Madeline sighed. “Then I killed him.”
Jason didn’t answer. He stared at the palms of his hands. “I don’t know, Mads. His last memories are lost. It’s like I only got the strongest ones. The ones he revisited over and over. There’s this one story he loved, about this magician called the Peasant King.”
“The Peasant King?” Madeline had met him, had seen him in the wood of the tower door.
“There’s a story about the Peasant King, about how when he built the Sunlit Lands, he went to the wealthy and the powerful people in the world and offered to let them come in. He told them it was paradise, and that meant everyone would be equal. They would leave their power and their wealth at the door, and in the Sunlit Lands all their needs would be provided for—they would never be hungry or sick. They would be happy. But they didn’t want to leave their wealth and their power. The Peasant King got angry, and he said those people could never come in, ever. He cast a spell so only the outcasts, the losers, the broken, the homeless, and the wounded could enter. He made the doors hard to find and in the worst places in the world.”
Madeline found herself leaning forward, eager to hear the end of the story. “What happened? Why isn’t that the situation now?”
“Mads, that’s the thing. I think someone broke the Sunlit Lands. Night’s Breath, he had this deep conflict going on inside of him because he saw the war against the Elenil as a betrayal of the Peasant King’s original purpose. You don’t fight for a higher position in the Sunlit Lands. It’s the beggars who are kings, right? The wealthy and powerful, they’re the fools. But his family didn’t have food to eat. So what was he supposed to do? And Mads, I get it. I know why you did what you did. I’ve been thinking about it, and I know—I know I would have done the same thing for you. Because I know you, and I didn’t know Night’s Breath.” He sighed heavily and looked at the little girl on the bed. He whispered, “I know you, and I don’t know Yenil. I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a part of me that thinks we should leave all the magic alone until your breathing . . . until the magic is permanent.”
Madeline gasped. “You mean until my disease kills her.”
Jason looked away, ashamed. “Yes. Listen, Mads, we’ve all been following along at school while you’ve gotten sicker. We’ve had the updates and passed along the rumors and felt awkward when you showed up in class. I know there’s not a cure, you’ve told us that. There’s not any hope, Madeline. There’s not any hope, and what I want to do more than anything is to make you well. I want to save you, and I don’t know how. Except I could let that little girl go, just like you did with Night’s Breath—”
Madeline grabbed his arms. “No. Jason, promise me. No! I couldn’t live with that.”
His eyes brimmed with tears, and it hit her all at once that she had done the same thing to him. He would have to live with it. He didn’t get a choice. The poor Scim soldier was dead so Jason could live, and that had been Madeline’s decision. It had been her call, and she had chosen her friend to live and the stranger to die. It couldn’t be changed now.
She leaned her forehead against Jason’s. “When you’re sick,” she said, “when you’re really sick . . . you just want one more normal day. I hated walking into school. Hated the looks on people’s faces. Hated the way everything stopped while I coughed and hacked, like everyone else was holding their breath. I hated the way people who had been mean to me the year before asked how I was doing and tried to be nice to me. I wanted to have a day where I showed up and someone called me a name. I wanted the boys to flirt with me and the teachers to lecture me for not turning in my homework. Or to walk through a room and have no one notice me, just once.”
“In my defense,” Jason said, “I was still a jerk to you sometimes.”
She grinned at him. “True.” She sat beside him and leaned her head against his shoulder, and they watched Yenil struggling to breathe. “That disease will be mine again soon,” she said.
“Maybe since we were gone, the doctors have found a new treatment,” Jason said.
She patted his arm. “I’ve spent a long time trying to have hope, Jason. There’s a certain point when you realize that hope isn’t what you need anymore. You can’t hope forever. Sometimes people die. Terrible things happen. Evil wins, and farmers end up in jail while the wealthy get richer. Injustice rules the world. Your lungs get more and more scarred and there’s nothing to be done.”
“But maybe—”
“No, Jason, listen to me. Sometimes hope isn’t what you need. This disease is going to kill me. I’m going to take it back, and I will die. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But I will. Sometimes you don’t need hope anymore.”
