“It isn’t just our war,” I say, without even thinking. “It’s yours, too. It’s everyone’s. Everyone in the whole world.”
Rae had been glaring at Charles and Vinneas, but now she looks at me and suddenly she seems more sad than angry. I can feel my face getting hot. When she speaks again, it’s almost like an apology. “I can’t understand what sort of people need to send little children warring.”
“Why don’t we all have a seat,” says Charles, “and I’ll tell you.”
The room we’re in has an oval table, and we each pick a chair and sit. It’s a little awkward because the table is pretty big, and Censor Reggidel seems to want to sit as far from Rae and Naomi as possible. Rae still looks a little mad, but she smiles at me as she sits down, which makes my face even hotter. I smile back, though, until I notice Naomi watching me, and she does look mad. I decide to just keep my eyes on the table while Charles tells the story of the Valentine War.
He starts with the world how it used to be, with countries and billions of people living everywhere. Back then, there was no such thing as thelemity, and people built houses and machines sort of like they have in the settlements today, but all of that changed the day the Valentines came.
The reason we call them the Valentines is that the day they first attacked, February 14 on the old Western Calendar, was called “Valentine’s Day.” We still don’t know what the Valentines call themselves because we’ve never been able to talk to them. We don’t even know what they look like. People had all sorts of different names for them early in the war, but “Valentine” is the one that ended up being the most popular. It used to mean something totally different, but not many people remember that now.
We never saw them coming. All at once, cities just started disappearing. A city would be there, everything totally normal, then it would be gone, nothing but rubble and a cloud of dust. By the time we figured out we were under attack, half the cities in the world had already been destroyed. We tried to fight back, but the Valentines had thelemity, and our strongest weapons were next to useless. They probably would have killed every single person on the planet, except for one thing: It turned out we could use thelemity, too.
As far as anyone knows, there have been fontani and revenni in the world as long as there have been people. The reason no one knew until the Valentines came is that revenni can’t do anything without a source of thelemity, and fontani won’t produce thelemity until something happens to activate them. The only time fontani become active—as far as we’ve seen, at least—is when someone nearby uses thelemity for something. Think of it as a candle lighting another candle. And when thelemity is used as a weapon, any fontani nearby are almost guaranteed to go active. So when the Valentines attacked, they activated the first fontani on Earth. Pretty soon, we had fontani all over the world.
There aren’t many things stronger than fontani. You can’t even compare them to people, or animals, or machines—they’re more like stars. Just one is more than a match for pretty much any army you can think of. But they’re also very rare. We think the Valentines brought somewhere between ten and twenty fontani when they first came to Earth. But this was a world with billions of people, remember. Within days, we had hundreds of our own fontani, enough to chase the Valentines away from Earth, back the way they came.
What we learned was that the Valentines didn’t come from someplace far away—at least, not anyplace we could have ever found on our own, by walking or flying or blasting off to the stars, for example. They were from another world entirely, a world parallel to ours, and they had used thelemity to open the way from there to here.
They’d made a kind of rip in space, up in the sky between Earth and the Moon. It’s still there today, a passage we call Lunar Veil. When the Valentines tried to escape from our new army of fontani, we followed them back through Lunar Veil, and on the other side we found an entire other universe. The Valentines had opened another gate there, which led to another universe, and another gate, and another universe. We kept chasing them, going from one world to the next, until finally we got to a place where there were reinforcements waiting to hold us off. That was when the real war began. We’ve been fighting them ever since, in all sorts of different worlds, but we’ve never found the place they call home, the world where they started out.
We’ve learned a lot about thelemity, too: how to build huge cities right out of the earth, how to design thelemic tools you don’t have to be revenni or fontani to use, how to fight an enemy that uses thelemity as a weapon, how to travel between the different parallel worlds—the Realms, as we call them. The front line of the fighting stretches across fifteen different Realms now. The only thing that hasn’t changed much since the beginning of the war is that, without fontani, we don’t stand a chance.
When Charles finishes talking, the room gets so quiet I can hear my heart beating in my ears. And then Rae says to Charles, “You still haven’t told us why you need Naomi.” Her voice is low and dangerous, and I’m glad there’s a big table between her and us. “You say you were there when the war began. Where are all your hundreds of other fontani?”
“Some are still fighting,” Charles answers. “I returned from the Front about three months ago. But I know what you’re asking, and I’ll tell you the truth: Many of them—most—have been killed in battle.”
“We don’t send children into combat,” Vinneas adds quickly, “not if we have any better choice. Fontani like Jax typically take indirect roles, such as powering a city’s defenses while more experienced fontani are away in battle.”
“But you will,” Rae answers coldly. “You will send them if you decide you must.”
“If we could afford to shelter children like Jax from the war, we would,” Vinneas says, sounding annoyed. “What you have to understand is that fontani are extremely scarce. Talent with thelemity isn’t inherited genetically, and if there’s a way to bestow it on someone, we’ve never discovered it. All we know is that fontani and revenni generally come into their ability sometime around the age of nine or ten. That, and we need as many of them as we can get. They’re the only chance we have.”
