Kingdoms of the cursed, p.1
Kingdoms of the Cursed, page 1
PRAISE for GREG KEYES
THE REIGN OF THE DEPARTED
“Keyes is a master of world building and of quirky characters who grow into their relationships in unexpected ways. Fans of his Age of Unreason and his Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone fantasy series will want to get in on the ground floor of the High and Faraway series.”—Booklist
“I liked a lot of what Keyes was doing in the novel, in terms of the story itself, the characters, and laying the groundwork for a multi-book narrative. The world where Errol awakens in his new body has a lived-in feel, a world with history and mythology of its own. . . . the story reminded me of Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars.”—SFFWorld
“Starts in the realm of normalcy and quickly descends into the favorably bizarre and surprising . . . there was not one character that was uninteresting. The world building is epic. A magical realm that mirrors earth while residing under a curse was not only inventive but enthralling.”—Koeur’s Book Reviews, 4.4/5 Stars
THE BRIAR KING
“A wonderful tale . . . It crackles with suspense and excitement from start to finish.”—Terry Brooks
“The characters in The Briar King absolutely brim with life . . . Keyes hooked me from the first page and I’ll now be eagerly anticipating sitting down with each future volume of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone series.”—Charles de Lint
“A thrill ride to the end, with plenty of treachery, revelation, and even a few bombshell surprises.”—Monroe News-Star (LA)
THE AGE OF UNREASON
“Features the classic elements of science fiction: high-tech gadgetry, world-threatening superpower conflict, a quest to save the world, and a teen hero who’s smarter than most of the adults . . . Powerful.”—USA Today
“Seems likely to establish Keyes as one of the more significant and original new fantasy writers to appear in recent years.”—Science Fiction Chronicle
KINGDOMS
OF THE CURSED
THE HIGH AND FARAWAY BOOK TWO
ALSO BY GREG KEYES
The High and Faraway
The Reign of the Departed
Chosen of the Changeling
The Waterborn
The Blackgod
The Hounds of Ash: and Other Tales of Fool Wolf
The Age of Unreason
Newton’s Cannon
A Calculus of Angels
Empire of Unreason
The Shadows of God
The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone
The Briar King
The Charnel Prince
The Blood Knight
The Born Queen
Babylon 5: The Psi Corps Trilogy
Dark Genesis: The Birth of the Psi Corps
Deadly Relations: Bester Ascendent
Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester
Star Wars: The New Jedi Order
Edge of Victory I: Conquest
Edge of Victory II: Rebirth
The Final Prophecy
The Elder Scrolls
The Infernal City
Lord of Souls
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Firestorm
War for the Planet of the Apes: Revelations
XCOM 2: Resurrection
Independence Day: Crucible
Pacific Rim Uprising: Ascension
KINGDOMS
OF THE CURSED
THE HIGH AND FARAWAY BOOK TWO
GREG KEYES
NIGHT SHADE BOOKS
NEW YORK | NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 2019 by Greg Keyes
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
Night Shade Books® is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.
Visit our website at www.nightshadebooks.com.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Keyes, J. Gregory, 1963- author.
Title: Kingdoms of the cursed / Greg Keyes.
Description: New York : Night Shade Books, [2019] | Series: The high and faraway ; book 2
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004693 | ISBN 9781597809955 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3561.E79 K56 2019 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004693
eBook ISBN: 978-1-59780-628-2
Cover illustration by Micah Epstein
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Printed in the United States of America
For Hyla Lacefield
Dear Diary,
I’ve been dead for more than thirty years.
I’m laughing, because the last time I wrote in a diary, it was the day before I died. It was something about a cute boy, but I don’t remember his name.
Anyways, I spent most of that “dead” time luring men to their doom at the bottom of a forest pool. I loved to play with their bones. But then Aster and Errol woke me up and put flesh and skin back on me.
They didn’t do it to be nice. Aster is a witch. She’s from another place called the Kingdoms of the High and Faraway, a place where miracles are commonplace. It’s separated from the normal world—where I was born—by a border called the Pale. It’s hard to get to from here. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of kingdoms, each weirder and more magical than the last. Castles of gold, cities of glass, seas with tides but no water, boats of silver, howling dark monsters in deep, black swamps. Curses and spells. Everyone born there has a light in them called elumiris. Another word for soul, I guess. When they die, they’re born again in another Kingdom, sometimes higher and further away, sometimes nearer to the Pale, depending how bright they shine inside.
Aster’s father brought her to the town of Sowashee, where I’m from. It’s in the normal world, which she calls the Reign of the Departed. It turns out my world is where souls go when they’re all worn out. When they don’t have enough spark to be born again in the Kingdoms, they’re born here, live their very last life, and then disappear forever.
