The Elves of Cintra (6 page)

O
WL STARED
down the short black barrel of the handgun and fought to stay calm. She saw that wires attached to its handle ran to a solar pack strapped to the boy’s waist. Some sort of stun gun, a variation on a prod. It would shock its victim if fired. Maybe it would kill. In any case, she didn’t want to find out the hard way.

Around her, the other Ghosts had frozen in their tracks, no one wanting to do anything that would cause the kid with the weapon to hurt her. But they wouldn’t stay still forever.

She took a deep breath and said, “What’s your name?”

He scowled. “What does it matter?”

“Just tell me, I want to know.”

“You don’t need to know my name.” He looked uncomfortable, his ruined face tightening further. “Are you going to give us the cart or not?”

“My name is Owl,” she said, ignoring him. “I am mother to the Ghosts. It is my job to protect them. Like it is your job to protect those who travel with you. Sometimes people make that very hard. Sometimes they make us feel foolish and weak and even helpless. They do this by threatening to hurt us because they don’t like us. That’s happened to you, hasn’t it? That’s what you were talking about when you said everyone always tells you to go away.”

She waited for him to say something, but he just stared at her, the gun steady in his hand.

“Tell him to quit pointing that at you,” Chalk said at her elbow.

“The thing is,” she continued, keeping her eyes fixed on the boy’s face, “you are doing to us what others have done to you. You are acting just like them, telling us we have to do something we don’t want to. You are stealing from us and telling us to just turn around and leave. Why are you doing that?”

Again, no answer, but she could see the confusion and anger mirrored in the boy’s one good eye.

“Don’t you see that you are no better than those people you don’t like if you do this?”

“Stop talking!” he shouted suddenly.

Everyone tensed. Bear came forward a few steps until he had moved between the cart with their goods and the street kids who wanted it. He didn’t say anything, but she could see the determination in his eyes. A few of the street kids glanced his way uneasily.

“What do you expect us to do?” she asked the boy with the gun. “Do you expect us to just stand here and let you take everything we have?”

“Everyone takes everything we have,” he snapped angrily. “Everyone calls us Freaks! We’re not Freaks!”

“Then don’t act—”

“Don’t tell me what to do!”

There was sudden movement to her left, and he shifted his weapon in response. Owl raised her hand to stay his, saying, “No!” The boy flinched, turning back to her as quickly as he had turned away. Seeing her raised arm and mistaking her intent, alarm flooded his face.

Then he shot her.

FOUR

I
T WAS THE WAY
that everything changed so suddenly that shocked Hawk the most.

One moment he was falling from the compound walls, the hands of his captors releasing him for the long drop, his stomach lurching as he struggled in vain to find something to hold on to, his fate a dark rush of gut-wrenching certainty flooding through him. He glimpsed the rubble waiting below, the sharp outline of the bricks and cement chunks clearly visible even in the fading light of the sunset. He caught sight of Tessa tumbling away next to him, her arms windmilling and her legs kicking, her slender body just out of his reach. He wanted to close his eyes to shut the images away, to escape what was happening, but he could not make himself do so.

A moment later he was surrounded by the light, gathered up by its white brilliance as if cradled in a soft blanket. He was neither standing nor sitting but sprawled out, his muscles becoming lethargic and leaden, his mind drifting to faraway places that had no identity. He was no longer falling, no longer doing anything. Tessa had disappeared. The compound and his captors, the city and the sunset, the entire world had vanished.

He didn’t know how long this cocooning lasted because he lost all sense of time. His thoughts were as soft and image-free as the light that bound him, and he could not seem to make himself think. All he could do was revel in the feeling of the light and the welcome hope that somehow he had escaped dying. He waited for something to happen, for the light to clear and reveal his fate, for the world to return—for anything—but finally gave in to his lethargy and closed his eyes and slept.

When he woke, the light was gone.

