These Divided Shores, page 6
Ben noticed it too. Outside the prison, a weight had lifted, as though it had been night and now the sun had risen. He had assumed the guards were altering the food or water, but if that wasn’t the case, where was the magic coming from?
Jakes sat outside the cage, frowning from Ben to Gunnar. The boat listed and Ben caught himself on Gunnar’s knee.
A defensor started the engine, but Jakes lifted his hand.
“We’re to wait for Andreu,” Jakes said. “You might see what is keeping him.”
Two defensors leaped off the boat while one remained in the pilothouse, out of earshot.
“Andreu?” Ben whispered. “Lu’s father?”
Jakes shrugged.
With a grimace, Ben tried again. “Where is mine having me brought?”
Jakes squinted, calculation veiling his face. “How long have you hated your father?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Answer mine.” A defensor, making a demand of his prince.
“Six years.”
“Six—” Jakes’s whole body rocked. “You expect me to believe that you hated him in secret all this time? You were loyal. I saw your devotion.”
You’re right, Ben almost said. He hadn’t realized how much he hated his father until recently. His hatred had grown over time, watered and nourished by every burning, every violent act, every beating and broken bone and reprimand.
This was the first time Ben had looked into Jakes’s eyes as his true self. Their conversations had been brief these past weeks, interrupted by monxes or cut off by Jakes’s angry sulking. Ben hadn’t had the chance—or desire—to explain his choices.
The defensor in the pilothouse looked at them, a question in his frown, but Jakes flicked his hand at his comrade in dismissal.
“All those weeks on the Astuto”—Jakes leaned closer—“you never intended to create permanent magic, did you?”
“No.”
Jakes dragged his hand down his face, laughing in incredulity. “But you tried to make the cure for Shaking Sickness. This isn’t any different—good will come of it. You don’t understand how much the world needs this power.”
“After the horrific acts you’ve seen my father do, how can you believe that giving him permanent magic will make the world better?”
Jakes jerked back from the cage, face set. He started humming that song he always fell back on when he was anxious, the one his sister had written. The smallness of the cage meant Ben couldn’t get away from it.
A detail snapped into place. Ben teetered, catching himself on Gunnar’s knee again. Gunnar cocked his head, but Ben only gaped back, unable to look at Jakes.
“You told me your sister and her children died of Shaking Sickness,” Ben breathed.
Jakes stopped humming.
“You betrayed me”—Ben licked his lips—“to further Elazar’s goal of permanent magic. But through Elazar’s own attempts, he gave uncountable victims Shaking Sickness. Which you knew. Yet you allied with him, even though he killed your sister.”
Ben turned. He wished he hadn’t, seeing the pain that flowed out of Jakes’s face. He couldn’t afford sympathy.
“My father killed your sister,” Ben repeated. “Didn’t he?”
A deadly level of resolve set Jakes’s eyes. “Elazar did not kill her.”
“She died of Shaking Sickness,” Ben pressed, his hand braced on Gunnar’s knee as the prison transport listed. “You told me that was how she died. And—and her children, too?”
“Stop, Ben.”
“Elazar killed them.” Had he not realized? But Jakes had been in the Grace Neus’s holding cells when Elazar had revealed his true intentions to Ben. Jakes had heard the same admission: that Elazar had left a trail of Shaking Sickness victims in the wake of his search for permanent magic. “Shaking Sickness comes from overdosing on Grace Loray’s magic.”
Jakes bared his teeth. “I said stop—”
“No one in Argrid has access to enough magic to overdose on their own.” Ben leaned closer, drawing strength from his hand on Gunnar. “Elazar used your sister and her children in his experiments to make permanent magic. He killed your family!”
“You’re wrong!” The shout tore from Jakes’s mouth, ripping him to his feet. He towered over Ben, hands in fists, the brim of his feathered hat catching his face in shadow.
Gunnar seized Ben’s arm, the two of them frozen as Ben glared up at Jakes, watching the nerve he’d hit twitch and writhe.
“Defensor Rayen?” the defensor in the pilothouse called. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Jakes snapped. “Our prince’s rebelliousness knows no bounds.”
