‘You knew,’ I said, pointing at Bastille.
‘I recognized His Majesty immediately,’ she admitted. ‘But he seemed to want to keep his identity secret. So I played along.’
‘I did too,’ Aydee said. ‘I . . . er, just didn’t do a very good job of it. Sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mallo, also known as King Talakimallo of Mokia. His wife stepped up beside him, and the guards watched the doorway into the palace.
‘But why hide from me?’ I asked.
‘And me!’ Kaz said, folding his arms, stepping up beside me.
‘It wasn’t just from you,’ the king said. ‘It was from all outsiders. You see, we sort of . . . well, tricked the knights.’ Bastille raised an eyebrow. ‘They insisted that I be protected,’ Mallo said, voice fervent.
‘They would not stop pestering me. I worried they’d kidnap me and take me from the city for my own good.’
‘The city is close to falling, Your Majesty,’ Bastille said. ‘Mokia can’t afford for the entire royal family to be taken by the Librarians. What of the rest of the kingdom? It will need leadership.’
‘There is no “rest of the kingdom,” child,’ Mallo said. ‘Mokia stands here. We’ve been beaten down by Librarian forces for decades now; if Tuki Tuki falls, it will spell the end for my people. We will become just another Librarian province, slowly assimilated into the Hushlands, our people brainwashed until we forget our past.’
The queen laid a hand on her husband’s arm. ‘We are not ignorant of the importance of preserving the royal lineage, fair sister – if only so that a proper resistance can be mounted to reclaim Mokia, should that become our fate.’
Before you ask, yes, she actually talks like that. I once asked her to pass the butter and she said, ‘It pleases me to bequeath this condiment unto you, young Alcatraz.’ Really. No kidding.
‘But wait,’ I said, scratching my head. Being stoopid, I do that a lot. ‘You’re here, but the knights think that you’re safe somewhere else?’
‘Our daughter imitated me,’ Mallo said. ‘She is an Oculator and has a pair of Disguiser’s Lenses. The knights shepherded her away to a hidden location while she used her Lenses to appear as if she were me.’
‘The lineage is safe,’ Angola said.
‘And I can stay to fight with my people, as is right.’ Mallo looked grim. ‘Rather, I can fall with my people. I’m afraid that several Smedrys and a single knight will not be enough to win this siege. Our Defender’s Glass is nearly broken, and most of my warriors have fallen to comas in battle. Those who remain have taken many wounds. My silimatic scientists think that one more day of fighting will shatter the dome. We are faced by superior numbers and superior firepower. In the moments before you arrived, I had made the difficult decision to surrender. I was on my way to the wall to announce it to the Librarians.’
The words hung in the air like a foul stench – the kind that everyone notices but doesn’t want to point out, for fear of being named the one who caused it.
Well, guess we came here for nothing, I thought. We should probably turn around and get out of here.
‘I’m here to help, Your Majesty,’ I said instead. ‘And I can bring others. If you will resist a little longer, I will not let Mokia fall.’
I’m not sure where the brave words came from. Perhaps a smarter man would have known not to say them. Even as they came out of my mouth, I was shocked by my stoopidity. Remember what I said about bravery?
Ridiculous though the proclamation was, the king did not laugh. ‘I have found that the word of a Smedry is like gold, young Alcatraz,’ King Mallo said appraisingly. ‘Of great value, but sometimes easy to bend. Are you certain you can bring aid to my people?’
No.
‘Yes,’ I said.
The king studied me, then glanced at his wife.
‘If we surrender, our people retain their lives,’ Angola said, ‘but lose their selves. If there remains but a slim chance . . .’
He nodded in agreement. ‘You said you needed to use our Communicator’s Glass, Alcatraz. Let us see what you can do with it, and then I will judge.’
‘Are you certain this is the right thing to do?’ Bastille hissed to me.
We sat on a wicker bench, waiting as the king and his wife fetched the Communicator’s Glass. Aydee was talking to one of the soldiers, getting news about her family. (Sing, Australia, and their parents had been sent to provide leadership at the other main battlefront in the Mokian war – though I suspect that the king really sent them away to prevent them from being captured when the city fell.) Kaz stood nearby, arms folded as he leaned against the wall, wearing his brown leather jacket and aviator sunglasses.
‘I don’t know if this is right,’ I admitted to Bastille. ‘But we can’t just let them give up.’
‘If they fight, people will get hurt,’ Bastille said, leaning in close to me. ‘Can we really offer them enough hope to justify that? Now that I’ve seen how bad it is, I don’t even know if the full force of the Knights of Crystallia would be enough to turn this war around.’
‘I . . .’ I trailed off, growing befuddled. I did that frequently when Bastille sat really close to me, particularly when I could smell the scent of the shampoo in her hair. Shouldn’t girls smell like flowers or something like that? Bastille just smelled like soap.
It was strangely intoxicating anyway. Obviously she gives off some kind of brain-clouding radiation. That’s the only explanation.
