“But … she talks about her alimony.”
“She doesn’t get alimony,” said Stone—or Peter, apparently. “We’re still married. But her father is still one of the top mucky-mucks in the Department of Agriculture—he’s really a first-rate Sapkin—and her mother inherited her father’s land in northern Virginia, and sold off some nice chunks of it as they were building up Tysons Corner into a shopping mecca, so her family is awash in dough. Her ‘alimony’ is checks from mommy and daddy.”
Danny had to laugh. “She really is a trickster. I never had a clue.”
“Well, I can tell you, our lives would have been very different if there had been any way to know that she was a gatemage instead of a drekka. She always said she was, but how could anyone believe her? She was so showy and dramatic, we all believed it was part of a pose.”
“But you married her.”
“I always talked with her as if she were a gatemage. I joined her fantasy, as I supposed. And come on, Danny, until you came along it was a fantasy. She had no more idea she was a gatemage than anyone else. We’d been married no more than a year when she realized that I didn’t really believe that she was a gatemage. That I was sort of humoring her. I didn’t mean to let on—I had always talked as if it were true, and I made no slip—but you know how gatemages are. You can read meanings in human speech or facial expressions that no else can see. Part of the language gift, maybe. Sometimes it makes me wonder if gatemagery isn’t right next door to manmagery. Anyway, she realized that I was only playing along, and it really hurt her, and she began spending less and less time at home, until I realized she was … gone. I’m telling you more than I should. But if you’re going to pin your whole plan on her being reliable…”
Danny nodded. “I appreciate your concern. But remember, we gatemages are tricksters and con men, too. She’ll bring off the only thing I really need her for—getting me enrolled in high school, setting me up in a cheap rented house with an allowance for necessities, and then popping in when I need to show off my flamboyant aunt.”
Stone smiled. “Oh, you gatemages aren’t the only tricksters.”
“Really?” asked Danny.
“Here you were, a genuine gatemage. And there I was, the man who still loves that infuriating woman. I thought, Maybe she really is a gatemage. I could never have gotten her to come here to see the gates you made—she now pretends to be allergic to the pollen of the plants I grow—but one day when she was visiting with her parents in Fairfax, I talked to her on the phone and reminisced a little about the restaurant Dona Flor, which used to be our favorite place to eat—they had risolli with a habanero sauce that could take the top of your head off—and she was as predictable as the tides. She drove off out Wisconsin where I knew you had some gates and…”
“And she was a gatemage after all.”
“The real thing. It’s not as if I ever said she wasn’t!” said Stone, as defensively as if Veevee were in the room. “And she’d have killed me if she’d known I planned it. ‘Trying to trap me into revealing that I couldn’t see a gate that you knew was there, is that it?’ ”
His imitation of Veevee was dead on, and Danny laughed.
“But I wasn’t testing her, I was giving her an opportunity. I wanted it to be true—I always did. I knew it was an affinity that couldn’t be tested as long as there were no gates in the world, unless she was a Pathsister or Gatemother herself, which was hardly likely. You are hardly likely, Danny. But I never said she couldn’t be a gatemage.”
“You were agnostic.”
“Agnostic but hopeful,” said Stone. “Or maybe … wistful.”
“And your wist came true,” said Danny with a grin.
“Though I’ll bet Leslie wasn’t thrilled when Veevee showed up.”
“I get the feeling that … well, to put it unkindly,” said Danny, “you were second choice.”
“She hadn’t met me when she had her fling with Marion,” said Stone. “And Marion flat out refused to accept her claim of gatemagery. He’s a stonemage, for heaven’s sake, and a geologist. He’s not going to willingly live inside someone else’s dream. And how could Veevee ever love or live with a man who didn’t at least try to believe? If only she didn’t have such a keen eye for pretense herself,” said Stone. “I’d still be happy to have her with me. But the final break was when she tested me. ‘Come to Florida,’ she said. ‘If you love me, get out of this miserable town and come to Naples.’
“But I couldn’t leave my work here.” Stone sighed. “America and a lot of the rest of the world come to DC. This is the place where my pollen can gather in the Orphan mages. The Families know about me, of course, but they don’t care—to them Orphans are no better or more interesting than drowthers. I’ve found nearly a hundred mages since I’ve lived here. How many would I have found in Naples, Florida? At best, a handful of old coots who are way too old to train.”
“You still love her.”
“Everybody still loves her,” said Stone. “Even the people who hate her—that’s why she makes them so angry. I bet Marion still thinks of her.”
“The way I think of Lana?”
“Well, no,” said Stone. “Veevee’s not that kind of woman, if you know what I mean. More like … Marion still wishes he could have lived inside her dream. And now that it turns out it wasn’t just a dream, she really is a gatemage, you can imagine how that must make him wonder and regret—even though he loves Leslie like crazy. Might-have-beens are a bitch.”
To Danny it was as if Stone had just unlocked everybody’s diary and he felt like a sneak for knowing so much about Marion’s and Leslie’s and Veevee’s past. And yet it was a relief to know.
“I’m glad you told me all this,” said Danny.
