“Yeah,” she said excitedly, “I got it.”
Naomi slipped away from her, dodging into the Deep and appearing in front of Avery. Arabel felt a slight ripple in the air after she’d gone, like a wake behind a boat. “Your turn then. The rest of you, keep trying.”
It did help to feel out with her hands, even though she knew that wasn’t needed and that she should be able to feel the boundary without even moving. But now that she knew what it felt like she found it more easily this time. A thin, shimmering layer underneath reality.
She slipped beneath it like she was diving into bed, sliding between the sheets, and then she was in that dark underworld. She could feel things tugging at her soul, could feel herself starting to drift apart, but there were lights in the distance, and she whirled around and saw lights behind her, too. She had half expected to see the snowy field, but it wasn’t there. Everything was darkness. The rage intensified. It wasn’t hers, though, she knew. There was an eidolon, or maybe a piece of soul that wasn’t yet an eidolon because it was still in the Deep, nearby.
She looked down and realized she couldn’t see herself; there was only emptiness below, and she panicked and slipped back out, tumbling to her knees, her gloved hands crunching into the clean white snow.
The others stopped what they were doing and turned to stare at her.
“Don’t stay in that long,” Naomi said, but she nodded. “Go for precision now.”
She’d done it. Not only that. She’d done it first. Naomi was showing Ferne now, taking her back in and out repeatedly, and Avery was jumping back and forth, trying to mimic what she’d felt when Naomi had shown her, but it wasn’t working.
I did it. Finally, something I’m good at. Arabel suppressed a grin. How far can I go?
She dodged back into the void, then out again. She’d moved a few feet to the right. She tried again, left this time. She could control which way she went by focusing on the direction she wanted to go right before she went into the Deep. She practiced until she could reliably control which way she went, then aimed for larger and larger distances, trying to perfectly pinpoint where she would come out.
That feeling of rage was always there, lurking around the edges of what she could sense, but it didn’t come any closer.
There was a shout, and Arabel looked up to see a group of guardians up on the wall watching their practice.
“Looking good, Naomi!” one of them called.
“Get on with your work and stop bothering us!” she yelled back, smiling.
Arabel noticed uncomfortably that a couple of them were staring at her in particular. Ian was among them. She tried to shake off the stares and carried on.
She slipped into the void, relieved this time to be disappearing from sight. She wondered if she could go up at all, maybe climb a tree this way or get up onto the top of the wall. Or end up underground.
“Arabel!” Naomi appeared at Arabel’s side in the Deep, yanking her back out of it. “You’re staying too long. No more than a second at a time.”
Arabel grumbled, but, thinking of David’s advice, agreed. Naomi turned her back and Arabel did a few more hops left and right, but it was too easy now, boring. She’s wrong. I can go farther. She glanced at Naomi, then did a long jump, appearing on the far side of the practice field. The cold rush of air on her skin as she reappeared in the real world made her grin, and she took a deep breath. She appeared by Ferne’s side, then Charlotte’s.
“Arabel,” Naomi said. “Stop it. That’s too far.”
Again, Arabel nodded, but Naomi was being stupid. It wasn’t too far. Arabel was just better at it than she was. David’s advice to just do what she was told flashed across her mind one more time. No. This was too much fun.
She slipped to the far end of the practice field, one short skip at a time to avoid Naomi’s ire, then took a breath and dove in. The darkness and silence surrounded her; there were no landmarks to show that she was moving, only tiny pinpricks of light and emotion out in the distant reaches of her awareness. She came up against a gauzy, bright gold barrier, like a wall of glowing fabric. It pressed against her, holding her back, but she broke through. She drifted and drifted, feeling the seconds tick by, holding her breath as if she were underwater.
She couldn’t hold on, and she slipped back out, knocking her head into a tree branch and falling a few feet onto the ground. She was in the midst of the snowy forest. Had anyone else ever slipped this far?
She turned in a slow circle, listening to the wind in the snow-covered branches. Other than that, there was silence. She wasn’t even sure which direction she had come from. No footprints to follow back, either.
