The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel

  He took off his hat and gave a look around. Even for a man who had never seen a real town before, Markus knew this one was dead. Empty, overrun by the forest, broken really—a lot like the Valley. But the Valley had never been much of anything, while Roam—according to Ming Kai, at least—Roam had been something. Markus closed his eyes and tried to see it the way it must have been, streets so busy you had to slide past the tide of people going the other way. Stores bright with colored boxes from all around the world. And silk. Silken curtains, silken tents. Silken kites for the children. Silken everything. A soft, cool place to be . . . and now, but for a few lonely places, shuttered and dark.

  Markus put his hat back on and started walking until he heard the crack of a twig somewhere behind him, a stifled growl. Without looking back again he ran, ran toward the dark house he saw looming above the desolate and decaying town.

  THE BROOCH

  There were three dogs prowling around the front porch, so Markus slipped around the side of the house. He didn’t have time to knock. He threw his shoulder against the door, and when it didn’t open he tried the knob, but it was locked. He slammed his hand into the window and it shattered, but the opening wasn’t big enough to do him any good. He knew the dogs were coming. Inside he saw someone, what he thought at first was an old woman and her little boy, but then realized he was a man, just a very small one, and a young woman, just very homely. When they saw him they froze, in a kind of shock. He held up Rachel’s brooch, which he had kept with him all this time, and when the woman saw it she went straightaway to the door and opened it, and he fell in the house just as he felt on his ankle the nip of a dog’s sharp teeth. She closed the door and he lay there, not sure he could get up, and not really wanting to, for having made it to his final destination he was spent, even though he had yet to do what he came to do.

  The little man said, “Who are you?” And the woman: “Where did you get that brooch?”

  A whole minute passed before he was able to lift his head, to stand, to sit in a chair and breathe. He raised his head and looked at the woman. He had never seen an uglier woman in his life, and coming from the Valley that was saying something. He turned away, not because he couldn’t stand to look but because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, for surely she could see in his eyes his wonder at her remarkable face and she would know what it meant. But she was kind. She poured him a glass of water from a pitcher and handed it to him. He took it and swallowed and just that quickly felt his strength returning, his breath, the power to speak.

  “I need to see Helen McCallister,” he said.

  “I’m Helen McCallister.”

  He looked at her again. Couldn’t be, he thought. He said, “Helen McCallister, Rachel McCallister’s sister. That’s who I mean.”

  The little man stared hard at him, not in a threatening way really, but protectively. Markus felt like he needed to move slowly, to speak carefully, or he might do something to set the little man off. Markus was not a fighter, and little men were the worst; they were tough and mean as rusty nails.

  “I’m her sister,” the woman said.

  Markus blinked, thinking. Her sister. It kind of made sense, with all he knew about Rachel and her sister. Helen McCallister and the little man, though, they looked like they’d been hit in the head by a rock and were standing frozen the second before they fell.

  “You’re Helen McCallister,” Markus said. He shook his head.

  “What?” Helen McCallister said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “You’re just not what I expected,” he said. “The way she described you. I thought you looked different, that’s all.”

  Helen took the brooch from him as though it might crumble at her touch, cradling it in the palm of her hand, studying it. She looked back and forth from him to the brooch, and he could see her putting it all together but not believing it. “Because she told you I was beautiful,” she said. Markus realized Rachel was right: Helen thought she was dead. All this time.

  “That’s right,” he said. Then: “She’s alive, Helen.”

  She swiveled her head toward the little man, no words necessary now.

  “We looked for her the night she left,” Helen said. “Digby and I looked. Jonas, too. Smith. Some time had passed. We didn’t know where she’d gone. How far could a blind girl go? That’s what I was thinking.” She laughed, and just as quickly stopped. “Where could a blind girl go?”

  “Turns out, pretty far,” Markus said.

  “What’s your name?” the little man said.

  “My name’s Markus. You Jonas?”

  The little man shook his head and frowned. “Digby. Jonas is dead. He died the night Rachel—”

  “—disappeared,” Helen said. “She was nowhere. Nowhere. We sent out word to Arcadia, in case someone delivered her there, in whatever shape. We wanted to know. I needed to know. I had nightmares,” she said. “But then, you know, one day you just stop and try to accept it. That she’s gone and she’s not coming back. And that’s when it gets even harder. It’s just really, really hard to know what to do then. I pray about this every day.”

  “You pray about it?”

  She nodded. “Why?”

  Markus was confused. “No reason,” he said.

  “She’s alive,” she said, somewhere between a statement and a question. She was catching up.

  “Very much,” he said.

  His gaze didn’t waver, even a little.

  Finally the two of them sat, Digby in a chair at the edge of the room, as if he were more of a guard than anything else, Helen closer. Markus looked all around him, at this room so perfectly arranged, so clean. Then he looked over his shoulder, as if he expected somebody to be there, and when there wasn’t he leaned in close to speak in a softer voice near Helen’s ear.

