Deception of the Magician (Waldgrave Book 2) (7 page)

Griffin almost laughed. “Sure you weren’t. But if you’re going to date…those types, then I think I should be allowed to explore my own options.”

“We’re not dating.” Lena narrowed her eyes.

Griffin furrowed his brow. “Then you want me to wait…”

“Yes. No! I meant no. I mean, that’s not what I said, I was just asserting the fact we’re not dating. He and I. Or you and I. None of the three of us are dating. Just friends, now and always. Clear?” Lena felt her face go red. She had said something that she knew Griffin would interpret as a Freudian slip, if he had caught it.

Griffin gave her a sidelong glance. “No.”

Lena nodded curtly. “Then date whoever you want to. I don’t care.”

She did care, but not the way she expected to. Probably not the way he expected, either. After a great deal of introspection, she had decided she cared merely because she liked the attention; not because she liked him 
that way
. It was because there was so little to do around Waldgrave, and Griffin provided entertainment, and if he started being interested in anyone else, her distraction of having him around to entertain her was done for. For this reason she had a vested interest in his remaining single—not for any other reason.

Griffin took a deep breath, let it out, and nodded. “Well. Goodnight then.”

He turned and started back down the hallway. Lena watched him go, then walked into her new room; it dawned on her that she had left her overnight supplies in Mrs. Corbett’s room. She grabbed the pillowcase off the foot of the bed and tied it around the outside door handle to be sure she could find the room again, retrieved her things, and came back. She made up the bed, read for an hour, and then fell asleep.

“And you play 
cards
 with them? Lena, please tell me you win…”  Hesper made a face that was caught somewhere between horror and pity.

A week later, the Council had worn itself out fighting and a vote had been taken to take a day off. Lena was using her spare time to talk to Hesper and play with Maren, who was much louder than she ever remembered Darius being, but was still filling the gap of familiarity that she missed since his departure. Maren was still so little, but Hesper was trying to get her to participate in what she called “turtle time”—laying her on her belly so she would learn to hold her head up.

“Well, yeah. It’s fun really. You should play with us sometime.” Lena knew that Hesper would reject the offer; she didn’t seem like the poker-playing type.       

“I don’t play cards. It’s too easy…You don’t think it’s easy? Can’t you tell what everyone else has?” Hesper looked concerned.

“No…” Lena replied, feeling stupid.

“Well…That’s the reason most Silenti don’t play each other. You might as well be playing with exposed cards. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how some of the families got started financially—playing humans. They wouldn’t have a chance.”

Maren’s big, quizzical eyes explored the room. They eventually landed on a bottle half sticking out of her diaper bag and she whined until Hesper got it for her and flipped her over on her back so she could drink it.

Hesper changed the subject. “So how are the meetings going, then?”

Lena sighed. She hated going to Council; it made her depressed. The idea that Griffin 
could
 have been bringing the portal back had inspired enough votes to garner Council time to decide on the reinstatement of current travel policy or on the instatement of a new policy.

Under the new policy, members of the Daray house, and descendants of it, would not be allowed to leave the property at all unless if extreme extenuating circumstances demanded it—and even then, if somebody had to be rushed to the hospital the request would have to meet with emergency Council approval first. There would be no guests outside of yearly Council meetings, either. Lena was fairly sure the new measures wouldn’t pass, but all the same it was going to be a closer vote than she preferred. It was getting ridiculous; she was never going to leave Waldgrave again.

On top of it all, Howard had vetoed her plan to sleep in the small room on the fourth floor because he was afraid other Council members wouldn’t like the idea. Lena was bunking in Ava’s room on the second floor until Council was out, and she really wasn’t happy about it.

Hesper gave her a sympathetic look. “Surely it can’t be that bad. I mean, your biggest deal two years ago was being sure you didn’t marry Griffin, right? And you managed to make it happen. You can do this too, and a few years from now you’ll think you were stupid to worry about this.”

The way they argued in that room, Lena doubted it. People were too stuck in their own ideas, and no one was willing to budge for the sake compromise. Too much was at stake on all sides. She looked down at Maren, so blissfully unaware of the world she was growing up in, and how imperfect people had made it.

“It’s all because of that stupid portal, Hesper. It probably doesn’t even exist, and people are all up in arms about it anyway.”

“Hey now, that happened because of the normal side of your blood, remember? A lot of the New Faith believers never took any of the stories seriously until your mom found it and your other grandfather confirmed it—he was an expert, after all. I do agree it’s sad that Griffin’s caused such a panic, though. Can you imagine if he actually had brought the portal back here? People would 
really
 be freaking out then.” She laughed.

Lena stretched out on the carpet next to Maren. What if he 
had
 brought the portal back, and the Council had intercepted it? Daray would have been furious, Griffin would probably suffer some sort of house arrest punishment, the New Faith believers would seize control of it in the ultimate checkmate…and there wouldn’t be any reason to hold the Daray family hostage anymore. If the portal were under lock and key, Lena wouldn’t have to be.

She sat bolt upright, as if she were a puppet on an invisible string. Hesper stopped laughing. “What is it?”

“I found a way to make them trust me.” Lena smiled. “I’m going to find it. I’m going to find it and bring it back.”

*****

CHAPTER 4

The next day, before the Council meetings started, Lena pulled Griffin aside in the hallway. She could hardly contain her excitement.

“What’s with you?” Griffin looked around at the other Council Representatives, who were pretending not to stare at them. Lena was comporting herself in a most undignified manner.

