Travelers

by K A Riley

“Horrifying,” Brohn repeats. “And beautiful.”

  He’s right. Horrifying and beautiful. Like the giant rotating halo above the Processor where we were taken as Seventeens. Or like the parched earth we ran through after our escape as we tried hard not to step on the hints of purple and green flowers struggling desperately to grow. Or like the explosive fireworks of war. Horrifying and beautiful. It’s odd to me that two such opposite terms could keep finding their way back to each other.

  “This way!” Branwynne calls out.

  I snap back to attention and join Brohn as we sprint to catch up with Branwynne, Cardyn, Rain, and Terk.

  As a result of our twists and turns, it takes us nearly two hours of meandering to make our way through the rubble as we press on along the northern bank of the Thames.

  Branwynne continues to glide ahead, leading the way in nearly complete silence, either offering up reluctant, one-word answers to our questions or else ignoring them completely. She doesn’t seem rude. Just focused on getting us safely to our destination.

  We’re all gassed by the time we arrive at last at the Tower of London.

  The expansive complex of buildings consists of rows of narrow slits for windows set into the long stone and brick wall of its outer façade. Unlike the homemade outer ring of the Hyde Park Settlement or the crude wooden turrets built on the roof of Buckingham Palace, this place has a series of real turrets and what look to be impenetrable walls.

  It’s a blocky, solid set of buildings consisting of right-angled ramparts interrupted by soaring, cylindrical towers. The first two or three stories of rectangular stones are black with thick ash. Streaks of orange show through in places, giving the long walls the look of a slowly dying campfire. Toward the top, most of the stones have been bleached white by the sun.

  Either this place was spared in the bombings and attacks we’ve been hearing about or else it’s been strong enough to withstand them.

  Brohn gives an impressed whistle. “Now this is a castle.”

  “It’s not really a tower, though, is it?” I ask.

  “More like four towers,” Cardyn gushes, trotting up next to me, giddy as a schoolboy.

  Sure enough, beyond the outer walls, a rook-like building rises up with a tall tower on each of the four corners.

  Terk points to the thick, gurgling water surrounding the castle. “Hey! It’s got a moat!”

  “Don’t touch the water,” Branwynne advises as we follow her across a creaking wooden bridge. “It’s pretty toxic.”

  Terk looks especially worried as some of the water laps up onto the edge of the bridge. “Toxic?”

  “And radioactive.”

  Branwynne takes us under a stone archway, over a brick walkway, and across a field of crispy-fried vegetation.

  Brohn gazes from the top of the archway and along the tower’s parapets before glancing back down at Branwynne. “No guards?”

  “No.”

  “How come?” Cardyn asks.

  “No need.”

  Rain frowns. “No one tries to get in here?”

  “No.”

  I start to ask why not, but Branwynne answers before I can ask. “They can’t. The Tower is protected.”

  “By…?”

  “We’re here,” she says, striding through an open door and into a cave-like but very clean room of polished blocks forming sloping walls and a high, curved ceiling.

  The room is lit by a single glass tube of pink-hued holo-lights running in a ring around the top-most part of the walls. I wonder at first how the lights are powered until I catch the hint of a hum of what must be a generator somewhere nearby.

  I can’t speak for the others, but I’m startled by the furnishings of the domed space: a set of four high-backed chairs pushed neatly under a round wooden table, a worn leather couch, three matching armchairs, a couple of plush footstools, and a long set of shelves—heavy with actual, old-style paper books—lined up like attentive soldiers around the perimeter of the room.

  Two adults are sitting shoulder to shoulder at a huge oak desk at the far end of the cave-like chamber.

  They clamber to their feet at the sight of us and rush over to smother Branwynne in a tight, welcome-home hug.

  “These are my parents,” Branwynne says, her voice muffled under the sleeve of her father’s red-trimmed, midnight blue coat. “My father, Llyr. My mother, Penarddunne.”

  Her mother is wearing the same type of outfit as her father’s: a blue-black, knee-length coat with long sleeves and a gold buckled belt over a pair of smoky, dark blue pants. The entire ensemble is highlighted by thick bands of red trim. On the front of their jackets is a red crown in between the letters C” and “R,” in thickly-embroidered red thread.