‘Shattering Glass, what am I saying?’ she said, pulling back. ‘Of course it’s better for them to fight! I’m sorry. I’ve just grown so used to contradicting you on principle that I’m shocked when you do something smart.’
‘Duurrr . . .’ I said.
She narrowed her eyes at me. ‘You aren’t still mooning over my sister, are you?’ Her voice was quite threatening.
I shook out of my stupor. ‘What? No. Don’t be stoopid.’
‘Did you just call me stoopid?’
‘No, I told you not to be stoopid. What is it with you and your sister anyway?’
‘Nothing! I love my sister. We’re like two shattering flowers in a field of shattering daisies.’
‘What does that even mean?’
‘I don’t know! It was supposed to sound sisterly or something.’
I snorted in derision.
‘So what’s that supposed to mean?’ Bastille demanded. ‘I’m very affectionate with my sister!’
‘So much so that you’ve never visited her in Mokia?’
‘It’s a long way away, and I was busy training to become a knight. So that I could keep idiots like you out of trouble!’
‘Wait. You get mad when I imply that you might be stoopid, but it’s all right for you to call me an idiot?’
‘Because you’re a Smedry!’
‘That’s always your excuse,’ I said. ‘I don’t buy it. Besides, this time you said you agreed with what I was doing!’
‘So!’
‘So!’
‘So?’
‘So maybe we should, like, go catch a movie together or something,’ I said, standing up. ‘Sometime when we’re not being chased by Librarians or being eaten by dragons or things like that!’
Bastille paused, cocking her head, frowning. ‘Wait. What?’
I found myself blushing. Why had I said that? I mean, I’d been thinking about it for a while, but . . .
Brain-clouding radiation. Obviously.
‘It was nothing,’ I said, panicking. ‘I just, uh, got confused, and—’
‘What’s a “movie”?’ she asked. ‘And why would we need to catch it? Did one escape?’
‘Er, yes. They’re these big, monstrous creatures that the Librarians let loose in the Hushlands. To terrorize people . . . and, you know, and steal their time, and make them cringe at bad acting, and then make them sit through long boring award shows that give statues of little gold men to people you’ve never heard of.’
She frowned even further. ‘You’re an idiot sometimes, Smedry,’ she said, then glanced at Kaz, as if asking for an explanation from him.
‘I’m not touching this one,’ he said, smiling. ‘In fact, I’m staying so far away from it, I might as well be in the next kingdom over!’
‘Whatever,’ Bastille said, turning her narrowed eyes back on me – as if she suspected that I was making fun of her in some way she couldn’t figure out. I just continued to blush, right up until the point where Mallo and Angola returned. The queen carried a small hand mirror. She crossed the woven rug and handed it to me.
I hesitated, looking down at the mirror. Half of the glass was missing. ‘This is it?’
‘Communicator’s Glass is best if portable,’ Mallo said. ‘We broke this piece in half and sent it to Nalhalla; it will allow us to communicate for some weeks through the two pieces, until the power fades. Then the glass must be reforged and broken again. It’s not the easiest way to talk across a distance, but we were desperate, particularly after sending away our last Oculator to maintain my disguise.’
‘Librarian agents destroyed our other means of communication,’ one of the soldiers added. ‘The Transporter’s Glass station, the soundrunners, even the city’s stockpile of Messenger’s Glass.’
I frowned. ‘How’d they do that?’
‘They continue to dig tunnels into the city,’ Mallo said with a sigh. ‘And send strike teams up to harry us. We just caught one earlier today. We captured them before they could do any permanent damage, then collapsed the tunnel. There will be more, however.’
I nodded, raising the hand mirror. They all looked at me expectantly, as if they figured that – being an Oculator – I’d immediately know how to use the glass. ‘Um,’ I said, turning it sideways. ‘Er. Mirror, mirror, in my hand, my food is tasty, but often bland.’
‘Alcatraz?’ Kaz asked. ‘What are you doing? You just have to touch the glass to make it work.’
‘Oh,’ I said, tapping the mirror. It shimmered, like I’d disturbed the surface of a crystal-clear pool of water. A moment later, the image changed from a reflection of my face to show an image of a stone room. One of the castles in Nalhalla.
A small Mokian boy sat in front of the mirror. He grew alert the moment the image changed, then ran off, yelling. ‘Lord Smedry, Lord Smedry!’
Within seconds, my grandfather was there. He looked somewhat frazzled, his hair sticking out at odd angles, his bow tie on sideways. ‘Ah, Alcatraz, my lad! You did it!’
‘I’m here, Grandpa,’ I said, nodding. ‘Inside Tuki Tuki. But things are bad here.’
‘Of course they are!’ Grandpa said. ‘That’s why we sent you in the first place, eh? Stay there for a moment. I need to get some knights!’
He rushed away. It looked like their half of the mirror had been hung on the wall in some kind of entryway or foyer.