He searched her face. “Too late how…?”
“Until,” she swallowed, “someone had died.”
“Oh. Okay.” He tipped back on his heels, thinking. “Don’t get me wrong! I really, really want to know!” Gaius put his hand over his heart. “I give you my word, I will tell no one.”
Rachel regarded him earnestly. She understood Nastasia’s point, that her judgment might be suspect. It was true she had been entirely wrong about her cat. But she could not believe this boy was evil. Would an evil boy try to talk her out of choosing him as her confidant?
“Thank you!” she said sincerely. “Let’s go somewhere else. I’d like to sit down.”
• • •
Rachel fetched her broom, and they found an out-of-the-way place inside a belfry tower on the roof of Roanoke Hall. They sat on a cold marble spiral staircase. Tall windows surrounded them, so that they seemed to be alone on an island enveloped in fog. When the wind blew, they could occasionally make out other nearby spires, looming like ghostly towers.
Rachel leaned against the misty glass and gazed out into the fog. She could barely make out a flying buttress and a bell tower. The belfry smelled of autumn dankness. The marble stair was hard, but she felt no desire to move. Rumbles of thunder came from the north, where the storm goblin, the Heer of Dunderberg, was imprisoned in Stony Tor.
She was tremendously eager to tell her boyfriend of her adventures and to see his reaction—whether awe, admiration, or dismay, but the sheer volume of what had occurred since they last spoke daunted her.
Finally, she admitted, “I don’t know where to begin.”
“How about at the beginning?” Gaius squeezed her hand. Stretching, he slid his arm around her shoulder. Rachel snuggled against him. His body was so warm compared to the cold of the dreary day.
“I don’t know where the beginning is,” she sighed.
“Start with the plane.”
“Oh, right.” Rachel traced the folds of her robe with her finger. “So, Vlad saw me from the dean’s office?”
“Vlad saw you from the plane.”
Rachel’s head snapped up. “What?”
“Vlad jumped to the plane to see if he could stop it.”
“He was on the plane. On purpose?” Rachel’s jaw dropped. “He’s…very brave!”
Gaius struggled not to laugh. “Says the girl who was flying at the plane.”
Rachel told him how she and Sigfried had disenchanted the rogue airplane, freeing it from the control of the technomancer Serena O’Malley and the pilots from the obscuration that had hidden Roanoke Hall from their sight. Gaius listened avidly, his gaze never wandering. Delighted, she grew more animated as she explained her backup plan of flying as high as she could and diving at the tail, hoping to strike the plane hard enough to cause it to swerve.
“Wait!” Gaius cut her off. “Move a jumbo jet with the weight of your bodies? How would that work?”
“I tried to turlu it first, to stop it the way I was stopped on my broom, but that didn’t work. So this was my next idea.” Rachel held out her broom and imitated striking the tip with her fingers. The back swung down. The front tip swung up. “I thought it would work like this. If we struck it at the very back, hard enough, it would tip the front up. Right? At least that’s how brooms work.”
“Planes don’t work that way.”
“How could they not?”
“Jumbo jets have stabilizers. Pushing the back down on ninety-nine percent of modern aircraft tips the horizontal wing on the tail. This pushes the tail back up, causing the jet to level out almost immediately.” Gaius took the broom and held it. He pushed one end down and then moved the hand holding the shaft so that the end he pushed down popped up again.
“But if we pushed the back down for even a second, that would have been enough to make it miss the school, right?”
“Um…Rachel, force equals mass times acceleration. The gross weight of your quintessential jumbo jet is, oh, probably about…975,000 pounds, with cruising speed of 570 miles per hour. Let’s be generous and assume you and Siggy together weigh 200 pounds.” Gaius glanced at Rachel’s petite form. “Which I doubt. We’ll go with 150, though that might be a tad on the light side. An object of that weight would have to be going,” he tipped his head back as he calculated, “370,500 miles per hour to be noticeable to the jet. That’s four hundred eighty three times the speed of sound. The space shuttle traveled at twenty-two times the speed of sound on reentry—You would have had to be flying twenty-one times faster than the shuttle.
