The Hero King (3 page)

Then we did a lot more talking. The breakthrough came when I assured the captain that we would be able to get him and all of his people back to the other world. I don’t know if he believed me when I said that nothing could be done for his ship, but there was undoubtedly a lot of what I said that he wasn’t ready to believe. And I didn’t broach the subject of just
where
in the other world they would be going. I just assured him that the crew would be able to get home. He could worry when the time came about explaining how he and his crew happened to walk into the Russian consulate in Chicago when they were supposed to be aboard their ship in the Indian Ocean.

It was nearly sunset before Captain Sekretov and a third of his crew accompanied me back to Castle Arrowroot. The captain wasn’t about to leave his ship unmanned. I told him that I would make arrangements for getting them all home. I assumed that he would be intent on destroying any documents and equipment that the Russian navy considered too sensitive for foreign eyes. I didn’t care about that. I wouldn’t have minded too much if he had ordered the whole ship blown to bits—if explosives worked in the buffer zone.

And then,
finally
, it was time for me to go home.

    I was a little nervous about using the magic doorway from Arrowroot to Castle Basil after the way Aaron had tapped into the system to get us home from the island. The doorways are a family magic, controlled by sets of rings made by Parthet and only usable by the royal family of Varay, and people with whom the blood royal (pardon my blush) have had sex. A pair of doorways have to be matched between specific places, with the doors on each end lined by sea-silver, a seaweed that grows only in the Mist, along the Isthmus of Xayber. That was the way it had been for as long as the magic had been in existence. But Aaron, new wizard, not part of the family in either of the necessary senses, had confided to me that he could go between any of the sea-silver-lined doorways at will, not just the matched pairs, without the proper rings or the proper family tree. And then, out on that island in the Mist, he had opened a doorway that wasn’t even part of the system to carry us back to Arrowroot. I was afraid that he might have shorted out the whole system, and magic
is
subject to interference and static, just like radio or television.

But we reached the capital without any difficulty. The passage worked the way it always did.

Castle Basil was more of a homecoming than Arrowroot.

We headed from the connection with Arrowroot toward the great hall of Basil. I knew that word of our return would spread quickly enough without any contribution from us. Baron Kardeen reached the hall as soon as we did. He strode across the room calling out his welcome before he got to us.

“You got what you went for?” he asked then.

I nodded. “We lost Master Hopay and the boat, though.” I waited until he was right with us and spoke softly enough that I wouldn’t broadcast that news throughout the room. “And the elf ran out of what extra time he had.” I pointed. Harkane was still carrying the head under his arm. “Something will have to be done with that for the time being.”

“We’ll keep it safe,” the baron said. The way he searched my eyes then, I knew the question that he didn’t want to ask.

“I will keep my promise to him,” I said. “We would never have made it without the elf. However, I have no deadline on the promise. I was careful about that. How is the king?”

Emotion rippled the muscles of Kardeen’s face. He controlled it with a deep breath and an instant’s hesitation. “He has been in a coma for more than a week now. Your mother or Parthet remains with him constantly.”

Or you. I thought. I bet you take your turns as well.

“Who’s with him now?” I asked.

“Your mother. Parthet, I believe, is in his workroom. He’s one place or the other all of the time. I don’t think he’s left the castle since we came back from seeing you off.”

Well, Parthet had been spending less and less time at his little cottage in the forest even before that. Even without a crisis, he had rarely gone farther from the castle than one of the pubs in the town of Basil, below the castle’s rock, for more than a year.

“Harkane, you and Timon take the elf’s head to Parthet,” I said, and they hurried off. “Aaron, will you go up to see King Pregel with me?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Have you seen much of the king?” I asked Aaron while we were on our way up.

“Parthet introduced me to him,” Aaron said. “I’ve seen him only one other time.”

Lesh followed us upstairs and took up a familiar position outside the door to the king’s bedchamber while Aaron and I went in. Mother got up from a stool next to Pregel’s bed and hurried to intercept us as far from him as she could. In
that
room, that meant about eighteen feet.

“You’ve bound him here too long,” Mother whispered angrily.

