Lost Ones

CHAPTER 7

T he cell door swung open.

Oliver stood leaning against the opposite wall beneath one of the grated windows. A light rain had started to fall, and even those few droplets that the breeze blew in were refreshing. The coolness of the dungeon could not compete with the heat of the day.

“You’re late this morning, guys. Breakfast is to be served promptly at eight A.M. on the Lido Deck.”

Two guards stepped inside-both Atlantean. One carried a tray of something that resembled gruel and a piece of crusty bread. Two other guards waited in the hall. They wouldn’t open the door to Julianna and Collette’s cell until Oliver’s was locked up again. Since the escape attempt, he hadn’t seen a single Yucatazcan guard in the dungeon. Only the pale, grim bastards from Atlantis.

The one carrying the tray sneered.

The other stormed across the cell and reached for Oliver, who did not bother trying to elude him. Where could he hide in this cell? The guard grabbed him by the front of his shirt and backhanded him across the face. His lip split, stinging in the warm air, and fresh blood dripped down his chin. It happened regularly. The guards didn’t leave him alone long enough for the lip to heal properly.

“And good morning to you,” he mumbled over his swollen, bleeding lip.

The Atlantean sneered at him. Either he was bald or his hair had been shorn almost to the scalp, for not a single strand poked out from beneath his helmet. Like many of the soldiers of Atlantis, he seemed an entirely different breed from the sorcerers-taller and broad-shouldered, but his features still had that narrow sharpness and his skin the greenish-white cadaverous hue. His eyes were dim and cruel.

Oliver did not react. He simply returned to his position against the wall, and waited while the other guard set down his tray and the two of them withdrew from the cell. During the last skirmish, he had given a good accounting of himself.

When the guards had locked him in once again, the keys jangled as Julianna and Collette’s cell was opened. Oliver tensed inwardly, hoping that there would be no beating for them. On the day after they had tried to reach Frost, Julianna had been groped by a guard. Had she been raped, Oliver would have attacked the next Atlantean to come into his cell, even knowing that it might mean his life.

But they hadn’t raped her. Yet.

She and Collette had both reassured him that they were okay. But that night he had heard Julianna crying and forged a new hate inside him.

Today neither his fiancee nor his sister met the guards with wisecracks, the way Oliver had. That was for the best. He did it because he couldn’t help it, and because the pain they gave him in return helped to keep the furnace of his hate burning. But Collette and Julianna kept quiet and the guards did nothing but leave their food and lock the door to their cell again.

Boots scuffed the stone floor as the soldiers marched back up the corridor, then up the stairs out of the dungeon. And they were alone again.

Oliver sucked on his split lip and spat some blood onto the floor. He pushed away from the wall and walked to the door. Atlantis had bred strange people, some of them stealthy and cunning. The guards did not normally fall into this category, but he had learned caution. Oliver peered through the grated window but saw no one. He heard his sister and Julianna speaking to one another quietly but could not make out the words, nor could he see any sign of them through the grate in their door. They were still choking down their food.

He ran his fingertips along the mortar grooves between the stones that made up the wall of his cell. Eyes closed, Oliver cleared his mind. Sometimes he tried this trick on the outer wall, tempted by the sunshine. But if Collette was right-if what she’d done at the sandcastle hadn’t been some strange fluke-then just getting outside wouldn’t solve their problems.

If Collette was right… Oliver knew his doubt had to be a problem, but he could not seem to put it behind him.

“At it again, huh?”

He opened his eyes. Julianna was peering at him from the cell across the corridor. Oliver smiled, drawing a sharp pain from his split lip. A flicker of concern passed over Julianna’s features. Her face was filthy, her hair tangled and wild, but her eyes had a light that woke something in him, just as it always had. With just a look, she could remind him of all the things he had always dreamed of being.

“Yeah. Not much else to do.”

Julianna looked back into the gloom of her cell. Her fingers wrapped around the grate.

“Collette, too. She’s getting frustrated.”

From within the cell, Oliver heard his sister’s voice. “Of course I’m getting frustrated. This is bullshit. We can do this. We can get out of here.”

Oliver grinned, hissing with pain and touching his bleeding lip. “Yeah. We’re so out of here.”