She waited a few minutes to see if anyone would come for her, then set off in the direction she thought was the correct one. If she walked for a while and didn’t come to the castle, she could at least follow her footprints back and try the other direction. If she tried slipping again, she might just end up more lost without realizing it.
For almost twenty minutes she trudged through the snow, listening intently every fifteen feet or so. There was no path and she had to crawl over downed logs and push her way through snow-filled bushes. This must have been the wrong direction. She turned back, followed her footprints easily to where she’d started, marked the place with a large circle of tamped-down snow, and headed in the opposite direction. Another twenty minutes and still nothing. How far did I go?
Arabel made her way back to her start point and tried a new direction. She started to feel angry at herself. Why had she stayed so long in the Deep? Why was she always pushing things like that? Couldn’t she just have been happy with doing well? She kicked at a bush as she passed, her anger growing stronger. She was furious. She hated everything. She hated the cold, and this stupid castle, and—she caught her breath. Maybe it was her work in the library, or the hours and hours of meditation she had been doing, but she suddenly realized what a large amount of rage she was feeling, and how it had come out of nowhere, and didn’t really make sense for the context. She was kind of annoyed to be lost in the woods, but she was going to find the castle. She actually kind of liked it here, and she had just done something Naomi didn’t even think was possible. That was all pretty cool. But the rage was still building inside her, and Arabel knew what that meant.
The eidolon was on her in a second, fury emanating from it in hot waves. Instinctively, Arabel tried to push it away. Not mine, she thought, like Naomi had told her, but the feeling only intensified. She could sense the demon’s certainty. It knew it had her. She could feel her soul bending under the heat of the rage, throwing off sparks, like a piece of scrap metal in a forge under a blacksmith’s hammer.
She dodged away, whirling around, and saw the demon as a blaze of light, a fiery red dragon with wings spread—ten feet long on either side, tipped with spines. It wanted a body, it wanted a soul, it wanted to be whole and to express all its fury and rage, vent it out on the world, and on her.
Her resistance was failing; it had already gotten past her defenses. She was going to die; she wasn’t strong enough to keep it back. It was much, much more powerful than anything Naomi had given them to face. She tried to run, floundering through the snow, but it stalked inexorably behind her.
Light flared and in front of her was the fox, its ears pressed flat to its head, its eyes panicked, looking from her to the dragon and back. Then it made a gesture with its nose. Towards the dragon.
“I know there’s a dragon there, thanks,” Arabel snapped.
The fox shook its head, then made the gesture again.
Arabel raised her eyebrows. “I can’t fight that.”
The dragon was inches from her now; she could feel the heat of its rage pounding into her. Its jaws snapped around her middle, and its teeth ripped into her.
Pure panic shone in the fox’s face; it gestured desperately to her, closed its eyes, then opened them again. It made a motion, as if rubbing its head on someone’s leg like a cat.
“What?�
� Arabel gasped, as something tore free inside her chest.
The fox made a gesture, as if patting something kindly on the head.
“You want me to be nice to it? It’s just going to eat me.” It wasn’t like she had any other options, though. And it was already eating her.
She dropped her defenses.
The dragon’s jaws released her, and the rage coursed through her; she grabbed a bush and uprooted it, oblivious to the woody stem tearing at her hands. Snow fell in a cascade and she screamed and hurled the plant as far as she could. She grabbed another, yelling, and did the same, feeling the dragon’s energy. She could feel the rage and the deep, deep fury, felt it so fully, but at the same time, feeling it and letting it run through her, there was a new certainty that it wasn’t her. She let it run through her body, let it tear the plants and pull bark from the trees and scream, and all the while she watched it. And the more she watched it the deeper into it she saw. She saw the ragged edges, the place where it had been torn away from itself, its true self, and a tiny golden thread, glowing faintly, stretching away into the distance, energy pulsing along it.
As she observed all of this, her own rage faded. The demon still raged and stormed, but it wasn’t her anymore. She could still feel her soul, ragged and missing its own pieces, but separate from this thing that had taken over her body, and something shifted. The demon pulled back; it was clear that it didn’t fit. Its wings drooped, and the fury turned to pain. She pitied it.