Tears streaked Jason’s face. He rubbed at them with the back of his hand. “If we don’t need hope, Mads, what do we need?”
“Courage,” she said. “I don’t need hope anymore, Jason. I know what’s coming. I need courage to face it.”
He took her hand. “We’ll face it together.”
35
THE CHOICE
To change the world, change first a heart.
THE GARDEN LADY
Jason rode on Delightful Glitter Lady’s back through the crowded streets of Far Seeing, like a king. “Are you sure you don’t want to ride up here?” Jason asked Baileya.
“I do not wish to be so conspicuous,” Baileya said, but Jason had already seen several people take note of her Kakri clothing and her double-bladed staff and give her a wide berth.
“It’s not every day you get to ride a rhino,” Jason said absently, watching the tower. “Unicorn, I mean.” They were at the bottom of the stairs, quite a way from the massive garden at the base of the palace. They were supposed to wait until Madeline, Shula, and Yenil reached the main entrance. If they entered without any trouble, Jason and Baileya would follow a little way behind. If there was a problem, they’d make some noise and see if that helped them slip inside the tower.
An Elenil guard stopped them. He glanced at Baileya, who had hidden her staff in her sleeves. “You cannot bring weapons into the courtyard unless you are Elenil.”
Jason flexed his biceps. “You talking about these guns?”
The guard clearly had no idea what Jason was talking about. Baileya gave him a quizzical look too. Whatever. That was comedy gold. Fine. He went back to the original plan. “I don’t have any weapons, sir.” That was true. Jason wasn’t carrying a single weapon.
The guard gestured to Dee. “This unicorn is a war beast.”
“Ha!” Jason shouted. “THIS IS A PEACETIME UNICORN.”
“I do not know what that means.”
“It means she is retired from military service and is now a civilian unicorn.”
The guard’s hand fell onto the hilt of his sword. “You cannot go farther unless you shrink your unicorn to its smallest size. And where is your Elenil guide?”
Jason pulled the magic dial off the saddle. “I’ve got the embiggenator right here. The only problem is, I also have this.” He held up a small, smooth stone.
The guard looked at it dispassionately. “A stone? Why is that a problem?”
“Well, you know how magic works, right? If something gets small, something else has to get big. I accidentally brought along the stone that gets big when Delightful Glitter Lady gets small.”
“I see,” the guard said.
“There’s Madeline,” Baileya said.
She wore a tightly bound Elenil sheath dress. Another Elenil woman he didn’t recognize stood beside her, a small Scim body in her arms. A guard had stopped her and was saying something, but they were too far away to be heard.
A flurry of birds flew into the square, squawking and calling out as they delivered messages to their various recipients.
The guard Madeline was talking to drew his sword. Jason didn’t know why, but he knew what it meant. It was time to shout the secret phrase he had taught Baileya as their signal. It was time for them to make their loud, impressive, over-the-top distraction.
>
He cleared his throat and shouted at the top of his lungs, “It’s morphin’ time!”
With her hair pinned up and the Elenil dress on, Madeline barely recognized herself.
“The eyes give you away,” Shula said. “We should remove the neck.”
The high neck of the dress could be unpinned. Fernanda stood in the mirror across from them, watching closely. They weren’t in the knight’s upper room, so she couldn’t speak, only make motions to them. Another side effect of her curse. She made it clear, though, that she agreed with Shula.
With the neck removed, however, the silver tattoos that had been spreading across Madeline’s body were visible. They coiled up from her collarbones, working their way up her neck and toward her chin in the front, the nape of her neck in the back. “No one ever shows their tattoos, though,” Madeline said.
Shula pulled Madeline’s hair back, pinning it up. “Only the Elenil have access to this much magic. It’s rare to show it off, especially if someone other than Elenil are around. But it would be unthinkable for a human to have so much magic, and it will distract them from your eyes.”
Fernanda nodded her approval from within the mirror.