Julianna frowned, angry with him. “Maybe it’s your attitude that’s keeping us here.”

“Hey-”

“Hey, nothing, Mister Bascombe. You two are special. Your mother was a legend. Borderkind. All your life, your father tried to drum that out of you. He pretended magic didn’t exist to try to convince you of the same thing.”

Oliver scratched his fingers against the mortar. “But it does exist.”

“Of course it does!” Julianna replied. “Don’t you get it? That’s why he acted the way he did. To protect you.”

A knot of ice formed in Oliver’s gut. This was nothing he had not already considered, but to hear Julianna talking about it, to have the thoughts spoken out loud, troubled him.

Nobody who had known Max Bascombe before the death of his wife could ignore how drastically the man had been changed by his loss. As young as Oliver had been at the time, he could still recall his parents laughing together often. He cherished the memories he had of them together, dancing at the New Year’s Eve party they’d thrown at the house, picnicking on a blanket on the back lawn with the Atlantic Ocean stretching endlessly in front of them, and a handful of times he had entered a room to find them embracing or locked in a kiss.

Her death had extinguished a light inside Oliver’s father. From that time on, he had become more sentinel than parent, grimly watching over his children, but seeming to take little joy in them. Oliver, in particular, had vexed the man. His father had steered him away from fanciful movies and discouraged cartoons. On one birthday, Julianna had given him a magic set. Oliver had played with it for hours, but when he woke in the morning it had vanished. He had ransacked the house searching for it, thinking Friedle or the cleaning woman had put it away, but no one could recall having moved it at all. It had taken Collette to make him see the truth-their father had gotten rid of it.

Later, other items vanished in similar fashion. Neither father nor son would say a word, but the gulf between them widened. His complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia disappeared a week after Christmas, the year he turned fifteen. When his high school English teacher had assigned Charles Dickens’s Hard Times to the class, Oliver had found a distressing echo of his own relationship with his father. The diatribe that opened that book had remained with him all of these years: Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: Nothing else will ever be of any service to them.

Oliver had taken to hiding away in the town library, reading mythology and fantasy and all sorts of other things his father would never have approved of. And whenever he had a part in a play in school, or with the Kitteridge Civic League, his father would never be in attendance. More than once, he had forced his son to quit the drama club, only to relent when teachers intervened on Oliver’s behalf.

And Julianna thought his father had done all of those things to protect him?

“It’s true,” a softer voice said.

Collette had stopped trying to take the wall apart. On tiptoe, she looked at him through the grate.

“She died because of what she was, Oliver. It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Collette said. “Dad was afraid we’d end up dead, too. He feared what we were because he didn’t want to lose us.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

“Do you remember when I gave you Phantastes?”

As painful as the memory was, Oliver laughed softly.

“How could I forget?”

As cold and distant as his father could be, it had given him a certain amount of pleasure to piss the man off. Any kind of emotion revealed that his father was still human, even anger.

Collette had read George MacDonald’s nineteenth-century fairy tale-about a man who slips from the ordinary world into one full of magic and fairy courts, a tale that now resonated powerfully with Oliver-for a college course, and had brought it home for her brother on a break from school. One morning, Oliver had come down to the kitchen to find his father standing by the table, reading the back cover of Phantastes. Oliver had left the book there the night before, forgetting to return it to his room.

His father had glanced up at him, his expression almost bewildered. Anger had flashed in his eyes and he had held the book up and begun to tear pages in half.

“Enough,” he had said. “Haven’t you learned by now? That is enough of this shit. You keep your head in the real world, son, or you’re never going to have much of a life. No more of this dreck in my house. I’m telling you now, and you’d better believe I’ll tell your sister as well. No more.”

Oliver had snapped, then. Years of hurt and rage over things that his father had made vanish bubbled over. He had screamed at the man and called him a dozen vile names. When he ran out of steam, his father dropped the book-in two halves now-onto the table, crossed the room, and grabbed Oliver by the front of his shirt.

“You may not like it, but I’m your father. I’m all you’ve got. You curse and shout all you like, but a father’s supposed to look out for his children, and that’s what I’m doing for you and your sister. If you want to hate me, there’s little I can do about it, and it won’t keep me from doing what I think is best for your future. Take your head out of the clouds. Wake up, Oliver.”

