Joshua and the Arrow Realm (5 page)

Leandro gripped the cell bars as if he wanted to rip them up from the blocks of stone. “What happened to you, my queen? You embraced the idea of change when I first came here! We were on the same side.”

“I let you think so.” She fingered her braided bracelet back and forth. “I kept you, my enemy, close at hand. Borin eagerly used his ancient power to transform into Lore, and you welcomed this gift of a royal hound from me. It was easy for your watchdog to watch
you
and discover your plans to bring the Oracle here to defeat me.” Her lips set in a thin line, and she brushed a curl of hair from her cheek. “Funny how your plans worked out for my own. Now I have the Oracle. He'll come in handy. Wait and see.” She smiled, and my insides shuddered as Leandro shot me a knowing look.

The Oracle.
She believed. Leandro believed. My mission to save Apollo exploded into something much more, like facing who I truly was—and saving a whole world … if I survived.

“I thought you trusted me,” Leandro said in a low voice.

“Trust you? Ha! You betrayed your own kind by fathering a child with a Reeker and deserted your post as a guard here. My mother once trusted you when she was queen, but you failed in your oath to her.” She leaned in closer to him. “You've been following me in the woods, watching me lately. I knew you would betray me now. A
traitor is all you'll ever be. Why trust you now?”

Leandro reached a hand through the bars, and Artemis twitched, taking a step back. The soldiers jabbed their vapes toward him, but he kept his hand out toward her and said so quietly I strained to hear, “Because you trusted me once with your heart and soul as a confidant.”

“As a princess, you betrayed me then too!” The torchlight flared across Artemis's sunglasses.

Leandro let his hand fall at her anger. “Your mother assigned me as a work camp guard to keep me from you when our friendship was discovered. Not my fault.”

“No, but falling in love with a Reeker was. You were the closest thing I ever had to a brother.” She paused. “You never came back for me.”

“I left to find my family.”

“I was your family first.”

Leandro bent his head and sighed. “I'm so sorry … Temi.”

Artemis trembled at his nickname for her, and her lip wobbled. She jerked around to command her soldiers. “Keep Leandro locked up with the Reekers until I decide their fate.”

She strode down the corridor with my lightning orb and disappeared through the doorway to the castle above. The soldiers snapped to attention and followed the queen. Their marching boots soon faded away, leaving us trapped in our rock cage. Charlie banged on the cell bars, spewing French curses at them. If only cursing had power here.

We'd gotten Leandro imprisoned with us, and we weren't heading home anytime soon. Instead, we awaited our fate, as Artemis put it. What Artemis meant most likely by
fate
in this land of hunters was really
bait
—and bait gets dead.

Heavy despair wrapped around me like fists between the sounds of Charlie's ragged breathing, Apollo's sighs, and the tapping of Leandro's boots as he paced the cell. I stepped toward Leandro but fell back, unsure what to say … what to ask. When we'd said goodbye in the Lost Realm, he'd flashed away here to his homeland through the Lightning Gate. Now he stood before me again, larger than life, striding back and forth with his hands clasped behind his back.

Suddenly, he stopped and gazed at me, his green-blue eyes shining in the torchlight. “I'm sorry. I got you in this mess. I had to believe.”

I swallowed hard. “That I'm the Oracle.”

“Yes.”

“I-I don't …” I couldn't put my conflict about being the Oracle into words.

“We'll know in time,” Leandro said to reassure me.

“We don't have time!” Charlie shot back.

Leandro cast him a crooked smile. “Merely one of our problems.”

“Not your fault, Leandro,” Apollo whispered. “This all happened because of me.”

We looked at him. He stared ahead with big, sad eyes.

“Zeus turned against me after you left,” Apollo continued. “My family turned against me, never believing I was the king my father wanted me to be. My people lost faith in me. The only ones loyal to me now are the korax. I reunited them with their families and improved their living conditions. Funny, the only ones I could help as king were dumb beasts.” He sputtered a sad laugh.