“I always kind of thought you knew. That somebody would have explained. But now that I’m saying this, it’s such a ridiculous idea. Which of them would ever see the need to explain any of this to you? Not one of them is proud of their behavior. Well, Veevee is, but she’s not an explainer.”
“She and I are doing our best to explain gatemagery.”
“Oh, come on,” said Stone. “She and you are trying to invent gatemagery. The best her research and yours can do is give you clues and hints and point you in interesting directions.”
“We’ve made some progress,” said Danny.
“Know how to make a Great Gate yet?” asked Stone.
“Not a clue,” said Danny.
“Keep it that way,” said Stone. “I don’t want the Gate Thief to strip you and make a drekka out of you.”
“At least then I’d be safe from the Families,” said Danny.
“Don’t count on it,” said Stone. “They’d assume it was a gatemage’s trickery and kill you anyway, just to be sure.”
“Yeah,” said Danny ruefully. “They would.”
“I’m not going to put you in touch with counterfeiters and crooks who sell fake i.d.s,” said Stone. “In the end, those things can always be tracked down and then where would you be? But I’ve helped other fugitives from Families get more-or-less legitimate identities, and a gatemage like you should be able to get one that’s a lot realer than usual, without having to bribe half as many people.”
After Stone explained the system and identified a likely county that hadn’t fully computerized their old records, it took only an hour for Danny to learn the ins and outs of record keeping in West Jefferson, North Carolina, which Stone had chosen as his new birthplace. Inserting his birth into the records wasn’t hard, so that when he and Veevee showed up asking for a duplicate, while Veevee shed a tear for her dear dead sister and brother-in-law, Danny’s fictitious parents, they got a copy of the birth certificate with no trouble.
Stone looked at the birth certificate and made a face. “Why didn’t you use ‘Silverman’ as your last name?”
“In Ashe County, North Carolina? That’s not going to be a believable name.”
“But ‘Danny Stone’? I’m flattered, but—”
> “It’s the one I thought of while I was in the records room,” said Danny. “Since it’s not really your name, I didn’t think you’d mind. And since I didn’t use ‘Von Roth,’ I figured Marion and Leslie would be fine with any other name I chose that would be believable in Ashe County.”
The Social Security number was a little trickier. There was a lot more information coded into the number than most people suspected. But Stone had a Westilian friend in the system who could pluck out whatever unused numbers met the paradigms—Social Security numbers of children who had died without ever having anything added to their records in the system. Attaching Danny’s pertinent information to one of the numbers took very little time.
Then there was the matter of recording false childhood immunization records, but that was another job that a gatemage could do after hours in the office of a pediatrician who had been in the trade in the same town for a long time.
As for Danny’s actual immunizations, Stone insisted that he owed it to the other children to actually get the shots and vaccinations.
“I can always go through a gate and heal myself whenever I start to feel sick.”
“I thought you were educated, Danny,” said Stone. “Don’t you know you can be contagious for days before any symptoms show up?”
The fact is Danny didn’t want anyone poking him with needles. It had never happened to him and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like it.
“Danny,” said Stone, “it’s just a matter of distraction. Wiggle your toes while they’re giving you the shots. Concentrate on that, and the needles themselves won’t bother you.”
As usual, Stone was right. But toe-wiggling did nothing for the sore arms. And Stone wouldn’t let him go through a gate until he was sure the immunizations had had time to work. “If you ‘heal’ your body by gate before the injections have a chance to stimulate the immune system, then the shots will have been for nothing. Think, Danny. Don’t be such an adolescent.”
I’m going to high school, Danny wanted to say. But he knew that Stone was right. He could not afford to be self-indulgent the way other teenagers could. He might be planning to live among drowthers, but he was not a drowther, and he could not afford to forget it.
When he was ready, Danny made a public gate between the attic room where he had slept at Stone’s house and a spot against a wall in Veevee’s condo. He doubted they’d discover it by accident, so at some point, when he judged it might be a good idea, he’d tell them about it.
Veevee was marvelous as his aunt who was moving to Buena Vista to explore opening up a small clothing factory. “For certain boutique clients in New York and L.A.,” she explained, “who must be able to tell their customers that the clothing is made in America by seamstresses who are paid a fair wage with full benefits. Though it will take time to assemble the funding, you understand. And since this will be my most stable address, poor Danny and I agreed that this is where he should live.” The principal seemed happy to know that there might actually be a new employer in town; and in the meantime, Veevee’s story would have no impact on Danny’s desired image as a not-rich kid who lived pretty much alone in a semi-crummy house. If anyone asked about his aunt’s plans to start a clothing factory, he’d simply roll his eyes as if there was little truth in it, or she was crazy, or whatever teenagers assumed.
Danny intended to be a good student, but not speak up much in class; to dress decently but not too well; to be a little wild, but not dangerously so; to be funny but never the class clown. He might try out for the school play. He knew that boys were always at a premium, and he figured that a con man like him would be a decent actor. He knew he could memorize the lines. There’d be girls in the cast.
He had it all planned out.