He was lying on a patch of grass so bright with color that it hurt his eyes to look at it. Sunshine flooded down out of clear skies that seemed to stretch away forever. Gardens surrounded him with a profusion of colors and forms and scents. He blinked in disbelief and pushed himself up on one elbow to look around. Wherever he was, he clearly wasn’t anywhere in Seattle or even anywhere he had ever been in his life. He had seen pictures of gardens in Owl’s books and listened to her read descriptions of them to the Ghosts. He had imagined them in his mind, spreading away from the edges of the pages that framed them in the picture books.

But he had never imagined anything like this.

And yet…

He stared off into the distance, off to where the gardens disappeared from view, going on and on in a rough carpet of plants and bushes, of petals and stalks, their colors so vibrant that they shimmered against the horizon in a soft haze.

Yet it was all somehow very familiar.

He frowned in confusion, sitting up for a better look, trying to understand what he was feeling. His mind was clear now, his limbs and body fresh and rested. The lethargy was gone, dissipated with the light. He felt that he might have slept a long time, but could not account for how that might be. Everything had changed so completely that there was no way he could make sense of it. It was magic, he thought suddenly, but he had no way of knowing where such magic might have come from.

Not from himself, he knew.

Not from Logan Tom, the Knight of the Word.

His confusion exploded into questions.
Why am I alive? What saved me from the fall off the compound wall? How did I get here?

Then he remembered Tessa, and he looked around for her in a welter of sudden fear and desperation.

“She is sleeping still,” a voice said from right behind him.

The speaker was so close and had come up on him so quietly that Hawk jumped despite himself, wheeling into a defensive crouch without even thinking about what he was doing. Breathing hard, arms cocked protectively in front of him, he stared up into the face of the old man who stood there.

The old man never moved. “You needn’t be afraid of me,” he said.

He was ancient by any standards, rail-thin and bent by time, his body swathed in white robes that hid everything but the outline of his nearly fleshless bones. His beard was full and white, but his hair was thinning to the point of wispiness, and his scalp showed through in mottled patches. His features were gaunt, his cheeks sunken, and his brow lined. But all of this was of no importance to Hawk when he looked into the old man’s eyes, which were clear and blue and filled with kindness and compassion. Looking into those eyes made the boy want to weep. It was like seeing a reflection of everything that was good and right in the world, all gathered in a perfect vision, bright and true.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Someone who knows you from before you were born,” the other answered, smiling as if having Hawk standing before him was the most welcome of sights. “Someone who remembers how important that event was.” His eyes never left Hawk’s face. “What matters is not who I am, but who you are. Here and now, in this time and place, in the world of the present. Do you know the answer?”

Hawk nodded slowly. “I think so. The Knight of the Word told me when I was locked away in the compound. He said I was a gypsy morph and that I had magic. I saw something of what he was talking about in a vision when I touched my…my mother’s finger bones.” He hesitated. “But I still don’t know if I believe it.”

The old man nodded. “What he told you is the truth. Or at least, the part of it he knows. It is given to me to tell you the rest. Walk with me.”

He started away, and Hawk followed without thinking. Together they moved down the pathways and grassy strips that crisscrossed the gardens, passing through rows of flower beds and flowering bushes and trellises of flowering vines. They moved without purpose and without any seeming destination, simply walking, first in one direction and then in another, the boundaries of the gardens—if there were any—never drawing any nearer, never even coming into sight. They continued for a long time, the old man moving slowly but purposefully, with Hawk matching his pace as he tried to gather his thoughts, to give voice to the questions swimming in his head. Spoor and tiny seedlings drifted in the air around him, shimmering with a peculiar brightness. Hawk could hear insects buzzing and chirping. He could see flashes of bright color from birds and butterflies. He could not stop looking.

“Did you bring me here?” he asked the old man finally.

The old man nodded. “I did.”

“Tessa, too? She’s all right? She’s not hurt?”

“She sleeps until we are done.”

Hawk scuffed his tennis shoes on a patch of gravel, looking down at the skid marks, still trying to make what was happening feel real. “I don’t understand any of this,” he said finally.

