Flecks of Gold (39 page)

“And did you heal me? You should have saved your strength.” A surge of worry for him came over me unexpectedly.

Breeohan leaned against the wall, looking sheepish. “I may have. I thought it would be best if we were both able to move swiftly. I’m not tired though.” He looked embarrassed. “After healing us, I couldn’t help but fall asleep too.”

“Oh, well good then . . . and thank you.” I studied the dust floating in the sunbeams. The thought of silence was suddenly unbearable. “You’ve probably figured it out by now, but the city is full of Kelteon’s people. I think the regular citizens are either hiding or were forced out. Oh, and they know how to look for the distortion movement in the chameleon lacing, so if we use it we’ll have to be extra careful.” I had started speaking just to fill the quiet, but I was starting to feel panicky.

“I guess Rafan knows about my mask lacing now, so they’ll probably have passwords at the gate, if they’re even letting anyone in and out with us on the loose. How soon do you think Kelteon will get here? Will he bring my mother with him, do you think? And the king, the king is coming here. We need to warn him, but how are we going to get out of here with a whole city trying to track us down? What if—?”

“Mary.” Breeohan grabbed my hands, which were gesturing wildly as my agitation increased. “Calm down. We’ll figure something out.” I stopped talking, but Breeohan didn’t relinquish his hold on my hands. The nervous turbulence that had been building up transformed into a flurry of soft and rapid wing beats inside my chest.

“You really never cared for Rafan?” Breeohan asked.

“No. I thought he was kind of creepy. No offense, but I didn’t understand why he was your best friend. You two seem so different.”

“The Rafan you are acquainted with is not the one I’ve known for so many years. I just wish I knew how Kelteon got to him. I would never have dreamed of Rafan changing so much or allying himself with Kelteon. I noticed that he was acting strangely, but I was too jealous to see that change clearly.”

I gulped. “Jealous?” My mouth spoke against my brain’s wishes.

Breeohan took a deep breath as if to fortify himself. “I was tormented with the thought that he loved you and that you loved him in return.” Breeohan’s eyes seared through mine until I felt at any moment I would burst into flames. “I know you may not care, Mary, but I love you. I fell in love with you the first time we met. You were alone, hurt, and scared, but you refused to let anything cow you. I’d never met anyone so full of determination. And then you looked at me with those defiant golden eyes. I was lost. I’ve been lost ever since,” he whispered, reaching up to trace the curve of my face.

My breath stuck in my throat. The hand he’d freed trembled uncontrollably. Breeohan leaned forward into the striped sunlight between us. I watched in frozen fascination as the strips of light moved across his face, highlighting chocolate skin and refracting purple and gold as though his eyes really were crystal amethysts.

“But I thought you loved Avana,” I stuttered while trying to fend off a cacophony of jumbled emotions. I wanted to bolt out the door. I wanted to never move. The thing I most feared was my wish that the four-inch gap between our lips would disappear.

“No,” he said, his eyes grave and unwavering, and then his lips met mine in a soft, hesitant brush that tingled like fire through my frame. I shivered.

Breeohan noticed the shudder and pulled back. “I’m sorr—” he began, but I put my finger to his lips. His feathery touch had scrambled my brain, and it took me several breaths before I could form a halfway coherent thought. His lips had been like a drug, heady and intoxicating.

“I’m afraid,” I said, my breath fast with more than fear.

“Of me?” he whispered.

“Yes. No. I’m scared if I let myself . . . You’ll leave. Everyone in my life has either left me, used me, or been taken from me. I can’t . . .” My eyes stared at my hand worrying the fabric of my pants.

He caught my fingers and turned my face to his. “I won’t ever leave you.” There was a tremendous pause where something was supposed to happen but didn’t. “And I won’t ask from you more than you can give.” His right hand released mine, his left caressed my cheek before it dropped to his side.

No. No
. I wanted to catch his hand and bring it back to my face, but I couldn’t move so much as a finger. A scream of anguished frustration caught fast inside, all the more painful for being trapped. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just let go, let myself . . . But I couldn’t even finish the thought.
They might as well take me to the loony bin right now—that’s where I belong
, I thought angrily at myself.

