Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (29 page)

She looked up at the moon. Earth only had one moon, like Prosperion. She’d learned in school that some planets had lots. Even hundreds and hundreds of them. It didn’t matter that Earth only had one, though. Pernie still hadn’t figured out how to tell when morning would come with it. If Sophia Hayworth stopped trying to be her guardian all the time, she might get out more and find out. She didn’t know precisely how long she’d been working on deactivating the window alarm, though. It might be closer to morning than she thought.

“Come on,” urged the man. “It doesn’t matter how far. Wherever you want, I’ll take you there. We can even get pizza on the way. Or ice cream. Whatever you want.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Pernie said, “but I want to go downtown. Where the buildings are broken from the Hostiles. Will you take me there?”

“Sure,” he said.

Pernie slowed to a walk. “Do you know where the dead ones are?”

He frowned for the barest moment. Pernie saw it in the glow of the streetlight a few yards up ahead. She started to run again, but then he said, “Oh, yeah. Sure I do. Whole piles of them.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I just hadn’t been over to look at them in a while. Not since, you know, they all died and all.” He stopped his vehicle and pushed open the door. He slid over to the far side of the seat. “Hop in. I know the perfect place.”

Pernie grinned. She’d just known she was going to see a Hostile tonight. She was very glad she hadn’t given up on trying to cut through the paneling on the wall.

She climbed into the vehicle and waited for the door to close.

“You have to pull that thing shut,” he said. “My poor van is shot to hell. Motor’s been dead on that side for ten years.”

“Who shot it?” Pernie asked. “Was it the Hostiles?” She felt stupid the moment she asked it. The Hostile war hadn’t been over for even two years yet, so it couldn’t have been ten.

“I’m Marty, but everyone calls me Zest,” he said. “What’s your name?”

He didn’t sound like he thought she was stupid like a lot of other grown-ups did. That was good. She pulled the door closed as she said, “I’m Pernie. What does Zest stand for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He tapped in a destination on the van’s console.

“Sophia won’t let me learn to drive,” Pernie said. “She says I can’t have my own car until I am sixteen.”

“Yeah, that’s not very fair,” he said as the van lurched into motion. Soon they were moving right along.

Pernie looked out the window as they drove. She liked having the wind blowing her hair again. The windows on the bus only came down halfway, and it never went fast enough to make much wind. It made her think of Knot again.

The man wasn’t very talkative, so Pernie contented herself with watching the buildings going by. Soon the tall buildings were climbing toward the stars, or at least what few stars there were. Pernie thought that Earth didn’t have half as many as Prosperion did. Maybe less than half. Sophia said it was light pollution, but Pernie wasn’t sure that made any sense.

They wound their way through a few blocks of downtown, and Pernie found herself growing more and more eager to see a dead Hostile.

“So how big is the biggest one?” she asked.

“Biggest what?” he said.

“Hostile. How big is the biggest Hostile corpse? Or are they just shells, and the Hostiles are dead inside?”

“Oh, uh ….” He glanced into the monitor that showed the street behind him, then looked out the windows on either side. She thought he looked very nervous doing it. “Very big. Bigger than the van.” She thought he sounded nervous, too. It was kind of silly for a grown man to be afraid of a dead Hostile, but Pernie was polite enough not to say anything.

She wanted to tell him that Master Altin killed Hostiles all by himself, and that she had magic and would protect them, too, if she had to. But she knew that she actually couldn’t because of the promise she’d made to Tytamon and Djoveeve. “No casting magic, no matter what,” Djoveeve had said. “You promised. And you know what a promise is from the Sava’an’Lansom.”

Pernie did. The Sava’an’Lansom couldn’t tell a lie. Djoveeve said that the protector of the High Seat had to be absolutely trustworthy, or the whole world would fall apart. She said that trust was the glue of civilization. Pernie didn’t know about all that, though, and she’d said as much. That’s when Djoveeve got her good.

“You said you want to marry your Master Altin one day,” Djoveeve had said. “Marriage is a promise, don’t you know?”

Pernie hadn’t ever thought of it like that before.

“It is,” the ancient old assassin had pressed. “It is a promise to be faithful until your dying day. A promise is not something to enter into lightly, child. And it’s all the more important for you. When you become Sava’an’Lansom, your promises must be stronger than your steel. When you promise to protect, when you promise to kill, there must never be a doubt in anyone’s mind. Ever. That is how the Keeper of the High Seat on String, and the Royal Assassin in your lands of Kurr, help hold the peace. It is their promise of death that makes the knot of peace between us, the humans and the elves. You, little Sava, must never make promises lightly. One day, your promise might hold together everything.”

So Pernie had promised not to use her magic. Which was fine. Especially here on Earth. Nobody else had magic anyway. Including a dead Hostile.

They turned up another street and were now driving toward the mountains. Pernie saw that they were leaving the tall buildings behind.

“Hey,” she said. “The Hostiles are back there where the broken buildings are.”

“I know a better place,” he said. “A great big one that crashed into the trees.”

He didn’t look scared anymore, and Pernie thought he might be running away. She didn’t want to call him a coward, though, because that would not be polite. His brain did come from the bottom of the basket, after all.

“Well, you said you would take me to the broken buildings,” she said. “And that’s where I want to go. So take me back like you said you would.”

“We’re going to see the big one way up in the trees.”

Pernie frowned at him. He looked back at her only briefly, flashed a flat smile, and looked back out again.

“Speed seven,” he said. Pernie knew he was talking to the car.

“Well, I don’t want to see the big one,” she said. “So if you are afraid to go to where there are lots of smaller ones, then you can just let me go myself. Take me back.”

“Just wait,” he said. “You’ll like this one.”