Collette called his name.

Through the grate in his cell door, he stared at her.

“All this stuff about Melisande…it gives that morning a different perspective, don’t you think?” Collette said.

“Maybe it does,” he admitted. Julianna and Collette were right. It would be foolish for him to try to deny it, especially to himself. All his life, he’d nurtured bitterness and resentment toward his father, and loved him in spite of it. Now he knew his father had had reasons they never could have guessed, and that only made both his love and his resentment grow. There must have been a better way for him to protect his children.

“Keep trying the wall,” he said.

Julianna smiled at him. Oliver closed his eyes, fingertips finding the grooves between the stones again.

Night fell. Damia Beck went on foot into the Oldwood. Sprites and pixies flitted up in the branches of trees, giving off glimmers of light like multicolored fireflies. The colors were soft and lovely, a bright bouquet of butterfly wings that danced through the darkness and then disappeared.

Things snorted in the undergrowth, rustling in the tangled branches, but did not emerge. Her hand gripped the pommel of her sword, but it seemed as though the creatures that lived in the Oldwood had been warned away from her.

Dark shapes watched from the branches and from the darkness of the thick wood. Some were low to the ground and misshapen-little goblin things with gleaming eyes-and others were clearly animals, or legends in the skins of beasts. Many of the animals in the Oldwood were not what they seemed. Some were legends, but others would be ancient demigods, wood deities. In a world full of legends, many were little more than names to her, and there must be countless things on this side of the Veil that she had never heard of at all.

But the master of the forest-that legend was quite familiar.

Damia tried to ignore the lurkers in the dark. She had set off at a steady pace, working her way through the woods on a westerly course. At some point, she would meet the one she had summoned, but when? Damia had begun to grow impatient.

“Hello?” she said, into the trees.

Leaves rustled. No path had opened before her, so she forged her own, relying on her instincts to keep on course. An owl cried mournfully above her and she glanced up. Something growled just off to her left.

When she focused once more on the trees in front of her, moving between two tall rowans, she saw a tiny man in a blood-red cap. He had a thin beard and leaned against a tree with his arms crossed, a grim expression on his face.

Damia cocked her head and studied him. “You’re not-” she began to say. Then, fearful of causing offense, she started again. “Are you the master of the forest?”

It was all she could do to keep the disdain and doubt from her voice.

The little man snorted with derisive laughter, shook his head, and turned away, disappearing into the Oldwood.

Frustration growing, Damia continued. For a time the ground trembled with the footfalls of something enormous, and she heard branches snapping loudly in the distance. More owls cried, and she tightened her grip upon her sword.

Back on the road, three-quarters of her battalion awaited. Likely they would be wondering why they were sitting around. Doubt filled Damia. Had Charlie misled her? Was this simply a waste of time? Images filled her mind of a Yucatazcan ambush falling upon her battalion while they waited on the road.

“Damn it,” she whispered.

Still, she forged on. She had committed herself to this rendezvous and would not turn back unless she had real reason to believe she had been deceived.

Damia walked on. Roots seemed to shift themselves underfoot as though trying to trip her. Branches scratched at her arms and face. Then she noticed something that troubled her.

The owls had fallen silent.

Not only the owls, but all of the creatures of the forest. Nothing moved in the branches or the underbrush. Even the wind seemed to have gone still. For the first time since embarking on this journey, Damia Beck took a step backward.

“Hello?” she said, her voice echoing back to her.

From the corner of her eye, Damia glimpsed motion. She turned, but saw only trees. Then something shifted near the trunk of a thick oak and she frowned in confusion. It seemed that the tree itself had started to move. Branches became arms and fingers. Bark took on a shape, rough and jagged. It was a woman, naked and thin, but her flesh had the texture and color of the tree. Or perhaps it truly was bark.

Something snapped behind her. Damia spun to see another tree-woman peeling herself from the trunk of an oak. Her eyes opened like a newborn’s, gleaming black in the moonlight that filtered down through the branches.

Damia drew her sword and backed away. But a wet, cracking noise came from behind, and again she spun to find a third tree-woman standing in the shadows. The creatures were unsettlingly sexual, their bodies ripe and alluring in spite of their rough texture. As they circled her-and a fourth and fifth appeared-their flesh grew smoother and lighter, until they almost could have passed for human in the darkness.

