The Lost Gate (31 page)

Luvix wiped the blade on the bedsheet, and a stain appeared. Then he reinserted the dagger into his boot, walked to the door, unlocked it, and left, closing it behind him. Wad noticed that as soon as his back was turned, the illusion of a stain on the bedsheet disappeared. There had been no blood or brains on the dagger, and therefore none on the sheet, and now that Luvix was not watching, Bexoi no longer needed to maintain it.

No doubt he is going to a place where Sleethair can see him. Then she will return here and discover the body, screaming and bringing everyone to see.

“We have a few moments,” said Wad quietly. “Will they find the bed empty? Or you alive in it?”

The Queen withdrew her face from the viewport and turned to look at him. “I have shown you what no other has seen,” she said.

“And I, you,” said Wad.

“You are a Gatefather,” she said.

“And you are a Lightrider,” he said.

“I have concealed it from everyone, all my life. No one knows in all the world but you.”

“Hull knows something of what I am,” said Wad.

“And you let her live?”

“She would not betray me.”

“Will
you
betray
me
?” she asked him pointedly.

“If you doubt me,” he said, “give me back that vial of poison and I will drink it now.”

A smile came to her lips. “On my doubt alone, you'd choose to die?”

“Not until I saw you safely through the gate and back in your room,” said Wad. “I would not want you to languish here, if I'm not as strong as I think, and the gate dies with me.”

“I will have to talk more with you,” she said. “I'm not sure what to do with a confidant—I've never had one before.”

“Talk to him,” said Wad, “and he will talk to you.”

“Oh, my,” she said. “The two most silent people in the castle, and here we are chattering like biddies in the henyard.”

“What will they find?” asked Wad again. “A dead clant? Or a living queen?”

“I think the living queen,” said Bexoi. “Let Luvix wonder what happened to his lovely murder. Let him try to guess. Let him, in fact, try again—now that I know a place where I can go. The gate will be there?”

“Always open to you. And I'll leave your viewport here as well, so you can control the clant.”

“I don't really need that,” she said.

“You can see through the clant's eyes?”

“I'm very good at it.”

Wad looked back through the viewport. The body of the clant was still intact, still naked and beautiful, still empty-eyed and stained with the blood that had spilled out onto the cheek. “What a perfect creation,” he said. “And how clever of you to pretend that your weak affinity for birds was all you had.”

He felt her brush past him as she moved back toward the gate. “How do I find it from this side?” she asked.

“I left it shimmering,” said Wad. “Since no one can see it from this side except someone who has already passed through it.”

She doused her light. Sure enough, the shimmer was there, a single spot in the stone. She touched it with her finger, pushed through it. She turned her face to smile at him just before she disappeared.

He stayed to watch. The clant simply vanished. Then Bexoi turned her back to him as she let the robe fall from her.

Naked, she turned back around, shaking her head. No doubt she realized that Wad had already seen her naked self-clant, and that if he chose to observe her nudity, he could choose vantage points anywhere in her chamber. She could never hide from him, so there was no reason for her to try.

And now that he knew he loved her, he deliberately chose not to look at her naked body. Instead he watched the door.

It opened. Sleethair came back in, accompanied by a lone soldier in the uniform of Gray—no doubt the same conspirator who had stood watch at the door. Luvix would not have involved more than these two, besides himself.

They looked at the bed. At Bexoi sitting there, exactly where Luvix had said he left the murdered clant. Both her eyes were open and undamaged.

“I thought you had gone for the night,” said Bexoi. “And what is he doing inside the door without my invitation? Put yourself under arrest, man. You will be sent back to Gray as soon as I tell my husband of this breach of propriety. Consider yourself lucky that I do not have you flogged.”

The soldier ducked out at once.

“I'm— I'm sorry to bother— bother you,” said Sleethair.

“Well, now that you're here, stay the night,” said Bexoi. “I had a strange dream and it has left me wakeful and restless. Here, beside me—spend the night with me.”