Breeohan regarded the floor. I felt no better than slime oozing through the cracks in the brick. To see his pain was like being stabbed all over again, but every time I opened my mouth to say something, only silence emerged.

“We need to devise a way to escape the city and warn the king,” Breeohan said quietly to the dust-layered ground.

I’m sorry, I’m so sorry
, repeated in my head, but my mouth stayed cemented shut. He looked up and, seeing my anguished expression, curved his lips up in a pained but compassionate smile and shrugged. I was staked anew, feeling like a villain.

“It might be difficult to climb over the wall even with the chameleon lacing since, as you say, they know all our tricks,” he said, smoothly keeping the conversation from uncomfortable territory.

I cleared my throat and tried to think rationally. “Just because they know all our old tricks doesn’t mean they’ll be able to stop us from using new ones,” I suggested.

“Such as?” His eyebrows rose in inquiry, but I still couldn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Well, the chameleon lacing isn’t as effective as it used to be, but it’s still useful if we don’t have to move around much. So what if instead of climbing over the wall, we go through it? The wall is made of sandstone right? Sandstone’s lacing is really similar to the sand lacing. We could make our own doorway through the wall. That way we could be virtually invisible, except for when we make a run for it through our new door.”

“I think that could work. We would have to time our movements carefully, but it’s better than what I was thinking.” He sighed in relief. I wondered what he’d been thinking, but he leapt to his feet in one smooth motion and cracked the door, looking cautiously both ways before signaling me to follow him outside. I had a bad moment when I stood up and saw the world narrow into black before it gradually expanded back into Technicolor. I realized that I hadn’t eaten for so long, my stomach wasn’t even complaining anymore.

Breeohan led us through the narrow roads and alleyways. There was a tense moment when we both had to dart into the lee of a doorway to avoid a woman patrolling the streets. Until she passed, my heart did an Irish jig in my chest.

Breeohan whispered, “I think we’d better keep the chameleon lacings on, even if they know how to spot us moving. It’s still better than being as visible as we are now.”

I nodded in complete agreement.

“It will mean that we will have to hold hands. Losing each other here would be . . . dangerous.” His eyes were fixed on the street where the woman had disappeared, but his voice was tentative, as if he expected a sound verbal slap.

My heart wrenched with guilt, and I shivered at the thought of being on my own again in Kerln. My hand shot like a bullet to connect with his, and I squeezed it tight. Breeohan turned to me with swift surprise before we both tweaked the chameleon lacing active. Then we moved again.

We had to stop five more times to avoid the eyes of patrollers, but we made it safely to some houses near a section of wall that seemed to be less crowded. For a long time we just sat in the shadows of the nearest building, observing how often someone passed by, above and below, for there were patrollers along the bottom of the wall as well as the top. We found that they spaced their walks to about every five minutes. It wouldn’t give us much time, but I was hoping it would be enough.

After the ground guard made another pass, Breeohan and I scuttled quickly against the base of the wall. I focused on an area of the sandstone and tweaked the lacing in my mind to make the stone turn to sand. At first I thought it hadn’t worked because the small archway I’d concentrated on looked no different, but then the sand shifted so that some spilled away from the wall. There was a slight indent at the top of the arch, but the sand still blocked our way. I kicked myself for not thinking my plan through. Sand might be less solid, but it was still very much in the way.

Breeohan quickly got on his hands and knees and shoveled sand as fast as he could. I followed suit. We managed to shift the sand so that a piece of sky shone through at the top. But there was no way we’d be able to make the hole big enough to crawl through before the next guard was due to walk by.

“Stand back and shield your eyes.” My forehead dripped sweat, and I impatiently brushed it away before causing a concentrated wind to blast through the small opening, clearing the sand away in a whipping frenzy. Sand bounced back in our faces, clinging to my sweat in a gritty mask. Too late I realized that much of the sand was hitting the wall and shooting upward in a cloud, making a puffy yellow beacon in the sky. I stopped the lacing when I’d created a big enough space for us to crawl through, but guards were already running in our direction.

