Sebastian Read online

  Sebastian braced his hands on the bench and leaned forward so he wouldn’t have to raise his voice above a whisper. Daylight! He felt as if he were exchanging vile secrets that would be worth his life if anyone else heard what Lee was saying.

  And maybe that’s true.

  “You can’t know that’s what happens to the girls, that they’re left alone like that,” Sebastian said.

  “Yes, I can. Because I found one of them two years ago.” Lee shook his head. “A calling so strong, I created a bridge to answer it. And I found her. She was very old and quite mad, but it was a lucid madness. She was in a woods, gathering leaves and twigs. I don’t know if she thought they were edible or if she was just doing it for something to do. She was wearing rags that barely covered her and looked so frail….

  “Then she saw me. And she told me about being sealed in her garden and what the wizards’ justice meant for the girl who was condemned.”

  “But she was mad,” Sebastian protested. “You don’t know if any of it was true.”

  Even in the lantern light, with his face half in shadows, Sebastian could see the pain in Lee’s eyes.

  “She talked about her sister. How her sister would take care of the baby. And how the daughter of that baby would carry the seeds of the Dark as well as the Light—and would be an enemy not even the Eater of the World could survive if the Dark Guides didn’t destroy her before she bloomed into her full power.

  “Then she broke off pieces of two plants and held them out to me. When I reached out to take them, I felt my hand pass through a barrier of power—and she disappeared.” Lee rubbed the back of his neck. “Somehow my bridge had pierced the barrier enough for me to see her and talk to her but not enough for her to feel the touch of a human hand. I wandered those woods for an hour. Same land, but not the same landscape. Except…the plants were there, and I think I understood the message. I never told Mother or Glorianna about seeing that old woman because of that message.”

  “Message?” What kind of message could be made out of two plants?

  “What she tried to give me was heart’s hope…and belladonna.”

  Sebastian felt his breath catch, felt his heart bump hard against his chest. But “belladonna” made his thoughts circle back to how this talk began.

  “Why would the wizards eliminate the best Landscapers? And why would the Landscapers at the school agree with it?”

  “How did the wizards become the Justice Makers, Sebastian?” Lee asked. “Why are they the ones who decide when a person is too…damaged…in some way to live in the daylight landscapes and must be sent to the darkest place that resonates within that person? No one remembers. The Landscapers are the ones who actually perform Heart’s Justice and shift a person to another landscape, but it’s the wizards who decide when it needs to be done. How did they become such a powerful force in our world?”

  Sebastian leaned back, feeling uneasy about what he’d heard. If it were true that the wizards had been systematically eliminating the Landscapers with superior skills, it meant the Justice Makers had an agenda for Ephemera no one else knew about. But what? And why?

  “Well,” Lee said, reaching for the lantern, “I don’t know what part of the day you’re in, but I need to get some sleep before I go to the school to record my working log.”

  The school. For this little while, his personal discovery had blocked out the horror. Now it came flooding back. “You can’t.”

  “Have to. I don’t have an established circuit of landscapes—at least, not that the Bridges’ School is aware of—so I’m required to report in once each season to log the locations of any bridges I created and the landscapes they connect.”

  Sebastian grabbed Lee’s forearm. “You can’t go back to the school. Everyone’s dead.”

  Lee stiffened. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Eater of the World escaped. It’s loose in the landscapes.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Glorianna.” He felt Lee tremble beneath his hand. “I think It attacked the school. There were creatures there—giant ants, giant spiders, other things—and I found a classroom full of bodies.” Parts of bodies, but he didn’t say that.

  “Everyone?”

  Hearing the shock in Lee’s voice, Sebastian hesitated. “I don’t know. We ran, made it to Glorianna’s garden, and got away to here.” Releasing Lee’s arm, he pulled the piece of marble out of his pocket. “Using this.”

  “A one-shot bridge,” Lee said, brushing a thumb over the marble. “I made this for Glorianna on one of my visits home.” He looked at Sebastian, his face hard. “I made three, to different landscapes. This was the bridge to Sanctuary.”

  “When I put my hand in the fountain, I didn’t feel anything from the other stones. Just this one.” He hesitated. “There was a stone just outside the gate of Glorianna’s garden.”

  “Black marble?”

  “No, just a polished stone. I stepped on it, stumbled. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have noticed the plaque.”

  Lee rubbed the back of his neck. “Then maybe the Guides of the Heart meant for you to find out about this now. Sometimes it’s a small thing that can make a difference in someone’s life.” He sighed. “You must have stepped on the agate. It was a bridge to the entrance at the Bridges part of the school. The black marble connected to the Den. If it had still been hidden in the fountain, you would have felt it. Which means Glorianna must have gone back to the school at some point and taken it. Damn foolish of her to take the risk.”

  “She knew there was trouble at the school.” Sebastian heard the hesitation in his voice and hated it, but he knew Lee understood the question beneath the statement.

