Joshua and the Arrow Realm (14 page)

Apollo put a hand on Oak's arm. “We're on the same side. Leandro was our good friend until he met up with Artemis again.”

Oak put his arm down and Charlie stumbled away, gasping for air.

“A spell perhaps …?” Oak said to himself. “Artemis used to love Leandro. He told me they met in the forest as younglings. She was like a sister, but her mother sent
him away. A princess and commoner can never be friends or family.”

Where was this going? I didn't dare question the man who'd held a knife to Charlie's throat. He might do the same to mine.

“With Leandro pardoned for desertion and back in her realm, the queen must've found a way to put a spell on him to do her bidding,” Oak went on, sliding his knife away and pacing the small room, his mission to hurt Charlie forgotten for the moment.

“Like hypnosis?” I said.

Charlie leaned on the wall and pointed a shaky finger at Oak, but it was Apollo who spoke the words. “The queen's slave, Hypnos!”

Oak stopped in his tracks. “She has a slave that hypnotizes?”

“Yes. Can we get him to un-hypnotize Leandro?” I said.

“Where is this slave kept?”

“In the castle dungeon.”

Oak crossed is arms. “Not where I'd choose to conduct a rescue. You boys should know that.” He scratched his mustache. “I do have a contact on the inside. And what if it isn't hypnosis, but a spell?”

Apollo spoke up. “The spellcaster must cast it out.”

“Artemis!” I said.

“Perhaps,” Oak said.

“I bet she did cast a spell on Leandro. She tried to hypnotize me to get my—” I shut up.

“Your what?”

I shook my head but Oak was already at my side, gripping my arms. “What's this?” He tugged on the journal poking out of my pocket.

“No!” I cried out but he ripped it away and flipped through it, then he blew out a big breath and sat down, slowly turning the pages. Charlie edged toward the escape hatch we'd arrived from. He pointed to the floor. But I wasn't leaving without Leandro's journal. It was the one good thing left of him.

Oak thumped the journal shut and tapped it on the table, staring at me in disbelief. “The myth. It's you? Your name is Joshua?”

“I'm Joshua. I'm–I—” the words wouldn't form. Charlie shrugged with his hands out in a question and Apollo stared at me. I looked at my feet to avoid Oak's unblinking amber eyes and fiery hair glinting in the candlelight.

“Just a boy … ” I peered up as he stared at me in wonder and something swelled inside me, the knowledge that these people believed in me, in the idea of me. Their belief encouraged my own.

Oak stood up, his thick eyebrows flattened into one. “Do you have powers?”

“Only with my lightning orb,” I lied.

“But you spoke to the animals even after Artemis stole it,” said Charlie, calling me out.

“You did?” Apollo said. I didn't answer, still trying to figure it out myself.

Oak stared at me for a long moment then handed me back the journal. “From what Leandro told me of the myth, the Oracle will be half mortal, half Olympian and carry the power of his Nostos homeland. You've got a parent from the Arrow Realm?”

“I don't know who my father was, but my mother was a slave from Earth. She lived in this camp.” Here came the chance to ask the question I'd been wanting to
ask since we met. “Maybe you knew her?”

“I've known many people who've come … and gone,” he said flatly, still assessing this new me.

I remembered my wallet jammed in my jeans! I tugged it out—where I kept the one photo of my mother. Thank goodness it was laminated and didn't get ruined in that nasty moat. I handed it to Oak. “Her name was Diana.”

He fingered it, his face twisting in a contorted expression. My heart beat faster with each second he stared at the photo, and my chest filled with a big bubble of air threatening to burst.

Oak looked at me with pinched eyes. “Yes, I knew her.”

A chill zoomed from my toes to my neck.

He handed back my mother's photo. “She's Leandro's wife.”

I
let my breath go and shuffled back with shaking legs, nearly tipping the chair over.

“Leandro's my father?” The idea buzzed in my head like a crazed fly.

