worse. After that attempt, he couldn’t even get his left foot to cooperate and go back into the stirrup.

  Down on the ground below him, Thomas coughed.

  Heat seeped from Zander’s forehead all the way to his neck.

  “Do you need some help?” Thomas asked. Zander had to give him credit – there was almost no hint of laughter in his vo
ice.

  There was no way out of this, he might as well make the best of it. “I don’t know. I think if I manage to get down, I’m going to be stuck in this clearing for a week. I don’t think I’ll be getting back on.”

  Now Thomas laughed. “There’s three of us. We’ll lift you back up somehow. We’ve got some rope somewhere, if we need it.” He held his hand up to Zander. “You’ll feel better if you spend some time down and walking around.”

  Although he was grateful that he was able to get down with only Thomas’ help, the sensation he felt once both feet were on the ground was far from relief. His legs were so stiff and sore that it took several minutes before he dared take even one step forward. When he finally did, the first few steps were painful enough to make him wish he’d never agreed to come on this ride, but by the time he made it all the way down to the edge of the water, he knew Thomas was right. Walking around was helping.

  “I take it this gets easier?” he asked when Thomas came to stand by him after he brought both Storm and Chestnut down to the water.

  “I guess you’ll find out.” Thomas grinned. “You have to get back somehow.”

  “People from my world must seem kind of silly to you. Can’t even ride a horse for an hour without limping afterwards. Can’t swing a sword, or hit a target with an arrow.”

  “Quinn managed all right from the beginning,” Thomas said.

  “Of course she did.”

  “Well, on the horse, anyway. She’s still better with daggers than swords or arrows.”

  “She’s probably better than me on either.”

  “Yes, but she’s been here longer, practiced more. I can’t drive a car, or figure out your video games. And I can think of a few things I’d be willing to give up in exchange for television.”

  “Really? You’d trade your world in for television?”

  Thomas looked around, over at the horses drinking from the river, over at where Ben and Linnea had found themselves a more secluded spot in a strand of trees and were curled together, talking where nobody could hear them, and then he shook his head.

  “No. To be honest, I wouldn’t give this up even to have a car – or a hospital here where my leg could have been repaired the way it was in your world – but it would be nice to have both sometimes.” Thomas picked up a rock from the riverbank and threw it, making it skip on the water’s surface three times before it clunked into the shallow bed. The river wasn’t much more than a stream here – it wouldn’t have come up any further than the middle of Zander’s calf if he’d waded in, but it was wide enough to skip rocks on.

  Zander smiled and started to reach for a stone of his own, but – nope – his legs weren’t ready to let him bend that way yet. “What are you going to do when you’re an adult, Thomas? Or do you have to do anything, since you’re a prince?”

  Thomas threw his head back and laughed. “Do you think being a prince means I get to sit around in a castle all day and order servants around?”

  Zander’s cheeks grew warm, but he held his composure. “I honestly don’t know anything about princes and castles besides what I’ve read in storybooks in my world. They don’t exist in the place where I live.”

  “Fair enough. And it was a reasonable question, too, because I don’t really know the answer. I grew up helping William and Nathaniel when they were here, traveling around the kingdom and helping them with setting up medical clinics. I didn’t do the medical stuff – that is not my gift – but I did a lot of the other work. Helping transport supplies, building rooms and cots in clinics, and – maybe the biggest challenge – talking people into accepting some of their new ideas about treating certain things, without giving away where they were learning it.

  “I can see where you might be good at that.”

  Thomas smiled again. “William’s gift is healing, but mine is charm. I am pretty good at getting people to accept things.”

  “Why don’t you keep doing it, then?”

  “It’s different now. William is a king, Nathaniel is back at the castle in Philotheum. I’ve still been working with the clinics here in Eirentheos a lot, but it isn’t the same without them.”

  “So go with them. To Philotheum or wherever it is.”

  “That’s the first time you’ve said it right.”

  “I know I must seem like an idiot with the way I don’t know how to do most of the things you can do, and the fact that I can barely get myself from Point A to Point B, but I am capable of learning.”

  “Yes, but are you capable of trying our food without gagging or making faces?”