He crouched in front of Ben, eye to eye. “You are wrong, my prince,” Jakes said, loud enough for the other defensor to hear. “The Eminence King could never commit the atrocities you mentioned. He knows best. Do you know what Argrid is doing while the king is here? He sent a missive during your first week of imprisonment, for the cathedrals across Argrid to lead the people in a constant state of prayer until his return. They will willingly obey him, because the Eminence King controls everything.” Jakes’s voice dropped but his intensity didn’t subside. “If you question him directly, you will die.”
Ben gaped. In Church services where he had listened to Jakes pray, or the moments when he’d heard Jakes speak of the Pious God, Jakes had never sounded so desperate—so imploring.
Up on the plateau, Andreu descended the steps with the two defensors.
Jakes stomped into the pilothouse. “Prepare to depart!” he bellowed.
Ben went slack against the bars, realizing in that motion that Gunnar’s hand had moved to his shoulder.
“He lies,” Gunnar whispered. “Soldiers, even pious ones, do not speak that—that—”
“Pleadingly,” Ben finished. “He was begging me, wasn’t he? I didn’t imagine it.”
Gunnar tipped his head to the cage’s bars, sweat glistening on his pale face. “Something is odd in him.”
Ben restrained himself from throwing Jakes a questioning look. Jakes had spied on Ben for months; he had stood by while Ben was imprisoned; he had let defensors whip Gunnar.
But Lu was right. They needed to escape—they needed a plan.
Maybe Ben could reach something in Jakes.
Milo grinned at Lu through the pulsing light of the lantern in his hand.
She shook her head, fingers on her temples. No—this was wrong. This prison was wrong, warping her mind. The magic that made the captives go mad was getting to her.
“Vex,” she said again. Tears sliced down Lu’s cheeks. She had heard him say her name. She had heard him.
“Vex?” Milo echoed, walking toward her. “My king’s banished nephew? You leave a trail of disgraced Argridians in your wake. Paxben. Benat. Almost, your father. Almost, me.”
Sweat ran in a cold droplet down Lu’s spine. Milo’s tone shifted from taunting to furious.
“Do you have any idea,” he said, “what you have cost me? I lost my title. I lost my command. Everything that I have done for this island, for Argrid, for my God and king—you wiped it all out when I did not recognize you as the girl who escaped me.” His lips peeled back in a manic grin. “But as your dear father has a chance to redeem himself, the Eminence King has also given me the opportunity to prove my worth.”
His insinuation pounced on Lu’s mind, but she stayed numb in the middle of the hall, watching Milo and his lantern come closer, closer.
She was trapped. She was Lazonade incarnate.
Milo surveyed the stone walls. “Emerdians call this type of prison Ribège. The Snare. Prisoners try to escape, but there are dozens of pathways, countless routes that these walls can make. Where will you go, Adeluna? The hall behind you slopes upward. Perhaps that is the way out. There is a corner ahead—perhaps that way will lead to an exit. To your Vex.”
“No,” Lu sobbed. “No—you don’t—stop—”
“No—you are right. No, he won’t be there, he won’t come to save you, for the same reason I did not recognize you and your father never turned you over to the Eminence King. You are worthless, Adeluna. But the Eminence King believes there is use for you, and it is my task to drag it out where your father failed.” His face was darkness, sin, and hunger. “Repent, Adeluna. Beg my forgiveness. Beg me to stop.”
Milo lunged. Lu’s body threw her backward, a stunted cry ripping her throat raw—
The hallway blurred. She had eaten bits of Ben’s food but hadn’t drunk any of the water with the antidote for whatever magic was down here. She felt the effects of that magic now, a wistful wave that yanked her out of this prison—and into her family’s apartment at the castle.
White light from the sun over Lake Regolith highlighted the tears on her father’s cheeks. “I’m sorry—you didn’t need to find out—it shouldn’t have happened at all!”
Kari was in front of him, sobbing. “She trusted you! You destroyed everything—”
The prison’s hall descended around Lu. She teetered, but her parents weren’t here.
