Lives of Kings (25 page)

“What did he do?” I asked.

Michael helped me climb in since the walls on either side were nearly six feet tall and I didn't want to risk collapsing the earth even further.

“Stupid,” Garrison suddenly muttered.

I sighed in relief. At least he was alive.

The four of us huddling over him formed a bit of a dark cave, so we had to back up, despite my desire to both take care of him and smack him for worrying me. I guess I couldn't really be angry. If there was one person who made magical mistakes resulting in injuries, it was me.

“We were trying to build up this path,” Michael explained, waving to the far side of the trench. “It looks like something formed by ice, and we wanted to see if we could move it.”

“Why?” Kian asked.

Michael looked at Garrison and Seth, obviously lacking a good answer. “To see if we could,” he said.

Kian nearly groaned. If he were anyone else, he would have waved his arms in exasperation.

“When it comes time to fight the Godelan,” Michael rushed to explain, “we'll be ready. Our magic will be stronger.”

“That's not how it works!” Kian was close to yelling, but he worked to get his temper under control. I could see the strained effort in his tense movements. “You can't make yourself stronger by pushing yourself to extremes. Magic is not like muscles. Your magic is tied to your past life. You need inner growth. Understanding. Compassion. Balance.”

Michael was quiet for a long moment. He looked a bit like a child caught doing something bad. “I didn't know that,” he said softly.

Kian sighed. “Of course you didn't, because I didn't tell you. But in the future, before you make any assumptions, just ask me, okay?”

The others nodded.

With Michael's brawn, we managed to carry Garrison back to the house. Well, it was mostly Michael, but we all fluttered around him. Garrison looked a bit like a wooden puppet, all rigid arms and legs flailing around as he was carried, using his last energy to emphasize how embarrassed he was to be carried around like a princess by a knight.

Luckily, my parents were busy with the cats and dogs (they even had a horse tied up in the backyard) so we were able to put Garrison into my bed without drawing any attention. Seth stayed with him while the rest of us went back into the woods to see what could have caused him to use so much magic.

By this time, my paranoia had kicked in and I was watching over my shoulder constantly for any sign of the Godelan. If they were behind this, then we weren't safe here anymore and my visit home would have to be cut short. I couldn't involve my parents in my problems.

Kian jumped into the trench and turned to help me. The ground smelled damp and fresh. I could tell it had been covered just a short while ago. It wasn't soggy and rotten like the rest of the forest, still thawing in the unusually warm weather for April.

“We moved this rock a part of the way,” Michael explained, pointing to the rock face that was cracked clean in two. That must have been the boom we had heard. Michael showed us how they had moved it at least ten feet. “But then it wouldn't budge.”

Kian ran his fingers over the split in the rock. The edges looked fresh and razor sharp.

“It's warm,” he observed. “There's still magic here.”

There was something unusual about the stone. If I tried to sense its shape and how I could use it, I couldn't see its definition.

“Hey, Michael, you climbed the rocks and cliffs because you always had a feeling about what to grab a hold of, because you knew its shape, right?” I said, guessing.

He had proven himself exceptionally skilled at moving the earth. Unless any of us had found ways to trick him or use his own size against him, we could never win any of the drills.

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”

“Well, tell me the shape of this rock,” I said, stepping aside.

He approached carefully, bouncing a little on his feet as if to get a feel for the ground he walked on. He eyed the rock before placing his hands on it and bouncing some more.

“I can't feel it,” he admitted. “I don't see where it ends.”

“Probably because it doesn't,” I told him. “You were trying to move a part of the continent. You could have sent us all right into the ocean if Garrison wasn't trying to do it all by himself.”

Again, I realized I sounded a lot like Kian, but it was true. They hadn't really used a lot of thought when overdrawing on their magic. I couldn't believe my friends had nearly just collapsed part of Oregon. Michael's chastised child expression lasted for only a few minutes as we walked back to the house. Moments later, he was already imagining all the possibilities.

“So do you think if Seth and I were helping, the three of us could have moved the whole cliff?” he asked.

Both Kian and I ignored his question.

Garrison eventually recovered his energy, but having all the information before throwing his magic into something was a lesson that was engrained in him and all of us. His magic came back as slowly as mine had when I had caused a snowstorm that let us escape the Godelan in the winter. He pined for activities while he was restricted to my bed, so many days found us playing board games around a little breakfast-in-bed table in my room.

I was happy enough to camp in the living room with everyone else, telling my parents Garrison had fallen outside on the path. Which was true enough. Kian and I managed to steal a few more moments alone together, but between my parents and running up and down the stairs to talk to Garrison because, as he said, he was dying of boredom, I had little time to spare.

A few weeks passed quietly enough, and May came around. Seth and Kian would often get into deep discussions about how much time we had left to kill the Godelan once and for all, and how much time they had to do the same for us.

Ultimately, we were as vulnerable as they were for another seven months. But before we could ever get close enough to act on a ritual that would take them out of the initial ritual they had performed, we needed their names to control them.

We quizzed Kian on what the names could be, how it had looked when the Godelan removed their names, and the type of box they had put them in. Kian answered diligently but always reminded us that Stone would never just entrust his entire life to a box. It had to be something more than that. Unfortunately, he didn't know about their travels right after his and Magician's arrival. They had stayed in the house alone and waited for the other two to return.