“I am Commander Beck,” she said. “I travel the Oldwood under the seal of the King of Euphrasia-”

“Not our king,” one of the dryads said, her voice sultry and full of warning. She extended one long, ragged finger. “Our king is here. ”

Sword held before her, Damia turned. The dryads had surrounded her, but now two of them stepped back to make way as a huge, gleaming stag came toward them.

She blinked. It was no stag.

He had a pelt of thin, sleek brown hair, but a body like a man. Huge and gloriously muscled, he towered over her. Atop his head was a massive rack of antlers that would have tangled in the branches of the trees…if they had not drawn back from the path of the Lord of the Oldwood. In ancient times, the Celts had called him Cernunnos, and that had served as his name ever since.

Cernunnos stood gazing down at her with hard, intelligent eyes of the brightest green. His antlers threw criss-cross shadows over Damia’s face.

“You are the Lost girl who summoned me?”

For a moment she hesitated. Then she cursed herself silently for becoming so enchanted. She stood up straight and sheathed her sword, then bowed her head in respect.

“I am, Lord Cernunnos. You honor me and my king by agreeing to meet here.”

“I avoid involvement with the lands beyond the wood,” the master of the forest said, his gaze sage and a bit sad. “But my people are afraid. They whisper of a dark time beginning. They fear war and fire in the wood. Are they right to be afraid?”

Damia raised her chin, meeting his gaze without wavering. “Yes, milord. They are. Atlantis has betrayed the Two Kingdoms. The truce is broken.”

Cernunnos waved a hand in the air. The trees seemed to sway away from him. But when he spoke, it was as if they leaned in to catch his every word.

“That has nothing to do with Oldwood. The legends here care nothing for kingdoms or kings.”

Still, she did not waver. “Would that they could continue to live without caring, sir. But the war will not leave the Oldwood unscathed. The armies of Yucatazca have invaded, with spies from Atlantis amongst their ranks. They will come. And those prophecies of fire may well come true. You will be a part of the war, whether you wish to or not.

“If you want to keep the Oldwood safe, you must help us. I have sent a portion of my soldiers to the west of the forest. The southern army will see them and will pursue them. My troops hope to retreat into the Oldwood, to draw the invaders in. We’d like to fight them here, in the wood.”

All the quiet wisdom went out of his eyes. Cernunnos’s face darkened with rage. His lips peeled back from his teeth and he quaked with anger.

“You dare much, Lost girl,” he sneered. “The war might have passed us by, and instead you ask to bring it here?”

The dryads hissed and circled closer, fingers hooked into talons. From the branches and the underbrush came a stirring of bestial sounds and the snapping of twigs. Eyes glowed yellow and red in the darkness, hidden behind trees and in bushes.

Damia steeled herself. “And what will you do then? Eventually, they will come to subjugate you and all of Oldwood. As angry as you are, you should recognize an ally when you see her. Hunyadi does not interfere with you. Do you think Atlantis will afford you that courtesy?”

Cernunnos scowled at her, his nostrils flaring. Then he held up a hand and the dryads withdrew.

“And how much time do I have to prepare?”

“Tomorrow, with your permission, a company of my soldiers will lead the invaders into the Oldwood from the west. I have three more companies, making a full battalion, waiting on the eastern road, with two regiments of cavalry and a platoon of Borderkind. I’d like to move them into the forest tonight.

“But I need to know, milord. When the battle begins, will you help?”

Cernunnos took a long breath, then nodded, his head heavy with those wicked-looking antlers.

“Yes, Commander Beck. We shall help kill your enemies.”

A shudder went through Virginia Tsing’s sleeping form. Rising almost to wakefulness, she drew her blanket up to her neck and huddled under it. This far north and east, the nights could get chilly, but she enjoyed sleeping with the windows open. Her bedroom was above the cafe and faced the Sorrowful River. Sometimes she felt she could hear the gentle sigh and weep of the waters, but usually it was only the soft rush of the river rolling by. The sound comforted her, eased her mind when she lay down at night.