Rae stands, pushing back her chair, and shouts, “Well, you can’t have her!” so loudly that I jump in my seat. For a while she just stares at Vinneas, then she says, more quietly, “We’re going home, both of us.”
For the second time, I speak up without even thinking about it. “It’s not so bad, not really,” I say, “being in a battle. I’ve never fought the Valentines for real, but I practice a lot with Charles. And I know it’ll be dangerous, the real thing, but it’s a lot less dangerous for people like me and Charles than for everyone else who has to fight. The legionary’s first rule of battle is to keep your fontani safe. So we just do our part because they’re all risking their lives to protect us.”
Rae only stares at me, so I keep talking, “And it’s true what Charles says, that fontani are really hard to kill. Do you know what a volcano is? I’ve been inside of one, and I hardly even noticed.”
She breaks into a smile then, sad but still very pretty. “You’re a fine boy, Jax,” she says. “If this Legion was full of men like you, I would count myself fortunate to be part of it. But Naomi and I have no use for the kind of protection your comrades are offering. We’ve done well enough by ourselves until now. I think we’ll keep it that way.”
I know I shouldn’t feel happy, because the Legion really does need both of them, but I still get kind of giddy, talking to Rae. Vinneas is obviously frustrated, but Charles doesn’t seem upset. Censor Reggidel just looks glad to be left alone.
And then Naomi speaks for the first time. She’d been so quiet until now, I thought she must be very shy, but she’s just as forceful as her sister. What she says is “You can count me in.”
TWENTY-FIVE
NAOMI
I am alone on an island, a place they call Bermuda, or Area 22-53, depending on who is speaking. T
o me it is merely a forlorn strip of land foundering in the middle of the sea, stranded among high waves and dark clouds. Rain comes down in puffs and gusts, and though I have been afforded tall boots and some manner of slicker for protection, my face is already damp with water the wind is flinging every which way. At the same time, warm sunlight shines across my back through a gap in the clouds, a pillar of brightness sparkling with errant raindrops and trimmed in the unlikely gamboling of rainbows. The ship, what they call a “harvester,” rises into the circle of cloudless sky, shrinking away as it flees my island, until at last it is lost in the glaring sun, and the clouds roll in, washing the light away like dust taken in a breeze.
However fierce the storm here on Bermuda, I imagine it is no more than a whisper compared to the one raging aboard the harvester. By the time I set forth for this island, Rae had worked herself into a temper fit to make anyone nearby fear for his life. She was particularly dire with Charles and Vinneas, railing at them in language it would have shamed our mother to hear. Of everyone, only Vinneas was fool enough to attempt any defense, perhaps because his command of English was good enough to understand her anger but not so perfect that the precise details of her threats and oaths were readily plain. Reggidel, meanwhile, sat well back, grinning as though he could imagine no finer entertainment. By now I expect Vinneas is regretting his resistance, as Rae is not one to be quelled with words. She will keep up her fury until this business on the island is settled, and heaven help Vinneas if anything goes wrong. She has promised to flay him alive and see him dragged twenty miles by a horse saddled with his own tanned hide. For me, Rae had only kindness and concern, riding down to the island with me and running out into the rain to hug me long and hard, saying, “I’ll come back for you, Sunshine. I promise. We won’t go far. I won’t let them.”
Not two sunrises ago, I would have counted her words and embrace finer comfort than all the world’s plushest luxuries, but I responded with nothing but a stiff-shouldered shrug. Since the moment Rae appeared, back from the dead and gathering me up in her arms, she has placed herself between me and every possible danger. In truth, it was a tremendous relief to be under her protection; I did not know how desperate and afraid I had been until she was with me again, hackles raised in my defense, and felt a measure of calm and safety I thought I had left behind forever in New Absalom. I have the notion Vinneas himself was mightily surprised when he went from champion in my sister’s eyes to lowest of all the Earth’s vermin once she heard the Legion’s plan for me. But up there on the harvester, as I listened to her snarl and snap at those Legion men, I came to a realization. It was something that boy said, Jax (what a name!), how all the Legion’s soldiers had a duty to protect him—and me, were I to join—and how he considers it his responsibility to do the same for them. To Rae I am still a child, not to be trusted with my own affairs, but I have changed since the Valley of Endless Summer. I learned I could be a protector, too. That is what the Legion is asking of me now, and I mean to do it if I can.
As the last glints of sun pass from the sky, I find myself wishing Rae were here, so I could tell her how wrong she is about me. I could summon her now, if I wished, but it would mean abandoning my test and admitting she was right. In my hand is a small device, a handle like the grip of a pistol, cast in black metal with a red button set into the top. I have merely to depress this button, and a flying machine will be dispatched to retrieve me. I am free to use the button at any time, but I resolve not to do so until I know for sure whether or not I am “fontani,” as they say, one of these creatures that make magic the way the sun does light and heat.