“Even if we assumed that the plane’s unloaded and unfueled, weighing only 800,000 pounds, and it’s going slower than normal—say, two hundred miles per hour—you would still have had to be going about 24,500 miles per hour. That was the speed of the Apollo spacecraft on its trip to the moon. At that speed, you would have burned up from the air friction way before you hit. Ouch.” Gaius took the broom and pushed his finger against it, making a smashing sound effect.
“Oh.” Rachel was quiet for a bit. “So…I nearly killed us both for nothing?”
“You would have splatted like a bug.”
Something large blocked her throat. She swallowed, but it did not budge. “I knew we’d die. I just thought everyone else would live.”
Gaius leaned forward and brushed a stray lock of hair from her face. “I’m still very proud of you. I’m not sure I could have done something so brave.”
His touch sent tingles through her cheek and neck. Her breath caught; her eyes half closed. He was so chivalrous, so respectful and kind. She felt so cherished and safe.
Claus Andrew’s voice rang in her ears: When he cops a feel, what’s there to feel up? Rachel shivered, suddenly aware of the chill. She had been so pleased that Gaius had not tried any of the bad things people had warned her an older boy might try. Now, she felt uncertain. Why was he not pressing her harder?
She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. Smiling with shy amusement, Gaius leaned forward and kissed her, sending tingles all the way down her spine to her toes. His lips were warm and sweet. Delighted, Rachel kissed him back, even though her lips were sore from whistling and the motion hurt.
They kissed twice. Gaius was more at ease with the intimacy between them than she, but his cheeks did grow a little red. He then pulled her closer, so that her head rested on his shoulder. They stayed there for a time. He stroked her hair with one hand, the other gently caressing her back. Rachel rested her hand on his robed chest and sighed.
A thought came to her. She smirked, glancing up at him sideways. “If you’d rather not be a commoner, you could prevail upon Vlad to knight you.”
She watched his expression carefully. Did he mind being a commoner? They had been so busy since they started dating. This was the first time she had had the luxury of speaking with him at any length. She was extremely curious as to what he thought—about this or everything.
“Possibly.” Gaius made an airy gesture with the hand that had been stroking her hair. “But then I would be a Bavarian knight rather than an Englishman. Not sure how I would feel about that. Besides, I would have to apply myself rather diligently if I wished to receive such an honor.” He tapped her on her nose. “I had better not make a habit of getting into duels with him over pretty girls.”
Rachel blushed with pleasure. Then she looked down shyly. Moving away from him, she ran three fingers along the window beside her, leaving parallel lines in the condensation. “Nastasia said y-you only dueled Vlad because he insulted your pride. That it had nothing to do with your liking me.”
Gaius laughed out loud. He pulled her back against him. “If it were about my pride, it never would have happened. I have too much respect for Vlad. I was mad at him for claiming that my feelings for you were inappropriate. They are not. It’s how I treat you that decides whether or not I am an upstanding gentleman.”
Her cheeks grew rosy. His words made her feel all glowy inside. He had just admitted to having feelings for her! Tha
t was very different from merely not wanting to dump her, which had been her assumption.
He had never said anything like that before.
As for Claus Andrew’s claim, if Gaius wished to prove to Vladimir that his behavior toward her was chivalrous, no wonder he was treating her so courteously!
“I told her you would not have fought Vlad for a frivolous reason!” As if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, Rachel’s whole outlook lightened.
“As to my being a commoner,” Gaius drawled, gesturing with his free hand. “Being a farmer isn’t glamorous, true. But my grandfather was knighted, and we can trace our family all the way back to Arthur’s court. I am a direct descendant of King Bors, who was king of Gaunnes—which I believe is another name for Gaul…or, in other words, France. He’s Lancelot’s uncle.”
“King Bors!” Rachel cried. “Wasn’t he the father of Sir Bors? Sir Bors was one of Arthur’s truest knights! He saw the Questing Beast. Only the most valiant knights did that!”
She giggled at the pun.