Again she stirred. Half aware, she frowned and reached up to rub at her eyes. Her nose wrinkled. The place was always full of the smells of the cafe-of coffee and baking bread, of cinnamon and moon cakes-and underneath it all the thick, starchy odor of dough and flour.

Without opening her eyes, she tried to discover what had woken her. There had been a sound that was not the river, and a smell that was not the cafe. The odor had an earthen quality to it and it tickled her nose.

She burrowed deeper under the covers. The aches of an old woman’s body pained her, but when she settled down again, they retreated. Her breathing was steady, but her forehead had not lost the crease of the frown she wore.

The sound came again. Not the creak of a floorboard or the sound of voices that might have reached her if Ovid had a lady friend visiting late. This was not the river. It had a scratchy quality, skittering across the floor.

Virginia’s nose wrinkled again. Her breath hitched and she brought her hand up, but could not prevent herself from sneezing. When she sneezed, her eyes flew open.

And there he stood.

Death had come for her, a hooded figure that seemed to shift and rasp with each movement. Its body flowed with motion and she realized it was made of sand.

The Sandman stared at her with bright yellow eyes. It smiled, showing sharp black teeth.

“What do you want?” she asked.

The creature slid toward her, its tread scouring the floor.

“Kitsune,” it rasped. “The Borderkind who traveled with the Legend-Born…the Bascombe. I am told that the fox is here, and that you will know where.”

Her heart fluttered with fear. Those eyes were dreadful to see. But Virginia Tsing would not crumble. She was far too proud. Perhaps that was the thing she had most in common with her son. Even terror could not break her.

“She’s no longer among us,” the old woman said softly. Her voice did not sound as strong as she had hoped it might.

It reached down with one hand and laid its palm across her mouth. She felt the sand spilling into her throat. Her eyes widened, and her heart began to race. Terror gave her the courage to reach up and grab its wrist. She felt the sand shifting beneath his cloak as she stared up into those awful yellow eyes.

Virginia gagged as the sand reversed direction, returning from her body to the Sandman’s.

“Where?” he asked.

“Perinthia,” she rasped. “Kitsune’s gone with Coyote to Perinthia, to see the old gods.”

The Sandman bowed his head as though in thanks, the hood of his cloak obscuring his eyes.

“You won’t stop the Legend-Born,” she persisted. “Their time has come.”

The monster laughed. “I don’t want to stop them. Only to kill them.”

As though it were a promise, he lowered himself toward her. Virginia cried out, her scream blotting out the sound of the river. Strangely, in that moment she could smell all of the aromas of the cafe-the coffee, the cinnamon, the flour.

The Sandman dipped its talons toward her eyes.

She studied its face and realized she had seen it before. Once, that face had belonged to a man, a Lost One, who had passed through Twillig’s Gorge.

“Halliwell?” she asked.

The Sandman plunged his fingers into the corners of her eyes and plucked them out. Virginia shrieked and he silenced her with a flow of sand that clogged her nose and throat once more. He flooded her skull with sand and it spilled from the empty sockets where her eyes had been.

Inside the Sandman, Ted Halliwell screamed.

The monster heard his voice, and only laughed in return.

Halliwell knew he existed only as a thought, now. He saw what the Sandman saw, heard what the abomination heard. Yet Virginia Tsing had looked up into the face of her death and she had seen Halliwell himself. Frozen in horror and grief over the woman’s murder, he shivered at the realization that, looking up into the sand sculpted into his own features, the woman had died thinking that Halliwell himself had murdered her.

And yet, as much as that weighed on his heart, he quickly realized it had other implications. Somewhere in the eyes of the Sandman, Virginia had seen him. Had some part of his essence come to the surface in that moment? If enough of me still exists in here for her to see me, is it enough to exert some influence?

Sickened as he was by the old woman’s death, he found in it a glimmer of hope.

When the Dustman had drawn him down into the dark storm at the core of the Sandman, he had shared a terrible truth. They were all one, now. Three spirits in one form. The substance of the Sandman had changed. Now it was sand, and dust, and Ted Halliwell’s bones, ground down to a fine powder by the scouring of the sand.

They were one. The teeth that bit into Virginia Tsing’s eyes were their teeth. The claws that ripped at her flesh were their hands.

“I’m sorry,” Halliwell said.

