“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.
CHAPTER 8
O liver could not sleep. He had tried, fidgeting awkwardly on the mat, searching for the least torturous position. Then he had gone to the window and stared out at the wall across from his cell, wishing he could see the sky. A view of the stars would have lifted his heart.
At length, he walked across the cell and stood in front of the door. Out in the corridor, nothing stirred. Torchlight flickered somewhere down the hall, giving the walls a wet glow. Beyond the grate in the door to Julianna and Collette’s cell, there was only darkness. He might have heard a low, troubled snore, but that could as easily have been his imagination.
He pressed his forehead against the cool metal of the grate and peered into the corridor. No one stirred. Idly his fingers brushed over the stones in the wall and traced the mortar grooves, just as he’d been doing almost since the moment they’d been locked up. Collette had been doing the same.
How many people believed they were Legend-Born? Thousands? Millions? And if all of those people believed, did that make it true? Once, humanity had believed their world was flat, but they had been proven wrong. How disappointed all the Lost Ones would be if they found out it was all bullshit.
And it had to be bullshit, didn’t it? They’d been in these cells for going on nine weeks and hadn’t been able to summon up a single bit of magic. If their mother was Borderkind-if they were supposed to fulfill some kind of prophecy-why did he feel so damned ordinary?
Or maybe not completely ordinary.
He chewed on that for a second. Ever since coming through the Veil for the first time, he’d felt the way he always did when giving a closing argument in court, or acting onstage. Like what he did was fulfilling some role in a grand plan.
Just a little full of yourself, aren’t you?
Maybe he was. But that didn’t change the way it felt.
And what if it’s true? That was a question he’d asked himself a thousand times ever since Ty’Lis had first talked about the Legend-Born. If it was true, that changed everything.
Could their mother really have been Melisande, a beautiful creature with dragon wings and a serpent’s lower body? Oliver had photographs of her and his memories, and she had always seemed ordinary. She had been sweet and kind, with a light of joy in her eyes. But he had seen Blue Jay and Kitsune and other legends transform themselves easily enough, and it might be possible that Melisande could do the same.
He had also thought about what Julianna had said about his father. If their mother had indeed been Melisande-if he and Collette were half-human and half-Borderkind-that went a long way toward explaining the way Max Bascombe had treated his son. Oliver had longed for magic, all of his life. And yet…
Dad didn’t want you to reach for it. He was afraid of what you might find. Or of what might find you.
Oliver drew in a long breath and bit his lower lip. All his life, all he’d wanted was for his father to love him and for himself to be able to put his resentment aside long enough to return that love.
But his father was dead, now, and that would never happen.
If only the old man had told them the truth, when they were old enough. Yet he’d kept it from them, trying to protect them. Otherwise he might still be alive.
Oliver froze, staring out into the corridor. A frown creased his brow. If Melisande had been his mother, and they had inherited some kind of magic from her legendary blood, what would that be? How did Collette’s escape from the pit at the Sandman’s castle make sense? She had torn the wall of her prison apart, but that didn’t seem like their mother at all. If their mother had magic in her, it wasn’t a magic of destruction. Yet whenever he had tried to dig at the mortar, he’d been thinking about pulling the wall apart with magic. Obviously, that wasn’t working.
The stones beneath his left hand shifted.
Oliver held his breath, then glanced over at his hand. Mortar sifted like dust from the grooves between stones.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
It’s not about destruction. No, it wouldn’t be. Not if they were their mother’s children. Which wasn’t to say that they would have magic similar to hers. From what he’d heard, there seemed no real pattern to the magic that developed in the offspring of legends, and no known precedent to indicate what magic might occur in a child half-human and half-Borderkind. Still, instinct told him that his mother’s magic would not have been cruel or terrible.
All creatures had delighted her. She had loved her garden, right down to every beetle. Her magic, he felt, must have been in beauty and life. In growth. Yet when autumn came and the garden began to wither, she had seemed equally as content as she’d been when the flowers were in full bloom. Oliver hadn’t learned the word entropy until he was in high school, but later, he’d understood it. Things fell apart, lost their cohesion. Everything had its season.
And if you could speed that process along…
Slowly, but firmly, he pushed his left hand forward, and dry, discolored mortar sifted down like powder. The stones began to fall outward.
Oliver drew back his hand and watched as the wall collapsed into the corridor.
He heard Collette and Julianna talking in low voices and knew they didn’t have long before the noise of the collapsing wall summoned the guards.
“Jules! Collette! We’re going now.”
“Oliver?”
Julianna’s face appeared at the grate.
He jumped into the corridor and went up to their door.
“What’d you do?”
“It worked.” His eyes sought his sister in the darkened cell. He saw Collette pulling on her shoes. She stared up at him.
“How?”
“It’s all real, Coll. Melisande was our mother. I went over it a million times, and it’s the only thing that could be true. We crossed the Veil, sis. All the legends are real, here, and we’re one of them. No way would the Atlanteans have gone to such trouble to deal us out of the game if they didn’t believe we were Legend-Born.”
He smiled, then glanced at Julianna, who gazed at him in wonder.
“Now, stand away from the wall. We’re out of time.”