“The very same. We’re descended through Sir Bors, too.” His eyes danced merrily. “It’s too bad our family lost its kingdom. I could have been a prince.”
“I knew you were knightly!” Rachel replied with delight. “Sigfried would be jealous! He’s a huge King Arthur fan. My brother Peter, too. He lives and breathes Arthurian tales. Does he know, about your connection to Sir Bors, I mean? Maybe that’s why he dislikes you so.”
“I doubt it’s that,” Gaius murmured, covering his mouth—and perhaps his smirk—with his hand, “but you never know.”
“Most commoners don’t worry about acting like a gentleman,” Rachel said admiringly. She added with impish cheer, “It’s for the best that you no longer have a kingdom. I thought about it, last time a prince spoke to me of marriage, and decided I’m not cut out to be a queen.”
Only after she had spoken did Rachel realize what had come out of her mouth. She had as much as said that if he had had a kingdom, she would have wanted to be his queen. Her cheeks grew uncomfortably hot. Marriage was not a subject girls were supposed to introduce. Ever. Especially when speaking to a boy who had not yet said or done anything to indicate that he might want her for his wife.
He had not even spoken of love.
Eager to distract him, she blurted out, “If I were Salome Iscariot, whose goal in life is to irk her mother, you would be the perfect boy to date. You have four strikes against you: older, thaumaturge, interested in mundane things, and commoner. Unfortunately, I’m not Salome, and I don’t have any desire to irk my family.” She paused, “Though being descended from King Bors might negate being a commoner.”
“Is the issue of my being a commoner important?” asked Gaius. “To you, I mean?”
“To me? No! To my family?” Rachel sighed. “Old families only get to be old families by jealously guarding their prerogatives. They are ever so sensitive about these things. Though, of course, I’m a girl, so it doesn’t matter as much.”
“Why is that?”
“I won’t inherit Gryphon Park or the dukedom,” explained Rachel. “It’s Peter who must carry the weight of the Griffin Family legacy on his shoulders. He has to marry the right type of girl. That kind of thing. It’s Mum’s fault, of course, for not producing the required Heir and Spare.” Rachel giggled at the foolishness of this notion. “But instead, only one boy and three useless girls. Not that Father would ever voice a word of complaint. But my grandparents cared enormously about such things.”
“The heir and the spare.” Gaius chuckled. “That’s a term I haven’t heard outside of old literature and True Hiss class.”
Rachel chuckled at his abbreviation for True History. “The life of a duke’s daughter is fraught with all sorts of matters that are out of fashion for everyone else.”
“Fair enough.” Gaius gestured airily. “We commoners know little of such things. My father had no idea we were descended from royalty.”
“How did you find out?”
“When I came to school here, I found a painting of my family’s farm. I did some investigating and discovered it had been painted during my grandfather’s youth. He was a sorcerer but chose not to practice. He ended up staying a farmer.”
“Hang on. Your grandfather had the gift of sorcery, but he chose to remain mundane?”
“Can you believe it?” he asked. “I guess the world was much different then. The idea of being apart from his family was too much for him. Anyway, it didn’t take me very long, once I knew where to start, to find out the history of the painting, and, from there, the history of my family.” Gaius grinned suddenly. “My father is completely unimpressed by this news. Our being related to knights and kings. He just wants to know if magic can milk cows without getting him lynched by our neighbors.”
Rachel giggled gleefully. “Magic can help with cows. But whether he would get lynched by his neighbors—that’s a stickier question. Can you show me the painting of your farm?”
“Sure, when we go downstairs,” he promised. “What happened next? After the airplane?”
“Oh! Right. Um…the Comfort Lion told me my friends were in trouble. Serena O’Malley was taking Sigfried and Nastasia off campus. I went after them.”
“You…went running off into danger?” He frowned seriously. “Without calling me?”
“I-I tried to call for help. There wasn’t time. I asked Zoë and Joy to tell the proctors,” said Rachel, wishing fervently that she could have called on Gaius and Vlad for help. She made a mental note to discuss the matter with Sigfried.
“I must admit, that’s rather brave.” Gaius placed his hand over hers. He paused and then asked, “What’s the Comfort Lion?”
