Chapter

3

Susan

We heard Cameron and Medea dragging their bags across the floor upstairs and the occasional mumble of distant voices.

“What do you think they’re doing?” Rhetorical question, but if I kept talking, perhaps I wouldn’t shatter from the tension. “Maybe they’ll get through with just two stones. The portal was doing something strange when I was in the attic. I know you’re worried about the clans, but the One will look out for them. They have a Restorer. Unless Kieran lost his Restorer power when Jake got his, but—” I gasped. “Mark, what time is it?”

“Um, I can’t really see my watch from here.” Mark jerked against the ropes for emphasis.

“Very funny. When did you get home from work?”

“Well, the meeting with the development team ran late, so it was probably about six. Why?”

“Jake gets off work at eight.”

Mark fell still, but I kept babbling. “They’ll capture him, too. They’ve controlled him before. Maybe they still can. He doesn’t know where you hid the third stone, but they might hurt him. And if they see that he heals . . .” I took shallow gasps between my sentences, tugging again at the ropes. “We’ve got to do something. I remember that when Nancy Drew got tied up, she held her wrists a certain way so she could get free. I tried, but Medea yanked the cords too tight. I can’t get loose.”

A strangled sound came from behind me. “Mark, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” he gasped. He was shaking with his effort to stop laughing. “Nancy Drew?”

Like he was contributing any great suggestions. “What about it? Karen and Anne love those books.”

“Nothing . . . it’s just . . .” He coughed and another laugh escaped. “If you’re going to use advice from books, couldn’t you pick Tom Clancy or Ian Fleming? Nancy Drew.” He barked, snorted, and finally wheezed. “Oh, honey, you’re amazing.”

I wanted to laugh with him. His teasing humor usually helped me find a healthy perspective on our problems. But this wasn’t a frozen water pipe or a kid’s bad report card. “Mark, I’m scared,” I said in a small voice.

He sobered quickly. “I know. We’ll be all right.”

We struggled with the ropes for several minutes, but couldn’t get free.

“Do you hear anything?” Mark asked suddenly.

I listened for a long ten seconds. The house sounded still and empty. “Maybe they’ve gone.” I shifted to ease the pressure on my arms.

Mark gave that comment the silence it deserved.

I didn’t want my thoughts to wander back to what Cameron and Medea would do to us. “Just keep talking, okay? If you keep talking, I don’t have to think.”

“What should I talk about?” Mark wrestled against the ropes again, jerking against the pipe as if he could pull it free. But the solid metal dug deep into the concrete floor and didn’t budge.

“Tell me about when you came here.”

“Now? We were going to sit in front of a fireplace with a bowl of popcorn—”

“Mark, it’s the middle of summer. We’re not going to have a fire any time soon. I want to hear about it. Why do you keep avoiding this subject? Please. I’m really scared.”

He didn’t answer right away.

I tried again. “Maybe it will help us figure out what to do about the portal . . . if you explain it to me.”

Mark sighed. “All right. Where should I start? You know about my father, and how my mother was murdered.”

How had it felt to be sixteen and alone in his harsh world? I didn’t want to linger on that topic. “And when the Kahlareans targeted you, the Lyric songkeeper sent you here. What was that like?”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Ravon was only a few years older than me, but he excelled at his first-year guardian training and then spent a year doing advanced training in Rendor. We knew a lot of the same people. He was assigned to protect me, and we became friends.”

I wanted to hurry him along, but he hadn’t indulged this stream of images from his past for a long time. Patience. He was netting memories like fish, selecting the ones he wanted to pull out and show me before releasing them again.

“I was Jake’s age back then. We’d sneak into the guardian tower to watch training matches. We found hidden doors in the Lyric walls and would slip out sometimes to explore. And we sparred every day.” Mark’s voice was warm with affection. “Ravon told me that if he was going to be my bodyguard, the least he could do was train me to watch his back while he was watching mine.”

I was afraid I knew where this story was going. “He sounds like a good friend,” I said quietly.

“One evening after a Council session, we were coming around the curve into the main square. You know, near the Tower?”

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. But he had already continued.

“Two guys appeared out of nowhere. We never heard them coming. Grey hoods, masks. One of them grabbed me before I could draw my sword. He had a blade to my neck and was dragging me away. Ravon was always quicker than me. He drew his sword in a flash and engaged the other guy. The attacker had only a small silver dagger. I figured the fight would be over in a second. So did Ravon. He was grinning as he swung at the guy. But then the Kahlarean threw the blade. Ravon barely winced when it hit his shoulder. He pulled it free and lunged forward to continue his attack, but he stumbled.

“I still remember his face when he turned to look at me. He was so confused. Neither of us knew anything about venblades back then. It paralyzed him fast. Some of the Lyric guardians showed up, and the assassin holding me let go. I don’t know why he didn’t slit my throat. Both of the Kahlareans disappeared into the twilight, and I ran over to where Ravon had collapsed onto the street and held him.

“‘Sorry,’ he said in a voice so choked I could barely understand him.

“‘Hey, you were great,’ I told him. ‘Did you see his eyes when you headed toward him with your sword? You had him scared.’

“He smiled, but then his whole body stiffened. He wheezed trying to make his lungs work. I saw the panic in his eyes and heard the gurgle in his throat, and I couldn’t do anything to help him. I just held him and watched him die.”