“But your majesty, I…”

Wad waited to see what excuse she would come up with, for of course she was desperate to get to Luvix and tell him that he had not killed the queen after all. Or to accuse him of lying to her. Or simply to get out of Nassassa.

Sleethair got into the bed beside the queen.

“Usually you smell like Luvix,” Bexoi said coldly. “But tonight you smell like vomit. Are you ill?”

“Yes,” said Sleethair—almost eagerly. Wad knew she was thinking: This is my excuse to get out of the room!

“Well, I'm glad you emptied out whatever was bothering you. If you need to puke again, you can do it over that side of the bed onto the floor and then clean it up yourself in the morning. I will not be left alone tonight.”

And that was that. Wad stifled his laughter. Let Luvix spend a miserable night wondering what has gone wrong, why there was no outcry when Sleethair “discovered” the body. Let Sleethair spend a sleepless night beside the woman she conspired to murder. With any luck, Luvix will go ahead and kill the hapless soldier without finding out that Bexoi is alive—and then Sleethair will wonder if he would have killed her, too, as soon as her usefulness was over.

I saved her life, thought Wad, by taking the poison and then coming here to give her warning. But she might well have saved her own life without any help from me, even if it meant causing the traitor to burst into flame as soon as he drew the knife, or make the poison burn up and evaporate completely when he opened the vial.

Bexoi still had the vial, come to think of it.

Wad gated back to the kitchen then, and took his place among the nest of sleeping boys behind the stoves.

The next morning the castle was abuzz with the tragic news that Sleethair, Queen Bexoi's chief lady-in-waiting, had died in the night. Those who had seen her vomiting attested that she was quite ill, but that they had thought her much recovered. Meanwhile, Luvix was seen looking haggard and haunted, and when he departed that afternoon to return to Gray, everyone chalked it up to his grief for his mistress's death—for
that
secret had not been well kept at all.

Wad came to the queen three nights later, after things had quieted down. As soon as her new lady-in-waiting closed the door, Wad came down the wall from the ceiling. Again, he said nothing.

Bexoi beckoned to him, and he came. She was almost exactly his height, for she was a tallish woman, and Wad was still boyish, like a gangling adolescent not yet come to his full manly size. She put her hands on both sides of his face and kissed him firmly yet sweetly. It was not the kiss of a queen to her royal subject, or even the kiss of a rescued woman for the hero who saved her. It was the kiss of a lover, and Wad recognized it as such, though he knew not how.

“I accepted my brother's plan for me,” she whispered in Wad's ear, “because Prayard is one of the mightiest mages alive, and I wanted his children. But he refuses to give me any. You are a greater mage than he is, my little savior; your seed has more value to me. I want it. I want your baby.”

“The King will know it isn't his,” whispered Wad.

“I will tell him I scooped his seed inside myself after he left. I've tried it, and it doesn't work, but he'll at least pretend to believe it. He'll hardly dare accuse me of adultery, because that would mean confessing that he hasn't given me his seed, which violates the treaty.”

Wad nodded. Her thinking had been more subtle than his own.

She let fall her robe and began undressing him.

“I'm older than you think,” said Wad.

“Good. I was afraid you were too boyish to do the job,” she whispered.

“I'm older than anyone else alive,” said Wad. “I don't know if my seed is still alive.”

“If it isn't, then we'll at least take pleasure in the experiment,” said Bexoi. “You are the first person in my life that I have trusted. We will make babies together, and we will talk about everything, and no one will suspect for a moment that the wall-climbing Squirrel, the kitchen boy called Wad of Dough, is the father of Queen Bexoi's magnificent, kingdom-inheriting son.”

“Or sons,” said Wad.

“And daughters,” said Bexoi. “But if Prayard stops visiting me, then we'll have to stop too, alas.”

“Eluik and Enopp will try to kill any child we have,” said Wad. “If Anonoei doesn't try it herself.”

She laughed lightly and softly. “The moment I'm pregnant with this baby,” she whispered, “I will have her sent away, and the boys too, for dear Prayard won't be able to contradict me. My child will be heir, and the people will rejoice, and if Anonoei remained here they would be outraged. The moment I have a child, her two boys become bastards and potential rebels. No, they won't be close enough to our babies to lay a hand on them.”

