Yucatazca didn’t seem to have a lot of cute, furry Borderkind, or even a lot of pretty tricksters. Not a happy lot.
But they needed allies, and the old saw about beggars not being choosers was never far from Grin’s mind as he spent time with the group the Mazikeen had gathered.
One by one, the Mazikeen had taken them and cast a glamour over them. They called it something else, but Grin had learned a bit about magic over his long life, and he knew a glamour when he saw one. The sorcerers disguised each and every one of them as humans, Lost Ones. They could see through one another’s glamours, but no one else could. If a magician grew suspicious, she might be able to use magic to get a glimpse of their inner selves, but otherwise, they were completely hidden.
Ever since, they’d been out in the city of Palenque, mixing with the people. Listening. And talking.
“You don’t really believe that,” said the bartender now, a woman slightly older but no less beautiful than the waitresses who served the fashionable young people on the patio. Perhaps her extra years meant the managers of the bar thought her only fit to deal with the grim drinkers in the gloomy interior.
“I certainly do,” replied a nattily dressed man with wispy white hair and a thin mustache. The others called him Professor, though Grin didn’t know what had earned him the title.
A portly fellow with several days’ growth of beard slapped one hand on the bar. “That is shit. Traitors talk like that, Professor.”
The professor’s eyes narrowed and he stared at the man. “So I am a traitor, now, Enrique? On the contrary. I am a patriot. I have taught the children of kings. Government is never perfect, and there are things they do in secret that we are all better off not knowing. I understand this. It isn’t our king or our government I’m speaking against, but our enemies. Our true enemies.”
“Atlantis,” Grin said.
All eyes in the bar turned on him. For a moment, he felt sure they could see the northern Borderkind that they would all call enemy, but then the professor just nodded.
“Precisely.” He gestured around the room, first toward Paola, the bartender, and then to some of the other men and women gathered there. They were no longer quite so interested in their drinks. “You have all seen them. I know that you have. The Atlanteans were here in Palenque before good King Mahacuhta was slain. On the day of his murder, some of you were in the plaza. There were giants on the palace steps, fighting the northern intruders. Atlantean giants.
“Why? What were they doing here?”
Enrique grunted. “Guarding the diplomats. Don’t you read the newspaper, Professor? The giants and the others were guarding the diplomats from Atlantis. They were already working to forge an alliance with us—that is why the dog Hunyadi sent his assassins to murder Mahacuhta.”
From a small table in the back, a woman spoke up. She might have been fifty and her face was weathered. She sat with a younger man whose face bore the scars of battle, yet who sat up straight and had about him the air of a soldier.
“Don’t believe everything you read, sir,” the woman said.
Eyes narrowed again, and this time they were focused on the woman and her son.
“My son was a captain in the King’s Guard. When Ty’Lis began to put Atlantean soldiers into their ranks, he questioned the order. They whipped him, beat him, and cut out his tongue. They stripped him of his rank and threw him in the dungeon for thirty days.”
Even the professor blanched at these words. “Atlanteans in the King’s Guard?”
After a moment, Enrique cleared his throat. When he continued, some of his confidence was gone. “So, what are you suggesting?”
The professor sighed. “You know what she’s suggesting, Enrique. Don’t be obtuse. We’ve spoken of the rumors before. Why did the entire city of Palenque stand by and let the northern Borderkind pass when they came to challenge the king? Hunters had been sent out to exterminate the Borderkind all over Euphrasia, and some in Yucatazca as well. But they left Palenque alone. Why? So that the Borderkind here would not rise up and fight beside their kin against the Hunters until it was too late.”
“Conspiracy shit,” Enrique muttered.
“Hush,” said the bartender. She looked troubled, almost sick, but she nodded to the professor to continue.
“He’s right,” said the woman. Her son looked as though he would have spoken, had his tongue not been cut from his mouth.