“Take me back,” she said again. She was getting mad.

“No, be patient. I told you there is a big one up here.” He was staring straight out the windshield now. “Window up—passenger front,” he said. Pernie’s elbow had been resting on the window frame, and the glass suddenly rising startled her.

“Hey,” she said. “Put that down. And take me back right now.”

“No.” He spun on her. “Listen, brat, you’re going to see the one up here in the trees. You’re going to like it, and that’s how it is. So shut up before I make you shut up.” He turned back and leaned over the backseat. He pulled out a roll of something silvery. He unwound a length of it, which looked like parchment made of very thin steel. “Give me your hands,” he said.

“No. Let me out.”

He snatched her by the wrist and tried to wrap her arm up in the crinkling metal parchment that he held.

She kicked him in the face, twice rapid-fire, then a third time in the throat. He made a gasping sound, and his head rebounded off the window on his side of the van. She lunged for him and grabbed him by the back of the neck. He was mostly limp anyway, so she was able to bounce his forehead off the dash three times right in a row. He slumped against it and didn’t move.

Pernie stared at him and shook her head. He wasn’t only stupid, he was mean, and maybe a little crazy too. Kettle had told her once that sometimes grown-ups lose control of their minds. Then they get sent to places like Goffa House in Hast. That’s where they sent the sight magicians and diviners who forgot themselves.

She pushed him up against the door and looked at the destination panel. It was smeared with blood. She picked up the wad of silvery parchment metal from the seat and wiped it away as best she could. If they weren’t almost to the giant Hostile, she was going to jump out and head back down the hill.

She looked out the window and realized that they were up in the mountains now. There weren’t as many trees as she had thought there would be, but in patches there were. She supposed the forest would be higher up. But she didn’t want to stay in the van for very long.

She could teleport out if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to break her promise not to. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. She couldn’t find anything to open it with. There was a little empty hole on the side near the window where the lock on Sophia Hayworth’s car was.

She looked back at the destination monitor. The green bar was just past three-quarters of the way. She supposed she could wait that long. And maybe there was a big Hostile. If not, well, maybe there were other things. She had wanted to explore the forest up here anyway.

She just wasn’t too sure she was going to be able to find her way home before sunrise.

Chapter 29

P
ernie did not make it home before sunrise. At least, she did not make it home on her own. In fact, she barely got to explore the forest at all. She’d only been out of Zest’s van for maybe twenty minutes at most when the first aircraft arrived.

She was just on her way up a tall pine when over the treetops came a light that seemed bright as a sun. It was even brighter than the light the Reno PD man had shone on her only a few short hours before. She was getting very tired of people shining bright lights on her and ruining her exploration time. She hadn’t gotten to see a Hostile yet, and now here was another light trying to do it again.

She’d jumped down from the tree and run out of the light, dodging side to side behind trees as the infernal light chased her through the forest. She was doing a fair job of it until a second aircraft came. It didn’t have its light on until after Pernie heard the hiss, two of them,
ffft
,
ffft
, right in a row. She’d managed about another step and a half, and then everything got blurry and she fell down. When she woke up, she was back with the stupid Reno PD again.

Two days later, she was finally back at school. She only got to go back to school because Don had had a big loud fight with Sophia Hayworth about it. He kept telling her that Pernie was perfectly safe and just had to learn how to be on Earth some more, just like he and Sophia had to learn how to be Pernie’s guardians. Pernie had laughed at that from her place in her room, where she was “grounded” again.

Sophia Hayworth was really mad at Don, though, and she shouted at him and told him, “I can’t live like this.” She said that Pernie had been in the clutches of a “pet on file,” or something very similar, but Pernie didn’t know what that was. She figured it must be pretty bad or Sophia wouldn’t be so mad, but Pernie had been very careful as she’d gone through the woods. The scariest thing she’d seen was an owl, and she was sure it was nobody’s pet. Still, Sophia was super mad, and it was actually a little bit like Kettle that time. But only a little. Mostly Sophia just sounded mad. She told Don Hayworth that she thought they should send Pernie back.

That was the first time Pernie was afraid.

She didn’t want to go back. If they sent her away, she couldn’t learn all the Earth things that made Master Altin love Orli Pewter so much. Going back to Prosperion now would ruin everything.

For a moment Pernie nearly panicked. What could she possibly do? She thought she might go out and beg Sophia not to send her away. She could apologize and promise not to go outside ever again. She could get a net visor and just play video games all night until bedtime like the other kids did. Or just read books and study on the net like their daughter Angela supposedly always did. Pernie could do all of that. She didn’t want to go home. Not yet.

But then she remembered what Sophia had told her the day before, about how there were treaties and things Pernie didn’t understand. Promises that the Queen had made with the leader of the NTA. Pernie was part of a contract between them somehow. Plus she knew there was some kind of a promise between the War Queen and the elves. That was part of Pernie being Sava’an’Lansom. That was why Djoveeve had made such a big commotion about Pernie and her promises.

So maybe Sophia Hayworth couldn’t send Pernie home.

Still, Pernie’s heart was actually beating very hard when Don Hayworth finally came into her room.

He sat down on the bed beside her and let out a long sigh. He looked at her a few times, then looked back toward the floor. Pernie was sure he was going to tell her she had to go back to Prosperion. Then Master Altin would never love her. She’d be stupid just like the man in the van with his soft basket brains. Everyone would be mad at her. Everyone. Two whole planets full of humans and all the elves as well.

“Well, kid,” Don Hayworth said finally. Pernie grimaced and waited for it. “What are we going to do with you?”

Pernie didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t think begging him would work anyway. Sophia Hayworth would make him do what she wanted him to do. Pernie had been here long enough to know that.