Aster’s dad is a witch (warlock?), too, and a really strong one. He brought her to the Reign to protect her from something, though he never told her what. But he was sick. He couldn’t remember things for very long, and he couldn’t learn new things. He thought Aster was still a little girl, even though she’s seventeen. He was trapped in his house, and Aster was afraid he would get out.
She had an idea how to cure him. There was this stuff called the “water of health,” but to find it she needed help from three guides—the Mostly Dead, the Completely Dead, and a giant. The Completely Dead was me. But to catch me, she needed someone Mostly Dead, and that was Errol. Errol was someone she knew from school. He’d tried to kill himself and ended up in a coma. Aster took his soul and put it into this sort of wooden Pinocchio/ Tin Man body she’d made of odds and ends. When he came to find me, I tried to kill him, like I did the others, but he didn’t drown. Then Aster put my skin back on and all, and they dragged me off on an adventure to find the third guide, the giant.
Before we could start, though, two people showed up at Aster’s house. One was her teacher, Mr. Watkins, and the other was the school counselor, Delia Fincher. They were checking up on her, but her dad turned them into smoke and put them in a liquor bottle.
Diary, that was not the strangest thing that happened, not even that day.
Since she needed someone to watch her father while she was gone, Aster got her dad to fetch Mrs. Fincher back out of the bottle. Then she put a necklace on her that kept control of her, and the school counselor had to follow any instructions Aster gave her.
After a little dust up or two, we went off through the Pale, me leading the way to the High and Faraway, because I could see the path they couldn’t. But someone was following us; a guy who called himself the Sherriff. Seems like doing what she did, Aster had broken some rules that he reckoned she needed to be punished for. And as for Errol and me—well, we weren’t supposed to exist at all, to the Sherriff’s way of thinking.
In that first Kingdom, right at the border, we got a new friend—a woman named Dusk, just a little older than Aster. She said she would help us find the giant Aster was looking for. We also learned about the curse; all of the grownups in the High and Faraway had turned into monsters or just . . . gone away.
The kids had to learn to fend for themselves.
The Sherriff was still following us. He deputized some bad boys and brought them along. We didn’t know that at the time. We also didn’t know Aster’s father had sent her teacher, Mr. Watkins, after her, and put a spell on him that let him sense which direction she was in and forced him to follow her. He took up with the Sherriff.
The deeper we got into the Kingdoms, the more powerful Aster’s witchery grew. But I got stronger, too. I could feel the creeks and rivers and deeps, talk to the creatures of the water. Do things. And sometimes, I still got hungry, like when I was a nov. And sometimes I wanted to be one again.
We made a new friend named Billy Noname. Nobody knew where he’d come from, least of all him. But Aster started getting sweet on him right away.
And yes, I was taking a fancy to Errol. Me, the living dead, him a walking puppet. The perfect couple.
Except Errol also had doe-eyes for Dusk. When I figured that out, I went off to sulk, and the Sherriff caught me. And th e teacher, David, was there. When I touched David, I suddenly knew—he was the guy who murdered me all those years ago. Surprised? Me too. But back then he’d had a different name, and a different face. Now he had his sights set on Aster.
Diary, they buried me head-down in a rocky shaft. Errol found me and pulled me out, and off we went again, until we came to the Mountain of the Winds and some folks who allowed they had a giant problem.
Boy, did they. It was huge, and we didn’t have a chance against it. Until Billy turned into a giant, too. See, Billy was the giant we were looking for. He had shrunk down, years before—for a vacation, sort of—and had forgotten what he was.
After that, he put us in his palm and walked off into the High and Faraway, until we came to a golden castle. He shrunk back down, and we found the water of health, a dose for each of us.
That’s when Dusk turned on us, froze Aster and Billy with her magic sword, cut off one of Errol’s legs, and sliced my neck clean through. Then she took all of the water of health and left us there.
I hate to use profanity, but Dusk really is a—well, it rhymes with witch.
What she didn’t know was that Aster had already given me my share of the water of health. Errol used half of it to stick my head back on. Aster and Billy unthawed, just in time for us to fight the Sherriff and his boys. And David.
I took care of David. Unfortunately, the thing in him, the dark soul—it didn’t stay down. It wandered off.
Aster killed the Sherriff. But Errol—they broke him to pieces. His soul slipped back to his dying body in Sowashee.
I didn’t like Aster at first, but by then she was growing on me. I didn’t envy her the choice she had to make.
Billy could take us home, but if he stayed a giant that long, he would forget her, and stay a giant. And by that point Aster was in love with him. If she used the half-potion she had left, she could restore his memory. Or she could save it for her father.
Or she could heal Errol.
She picked Errol. And when he got to her house, we found her father was gone anyway. Dusk had come along, pretended to be Aster, and whisked him away.
And me? The water of health did more than just sew my head back on. During the day, I’m alive now. Heartbeat and all. Of course, at night, all of that stops again. But I’m better than I was.
Now I’m off to plot with Aster. We’ve got to get Errol out of the hospital, find her father, and cut off a certain person’s damn head.
