Flight of the King (14 page)

“I'd best be off! Good-bye, Miss Castling. Mr. Walker,” Jerri said, bowing. He walked off to the front of the next car.

Phi touched Bailey's arm before stepping up into the rigi.

“It might be nothing, anyway,” she whispered. “But I'll check and see if the conductor meets with anyone in the Gray,” she said.

“Good idea,” he said as the rigi car began to creak forward. The dirigible balloon whooshed upward, casting a yellow shadow over the platform. Phi waved from the doorway, and then
was gone.

Bailey felt empty watching the rigi pull away. With Taleth out of reach in the woods, Gwen gone, and now Phi too, Fairmount didn't seem like home anymore. As he left the platform, Bailey
regretted not wishing her a safe journey. He looked around, hoping to cross paths once more with Jerri, but the assistant had disappeared. Instead, he walked across campus to Tremelo's garage
workshop. Tremelo and Hal stood side by side, bent over the machine spread across the workbench. Fennel the fox sat upright on a wooden chair, watching Tremelo with intent yellow eyes.

“Where's Tori?” Bailey asked.

“Not coming,” said Hal.

“What do you mean, ‘not coming'?” asked Bailey.

“Phi catch the rigi on time, then?” asked Tremelo. “Shonfield asked if I wanted to send along some homework, but I'm not that cruel.…”

“But what about Tori?” Bailey asked again.

Hal put down the wrench he was holding.

“I was on my way here, and I saw her—with Lyle!” he said.

“And you didn't stop her?” Bailey asked. “Maybe she forgot we were meeting.”

“Would that make it any better?” asked Hal. “If she just ‘forgot' that we're trying to do something important like, I don't know, save the
kingdom?” He paused and took a deep breath. “I didn't talk to her, no. But…”

Tremelo raised an eyebrow.

“But what?” he asked.

“I might have followed them,” Hal said. “Just for a minute! Just to listen.”

“Hal!” said Bailey. “That's
weird
.”

“Listen? Or eavesdrop?” asked Tremelo, a mischievous smile breaking out from underneath his mustache.

“It wasn't like that! And anyway, I think Lyle's got his own Science Competition entry in the works,” Hal said. “Tori's helping him! They're going to
‘try it out' at the end of the week, after some part they're missing gets delivered.”

“Aha, so it's not that you're jealous of Tori's wayward affections—you're worried about your standing in the Fairmount scientific community,” Tremelo
said, laughing.

“Neither,” said Hal, a little too forcefully. “I just dislike when people don't keep appointments.”

Bailey studied the machine taking shape on the desk. Since the weekend of the Dominae's visit, he and Tremelo and the others had built an almost exact replica of the casing of the machine
according to the specifications of the blueprint. The result was a boxlike structure with an apparatus in the center that would hold what Tremelo referred to as the “orb,” the missing
piece. The casing had been relatively easy to build, with an assemblage of wires that mimicked the blueprint. But the orb remained a mystery.

“I wanted to show you all something I'm trying out,” Tremelo said, gesturing to the machine. “It's a shame the girls will miss it.…”

It was clear that Tremelo had been busy since the boys' last visit to the workshop. He'd added three gramophone earpieces to the machine's top, as well as a system of wires and
metal cuffs protruding from the machine's side.

“Those weren't on the blueprint,” Hal observed.

“I admit, I've struck out on my own,” said Tremelo. “But this is something that's been buzzing around in here”—he pointed to his noggin—“for
ages. And I think that maybe, just maybe, it might help us understand Viviana's project.

“You see, this casing has been built to hold something volatile—something that's meant to be a conduit of a very large amount of energy. And so from what I can tell, this
machine is meant to be an amplifier of that energy. It harnesses that energy and then directs it outward.”

He whistled, and Fennel left her chair and hopped dutifully up to the desk. Tremelo picked up what looked like a metal bracelet and fastened it around the fox's neck like a collar. It was
connected to the machine's base by three thin wires.

“When Gwen left her harmonica behind, it got me thinking of an experiment. We still don't know what this orb does, but what we can use now is the amplifying system.…” Tremelo
trailed off as he clamped a wired cuff onto his wrist. “Tell me what you hear,” he said to Bailey and Hal. Then he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes tightly.

Bailey couldn't know what passed between Tremelo and Fennel then. He didn't know what memory they were reliving together, or whether they were just having a wordless conversation.
But it didn't matter—what mattered was the unearthly, beautiful sound that flowed out of the gramophone horns. It was like nothing he'd ever heard, a humming that rose and fell in
volume and tone until it sounded like many notes at once.

He felt a vibration in his own chest, like the strings of an instrument being strummed. It was the same feeling he'd had when he'd walked into the woods to see Taleth, the feeling of
energy thrumming inside him. As he listened to the sounds Tremelo and Fennel were producing, that thrumming in his chest grew until he was sure he wasn't listening alone: somewhere in the
nearby woods, Taleth was hearing it too. He could almost feel her ears perking up as though they were
his
ears, and
he
was the one standing on a mountainside, watching the school
in the dying light of day. Just the thought of her—this small connection—made Bailey feel more at ease than he'd been in weeks.

Tremelo took off the wrist piece, and the music stopped. Bailey's connection with Taleth faded away.

“Incredible,” said Hal. Bailey nodded, speechless.