I cursed myself, pushing Breeohan into the opening.

“You go first,” he insisted.

“We don’t have time to argue. Just get moving.” With protective desperation, I shoved him in the right direction. He followed my lead and began crawling quickly through the hole. I noticed that even with the chameleon lacing, the sand sticking to his face and body made him more visible. Looking down, I saw that I was in the same state. I crouched down to follow right at his heels.

I was almost completely in the shadow of the tunnel when someone grabbed both of my ankles and heaved. My hands scrabbled for something to stop my progress backwards but grasped only sand that slid through my fingers. Something between a shout and a scream emerged from my throat. Breeohan looked behind him, but there was no room for him to turn, so I watched his eyes track me helplessly during the second it took to drag my body out of the hole.

“Keep going,” I yelled before rough hands flipped me by the ankles to my back.
Big mistake
, I thought as I bent my knees into my chest and kicked out savagely. The man holding me flew backwards and landed with a thud on the ground. I turned and tried to dive back into the tunnel, but a body slammed into my back and weighed me down before I could. Another man added his weight to the first, and I saw through my writhing struggles that a woman was trying to get past us and into the tunnel to stop Breeohan’s escape.

Praying that Breeohan was already through the wall, I created a wind to catch the sand still in the tunnel and whirl it about, then changed the sand back into sandstone. The stone would be more brittle than what it once was, but it was solid. With that accomplished, I stopped struggling against my captors. My insides felt cold, remote. The people smashing against me became unimportant, not even worth the attention I would give a fly. When a sharp explosion of pain cracked through my head, I welcomed it with a near-hysterical relief. I fled into the dark oblivion that enfolded me.

I
woke to total darkness, feeling thoroughly tired of being repeatedly whacked on the head. But the thought of being unconscious again was a new and manic temptation. Such dark thoughts, so foreign to me, were enough to snap me out of my despair. I pushed the thoughts aside and held still, refraining from healing myself. I must have made a movement or noise, however, because I heard a ruffle of fabric. Instead of a blow, a soft hand stroked my face.

“Mary, honey, are you awake?” a sweet smooth voice asked. I would know that voice anywhere. I tried to sit up quickly only to fall back in a swamping wave of pain and nausea.

Swallowing down something nasty, I finally croaked, “Mom?”

“Lie still. I’m really worried about you. You’ve been asleep for a whole day, and I was starting to feel frantic,” Mom’s beautiful, wonderful voice said. Just hearing her made the shooting stabs in my head lessen.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” I slowly brought the lacing required into the forefront of my mind and plucked the string for healing. The hand stroking my face twitched, then hesitantly brushed my hair back, a gesture that sent a rush of childhood memories through my mind. They were comforting, and I had to struggle to hold the waterworks at bay.

“So you can do this magic stuff too, huh? I guess that gives us a better clue as to why we’re here.” The hand brushing through my hair began to tremble.

“Kelteon hasn’t told you anything?”

“Is that his name? I thought it was Kelson. He isn’t a young man at all. Did you know? He changed from a boy into a middle-aged man right in front of my eyes.”

“I know.” I wished bitterly that I could see her face. I almost slapped myself when I realized that I had again overlooked a simple solution. I lit the room with a globe of golden light, or at least, I thought I had, but my vision stayed black. The blindfold lacing had been placed on me again, but this time, because of Breeohan, I knew how to undo it. The room’s round contours quickly became clear, lit by my golden ball. The ground was sand, and as I lay looking up, I saw that the round ceiling thirty feet up had a square door. We were in a closed-up well.

I sat up to look at Mom. Wet streaked her cheeks. I found that the sand on my own face was being washed away in the same manner.

“Are you really all right, honey? I can’t see you too well. It’s like your face is only where the dirt is.” Her voice wavered.

“Oh, I forgot.” I undid the chameleon lacing.

Mom sighed in relief, and we hugged each other fiercely. I found myself sobbing into her shoulder, gulping out wet apologies. Mom massaged my back until we were calm enough for her to hold me at arm’s length and look me over.

“Now, what’s this about being sorry? You have nothing to be sorry about,” she said.