“You've thought of everything,” whispered Wad, who by now was in the bed beside her, discovering that his hands knew exactly what to do with a naked woman, even though he had no clear memory of ever being with a woman before.

“I always knew you watched me,” said Bexoi. “Now I'm glad I never told the king to have you killed.”

“It's always an option, if you get tired of me,” Wad pointed out.

“Father me a baby, and I'll never get tired of you.” She kissed him into silence.

13

V
EEVEE

At fifteen, Danny was getting more and more frustrated with the solitude of his life with the Silvermans. It was the same problem he had had at the Family compound when he was younger. He could get a good education by reading whatever he could find on the internet and studying books from the library, so it's not that he was behind his grade level in school. In fact, he was doing college-level work in most subjects, and when Marion and Leslie periodically quizzed him about what he was learning, they always ended up nodding and saying, Carry on. What Danny missed was associating with people his age. With friends.

Now that some time had passed, he could look back on his association with Eric and realize that the reason he let Eric boss him around was that even though Eric didn't seem to particularly like him, or see him as anything but someone to use, he was the closest thing Danny had ever had to a friend. And now, though he didn't have to deal with cousins who despised him, he still felt like the only prisoner in a minimum-security facility.

He still ran, the way he had run when he lived in the Family compound. Now, though, it wasn't a secret, he wasn't escaping—he had permission. He was running openly on the roads around Yellow Springs. He would run up and down Xenia Avenue, or cut through the fields and run on East Enon Road—or County Road 18A, depending on where you were. That was the worst and best place to run, because it passed Yellow Springs High School.

Sometimes, when he ran in the daytime during the school year, he would turn left on the Dayton–Yellow Springs Road, which ran along the north side of the high school. He would see high school kids running on the track—not the track team, usually, but just kids in P.E. class, and he would wonder what it might feel like to have a dozen or two dozen kids running along the same road with him. At such times he would pretend that there was someone with him who would say, “Was that as fast as you can go, slowpoke?” or “I saw the way you jumped over that big puddle, good job.” And sometimes he would deliberately splash in puddles as if he were trying to soak an imaginary friend—a prank (of course a prank, wasn't he a gatemage?). Or he'd set himself a goal as if a friend had challenged him.

But there was no friend.

He knew better than to wish for a competition, however, because he knew that if he ever started to care who
won,
then he would always win. While he hadn't made the great breakthroughs as a gatemage that he had hoped for, he had learned to refine and control the techniques he already knew. So he could make a series of tiny gates, by reflex rather than by concentration, that would hurry him along in fine increments, so that to any observer he would seem to be faster than the other runners, but no magic would be visible. If he cared about winning, it would become tempting, if the race was close, to give himself just a little bit of a magical boost. And that would be cheating. What honor would there be in seeming to defeat someone who was actually faster than he was? Yet how could he bear to be bested? So he would never race. If he encountered another runner out on the street, the moment they seemed to be competing with him he would stop and contemplate the scenery for a while, until they were far enough away that competition was impossible.

Just because he
had
the power of a gatemage, or at least some of it, Danny didn't think it was necessarily right for him to use it. Gating Eric out of Rico's office was necessary, he did not regret that, for it healed Eric and it kept him from getting beaten to death. Using his gatemagery to immobilize Rico was also the right thing to do, he was sure, because it was the only power he had to stop the man from doing more of his murders. But using gates to defeat a high school athlete? To break into people's homes or spy on them?

He was not ashamed of all the spying he had done as a kid, because he hadn't known he was a gatemage then, and he was trying to survive in a compound full of mages who had no qualms about using
their
powers against him or anybody else. He had to know whatever he could learn. But now? He never created a gate that would let him see into Marion's and Leslie's room or spy on them when they were talking with each other or with interesting strangers. They would tell him what they wanted to tell him. He was not going to spy on them.