It might have been that the words came from the Sandman’s lips. And, if so, what else might Ted be able to do down there in the dust, and the sand, and the powder of his own bones?

Ovid woke to the sound of his mother’s voice. As he blinked, clearing his vision and his mind, he realized it was still early. What was his mother doing awake? Yet, now that he listened, he realized there was another voice as well-an inhuman rasp that made the hairs on his arms stand up.

He vaulted from his bed, legs tangling in the sheets. As he extricated himself, he heard his mother coughing. Ovid’s heart beat faster, his skin warming with the heat of panic. He ran to his wardrobe. His sword hung in its scabbard from the door. The metal sang as he drew the blade.

“ You won’t stop the Legend-Born, ” he heard his mother say, coughing. “ Their time has come. ”

Whatever menaced her, it laughed. It didn’t want to stop them, it claimed. Only to kill them.

Ovid froze. The thing-whatever it was-had just confirmed his mother’s belief. The Legend-Born were real.

Then his mother began to scream.

“No!” he cried, and bolted from his room.

Sword in hand, he raced down the corridor. He had recently begun to insist that she lock her bedroom door at night. As she shrieked in agony he tried to work the point of his sword between the door and the frame. His blood boiled with bitter irony.

At last he reared back and began to kick the door, just beside the knob. Again and again he kicked, until at last the wood splintered and the door flew open.

Only then did he realize that her screams had ceased. He peered into the darkened room. His mother lay on the bed, her throat crushed, broken, and bleeding. Her chest had been caved in. Where her eyes had been there were bloody, ragged holes.

Above her stood a thin figure in a gray cloak, its body shifting and flowing, its flesh in motion. But it was not flesh; it was sand. For a moment, he recognized that face, and it was not the face of a monster but of a man he recognized…a man to whom he and his mother had given their hospitality. Ovid even remembered his name. Ted. Ted Halliwell.

Then the sand shifted again and the face became the monster’s. The Sandman turned to gaze at Ovid as it licked its bloody fingers, which were thin as knives.

Ovid screamed and ran toward it, anguish overcoming reason. He raised his sword-grief a hollow pit in his gut-and swung the blade as he lunged for the Sandman.

The sword passed through it. Ovid felt a tug against the metal and heard it hiss as the sand scraped against it.

The Sandman collapsed, losing all cohesion. A wind rose from nowhere and swirled and eddied the sand across the floor and out the windows into the nighttime peace of Twillig’s Gorge.

When it had departed, all that remained for Ovid Tsing was the gentle sound of the river passing by outside.

On a street in Palenque’s inner maze, just outside the great plaza where the king’s palace thrust up from the city’s heart, a small bar called Brasilia provided the pulse of the capital. A pair of musicians played steel drum and guitar, sometimes adding flute and trumpet. The couples who dined or drank on Brasilia’s patio were young and beautiful, with complexions the color of caramel or cinnamon. The waitresses were even younger and more beautiful. Everyone smiled and laughed, and once in a while someone passing by the patio would begin to dance to the music.

The scent of flowers carried on the breeze from a nearby florist. A father swung his daughter up to perch on his shoulders and made the snorting sounds of an angry bull, scraping his shoe against the cobblestones as though about to charge. The girl squealed in delight.

Leicester Grindylow watched all of this from just inside the bar. He sat on a stool from which he could take in both the inside of the bar and the bright, glittering nightlife on the patio and beyond. Inside, however-where the serious drinkers were-things were not so bright, and the patrons were far less beautiful. They had not come for dinner or music, but only to stare into their drinks and to argue bitterly about things upon which they mostly agreed.

Had they been able to see him for what he was, they would not have spoken so freely. Had they realized he was a spy-for what else could one call his present occupation?-they likely would have beaten him bloody. But there was no way for the Lost Ones in Brasilia to recognize his true nature. They would see an ordinary man instead of a long-armed water boggart. When he spoke, they would not hear English with the London accent he had acquired over years of visiting the ordinary world.

The Mazikeen had seen to that.

