C hapter 50: Secret Upon Secret
“He was far too young,” Professor Block said, looking over the prow of the ship atop the upper deck. He was on his feet again. After some food and rest, he was on the path to recovery. Still, there was something missing from that dull, excitable and kind history professor that I'd known for so many years. Something was wrecked inside of him. I could see it by the frantic flashes in his eyes. “If not for our foolishness... well. Nothing can be done.”
Kyle and I were on deck with him. The Fish was up and flying again, and the early wisps of sunset dusted the horizon ahead of us. The coastline, hills and familiar mountains beyond seemed to creep toward us.
Haven. The world's one true constant, would still be as it was, even if life was changing me. The grocer on the corner of Walker and Market would argue with the postmaster about politics all the way to the alehouse. A band of street performers would play their music beside Falwitch Watermill. Dad would pick up roast beef sandwiches from Hand Over Hand on his way home from work. My former classmates would be gathering for oddly contrived games on the riverfront, like attaching two long lunge ropes to two horses on opposite sides of a stream. Strap your feet to a smooth board while your friends help you balance on the water, kick those horses into motion, and see how long they can pull you upright down that stream. Water Horsing. The results were generally hilarious. I'd done it twice. That's what it was like in Rivermarch. Why hadn't it been enough for me?
“You wanted to see us, Professor?” Kyle asked. He leaned his elbow on the rail of the prow, slouching his lanky form in a sullen way.
“Mister Kiteman, Miss Kestrel,” he said by way of greeting. “Do you know why I was chosen to come here?”
Kyle frowned but didn't respond.
“You were arrested when you were nineteen for trying to find a way out of the Haven Mountains,” I said, recalling the story he'd told me. “You teach history.”
“Yes, my interest in the Outside World was well known. But passion is a complementary attribute. Passion can drive a person, motivate them, but the moment that passion becomes selfish, the result is catastrophic. I wasn't chosen for the actions of my youth. After my arrest and public humiliation, my father disowned me. I was alone when I found out the truth about Haven.”
Lights flashed in my brain. I stared at him, not realizing that I was holding my breath. Finally, someone was going to make sense of the tangle of questions in my mind.
“I was approached by an official. She brought me to a medical building and made me take a test. They ran a tube into my arm and took some readings. It was all very strange. She returned the following day and told me that at my age, my family was supposed to explain things to me. Because they cast me off, this was now her responsibility. The things she said... I couldn't believe them. Not at first.
“She told me that most people throughout Haven had special talents, unique skills that they were born with. She said we all had a place in the world, a duty to Haven. Each year, every child is taken in for an inoculation, do you know the one?”
“Yeah,” I said holding very still, as though movement would scare my answers away. “My dad told me I was allergic to it.”
The professor gave me a very strange look, and then continued his story. “That inoculation isn't for protecting against the flu. It's an Ability suppressor, a mild one. The injection activates the byproduct Iorscene, which is continuously added to every water source throughout Haven. Once combined, so long as the child drinks Haven water, their Abilities will be smothered.”
“So that's how you do it,” Kyle said. I was amazed by how calm he was.
“You're drugging us?” I was outraged. This wasn't possible... everything I thought about Haven was a lie! “I can't believe this!”
“Don't invent conspiracies, Miss Kestrel,” Block said in a weary voice. “Haven keeps this system in place for a very good reason. Abilities in the young are suppressed until adulthood. After the test determines whether the youth has Abilities, the family explains the nature of our society, the truth about Abilities, and our responsibility to each take our place in the world appropriately. If we did not do this, our lives would depend on the fickle whims and extreme moods of the immature. Imagine entrusting the power of the elements with children who would not understand how to use them. Haven would be a ruin.”
I did remember hearing a story about a certain boy from Breakwater who'd nearly burned a building to the ground.
I sighed, crossing my arms over my chest. “I see your point. But why the secret? Why not tell everyone what's going on?”
“A small percentage of children are born without Abilities. I'd imagine it would be very difficult to live with. All people should be treated equally and measured by the value of their character, not what attributes they were born with. We have no room for prejudices in our society. Abilities are a very private matter. Even as an adult, and knowing your talents, it is still unlawful to speak of them in public.”
I thought of my birth mother and considered the reasons for her ruthless desire to prove herself. According to the memories that Sterling helped me reveal, she knew about my dad's Abilities, so she must have known about the others. What might that have been like? Was it my father who revealed Haven’s greatest secret to her?
“Without the support of my family, I reacted much the way you did,” Block admitted. “The official told me that I was invaluable to Haven. That without me, without my help, our country would crumble. It was flattering. I'd just discovered I had impossible capabilities, and now, I was needed.
“The test revealed that one of my Abilities was problem and puzzle solving. It didn't sound flashy, but I was excited. It was what I'd wanted to do all along. I threw myself into my studies at the University in Pinebrook. I accepted the guidance offered by the counselors there, and took special, private classes to hone my Abilities. This is what would be available to you. After graduation, I was offered a position with the Historical Research Society. It was fascinating, but I knew there was a more important career for me.”
“Teaching?” I asked, unimpressed. It sounded like a downgrade to me.
