Locke sighed, and said softly, “I first came into this world in 1764, in the northern mountains of Scotland.”
In England or Scotland, I don’t recall.
I thought I’d circled back to the beginning of my own labyrinth. I thought I knew where I was. But now everything warped strangely in my vision and I realized I was still wandering in the heart of the maze, entirely lost.
“You’re the Founder,” I whispered.
And Mr. Locke smiled.
I stumbled backward, clutching at Bad’s fur. “But how could—no. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care. I’m leaving.”
I fumbled for the newsprint pages, held the pen tight in shaking fingers. Run away, run away. I was through with this world and its cruelties, its monsters and betrayals and stupid colored sections on its stupid trains—
“Is that how you do it? Some sort of magic ink? Written words? I should have suspected as much.” Locke’s voice was genial, quite calm. “I don’t think so, my dear.” I glanced up at him, the split nib already touching the page—
—and his eyes caught me like two silver fishhooks. “Drop that, January, and be still.” The pen and paper fell from my hands.
Locke retrieved them, tucked the pen in his coat pocket, shredded the newsprint, and tossed the remains behind him. They fluttered like yellow-white moths into the grass.
“You are going to listen to me now.” My pulse beat turgid and reluctant in my skull. I felt suspended, like some unlucky prehistoric girl preserved forever in a glacier. “When you’re done listening, you’re going to understand the work to which I’ve dedicated my life. And, I hope, how you might help me.”
And so I listened, because I had to listen, because his eyes were hooks or knives or claws fastened tight in my flesh.
“How is it your stories always start? Once upon a time there was a very unlucky little boy. He was born into a nasty, brutal, bitter world, a world too absorbed in killing and being killed even to name itself. The locals in your world called it Ifrinn, I later learned, and that’s what it was: hell. If hell were dark and frigid.”
He wavered oddly between accents, his tone swerving between dry narration and bitter anger. It was as if the Mr. Locke I’d grown up with—his voice, his mannerisms, his posture—was just a sort of party mask, behind which lurked someone much older and stranger.
“This unlucky boy fought in four battles before he was fourteen. Can you imagine? Boys and girls dressed in mangy animal skins, half-feral, running among the soldiers like hungry scavengers… Of course you can’t.
“We fought for such meager rewards. A few snow-covered acres of good hunting ground, the rumor of treasure, pride. Sometimes we didn’t even know why we fought, except that our chieftainess willed it. How we loved her. How we hated her.” My expression must’ve changed, because Locke laughed. It was a perfectly normal-sounding laugh, the same jovial boom I’d heard how many hundreds of times, but it made the fine hairs on my arms stand upright.
“Yes, both. Always both. I imagine it’s much the same way you feel about me, really, and don’t think the irony is lost on me. But I was never cruel to you, the way our rulers were.” Now his tone turned almost anxious, as if he were afraid one or both of us might not quite believe him. “I never made you do anything against your own interest. But in Ifrinn they used us, like soldiers use bullets. It was too damned cold to live clanless and hungry, but we might have tried anyway if it weren’t for the Birthright.”
I heard the capital B pressing up through Locke’s sentence, casting a bulbous shadow behind it, but didn’t understand it.
“I should’ve started with the Birthright. I’ve gotten it all jumbled up.” Locke dabbed sweat from his lip. “This storytelling rubbish is harder than it looks, eh? The Birthright. Around sixteen or seventeen, a very few children in Ifrinn manifest a, ah, particular ability. It’s easy, at first, to mistake the children as bullies or charmers. But they possess something much rarer: the power to rule. To sway men’s minds, to bend their wills like smiths bend hot iron… And then there are the eyes, of course. The final sign.”
Locke leaned toward me and widened his own ice-pale eyes for my inspection. Softly, he asked, “What color would you call them? We had a word for it that English doesn’t supply, which referred to a very particular kind of snow that has fallen and refrozen, so that there’s a gray translucency to it…”
No, I thought, but the word felt weak and distant in my head, like someone calling for help a long way away. A broken grass-stem poked into the bare arch of my foot; I pressed down against it, felt it peel away a semicircle of skin, felt the prickle of raw skin in the open air.
Locke’s face was still close to mine. “You already know all about the Birthright, of course. Such a willful little girl you were.”
Like smiths bend hot iron. I saw myself briefly as a piece of worked metal glowing dull orange, hammered and hammered—
Locke straightened again. “The Birthright was an invitation to rule. We were expected either to challenge our present chieftainess in a battle of wills, or skulk off and form our own miserable clan. I challenged her as soon as I could, the old bitch, left her weeping and broken, and claimed my Birthright at sixteen.” His voice was savage with satisfaction.
“But nothing lasted in that world. There were always new clans, new leaders, new wars. Challengers to my rule. Dissidence. There was a night raid, a battle of wills, which I lost, and I ran away and… You know what I found, of course.”
My mouth moved, soundless. A Door.
He smiled indulgently. “Quite right. A crevice in a glacier that led to another world. And oh, what a world it is! Rich, green, warm, populated by weak-eyed people who cave to my slightest suggestion—everything Ifrinn was not. It took only a few hours before I returned to the fracture and smashed it to rubble with my bare hands.”
I gasped, eyes wide, and Locke scoffed. “What? You think I should’ve left it wide open, so some Ifrinn bastard could sneak out after me? Could ruin my lovely, soft world? No.” He was strident and principled, like a priest trying hard to save his sinful flock. Except there was something else panting beneath the preaching, something that made me think of cornered dogs and drowning men, a kind of clawing terror. “This is what I’m trying to tell you, January—you call them ‘doors,’ as if they were necessary, everyday sorts of things, but they’re quite the opposite. They let in all manner of dangerous things.”
Like you. Like me?
“I found a town big enough to grant a little anonymity. Clothes and food were easy for a Birthrighted man to acquire. So was a rather nice home, and an obliging young woman to teach me the language.” A smug smile. “She told me stories about great winged snakes that lived in the mountains with hoards of gold, and how you must never look them in the eyes lest they steal your soul.” A fond chuckle. “I confess, I’ve always liked nice things—what is Locke House if not a dragon’s hoard?”