When Blue Jay and Cheval had first returned to the apartment where the Borderkind had holed up in Palenque, Grin had been dubious. Yeah, the Mazikeen were powerful. But a pair of sorcerers weren’t going to have enough magic between them to take the palace and free Oliver, Frost, and the others. For that, all the Mazikeen in the Two Kingdoms might not have been enough. Ty’Lis had enough sorcery on his own to take out several Mazikeen, at least the way Grin had heard it. And even if Ty’Lis had sent most of the other Atlanteans off to the north to conquer Euphrasia, they had no way to know what kind of forces he had in the palace, or what surprises he had waiting.

But it turned out Blue Jay hadn’t shared the whole plan with any of them. Part one of their mission didn’t have a thing to do with getting Oliver out of the dungeon. A bit of espionage was the first order of business.

The Mazikeen had lined them up-not just Grin, Cheval, and the burning Li, but a bunch of local Borderkind the sorcerers had organized in secret in Palenque. There was a bloke with a massive mouth in his belly, and half a dozen Pihuechenyi-tall, winged, serpent-men with wicked fangs.

Yucatazca didn’t seem to have a lot of cute, furry Borderkind, or even a lot of pretty tricksters. Not a happy lot.

But they needed allies, and the old saw about beggars not being choosers was never far from Grin’s mind as he spent time with the group the Mazikeen had gathered.

One by one, the Mazikeen had taken them and cast a glamour over them. They called it something else, but Grin had learned a bit about magic over his long life, and he knew a glamour when he saw one. The sorcerers disguised each and every one of them as humans, Lost Ones. They could see through one another’s glamours, but no one else could. If a magician grew suspicious, she might be able to use magic to get a glimpse of their inner selves, but otherwise, they were completely hidden.

Ever since, they’d been out in the city of Palenque, mixing with the people. Listening. And talking.

“You don’t really believe that,” said the bartender now, a woman slightly older but no less beautiful than the waitresses who served the fashionable young people on the patio. Perhaps her extra years meant the managers of the bar thought her only fit to deal with the grim drinkers in the gloomy interior.

“I certainly do,” replied a nattily dressed man with wispy white hair and a thin mustache. The others called him Professor, though Grin didn’t know what had earned him the title.

A portly fellow with several days’ growth of beard slapped one hand on the bar. “That is shit. Traitors talk like that, Professor.”

The professor’s eyes narrowed and he stared at the man. “So I am a traitor, now, Enrique? On the contrary. I am a patriot. I have taught the children of kings. Government is never perfect, and there are things they do in secret that we are all better off not knowing. I understand this. It isn’t our king or our government I’m speaking against, but our enemies. Our true enemies.”

“Atlantis,” Grin said.

All eyes in the bar turned on him. For a moment, he felt sure they could see the northern Borderkind that they would all call enemy, but then the professor just nodded.

“Precisely.” He gestured around the room, first toward Paola, the bartender, and then to some of the other men and women gathered there. They were no longer quite so interested in their drinks. “You have all seen them. I know that you have. The Atlanteans were here in Palenque before good King Mahacuhta was slain. On the day of his murder, some of you were in the plaza. There were giants on the palace steps, fighting the northern intruders. Atlantean giants.

“Why? What were they doing here?”

Enrique grunted. “Guarding the diplomats. Don’t you read the newspaper, Professor? The giants and the others were guarding the diplomats from Atlantis. They were already working to forge an alliance with us-that is why the dog Hunyadi sent his assassins to murder Mahacuhta.”

From a small table in the back, a woman spoke up. She might have been fifty and her face was weathered. She sat with a younger man whose face bore the scars of battle, yet who sat up straight and had about him the air of a soldier.

“Don’t believe everything you read, sir,” the woman said.

Eyes narrowed again, and this time they were focused on the woman and her son.

“My son was a captain in the King’s Guard. When Ty’Lis began to put Atlantean soldiers into their ranks, he questioned the order. They whipped him, beat him, and cut out his tongue. They stripped him of his rank and threw him in the dungeon for thirty days.”

Even the professor blanched at these words. “Atlanteans in the King’s Guard?”

After a moment, Enrique cleared his throat. When he continued, some of his confidence was gone. “So, what are you suggesting?”

The professor sighed. “You know what she’s suggesting, Enrique. Don’t be obtuse. We’ve spoken of the rumors before. Why did the entire city of Palenque stand by and let the northern Borderkind pass when they came to challenge the king? Hunters had been sent out to exterminate the Borderkind all over Euphrasia, and some in Yucatazca as well. But they left Palenque alone. Why? So that the Borderkind here would not rise up and fight beside their kin against the Hunters until it was too late.”