The tiny room melted away and a whole world opened up. My father was the hero I'd always imagined. We'd been brought together in a great adventure in the Lost Realm, fought alongside one another—winning our freedom, and the freedom of so many stolen children. He'd been my mentor, my friend. Now he was the father I'd longed for all my life.

It crumbled away with the knowledge that he now hunted me.

My own father.

It couldn't be true! Someone was using him. I resolved to find a way to get the Leandro I knew back.

Oak put a hand on my shoulder, warming it as
Leandro's once had, and pulled me back down from the stars in my head. “No. Sorry, son. He can't be your father.”

The word “son” cracked a hole in my heart, ripping away the belief that for one moment Leandro had been my father.

Oak pushed up my sleeve and touched my forearm. “You don't bear the birthmark of Leandro's firstborn. Besides, his son would be older than you.” He pulled his hand away, leaving me cold all over, and pointed to the shabby bed. “My wife helped your mother deliver his son, Evander, in this room on that cot. She and the baby disappeared a few months later then so did Leandro.”

With all this exploding in my head, there was more—Leandro may not be my father but we now shared a mission: to find the lost family connecting us. Someday, if I ever got the chance, I'd have to tell him his wife was dead.

“Family means everything,” Apollo said. “Especially if you lose them.”

That was the truth.

“Sorry, Joshua,” Charlie said, stuffing his hands in his pockets with a shrug.

“I have a brother.” The words crashed out of me with the force of its reality. Those words spun through me with a strange happy-sad mix. Was he alive? Here? Or on Earth?

“Half brother,” Charlie corrected.

“Half brother,” I echoed and forced a smile up from the lump in my throat as if a full-blooded brother out there could stop Charlie and me from being “Earth brothers.” Now both our brothers were lost to us, except I'd never met mine and he may never see his again. Charlie had a
new goal now—to find a replacement brother in me. I didn't want to be anyone's replacement.

“Does he look like me?” I asked Oak.

He clutched the pendant on his chain, then opened it up like a book. “See for yourself.”

Inside was a painting of my mother holding a baby. My brother. “You painted this?”

He nodded. “Your brother was only a few weeks old when he disappeared. He was born with a head of white-blond hair and a birthmark on his arm like—”

“A flame?”

His eyebrows shot up. “How did you know?”

“Leandro told me in the Lost Realm … and I see it there.” I touched the mini-portrait, not wanting to look away from the second-only picture of my mother and the first of my newly expanded family. Would it be better if I never knew? Would I become like Leandro, searching the world for years to find my lost family? It didn't seem like any kind of life. Leandro might as well be lost with them, except now he followed a new mission as the queen's henchman.

Oak closed the pendant and touched the lion etched on the front. “I had this made for your mother by our blacksmith, but I never had the chance to give it to her. She wanted the lion on the front for Leandro because—”

“He's a lionheart.”

He nodded, dropping the pendant into his shirt and staring at the cot as if seeing another night in another time. “I'd always thought your mother and brother were killed when her relationship with Leandro was discovered. I never knew who turned them in …” He scowled, crushing his hand into a fist.

“She escaped to Earth and I was born there,” I said.

“My wife would've been glad to know she got to Earth and had another child. She must have found someone else …” He shook his big head. “Is she okay?”

“She died when I was two. She never even told my grandfather who my father was.”

“Sorry to hear.”

“A Child Collector found her and killed her right in front of me and my grandfather.”

Oak's eyes widened and he slammed his fist into the table with a crack. “Monsters!” Fire reflected angrily in his eyes as a draft whipped the candle flames around the room in a frenzy.

“I killed him.”

His eyes grew bigger and he shook his head as if he couldn't believe it.

“It's true,” Charlie said, nudging me. “He blasted him with the lightning orb.”

“And … my friend here,” I pointed at Apollo, “killed Hekate with a curse.”

“That witch! I've heard about her evil doing.” He turned to me. “So, you're a malumpus-tongue and can talk to animals. Like Leandro. Your father must be from the Arrow Realm. I don't know how this all came about, but if you are the Oracle and the myth is true, you can free us from slavery. All of us in the WC have been waiting—hoping—for you. Leandro hoped for you to change this world so he could find his family again … now, it seems, your family too.”

