Alcatraz vs. the Shattered Lens (11 page)

"I'm tired of you wavering back and forth, Alcatraz,” she said. "Shattering Glass! Half the time, you act like you’re panicked by the idea of being in charge, then the other half the time you just take control!”

"I . . . er . . . well . . .”

"And the other half the time you babble incoherently!”

“I like babbling!" I exclaimed. (I'm not sure why.)

"Besides, that sounds like some Aydee math. Three halves?"

She eyed me.

"Yes, you're right about me," I said. “Sometimes, this all feels like a game. It twists my head in knots to think of the things I've been through, the things that have become part of my life. I get carried away with it all, with what everyone expects of me just because of my name.

"But I've already decided I want to lead. I decided it months ago. I want to be a hero; I want to be a leader. But that doesn't mean I want to be a
king
! When I actually stop to think about it, I realize how insane it is."

"Then don't stop to think," Bastille said. “I don’t see why it should be so hard. Not thinking seems to be one of your specialties."

I grimaced. "The things you say to me don’t help either, Bastille. Every time I think that I'm starting to do well, I get a faceful of insults from you. And I can never tell if I deserve them or not!"

She narrowed her eyes further, finger pressed my sternum. I cringed, preparing for the storm.

"I like you," she said.

I blinked, righting myself. "What?"

"I. Like. You. So I insult you."

I scratched at my head. ".drawkcab ecnetnes a epyt ot dluow ti sa esnes hcum sa tuoba sekam taht ,ellitsaB"

She scowled at me, lowering her hand. "If you don't understand, I'm not going to explain it to you."

Boys, welcome to the wonderful world of talking to women about their feelings. As a handy primer, here are a few things you should know:

1) Women have feelings.

2) You will spend the next seventy years or so trying to guess what they're feeling and why.

3) You will be wrong most of the time.

4) I like French fries.

That's about all the help I can give you, I'm afraid. If it's any consolation, at least the women in
your
life don't have anger-management issues and a tendency to carry around five-foot-long magical swords.

"Look," Bastille said. "It's not important. What's important is saving Mokia. If you didn't notice, that was my
sister
who just got towed away unconscious. I’m not going to let the kingdom fall while she’s out."

"But shouldn't a Mokian be king?”

"You are Mokian," Bastille said. “And Nalhallan, and Fracois, and Unkulu. You're a Smedry - you're considered a citizen of all kingdoms. Besides, you
do
have Mokian blood in you. The Smedry line and the Mokian royal line has often intermixed. It wasn't odd for your uncle Millhaven to marry a Mokian. His wife is a third cousin of Mallo’s, and your great-great-grandfather was the son of a Mokian prince."

I blinked. Bastille, it should be noted, rarely shows her princessly nature. She has a tendency to rip up anything pink, her singing sounds remarkably like the sound produced when you drop a rock on the tail of a wildebeest, and the last time a sweet flock of forest animals showed up and tried to help her clean, she chased them for the better part of an hour swinging her sword and cursing like a sailor.

But she
does
think like a king's daughter sometimes. And she was force-fed all kinds of princessly information as a child, including long, boring lists of royal family trees. She knows which prince married which hypercountess and which superduke is cousins with which earl.

Yes. In the Free Kingdoms, we have royal titles like superdukes and hypercountesses. It's complicated.

"So . . . I really
am
in the royal line," I said, shocked.

"Of course you are. You're a Smedry - you're related to three quarters of the kings and queens out there."

"But not you, right?"

"What? No. Not in any important way. We might be fourteenth, upside-down übercousins or something."

I eyed her, trying to figure out what the gak an "upside-down übercousin" was. Sounded like the kind of drink a kid my age wasn't allowed to order.

It should be stressed that Bastille and I are certainly
not
directly related. At least, we weren't at that point.

"All right," I said. "But I don't know anything about running a war."

"Fortunately, I do. Troop morale and logistics were part of my training as a princess, and I have practice with battlefield tactics as part of my Crystin training."

"Great! You can take over for me, then!”

She shook her head, eyes going wide, face getting a little white. "Don't be stoopid.”

"Er, why not?"

As I think about it, that was kind of a stoopid answer, which was fitting, if you think about it. Me, I try not to think about anything. Oooh . . . shiny . . .