“If
I’ve bound him, it was only to give him a chance to heal himself again, the way he has so often before,” I whispered back. I was still skeptical about Mother’s belief that Pregel—her grandfather, my great-grandfather-remained alive only because I kept telling him that I couldn’t take over his job yet. Anyway, the tension between Mother and me often means that I doubt
anything
she tells me about
anything
. Twenty-one years of pervasive deceit are hard to forget.

Mother and I stared at each other for a moment, then I suggested that she take a break. I would stay with the king for a bit.

“Will you never release him?” she demanded.

I bit back the impulse to snap an angry reply at her. I was too tired for patience, but I was also too tired for an argument. I was too tired for much of anything. It was more than just lassitude after weeks of short rations and mortal peril. I had never been so thoroughly drained in my life, not even when I was badly injured and holding on through sheer insanity during the struggle against the Etevar of Dorthin.

I continued to stare at her. Slowly, I collected enough energy to say, “If we can’t find a way to stop this crazy spin into chaos, we’ll all have our release, much too soon.”

She brushed past me and left the room.

I leaned my head back to ease a throbbing pain at the base of my skull and closed my eyes for a moment. Disagreeing with Mother did that to me. Finally, I looked across the room at Pregel, so thin that he hardly dented the sheet pulled up to his shoulders.

“Aaron, will you see if there’s anything you can do to help him?” Despite the unbelievable magics I had seen Aaron pull off at the shrine of the Great Earth Mother, I couldn’t work up an ounce of confidence that he could help the king. But I had to know.

“I’ll try,” Aaron whispered simply. There was no bravado in his voice, but neither was there doubt.

We crossed the room together. I sat on the stool Mother had vacated. Aaron stood at the foot of the bed and stared at the king.

I could see the change in grandfather’s condition, the deterioration he had suffered in the weeks since I had last seen him. He seemed to be—quite literally—wasting away to nothing. The way people have to eat and eat just to maintain themselves in the magical climate of the seven kingdoms, wasting away actually made some sort of sense. If you couldn’t eat, you had to lose body reserves, and people don’t maintain great quantities of fat in the buffer zone. Pregel was so thin that I thought he might almost be translucent if I held him against a strong light.

At the end of the bed, Aaron started chanting very softly. I felt the light tingle, like static electricity, that comes from active magic (as opposed to the passive magic that can’t be escaped in the buffer zone).

“I’m back from another crazy quest, Grandfather,” I said, speaking softly but not actually whispering. I reached over and took his hand. It was cold, impossibly cold. I felt his wrist and could barely detect a pulse—faint and irregular. His breathing was just as poor.

As briefly as I could, I reported on my quest for the balls of the Great Earth Mother, and where they were now, the way I had to swallow them, the way they now rested between my legs. Talking about that seemed to bring back the throbbing, the ache.

“We’ve got a chance now, Grandfather. Sure, everything seems to be going to hell in a hurry and we don’t know what we have to do to stop it, but I’ve got the ammunition. As soon as we find out what has to be done, I’m going to give it a try.”

If there was time. If the runaway entropy didn’t drop the End of Everything on us first. It seemed strange that only when everything was spiraling toward destruction did any sort of reasonable logic seem to hold in the buffer zone. It was as if magic was descending on its way to and through science.

“Do you remember the way I stormed out of your dining room that day?” I asked, knowing that the king wouldn’t answer. “I didn’t want any part of being Hero of Varay. I was madder than hell about the way I was secretly groomed for the job without being told, without being given a choice.”

I shut up then. I didn’t want to go down that path again. Not that I can ever avoid the memories. Every time Mother and I have a disagreement, it brings the pain and anger back again, full force.

Then I noticed the silence. Aaron had quit chanting. I turned and glanced up at him. He shook his head and gestured toward the door. We both walked over there.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Aaron whispered. “He isn’t in pain, but his spirit is—well, I guess the word is restless.”

“Am
I holding him?” I asked.

“Mostly, but he
is
fighting on his own as well.” Aaron shrugged. “He is aware of what’s going on, I think, and I feel a tremendous sense of duty from him. He’s fighting, but he couldn’t make it for long without you. He seems to be getting impossibly stretched out, the way Wellivazey was near the end.”