“It was always like that,” Kian remembered. “We would just wait. They'd never share anything with me, and I don't think Magician knew much more. They were born and raised in this world. While they knew him, he was still different. Unpredictable.”

My theory of placing the names somewhere we wouldn't dare go was fine, but it didn't narrow down our options. And would the location of the names be physical, like a box hidden in a cave somewhere in the North Pole, or would it be something that would present itself to us only when we had figured it out, like the answer to a riddle?

That thought pattern usually made my head hurt with all of the answers I didn't have, so I gave up a lot faster than Kian or Seth. For them, it seemed to be the thing that bonded them. As the only two who could perform the ritual or command the Godelan, this was a way to finally be kings and redeem themselves for leaving the tribe.

While we came together as a group, I couldn't help but think about Moira. She had been the banished one, yet I had ended up going home. Had she gone back to her parents? Was she living now just as she had before we found her, or had we ruined her life by igniting her past, which took over in the end?

Perhaps my constant dwelling on the guilt of losing the present Moira to her past self turned many of my memories into ones of her. She had always been kept apart by a strict mother who was proud of her magic yet disapproved of the rest of us. And I had never fully considered that she was also Kian's cousin.

My ties to Moira through their family reached far into our past, and in some ways I wondered if she was right to hate me. I always wanted what she took for granted, and so I took it for myself.

After a month of being in Oregon, an earthquake struck in Los Angeles, but it was so strong that we could feel it in our house. It was six in the morning when the ground began to shake and books fell from the shelves, nearly on top of our heads.

We jumped out of our sleeping bags and just stood in the middle of the room, adrenaline rushing though somewhat still asleep, just trying to keep our balance and dodge falling objects. I could hear my parents shouting upstairs, and Garrison answering them. Dogs began to bark and howl in the vet clinic part of the house.

From what I remembered of events in San Francisco, it was fairly long for an earthquake, lasting about a full minute. The sound was the scariest part, since the old wooden house, built into a hillside with probably very little foundation, creaked and groaned as if it was about to fall over. Finally, it stopped, yet we all stood stock still for several moments afterward.

“You kids okay?” my dad yelled from upstairs.

“Yeah!” I called back.

A few moments later, they came downstairs with Garrison hobbling behind them. He was walking now, if only for short periods, but had to pretend to limp to keep up the fall story.

As was our routine in California, my parents immediately turned on the TV. Every news channel in the country was reporting on a strong earthquake that had hit Los Angeles.

As the day progressed, shocking images played across the screen. The most eerie for me was an entire freeway that had simply slid into the ocean, along with all of the cars. Houses were rubble. Buildings were beyond repair. People cried and looked for lost loved ones in front of the cameras.

While I was used to the guilt and what-ifs that immediately hit me, it was a first for Michael. He waited until my parents left the room before turning to me and asking, “Did we do this?”

He was ashen.

I was glad that seeing things like this would keep him from thinking that trying to move continents was cool, but he also seemed heartbroken. And for the first time, the big, happy guy we had met in Australia looked to seriously be contemplating what he was doing here with us.

“No,” I told him. “These shifts, pushes and pulls, the Godelan do it.”

“Why?” he asked, though we had been over this several times.

“They want power. Chaos and destruction make it easy to get.”

“So if we stop the Godelan, this will stop?”

Time to admit where we had failed.

“I don't think so,” I told him honestly. “But if we stop them, we can help to keep it from getting worse.”

Michael continued to stare at the TV for the rest of the day, and the day after that. I could see each bit of information flowing over him like the tidal wave in New York had flowed over me, haunting me long after I had escaped it.

I stoked a fire, though the smoke was stifling. It refused to rise up through the roof. Evergreen sprigs were the only dry things I could find during the particularly wet winter, and they did not lend themselves to burning well. I coughed and eventually gave up, leaving a small, cold house and stepping out into the chill night.

While my magic could start the fire, I could not spend all my energy burning it. Firewood was particularly hard to come by as Romans cut their way through our lands, using our wood for their furnaces as the other tribes encroached on our lands from the north. At least winter was almost over.

The entire village was dark. Even the moon was hidden behind clouds, covering everything in shadow. I couldn't rest. Despite riding the perimeter of our lands all day, I was too agitated to let exhaustion take me over. Several people, including past-Seth and past-Michael, had gone to scout our lands. It wasn't safe to ride at night anymore. I hadn't seen past-Garrison in months. I felt like the last survivor of a settlement that didn't stir.

After wandering in the cold, a flicker of light caught my attention. A lantern shone out of the window of the main hall, where the king would return. I rushed forward, my heart torn between assuming the worst and hoping for the best. A thousand scenarios of attacks and ambushes ran through my mind as I crossed the village and burst through the heavy wooden doors.

I stopped, surprised.

At first I thought there was no one there. Then, in the darkness, I saw a woman sitting on the throne.

“Close the door, you'll let in the chill,” said a voice. It was as cold as the winter, and delved just as deep into my bones. I recognized past-Moira.

My past life flared with a dozen emotions at once. I was awkward and resentful, ashamed and proud at the same time. Despite a solemn belief that she should not be on the throne, my first instinct was to turn and leave. As I began walking out without a word, her voice called me back.