Bastille grimaced. "You need to ask? I’m not what this people need. I'm not inspiring.
You
are. You’re a king. I’m a general. They're different, different sets of skills.” She nodded toward the Mokian soldiers standing atop the walls. A lot of them didn't look much like warriors. Oh, they had war paint and spears. But not many of them were muscular.

"Mokia is a kingdom of scholars and craftspeople, Alcatraz,” Bastille said softly. "Why do you think the Librarians attacked here first? They've been besieged for months now, their country at war for years. Many of the trained soldiers have already been knocked unconscious or killed. Do you have any idea what the loss of both the king and queen could mean? They're demoralized, wounded, and beaten down."

She lifted her finger, tapping me in the chest again. "They need someone to lead them. They need someone
spectacular
, someone miraculous. Someone who can keep them fighting for just a little longer, until your grandfather arrives with help."

“And, uh, that someone is me?"

"Yes," she said, almost grudgingly. "I told you a few months back that I believed in you. Well, I do. I believe in what you can be when you're confident. Not when you're
arrogant
, but when you're confident. When you decide to do something, really decide, you do amazing things. I wish you could be that person a little more often."

I scratched my head. "I think that person is a lie, Bastille. I'm not confident. I just get lucky."

"You get lucky a lot. Particularly when we really need it. You saved your father, you got the Sands back, you rescued the kings."

"That last one was mostly you," I said with a grimace.

"The idea that got us free was yours,” she said, "and you spotted Archedis."

I shrugged. "It seems that when I get desperate, my mind works better. I'm not sure if that's something to be proud of or not."

"Well, it's what we've got,” Bastille said, "so we're going to work with it. I'll organize the troops.
You
be confident, give the Mokians the sense that someone’s in charge. Together, we'll hold this city together until the old Smedry gets here."

"He'll probably be late, you know.”

"Oh, I'm certain he will be," Bastille said...The question isn't, 'Will he be late?' The question is, 'How late is he going to be?’"

I nodded grimly.

"You ready to be a king?” she asked.

I hesitated just briefly. “Yes.”

"Good," she said, spinning as screams erupted from the center of the city. "Because I think another group of Librarians just tunneled in.”

Don’t yawn.

I shouldn’t have agreed to be king. If you’ve been following these books, you know that my early experiences set me up to fail. Being a celebrity made me think that I was much more important than I really was, and success led me to take more responsibility than I should have. That all meant I fell really far when I did fall.

You yawing yet? No? Good. You most definitely
don’t
want to part your lips, suck in that sweet air, and feel the relaxing release as you stretch and let your mouth open wide. You itch to do it; you’ve been reading for a while now, and you’re getting a little groggy. But don’t yawn. Really, don’t do it.

Accepting the crown of Mokia, if even for a short time, was the culminating peak of my spiral to fame. The events of this siege became infamous. In fact, I didn’t realize what I'd done until long afterward. (After leaving Mokia, after all, I returned to the Hushlands.)

Some Hushlanders think we yawn to increase oxygen to the brain, but researchers have recently discounted this theory. In this case, they're right. In the Free Kingdoms, it's been known for a long time that yawns frighten away bloogynaughts. You know what bloogynaughts are, don’t you? They're those things that sneak up on people while they're reading books, lurking just behind them, watching them, edging closer and closer until they're right there. Behind you. Breathing on your neck. About ready to grab you. A yawn would scare it away. If only you could yawn . . .

Why did I agree to be king? I should have said no. And yet I didn't. I let them make me king. I let Bastille persuade me. I let them set me up high.

Why? Well, perhaps for the same reason that – when reading the paragraphs above - you had a powerful urge to yawn or even glance over your shoulder. Talk about something long enough, and people will start thinking about it. It's kind of like a twisted, funky kind of mind control. Bastille was a princess, my family had once held thrones, and I was related distantly to pretty much every monarch in the Free Kingdoms. I guess I wanted to feel what it was like to be king.

(In the end, I discovered that being a king feels pretty much like being a regular person, only people shoot at you more often.)

Bastille and I charged through the city, racing toward the screams. Mokian men and women threw down the things they had been working on and rallied to the breach. Bastille slipped her sunglasses on, and I nodded to her. She took off at a much faster speed, leaving me behind as she used her enhanced Crystin speed to dart toward the disturbance.

