“Listen,” I said, “I’m about to start.”
“Okay.”
“The next time I say . . . the word.”
“And?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
“and . . .”
I could feel his hand tremble a bit. Mine, too.
“one,” I said, breathing in loudly.
I could hear him doing the same.
“two,” I said, difficult to do while holding a breath in. My mouth was wide open. Glancing sideways, I could see Dusty’s great gape.
“three!” I said.
The Shout whooshed out of me, again burning my tongue, my lips. But this time, it didn’t feel as if I’d thrown up hot ginger tea, because Dusty’s Shout was doubling mine. Instead, it felt as if the Shout were made of pulped ginger pouring out of me. Volcanic, pure heat. Burned lips. Scorched throat.
At the same time, I made the Wish. I didn’t even pause to set it in rhyme.
I wish the great Gate would separate itself from
the rock and all its magick melt away. I wish that
the great Gate before us would fall away from us, making
a walkway into the corridor ahead. I wish that we
would be free and all that holds us here be gone.
The twinned Shouts bounced off the rock walls, echoed off the rock floor, rebounded off the rock ceiling, quadrupling back on themselves, over and over and over again, till the two of us were like finely pulled lines vibrating in tune. My body trembled, my hair trembled, my heart trembled. It was that kind of Shout.
Then slowly, very slowly, the echoes died away and all around us was as silent as a tomb.
For long moments, I heard nothing. Not a breath, not a sigh, not a sob.
And then, I heard a great, deep moan, as if the very stones were in agony. It felt as if the stone beneath us and all the stone above us had begun to shift. Rocks fell, crashing loudly around us, a waterfall of them.
I wanted to move, to run away, back to where the two princes and the tribe cowered in safety. But my feet seemed stuck to the moving stones. My limbs would not listen to what my mind told them to do.
Closing my eyes, I clutched Dusty’s cold, wet, trembling hand. We clung together, fingers interlaced, making whimpering noises, like whipped dogs.
When the groaning stone finally stopped moving, I opened my eyes again.
There were fissures in the rocks around the Gate, as if a giant with a great sword had tried to split them in two and failed.
But the Gate had not moved at all.
• 13 •
AFTER THE SHOUT
What happened?” Dusty asked. “Gorse, what’s happened here?”
“Nothing has happened here but a lot of stupid noise,” I said angrily, exhausted by the terror and the unrhymed Wish. My lips were sore, my throat raw, my head was aching again, and all for nothing. Nothing!
“How can that be?”
I turned and yelled at him, “How should I know? It’s only the second Real Shout I’ve ever made in my life, and the first one worked.” I bit my lip. It had worked only too well, but I hadn’t meant to tell him that.
“Then what’s the difference?”
I looked back at the Gate. It seemed to be laughing at me. Then I turned and saw a fine gray dust in my brother’s hair, on his shoulders, a sparkling kind of dust that caught the light from the hearth.
Stone dust.
That’s when I understood.
“Magick,” I said. “Much older magick than our Shout. Much stronger. Our poor magick won’t bring that Gate down. Not now. Not ever. It’ll bring the walls down on us first.”
Quickly, then, I told him everything I’d left out. I explained all about the Curse, and the imprisonment, and how we were related to both men. And then I told him about the Oath I’d been forced to take, and he let out a fearsome swear.
“Mab’s backside!”
I slapped a hand over his mouth. “We have enough trouble down here without you stirring up the Old Ones.”
“Whosh, little sister. What have you gotten yourself into?” He collapsed onto the stone floor, folded his legs, and said nothing else for a full minute.
Slowly, I lowered myself down next to him, so exhausted I could hardly move without falling over. My head wasn’t just aching; it seemed on fire. I didn’t mean to, but I began to weep.
Dusty put an arm around my shoulder. “Don’t cry, little Goose. A Real Shout is tiring. No wonder we can only do one a day.” He giggled. “And some of us are done for a week or more after. Why, Aunt Gardenia once took to her bed for a full month having given a great Shout, or so Solange said. Not”—he raised his left hand to forestall what was sure to be my next comment—“that I believe everything Solange tells me.”
“Hush,” I whispered to him, snuffling up the rest of the tears. “Don’t say that aloud. I don’t want the princes to know.”
“Know what?”
“How often we can . . . you know.”
“Shout?” He whispered it.
I nodded.
“Ah . . .” He smiled and put a finger to his lips. “Silence is the word.” As if Dusty could ever be silent about anything. But he could find the humor in just about any situation.
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
It wasn’t as binding as an Oath, but then I’d never ask that of him. I had to trust him to do the right thing. He was my brother, after all.
For a moment, my traitor mind went to the other brothers whose actions had led us to this place—Orybon and Fergus. They were to blame, not Dusty or me. We were Shouting Fey, and generations removed from them. It was not the same at all.
But then I shook myself back into honesty. It wasn’t only their fault. I’d gotten into this mess all on my own, because of my rushing about, choosing the easiest route to the castle against all prohibitions, and because of my accident-prone nature. Also because I didn’t think things through carefully enough. And by my actions, I’d brought Dusty into the mess, too.
