His mother stood behind the counter, moving sweet rolls from a hot baking tin onto a tray in the display case. When she looked up, Virginia must have seen something in her son’s face, for her brow creased with worry.
“Ovid? What is it?”
How could he explain without offending her again? He still did not believe in the Legend-Born. The idea that some predestined figure could deliver the Lost Ones seemed so much like a dream. Besides, wouldn’t such beings have appeared long before now? Other legends were solid and verifiable.
No, the Legend-Born were nothing more than a story. But his mother believed in them with all her heart. He could not challenge her faith again, and had no desire to spend the few days they had left together arguing.
Yet he had been wrong once already. He had not believed the rumors that Atlantis was behind the invasion of Euphrasia, the murder of King Mahacuhta, and the shattering of the truce between the Two Kingdoms. The Stonecoats were legends themselves. Ovid knew he should not simply take their word for it, but still he found himself believing the Jokao.
And if the Atlantis conspiracy turned out to be true, then it seemed Oliver Bascombe had not assassinated Mahacuhta after all. That did not mean he and his sister were Legend-Born, but it was curious, indeed.
“What is it?” his mother asked again. She looked almost frightened.
Ovid smiled and reached over the counter to take her hands. He raised them to his lips and kissed her fingers.
“Nothing, Mother. Only that I love you. No matter how we disagree, that will never change.”
Virginia nodded. “You have always been a good son, Ovid. Too serious, sometimes, but good. The Lost need to rise. The future depends upon it. I’m proud that you will help to lead them.”
“Only a few.”
“A brave few. And more will follow. They must.”
Ovid nodded. “On that, at least, we can agree.”
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.