The magus was pale, and unsteady on his feet, his hands extended to keep his balance. “No,” he said, his voice rough. “I said it would only work for the true steward, the rightful heir.”
The Queen whirled toward Dafyd. “You.”
—and when he opened his eyes again, David was in the throne room in Colcott, the two thrones on the dais a short distance away. He shifted his direction slightly to go around the dais—blink
—desk, to get to the doorway—
blink
—the tapestry behind the thrones. He could hear voices. They were all familiar, but too distorted to make out what they were saying, like he was hearing an echo.
I struggled to rise to my feet.
Reality was coming apart at the seams. The house was shaking now, our every motion slow and distorted. I could barely see, images flickering past like a film caught in a projector, twisting and doubling over one another. Two beds, two old men, two women, each pair seeming to occupy the same space, and no space at all.
Cora lowered her gun. “What …?”
The room lurched again, and I lost my balance.
The Queen’s face seemed to melt from her bones. “You.” She pointed at him. “Her …”
Dafyd glanced toward the magus, who nodded slowly.
“That whore,” she spat.
Mareigh’s body jerked in Dafyd’s arms. There was a sound like a cough, or a sharp laugh. When he looked down at her, blood trickled from her lips.
“You knew all along,” the Queen accused Loren.
He nodded. “He was my oldest friend. My Lord. My King. When he summoned me …”
A look of dawning horror and understanding seemed to rise in the Queen’s face.
“He told me he was being poisoned. That the Queen was killing him, just slowly enough to gain control over the kingdom before he died. I did not want to believe him, but I made plans with him. And then the handmaiden was poisoned … Why did you kill the girl?”
The Queen looked scornfully at the magus. “I needed to get you out of the castle. My brother had men waiting on the road. What matters the life of a servant?”
As Dafyd glanced between the Queen and the magus, trying to follow what was going on, the room shifted again. Everything flickered like torchlight.
“So you went to your books, your prophecies …” the Queen continued, lurching with the room.
The magus shook his head. “King Dafyd and I made up the prophecies about the chosen one, to allay your suspicions. There were no prophecies, no mystical signs. We knew where the heir was. We had known his entire life.”
A bubble of heat formed in Dafyd’s chest, building, until it seemed to burst, a sob racking him. The King … his father. He glanced up, toward the body on the bed, then down again at his mother’s face, bloody and slack.
“The only prophecy was that of the Stone. And as you see, the boy has more than proven himself. He is the true heir. The true steward of Colcott.”
A steely calm seemed to come over the Queen, a resolve that was terrifying in its simplicity. “Ah well,” she said. “Easy enough. Kill a king. Kill a prince. A small price to pay.”
Her eyes scanned the ground, searching for her dropped sword.
As she turned, Captain Bream brought the blade up, set the point level with the centre of her chest, his eyes focusing on her with a savage intensity. “No, My Lady.”
As I caught myself on the edge of the bed, Cora raised the gun again, held it unsteadily toward us. A flicker, and another woman seemed to be standing in her place.
“Make it stop,” she cried out, and I couldn’t tell who was speaking, and if she was talking to me or to the husk of her husband in the bed.
My head throbbed with a concussive force. I tried to breathe through it, and—
“Mom!” David cried out, pushing through the thick air as he crossed the study to where her body lay in the doorway. He fell to his knees beside her. He didn’t know if he should touch her, and all he could do was watch as her chest shuddered, as blood bubbled at her lips. “Mom,” he whispered, his voice breaking—
“Mom.”
The word echoed through the King’s bedchamber like thunder. Dafyd and the Queen both looked to the doorway, where shadows shifted in and out of focus. It seemed like there was a fallen body, there one moment, gone the next, and a small figure bending over it.
David. The voice in Dafyd’s head was a desperate shout, and only a moment later he realized that he had cried the name out loud.
I looked up at the sound of David’s name, a shout in a young man’s voice I didn’t recognize. A shadow at the end of the bed, human shaped, turned its head toward the doorway.
I glanced up, and my eyes met David’s. He was crouched over Jacqui’s body but staring into the room, his eyes seemingly locked on the shadowy figure that had spoken his name.
David’s eyes met Dafyd’s, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. Two lifetimes of memories seemed to swell inside his head, and he rose slowly to his feet, stepping through the doorway and—
—everything seemed to solidify. The throbbing in my head dissolved, and the room stopped moving, my stomach settling almost instantly.
I rose carefully to my feet, not yet trusting the stability of the floor. “David,” I called out, and as he looked up at me, Cora Took whirled toward him, levelling the gun, now solid and unwavering in her grip.
Then she caught sight of two figures who had been behind her, a woman in rich formal dress, and a strong-looking man in some sort of uniform, the tip of his sword almost touching the woman’s chest.
The hand holding the gun fell limply to her side.
“Reg?” she said.
As David stepped into the room, Dafyd turned from his mother’s limp body and rose slowly to his feet.
They stepped toward each other haltingly, cautiously, each wet with his mother’s blood, seeing each other for the first time.
His sword point drifted slightly from the Queen’s breast as Bream turned to the sound of a name he had never expected to hear again.