  One at a time, we introduce ourselves and go to bow to them, but they brush off our bows and pull us one by one into tight bearhugs.

  “What’s this, then?” Llyr says, pulling back from Terk, one hand on Terk’s back, the other still locked onto his upper arm.

  “Oh. That’s the Auditor,” Terk starts to say but then stops before turning to me. “Kress?”

  “It’s a techno-human consciousness. Designed by my father and based on my mother.”

  Llyr gives me a skeptical sideways glance. “Really?”

  “So we’re told.”

  After we’ve disentangled ourselves and gotten over our shock at being nearly squeezed to death by total strangers, Cardyn points to the outfits of Branwynne’s parents. “Please tell me that ‘C’ on your jackets isn’t for the Cyst Plague.”

  Llyr and Penarddunne exchange a puzzled look before shaking their heads.

  Penarddunne runs a finger lovingly along the raised letters. “The ‘R’ is for ‘Regina,’ the queen. The ‘C,’” she sighs, “is for Charlotte. Rest her soul.”

  Cardyn’s says, “Oh,” and his shoulders relax with the realization that we haven’t just been infected with anything.

  “Charlotte?” Brohn asks.

  “The queen,” Llyr says. “Before Harah.”

  Penarddunne hangs her head. “She didn’t make it to New Scotland. Poor Charlotte.”

  “But that’s old news,” Llyr beams at us. “You’re new news! Come in! Come in!”

  All smiles, Branwynne’s father Llyr is short and round with dark, weather-beaten skin and a glistening sheen of sweat coating his head, which is as smooth and round as a river stone. Penarddunne, her silvery hair pulled back in two intricate braids along either side of her head, is tall and pale-skinned with a long neck and wide hips. Together, they’re an odd couple who seem as perfectly fit for each other as a bowling ball and pin.

  Behind us, Render soars down and buzzes the ground along the courtyard before gliding straight into the open room to land on my shoulder. The usual reaction when this happens is for people to leap back like someone’s just tossed a grenade.

  Not Llyr and Penardunne, though. They rush straight at me, startling me into taking a giant step back. But they’re undeterred. Ignoring me, my Conspiracy, and even their own daughter, they lean in, cooing and clacking at Render.

  This is the part where I expect Render to launch into one of his harangues of territorial barking. Although he enjoys attention and a good petting—especially from me or Cardyn—he’s not overly fond of too many other people, especially strangers. But he leans right into Llyr and Penardunne’s affectionate nuzzling and makes the gurgly, purring sound he usually reserves for when he’s happily digesting a big meal.

  “He’s smashing!” Penarddunne gushes. “And I love the gold embellishments.”

  “They’re implants, actually, not decorations,” I tell her, slightly offended. “They keep him alive.”

  Penarddunne nods but doesn’t take her eyes off of Render, and I’m not sure she even heard me. “We’ve got our six here like always. But the city’s full of ‘em. Has been for a good while now.”

  “We saw them all over the place this morning,” Terk mumbles absently. He still sounds a bit shaken by that particula
r experience.

  “Were those your ravens?” Rain asks. “The ones who helped us back at the palace.”

  “Is that where you got off to?” Llyr asks, whipping around to face Branwynne. He takes his daughter by the shoulders. “We told you it was too dangerous at Buckingham.”

  “Your daughter and your ravens may have saved our lives,” Brohn says.

  Turning his attention away from Branwynne, Llyr gazes up at Brohn and beams a cheek-stretching smile. “Really?”

  “Um…yeah.”

  “Sorry for our manners. Tea?”

  “Um…sure?”

  “We get our priorities a bit backwards sometimes,” Penarddunne apologizes as she finally turns her attention from Render to Brohn.

  Brohn seems a bit disoriented, but he manages to say, “Granden sent us.”

  I expect confusion, but Penarddunne simply twirls the end of one of her silver braids around her finger. “Yes. Granden. Of course, of course.”