Milo was an arm’s length from her. Heat palpitated off him, the air thick with his body odor and acrid hair grease. He had been this close before, holding a knife to her skin as soldiers dosed her with Lazonade to immobilize her.
Lu’s strength unraveled. She fumbled, caught herself, ran.
“She trusted you!” Kari screamed. “You’ve been lying to us! You’ve destroyed everything, and now—and now—”
The memory, what was it? Lu couldn’t recall her parents arguing like this—
Milo stalked her; his lantern light wavered on the stones. Lu glanced back as she took a turn and smacked into a wall. Hadn’t she come this way? It was a dead end now.
She spun around. No, no. Milo had moved the walls, with levers and knobs hidden in the stones. He was corralling her wherever he wanted her to go.
Her resolve was gone. Her determination, obliterated.
Lu hammered her fists on the wall. She had feared this moment every day since the revolution’s end; she had lain in the darkness of her bedroom and imagined Milo in the shadows, and she had wept that not only would it happen again, but that she deserved it.
She had killed people. She had killed people for Argrid. Tom had made her betray her own country.
Fingers coiled into Lu’s shoulder. A trilling echo rebounded as Milo yanked her away, her stone-warped screaming coming from a dream, from the past, from the moments she had bitten it down for fear of what it would do to her.
Elazar knew that hurting Gunnar would wear Ben into submission. He had tried, with Tom, to break Lu. But this. Milo. His arms around her as he dragged her up the hall—
Milo was her undoing.
6
THE PRISON TRANSPORT sailed through starkly different scenery than the mangrove trees and slimy darkness of Backswamp that Ben had seen from the deck of the Astuto. Now the jungle pressed against the river in walls of emerald vines and thick tree trunks, gold and teal macaws launching into the sky amid flurries of leaves. The water ran a brilliant, piercing blue that rivaled the sky. Each gust of a breeze brought fresh perfumes of greenery and salt.
When Elazar had moved Ben, Gunnar, and Lu from the ship to the Port Camden prison, he had done so at night, locking them in a covered wagon. Ben’s first true visit to Grace Loray would have awed him if he wasn’t looking at it from a cage.
The steamboat turned down a narrower river, and after chugging along to the squawks of distant birds and the gust of a strong wind, a village appeared.
The jungle wove through every part of the village, mating with it in dances of lacy moss and curtains, branches and wood. Buildings, the doors accessible by rope bridges, teetered on stilts where the river died in a mud pit. Two docks shot into the river.
The defensors tethered the prison transport between bobbing, dented steamboats. The only other activity was on the opposite dock, crowded with boats flying the Argridian flag. One boat lurched under defensors struggling to force manacled villagers belowdecks.
Ben’s heart heaved. What was Elazar doing?
The buildings and rope bridges surrounded a platform of wood planks on stilts. Stalls sat at the edges, framing people who stood shoulder to shoulder in silence. Argridian defensors guarded the bridges and balconies.
Ben swallowed hard as defensors forced him and Gunnar off the boat, trailing Lu’s father into the village. The thumping of their boots on the walkway echoed like thunder and drew the crowd’s curious eyes.
The silence grew more potent. Lungs sucked in gasps.
Ben and Gunnar were prodded into the square, their boots at the edge of the wooden platform. Defensors stood on either side of them, pistols held in silver threats, while Andreu disappeared into the crowd.
Jakes linked one hand around Ben’s forearm as though he might run. Gunnar was on Ben’s other side, and when he swayed in the oppressive heat of the island, Ben jerked out of Jakes’s hold to steady Gunnar with a hand on the small of his back.
“Careful,” Ben whispered. “Eye of the Sun warriors probably don’t fare well in water.”
Gunnar eyed the water behind them. He cocked an eyebrow over his muzzle.
“I doubt dainty princes do either,” he murmured.
A flush warmed Ben’s face. He thanked the island’s heat for hiding it when he saw Jakes glowering in his peripheral vision.
“Citizens of Grace Loray!”
Ben went rigid. On a balcony across the square, Elazar lifted his arms, robes glowing blue in the sunlight that filtered through the trees. Blue was one of the colors for Grace Aracely, the Grace of the Pious God’s pillar of penance. Of contrition. Of regret.