  “I’m working on it!” Zander said, laughing. “But you have some strange food here. Weird vegetables, strange fruit…

  “Maybe it’s the food in your world that’s weird,” Thomas said. “You should have seen the look on Will’s face the first time he tried to describe a tomato to me.”

  “He doesn’t like them?”

  “No. He hates all the food in your world that even has tomato sauce on it.”

  “I knew there had to be at least one legitimate reason not to like him.” Zander chuckled.

  “He’s crazy, right? Nathaniel ordered me a pizza once when I went there to visit them, and after that, he had to order one every time I went.”

  Thomas scooped up another handful of rocks, handing a couple of them to Zander. They took turns skipping the rocks across the water – here, at last, was something he could do as well as Thomas.

  His fifth skip was impressive, the rock skipped seven times before landing – not in the water – but on the opposite bank, making a loud plunk and scattering some of the rocks and gravel on the other side.

  He was about to turn to Thomas with his grin when he noticed a motion in the trees over there – the sound had startled something. He held his breath as a large animal came out from behind the thick brush – it was a deer, he thought, though her silky black fur was unlike anything he’d ever seen at home. She sniffed at the air, investigating, perhaps trying to determine the origin of the sound, but she clearly hadn’t seen them yet.

  He looked over at Thomas – but Thomas wasn’t there. When he spun around to look for him, he saw him – already halfway to where Linnea and Ben were still sitting on the ground together, his footsteps as light as he could make them on the forest floor.

  As Zander watched, Thomas said something quiet to Ben, and Ben rose immediately, his own footsteps silent as he hurried to where Scruffin was standing, and reached up to retrieve something off Scruffin’s back – the crossbow.

  Oh. Zander didn’t think he wanted to watch this. He’d been hunting with his dad before – with rifles and not arrows – and it had never bothered him. Those hunting trips had always been something he looked forward to, even. Hunting and going to the shooting range were second nature to him; guns, he understood – but something about this was different.

  There was no time to do anything else, though – not even to say something. Ben pulled the bow down and shot it in a motion so fluid it bordered on magic. Zander didn’t even see the arrow fly, he only saw it hit the doe right in the neck; he was both fascinated and horrified when the doe crumpled immediately to the ground.

  “Ugh,” he heard Linnea say as she walked up behind him. “I hate this.”

  “You don’t like hunting?” he asked her.

  “I wouldn’t put hunting on my list of favorite activities, no – but this isn’t hunting. Not in the normal way, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” He looked over at Thomas and Ben, but they weren’t listening. Thomas had opened Storm’s saddle bag, and was pulling out some kind of map, unfolding it in front of him. “This isn’t going to be our dinner at the castle tonight?”

  “No. If they test the deer and it’s safe to eat, the meat will be preserved and distributed to anyone in the area who normally relies on hunting as a source of food – not that there are really any people in this particular area. We should be almost at the edge of the clear zone.”

  “The what
zone? Why wouldn’t the deer be safe to eat?”

  “They have to check to make sure it’s not carrying rabies. The clear zone … it’s…” Linnea sighed. “It’s because we’ve had an unusually high number of rabies cases, both near the capital city, and in another place called Cloud Valley. My father declared a clear zone in a perimeter around each place – any animal capable of contracting rabies has to either be tightly controlled and observed during the entire clearing period … or killed and tested.”

  Wow. “I guess you can’t control and observe a deer,” Zander said, trying to wrap his head around what she was telling him.

  “No. That’s mostly for pets and horses – any animals that people own, if they can keep them locked completely inside when they’re not outside watching them.”

  “That seems … a little extreme. I thought rabies was rare here.”

  “It is rare, and it is extreme. But the other option is one where people – and the animals they really care about and need – die. The wild animal populations will replace themselves over time – more animals will migrate in from outside the zone.”

  “How long is the clearing period?”

  “For thirty days from the last positive case they find – human or animal. Right now it’s been six days since that fox at the castle. We need to hope that deer’s test comes back clean.”

  “Okay, Nay,” Ben said, coming up behind her holding a small, leather-bound notebook, “this is our location. Can you and Thomas get a message back to the castle so some men can come pick up that deer?”

  She nodded. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go and take a look around, make sure there aren’t any other animals in the area. I’m not sure this spot has been searched yet. We’re really close to the edge of the perimeter here.”

  “By yourself?”