“The whole city let it happen, that terrible day,” the woman went on. “Some of us hid in our houses and pulled the shutters. Others lined the streets and cheered them on, thinking that Mahacuhta had betrayed the truce and sent the Hunters north. But we should have known better. The Atlanteans had been infiltrating for months. Ty’Lis is behind it all.”
Enrique stood up and took two steps toward her, glancing at the door that led to the patio. “Watch yourself, woman. Talk like that could cost your life.”
The professor smiled, but there was no humor in it. “There. You’ve said it yourself. If she speaks against Ty’Lis, an advisor to the king, she is doomed? Is that the kind of kingdom this has become?”
“That’s enough,” said another—a disheveled, bearded man who’d been drinking with Enrique. “You are all traitors. Prince Tzajin is going to be crowned soon enough, but already he rules in his father’s place. He has declared war against Euphrasia. He has issued edicts calling the legendary and many Lost Ones to enlist in his army. Tzajin leads us, now, and to question his rule is treason.”
A chill went through the bar. Waitresses hurried from the kitchen out onto the patio with drinks and trays of food. The woman tending bar stared at Enrique, but he did not meet her eyes. Even the professor seemed frightened by the prospect.
Leicester Grindylow turned on his stool. He tipped his beer glass back and took a long sip, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“How can it be treason,” he asked, “when the throne is here in Palenque, and Prince Tzajin is issuing his edicts from Atlantis? The boy is the guest of the High Council of Atlantis, surrounded only by the scholars who have been teaching him. The edicts are released here in Palenque by Ty’Lis, who has been behaving like a regent instead of an advisor. Only a blind fool would not at least ask the question, my friends. How do we know that Tzajin declared war, or issued those edicts? How can we be sure the prince even knows that his father is dead?”
They stared at him in horror. Some shifted uncomfortably and looked away, but the mute soldier only nodded in dark approval.
“There’s a more horrible question,” the professor said. “How do we know Tzajin is still alive?”
The soldier knocked on the table to get everyone’s attention.
“He wants you to consider another question,” the mute man’s mother said. “Who really killed King Mahacuhta?”
“Now that is enough!” cried the bearded man who’d lectured them about treason.
Enrique shook his head. “So now you want me to believe the Atlanteans murdered the king?”
“How can you not believe it?” the woman asked, her voice weighted with grief. “You’ve heard all of the rumors. The only reason that you haven’t made that connection is because you don’t want to. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, why hasn’t the prince come home, yet? We are at war, for the gods’ sake! Where else should he be, if not in the palace, commanding our fate?”
Her dark-eyed son stood, arms crossed. He opened his mouth and even in the gloom the vacant hollow inside was evident.
“Then what of the assassins in the dungeon?” the bartender asked. “If they weren’t sent by Hunyadi to murder Mahacuhta, then who are they?”
Grin stood and set his glass down on the bar, drawing their eyes one last time. He turned to take in every man and woman in the bar—twenty-two souls; he had counted.
“Why did Ty’Lis send the Hunters out to slaughter Borderkind if not to cut off all contact with the ordinary world, to separate the Lost from our ancestral home forever? Maybe the so-called assassins in the palace dungeon are exactly what all of the whispers say they are. Maybe they’re the Legend-Born, come to take us home.”
He turned and strode through the door, out onto the patio. The laughing beauties of Palenque took no notice, but he felt the attention of those inside the bar until he had vanished from their sight.
As they infiltrated the city, Grin and the other Borderkind had found just what Blue Jay had hoped and predicted. Many of the Lost Ones of Palenque were not blind or stupid. They might be afraid to make unpleasant connections, or speak up, but they were not fools.
If they could be forced to face their own suspicions, the Borderkind would have more allies than they could ever have imagined.
CHAPTER 8
Oliver could not sleep. He had tried, fidgeting awkwardly on the mat, searching for the least torturous position. Then he had gone to the window and stared out at the wall across from his cell, wishing he could see the sky. A view of the stars would have lifted his heart.