“Kitten Fabian’s familiar.”
“Ah. That Lion.” Gaius looked thoughtful for a moment. Rachel recalled how he had remembered, under the influence of the Spell of True Recitation, having seen the Lion as larger than the universe. He shook his head slightly and ran a hand over his brow. “Um…why did they want Smith and the princess?”
“According to Azrael, Sigfried and Nastasia are two of seven prophesied Keybearers.”
“Keybearers?” asked Gaius. “For what?”
“No idea.”
“I’ll ask Vlad. Maybe he’s heard of this prophecy.” Gaius pulled a notepad from the pocket of his robe and jotted something down. “What happened then?”
Without precisely lying, Rachel worded her description to suggest that Serena O’Malley’s geas had not affected her because it had not been cast on her properly—as if her arriving after the others had protected her. She had not yet told Gaius about her perfect memory. She was not certain this was the right time.
She described the battle between the Agents and the followers of Veltdammerung. Gaius listened attentively and asked many questions, especially about Sandra’s part. He seemed very interested in how a student who had graduated from Roanoke only last year had come to be an undercover Agent. Rachel began to wonder if maybe she should not have mentioned her sister.
“Please don’t tell anyone about Sandra’s part,” Rachel pleaded. “I’m not sure she wants anyone to know. Especially if she plans to go undercover on another project.”
An odd look flashed across Gaius’s face, but he nodded. “Of course. I would never tell.”
“Then, we went to Transylvania. Azrael had a bonfire set up as an Obscuration Lantern. With it, he called up tenebrous mundi—dragon-like shadows that are apparently responsible for maintaining the Wall around the world.”
“Good grief!” Gaius’s head jerked up. “You mean this Wall you’ve been telling us about is an obscuration?”
Rachel’s jaw actually dropped. “Of course! How could I not have seen it?”
“It certainly would explain why the beliefs of the people living on our world matter to the integrity of the Wall,” he spoke intently. “I mean, a wall made out of metal or brick wouldn’t fall apart because someone discovered I was from another planet, righ
t? But an obscuration…they work that way, don’t they? I’ve heard of mundane people seeing through obscurations—when enough people learned the truth about what was being hidden. Isn’t that what happened at Findhorn? That came up in True Hiss.”
“Yes!” Rachel nodded eagerly. “The owners shared their giant vegetables with so many Unwary visitors that the obscuration around the garden failed. Now everyone can see it. The Obscurers who work for the Parliament of the Wise had a proper time of it, trying to convince the Unwary that all those folks babbling about fairies being responsible for such a lovely garden flourishing in the cold of Scotland were daft.”
“But it is fairies, right?”
“Of course.” Rachel nodded. “Back to last night. To get the tenebrous mundi to tear down the Wall…” She paused and waved her hands in exasperation. “The Wall that the princess thinks is evil and wants to tear down! Hallo! If it were good to tear it down, would the demon have been trying to do it?” Rachel took three deep breaths and then continued calmly. “Azrael needed a sacrifice. He wanted to sacrifice my father, my sister, Nastasia, and Sigfried. He thought I was geased, so he had Serena O’Malley hand me a wand and ordered me to kill them.”
“Good grief!” Gaius’s pupils had grown gratifyingly large. “What did you do?”
“Do you remember that we found out that Azrael was originally summoned by some Germans who sicced him on an English sorcerer. And that this sorcerer had outwitted him and bound him into a human body?”
“Of course.”
“That sorcerer was my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather, the great cryptomancer?”
Rachel nodded.
“So, there was a masterword!” Gaius exclaimed with the glee of someone who has been proven right. “Vlad and William and I debated that.”
“You did?” gawked Rachel.
“We knew Blaise Griffin was one of a small number of sorcerers who were intimates of Crowley in his youth. And after you told us about your ancestor—the one who bound brollachans into human hosts to capture them—we realized your grandfather had both the knowledge and the opportunity to cast the spell that bound the demon into Crowley.”
Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland (The Books of Unexpected Enlightenment Book 3) Page 14