“I’m so sorry,” I told him, and began weeping all over again. When he tried to protest, I added, “My head hurts, and my throat hurts. I never want to do another Shout again, ever.”
And I meant it, too. At the time.
• • • • • • • •
As we sat huddled together in our misery, we realized that the trembling beneath us had stopped. The sound of stone grinding on stone had stopped as well. And that’s when a bunch of shadows walked toward us.
“What was that?” Prince Orybon asked as soon as he’d reached us. Behind him the McGargles gabbled in their own language, but clearly they were asking the same thing. Only Grey was silent.
“A Shout,” said Dusty.
“I know it was a Shout, stupid fey!” The prince reached out and cuffed Dusty on the ear.
“Ow!”
I could see that Dusty was more angry than hurt. His face was scrunched up and furious. No one smacks anyone in the Family. So I said quickly, remembering something I’d read in a book on the E shelf, “It’s called an earthquake, prince.”
“Explain.” Now that he had Dusty to bang about and bully, he was no longer wasting more words on me than needed.
As best I could—my head throbbing with the remnants of the Shout and the Gate’s ward against it—I explained about plates moving on top of one another, which created fissures and tremors and tremblors and . . .
“Are you just making this up?” Prince Orybon’s voice was hard as stone.
“Why would I do that?” I tried to sound astonished that he’d believe any such thing. But even to my own ears, that explanation of an earthquake sounded more like a table setting gone bad. And of course he knew I’d been holding ba
ck about my name and the Family all along, so I expect he’d a right to ask. “I read about it in my Father’s library.”
“I never believe what I read in libraries,” he said. “You can’t bring any pressure to bear on books, or question them, so how do you know they are truthful?”
It was clear how much he liked bringing pressure. I thought about the pressure he’d put on me, and on Grey, and how we’d been made to do his Bidding the way the Family has to do the human king’s. Poor Grey had carried his burden for centuries.
“Why would a book lie?” I asked.
He gave me a withering look. “I suppose it depends who wrote the thing, doesn’t it?”
I supposed he had a point.
So Dusty and I went with the prince and Grey to examine the walls on either side of the Gate, but were very careful not to get so close as to set off the sparks again. The McGargles stayed far behind.
The fissures and slices had not changed in the few minutes since Dusty and I’d examined them, and Dusty made the mistake of saying so. He received an angrier cuff on the other ear in answer.
“Maybe another Shout?” Grey suggested.
“Of course another Shout,” Prince Orybon said.
Dusty turned and glared at him. “We’re too exhausted from that one,” he said quickly. “And G—”
I nudged him with my elbow in case he said my real name. He understood at once.
“My sister hurt her voice and her head. She needs to rest up if you want the next Shout to work.”
“How long?” Orybon asked, glaring back at Dusty, hand raised.
Grey stepped between them and put his hands up in supplication. “We have all the time in the world, prince,” he reminded. Then looked back at me and winked.
He’s guessed . . . I thought. Somehow he’s guessed we can only do one Shout a day, and he hasn’t said anything about it to the prince. Curiouser and curiouser.
Prince Orybon chuckled and waved Grey away dismissively. “Let them rest, then. They are just children.”
“As you wish.” Grey head-bobbed and turned away, quickly shepherding Dusty and me away from the prince. He led us back through the maze of tunnels to a nearby cavern half the size of the one where he and the prince usually stayed. In this one stood a large bed by the hearth, twice as big as the pink-and-gold bed I’d been sleeping on, with draperies hung all around to keep it snug. It filled almost every inch of the smaller cavern.
“Where did they get . . . ” Dusty began, his eyes suddenly grown big.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” I said, sounding like one of the Aunts. “It’s a glamour.”
“Oh.” His disappointment showed on his face as if he really were a child and not nearly fifteen years old. At a calmer, less fraught time, he would have laughed and made a joke at his own expense, but there was no joking here.
Glamour or not, the bed was comfortable, and we were exhausted. We fell asleep, and I had the same dream as before—chimera, gray knight, crown, throne, door, and a burst of stars.
I woke up screaming, “Shout! Shout! Shout!” as if I were in the midst of an ague-ridden nightmare.
Dusty woke at my screams and wrapped his arms around me, the way Father would have done. He smoothed down my startled hair. “It’s all right, Goosling,” he crooned. “I’m here.”
Comforted, I fell back to sleep at once.
• • • • • • • •
When I woke, parched, there was a cup of cold river water by the bed, but Dusty wasn’t there. He was sitting with Grey on two small, smoothed-down stalagmites halfway across the cavern, deep in conversation.
Getting up from the bed of moss, cup in hand, I sipped it slowly while walking gingerly over to them. I was trying to keep my poor pounding head from hurting even more. “Don’t start any new plans without me,” I said, my voice scratchy.
They looked up like guilty boys and gave me almost identical grins. It was as if I could see the thirteen-year-old that Grey had once been. Clearly, he’d been under Orybon’s thumb for far too long, and we—whether or not we could bring down the Gate—had already changed his life and given him back a kind of innocence.
