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"I'm sorry about Dad getting killed," I said. "That hurts me just as it hurts you. But if I wanted to be a soldier, I'd have enlisted in the army back home." I walked past her, toward the door. Halfway there, I stopped and turned.
"Home. That's where I'm going. This isn't it. Unless I've completely lost track of time, I can still get back to Evanston before spring break ends." I waited for Mother to say something, but she just looked at me. Finally, I left.
I had spotted a number of doors with silver tracing in the keep, and I knew the door I wanted. I went back to my room and ditched Lesh and Timon. I told them to go down to the great hall, and I was still mad enough that they didn't argue. The doorway from the bedroom to the privy in the outer wall also led home. The castle didn't really have ru
It was late Friday, early Saturday. I flipped on the TV to see what was on. Then I went upstairs and climbed in the shower for a long, hot soak, trying to wash out a week's dirt. I wished I could just wash out the week's events too-or a little more. I had the radio blaring in my bedroom, trying to exclude thought. It worked fairly well. When I came out of the shower I was relaxed and sleepy. I fell asleep almost at once.
But a person can sleep only so long, and I had slept most of Friday in Varay. It was four in the morning by the clock-radio when I woke, as alert as could be-no chance of getting back to sleep.
I got dressed, took Dad's Citroën, and found an all-night diner along the interstate east of town. I waded through two of their $2.99 breakfast specials, a half-dozen donuts, and four cups of coffee. I sat in the corner and watched other customers come and go. It was a long way from breakfast at Castle Basil, but I still had that insatiable appetite. I almost ordered a third breakfast, but the waitresses started giving me strange looks, so I paid my tab and left.
The night air was damp. Louisville had received a lot of rain in the past couple of days. I overheard that in the restaurant. The air felt wet and chilly. Dad's car had a half tank of gas. On the way to the restaurant I had stopped at the bank and used my card in the all-night teller to get out a hundred bucks. Money was no problem. I had a trust fund. I had controlled the interest since my eighteenth birthday. Now that I was twenty-one, the principal was mine too. I had signed the papers before I left school and mailed them to the bank. Twenty thousand a year in interest-or I could take everything out and live like a king for a few years.
"Live like a king." Poor choice of words, I told myself. You saw how the king lives, the kind of life you could live.
"I should live so long," I mumbled. I realized then that my trust fund had almost certainly come from Varay. The source was another of the things my parents had never told me about.
I leaned on the steering wheel in the restaurant parking lot. I had a notion to start driving back to school. Nobody would say anything if I took Dad's car. I could drop a note in the mail when I got to Northwestern to let Mom know. If she even bothered to come home. It occurred to me that she might choose to stay in Varay now that Dad was gone. I started driving. I was across the Ohio River, heading north on 1-65, before I changed my mind and turned around at the next interchange. The sun was up by then. I had no intention of returning to Varay, but I did figure to leave Mom a note at home, collect as much of my stuff as I could pack in the car, and stop the mail and newspapers. I'd make arrangements with one of the neighbors to look after the place. The orderly mind at work. School didn't resume until Monday, and I could make the drive in seven hours without pushing it. Even if I waited until Monday to go back, I wouldn't miss much at school, just three lectures. Nobody scheduled tests for the first day back from break-at least none of my professors did.
I stopped for groceries on the way home, deli pizzas, TV di
Maybe I missed something as a teenager, but I never had a real rebellious period. Dad and I had too much fun together. That's all I thought it was at the time. I didn't know that I was being bamboozled, secretly groomed to be a royal swashbuckler. Walking out of Castle Basil in a huff was my first real experience at rebellion. I wasn't sure what to expect. Sure, I was twenty-one, legally of age, financially independent, but I still expected Mom to come drag me off by the ear. "You'll do what you're told, or else." That was part of my anger at the whole situation, I guess.
I popped a pizza in the oven and turned on the big TV in the living room to catch the Saturday-morning cartoons-not the new gimmicky ones, but the good old ones. Wile E. Coyote was falling off a cliff when the network broke in with a big news special. Middle Eastern terrorists had been intercepted trying to attach a fifteen-megaton H-bomb below a pier in New York City 's Hudson River. The bomb had been captured before the terrorists could trigger it. No one was saying how close the call had been. There was a lot of speculation that there might be other bombs planted in New York or other cities.
Panic time.
All the networks and cable operations were covering the story. Army units were on alert. Searches were "undoubtedly" under way for other bombs. There was a diplomatic flap as we consulted with our allies and with Soviet and Chinese officials. There were thinly veiled hints of massive reprisals against any country that could be tied to the bombs if one went off. One former secretary of defense intimated that such an offending nation would be wiped off the map-without nuclear weapons. There are other weapons.
Even with the buzzer on the oven timer, I almost didn't get my pizza out in time to save it. It wasn't quite incinerated, but it was the crunchiest pizza I had ever had.
Sitting in front of the tube, I managed to get most of that pizza, and a second one, down. It was midafternoon before the networks started repeating the interviews with their tame experts. I turned down the volume but left it loud enough to hear anything new.
"This can't be real," I said, getting off the couch. I was all set to get back to normal in the normal world. The last thing I needed just then was for terrorists to start playing with nuclear weapons at last.
Okay, you can add delusions of grandeur and paranoia to everything else, but I took it personally. I paced around the living room for a time, then stood by the picture window, looking out but not seeing much.
"Looks like once you go crazy, you can't come back," I mumbled. "It follows you." I recalled Parthet telling me how the different worlds were tied together, how events were reflected from one to the next. Disruption on one side led to increased strength on the other, and vice versa. Any major change hurt the buffer zone. All that mumbo-jumbo. It looked like it was starting. I wondered if it was because of Dad's death, or maybe even because I had walked off the job as Hero of Varay. It sounded farfetched, but not as crazy as the very existence of the seven kingdoms and Fairy.
A little after four o'clock, I gathered up my things, went up to the bedroom, and walked through the doorway leading back to the bedroom in Castle Basil.