“King Poseidon was a friend, but I'd barely begun secret talks with him when Artemis kidnapped me. She turned against me … I don't know why. She'll probably
turn Poseidon against me too. The Oracle … that's a myth. No one is coming to save us.” He fingered his filthy purple vest, the royal sun insignia of his land stitched on it. The king's ring, given to him by his dying father, shone bright gold. He pushed his sleeves up and clasped his hands behind his head, revealing the royal tattoo on the inside of his wrist: a yellow sun with a fancy “A” in the middle. He may be a king but he was branded like all Nostos slaves in a prison of his own destiny's making. We were all in the same jail now.

Anger filled my every limb. Anger at trusting Ash and Lore—or Borin. Anger at the queen for imprisoning us and taking my orb. Anger at coming here in the first place. Anger at my friend Apollo, who'd given up hope when we needed it most. As quick as it came, my anger fled, leaving a depressed knot in my chest.

“What happened to you, Apollo?” I said.

He didn't answer.

“After you left, Joshua, Zeus punished Apollo for releasing the Lost Realm slaves,” Leandro explained for him. “He shut down the Lightning Road to Earth from every land except the Arrow Realm, which became the main hub of inbound mortal slaves and outbound Child Collectors. I've tried to reason with Artemis to band with Apollo and lead the revolution Nostos needs to free itself from slavery. At first, she was receptive, but now … she's changed.” He narrowed his eyes. “I suspected she's been lured to dark forces so I followed her into the woods seeking answers. Now I know she watched me too.”

“Did you find any answers?” Charlie said, with a lilt of hope.

“Yes,” Leandro said. “That she forces herself to go into the forest she dreads to overcome her terror.”

“Terror of what?”

“The woods.”

“She's a hunter and afraid of the woods?” I laughed.

But Leandro didn't laugh. He frowned at me. “She's had this fear of the trees trapping her and strangling her to a slow death since she was a child. Her mother made her sleep in the forest alone at the foot of the Black Heart Tree to drum the weakness out of her but it drove her anxiety on. Artemis still forces herself to go there and sleep sometimes to spite her mother, now long dead. I thought Artemis was cured when she returned one morning with a new bracelet she'd made from the branches of the very trees that terrified her.”

“So was she cured?” I said.

“I don't know. She still wears her sunglasses. They make her feel safe and invisible from the trees. Or so she told me as younglings.” He inhaled sharply and flung his cloak behind him at the memory. “Perhaps she dreads taking the glasses off. I don't know. I do know this: it seems as if the old Artemis is gone, replaced by another …” He tapped his lips with a knuckle in deep thought.

“What does that have to do with us?” Charlie said. “Let's break out of here. We've got Apollo like we planned. We can go home.” He backed up and rammed into the cell bars. They shook but didn't budge.

“They're sunk two feet deep into the stone,” Leandro said with a deep sigh. “I know. I
was
the head guard here.”

“Call on some of your animal friends to help us then.” Charlie rubbed his smashed shoulder.

“We're too far below ground to reach them if they'd even come. Most are loyal to Artemis.”

“Joshua, you've got powers here. I mean,
mon Dieu
, they think you're this Oracle. That must mean
something
.”
He twisted his fingers around the bars and lowered his head to them. “I'll never see my brother again … even if I do get home.”

“Stop,” I said. “You will.”

But our adventure had grown more complicated.

“Joshua has no powers,” Apollo said with watery eyes. “Artemis took his lightning orb.”

“You're a king! Don't you have people to call on for help? Could you get them a message somehow?” I said, eager for him to be the take-charge Apollo he was when I knew him as Sam.

He shook his head.

“It was your father's dying wish to help your people, don't you remember?”

“I can't help anyone. I'm powerless.”

“You don't need powers to do the right thing. All you need is to believe in yourself.” How true those words rang for me as I said them but Apollo didn't respond. I tried once more. “Don't let your father's death be for nothing.”

“
Oui
,” said Charlie. “At least he apologized to you in the end for how he treated you.”

Apollo refused to look at either of us and so I continued to search every crevice of our cell for a spot to tunnel out. Hopelessness filled me but I shook it off, not wanting to believe we were powerless to save ourselves. There must be a way out! Loose stone to pull apart. A hole to make bigger. Something! The heavy stones wouldn't budge.

We were fortified worm food.

