The Eyes of a King Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the castle eventually, though it was not the only street that did, and the apartments were cheap because of the constant thoroughfare of soldiers day and night. “What’s wrong with being a priest?” Stirling said again. “If you don’t want me to be a priest, Leo, I won’t be a priest.”
    “Why are you so impressionable?”
    “What’s that?”
    “Easily swayed by what other people say. I mean, if it’s what God’s told you to do, it is what you have to do. Who’s more important, God or me?”
    “But like Jesus said, if I hurt you, I hurt him. Like it says, ‘Whatever you do to one of the least of these my brothers—’”
    I laughed. “Stirling, shut your mouth and be a priest if you want to. I can’t think of you being anything else.”
    “Unless I have to be a soldier too.” He frowned. “Maybe there’ll be another revolution by then. A good one. Maybe the prince will return.”
    “Shh, Stirling. Do you want to go to prison?”
    “Sorry, Leo.”
    He began to hum, and we walked the rest of the way without speaking. It was not far.

    T he next morning I was disappointed to find that there was no more writing in the strange book. I had hoped that there would be. I had expected, even, that there would be. I went on checking the book when I remembered, but after a week with still nothing, I began to forget it.
    One evening I came home late and alone. The snow was still frozen in hard gray slivers at the edges of the streets, where the sun never reached. It was the beginning of June now, but it might as well have been winter. I hurried. I did not like to approach people suddenly in the shadowed alleys when I did not know who they might be. But that day the streets were almost deserted. The air was so still that I could just hear the gunfire and explosions from the northeast border, where Malonia meets Alcyria. It was a long way away, but on days like this it could be heard.
    I trudged down the alleyway beside the house and let myself in at the side door, shaking the hard ice off my boots. That day the sky was dark with clouds, and dusk was falling in the stairwell. My footsteps echoed coldly on the stone as I hurried up the stairs. I passed the two lower doors—reinforced steel, identical to ours—then reached the third one, second from the top. The top apartment had stood empty for years, and dust lay thick on the handrail and the steps beyond our door.
    “I’m home, Grandmother!” I called, shutting the door behind me. My grandmother marched in. “Leo, where have you been? Where is Stirling?” I sat down on the sofa, dumped my coat beside me, and put my keys back into my pocket. “Leo, where is Stirling?” she asked again.
    “He got kept in late,” I told her. I spoke slowly, because I knew she wanted me to speak fast.
    “Again?” She stopped in front of the sofa and regarded me, frowning. “What did he do this time?”
    “He wouldn’t do drill. It was target practice, and you know he never does that.”
    “Why wouldn’t he today?”
    “I didn’t ask him.”
    My grandmother sat down in the chair beside the window, throwing up her hands in a gesture of despair. “Honestly, Leo!”
    “What? What did I do? It’s not my fault that Stirling is a pacifist, or whatever the hell he is.”
    “Leo, he is not a pacifist,” she told me, standing up again restlessly. I looked at her but didn’t say anything. “He doesn’t even know what a pacifist is. He’s only eight! You are a bad example to him, Leo, for one thing, and for another—he’s lazy.”
    “I think you underestimate him sometimes,” I ventured. “He’s very clever. Anyone can see he’s very clever and if—”
    “Don’t tell me,” she interrupted. “However intelligent he is, he won’t get anywhere with it. Intelligence is worthless unless it’s applied to something. What use is a scholar in the family? No one needs professors or lawyers. We need soldiers and farmers and factory workers. Books and lectures do