  43

  Blessed

  “Please sit,” Penarddunne says, plopping down herself into what turns out to be the deepest, softest, and most comfortable couch I’ve ever had the pleasure of collapsing into.

  I have to look twice to make sure it’s really a couch and not a collection of giant, lightly toasted marshmallows.

  “You know Granden?” Brohn asks from my left while Cardyn eases down with a contented sigh on my right.

  “Granden? Absolutely!” Llyr chortles. Humming to himself over by a small sink and counter, he pours tea from a blue and white ceramic teapot into eight matching ceramic mugs on a round, two-handled tray. He brings the tea over and sets it down on the table between the toasted marshmallow couch and the three big, equally cushy armchairs facing it. Branwynne brings two more chairs over from the dining room table. She sits in one and invites Terk into the other.

  “Granden visited here a long time ago,” Llyr says, half to himself. “He was just a boy. But he loved the ravens. Loved them. Even then. He’d sit right out there in the yard for hours on end. Sit right in the grass. There used to be grass. And he’d watch them. Listen to them. Study them.”

  “He never talked about it,” I tell him.

  “Granden keeps his cards close to the vest.”

  I think about the truth of that statement. Granden was the son of President Krug, one of the most cruel, deceptive, self-centered, and violent leaders in modern history. He worked for his father in the Processors, rounding up and helping lead the experiments on the kids who would later be known as Emergents and then, Hypnagogics. And all the while, he was guiding the resistance movement from behind the scenes. It was Granden who helped us escape from the Processor. He was the one who first led the Insubordinates against the Patriot Army in San Francisco. And it was Granden who got us into all the right places leading up to our final takeover in Washington, D.C. All right under his father’s nose.

  It makes me wonder how well we really know him. And that makes me wonder how well Kella really knows him.

  We haven’t talked about their relationship much. But maybe that’s a good thing. Kella seems happier than we’ve ever seen her, so maybe that’s all that matters. We may not know everything about the man she’s with, but he seems to be a good man, anyway.

  “I’m sure Granden’s craftiness and cautious nature is exactly how he’s stayed alive this long.” Penarddunne pauses before snapping her head up in my direction. “He is alive, isn’t he?”

  “Granden? Yes. He’s alive.”

  “That’s good. He’s one of the good ones.”

  “In spite of that monster of a father of his,” Llyr grumbles into his chest.

  “Krug’s dead,” I blurt out.

  Llyr and Penarddunne exchange a look of disbelief, but Rain leans forward and tells them it’s true. “We chased him across the country until we caught up with him in the capitol. Render finished him off personally.”

  Render’s offended voice slips into my head.

  ~ I’m not a person.

  They know that. But there’s no such word as “ravenly.”

  ~ There should be.

  I’ll see what I can do.

  “He’s still on the viz-screens here,” Llyr says slowly. “The few that are left.”

  Brohn nods. “Trust us. He’s dead.”

  “He fell three-hundred-feet off the top of the Old Post Office Building,” I tell them.

  Terk grins with pride and pats his chest with his hand. “Practically landed at my feet. We had to take what was left of him away in three different body bags.”

  Llyr and Penarddunne take a full three seconds to realize that Terk’s joking about the body bags, and then they both burst into a bout of knee-slapping guffaws.

  Cardyn’s quiet voice slips into the fading echoes of their laughter. “We were too late, though. That was after he…”

  I know why he doesn’t finish. The weight of Manthy’s memory is sometimes still too much to bear.

  Rain reaches across the space between her chair and the couch to put a comforting hand on Cardyn’s knee. He puts his hand on hers and tilts his head up to give her a small but obviously appreciative smile.

  “How much do you know about us?” Penarddunne asks, after a delicate sip from her teacup. “About the Ravenmasters?”

  “Some,” I say. “Mostly what Granden told us. And my dad told me about some of the traditions when I was younger.”

  “I’ve read a bit, too,” Rain says.

  Llyr looks impressed. “Do you know how we got started? What it takes to be a Ravenmaster?”

  We all mumble a chorus of “Nos” and “Not reallys.”