“Yes,” he smiled, his bruised lips turning upward. “Teaching. I am a problem solver remember? I knew that teaching was the best way for me to support Haven. The Research Society was not pleased with my decision, but eventually they saw reason.
“Twelve years ago, the Historical Research Society came to me in Rivermarch. They were prepared to show me things that only the highest officials had ever seen. One was the Still Well, a blue pool, dry to the touch, where texts from the Outside World had been placed for centuries. It was believed that the Still Well was some kind of gate, a portal that could transcend distance, but the other side had always been sealed by an impenetrable slab of rock, smooth as marble. That year, the slab cracked, and the texts did not appear again. When the slab was removed, they found an organ of gears, pulsing, turning. It was the greatest puzzle I'd ever seen. I studied it, within the numb, weightless dry water for years.”
“You opened it,” Kyle said, reading my mind.
“I did,” he said, turning his back on the ocean. “And I've regretted it ever since. At the time, it begged the infuriating question... what had changed? Why should we receive gifts of knowledge, though much of it was more rudimentary than our own? We fled the Outside World nearly seven hundred years ago. Who was doing this?”
Brows knitting together, Kyle stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground. “Maybe the Well should never have been built.”
“Maybe not,” the Professor said. “But it was, and we opened it six months ago. Naturally, the Research Society decided to explore our findings. For my skills, and my considerable passion,” he said the last word without any pride. “I was granted a place on the team. Cathrine Cline, Edward Elm, Paul Treller, and me. We thought we were so clever, that everything we'd need to know was in those texts. Coloring our eyes, arming ourselves with pistols and limited a
mmunition... with no knowledge of the world we really stepped into, we were like babes among bears. We left, not even sure whether we'd meet any people at all.
“We were caught.” Block's face went dark. His eyes grew unfocused. “Too friendly, too trusting. They... they tortured us.” Professor Block's eyes glazed with tears and he whimpered, shrinking in on himself. “When the Margrave came to interrogate me, she began to break my bones. The pain was tremendous. Gravity. I couldn't stop myself. Oh, forgive me... I couldn't hold it in. A shadow figure came up to me. He h-had white eyes. When I looked at him, I saw the Prince. I just wanted the pain to stop. I told him everything he wanted to know. I told him where to find the entrance to the Still Well. I begged him not to go there. I begged and groveled, but it did no good. The damage had been dealt, and it was my fault.”
I watched Block, feeling more sympathy than anger. Would I have done any better, if I were tortured?
He sniffed, clapping a hand to his face to wipe the tears from his salt and pepper beard. “Knowing what they knew didn't stop them from torturing us. They began taking Paul away first. Each time I saw him, his condition worsened. One day he didn't return. They were using him for experiments. He was a strong man. Stronger than me. When we first witnessed how they drain the life energy from their victims, we knew what they would do to our people in Haven. Eddie managed to escape. The Prince left Cape Hill several days ago to find the Still Well. He took Catherine with him... a- as some kind of fuel. I was the last one, left at the cape for safekeeping.”
Gravity. That’s where he was going when we passed him on the streets.
“Professor,” Kyle said. “Eddie Elm is dead.”
“Before we left Haven, we saw him,” I explained. “He blew up the base of the weather tower and nearly killed us.”
“He did it then,” Block said, thoughtfully.
Kyle watched him shrewdly. “You don't sound surprised.”
“I can't be,” Professor Block said, letting his head hang. “I told him to do it.”
“What?” I snapped. “Why?” I’d been forced to accept violent behavior from the people outside Haven, but coming from one of my own people, I couldn’t believe it.
“Miss Kestrel, Mister Kiteman, that tower wasn't built for weather predictions. It's an amplifier, similar to a radio tower. Haven Valley is nestled into a very high mountain range. Those weather towers, stationed in each region of Haven, amplify the Abilities of weather controllers... like your father, Miss Kestrel. The range they must reach to control the sky is immense.”
The concept gave weatherman new meaning. I struggled to imagine my dad, sitting at the station, controlling the weather. I found myself gaping in disbelief.
“Our home is supported by a nearly artificial environment. Men and women are rotated twenty-four hours a day, each focusing on temperature, wind, precipitation and storms. If not for weather controllers and those amplification towers, Haven Valley wouldn't be a mild temperate climate. It would be frozen tundra. So perhaps now you'll understand why each and every individual is important to Haven. All of our lives depend on our mutual cooperation, in every aspect of our existence.”
“Well, if the weather tower was destroyed, what does that mean?” I asked, feeling a building sense of dread.
“It means that Rivermarch and the greater eastern region has frozen.”
So that was it then. I'd been wrong all along, about everything. Haven wasn't some quaint, simple country. It was a machine, like my father had said it was. It depended on every piece to function, every piston, every cog. We were those pieces. Haven wasn't a constant. It couldn't always be safe, free from harm. It was difficult to learn that your entire society had lied to you from birth, but even more difficult to see that the choice had been made with care, for the greater good, and that it was falling apart.