I ran much more slowly, but I made a fair showing of it. The last half a year or so had been very good for my constitution. If you want to practice for a footrace, I'd highly recommend the Alcatraz Smedry training regimen. It involves being chased by Librarians, half-metal monsters, evil apparitions, sentient romance novels, fallen Knights of Crystallia, and the occasional evil chicken named Moe. Our success rate in training footrace winners is 95 percent. Unfortunately, our survival rate is about 5 percent, so it kind of balances everything out.

A group of Mokians filled in around me, running at my same speed. At first I thought they were joining me to rush to the scene of the disturbance. However, they were keeping too close. I realized with shock that they were an honor guard, of the type that run around protecting kings and saying, "Who dares disturb the king?" and stuff like that. That made me feel important.

Even running as fast as we could, we arrived too late to help with the fighting. The Librarians had come out of a large, gopher-hole-like pit in the ground of a large green field near what I'd later learn was Mokian Royal University. Some bodies lay on the ground, and it made my stomach twist to see how many were Mokian. At least they weren’t dead. Of course, being in a coma was even worse, in many ways.

You may be shocked at how "civilized" war is out in the Free Kingdoms. However, realize that they do what they do for a reason. If the Librarians could capture Tuki Tuki, they could get the antidote for the sleeping sickness – and they'd get nearly their entire army back to keep fighting, moving inward, to conquer more of the Free Kingdoms. It made sense for the Librarians to encourage the use of the coma-guns and coma-spears.

This latest group of Librarian infiltrators, strangely, looked like they'd surrendered soon after climbing out of the hole. Why hadn’t they fought longer? They stood with their hands up, surrounded by ragged Mokian fighters. Bastille watched nearby, arms folded, looking dissatisfied. Likely because she hadn't gotten a chance to stab anyone.

The Mokians should have been happy to have won the skirmish so easily. But most of them just looked exhausted. The field was lit by torches on long poles rammed into the ground, and boulders still struck the dome protecting the city. Each one seemed to crack it a little bit more.

“We can't hold out!" said one of the spear-wielding Mokians. "Look! They know they can surrender if we rally to fight them. There are so many of them that they're content to lose an entire team to knock out a few of us."

"It's probably a distraction," another soldier said. "They're digging in other places too."

"They're going to overrun us."

"We've lost."

“We -"

"Stop!" Bastille bellowed, waving her arms and getting their attention. "
Stop being stupid!
" She folded her arms, as if that was all she intended to say. Which, knowing Bastille, might just be the case.

"We
haven't
lost," I said, stepping forward. “We can win. We just need to hold out a little longer.”

"We can't!" one of the soldiers said. “There are only a few thousand of us left. There aren't enough people to patrol the streets to look for tunnelers. Most of us have been awake for three days straight!”

“And so you'd give up?" I demanded, looking at them. "That's how they win. By making us give up. I’ve
lived
in Librarian lands. They don't win because they conquer, they win because they make people stop caring, stop wondering. They'll tire you out, then feed you lies until you start repeating them, if only because it's too hard to keep arguing.”

I looked around at the men and women in their islander wraps, holding spears that burned. They seemed ashamed. The field was shockingly quiet; even the captive Librarians didn't say anything.

"This is how they win," I repeated. ..They
need
you to give in. They
have to
make you stop fighting. They don't rule the Hushlands with chains, fire, and oppression. They rule it with comfort, leisure, and easy lies. It’s easy to accept the normal and avoid thinking about the difficult and the strange. Life can be so much simpler if you stop dreaming.

"But
that
is how we defeat them. They can never win, so long as we refuse to believe in their lies. Even if they take Tuki Tuki, even if Mokia falls, even if
a
l
l
of the Free Kingdoms become theirs. They will never win so long as we refuse to believe. Don't give up, and you will not lose. I promise you that."

Around me, the Mokians began to nod. Several even smiled, holding their spears more certainly.

"But what will we do?" a female warrior asked. "How will we survive?"

"My grandfather is coming," I said. "We just have to last a little longer. I'll talk to my counselors . . ." I hesitated. "Er, I have counselors, don't I?"

"We're right here, Your Majesty,” a voice said. I glanced backward, to where three Mokians stood in official-looking wraps, wearing small, colorful caps on their heads. I vaguely remembered them joining me as I ran for the disturbance.

"Great," I said. "I'll talk to my counselors, and we'll figure something out. You soldiers, your job is to keep
hoping
. Don't give up. Don't let them win your hearts, even if they look like they'll win the city."