“I’ve got a surprise for you…I think you’ll like it. I need your help translating something. Oh, and have they released that book from India yet?”

Now the other Representatives really 
were
 staring. Griffin gave Lena a curious look before he simply said, “No,” and took his place next to Master Daray in the Council hall. A few moments later, he caught her eye.

We have copies of parts of it. Meet me in the library tonight after Council and dinner, but keep it a secret. And for decorum’s sake, calm down! If you act too happy, you’re going to make people think we’ve got an extra trick up our sleeve and we don’t.

It was the day of the vote to determine if more stringent laws were going to be inflicted on the Daray household. Lena looked around and realized that some representatives really were watching her with apprehension; the vote wasn’t looking good for the Daray’s after all, and seeing her in a good mood spoke that Master Daray was up to something. But none of it mattered to Lena anymore.

She smiled through the whole Council and even the vote—the new measures didn’t pass, which made Griffin and Howard very happy. At lunch, Lena found it in her heart to sit with Master Astley and a group of New Faith supporters who had been pushing the measures, and she offered her condolences that the measures hadn’t passed. While she had never supported that particular issue, she did greatly sympathize with New Faith ideals about how the situation of the portal needed to be handled.

The afternoon and the evening seemed to drag on slowly, and the Council moved on to dealing with the situations of found children in debatable situations—the debate was whether or not they needed to be “rescued” into the Silenti world, and knowing the life that such human-born children faced, Lena could see why many children were considered on an individual basis. While there were regulations controlling who immediately got in and who didn’t, there were a surprising number of borderline cases. Usually it was an issue of whether or not the splitting up of a sibling group was justified, and Lena quickly found that she wasn’t fond of such votes. Deciding whether children should be allowed to brave the adoption process and foster homes in the human world and face the possibility of eventually being split up, or be adopted into the Silenti world, most often as servants, was heart-wrenching. Though Howard assured her that human-born Silenti lived fuller, more realized lives in the presence of other Silenti, Lena wasn’t sure if the psychological benefits were an equal balance for the social injustice that many human-born Silenti faced.

But finally dinner rolled around, and then dinner was over, and Lena raced up to the study. Griffin wasn’t there yet, and she waited nearly fifteen minutes before he finally walked in toting a stack of books. He dropped them on their table, the one they usually sat at, with a thud.

“Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” He pulled up a chair and sat down next to her.

Lena smiled. She pulled a heavy envelope out of the middle of her study journal and placed it on the desk in front of Griffin.

Griffin gave her a tired and annoyed look. “And you can’t translate these yourself?”

“I lied. They don’t need translation.” Lena opened the envelope and passed several bundles of letters to Griffin, who now looked puzzled. “These are all the correspondence letters Howard has between my two grandfathers…and these,” she produced another, much smaller bundle, “are the ones Master Collins sent to Master Daray confirming that the portal was authentic. He gives a detailed description of what it looks like, and a copy of Ava’s initial claims of how she described it to the Council. I had Howard dig them up for me out of…personal interest.”

Griffin stared at the bundles in his hands like they were made of solid gold. Then he looked up at Lena with a look he’d never had before. It might have been something akin to thankfulness. “Why are you doing this? Giving them to me?”

“I’m not—they’re on loan.” She said with a wink. “I want to learn more about Benjamin Collins and his take on the portal, and I think this might be the best way to do it. I think whatever he has to say is the closest I might ever come to believing, because he certainly thought it was real. He died because he thought it was real. So, do you think you could read these over, get together anything you might have on Daray’s side, and then we can go over it together?”

Griffin was still in awe. He was holding the letters as if he were afraid they would crumble if he held them too tightly. He gathered himself very quickly. “I think that would be an excellent idea. For now, would you like to go over what I have from the new text?”

“Oh.” Lena had almost forgotten. “Sure, I guess.”      

Griffin opened one of the books in his stack and pulled several folded photocopied pages out of the middle of it. “I made these right after I picked it up, and no one knows I have them but Master Daray. It’s not in Latito…I think it might be a fictional account of some sort. It’s in Etruscan, and I don’t speak Etruscan, and apparently it’s too different from anything that people speak now, because I couldn’t find anyone while I was over there who could figure out much of what it says. So,” He pulled out another massive volume from the middle of the stack, “we invested in a book about Etruscan, which hasn’t been a huge help because apparently there aren’t many words with certain translations, and there were a lot of dialectal differences. I’m hesitant to even call this the same language that’s described as Etruscan, for the few similarities I’ve noted.”

Lena looked at the pages Griffin had. He had written a sort of broken translation beneath the words on the sheets—it wasn’t very good. There were maybe two sentences out of the whole selection that he had managed to translate completely that also made sense. The rest of it reminded Lena of what Silenti books had looked like to her in the beginning—little word islands appearing randomly all over the page.

She looked up at Griffin. “So what’s it supposed to say? Surely he wouldn’t have flown you all the way around the world unless he thought it said something important.”

“It was a gamble. All we know—all the seller would tell him, was that it was a story about magic beings from long ago. It must have been recopied from a tablet at some point, because the translation book claims that the way the words run together is an indication that this was one of the earliest forms of the language. It could even be a recopying of a written copy made of a tablet, for all we know. The seller advertised it as a fiction, but I knew we were onto something when I got there and had him translate the title…it’s 
The Traveler and The Magician
, Lena. 
Viator kod Venefikus
. But it predates when we think the original story was written…I mean, if this is what we think it is, it means the Silenti have been here a lot longer than we ever imagined. The Etruscan language dates back to seven hundred BC, Lena.”