“Yes—and soon,” said Regent. “He has spies who are loyal to him, though I can’t think why. Perhaps it is easier to believe wickedness and hate will always prevail.” He turned to Maud. “The cat will slow us down. Will you part with him?”
“Never!” said Maud, holding the animal even closer, her hands lost in his abundant gray fur. “Vesuvius came to hell with me. He and I will part ways with you if you even ask again.”
Regent seemed to have expected this response. He dropped the matter, and led the party down the riverside. They walked two by two, Maud and the Ukrainian just behind Regent and X.
“Forgive my outbursting,” the guard called out before they’d gone even a hundred feet, “but as we are speaking of cat, I must ask you … When X is boy, you give him buttons and collars as clues. Is terrible complicated! Why not say, ‘Someday you must find Maud. Thirty years old. Bloody apron like serial killer.’ ”
Regent looked at X.
“Tell your friend the answer,” he said. “You know it, do you not?”
“I suspect he never told me about Maud for the selfsame reason he never told me about my mother,” said X. “He believed that hope was dangerous—a bird of prey.”
“I still do,” said Regent.
“Yet you freed us,” said X. “Perhaps your heart does not know how cynical you are.”
Regent rubbed the top of his head, which was shaved close. It was just an offhand, human gesture, but X found it endearing.
“No, perhaps my heart does not,” said Regent.
X watched the lord as they walked. Regent had been taken to the Lowlands when he was 50, yet he seemed ageless, apart from the lines worn into his forehead. Usually, Regent moved so decisively—with such long, muscular strides—that he seemed less like a person than a statue come to life. But he looked troubled now. Not so much a lord as a man.
“How is it that Maud knew where my mother is prisoner, but you did not?” said X.
“When your mother was found to be with child, there was an uproar and a trial,” said Regent. “I defended her heatedly, and Dervish told the other lords that I could not be trusted. I was kept forcibly away when you were born. Yet the lords did grant two of your mother’s requests. The first was that Maud be at her side when she gave birth.”
Regent turned as he walked, and indicated that Maud herself should take up the story.
“I knew your mother up there,” she said. X looked back to see her pointing at the ceiling. “I was just her lady’s maid, but she was the truest friend I ever had. They separated us when we were damned because they didn’t trust us together. I didn’t see her for maybe eighty years. Then a guard came, and told me that I was needed—that she was in labor. ‘She’s having a baby?’ I said. ‘She’s dead!’ But then, I told you she was stubborn. Your mother was ecstatic when you were born. I feared for you. I said—my god, I should never have said it—I said I was afraid you wouldn’t live. Your mother was so proud of you already. She kissed your little mouth, and said, ‘Of course my son will live.’ ”
Maud stopped, overcome by memories. X said nothing, hoping she’d continue.
“They pulled you away from her almost immediately,” she said at last. “Your mother’s face at that moment—you may think you’ve seen true agony in the Lowlands, but I promise you haven’t.”
Maud’s words were so like what Plum had said about the screams that X looked at her a second time. She stared at the ground.
The Ukrainian tapped her shoulder gently with his bat.
“Do not fret, Maud person,” he said. “Everything becomes okay. Look at us now, off to rescue!”
Maud finished her story quickly, as if she wanted to be rid of it.
“Dervish and a guard dragged your mother and me away,” she said. “I was left on the Countess’s hill—to punish me for helping your mother, probably—and they continued on. That’s when I heard Dervish tell the guard where they were going.”
“You said my mother had two requests?” X asked Regent.
The lord slowed his pace so the others could keep up.
“Her second request was that you be placed in my care,” he said. “The other lords fell about laughing. They assumed I would be horrified. Yet I was moved, for I had never raised a child, nor been believed in as much as your mother believed in me then.”
X had assumed that the way to find a place called Where the Rivers End would be to follow a river until—well, until it ended. But the light that Regent had laid before them veered from the current now, and slipped into a tunnel.
The lord stopped by the entrance to let them rest.
“This place we journey to,” said X, “have you been there before?”
“No,” said Regent. “The Lowlands are so vast that I shall never see them all. Yet I know that Where the Rivers End is somewhere that one rushes away from, rather than toward. Forgive me for lecturing again on the perils of hope, but we may not achieve what we hope to. Dervish may have foreseen the day I would look for Maud, and hence lied about where he was taking your mother.” Regent looked back to the river, as if to underscore what he said next. “Even if he told the truth, he and his men will no doubt ambush us along the way.”
X hadn’t allowed himself to consider these possibilities, and they settled on him heavily.
“Regent, if I may outburst second time,” said the Ukrainian. “You are not life of party.”
The lord, who had yet to warm to the Ukrainian, ignored him and continued addressing X.
“I have risked a great deal for you because your mother was my friend—and because you are an innocent,” he said. “It’s as if you weren’t born but rather woke up in a tomb. The injustice staggers me still. So I regret nothing I have done. If Dervish means to pull us all farther into the shadows, then I am resolved to push us all toward the light.”
“Thank you,” said X. “Thank you for everything you have done. If I knew grander words, I would use them.”
“Yet you must hear what I tell you now,” said Regent. “Your plan to rescue your mother—and for her to rescue you—is the plan of a dreaming child. I shall take you to Where the Rivers End, for you deserve at least to lay eyes upon the woman who gave you life if you can. In truth, I am ashamed I did not seek her out long ago. It may have been that I was afraid to see how imprisonment and degradation had altered her. Or it may have been that I needed you—your fire—to propel me.”
X took this in quietly, as he leaned against the wall near the tunnel entrance. A small torch sat in a bracket above him; the torches were always bolted up high so the prisoners couldn’t use them as weapons. X thought of what Regent had said about the likelihood of failure. He pictured himself trying, pathetically, to escape the Lowlands armed with nothing but a torch.
He closed his eyes, as Plum would have, and tried to quiet his thoughts. He’d heard so much about his mother, but a hundred questions still swirled inside him. After a moment, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He opened his eyes to Maud’s freckled face, tilted with worry. Vesuvius lay in the crook of her elbow.
“All this must be overwhelming,” she said.
“It is,” said X.
“What would help?” said Maud.
“Knowing right now if we will succeed or fail,” said X. “Knowing if I’ll be able to stand in front of my mother and say, ‘I am your son, and I survived, just as you said I would.’ Knowing if I will make it out of the Lowlands and back to Zoe.”
“It’s a lot to ask for,” said Maud. Then, apparently fearing she’d been too fatalistic, she nodded toward Regent and the Ukrainian, and smiled. “But you’ve assembled a good team.”
X gazed at the lord, who, unable to stand still, was pacing sternly in his royal blue robes, and at the guard, who was trying to balance his baseball bat on one finger.
“They make a handsome picture, don’t they?” said X.
“They do,” said Maud. She paused. “Is Zoe a girl you love?”
“Yes,” said X. “She’s up there, as you would put it. I owe her everything, even my name.”