Chapter 12

 

“Peter, get back here, you need a horse!” Lily called after him in exasperation.

“I’ll walk!” he shouted back.

“Well then we’ll just explore without you!”

“Fine!”

“What’s he mad at you for?” Cole asked Lily, bewildered.

“I don’t know, he’s always mad at me for something, isn’t he?” Lily muttered to herself.

“Can’t imagine why, you’re so pleasant,” Brock scowled.

“Speak for yourself!” Lily shot back.

Cole and Brock had mounted their horses impatiently, and Lily held the reins of a beautiful mare named Candace, while Eustace stood uncertainly holding the reins to a dappled horse named Stroud that was to be Peter’s.

“He’ll come back and get him when he wants to stop being so stubborn,” Lily said to Eustace, rolling her eyes.

Just then Eustace saw movement towards the entrance of the castle and turned to exclaim, “Master Kane!” Then his face fell as he looked at Peter’s horse. “Uh oh.”

“Were you giving my horse away, Eustace?” called Kane, his tone surprisingly good-natured.

Peter stopped walking down the path and turned to watch what was going on. He wandered back a few steps. “What are you doing?” he demanded, his eyes narrowing at Kane.

“I’m coming with you,” Kane announced. “As your guide.”

“But these are th’ last four horses!” said Eustace. “I don’t have a fifth…”

“It’s fine, Peter was gonna walk anyway,” said Lily with a smirk.

“We don’t need a guide,” said Peter to Kane. “Isdemus said it was a straight shot into town. We won’t get lost.”

“Sure, it’s a straight shot if you keep to the main roads, but what’s the fun in that?” Kane replied, taking the reins from Peter and mounting Stroud before Peter had a chance to protest. “Come on. I’ll show you the real Carlion.”

“Why?” said Cole. His tone was the closest to suspicion that Peter had ever heard from him.

“Why?” Kane repeated innocently. “Because you’re new here! I was new myself once, and it would’ve been nice if someone had shown me around.” He spurred Stroud’s flanks with his heels, and Stroud began to canter down the main road. Brock and Cole exchanged a look and shrugged, following him.

“Come on, you can ride with me,” Lily conceded to Peter. But she mounted first.

When Peter climbed up behind her, he muttered, embarrassed, “What do I do, hold your waist or something?”

“If you don’t want to fly off,” she said, bemused, and dug her heels in.

Kane set the pace at an easy canter even though at first there wasn’t much to see. On either side of the road were huge fields. Peter had never seen grass or crops so green, sparkling like vast emeralds in the sun. There was a river at the far end of the pasture, and the vegetation seemed to glisten as if with morning dew. Far in the outer reaches of the field, they could see specks, which must have been workers.

Peter tried to grip the edges of Lily’s jumper so that he wouldn’t actually have to touch her skin. He probably looked like a sissy, he thought, riding behind a girl, and he suspected that Brock would take the mickey out of him for it at the first opportunity.

“So,” Lily said after a few minutes. Her tone was suddenly serious.

“So,” Peter repeated. He wasn’t going to help her out.

“Wonder who the other two are.”

“Well, apparently Brock isn’t one of them,” said Peter evasively. “At least not according to Eustace.”

“Ha! Can you imagine his ego getting any bigger if he found out he was supposed to save the world?” Half a beat later Lily went on, “Seriously, though, Peter. You do know it’s got to be you in the end, right?”

Peter’s grip tightened on her jumper but he pushed himself away from her involuntarily as he snapped, “Can we talk about something else, please?”

She paused. “Okay.”

He couldn’t see her face but from her tone, he could tell he’d hurt her feelings. Good, he thought, but he felt a twinge of guilt anyway. Lily was impossible to figure out. One minute she had a razor tongue, and the next, she was crying. How was he supposed to know what would set her off?

When she was still silent a few minutes later, Peter realized she was waiting for him to suggest an alternative topic. Finally he said, “Um. Did you sleep all right last night?”

Lily let out a short laugh. “Is that the best you can do?”

Peter felt his irritation rise again. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re obviously trying to apologize for snapping at me,” Lily said, “but instead of just saying you’re sorry, you’re trying to make polite conversation about something so irrelevant that it’s completely absurd. You don’t care how I slept last night and we both know it.” She paused, and then added, “And I slept horribly, by the way. Thank you for asking.”

Peter was stunned to silence. He wasn’t sure if he was more affronted at her importunity, or impressed at her insight.

As if reading his thoughts, she said, “Don’t feel bad. I’ve spent most of my life listening to the penumbra verbalize people’s motivations, and there are only so many to choose from. After a while I became an expert at cutting through the crap.”

“Huh,” said Peter, and thought for another moment before he added, “That’s kind of… terrifying.”

Lily started laughing incredulously, and after a minute Peter found himself laughing too. It felt refreshingly normal.

As the wind flew through their hair, Peter turned around to look behind them. The castle was now far enough away that he could see the entire structure clearly: it was tall and proud against the cloudless sky. The turrets, spires, and buttresses seemed to sprawl this way and that, not necessarily with any clear purpose, and towers sprung out of every nook and cranny like mushrooms sprouting from a log. Even at a distance, they could see that it was plastered with a faintly gold tint, and at the top fluttered a flag bearing a crest of two flaming red, entwined dragons.

“So what do you think Kane’s deal is?” Lily said finally. That sobered them both.