“Cora?” he said, his voice thick with an emotion that Loren had not heard from the man in the more than twenty years he had known him.
Cora’s face was wide with wonder.
The captain stepped toward her, his sword lowering.
As he turned, the Queen fumbled at her dress.
The magus cried out, “Bream!” as a knife flashed in the space between the Queen and the soldier.
I looked around the room—rooms. We were still in the room where Cora had imprisoned Lazarus Took, and I could see the circle of his blood, the symbols, on the floor around me. But at the same time, we were in a much larger, older room.
It took me a moment to place it, like something from a dream. It was the King’s bedchamber, where Dafyd had gone at the end of the book, where he had used the Sunstone to heal the old man, where he had knelt to be knighted. It was different than I had imagined it, but I knew I was right.
And if this was the King’s bedchamber, then …
Bream sidestepped the knife almost effortlessly, and turned in the same motion, his sword coming up again and catching the Queen above the neckline of her dress. Her momentum, the thrust that should have been a death-blow to him, instead buried his sword deep in her. There was a crunching sound, a hiss as blood sprayed the captain’s face, and her eyes went wide, disbelieving. She fell.
Bream drew the sword from her body, and stepped toward Cora Took.
The magus gestured toward the Queen’s body. “Dafyd,” he said, “the Stone.”
I made a move toward David, toward Jacqui’s fallen body, but I was held back by the pinch of cold fingers on my arm.
I turned to the bed. Lazarus Took had pulled himself up, had reached out to stop me.
“Is that …” he said in a pained whisper. “Is that your son?”
I nodded, wanting to pull away, wanting to turn from the sight of him, from the sight of the body on the bed next
to him, the wizened man with the bloody wound in his chest, the red foam at his lips.
I stopped myself, my thoughts reeling: if that was the King, how had he been wounded? That wasn’t in the book. And if that was Dafyd, then the man who had just killed the Queen, the man who looked so familiar …
Took’s face formed with effort what might almost have been a smile. “Good,” he said, releasing my arm.
“Reg,” Cora said as he faced her, as if they were the only two people in the room.
“Cora.” His voice had lost the hint of sadness.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she said breathlessly.
“After this, you mean?” he said, looking down at himself, at the uniform of the King’s Men, at the sword.
She reached out and ran her fingertips along his cheek, smearing the Queen’s blood in thin trails. “It’s been so long,” she said quietly.
Dafyd followed the magus’s gaze down to the Queen’s body, to where the Sunstone lay just above the wound from Bream’s sword.
“Quickly,” Loren urged.
Dafyd lunged toward the body and grasped the Stone. Pulling it sharply, he snapped the chain, and the Queen’s head bounced against the stone floor with a dull thud.
“I did everything you asked,” Bream said.
“I know,” Cora said, in the tone one might use to comfort a child. “I’m sorry.”
“You told me we would be together.”
“Yes,” she said, still stroking his face. “I’ve missed you. It’s been so long.”
He stiffened at the words. “How long?” he asked, his voice suddenly cold.
Cora took a step back. “It’s not—”
“How long?” he asked again, his voice rising.
“Sixty years,” I said, advancing a little, hoping to get past them to Jacqui and David.
He turned at the sound of my voice, his sword rising. It was as if he hadn’t even known I was there.
“It’s been more than sixty years,” I said.
“Sixty years,” he muttered, rolling the words in his mouth.
Dafyd slipped between Bream and the bed, the chain of the Sunstone dangling from his right hand.
“Sixty years?” Pilbream repeated, turning back toward Cora. “But how? You haven’t changed.”
She shook her head slightly, suddenly awkward in the face of his questioning eyes.
“That’s why she sent you away,” I said, taking a half-step forward. Bream cocked his head, listening to me without taking his eyes from Cora. “Why she put you into the book. It was all a spell. To keep her young.” I tried to keep my voice from breaking, tried to sound strong, but when I looked toward the doorway, saw Jacqui’s body still on the ground, saw David crouching again next to her, touching her gently on the cheek, I cracked. “She didn’t care who she hurt.”
Her eyes flashed at me, and I retreated back to the bedside.
Dafyd stood beside the bed for a long moment, his fist tight around the Stone. He looked first at the King, his chest shuddering, blood seeping from his wound, soaking the sheets around him. Then he looked at his mother, slumped against the foot of the bed, her face damp, contorted in pain.
“Dafyd,” the magus urged him.
He bent toward the King, lowering the Stone to the wound on his chest. When he glanced at Bream, their eyes met, and the soldier nodded, his face showing something that looked like pride.
The Stone began to glow as it neared the wounded man. Dafyd closed his eyes—
—and didn’t see the King reach up and grasp his wrist, pushing his hand away.
Dafyd’s eyes flashed open.
“Stop,” the King muttered, in a voice so weak it was difficult to hear.
Dafyd struggled against his grip, trying to push the Stone back toward him.
“Stop,” the King ordered again, and this time his voice resonated with a trace of its former power. “Your mother.”
“Your Majesty,” Bream said, starting forward.
The magus grasped his shoulder, stopping him.
