The Book of Sight by Deborah Dunlevy Page B

Began to
read
the words on the page he had pointed out.
    The story made sense.
    Hot and cold chills passed over her body.
    Adam let out his breath in a hiss.
    “Can you understand it?”
    “Yes. You?”
    “Yes.”
    He turned back two pages to where the second chapter started. Fifty times Alex had tried to read this page and it had always remained a stubborn sequence of nonsense words and random letters. But she could tell before she even started that this time was going to be different. The words seemed to jump off the page at her, waving as if greeting an old friend, and beckoning her in to where the beautiful pictures would fill her mind. For just a second, she raised her head and caught Adam’s eye. He gave a tiny nod, and they both turned and lost themselves to the story.
    This time Alex found herself looking out through the eyes of a young man, a prince…
She felt his agony as he heard of the betrayal of his brother, his guilt over his part in pushing his brother to such an extremity. She tasted his disgust on her lips as he spoke the necessary words of banishment and smiled in grim satisfaction as she made arrangements to follow her brother into exile. If her brother must be lost, she would go with him, protect him, redeem him if she could. It seemed to Alex that she lived years of wanderings, of dangers, of discomfort, but also of fleeting joys and chance meetings of hope. She followed her brother’s aimless path and did what she could to repay his debts, repair that which he broke, give aid to those he turned away. And each place she went, she left behind a token, an eagle carved by hand from bits of wood in remembrance of her family crest. At times, she lost hope, but always there was someone who came with the right words. Gendel sea. She carried on. Time and time again her brother sought his own destruction in bad company and evil living, and time and time again she was able to save him at the final moment. Until one day she could not. She arrived too late, her brother already falling before her eyes at the hand of his own ill companions. Her years of sacrifice in vain, Alex despaired utterly. She charged her brother’s attackers in blind rage, only to find herself overpowered. Soon she was facing her own death, accepting the cold clear-headedness that came with it, conscious only of a sense of loss, of life wasted, of noble purpose thwarted by petty ugliness. Her point of view shifted. She rose above the young man’s lifeless body, watching as the brigands left him and he was carried by some peasants to the top of the hill. Men and women came from miles around to lay tiny carved eagles on his grave, raising a mound high enough to be seen from the valley below, a wordless epitaph silhouetted against the sky.

11

Gendel Sea
    A dam had a brother, but he had never felt much of a brotherly bond. Living in the same house for fifteen years had given them a lot of the same memories, but it hadn’t made them understand each other.
    Adam’s brother, Brian, was only two years older but those two years might as well have been twenty for all that they had in common. Brian’s world was balls and bats, nightly sports broadcasts, and a string of beautiful but boring girlfriends.
    Adam’s world wasn’t even in the same universe. It was peopled mostly by the characters from the books he read, along with James and handful of other friends. As far as Adam could tell, Brian barely knew he existed, and Adam told himself he was just fine with that.
    In James, Adam had a friend that shared all of his interests. They’d known each other forever. They had discovered the Hardy Boys at the same time, had staged elaborate mock battles with their Star Wars action figures, and had camped out all night in each other’s back yards. Adam knew James’s top five movie moments, and James knew which of Piers Anthony’s novels was Adam’s favorite. They’d been using the words “best friend” since first grade, and it was an