“Conspiracy shit,” Enrique muttered.

“Hush,” said the bartender. She looked troubled, almost sick, but she nodded to the professor to continue.

“He’s right,” said the woman. Her son looked as though he would have spoken, had his tongue not been cut from his mouth.

“The whole city let it happen, that terrible day,” the woman went on. “Some of us hid in our houses and pulled the shutters. Others lined the streets and cheered them on, thinking that Mahacuhta had betrayed the truce and sent the Hunters north. But we should have known better. The Atlanteans had been infiltrating for months. Ty’Lis is behind it all.”

Enrique stood up and took two steps toward her, glancing at the door that led to the patio. “Watch yourself, woman. Talk like that could cost your life.”

The professor smiled, but there was no humor in it. “There. You’ve said it yourself. If she speaks against Ty’Lis, an advisor to the king, she is doomed? Is that the kind of kingdom this has become?”

“That’s enough,” said another-a disheveled, bearded man who’d been drinking with Enrique. “You are all traitors. Prince Tzajin is going to be crowned soon enough, but already he rules in his father’s place. He has declared war against Euphrasia. He has issued edicts calling the legendary and many Lost Ones to enlist in his army. Tzajin leads us, now, and to question his rule is treason.”

A chill went through the bar. Waitresses hurried from the kitchen out onto the patio with drinks and trays of food. The woman tending bar stared at Enrique, but he did not meet her eyes. Even the professor seemed frightened by the prospect.

Leicester Grindylow turned on his stool. He tipped his beer glass back and took a long sip, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“How can it be treason,” he asked, “when the throne is here in Palenque, and Prince Tzajin is issuing his edicts from Atlantis? The boy is the guest of the High Council of Atlantis, surrounded only by the scholars who have been teaching him. The edicts are released here in Palenque by Ty’Lis, who has been behaving like a regent instead of an advisor. Only a blind fool would not at least ask the question, my friends. How do we know that Tzajin declared war, or issued those edicts? How can we be sure the prince even knows that his father is dead?”

They stared at him in horror. Some shifted uncomfortably and looked away, but the mute soldier only nodded in dark approval.

“There’s a more horrible question,” the professor said. “How do we know Tzajin is still alive?”

The soldier knocked on the table to get everyone’s attention.

“He wants you to consider another question,” the mute man’s mother said. “Who really killed King Mahacuhta?”

“Now that is enough!” cried the bearded man who’d lectured them about treason.

Enrique shook his head. “So now you want me to believe the Atlanteans murdered the king?”

“How can you not believe it?” the woman asked, her voice weighted with grief. “You’ve heard all of the rumors. The only reason that you haven’t made that connection is because you don’t want to. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Otherwise, why hasn’t the prince come home, yet? We are at war, for the gods’ sake! Where else should he be, if not in the palace, commanding our fate?”

Her dark-eyed son stood, arms crossed. He opened his mouth and even in the gloom the vacant hollow inside was evident.

“Then what of the assassins in the dungeon?” the bartender asked. “If they weren’t sent by Hunyadi to murder Mahacuhta, then who are they?”

Grin stood and set his glass down on the bar, drawing their eyes one last time. He turned to take in every man and woman in the bar-twenty-two souls; he had counted.

“Why did Ty’Lis send the Hunters out to slaughter Borderkind if not to cut off all contact with the ordinary world, to separate the Lost from our ancestral home forever? Maybe the so-called assassins in the palace dungeon are exactly what all of the whispers say they are. Maybe they’re the Legend-Born, come to take us home.”

He turned and strode through the door, out onto the patio. The laughing beauties of Palenque took no notice, but he felt the attention of those inside the bar until he had vanished from their sight.

As they infiltrated the city, Grin and the other Borderkind had found just what Blue Jay had hoped and predicted. Many of the Lost Ones of Palenque were not blind or stupid. They might be afraid to make unpleasant connections, or speak up, but they were not fools.

If they could be forced to face their own suspicions, the Borderkind would have more allies than they could ever have imagined.