Canes of Divergence (20 page)

“And a mighty fine one, from the looks of it,” Thomas said, smiling at the sleeping infant. “He’s lucky to have you.”

Owen beamed.

“But I think we should let him sleep, and
let William and your sister get some rest, too.” Thomas put his hand on Owen’s shoulder. “Let’s go look and see if we can find you some pajamas and things for the night okay?”

“Okay.”

William gave him a hug, and Quinn, whose arms were full of baby, kissed him on the top of his head, then whispered “I love you” in his ear. Even knowing she’d see him in the morning, and that he’d be here for the next ten days, it was hard to watch him walk out the door with Linnea and Thomas.

Once the door was closed behind them, William put his arm on her shoulder and squeezed it gently. “Are you all right, love?”

“Yeah,” she whispered. The baby stirred a little, and she hurried to carry him into the bedroom and set him ever-so-carefully into the cradle. His little head moved back and forth, and his eyelids fluttered, but after a tense, silent moment, they stayed closed, and he sighed, deep in whatever kind of dreams babies had.

“That was close,” William whispered as they left the bedroom, closing the door behind them as softly as possible.

“We’ll be lucky if we get fifteen minutes, but…”

“But I get a little bit of time alone with you.” He moved behind her and pulled at
the clip in her hair, letting the tresses fall around her face. She hadn’t even seen him get the brush, but he had it, and he started brushing, gently tugging the tangles out.

“That feels so good,” she said, relaxing into his touch
, relishing peace for the first time in days.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been here to do it the last couple of nights.” Setting the brush down, he swept her hair
over her shoulder and then lightly massaged her neck for a minute before resting his chin on her shoulder and wrapping his arms around her waist.

She put her hands over his, though she was careful to avoid the spot where his shirt hid the bandaged-over bite. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right. That bite is on fire, and I’m sore everywhere else you stuck me, but it’ll be fine.”

She rubbed his unbitten lower arm gently – he hadn’t had any shots there, at least.
“How are Ben and the girls?”

“Ben’s fine. Relieved. Emma hates me. She wants to trade me in for a different brother.”

Quinn chuckled. “I’d have felt the same way when I was eight.”

“
Me too. You’re lucky I don’t know what I would do without you, or I might feel the same way
now.
Alice was awfully sweet, though. I felt so bad going to her with a needle for the second time in one night – but she spent half the time reassuring me, and then she gave me a big hug afterwards. We need to go to the next market day – I’m out of candy.”

She giggled. “Did you see what else Owen had in his pockets tonight?” she asked, pointing to the coffee table.

He gasped when he saw it – a small package of Skittles candy from the other world; those had always been his favorite.

“He didn’t say anything, he just set it there, but I know what it’s for.
” She brought his fingers to her lips and kissed them.

“I love that kid so much it hurts my heart.”

“I love that you do. I just want to hold him right now and never let him go home. I won’t do that, but…”

“But it sure would be nice if he never had to leave
.” He squeezed her hand. “How does he
know
?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know. I think we’re probably not supposed to. It just
…
is.
”

He nodded,
nestling his head next to hers, holding her for a long time before he spoke again. “Are we okay, Quinn? I’m so sorry. I love you – I never meant to hurt you like that. I don’t know what got into me…”

She turned around in his arms so she could see him, look into his eyes. “
Yes, we’re okay. I know what got into you. You’re my Will. It’s who you are and how you handle things sometimes.
I’m
sorry for taking it so personally, and for letting you get away with it for so long, instead of coming and knocking some sense into you.”

He laughed, and it sounded so wonderful; the deep rumbling in his chest reverberated throug
h hers, calming and filling the empty places inside of her. “We’ll get better at this, won’t we?” he asked.

“We’ve got a lifetime to practice – now that neither one of us is going anywhere.”

Just as he was kissing her forehead, a loud cry came from the other side of the bedroom door.

“We’ll get better at
that
one too,” he chuckled, following her in to retrieve the baby.

“You are on diaper duty for the next week after that medication kicks in,” she
said, as she picked up Samuel and smelled what had wakened him.

“For the next
moon
,” he agreed. “And I’ll take him after the first morning feeding so you can go back to sleep for two hours if you want.”

“As soon as he
goes longer than twenty minutes after that feeding to be hungry again, that might work.”

Rosewood Castle, Eirentheos

Z
ANDER HAD BEEN
certain he would never be able to sleep in this strange room in a castle in another world. But he’d been wrong. For a long time after Ben left, he’d wandered around the guest suite, examining the intricate wood of the furnishings, opening and closing empty cabinets, digging through the basket of clothes, searching for something that seemed familiar, and finally getting hungry enough to sample the fruit. The apples had tasted like apples, thank goodness.

Eventually, he’d tried the bathtub, rather surprised to discover that there was hot running water. He wondered how they pulled that off, when Quinn had told him they didn’t even have electricity in most of this world.