A
pollo talked on as Charlie and I searched for a way out of our rock prison. “My father named me his successor with his dying breaths, but the rightful heir, my cousin, contested it. He said I killed my father. My own father!” I glanced at him in my search. He gazed at the ceiling, nostrils pinched. “My cousin called me weak for wanting to end mortal slavery. He convinced the rest of my family. They all said Leandro was a deserter and not to be trusted as my father's witness to name me as heir. No one stood with me for what was right.” He paused and in a quieter voice said, “I failed in my promise to you, Joshua.”

“Your cousin sounds like a bully,” I said. Charlie agreed. I'd had my share of them at all the different schools we'd moved to over the years. The new kid with only a grandfather for family was great for getting picked on. “There's got to be others on your side. I just know it.
Don't give up, okay?” I said. “We all need to get home where we belong.”

Charlie nodded, swatting at a sluggish moth buzzing about his head.

Apollo huddled on the floor, knees to his chest. “Nostos is too corrupt for change. I'm just one person. One person can't change a whole world.”

“Yes, they can.” Leandro strode to Apollo and pulled him up to face him. “The Oracle can.” But he stared at me when he said it.

“He'll die trying,” Apollo whispered.

Leandro shook Apollo. “Are
you
going to let Joshua die?”

Tears welled in Apollo's eyes. “It's not up to me. I used to have faith there was an Oracle.”

Leandro let Apollo sink back down to the floor. “We need to have faith in something to go on in this doomed world. It's why I sent Ash to bring Joshua here. And Lore. Unfortunately, that didn't work out.”

“Obviously. They betrayed us,” Charlie said.

“Only Lore. Ash is a friend, and why wouldn't she trust my hound? She trusts me.”

“Funny,” I said. “Like I thought you betrayed me once.”

“Yes, well, we are alike, you and I, young Joshua,” Leandro said. “We must pass over what is evident and search deeper—trust our instincts to know the truth.”

He held my gaze. Old feelings for him as a leader and a hero surged through me.

“Do you have faith in me?” Leandro asked as if reading my thoughts.

With all my feelings bubbling inside me, I could only nod.

Then a silky voice murmured from the stone walls. “Faith is alive.”

We all looked around. “Wha—”

Leandro held up a hand to silence us. “Who said that?”

“A mastermind. And a master of minds,” the voice said with a giggle. I pointed to where the voice came from in the wall. Leandro nodded and we sneaked over there.

“It's a crazy prisoner Artemis locked up,” Apollo said.

“Perhaps he has information to help,” Leandro said.

I nodded and pushed on a two-foot block of stone where the voice came from. Nothing. I tried another stone. Put all my weight behind it. Charlie and Leandro helped. The voice giggled again. We braced our feet and shoved our shoulders into the wall. Charlie grunted, his face straining red. The rock moved an inch. We both gasped in excitement. It must've been used to get through before. We pushed harder. The jagged rock slid forward and fell on the other side.

A man's face bulged through the opening. I jumped back and fell on my butt. His eyes widened, and his giggle spilled into a musical laugh bouncing around our cell.

Leandro reached through the hole and caught the neck of the giggler. “What's so funny?”

The man's eyes bulged bigger. “Nothing, m'lord,” his voice croaked. “You need faith to get out of this dread. Faith is alive. Not dead!”

Leandro let go and the man's face popped into our cell. His pale, smooth face beamed with large, bright blue eyes, red cheeks, and a chunky nose. Tufts of white hair stuck out from his head. He looked like an old man trapped in a kid's face.

Charlie jerked back.
“Mon Dieu!
Santa's crazy cousin.”

“Faith renders us invincible,” Crazy chanted. “No matter the enemies yet to be faced. If doubt enters, our faithful hearts will be erased.”

“You're talking nonsense, whoever you are,” Leandro said, flinging his cloak behind him.

“No, no. A silly sot they put here to rot … but the truth will be got. Found in the lyric cast to spin my trick.” The old man's words and eyes mesmerized me, chaining me in place. His face became a head and an arm with a hand stretched toward us as this strange person squeezed farther through the opening. We all leaned back. The tip of the man's blackened fingernail curled up and pointed at me.