I was divided again, split between two worlds as Nostos pulled me further into its secrets and pushed me away from my life on Earth—and getting back home. He'd once said to me:
Home is a reflection of who you are. It defines you
. If his words were true and this was my new
home, I must accept how it defines me.

“Leandro believes you're the Oracle,” Oak said. He put a hand on my shoulder again. “I will too.”

I swallowed hard not wanting to cry. Leandro and my family were lost to me, but help had arrived in a new friend.

Oak's forehead creased. “If you are a malumpus-tongue with ancient power to speak with animals, you may have the power to do more, according to Leandro.”

My pulse raced, wanting to know … not wanting to know.

“Like get us home?” Charlie said.

“No.” Oak crossed his arms and paused. “The power to transform into animals.”

Charlie snapped his fingers. “Like Lore did!” Oak seemed confused and Charlie went into detail about our dungeon experience.

“No,” I whispered, shaking my head to rid myself of the image of turning into a beast. “Artemis said only a rare few can do it.”

“As the Oracle, there's none rarer,” Oak said. “But a power this big comes with great responsibility. Not all who carry it use it wisely.”

“Very true,” Apollo said. “I've seen it.”

“Leandro can't do that, can he?” I said.

“No, he talks to animals but only those with the rarest of malumpus-tongue powers can transform.”

How to transform—and into what creature?

We all stood in silence for a long moment. There was so much more to learn … especially about my mother. And there wasn't much time. Where to start asking? Like what her life had been like here, things she said, and about her relationship with Leandro. Suddenly, the gong
bashed the air in a frantic rhythm.

“A raid!” Oak blew out the candles while grabbing a glow stick and activating its green light. He threw my bow and arrows at me and shoved Charlie's knife at him, then he pulled a bag out from under his cot and fell on his knees to the floor, ripping open the hidden door to the tunnel we'd first come through. He jumped down in the hole, his head sticking out like a ghost in the garish glow. “Come on, boys!”

Charlie inched away from the tunnel, glancing at the door that led outside. He pulled me aside and whispered between the gongs, “Joshua, we can run through the street. Find another way out!”

“You'll have no chance once the WC guards get you,” Apollo said.

I agreed with him. “No, we have to follow him,” I said. “He knew my mother … my brother … Leandro.”

“But Leandro wants to hurt us now!” Charlie argued.

“No! We trusted him once. We could again. We've got to trust Oak now. We won't make it here without trusting someone.”

I did trust this man, Oak, even though he'd held us by knifepoint—like Leandro had when we first met. Like Leandro, Oak was living on the edge, trying to survive, searching for a better life—for himself and his people. So were we.

“I can run fast,” Charlie said. “You too!
Allons
!”

“If they catch us, they'll kill us—or worse,” Apollo said.

“Throw us to the animals,” Charlie nodded miserably.

The floor shook as guards pounded on a nearby shack, yelling at the inhabitants to open their door.

“Enough debate!” Oak thundered, his face a light in
the dark shadows. “The time to escape is now!”

I jumped into the tunnel.

Charlie carved his hands through his hair and jumped with Apollo right behind. Oak clicked the hatch shut and led the way hunched over, his scrawny shoulders filling the tunnel. Through the dark, we ran after him and the sickly beam of a glow stick.

Oak huffed as the tunnel split. He ran left, switching his sack to the other shoulder. “We've been tunneling our way out. There are too many booby traps and guards on the wall to get out that way. Many of us have been working on this tunnel for years and generations before that.”

“Where does it end?” I asked in between breaths.

“Someday it'll go under the wall and into the forest of the Perimeter Lands.”

“What's out there?” Charlie asked.

Oak's face was like a ghoul in the ghastly shadows. “Freedom.”

When I thought my legs couldn't carry me anymore, Oak stopped and felt around on the wall. “You'll be safe here, for now. The only ones who know of this place are the parents.”

He pushed at the wall and a door opened. Light creaked through the crack. “The parents of whom?” I asked, the light burning my eyes.