  “She’s alive,” he said, and he looked behind him again, and then to her, still speaking in a voice weirdly hushed. “But that’s not even the most important part,” he said.

  Outside he could hear the dogs rustling, growling, barking, and howling. Rachel was getting closer.

  “Not the most important part? But what could be more important than my sister being alive?”

  “That’s just it,” he said. “Your sister, she’s . . . not your sister anymore. She’s not the girl you remember, or even the one I used to know. And she’s on her way.”

  “Here?” Helen said. “She’s coming here? But that’s good. That’s a good thing . . .”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not.” Helen didn’t get it. He didn’t blame her. Her eyes were as soft and uncertain as Rachel’s had been when he met her, but that seemed a long time ago now. “Helen,” he said. “She knows what you did to her. Everything.” He let this settle until he saw she knew what he meant, until she had to know what he meant. He reached across the table and touched her hand, not to reassure her—because this wasn’t that kind of news. He did it to be sure she heard what he had to say. “She’s coming to make things right.”

  And this is what he told her.

  FINDING RACHEL

  Going always took longer than the coming back. Even though the idea of leaving had been tumbling through his mind, for years and years, Markus’s first steps out of the Valley had been hard going. He wouldn’t look back. He’d have to see Liling if he did, his friends and family—all the rest. His life. He thought it would get easier, but each step was harder than the one before. Who up and leaves their life behind like that?

  Well, a lot of people. Because a lot of people think there’s something better than home and friends and family—a lot of people, like almost every man who’d come to or been born in this valley. One day they’d go and they’d never come back, and later you’d forget they had ever even been here. They’d become just another lost thing, accompanying all the other lost things, until you lost more than you ever knew you had. The journey wasn’t even about being happy, or happier, here or there. It was simpler than that. It was more li
ke, If there’s something here, there’s something there, and I’ve been here, now let’s see what’s there. It’s how people came to the Valley in the first place. It’s how anybody gets anywhere.

  He went back with Rachel the way he came, the dogs following along. For a blind girl with only one good shoe, Rachel could walk pretty fast. It helped that there were no bears this time. She didn’t talk. Markus hoped he’d get her story, because he knew there had to be one. How often does it happen that a beautiful blind girl with one shoe ends up facedown in a forest close to the middle of nowhere? If there was a story anywhere, there was a story there, but she wasn’t telling. Maybe it was too big to tell all at once. Or maybe she was shy, like him. That was okay. He could wait.

  The night of the day they first set out he waited too long to build a fire and the dark bled through the air and every tree in the forest and it settled all around them. Rachel found more wood than he did, and he scraped a flint against a dry stack of twigs and warmed up some chicken meat they’d taken from the fat man’s cabin. The fire crackled. Night birds sang. But Rachel didn’t say a word. Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and he just started talking.

  “My grandfather told me a story once, how a long time ago there was no light in the world at all. Then fire came, and there was a great battle between the dark and the fire, and darkness won. But before the fire died it whispered its secret to a man, and that man told another man, and soon fire was everywhere, and darkness gave up trying to kill it. They had to make a deal.”

  He stopped, and watched her as she chewed the last bits of chicken off the bone.

  “Don’t you want to know what the deal was?” he said.

  “I guess,” she said, so softly he could barely hear.

  “It doesn’t sound like you really want to know.”

  “No. I do. Tell me.”

  He poked the fire with a stick. “It’s just a story,” he said. “He probably just made it up.”

  “Or maybe it’s true,” she said. “We don’t know.”

  “We don’t,” he said.

  He tried to smile. She couldn’t see him try to smile, of course, and he realized that people smiled so that other people could see the smile, instead of just smiling for themselves. It had less to do with being happy than with showing someone else you were happy. He didn’t have to do that with her. Things changed when you sat around a fire with a blind girl.

  “I know you want me to tell you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Everything,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “only since the moment I found you.”

  She moved a bit closer to the fire. It was impossible to tell where the fire ended and the red of her hair began. Her face glowed white. She didn’t speak.

  “All I know is your name,” he said. Which, he didn’t say, would still be enough, if that’s all she gave him.

  “I didn’t know I’d be alive now to tell anybody anything. There was the ravine, first,” she said. “I thought I might fall into it. And then the birds.”

  “The birds?”

  “In Roam they’re everywhere,” she said. “In the trees, in the forests. You’ve never seen them? You’ve never . . . ?”

  “No,” he said, when he saw the fear and doubt on her face. “I think—sure. I mean, I’ve never heard of them coming this far, this far out.”

  This seemed to satisfy her, but it was impossible to tell what she was thinking. She was holding a stone in her hand, which she dropped and picked up, over and over again.

  “I didn’t leave Roam because it’s a terrible place, though. I left because of my sister.”

  “What did she do to you?”

  “To me? She didn’t do anything to me. She did everything for me. After our parents died she could have . . . she could have done anything she wanted. Put me somewhere. Gone away. But she stayed. She stayed because she loved me. She gave up her life to take care of me. That’s why I left, on my own. She would never have let me go.”