Grey said, “We have fish for breakfast or . . . fish for breakfast.”
That made me laugh, much too loudly and much too long for so feeble a joke. Oddly enough, I hardly noticed my headache after that.
“I’ll take . . . fish,” I said, and he handed me his stone plate and what remained on it.
“That’s it?”
He nodded. “But next time I see a passing McGargle, I’ll ask for more.”
“Move over,” I told Dusty, and he moved, leaving me a corner of the stone to sit on. I ate the offered fish ravenously, while they continued to talk. That the fish was cold, and left over from Grey’s breakfast, didn’t matter. I only held myself back from licking the plate out of a sense of embarrassment. But if I’d been alone, I would have licked it in an instant.
They continued their conversation, heedless of my manners. Actually, it was less a conversation than an odd argument. Grey was holding forth on fey battles, and Dusty was explaining about the building of stone walls. Less an argument than a pair of monologues, each one fascinating in its own way.
I waded in with my own. “I had a dream . . . ” I began.
“Don’t pay her any attention,” Dusty said, shaking his head. He smiled wryly at Grey. “She always has dreams. Wild dreams, improbable dreams. Possibly prophetic dreams, or so the Aunts think, though none of the dreams have ever come true.”
“All dreams are wild, improbable, and possibly prophetic,” Grey said. “That’s the nature of dreams. Perhaps no one has been reading them aright.”
I think my mouth gaped wide.
“Don’t encourage her,” Dusty said, clearly wanting to get back to talk of battles and stone walls.
Ignoring Dusty’s warning, Grey leaned in toward me. “Tell me the dream.”
“Really?” I tried to fathom his reason for asking.
“Really,” he said in such a reasonable fashion, I did.
As I told it, I think I understood the dream for the first time, reading it aright myself, as Grey suggested. “I thought it meant I had to throw a Shout at the Gate, but we all saw how that came out.”
“Gate one, fey nil,” Dusty joked, making it sound as if the Shout were only a boy’s game. And maybe for him it was. He hadn’t taken an Oath, after all. At least not yet.
“Not nil at all,” Grey said. “We have gotten something from the Shout.”
“Nothing I can see,” said Dusty.
“Then you are not looking hard enough.” Grey was no longer the boy, but a teacher of boys.
Suddenly, understanding what Grey meant, I leaned forward with excitement. “We learned something.”
Grey smiled at me. “A battle lost is not a war lost, as long as the losing side takes good information away from the encounter.”
“Exactly!” I’d seen that very sentence in The Book of Battles by the Greek writer Athenios, a huge tome I’d found on the B shelf and read a bit of one sunny afternoon in the meadow. I remembered it specifically because the meadow seemed such an unlikely place to read such a book, and I only understood a small part of what I found in the book. I liked the stories of the particular battles best, not the parts about battle strategy. But that sentence Grey quoted, coming at the end of one disastrous battle whose armies I couldn’t recall, had made an impression on me. “Athenios,” I said, and when Grey looked startled that I knew it, I grinned broadly.
“My, my, you are a surprise,” he said.
Dusty laughed. “Father always says that about her,” he told Grey.
But I thought that it was Grey who’d been the surprise.
Dusty suddenly realized something and shook his head. “What i
nformation did we get?”
Grey said, “Do you want to tell him, or shall I?”
“I will,” I said, putting my hand on Dusty’s. “The Gate didn’t fall, but some of the wall around it crumbled.”
“So?”
“So . . .” I prompted.
“So . . . another Shout?” he guessed.
“And another,” I said. “And another. Until it’s done.”
“Or we’re done,” Dusty warned.
He was right, of course. We Shouters all had to rest after a Shout, some—it seems—more than others. I more than most.
“But surely we have plenty of time,” I said. “And a wall of stone, unlike a wall of ivy, won’t grow back.” If there was a whine in my voice, I hadn’t meant it to be there.
Grey held up a hand to silence us. “The prince has not the patience he once had, and that was little enough. Now that we are so close to the end of this exile—or so he hopes—he wants everything done and over.”
“Don’t you want it done and over, too?” I watched a series of emotions race across his handsome face as he formed his answer.
“I want it done properly, and with no loss of life—to us, to the McGargles, to anyone. But Orybon just wants it done fast. He would have made a terrible general.”
I nodded.
Grey crossed his arms and looked at Dusty and me, as if he was about to say something that was heresy, and it was. “Prince Orybon no longer has his great magicks, which may be due to the exile, his father’s Curse, or the closeness of the Gate, which is why we stay mostly as far from this part of the cave as is possible. But I have seen him still work small Curses on some of the tribe. It is never a pretty sight. I would not have him hurt the two of you.”
“Why should we trust what you say?” asked Dusty, his face getting that pinched look that shows he is worried.
Though it may sound strange, given what I’d been through with Grey, I did trust him, and said so. “Because he has no reason now to lie.”
Dusty stood up. His hands in fists struck against his thighs. His anger exploded from his clothing in stone dust that our sleep hadn’t erased. “Don’t be stupid, Gorse. Of course he has a reason. He’s the prince’s man.”