Tears streamed down Dafyd’s face.
The King’s grip on Dafyd’s hand loosened, and his arm fell heavily to his side. “Your mother …”
Dafyd bit his lower lip and rose to his feet. Before he turned away, though, he took the King’s hand in his own and squeezed it gently.
“Leave him,” the magus said to Bream. “It’s what the King wants. It’s what he always wanted, to save the woman he loves.”
As Dafyd knelt beside his mother, the glow of the Sunstone flickered off her face. Cora Took was standing next to Bream, completely rapt with what she was watching, her gun at her side.
I took a careful step back and glanced at David. He was craning his neck to watch as Dafyd pressed the stone into his mother’s wound.
She gasped as the stone touched her, and bucked like David in the midst of a seizure, her body snapping and flailing.
And then the movement stopped, and she opened her eyes.
Dafyd lifted the Stone away.
“Dafyd?” she whispered.
I glanced back at David, wanting to urge him to run, but when I saw the expression on his face, the words died on my lips. His eyes wide, he was watching Dafyd and his mother as they embraced, as the Sunstone fell with a barely perceptible clatter to the floor.
Jacqui.
Cora was still watching Dafyd and his mother.
I took another step back. Neither Cora nor Pilbream seemed to notice.
But Pilbream wasn’t looking at Dafyd: he was looking at the wizened, festering body next to the still form of the King.
“Lazarus?” he whispered, his horror plain.
The old man didn’t speak: he seemed to radiate weakness and pain, his face contorted in agony, his hand fallen over the book where I had dropped it beside him.
“Lazarus, what has happened to you?”
“He’s just an old man now, Reg.”
Bream’s eyes darted around the room, taking in the sores on Took’s body, the symbols written on the floor. He approached the bed and dropped to his knees.
“Lazarus, can you hear me?”
Cora flinched when she noticed me still beside the bed, as if she had forgotten that I was there. Her fingers tensed on the gun, but it remained at her side.
I should have told David to run while she was distracted.
By what seemed to be sheer force of will, the old man lifted his hand from his side and took Pilbream’s in his own. Pilbream turned back to Cora. His eyes were bright with tears.
“Did you do this to him?” he asked, his voice low.
“It was all part of the plan,” she said, keeping her voice light with affection. She sounded like she had in the coffee shop, when she’d kept me off guard long enough to lure me here.
“What plan?” he said, seething. He lowered Took’s hand gently to the bed and stood up.
She took a step back. “The plan we talked about.”
He moved toward her, and I could see his fingers tightening on the hilt of his sword. “You told me we would be together. You told me we would go somewhere, and never have to worry about him.”
“Yes,” she said, taking another step backward.
“You never told me about this.” He followed her retreat.
“And what—” she asked, her voice suddenly sharp, “what would you have done differently?”
“I never would have hurt him,” he said. “Not after everything he did for me. I would have refused.”
She laughed. “You’ve never said no to me.”
His sword flashed.
I didn’t think it had even touched her, but seconds later a thin seam opened across her throat, widening as blood spurted from it. She rocked back on her heels, and I expected her to fall.
Instead, a faint glow seemed to come from the centre of her chest, just below the neckline of her blouse, a glow that intensified as I watched until it was almost blindingly bright.
And as quickly as it ha
d opened, the slash across her throat closed, like a zipper shutting. The glow faded, leaving her neck pale and unmarked.
She smiled, and raised the gun.
Pilbream stared at her, not understanding, until she reached with her free hand and drew her pendant out from under her blouse, holding it toward him, toward us. It was an identical match to the Sunstone from the book, the amulet that Dafyd had used to heal his mother.
“I don’t die easily, Reg,” she said coldly. “Though that did take a lot out of me. Keeping me alive is one thing, but healing me …” She looked at the Stone, seeming pleased. “I wasn’t sure it would work. This opens new worlds of possibilities. New worlds, Reg. But not for you.”
I saw the hole open in his forehead, saw his body snap backward, before I heard the shot, the thunder that seemed to fill the world. It echoed in the room as Pilbream’s body crashed to the floor.
“David, run!” I screamed, turning toward the door myself, catching his eye.
Cora Took spun and fired.
The bullet caught me as I began to run, too. It should have hit me in the chest but instead hit me in the left side, just below my ribs. It felt like a punch, and I clutched myself, surprised at the burst of searing pain, the sudden disorientation. Glancing down, I saw my blood pouring out of the hole.
“This is one hell of a mess I’m going to have to clean up, Chris,” she said. “First things first, though.”
She took off after David.
I tried to go after her. I tried to get my feet to move, but I couldn’t.
As I started to fall I caught myself on the edge of Took’s bed, leaving bloody red handprints on the grey sheets, slowing myself enough that I slumped to the floor beside Pilbream’s body.
I tried to fight, tried in vain to pull myself back to my feet.
“Son?”
The voice was a creaky whisper, and I turned to it. To Took.
“Is that your son?” he asked, a question he had asked minutes before.
I nodded, and the movement made me even dizzier. “Yes,” I managed.
“Good,” he said. “Lighter.”
Bedtime Story Page 47