The black handle with the red button has one other feature of note: an array of glowing numbers counting slowly toward zero, representing the time remaining for the other players of this game to arrange the details of my test. At present, the harvester bearing Rae and Vinneas and Reggidel is busying itself with getting as far from me as possible. Meanwhile, Charles has taken his place elsewhere on this island, at a specific point roughly a mile from where I stand. The exact distance between us is known as a “yiell,” meaning the span thelemity will project from any one source—in this case, Charles. The limit of one yiell from Charles’s position is marked on the ground before me, a line in yellow paint. Already I have caught the scent of brimstone crackling in the air, as it sometimes does at the edge of anyplace filled with the magic of thelemity.
When my counter falls to zero, Charles will perform a trick called “shading.” He will no longer be merely fontani, a simple source of power, but a weapon, “fontani usikuu.” This will alter the nature of his thelemity, a shift akin to music’s dropping or rising in key, so subtle as to be indiscernible by anyone except other fontani. Once this is done, I will walk across the yellow line, and if I am indeed fontani, as everyone seems to believe, I will “shade” as well and become “fontani usikuu.” Or so I have been told.
I still do not quite understand what it means to shade, or to be fontani usikuu. According to Charles, it is a thing easier experienced than described, hardly worth discussing until you have witnessed it firsthand. He did try, but it was difficult to take him seriously. Not only did his admonitions sound like so much fanciful nonsense, but Charles himself freely admitted that nothing he told me now would make any difference once the shading began. Vinneas, Reggidel, and others of the harvester’s small crew had any number of poetic descriptions of fontani usikuu, none of which made any obvious sense. Near as I have been able to learn, it means to become a being cloaked in magic, like the calm at the center of a spinning storm. The one thing Charles was sure to make clear was that, whatever happened, there would be no danger to me.
I do not share Charles’s confidence. As the little lit numbers click away, I feel the fear pooling in my belly. I was so sure of myself when I stepped onto this island, so determined, but in the wind and wet, my banner of courage has gone to tatters. It is as if I can see what awaits me in the swirling spray beyond that yellow line, rainy images of a long war spanning worlds and worlds, and I yearn to return to my old life, to be safe in New Absalom with Rae and Mama and Baby and all my coda with me, close around warm fires and the snow deep outside and danger far away, and know nothing of thelemity or these creatures, the Valentines.
In my hand, the counter has fallen to zero. I raise my eyes to the yellow line, some ten feet distant. It seems so harmless, a drizzle of paint on uneven concrete gathering water in shallow puddles. I will not allow myself to fear a color, or a shape. I draw one long, slow breath and begin to walk.
The line nears, and I close my eyes, feeling the wind tug at my flapping hood. It will come any moment now, the change, the shade. I steel myself, knowing there can be no retreat from here, and summoning every bit of nerve I have left, I take what I know must be the last few steps toward whatever strangeness awaits.
TWENTY-SIX
NAOMI
Nothing happens. Only when I am sure to be well past the yellow line do I stop walking and open my eyes. The island of Bermuda remains, trees bowed beneath the gathering storm, spray soaking every rock and bush. Before me are the remnants of an ancient road, broken and overgrown, not a splotch of yellow to be seen. Turning, I spot the dreaded line fully twenty paces behind me. For a time, I can only stand there looking at it.
I wonder whether I have failed in some essential piece of my test, whether there was some incantation I was meant to recite, some occult password I neglected to call. I stomp on the ground, as if that might shake my power loose, then cross the line again at a full run. Nothing still. I leap over it and back, walk down its length, arms extended as though to balance on the branch of a tree.
At last I am forced to conclude that everyone was mistaken about me. I am no being of war and magic after all, only a girl splashing in the rain, and I must press my red button or spend the rest of my life on this deserted island.
The button illuminates beneath my thumb, signaling that my only duty now is to wait for
rescue. I reason it will be best to seek refuge from the inclement weather, since I am not to become any great force of nature myself. There is little nearby that would pass as shelter, but not far off I spot a number of crumbling structures, relics of this island’s long-departed denizens. I choose the tallest and set off in that direction, and soon I am walking the streets of a forgotten city.
It is as fine a place as any my people have chosen for our winter refuges, excepting perhaps New Absalom and one or two other shroomtowns. The buildings here are sturdy and well formed, many standing above their first story, a feature I have rarely seen in so ancient a place. As I walk wide avenues fringed in brush and rubble, gazing up into dark windows, I catch sight of something that gives me pause. There, at the base of an especially grand edifice of arches and pillars, is an open door spilling light outside. After staring at it a good while, I conclude it must be Charles. He has deduced that I am not one of his fontani after all and chosen this place to keep me in comfort and company until the others arrive.
The doorway and surrounding stonework are ornate and very well maintained considering their age, and I wonder whether this island is quite so abandoned as I have been told. The place I find inside is warm and brightly lit, with quiet music playing from a source I cannot quite discern. It is a long room with high ceilings, orderly and clean, with tall windows all down one side. Along the interior wall is a high, lacquer-topped counter with stools beneath and backed by shelves of multicolored bottles. The space throughout is filled with circular tables, each ringed with chairs and covered in a white cloth that falls nearly to the wooden floor. Every table is empty, save one by the far wall, where a man sits by himself, facing me.
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