  “Glorianna believes in letting people make their own choices, good or bad, but if she’d suspected the Eater could make this kind of attack, she would have told you straight out not to go to the school. And if she decided not to tell you straight out, she has a connection with Ephemera no other Landscaper can match. You would have started out on the journey, but she would have made sure you couldn’t reach the school.”

  Sebastian felt one knot of tension ease inside him, swiftly replaced by another. “What’s going to happen to Ephemera?”

  “Most of the Landscapers and Bridges don’t live at the school. They wouldn’t have been caught in the attack. Even if the Landscapers came back to their gardens, as soon as they realized they were in danger, they’d be only a step away from escaping into another of their landscapes.”

  Sebastian studied his cousin. “You should never lie to someone who has played cards with you. You give too much away.”

  “Then I’m lucky I’ve never played cards with anyone at the school, since I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of experience lying to them,” Lee snapped. Then he looked out over the water. “The school is a focal point because the gardens are there. If a Landscaper comes back to the school through her garden and realizes something bad has happened, she’ll probably be able to get out again before she’s attacked, but…”

  “She won’t have access to all the landscapes in her keeping, will she?”

  “I’m not sure. My mother can step from one of her landscapes to another without going back to her garden, but she’s a Level Five Landscaper. Landscapers below that level don’t have the skill to do that. They’re dependent on having access to their gardens.”

  “So what happens to Ephemera?”

  Lee closed his eyes. “The Landscapers’ resonance will last a few weeks, maybe a month, without being renewed. After that…” He swallowed hard. “After that, there won’t be anyone standing between Ephemera and the human heart, so it will begin manifesting everything in response to all those emotions. A child will have a temper tantrum, and the family’s well will go dry. A farmer will have an argument with his wife, and when he goes out to work in the fields, his plow horse will step into a hole that suddenly appears and break a leg. People will blame one another for their troubles, and everything will get worse and worse
because the Dark currents will get stronger and stronger—and the Eater of the World will be able to use all those dark emotions to shape terrors made from people’s deepest fears.”

  “Guardians and Guides,” Sebastian whispered.

  Lee opened his eyes and stood up. “I have to go.”

  Sebastian stood as well. “Go where? You can’t go to the school.”

  “We have to assume all the Landscapers who were at the school are dead. And all the Bridges who were there as well. But that means the Eater has access to all the landscapes connected to those gardens.”

  “So where are you going?” Sebastian asked, hurrying after his cousin as Lee left the island and strode across the bridge.

  “I have to break the bridges between Glorianna’s landscapes and the rest of Ephemera. I have to break as many as I can, as fast as I can. I can start with the ones that cross over into Sanctuary.”

  As they reached the shore, Sebastian grabbed Lee’s arm, pulling his cousin around to face him. “You’re going to cut people off with no way to escape that thing?”

  “I’m going to do what I can to save what I can,” Lee replied. “Guardians and Guides, Sebastian! We need some safe ground that the Eater can’t reach, or we’ll never be able to gather enough force to fight It.”

  It made sense, but…“So you’re going to save Sanctuary.” He felt cold…and so alone.

  Lee gave him a strange look. “I’m going to close off Glorianna’s landscapes. I’ll break the bridges that connect them to outside landscapes. We’ll be isolated from the rest of Ephemera, but the landscapes are diverse enough to provide people with everything they really need.”

  “But you said…Sanctuary.”

  Lee smiled with bitter humor. “This is one of Belladonna’s landscapes. Sanctuary and the Den are connected. Not directly, but they’re connected.”

  The Den. Sebastian shook his head. “There are dozens of ways into the Den, and the Eater has already attacked there.” He swallowed the lump in his throat and felt it lodge in his heart. When he went back to the Den, Lynnea could stay here in Sanctuary. Lynnea would be safe. “You have to let the Den go, or you won’t have your safe ground.”

  “There are ten stationary bridges that cross over into the Den. I created them, and they all connect with landscapes held by Glorianna or Nadia. It’s the resonating bridges and any stationary ones other Bridges established since the last time I made a circuit around the Den that I have to find and break.”

  “Didn’t you hear me? The Den is already compromised!”

  “Then the only thing I can suggest, cousin, is that you gather whoever you can to help you defend it. Because Glorianna isn’t going to abandon the Den, and neither am I.”

  We’re not going to abandon you. That was the message. They didn’t care if he was human or demon. He was family. That was all that mattered.

  “All right,” Sebastian said. “I’ll hold on to the Den.” Somehow.