  “There are certain specific requirements you have to meet,” Penarddunne begins. “You need to be retired from the Armed Forces of the Commonwealth. And a retired Warrant Officer.”

  “With at least twenty-two years of service,” Llyr adds, picking up where his wife left off, the two of them bouncing back and forth without missing a beat.

  “And recipient of the Long Service and Good Conduct medal.”

  Llyr snorts. “And don’t confuse us with the Yeoman of the Guard.”

  “We’re Beefeaters,” Penarddunne proclaims with a cautionary finger wag. “Totally different kettle of fish.”

  “‘Beefeaters,’ the Auditor’s voice repeats from under Terk’s cloak and sounding slightly more mechanical than usual. “The term most likely originates from the early days when Yeoman Warders were partly paid in meat. Some believe it comes from the French term buffitier—a barman or buffet manager—while others think it dates from the reign of Henry the Eighth who insisted his bodyguards, the Yeoman Warders, taste his food before he ate to check for poison.”

  “Don’t mind her,” Terk apologizes, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb. “She’s still a little punchy after the reboot.”

  Llyr frowns. “Reboot?”

  “Long story,” Rain says.

  “You take care of the ravens?” Brohn asks.

  Penarddunne grins. “Almost as much as they take care of us.”

  “If they go, so do we,” Llyr says.

  “And not just us,” his wife adds. “The entire kingdom!”

  “We’ll have to introduce you to them.”

  “They kind of met them in the palace,” Branwynne volunteers through a sheepish mumble before scrunching back into her seat.

  Penarddunne gives her daughter a slightly scolding look before blowing steam from her cup and taking another sip of her tea. “It used to be that the ravens’ flight feathers were clipped to keep them from flying off and never coming back. Later on, just certain feathers were clipped so they could still fly, only not far enough to get away for any significant length of time.”

  “Now, they’re free to come and go as they please,” Llyr says. “Sometimes we have more than our six. They come. They go. But the six you met took a special liking to us early on—”

  “Mostly to Branwynne, though.”

  “Right. She was always t
he real draw.”

  We all look over at Branwynne who is back to sitting cross-legged and chin-down in one of the dining room chairs that she swung around into the conversation circle.

  I feel bad for her. It’s like she’s bobbing halfway between the islands of “Heroic Fighter” and “Subservient Little Girl” and doesn’t seem to know which way the tide will take her.

  Turning my attention back to Llyr and Penarddunne, I tell them what Granden told us back in D.C. before sending us on this mission. “He said the ravens being here had something to do with an ancient story.”

  “Yes!” Penarddunne beams. “The story of Bendigeidfran. Brân the Blessed.”

  “Right. That’s what he said. Something about a buried head?”

  “It’s an old Welsh tale. From the Second Branch of the Mabinogi. According to that story, Matholwch, the Irish King, sailed to England to meet with Brân the Blessed about possibly marrying Brân’s sister. The two kings agreed, and everything was pointing to a strong alliance between the kingdoms when Efnysien, Brân’s jealous, and, frankly, pretty sadistic half-brother, got offended that he wasn’t involved in the wheeling and dealing over the marriage, so he slipped out at night and killed all of Matholwch’s horses.”

  Rain seems especially shocked by this and asks, “Really?”

  “According to the story,” Llyr says.

  “But why kill the horses?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it was the worst thing he could think to do.”

  Rain stares but doesn’t say anything so Penarddunne continues. “Anyway, the new alliance looked like it was already over, but Brân came to the rescue by giving Matholwch a peace-offering gift, a magic cauldron that could bring people back from the dead.”

  Now, it’s Cardyn’s turn to lean forward. So far, in fact, I think he might pitch himself clean off the sofa. “Back from the dead?”

  “According to the story,” Llyr interjects as Penarddunne goes on.

  “Matholwch returned to Ireland with his new bride and things were going well at first but then, as often happens—in stories and in life—things went barmy. Matholwch started abusing his young wife, who was also a new mother by this point. Brân got wind of his sister’s mistreatment and led his navy from Wales to Ireland to save her. Matholwch offered to make peace by hosting a banquet in a great hall where he had hung giant sacks of flour from the rafters.”