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Is it possible they didn’t know?
“As I said, balance. Light and Dark are both part of the invisible scale that is always tipping as we hang on to the edges.” He ran his crooked fingers over the cover of the book. “You can’t have one without the other. Sad as that might be.”
After everything I had learned about The Book of Moons, I couldn’t imagine what was within the covers of its counterpart. Did The Book of Stars yield the same kind of devastating consequences?
I was almost afraid to ask. “Is there a price for using that one, too?”
The Gatekeeper walked to the far end of the room and sat down in an intricately carved chair that looked like a throne from an old castle. He lifted a Mickey Mouse Thermos, pouring a stream of amber liquid into the plastic cup, and drank half of it. There was a weariness in his movements, and I wondered how long it had taken him to amass the collection of intangibly valuable and valueless items within these walls.
When he finally spoke, he sounded like he’d aged a hundred years.
“I have never used the book myself. My debts are too steep to risk owing anything more. Though there is not much left for them to take, is there?” He threw back the rest of his drink and slammed the plastic cup on the table. Within seconds, he was pacing again, nervous and agitated.
I followed him to the other side of the room.
“Who do you owe?”
He stopped walking, pulling his robe tighter, as if he was protecting himself from an unseen enemy. “The Far Keep, of course.” There was a mix of bitterness and defeat in his voice. “And they always collect their debts.”
CHAPTER 17
The Book of Stars
The Gatekeeper turned his back to me, moving instead to a glass case behind him. He examined a collection of charms—amulets hanging from long leather cords, crystals and exotic rocks that reminded me of the river stones, runes with markings I didn’t recognize. He opened the cabinet and took out one of the amulets, rubbing the silver disk between his fingers. It reminded me of the way Amma touched the gold charm she wore around her neck, whenever she got nervous.
“Why don’t you just leave?” I asked. “Take all this stuff and disappear?” I knew the answer even as I asked the question.
Nobody would stay here unless they had to.
He spun a large enamel globe on a tall stand next to the cabinet. I watched as it turned, strange shapes spinning past me. They weren’t the continents I was used to seeing in history class.
“I can’t leave. I’m Bound to the Gates. If I venture too far from them, I’ll continue to change.”
He stared down at his bent, gnarled fingers. A chill rushed up my back.
“What do you mean?”
The Gatekeeper turned his hands over slowly, as if he had never seen them before. “There was a time when I looked like you, dead man. A time when I was a man.”
The words were swimming around in my head, but I couldn’t find a way to make them true. Whatever the Gatekeeper was—however reminiscent his features were of a man’s—it wasn’t possible.
Was it?
“I—I don’t understand. How—?” There was no way to say what I was thinking without being cruel. A
nd if he was a man somewhere inside there, he had suffered more than enough cruelty already.
“How did I become this?” The Gatekeeper fingered a large crystal hanging from a golden chain. He picked up a second necklace, made of rings of sugar candy, the kind you could buy at the Stop & Steal, smoothing it back down inside its velvet-lined case. “The Council of the Far Keep is very powerful. They have powerful magic at their disposal, stronger than anything I witnessed as a Keeper.”
“You were a Keeper?” This thing used to be like my mom and Liv and Marian?
His dull green eyes stared back at me. “You might want to take a seat….” He paused. “I don’t think you told me your name.”
“Ethan.” I’d told him twice now.
“It’s nice to meet you, Ethan. My name is—was—Xavier. No one calls me that anymore, but you can if it makes things easier.”
I knew what he was trying to say—if it made it easier to imagine him as a man instead of a monster.