At length, he walked across the cell and stood in front of the door. Out in the corridor, nothing stirred. Torchlight flickered somewhere down the hall, giving the walls a wet glow. Beyond the grate in the door to Julianna and Collette’s cell, there was only darkness. He might have heard a low, troubled snore, but that could as easily have been his imagination.
He pressed his forehead against the cool metal of the grate and peered into the corridor. No one stirred. Idly his fingers brushed over the stones in the wall and traced the mortar grooves, just as he’d been doing almost since the moment they’d been locked up. Collette had been doing the same.
How many people believed they were Legend-Born? Thousands? Millions? And if all of those people believed, did that make it true? Once, humanity had believed their world was flat, but they had been proven wrong. How disappointed all the Lost Ones would be if they found out it was all bullshit.
And it had to be bullshit, didn’t it? They’d been in these cells for going on nine weeks and hadn’t been able to summon up a single bit of magic. If their mother was Borderkind—if they were supposed to fulfill some kind of prophecy—why did he feel so damned ordinary?
Or maybe not completely ordinary.
He chewed on that for a second. Ever since coming through the Veil for the first time, he’d felt the way he always did when giving a closing argument in court, or acting onstage. Like what he did was fulfilling some role in a grand plan.
Just a little full of yourself, aren’t you?
Maybe he was. But that didn’t change the way it felt.
And what if it’s true? That was a question he’d asked himself a thousand times ever since Ty’Lis had first talked about the Legend-Born. If it was true, that changed everything.
Could their mother really have been Melisande, a beautiful creature with dragon wings and a serpent’s lower body? Oliver had photographs of her and his memories, and she had always seemed ordinary. She had been sweet and kind, with a light of joy in her eyes. But he had seen Blue Jay and Kitsune and other legends transform themselves easily enough, and it might be possible that Melisande could do the same.
He had also thought about what Julianna had said about his father. If their mother had indeed been Melisande—if he and Collette were half-human and half-Borderkind—that went a long way toward explaining the way Max Bascombe had treated his son. Oliver had longed for magic, all of his life. And yet…
Dad didn’t want you to reach for it. He was afraid of what you might find. Or of what might find you.
Oliver drew in a long breath and bit his lower lip. All his life, all he’d wanted was for his father to love him and for himself to be able to put his resentment aside long enough to return that love.
But his father was dead, now, and that would never happen.
If only the old man had told them the truth, when they were old enough. Yet he’d kept it from them, trying to protect them. Otherwise he might still be alive.
Oliver froze, staring out into the corridor. A frown creased his brow. If Melisande had been his mother, and they had inherited some kind of magic from her legendary blood, what would that be? How did Collette’s escape from the pit at the Sandman’s castle make sense? She had torn the wall of her prison apart, but that didn’t seem like their mother at all. If their mother had magic in her, it wasn’t a magic of destruction. Yet whenever he had tried to dig at the mortar, he’d been thinking about pulling the wall apart with magic. Obviously, that wasn’t working.
The stones beneath his left hand shifted.
Oliver held his breath, then glanced over at his hand. Mortar sifted like dust from the grooves between stones.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
It’s not about destruction. No, it wouldn’t be. Not if they were their mother’s children. Which wasn’t to say that they would have magic similar to hers. From what he’d heard, there seemed no real pattern to the magic that developed in the offspring of legends, and no known precedent to indicate what magic might occur in a child half-human and half-Borderkind. Still, instinct told him that his mother’s magic would not have been cruel or terrible.
All creatures had delighted her. She had loved her garden, right down to every beetle. Her magic, he felt, must have been in beauty and life. In growth. Yet when autumn came and the garden began to wither, she had seemed equally as content as she’d been when the flowers were in full bloom. Oliver hadn’t learned the word entropy until he was in high school, but later, he’d understood it. Things fell apart, lost their cohesion. Everything had its season.
And if you could speed that process along…
Slowly, but firmly, he pushed his left hand forward, and dry, discolored mortar sifted down like powder. The stones began to fall outward.
Oliver drew back his hand and watched as the wall collapsed into the corridor.