Until later, dear diary, I am yours,
Veronica Hale.
PART ONE
PLACES KNOWN
AND STRANGE
ONE
A KISS THROUGH THE BARS
That hot July night, in the grey hours before dawn, Errol’s dead girlfriend came for a visit. She swam up Gallinger Creek and into the storm drains beneath Sowashee, under the wall around Laurel Grove Hospital, emerged from the old cistern near the orchard, slipped past the bored night watchmen, and scaled the century-old wrought-iron downspout to the ledge beneath his second-story window. The sash was propped open with a stick, but iron bars prevented her entering his room. Fortunately, there was space for her to press her face through. Her kiss was cool and wet, and tasted slightly of algae, minnows, and crawfish. He brushed a leaf from her long hair which—even wet and in the dark—still had a golden glint.
For a while Errol was conscious only of her lips, her luminous, half-lidded eyes, the night symphony of frogs and insects, the sultry atmosphere redolent of mimosa and woodbine enveloping them.
“I hate I’m all soaking wet,” Veronica confided, after they finally parted long enough to talk. “It’s hard for a girl to look her best after a swim. But I can’t figure out any other way of getting in here without being seen.”
“I don’t mind,” Errol said. “You were soaking wet the first time we met, remember?”
“Well, I do remember, Errol, if you must know. And naked. And I think I may have tried to drown you.”
“Not the greatest first date,” Errol admitted.
Her eyes dropped a little.
“Hey, I’m kidding,” he said.
“It’s just . . . you’re all normal now,” she said. “A regular boy. And I’m still . . .”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Not to me anyway. I hope it doesn’t matter to you.”
“You’re sweet,” she said. She kissed him again.
“How much longer do you have to stay in this . . . place?” she asked, when they parted once more.
“Until I can convince them I’m not going to try and off myself again, I guess,” he said.
“That shouldn’t take long,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. “You would think.”
Suicide, as it turned out, was not without consequences.
Of course, the doctors called it “attempted suicide” because technically he had never quite been dead. But Errol knew better. He had seen death coming for him, and if it weren’t for a good friend and a literal miracle, he wouldn’t be alive today. Nor would he be an unwilling resident of the Laurel Grove State Hospital, a dumping ground for the mentally ill, drunks, drug addicts, and depressed teens.
His mom liked the place because it didn’t cost her anything and because it took him off her hands. In his lower moments, he thought it would have probably been easier for her if he had gone ahead and died. But despite what most everyone thought, he had no intention of dying anytime soon, not if he had a choice in the matter.
“So what are you and Aster up to?” he asked.
Veronica hesitated. She squeezed his hand.
“It’s kind of a mess,” she said. “What with Aster’s father disappearing and that teacher, Ms. Fincher.”
“And Mr. Watkins,” Errol said.
Veronica’s small brow creased and a nasty little smile spread her lips.
“Yeah,” she said. “That guy.”
Mr. Watkins had been an English teacher at Sowashee High. He had also been the vessel occupied by an evil spirit who had a thing for raping and murdering girls before stealing their souls. In an earlier incarnation—thirty years before—he had been Veronica’s neighbor. He had killed her, but hadn’t managed the raping and soul-stealing part.
Errol squeezed her hand. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to bring that up. It’s only—have the police found anything? How is Aster explaining all this?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Veronica said. She glanced away, as if looking at something behind him, but he knew there wasn’t anything back there but a blank, beige wall.
“What?” he said.
“The police sort of took her off yesterday,” she said. “She hasn’t been back.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s not good.”
“I know,” Veronica said. “She was working on a plan of some kind to get us all back to the Kingdoms, rescue her dad, kill Dusk, find Billy—all that stuff.” She smiled. “We were gonna break you out, if they hadn’t let you go by then. But now . . .”
She shrugged.
“Do you know where they took her?”
She shook her head. “They were in a car,” she said. “I couldn’t keep up. And besides, she told me to stay hidden.”
“Yes!” he said. “Definitely stay hidden. The police—no one—should know about you.”
“Too late for that,” she said. “They’re looking for me already. I heard them asking Aster about me. I guess somebody noticed me at the hospital.”
“That’s bad,” Errol said.
Veronica had been dead for decades. If anyone figured out who she was—and that for some reason she only appeared to be sixteen or so—it could lead to further questions. Like why her heart didn’t beat at night. He imagined her being hauled off to a lab somewhere, never to be seen again. He didn’t care for the image.
“You shouldn’t even be here now,” he said. “It’s too risky.”
“Oh, hardly,” she said. “They’re not so much worried about people getting in here as they are about people sneaking out. Who breaks into a loony bin?”
“Yeah, that’s a good point,” Errol said.
“Not that I think you are loony, dear Errol,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said. “We need Aster, though. I need to get out of here.”
Veronica caught his gaze and held it.