He could see she wasn’t kidding. Although there had been electric lights in the room where he’d talked to her, the “guest suite” he was staying in was lit with some kind of gas lamps he’d had to extinguish before going to bed. Apparently some parts of the castle had been retrofitted for electricity, but others hadn’t.

He’d thought about it the whole time he was taking a bath, actually, finally shaking his head at himself when he realized he was entirely too interested in a topic that didn’t concern him at all.
Who cared how they got hot water up here, as long as he was able to take a bath in it?

At home, he didn’t always wear pajamas, but he thought it was probably a good idea to adopt the practice while he was here – someone might just decide to come in through the unlocked door at any time. In the basket, he found two pairs of pajamas that were startlingly like something he might have been able to buy at home – if he’d been into conservative two-piece pajama sets.

Finally, once he was clean and dressed, there’d been nothing left to do besides check out the large four-poster bed.

It had been unbelievably soft and comfortable – all down comforters and soft sheets, and cozy pillows. The lack of sleep from the night
before combined with the most stressful day of his life and the soft bed … he didn’t remember anything after settling under the blankets.

He had no idea what time it was when he awoke, but it was
n’t early. Pulling open the heavy curtains revealed a bright, sunny morning. If waking up in a room in a castle wasn’t enough of a reminder of yesterday’s strange events, the view from his window would have done it.

His window faced what must have been the back of the castle; it looked out over a
n expansive garden with rows and rows of vegetables and beyond that an orchard. The trees confused him though; their leaves were reds and browns, and most had fallen to the ground below. Were seasons different here, too? At home, it was mid-spring.

He looked closer. The bushes that lined the wall on the outskirts of the vegetable patches were familiar-looking – yes, they were rose bushes. His mother had several of those at home. The ones in his front yard were beginning to leaf, and in the last week, he’d even seen a few buds.

These ones were growing fallow. What few flowers were left had turned brown and crunchy; there were dried petals all over the ground underneath them. Most of them had actually been pruned all the way down, and now there were only rose canes, ready to survive a winter before coming to life again in the spring.

It was
late fall – or this world’s version of it, anyway.

In the distance, beyond the gardens,
a high stone wall surrounded the castle, and just beyond that he saw the pointed roof of what he assumed was some kind of guard tower.

No, there was no chance he was escaping this place.

Not that he would have tried. A full night of sleep had brought him some clarity. If the gate was really closed for ten days – and he didn’t have any reason to mistrust Owen or Quinn on that point – then trying to escape a
castle
and then survive on his own in a strange world for ten days was akin to suicide.

Besides, he didn’t know exactly when the gate opened
again, or even how to find it. As much as it pained him, he was just going to have to trust these people until then.

The morning had brought him some clarity about Quinn, too. Now that he knew a little more about it, it was hard to be quite as mad about the way things had gone between them in Bristlecone.

He was still pretty edgy about the fact that she was married to William Rose – there was just no way he could have prepared for that kind of news – but he understood the lying a little bit more. There was nothing she could have told him about where she’d gone that would have worked out well. Either he wouldn’t have believed her, or – perhaps worse – if he had…

At any rate, some things made a lot more sense now. That weird injury on her arm, when she’d showed up one day with stitches, and then three days later it was mostly healed – she must have come to this world twice in that time.

He wondered when she’d found out about her real father. All of this explained why she’d been acting so weird, and why her mother had, too.

He didn’t really want to think abou
t what it would be like for him when he went home. There was nobody there he could explain this to. At least he probably wasn’t going to be charged with kidnapping Owen. If they really did get back after just one night, anyway.

After dressing in the strange clothes – he wondered if the loose shirt with a drawstring neck might be one of Ben’s, it was very si
milar to the one the guard had been wearing last night – Zander wasn’t entirely sure what to do with himself. He wanted to talk to Quinn again, but he had no idea where to find her. Should he stay in the room and wait for someone to find him?

That idea wasn’t very appealing. Ben had told him he was free to wander the guest areas of the castle. Now that he had resigned himself to staying here for ten days, the idea of being in a real castle was actually intriguing. He realized he wouldn’t mind knowing more about the place.

Grabbing another apple from the bowl on the table, he decided to go exploring.

He’d only just opened the door when he heard voices in the hallway. The shock nearly made him slam the door closed again, but he didn’t. He took a breath and then braved it, stepping outside of his room.

“Zander, you’re awake.”

He hadn’t expected to find Quinn so easily, but there she was, standing in the hallway, only a few feet away from him, chatting with Ben,
Thomas, that girl Linnea, Owen, and William.

“We were just debating if we should knock,” William said.

But Zander didn’t really comprehend anything, because he was staring at Quinn’s arms.

That was a
baby
. The bundle of green blankets cradled in her arms was wiggling. There was definitely a baby in there.

Why was Quinn holding a baby?

