Christopher Golden - The Borderkind

The first thing he noticed was that the black aura still surrounded the shattered fragments of the winter man. The gusting wind and the snow and the broken pieces of Frost’s head were still suspended there as though frozen in time.

But the black umbilical of that sorcery did not stretch to the corpse that lay before Oliver.

It was attached to the man in the other chair, to the fingers of King Mahacuhta.

Yet even as Oliver saw this, the image of the man shimmered and the chains that had pulsed with magic vanished as though they had never been there. Instead, those same chains gleamed around the corpse that lay at Oliver’s feet. Now they too faded, even as the body seemed to shift, the flesh running like hot wax.

His sword, the Sword of Hunyadi, was lodged in the cloven skull of the king.

Ty’Lis sat in the king’s chair in his lush crimson robes, grinning and unharmed.

“No,” Oliver whispered.

“I do so love my puppets,” Ty’Lis murmured, as if to himself.

The door to the king’s bedroom crashed open and more Atlantean soldiers thundered into the antechamber. Shouts came from out in the corridor and more soldiers-the king’s own guard-appeared, herding into the room, angry and brutal.

Collette had already been caught, held by a pair of Atlanteans. Julianna stood in a corner, sword raised, but she had no hope as they gathered round her.

“Murder!” Ty’Lis cried, voice shrill as he leaped to his feet. “They’ve slain the king! Arrest them!”

Kitsune and Oliver stared at one another across the room. For a moment her eyes were full of love and sadness and regret. He saw it all, just as he saw all of those emotions drain from her. The fox-woman reached out and touched the fabric of the Veil, the air at her fingertips shimmered and opened, and she went to step through.

“Wait!” Julianna shouted. “You can’t leave without us!”

Oliver called to her to stop, but Julianna clashed swords with the guard in front of her, then kept going forward. She knocked him down and let go of her blade, skirting around the fallen man even as he tried to grab her long legs. Julianna dodged the hands of two other guards and reached for Kitsune.

She could not pass through the Veil. Julianna was one of the Lost Ones. With her in tow, Kitsune would never have been able to escape.

Even so, Oliver flinched as Kitsune struck her with the back of her hand, splitting Julianna’s lip and staining her own knuckles with blood.

Oliver called her name.

Julianna’s name.

Kitsune sneered at him, eyes cold. She stepped through the Veil, the air shimmered and closed, and she was gone.

Oliver stood staring mutely at the place where she had been as the king’s guard surrounded him. His hands flexed instinctively, but fighting now would be suicide and mean death for Collette and Julianna. They were all disarmed.

They were prisoners.

Ty’Lis strode toward Oliver, picking his way delicately around the dead guards and shattered fragments of frozen Perytons. The aura no longer surrounded him, but it pulsed now around what remained of Frost, and Oliver did not know if that sorcery was his prison or his final destruction.

“Bascombe,” Ty’Lis said, glancing from Oliver to Collette, ignoring Julianna completely. He leaned in toward Oliver and his voice lowered to a whisper. “Legend-Born.”

Oliver gritted his teeth and shook his head. “I don’t even know what that means.”

Ty’Lis blinked and glanced at him. “No? Truly? None of your myth friends ever told you?”

Unwilling to play along, Oliver looked away, staring instead at Julianna and then at Collette, trying to assure them that everything would be all right. Somehow.

“You and your sister, boy, you’re half of this world and half of that. An uncommon breed, and an unwelcome one.”

Collette screamed at him, “You hideous freak! What the fuck are you talking about?”

Ty’Lis ran his fingers over the braids of his beard. “Idiot girl. You haven’t an inkling, have you?” And now he whispered so that only Oliver could hear, so that none of the soldiers, Atlantean or Yucatazcan, could make out a word.

“We made the Veil to separate the ordinary from the legendary. From time to time, couplings between Borderkind and humans have produced creatures that are both. You are the opposite of the Veil in every way, anathema to the magic used to create it. The stories the Lost Ones tell say that one day a Legend-Born will tear the Veil down, reuniting the two worlds, so that at last they can all go home again.”

Ty’Lis pressed his forehead to Oliver’s, heat pulsing on the sorcerer’s clammy skin, and stared into his eyes.

“That is why you must die. To take away any such false hope. But first, I have need of you…”

Again the sorcerer stepped back and gestured broadly to the king’s guards.

“Put them all in chains,” Ty’Lis commanded. “And I shall attend to the Borderkind. They are under arrest on charges of conspiracy and regicide. You are all witnesses to the crime. You see the Sword of Hunyadi, which was wielded by the hand of this Intruder from beyond the Veil. No other evidence is necessary. He and his companions are assassins, sent by Hunyadi himself.

“The king of Euphrasia has shattered the truce between the Two Kingdoms, and in the name of Mahacuhta, my robes stained with his blood, I swear that Yucatazca shall have her vengeance, that there will be justice.

“That there will be war.”

The day after Christmas, Sara Halliwell rode up to Kitteridge with Sheriff Norris. The twenty-sixth of December had always seemed a strange day to her, simmering with the surreal. Many shops remained closed in the morning, so that a drive through Kitteridge gave the impression that the night before had brought some silent apocalypse. People slept in, recovered from the holiday, enjoyed their gifts in quiet solitude as they finished digesting the Christmas feast. Yet the holiday lights were still lit, decorations still hung. No one dared drag their tree to the curb on the day after Christmas. Not yet.

After a day of such passionate celebration, the twenty-sixth of December felt like a national day of mourning.

Fly the flags at half-mast, Sara thought as she gazed out the window of the sheriff’s car at the stillness of the day. Santa’s dead and gone.

By the time Sheriff Norris turned the car onto Rose Ridge Lane, tears made thin tracks down her cheeks. She wiped them away as he pulled into the long driveway of the Bascombe house. This was Sara’s first glimpse of the place and it astonished her. They passed a carriage house, a lovely little cottage larger than the house she’d grown up in, and then the car rolled to a halt in the shadow of what could only be called a mansion. The house itself was painted a light rose and it would have been a thing of beauty if not for the sheer emptiness of it. Like the twenty-sixth of December, the Bascombe house was a monument to what it had lost.

“I shouldn’t be doing this,” Jackson Norris said.

Again, Sara wiped her eyes. “I really appreciate it.”

“It’s just-” he began, but faltered when he turned to her and saw that she’d been crying.

The sheriff hesitated, then he killed the engine and plucked his keys from the ignition, choosing not to comment on her tears. Sara felt absurdly grateful.

“I don’t know what you expect to find here,” he said.

Sara tucked her hair behind her ears as she bent to look out through the windshield at the magnificent facade of the house. The place looked almost magical, like something out of a storybook.

“I just need to see it.”

Jackson Norris stared at her for another long moment, then nodded and climbed out of the car. Sara got out and closed her door with a soft click, staring at the house even as she followed the sheriff up the walk to the front door.