The noise of the Flying Fish's turbines filled my head. The chugging of the steam out of the rear billows harmonized with the sounds of the ship. My mother was a manipulative liar, my father was a sweet man who deserved better, Paperglass Two B was my brutalized history teacher, Rune had involuntarily almost crippled me, and Haven was being torn apart from within. My fingertips twitched. I was in shock.
“You wanted to destroy Rivermarch? What's wrong with you?” Anger flashed through Kyle as he threw himself away from the rail of the ship to face Block directly.
Whose life was I living in? It had to be a dream, a fiction. There was no way this could really be happening. I thought of my dad, my sweet stepmom and my little brother, and how I'd left them again. They wouldn't know what was going on, why they'd been attacked. “Our families,” was all I could say, and they were soft, feeble words. I was beyond tears or shouting.
“I know,” Professor Block said, heavy with remorse. “I know. I have people that I love there too. It's my home. I know it sounds like a decision made from lunacy or evil, but it is rooted in neither. Don't discount my Ability. I thought about it, early on during my capture. I had little else to worry my mind with while they broke my ribs one by one. And Paul...”
I'd seen Paul. He was the man strapped to the Monarch, the dead man with brown shoes and no eyes.
“With all of the knowledge available to me, I could see no other way to protect our loved ones than to save them from a cruel and hideous death. While you judge me, answer me this? Isn't it kinder to let a people freeze alongside their families, or even starve when the crops fail? Or would you let the Prince take them,” his voice flooded with emotion. “And see the life force torn from them, the consciousness stolen from their eyes, like Mister Mason down there? Would you rather see that? There was only one answer then, and one answer still...”
I swayed where I stood. My reverie consumed me. Haven really was a machine. We were supposed to be pieces of it. Where had I gone wrong? It was then that I realized, really comprehended, that all of this would have happened whether or not I'd found the Outside World a year ago. My experience might actually be a tiny measure of help to a doomed world. It wasn't for nothing.
Margrave Hest and my father had one thing in common. They'd both told me something similar.
“We are all parts of a living machine.”
“All it takes is one person to change everything to right or ruin.”
Rune was a key piece. By affecting him, showing him a glimpse of happiness, he spiraled off on his own course to destroy the function of Cape Hill. If he could make such a vast difference, so could I.
Professor Block looked between us like a man drowning, and whispered.
“We cannot let them take us.”
C hapter 51: Just Punishment
Common-Lord Brendon Axton stood in his study, with his white sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a gold chain looped over the breast pocket of his plain brown waistcoat. A black band was tied around his right bicep, a symbol of mourning. There was a stout glass filled with yellowish liquid in his hand, and a bottle of whisky sitting on the dark brown desktop at his side.
When he turned to face us, I noticed irritation first. We hadn't been announced. In fact, whenever the Keep guards had moved in to intercept us, they wound up stopping short and trailing behind us like lost puppies. By the time we reached the top floor, half of the Keep was following us, and barely a quarter of our entourage could fit in Brendon's antechamber.
His eyes caught onto me with surprise, then Rune with confusion, and finally Dylan with relief. But when the children flooded in behind us, his face went slack and his jaw fell open.
The glass fell from his hand and shattered on the hardwood floor.
* * *
“Katelyn Kestrel,” Lord Brendon addressed me, pacing. “I've questioned your sanity before, and you've left me no room for wondering. You truly are mad!”
I frowned with indignation.
Some heroic reception.
The Common-Lord had sent the children, under heavy guard, to the dining hall to be fed, and he'd demanded that the rest of us remain in the study. Four rough m
ilitia soldiers remained with us, barring the door, as if they'd be able to stop a Dragoon, a Commander, and three Lodestones from leaving the room. Carmine was with us too, and not pleased about it. Brendon had insisted on having his men board her ship.
“I thank you for returning my brother to me,” he said, pausing only to rub his forehead with his hands.
Dylan was loafing in Brendon's desk chair as though he owned the place. “Right here, Brendon. I'd like to think I had something to do with my own return, thank you very much.”
Brendon spun on him, his muscular shoulders tensing. “Yes, and I have a few choice words for you on this matter. Don't think you'll be free of it.”
He turned back to the rest of us. We were sitting in a crescent formation of chairs at Brendon's insistence. Rune was unaccustomed to sitting in the presence of a lord, and stood behind me instead.
“You found the person you sought. You've provided me with a reason to believe that my brother might be halfway competent,” Brendon said.
“Pardon?” Dylan snapped irritably.
Brendon plowed ahead. “Those efforts are to be commended, without a doubt. Would that I could, I'd send you on your way. But things are not so simple as they should be. In my fair judgment and sympathy, I've already pulled my collar down to expose my neck, and you've lowered it over the executioner's block! You've brought with you a Dragoon defector and the children of Penalty!”
I was shaken. It hadn't occurred to me that Breakwater wouldn't want their children back. “We couldn't leave them there.”
“No? And why is that? You've grown tired of living and you'd like a swift end to it all?”
“Sir,” Professor Block said politely. “Prince Raserion has found the way to our home. If he reaches it...”
“You forget yourself, stranger. He is my Prince! Your problems are not mine.”
Kyle rose to his feet with urgency. “They'll be all of our problems if we don't-”
Dragoon (War of the Princes Book 2) Page 29