There wasn’t any way … it couldn’t possibly …

But as he watched, the baby fussed, and Quinn shifted it up onto her shoulder, making shushing noises in its ear and kissing its thick tuft of black hair – the same color as William’s.

“Zander!” Owen called. “Did you know I’m an uncle now?” The little boy laid his hand on the bundle, beaming with pride.

William hovered protectively over the little group, his back straight, his eyes scrutinizing Zander closely
, waiting for his reaction.

“You have a
baby?
” He was sure he wasn’t disappointing those who were waiting for the show, but he didn’t care. Finding out that Quinn lived in an alternate world was bad enough … learning that she’d
married
William Rose at seventeen was … but a
baby
? It hadn’t even been two months since she’d broken up with him.

“Yes, Zander,” Quinn said quietly. “This is our son. Mine and William’s.” As she spoke, William’s arm curled all the way around her waist.

“Is
that
why you married him?”

The words were barely out of his mouth when he knew he’d made a mistake. Nobody said a word. William closed his eyes, and Zander could see his chest rising and falling as he kissed the top of Quinn’s head
, the arm around her waist pulling her tightly to him.

Ben, however, separated himself from
the group and moved to his side so fluidly and silently that Zander almost didn’t see it happen.

“Let’s take a walk,” the guard said.

There was nothing threatening about Ben’s tone, but Zander didn’t for one second consider ignoring him.

He almost had to run to keep up as Ben led him through a maze of hallways, down three flights of stairs, and through more hallways. Finally, they went through a doorway that led into an odd sort of outdoor hallway. There were stone walls and a stone ceiling, but none of the numerous windows had glass. When they exited this hallway, they were in some kind of walled-in yard. The ground here was packed dirt.

They were alone.

Zander’s heart thudded when Ben turned to him. He was dressed in casual clothes, and he wasn’t carrying his sword, but Zander
suspected he was probably still somehow armed. And even if he wasn’t … no amount of playing running back could have equipped him to take on Ben.

His fear only grew when Ben didn’t speak for almost a full minute.

By the time he did, Zander’s hands were so slippery he was having a hard time holding on to the apple he was still carrying.

“That was the second time.”

The apple hit the ground with a
thud
.

“I don’t know what things are like in your world, Zander. Her Majesty has tried to tell me about some of the differences, and I understand you live somewhere where there are no kings and queens. But here, insulting my queen – implying what you just did against her character – that’s very serious.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“I hope you didn’t. The prince is the legitimate child of King William and Queen Quinn, conceived after their marriage. He is the much-anticipated heir to the throne of Philotheum, and the proof of the strength of our alliance with Eirentheos.”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t understand half of what Ben was saying, but he got the message.

Ben stared at him for another long moment before finally nodding. “Come.”

Zander was perplexed – and still nervous – as he followed the guard across the dirt yard and through a set of double doors that led into a very large room. The floor here was still tightly packed dirt, but they were inside. He wondered what the guard was going to do to him in here.

At first, he couldn’t understand the purpose of the room. There were bales of hay stacked all along one wall, and wooden crates full of various – odd – things stacked on shelves along another. He saw a crate full of strange metal balls, another with what looked like dull swords – were those knives in a third?

It wasn’t until he looked into the corner and saw an enormous box filled with leather balls that it began to dawn on him that this was some kind of gym.

Ben was already pulling out a wooden crate and carrying it to some kind of platform in the middle of the floor on one side of the room.
The why-are-you-just-standing-there look that Ben shot him sent Zander jogging over to join him.

The crate was filled with what looked like long metal cylinders in varying sizes. Zander had no idea what any of it was for, or how it worked.
Ben didn’t explain anything to him; he worked without speaking to set up the cylinders on the platform.

The platform was about two feet off the ground. Ben stood two of the longest cylinders up on either end of it. These cylinders each had a piece of metal protruding out to the side, turned toward the center, and a second later, Zander saw wh
y. Ben balanced a square-shaped bar on those protrusions, making an H shape.

Then, he took the smaller cylinders – five of them in all – and arranged them
in a pattern, one in the center, and the other four flaring out to the side, like a triangle missing one side.

“What are you doing?” Zander finally asked.

“I thought maybe we’d play a game. Our version of what you were telling me about last night.”

A game? All of this and now they were going to play a game?
What had he told Ben about last night?
“Bowling?” he asked, remembering.

Ben shrugged.

“This doesn’t look
anything
like bowling.” Maybe the arrangement of the cylinders, but not really.

“Well, it’s not your world. Maybe it’s not anything like your sport. This is what we call
bar drop.”

That was …
original
, Zander thought, thinking he could see the object of the game. “How do you play?”

Ben walked to the other side of the gym and came back with two leather balls. They were small
– bigger than softballs, but not by much. Just large enough that they’d be really awkward to throw with one hand.

Ben handed one to him. It was surprisingly heavy for such a small ball.