Mark fell silent.

Whose stupid idea had it been to talk about this now? My eyes welled and I blinked back tears. I tried to find Mark’s fingers but couldn’t reach him.

He cleared his throat. “So anyway, that was when I went to talk to the eldest songkeeper of Lyric. I couldn’t let anyone else die because of me. I didn’t know what the prophecy meant, but I hadn’t shown any signs of Restorer gifts.”

He still wrestled with the choices he had made. Even with me, he felt the need to justify himself—to explain the dire events that had driven him to leave his world. The tautness in his voice told me that guilt still haunted him. I longed to reassure him.

Oh, Mark. You were just a boy. You’d watched too many people die. You’ve tortured yourself too long over this.

But I didn’t want to interrupt.

“The songkeeper was kind of an odd guy. He was tall and so thin it looked as if he never ate. He stared into space like he was focusing on something that wasn’t there. I begged him for help but wasn’t even sure he was listening. Then he turned with a look that burned into me. His hair was sticking out all over, and those eyes—I decided coming to him had been a bad idea.

“‘Yes. It’s time.’ He said it as if he’d been waiting for me all along. He grabbed a small bag and headed for the door. When he reached the frame, he had to duck, and he turned back and frowned at me. I was still sitting at his table.

“‘Come.’ That was all he said. And he started walking. I hurried along behind him. I hadn’t been assigned a new bodyguard yet, so I stayed alert for attack as we raced through the streets. He took me out a side door in the city wall, and I didn’t see anyone I knew along the way. If I’d had any clue what he was going to do, I would have insisted on talking to Jorgen or my friends, but everything happened too fast.

“He led me to the grove, and we wove deep into the trees. He still hadn’t explained anything. Then he opened the bag and shook out three stones. Grey, white, and black. Smooth and heavy. They had sliding panels with a mechanism hidden inside, something beyond any transtech gadget I’d ever seen.

“‘Pay attention,’ the songkeeper told me.” Mark gave a short laugh. “He had my attention, all right. I was beginning to think he was totally nuts.”

I twisted my head to get a glimpse of Mark. “Did I ever see him when the songkeepers led the gathering?”

“No, he never leads singing. I don’t think he writes songs or teaches Verses, either. I’m not quite sure what he does. You wouldn’t have met him. He’s kind of reclusive.” Mark stopped talking and fidgeted against the ropes.

I shouldn’t have interrupted him. This was the part of the story I had been longing to know. “So what did he do with the stones?”

“He laid them out in a pattern, told me to memorize it, then scrambled them and had me show him I could set them up correctly. We must have drilled that ten times. I still had no idea what they were for. But when they were lined up the right way, I could feel . . . a current in the air. Like the static that builds up when fabric rubs against a light wall.

“When he was sure I wouldn’t forget, he put the stones back in the bag and handed it to me.

“‘I’m sending you through a portal,’ he said. His head darted from side to side, looking every direction and making me nervous. ‘No one knows where it leads, but it is far from all the danger here. You won’t be followed, and Jorgen will tell the Council you’ve been sent to negotiate with the lost clans. Use the stones to return when you are needed.’

“I guess I thought he was leading me to a tunnel that would take me to some land past Hazor. He motioned me forward, and I walked on ahead of him. I was about to ask him how I would know when I was needed, but something grabbed me.

“I stumbled forward and fell to my knees. Pain shot through my head, and I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the songkeeper had disappeared. I was still in a grove of trees, but they had changed.”

“Where were you?” I couldn’t stop myself from jumping in. There was so much I didn’t understand about the portal, and he had never talked about this before.

Mark leaned his head back against the pipe. “I was right here. This spot. There weren’t any houses here back then. I wandered out of the trees just as a cloud moved away from the sun.” His voice was thick with remembered terror. “It was like an overloaded light cube about to explode. My eyes burned, and I stumbled back under cover of the nearest tree. I was sure if that light touched me I would incinerate. I’d never seen anything like it. The color where the rays hit. The intense shadows. The blue sky beyond the clouds. I couldn’t believe it was real . . .” His voice trailed off again.

I ached for the frightened young man thrown into this strange place without explanation. “What did you do when night fell?”

“Camped here. At first I was afraid to wander far from the portal. That’s why years later when the new development was built, I wanted this house; it was over the site where I arrived. Silly, I guess. With the stones, it shouldn’t have mattered. At least I think they would work from other places. But it was my way of staying connected.”

I remembered now. We had been living in a tiny apartment near Ridge Valley College. Almost overnight he had gotten worked up about buying a place of our own—not throwing money away in rent each month. It didn’t take much to convince me. We’d been saving every penny we could from both our jobs. Jake was a toddler, and I longed for him to have a back yard to play in.

“So what did you do when it sank in that you weren’t in the same world as Lyric anymore?” I thought back to my confusion when I found myself in a rain-soaked street in Shamgar—pulled out of the safety of our attic into a strange world. “And why didn’t you try to go back? And why, why, why didn’t you ever tell me?” Mark shifted again and was about to answer, when we heard a scraping sound at the top of the stairs.

Mark stiffened, and my stomach swooped as if I were in an elevator dropping too fast. What was that lie he wanted me to tell again? “We don’t know how it works. You can’t bring things through,” I muttered to myself.

The door above flew open and crashed against the wall.