Ben growled deep in his throat.
“Many of you have heard the rumors involving my country,” Elazar continued, his voice echoing over the square. “Rumors of ruthless burnings. Senseless arrests. Bloodshed and violence. But I have personally come before you to speak the truth: your Grace Lorayan Council has allied with Argrid to rid this island of raiders, such as those arrested from your village.”
A retching sob cut through the air. Ben spun toward it to see a woman and man curled together, weeping, while others gave them a wide berth and eyed the docks.
Elazar had had villagers arrested. Raiders—likely people who had resisted his presence.
“The depth of the corruption on this island is astounding,” Elazar continued. “We have discovered neighbors, your neighbors, to be conspirators in a plot to turn this island into an anarchist, crime-run hell. I have seen this fate befall other nations who embrace magic—the evil of magic split the Mechtlands into warring factions that killed thousands of their own countrymen. Does that not sound familiar? A country, split into groups, warring over magic?”
Elazar paused. The crowd stirred, casting looks at one another, while the weeping man and woman stifled their misery. Who had Elazar taken from them? A son? A sister?
The soft padding of feet followed, and Tomás Andreu joined Elazar on the balcony.
“This is why we of your Grace Lorayan Council reached out to Argrid,” Andreu announced. “The Eminence King is the only force on this earth who possesses a power stronger than the evil botanical magic of the stream raider syndicates. He saw the truth long before the world was ready to believe: that magic is the source of our ills. But the Pious God’s power is pure and lasting. We must commit to it, and to the War on Raiders.”
“But do not believe our words without proof.” Elazar lifted a hand. “I have brought someone else who can confirm these truths.”
Elazar went on to explain the destruction magic had caused in the Mechtlands. People addicted to certain plants; towns slaughtered by enhanced fires; victims unable to put up any resistance to those affected by magic.
Ben’s mind spasmed. The defensors hadn’t dragged the two of them here because of him.
“He means you,” he panted at Gunnar, expecting the defensors to rip him away and escort him up to Elazar. “You have to deny it. You have to tell these people what really happened.”
Redness highlighted the blue in Gunnar’s eyes. “How? The things he says are true.”
“More factors caused the Mechtlands’ war than magic—and more is at work here.”
“Yes. But will these people believe that?”
Ben looked at the crowd again. A few villagers, slinking away to the recesses, might have been raiders, but most were regular citizens trying to survive. Those people were the ones who watched the others, whispering, glaring—blaming.
“Grace Loray!” Elazar bellowed. “Your Council and I present a man who was once one of the outlaws bent on your destruction. The Head of the Mecht syndicate, Ingvar Pilkvist!”
The crowd murmured their amazement as Ingvar ascended the steps to Elazar’s balcony.
Elazar hadn’t called up Gunnar. But Ben didn’t relax.
“Friends,” Ingvar started. He had the same accent as Gunnar, only weathered by years away from the Mechtlands. “Magic brings ruin, and I admit that the raider syndicates had planned to seize this island by force.”
The crowd gasped. Some let out startled yelps of fear. Andreu nodded gravely, and Elazar put a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“Each syndicate has been stockpiling dangerous magic,” Ingvar continued. “Our plans were gruesome and need not be recounted here. I beg your forgiveness, Grace Loray, for allowing magic to manipulate me into plotting atrocious acts against you.” He dropped to his knees and lifted his hands in the curved V of the Church. “I throw myself at the Pious God’s mercy. Any raiders who do not recant as I have are vying for war. We are sick from magic use, sick from obeying the Devil, and we need the superior power of the Pious God to heal us.”
Elazar held his hands out over Ingvar but spoke to the people. “With the support of the Council, I will bring order to this island. I will cleanse Grace Loray of evil.”
“You have our full support,” Andreu declared.
Elazar nodded. “I understand the transformations I ask will not come easily. Removing the Devil’s influence from your hearts can be painful, and many of you may struggle. But I am familiar with sacrifice—the Pious God taught me early that he most rewards his followers when the sacrifices we make are great. I have lost many people I love through sacrifice—some by corruption, others to a higher will—”