  They climbed the hill in silence. When they reached the door into the building, Lee paused. “Could you stop at my mother’s house on your way back to the Den? Just to make sure everything’s…” He closed his eyes. “There’s a saying I learned in school. ‘Despair made the deserts.’ That’s what the Eater of the World really does, you know. It’s not the landscapes It twisted or the creatures It twisted into monsters; it’s the loss of hope, the seeds of fear that almost gave It control of the world long ago. It feeds on those feelings, cultivates the dark aspects of our hearts. It’s going to try to kill all the Landscapers. That’s the only way to keep the world from holding on to the Light.”

  “I’ll check on Aunt Nadia.”

  Lee nodded.

  They went inside, Lee to pack his things and begin his own kind of fight against the Eater of the World, and Sebastian to find Lynnea and tell her he was going back to the Den in a few hours. Alone.

  “There’s something you need to see,” Nadia said. She opened a kitchen drawer, removed two folded pieces of paper, and set them on the kitchen table in front of Glorianna.

  “Where did you find these?” Glorianna asked as she opened the papers and saw the heavy lines of masculine handwriting.

  “In the attic.” Nadia latched the kitchen’s screen door, locked the wood door, then walked over to one of the windows. “I didn’t go up for anything in particular. Just to sort things out, I suppose, for something to do, since I was feeling restless. I found those at the bottom of a trunk of children’s clothes, wrapped in your old baby blanket.”

  Glorianna looked up. “You told me a dog stole my blanket.”

  Nadia closed the window, then closed the shutters over it. “What was I supposed to tell you? It was so worn and tattered—and got more tattered every time I washed it. But you didn’t want to let it go.”

  “So you lied to me?”

  “I told you a lie that gave the loss meaning. You used to find comfort from thinking a small orphan dog was snuggled up in that blanket on cold nights.”

  Glorianna watched her mother close the other kitchen window. “Why are you doing that? It’ll be stifling in here.”

  “For a little while. Read, Glorianna.”

  So she read, and what she read chilled her to the marrow.

  “Guardians and Guides, can this be true?”

  Nadia sat down opposite Glorianna and said nothing for a long time. Then, “It makes a frightening kind of sense. Both sides lost some abilities, some aspects of their magic after the Eater of the World was fought and defeated long ago. But one side forgot its roots, except for the families who passed the truth down from mother to daughter; the other side did not. It hid in plain sight, keeping its bloodlines strong while depleting the strength of its enemy.”

  Glorianna looked at the papers lying on the table between them. “Who…?”

  “Your father. Peter. Shortly before he…”

  “Disappeared.”

  “Yes.” Nadia closed her eyes. “I thought he left because he was dissatisfied with his life, or with me. I thought he left because he’d grown tired of the secrets he’d insisted we keep—and because of the secrets he knew I kept from him about my family. I thought he left because he crossed into a strange landscape and couldn’t find his way back—or didn’t want to find his way back. I thought a lot of things during the months after he disappeared.” She opened her eyes. “After reading that, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  Glorianna looked at the papers, at the strong handwriting that looked as if the hand had trembled a little while it held the pen. Out of haste? Fear?

  “You think the Wizards’ Council killed him, or had him killed, because he found out about this?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “But…” Despite the closed door and windows, despite their being alone, Glorianna lowered her voice. “Females kept in secret as breeders? Females who aren’t…human? Even if it’s true, he didn’t say where he saw these females or who was mating with them. He didn’t accuse any particular group of being the—”

  “Peter was a wizard,” Nadia interrupted. “If he’d seen this place anywhere but in Wizard City, he would have reported it, and the wizards would have been the first to rally against some dark aspect gathering strength in secret. They’ve always been the most vocal about keeping humankind away from the demons who share this world.”

  “Exactly.”

  Nadia looked at Glorianna. Her face, even in the soft glow of the lamp on the table, appeared older than her years. “If the power that your kind had shaped in order to control the world had been defeated by your enemies, by the ones who stood for the Light, what better way to survive than to transform into a shape that would blend in? What better way to survive than to build a fortress city in which to hide the females who, for whatever reason, weren’t able to transform but who held the dark legacy in their wombs?”

  “I don’t believe this. I don’t believe any of this.” But Glorianna stared at the words on the papers and felt sick.

  Th
e Dark Guides are not just an unseen force that flows through Ephemera, providing an opportunity for a person to follow the baser feelings in his heart. And they are not figures so malformed that they slink in the dark corners of cities or hide in caves in the countryside, appearing as a black-cloaked shape that whispers lies or helps bring about misfortune.

  I have seen the creche, the breeding grounds. I watched males who wear the mask of human faces mate with females who are not human.

  The Dark Guides exist. They are real. They wear human faces, but they are not human under the skin.

  And, perhaps, neither am I. If the power I was born with comes from this dark place, neither am I.

  “I told you the family secrets,” Nadia said softly. “Things I never told your father. We can trace our line back to the first Landscapers, who were the Guides of the Heart. Human in form, but not human. They had such a strong connection with Ephemera, they could alter the landscapes, actually change the shape of the world.”

  “Like me,” Glorianna whispered.