  “I see,” he said. But he was more confused now than when he didn’t know anything at all. “So she doesn’t know where you are?”

  She shook her head. “She thinks I’m dead. It’s hard to believe I’m alive myself. But I would have given up my own life so she could have one of her own.”

  He looked away from her briefly, hearing something in the forest behind him. There was a dog out there, for sure.

  “Now I am putting my trust in you,” she said. “All I want is to live long enough to go back to Roam one day and show my sister. Look, I’ll say. Here I am. A woman. A woman who has learned to take care of herself, your sister, who now you can freely love, without responsibility or worry. And I will thank her for everything she did for me. Everything.” She paused. “Maybe you can help with that, Markus,” she said.

  “I think I can,” he said.

  “I know you can, Markus,” she said. “At least, that’s what I’m going to believe, until you prove me wrong. I’ve been lucky so far. I have to be thankful for my life. Some blind girls have no real life at all; and blind girls who look like me—” She laughed. “They may as well have died the day they were born.”

  “Look like you?” Markus said. “What do you mean? You’re beautiful.”

  Rachel threw the stone at him and it flew past his head.

  “This fire must not be as bright as it is warm.”

  She held her legs up close to her chest and rocked back and forth in front of the fire. But she was still shivering, so he gave her the blanket he’d taken from the dead man—after you die everything you ever owned is returned to the world, free to those who find it—and Markus curled up close to the stone circle—it was where the dark had told the fire to stay—and slept. Already he knew he would do anything to keep her.

  The next day they walked up a mountain and then across a long wide-open plain and then back into the thickness of the forest, where the trees were so tall you couldn’t see the tops of them or the sky above them. Occasionally he would take her hand and lead her over a rough spot, but for the most part she was okay walking on her own, even though as far as he knew it was the same as walking with your eyes closed. He couldn’t do that, but maybe with practice he could learn to, and she’d been practicing most of her life. Then they came to what was the Fallen Wall, a stone field Ming Kai had told him was once a great wall separating the Valley from the rest of the world, a wall he’d had to break to get there, but even Markus knew it was really just a big pile of rocks. He didn’t need anyone to tell him what stories were for.

  As they came to the ridge above the Valley, Markus saw some of his people, as if they were on watch, a little ways away. He didn’t know if somehow they knew he was coming or whether they’d waited there every day, hoping he would be. One of them raised his arm from his side and held it in the air for a moment, then let it drop. Then he and the others turned and disappeared below the sightline.

  “Almost there,” Markus said, without much enthusiasm.

  Rachel seemed more excited than he was. She stopped, and took a sudden, quick breath.

  “What’s it like, Markus, your home?”

  She touched his arm, lightly. He wondered if this touch for her took the place of the connection that happened when one person looked into another’s eyes.

  “Does the sun come up in the morning,” she said, “and paint the town all yellow, warming the porches and the windowsills?”

  “Windowsills?”

  “Does the dew cling to the soft green grass before it spirits itself into the air, the air that smells of pine needles and down?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Is the sky a milky blue, and at night does every star come out to shine on the perfect little houses and—”

  She stopped, too excited to go on. He watched her breathe: she had come to life. Markus didn’t think he could stand her becoming any more beautiful than she was already was, but she was becoming more beautiful by the second, and he was enduring it. Some
how.

  “Like that?” she said.

  “Something like that,” he said. “I mean, I can sure smell those pine needles sometimes.”

  He took another step, but she didn’t move.

  “And is everybody happy?” she said.

  “Happy?” How far would he go to please her? This is how he thought about it then, in the beginning. He was pleasing her by telling her things she wanted to hear. Why she wanted to hear them, Markus didn’t understand. But isn’t that the way with everybody? We all have our own ideas about things. Was it his place to tell her she was wrong about them? And she looked so expectant and bright. “I’d say so,” he said. “Yes. They’re happy. But I don’t know how they’ll be when they see you. You’re . . . different.”

  “Different how?” she asked. Then, before he could make anything up, she said: “Wait, don’t say it. It’s because I’m homely, isn’t it?”

  “Homely?” Markus laughed. “No, Rachel. I told you—”

  “Don’t,” she said, turning on him. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t be like everybody else. I know who I am. My sister told me.”

  “Your sister told you.”

  Even Markus was able to start putting it all together. It’s the sister who has done this to her, told her these stories. The sister she loves, the sister she left.

  “But I’m more than just an ugly girl, Markus,” she said. “So much more.”

  He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. She smiled, smiled as though she were happy to finally be able to share this news with someone. Her right hand enlaced his wrist and sort of tugged at it. She brought him close and whispered: “Do you know about the river?” She was so beautiful. He could understand her now, a little. He was coming to understand the sister, too, and of the two, he thought—unfortunately—he knew the sister better.

  “No,” he said, before he could stop himself. “I don’t.”