Madeline studied her reflection in a different mirror. Her skin was not pale enough to be Elenil, and her hair had too much yellow in it. Most of the Elenil had blonde hair that leaned toward silver. Her eyes were definitely a distraction, the wrong blue. But she might pass if no one studied her too closely.
Shula opened her knapsack. “Now this,” she said. She held up the shining, mirrored Scim artifact known as the Mask of Passing. She held it up to her face and tied the ribbons behind her head.
Her clothing—jeans and a long-sleeved shirt—flickered, then became a light-violet Elenil dress. Her face reappeared, only not dark any longer . . . It was similar to Madeline’s own skin color. Her hair was golden blonde rather than black.
“You look . . . surprisingly like me.”
The woman who was not Shula nodded. “The mask causes you to see someone like yourself. That’s how it works. Anything that might make you think I’m ‘the other’ goes away, so you know I’m the same sort of person you are.”
“You look human still, though.”
“To you. To the Elenil I’ll look like an Elenil. To the Scim, a Scim.”
“We should test it on the way,” Madeline said.
“That would be wise.”
They stopped at a market stall a few hundred meters from the main tower. Shula hailed an Elenil soldier and told her to send a message to the wall, asking if there was any danger. The soldier sent a bird without hesitation.
Yenil had tried to walk, but it had been too much. Madeline carried Yenil, perched on her back. Shula would take over when they reached the tower, they decided, and carry her in her arms. They planned to say, if stopped, that they were looking for a healer.
They were stopped. Of course. It wasn’t Yenil who was the problem, at least not at first.
“Is that a sword, miss?”
Madeline hesitated. The Sword of Years, wrapped in cloth and rope, hung from her shoulder like a purse. “Yes,” she said. She did her best imitation of Gilenyia. “We Elenil are allowed to walk armed wherever we please.”
“Of course,” the guard said, his eyes lingering on her neck. “The archon has requested, though, that we catalog the weapons as they come through.”
Would he recognize the Sword of Years? She didn’t know. If he did, they wouldn’t make it into the tower, let alone to the top. They wouldn’t get the Heart of the Scim.
“This girl is in distress,” Shula said smoothly. “We seek a healer and do not have time for pleasantries.”
The guard frowned. “To call the archon’s order a mere pleasantry is a grave insult.” He glanced at Yenil. “Is that a Scim girl? She looks almost like . . . a human.”
“She is gravely wounded,” Shula said.
“Gilenyia herself has ordered us to bring her,” Madeline said, taking a chance.
The guard looked over his shoulder. “Gilenyia is at the ceremony within,” he said.
“As is any Elenil of consequence,” Madeline snapped.
The guard stepped backward as if she had struck him. She could see the truth of her own words in the shocked look on his face. The guard started to step aside, but just at that moment a flurry of birds circled the tower. Hundreds of them flew past in a great swarm, knocking the Mask of Passing from Shula’s face. It clattered to the ground. The guard unsheathed his sword despite the storm of birds.
“What trickery is this?” he shouted. His gaze met Madeline’s eyes, and his own widened. “You’re no Elenil.”
A small yellow bird perched on his shoulder. “Lieutenant,” it said, “the Scim have breached the walls again.”
“It is full daylight!” the soldier cried.
“They pour through the walls like water. Pray they do not drown us. Break Bones rides at their head upon a grey wolf, and the Black Skulls ride beside him.”
“May the Majestic One protect us!”
Shula bent for the mask, but the guard stopped her. “I do not know what game you play, but none of you three may enter.”
“She will die!” Madeline shouted, pointing at Yenil.
“Scim die,” the guard said. “Such is their fate.”
The sudden bellowing cry of a runaway rhinoceros echoed across the square. Shula hoisted Yenil onto her back. Madeline grabbed Shula’s hand, and they ran past the terrified guard and into the tower.
Whatever message the cloud of birds had brought, the Elenil guards had taken a sudden interest in Jason and his rampaging unicorn. He burst past fifteen or so guards without any trouble. He pulled Dee up short when a row of Elenil appeared ahead, each on one knee with a spear shaft pushed into the ground, the points ready to pierce the rhino’s chest. He couldn’t see Baileya . . . She had slipped away into the crowd somewhere.