I closed my eyes for a moment when I realized that I could no longer argue the point. Maybe I couldn’t see it on my own, but when Aaron pointed it out to me, I had to accept that he was telling me the truth.

“Wait here,” I told Aaron when I opened my eyes again. I went back to the bed, sat on the stool, and took Pregel’s hand again. For several minutes, I just sat there with him, knowing what I had to say, but still having trouble bringing myself to say it.

“I won’t hold you any longer, Grandfather,” I whispered. “I know you’ve done everything you could.”

I’m not sure exactly what I expected to happen when I said that. I guess I thought that something would happen quickly, like in the movies—you know, a moment of consciousness, a dying message, and then a dramatic end. But nothing at all seemed to change. The king continued his oh-so-shallow breathing. His pulse remained the same. After perhaps another twenty minutes, I heard footsteps behind me. Mother had tired of waiting out in the hall. I’m sure she hadn’t gone any farther away than that … not for more than a couple of minutes at least. I got up and let her sit again.

“It’s just a matter of time now, I think,” I told her, standing so my back was to the king. “I’ve got to get home for a little while. You’ll send someone for me … if there’s any change?” I didn’t want to spell it out. Mother nodded and kept her face neutral, without expression.

Aaron and I left the room and headed downstairs with Lesh trailing behind.

“You’ll have to brief Parthet and Kardeen on everything,” I told Aaron. “Tell them about the Russians up at Arrowroot and ask Kardeen to start figuring out how we’re going to take care of them all until I can get them back to the real world. I’ve got to get home to Joy.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything here,” Aaron said.

Despite all the weirdness in general conditions and in his own personal, extraordinary experiences, Aaron had a sureness that was uncanny. As short a time as I had known him, and despite the circumstances, I already got the same feeling of reliability from Aaron that I got from Baron Kardeen or—within his expanding limits—Lesh. As dislocated as I had felt when I first stumbled into Varay, I at least had had a lot of training that helped me adapt and made it possible for me to respond to an immediate crisis. Aaron hadn’t had that advantage, and his early days in the buffer zone had been infinitely more dislocating than mine. It wasn’t just the way he suddenly appeared in Varay, or even his impossibly rapid growth. I remembered Aaron the way I first saw him in the great hall of Castle Basil, a scared little kid trying to sound brave with fake street talk. That was all gone, the street jargon, the pretense, the little kid. His speech had become homogenized—middle-class, middle-America—and I don’t think it was the usual translation magic doing it.

That all hit me at once. I guess I stopped walking and stared at him.

“We all do what we have to do,” Aaron said—as if he were reading my mind.

I shook my head. “How the hell have you managed to cope with all that’s happened to you the last few months?” I asked.

Just for an instant, he slipped back—figuratively—into the little kid I first met. “It ain’t easy, bro,” he said. He grinned, and then we both laughed.

Parthet was in the great hall waiting for me, so nervous that he wasn’t even paying proper attention to the mug of beer in his hand. But I aimed Aaron at him and held myself to a quick greeting and a single question.

“Have you found out yet what I have to do with the balls?”

He shook his head. “No, but we can conjure on them all we want now that you have them back.” He held out his hand for them, and I laughed.

“It’s not that easy,” I said. “Aaron can tell you all about it. I’ve got to get home to Joy now. We’ll talk tomorrow.” I felt my smile wither. “Maybe a lot sooner,” I said. Parthet looked from me to Aaron, then up—in the direction of the king’s chambers.

I nodded, then collected my entourage and we went back to Cayenne.

Castle Cayenne had been my home for more than three years, but it still didn’t have all the emotional connotations of
home
. It was part of my home, but with the magical doorways,
home
was an entire complex—Castle Cayenne, Castle Basil, my condo in Chicago, and the house in Louisville. My parents’ house in Louisville remained part of the construct mostly on the strength of memory and childhood ties. I rarely went there except when I knew that Mother was in Varay. During the years between the defeat and death of the Etevar of Dorthin and the nuking of the
Coral Lady
, I had become accustomed to the double life I was leading, and even enjoyed it most of the time. I could understand the way my father had always seemed to enjoy life so fully while I was growing up … if not the way he and mother had concealed Varay and my heritage from me.