“You mean why did he suddenly turn all sugar and sunshine today when he was such a prat last night?” asked Peter. “He’s up to something, of course. I have no idea what it is…”

“Did you believe Isdemus last night, when he said he didn’t think Kane was trying to kill you?” she asked.

Peter was momentarily surprised she knew about that, until he remembered she’d been eavesdropping on the whole conversation. He thought for a minute and said, “Yeah. Or at least I think Isdemus believes it.”

“You do think he meant for us to hit his car, though?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Peter murmured. “If he meant for us to hit it, though, and he didn’t mean to kill us, then I don’t really understand what he expected to happen.”

“He expected you wouldn’t be able to stop the accident from happening, of course,” said Lily, as if it were obvious. “He probably just didn’t mean for it to be so severe.”

“I’m still not convinced I did stop it,” said Peter.

“Oh, be real, Peter.”

“Something happened, I’m not denying that,” he said defensively. “I just can’t figure out why everyone seems ready to jump to the conclusion that I broke the laws of gravity and stopped time… or that anybody else did, for that matter, since technically if it did happen it could have been any one of us! But it didn’t happen – laws are laws. There has to be another explanation!”

“Peter! You yourself told us about the meadow with the rainbow and all those images of the accident, and we all saw that car stop in mid-air and reverse. Cole heard you speaking the Ancient Tongue. Why are you being so stubborn? The world doesn’t all fit into your neat little science box, admit it!”

“I will not admit that!” Peter said heatedly, “There’s an explanation for everything, Lily! And by the way, you were muttering something in that car too, I might point out!”

“I was whimpering because I thought I was about to die!”

“Well, maybe you were whimpering in the Ancient Tongue, for all we know!” he retorted. “Look, I don’t know what that meadow was, but maybe my life just flashed before my eyes and the adrenaline made my brain do crazy things –”

“Like freeze a car in mid-air?” she said sarcastically.

“Like create a scenario in which I had the capacity to collapse the wave function!”

She paused, and then said stubbornly, “I know you want me to ask you what that means. Well, I won’t.”

“It’s an interpretation of quantum physics. It means out of lots of possible realities, I can choose the one I want.”

“Evidently I don’t have to ask you, because you’re going to tell me anyway,” said Lily dryly.

“It’s something I’ve spent years thinking and dreaming about,” Peter went on, as if he hadn’t heard her, “so it’s not all that surprising that in a moment of extreme stress, that would be where my mind went…”

“You’re telling me that in that critical moment, when you thought you were about to die, what popped into your mind was quantum physics?” Lily asked with a snort.

“Well, not like that,” Peter scowled, even though she couldn’t see his expression. “I wasn’t theorizing. I was… I don’t know, fantasizing about a way out of the situation. Look, it’s not that hard to understand, I’ll just explain it to you really quickly –”

“Peter, I don’t care.”

“You will care! This is awesome! Listen, there was this really famous experiment called the Double Slit Experiment. Scientists fired photon particles at a wall with two slits in it, and got a wave pattern. That didn’t make sense, though, because they fired particles, which should have meant they’d see one single point where the particle went through one of the slits and hit the back wall. Instead, it looked like that single particle somehow split itself in two, went through both slits at the same time as a wave, and interfered with itself!”

“Peter,” said Lily.

“Wait, wait, here’s where it gets fun,” Peter said, anticipating her delight. “So then the scientists installed photon sensors to see which slit the photon actually went through. Then guess what happened?”

“I’m on the edge of my seat.”

“As soon as they installed the sensors, the particle stopped acting like a wave and behaved like a particle again, went through only one slit, and they got a single point on the back wall, instead of a wave-like interference pattern!”

He waited for her to get it. Then he tried again, “The scientists’ expectations changed the outcome of the experiment. The particle did what they told it to do.”

“Oh!” she said. Then a second later, she added, “Nope, still don’t get what that has to do with the accident.”

“Okay, okay. Think of the wave they saw on that back wall at first as a representation of all of the possible locations of the particle. Then when they installed the sensors, out of all of the possibilities in the wave, the particle had to pick just one. One of those possible locations became its reality, and all the others went away. That’s the collapse of the wave function.

“Larger objects have waves of possible locations too, it’s just that the probability that matter will behave in some way contrary to the laws of classical physics is so low that it’s effectively negligible in the real world. Once we hit Kane’s car at that angle and that speed, it should have killed us. The chance that all of the molecules in the Land Rover would simultaneously reverse their course without landing on top of us was astronomically low… but it was not zero.”

She was silent for a long moment. “So what you’re saying is, there could be a scientific explanation for you stopping that car!”

“No,” said Peter stubbornly, “because probability dictates –”

“You broke the rules!” Lily interrupted, paraphrasing Isdemus from the night before.

“Or maybe I dreamed the whole thing –”

“It happened, Peter!” she protested. “And I’ll bet you that’s exactly what Kane was trying to prove you couldn’t do.”

Peter had been just about to argue automatically with whatever she said next, but this stopped him cold. “But why? What possible motive could he have?”

“Can’t you tell?” she said, surprised. “Isdemus said he became obsessed with you. He admitted to stalking you the moment we met him. You saved all of our lives, but he seemed almost mad about it. He’s jealous of you.”

Now it was Peter’s turn to be surprised. “Why, because Isdemus and the rest of the Watchers think I’m the Child of the Prophecy?”

“Exactly.”

“What, you think he wants to be the Child of the Prophecy instead?” Peter scoffed.

“Yes, Peter. That’s exactly what I think.”