18
THE FATHER OF TRICK
The boy called Oath had walked at nine months of age, having never spent much time upon his knees, as King Prayard often pointed out. He was talking in clear sentences at fourteen months. It was far too soon to look for signs of any affinity, but this was Iceway, and so every time the boy even glanced at water it was taken for a token of things to come. The King had carried him upon his shoulders, taken him to councils, shown him off before ambassadors, flaunted him especially before the representatives of Gray.
But then, as Bexoi’s belly began to grow with yet another child, a strange thing happened. The King became solicitous of Bexoi and spent more time with her. He wasn’t often seeking out Prince Oath. And though the tot was only sixteen months of age, he felt the change; he felt it as a loss. “Where is Papa?” he would ask. And his nurses would answer, “He’s the King, and he must do his work.”
But in truth King Prayard was not working, he was rubbing salves into the tight-stretched skin of Bexoi’s belly, hearing her say, “This is the child you put inside me on purpose, this is the child that will be the product of your love, and not your contempt.”
“Don’t taunt me with my old mistakes,” King Prayard murmured.
“I’m celebrating our newfound love,” said Bexoi. “Politics are finally gone. This will not be a political child.”
“I hope that she’s a girl,” he said, “and that she looks like you.”
“So you can marry her off to some foreign king, and we’ll never see her again?”
“But a boy will be a rival to Oath,” said Prayard.
“A boy will be a protection for the kingdom,” said Bexoi. “This boy that is so ripe that in two months he’ll burst forth into the world, he will step behind Prince Oath in every way, ready at a moment’s notice to take his place, if something dreadful were to happen to his brother.”
“You fear your nephew Frostinch, don’t you?” asked King Prayard.
“Your heir will have so many enemies. Two sons will serve the kingdom better than one. Look what happened to the children of your concubine.”
“You know I never think of her,” said Prayard, “and yet you grieve me by mentioning her again and again.”
“I think of how she disappeared so tragically, and her sons—you can never have too many sons.”
Wad heard all of this. He heard, and knew that Bexoi knew he heard. These were subtle threats against the boy that she called Oath and he called Trick. Yet what could he do? He was Wad the kitchen boy, Wad the Squirrel, Wad the silent roamer and runner of errands; now that Hull was gone he had become less than nothing, barely tolerated in the kitchen, and not endured at all anywhere else. If he was found in the stables they thrust him out as if his presence would poison the horses; if he was found in the armory, he was treated as if he would dull the blades of all the swords.
How could such a one be granted even a moment in the presence of the Prince?
But Wad the Gatefather, Wad the Man in the Tree, Wad the lover of a queen and warden of three royal prisoners, the Wad that no one knew of but Bexoi herself—how could he be prevented?
So while she lay there, manipulating the King’s affections, Wad was listening, yes, with half an ear, opening the tiniest of gates between his ear and her chamber so he heard without having to see what passed between Prayard and her, he also kept a tryst of another sort.
He gated little Trick to a garret room that Wad had set up as a child’s playroom—not overpopulated with bright-colored toys, as fools think children want their world to be, but thick with dust and ancient furniture and trunks and weapons and other forgotten detritus of bygone kings and queens and stewards and princes, where there are nooks and dens and lofty places and deep but tiny dungeons to explore. Here he and Trick would play at hide and seek, or Wad would let the toddler dress him up in dusty old clothes, or they would play with toy soldiers and carts and carriages.
“I will always call you Trick,” Wad told the boy, “because it’s a trick on everybody when we play together. You can’t tell anyone or I’ll be sent away. You must pretend that you don’t see me when you’re with your nurses or your mother or the King. Pretend that I’m invisible. Because I am.”
And the
n he winked out of existence in one spot, and then winked back a few feet off, and Trick clapped his hands and laughed and shrieked.
Meanwhile, back in his nursery, a lifesize wooden baby doll pretended to be young Oath, the well-tended Prince, asleep in his high-sided bed, the one that kept him safe—but also quite invisible to his lazy nurses, who dozed or gossiped or did needlework while supposedly he slept. When, even after an hour’s nap, he seemed fitful and tired as if he hadn’t slept at all, they took it as a sign that he missed his father the King, never realizing that the father he was missing was the much-despised kitchen boy whose presence in Nassassa no one understood.
Sometimes, though, Trick fell asleep while he was with Wad in their secret garret playroom. Then his father would sit and look at him, and whisper to him silently: Your mother is a monster of ambition; your father a monster of cruelty for her sake. She plots against you. She plots your death. But I will keep you safe. She will know that she dares not harm you, for the consequence would be too dire.
Deep inside himself, Wad felt the answering echoes of hundreds of other minds. Usually they were a sea of turmoil, and for long years he had not understood what they were, thinking them to be a part of himself. Now, however, he knew this much: They had memories that could not be his own. They had wills that would not choose what he had chosen, and when he acted in a way that distressed them, any of them, they’d protest, a sort of indigestion in his mind. How he came to have such madnesses within his mind he could not guess, but he must live with them, he knew. They were powerless to harm him.
When it came to Trick, however, they were of one mind and heart with him. He is your son, they echoed, when he said, He is my son. You must protect him now because that’s what a father does. You must die for him, kill for him. Whoever puts the boy in danger, even if it is his very mother, is your enemy. If you can’t control the woman, she must die.
The Lost Gate Page 30