“Halt!” one of the guards shouted.
“We already halted,” Jason said.
“Don’t come any closer,” another shouted.
“We’re not moving.”
Madeline and Shula had made it into the tower already. That was the main point of the distraction, but it would be better if he and Baileya could get into the tower too, to help them get to the top and retrieve the Heart of the Scim.
Another flurry of birds sped through the crowd.
One of the guards shouted, “The Scim have breached the outer walls!”
A howling sound came from the west, just before a monstrous wolf loped into view, Break Bones on his back. “Wu Song,” he called, pulling his wolf to a stop. “The Elenil have invaded our territories and murdered our people for the last time. We have come to destroy them and retrieve the Heart of the Scim.”
“I am pretty sure we called dibs,” Jason said. “Only we’re gonna do the opposite. We’re here to destroy the Heart of the Scim and . . . retrieve the Elenil?”
The massive Scim dismounted from his wolf. “You must not destroy the Heart. It is ours! It is not yours to do with as you please!”
As he spoke, the Black Skulls arrived.
“Hey,” Jason said. “Good to see you all. Before anyone kills anyone, I just want to remind you that I go to the same high school with at least one of you, and I think school spirit should count for something.”
The antelope-headed Black Skull spoke, and despite the magically modulated voice, Jason could recognize Darius’s voice beneath it now that he knew who it was. “Return the Scim artifacts and no one need die.”
“Hi, Darius!” Jason said. “I feel like we’re basically on the same team here.”
Break Bones laughed. “Unfortunately for you, Wu Song, I have made a blood oath to murder you.”
“Um. There’s no time limit on that, though, right? I mean, you could wait until I’m 130 years old.”
An arrow blossomed in Break Bones’s shoulder. Baileya appeared from behind a column. She didn’t say anything clever. She was
n’t one for talking needlessly in battle. She did, however, unsling a massive bag from her shoulder and throw it to Jason. It fell open, revealing a huge collection of weapons. Jason felt intimidated by the fact she could throw it. He pulled out a sword, his magic flowing into it, and shouted a battle cry. The Elenil and Scim met like competing waves, with Jason and Dee between them.
“These plates fly,” Madeline said, placing her feet on the floating panels that had taken her to the top of the tower the last time she had been here.
“You dare to bring a Scim here? On this, of all days?” It was Rondelo, dressed in beautifully brocaded white clothing from head to toe. Evernu, the stag, stood beside him.
“She’s ill,” Madeline said.
Gilenyia peeled off from the crowd of elaborately costumed Elenil. “This is a funeral,” she said firmly. “A rare occurrence for us Elenil. A certain solemnity is encouraged. Not only that, but it is the funeral for Vivi, the father of Hanali. You, of all humans, should respect his loss. I will attend to the Scim girl, if only to keep you from interrupting.” Despite Madeline’s protests, she tried to take Yenil from Shula’s back. Shula stepped away from her, refusing to let her touch Yenil. Gilenyia studied the girl more closely, tracing the lines of the tattoos. Her eyes widened, and her face snapped back toward Madeline. “What is this? How did you come to find this girl?”
“How did the Elenil come to find her?” Madeline said fiercely.
Shula spoke in a quiet, calm voice. “Go back to your funeral and leave us be. We don’t want to harm you.”
Gilenyia looked at them more carefully. “Why, Madeline. You’re dressed like an Elenil. Shula appears to be—ah, but what’s that? The Mask of Passing?” It hung from Shula’s hand. “What mischief are you two up to?”
Madeline’s jaw clenched. She slung the package on her shoulder to the front and unwrapped it. Rondelo and Gilenyia watched in curious silence. When the cloth fell away, Rondelo gasped. Madeline took the rusted, nicked, dull blade and slid it into the scabbard. When she pulled it out again, the blade vibrated like a tuning fork. Bright, polished, and sharp, the Sword of Years sang for the blood of those who had benefited from the death of Scim people.
The Crescent Stone Page 39