“It's just an experiment,” Tremelo answered. “Still some kinks to fix. I call it the Halcyon.”

“How does it work?” Bailey managed to ask.

Tremelo pointed to the metal cuffs.

“When Fennel and I are connected by those,” he began, “our bond creates an energy that I can channel into the machine, sort of in place of the missing orb. The sound you hear
is that energy becoming magnified, and released into the air around us.”

Bailey nodded again. “I was sure that Taleth could hear what I was hearing too.”

“I felt the same,” said Hal. “Like I was whirling around the clock tower with the bats.”

“Wonderful!” crowed Tremelo. “So you see, the Animas bond is an interconnected web. When I magnify my bond, it in turn magnifies yours. It affects everyone, all the
time!”

Tremelo's enthusiasm was contagious. Bailey broke into a grin.

“Which means, you could make everyone in the kingdom feel it too,” he guessed. “They could become more closely bonded; everyone could.”

“This machine, as it is now, is nowhere near
that
powerful,” said Tremelo. “But still, it's a start, isn't it?”

“Yeah,” Bailey said. He had been so focused on the fight against Viviana that he hadn't thought about what he and his friends were fighting
for
—it was this, the
bond and its goodness. It had the power to connect him to another living creature, to
all
living creatures. For just a minute, he forgot about the danger they faced. He felt nothing but
gratitude that he'd Awakened, and could take part in this.

As Bailey stood in awe, Tremelo's face changed. A darkness crossed over it.

“But Viviana is using some of this same technology.”

“For what, though?” asked Bailey.

“That's precisely what I'm afraid of,” said Tremelo.

VIVIANA STOOD IN A
snowy field, concentrating intently on the woods in front of her.

She held a long brass blunderbuss decorated with a golden stag and crow, which Clarke had fashioned for her. She enjoyed the weight of it, its solidness, compared to a smaller pistol. Behind her
in the land train, her staff busied themselves in the kitchen in preparation for dinner. Clarke, meanwhile, stood by politely and watched her hunt.

Once as a child, she'd traveled to the Golden Lowlands with her father, King Melore. Just as it did then, the Lowlands struck her as the most boring landscape she could imagine. Rolling
fields and small towns with dusty main streets. She was in need of a distraction, after the message was delivered that morning.

The girl has fled. Have arranged for a tracker.

She wanted to crumple it up and discard it. Instead, she tucked it into the inside pocket of her embroidered coat.

“Clarke,” she said, calling her chief tinkerer to her. “I've had an idea, regarding the Catalyst. Discard the prototypes you've been working on—we'll be
using a new casing for it.” With the Child of War still unlocated, she could take no risks: the Catalyst needed to remain as inconspicuous as possible.

She heard the rustling of dead leaves, and from out of the woods walked a male deer. Viviana focused her gaze on it. The stag came toward her as if it were being pulled by a heavy, invisible
rope. Even hunting was boring, Viviana decided, when you could simply summon your kill to you.

“An excellent specimen, my lady,” said Clarke.

Viviana braced her shoulders to steady her aim with the cumbersome blunderbuss, but she could not so easily steady her mind. Not since her illuminating visit to Fairmount. The memory of that one
child—one of the students, she learned, who had been missing from campus at the time of Joan's death—leaping through the air so powerfully, so brazenly. And without her kin in
sight. Now she'd fled the school. Was it possible, Viviana wondered, that she'd found the Child of War so soon?

“Sophia Castling,” Viviana whispered. “Who are you, and what do you know?”

She breathed out once more, readying herself for the kick of the gun. She aimed at the stag and pulled the trigger.

AFTER A DAY'S RIDE
from the Gray to the rocky western mountains, a heavy layer of mud and snow caked the bottom of Gwen's coat and boots.
She abandoned Tremelo's motorbike when it ran out of gas, and continued on foot. The valley that separated the Seers' Land from the northernmost edge of the Velyn mountains was full of
cliffs that slowed her progress, and what had been a thin layer of melting snow outside the city had become thick white heaps that she had to slog through. Once she'd left the city, the flock
of owls who had accompanied her from Fairmount reconvened to follow her again. Crossing the valley took her another day, but the presence of the owls encouraged her.

Heavy clouds hung overhead in the afternoon sky when she finally reached the Statue of the Twins. It had been built by the first rulers of Aldermere, who, the Elder had told her, had direct
communication with the Seers of the western mountains. Situated at the entrance to the valley, the statue marked the division between civilized, settled Aldermere, and the Seers' Land. Nature
herself had once lived here, where she had given birth to the Twins of legend. Those like the Elder—people who believed that the Seers still existed—often came here, only a short
distance from the city, for reflection. But for Gwen, it was entirely new. In all her years as the Elder's apprentice, she had never been allowed to come with him to the Seers' Land.
She'd imagined the grandeur of the statue, but now the sight of the tumbled stones in its place filled her with profound sadness. This had once been a symbol of the Animas bond, but now it
was little more than a stone slab.

The feet of the boy and three paws of the fox remained intact. Gwen ran her hand along the base where the Elder had taken the fourth stone paw. Something in her belly quivered, and Gwen felt
herself transported to that day at Fairmount, when she'd stood with the others around the Elder's funeral pyre. She sat down on the cold stone slab and wiped her watering eyes. She
pulled her rucksack onto her lap and fished inside it for the stone paw.