The old man had been studying the landscape ahead, but now he looked over. “No, I don’t suppose you do. It must all seem very strange to you. A lot has happened in the past few weeks. A lot more will happen in the weeks ahead. You are different from who you were, but not as different as you will be.”

He made a sweeping gesture at the gardens. “This is where you were conceived, young one. Here, in these gardens. A small, unexpected gathering in the evening air of magic from earth and water brought you into existence, a wild magic that only happens now and then with the passing of the centuries. I have seen it before, but not like this. The brightness of the gathering was unusual, the joining quick and sure, the suddenness and the frantic need so apparent that it caught me by surprise. That takes something special. I have been alive a long time.”

Hawk believed it. The old man had the look of something about to crumble and be scattered by the winds. “How old are you?”

“I was here at the beginning.”

Hawk shuddered despite himself.
At the beginning?
He knew instinctively what the old man was talking about, and at the same time he did not believe such a thing was possible. “How do you know what you saw happening with the magic was me?” he asked sharply. “I mean, it wasn’t me then. It was just…just something happening in the air, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, it was you. Such things cannot be mistaken. You weren’t a boy then, just a possibility of becoming something wonderful. I saw the potential of the magic that would form you and dispatched it into the world at a time and place where you might find help in making the necessary transformation. I could not tell what that transformation would be; only that it would be special and powerful and mean something to the world. You were found and caught up by another Knight of the Word, then taken to your mother. You found your purpose with her, merging with her, becoming her unborn child. She took you inside her, gave birth to you, raised you, then gave you back to me.”

Hawk stared, and then said the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t remember any of this. I don’t think it ever happened.”

The old man nodded. “I took away your memories.”

“You took away…” Hawk couldn’t finish. “Why would you do that?”

“You didn’t need them then. It wasn’t time for you to have them.” The old man kept walking, not slowing or quickening his pace, just ambling through the flowers and the sunlight, his time and Hawk’s of no importance. “Let me start again,” he said, “so that you will understand.”

Hawk folded his arms over his chest, already prepared to dismiss everything he was about to hear. He didn’t know who the old man was or how he had brought him to these gardens, but when you started believing that someone could take away your memories or make you become a boy out of a seed, it was time to back up a few steps.

He waited for the old man to begin, but they continued walking in silence. Hawk was impatient but knew the value of not rushing things when you were at a disadvantage, which he clearly was, so he waited. Finally, they reached a small pool and stone fountain surrounded by ancient wooden benches, and they seated themselves next to each other facing down long rows of small purple flowers that hung from vines off lengths of trellis, climbing and tumbling away like a waterfall.

“Wisteria,” the old man said quietly, gesturing toward the flowers.

Hawk nodded, saying nothing, still waiting. He wanted to get this over with. He was anxious to see Tessa, to make certain she was all right. He was eager to return to the Ghosts, assuming the old man would let him do so. He couldn’t be sure of that. He couldn’t be sure of anything just at the moment.

“You asked before who I was,” the old man said, looking not at him, but off into the distance. “I have no real name, but the Elves in Faerie time called me the King of the Silver River and the name has stayed with me. Like you, though you doubt your origins still, I am a Faerie creature born of the Word’s magic. We sit in the Gardens of Life, which have been given into my care. All life begins here. Once conceived, it goes out into the larger world to play its part. This is what happened to you. You were wild magic conceived first within these gardens, then within the world of humans. A Knight of the Word named John Ross caught you up before you were fully formed, and when you took the shape of a small boy he took you to Nest Freemark, who became your mother. She did not know your purpose, but she possessed magic as well, a legacy of her unusual family. She kept you for as long as was necessary after giving birth to you, but eventually it was necessary to take you away from her and bring you here.”

Hawk shook his head. “I remember the Oregon coast, swimming in the ocean, lying on the beach, being with my family there. I don’t remember anything of what you are telling me.”