“I’ll help you, if I can,” she said, and a shudder went through it. It shied away from her in fear.
“Over here!” a strong male voice shouted behind her. “I’ve got her! She’s over here!” The demon’s head jerked up, its nostrils flaring. “Arabel! Are you—oh holy, get back!”
Ian sprinted into the destruction of torn plants and trampled snow, staring in wonder at her and then at the demon. He whipped the soul blade from his back and crouched into a fighting stance.
“Run!”
“Wait, it’s OK—” She stumbled forward, but he wasn’t looking at her, and neither was the demon. They circled one another, and the rage mounted again, filling the air with crackles of electricity.
Ian’s face was utterly calm, the ends of his blade flickering with currents of power; he dove in, slicing with his weapon, but the demon dodged, snapping its red jaws and giving a roar of fury. It swiped at him, its movements lighting fast.
“No, Ian, stop.”
Ian’s focus slipped as he glanced at Arabel. “Get out of—”
The demon lunged, ripping into his chest and finding purchase. She saw it biting and clawing at the bright green light that glowed within him, saw the red overpowering it, mixing into a reddish brown, like old blood. Ian dropped his blade. Arabel stumbled backward as he flexed his hands, gripped a branch and tore it out of the tree; he turned, swinging it, then hurling it at her. He knelt, grabbed a rock and threw it, hard. She tried to dodge but it smashed into her shoulder, knocking her back.
Arabel turned and fled, dodging in and out of trees, leaping over anything in her way. But she could hear Ian, or whatever he was now, running after her, and he was gaining. She felt his hand scrabbling for purchase on her back and put on a fresh burst of speed, suddenly grateful for all the running Naomi had made her do. Ian’s breath came in great huffs and snorts.
He grabbed again, his fingers winding into her hair, and yanked her back. She fell to the ground, the wind knocked out of her and he was on top of her, punching and shaking her. She gasped, her chest locked and hitching, and tried to move her arms up to cover her face, but he moved his knees, pinning her down. A staff came swinging out of nowhere, cracking him about the middle and sending him flying off her. There, red-faced and terrified, was David, and behind him three other guardians sprinting towards them.
“I’ve got her, can you deal with him?” David shouted. The others yelled back something Arabel didn’t hear, but David knelt next to her, his eyes running over her face and body.
“Are you hurt?”
She still couldn’t breathe, but she managed to shake her head no.
“Come on, I’ll get you out of here,” David said, his body tense, his head up and scanning. There were screams and crashes coming from only a few yards away in the forest. As quickly as he could without hurting her, David helped her up, one arm around her waist, the other hand guiding her to the easiest paths.
Pain seared through her body, and she started to shake. For the first time in her life she thought she might pass out. Her head felt fuzzy and stars danced in front of her vision; she tried to take a deep breath to clear it, but that sent sick waves of pain shooting through her left side. She started to panic, gasping for breath, and David stopped, one hand rubbing slow, gentle circles around her back.
“It’s OK. You’ve just got the wind knocked out of you. You’ll be OK.”
This calmed her somewhat, but she still couldn’t get enough air; her breath was still hitching and gasping, her lungs refusing to open.
David’s hand was warm and calming, though, and he just kept murmuring to her that it would be OK, and slowly her chest relaxed and her breathing returned to normal.
“OK. I’m OK.” She started trying to walk again, and fresh pain seared up her side.
“Let’s take it easy, OK? You’re hurt.”
“No.” She didn’t want to be hurt. “I’m all right. Let’s keep going.”
He didn’t say anything, just helped her along as she struggled to walk despite the pain. It took forever before they reached the old mossy gate of the castle.
He took her inside; Moira, Walt, and a few others rushed to help. Despite her protests, they lifted her gently, carrying her to the old tower and up one floor to the large open room filled with beds. She vaguely noted clumps of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling and the rows of shelves at one end which held all manner of dusty vials. They took her to a bed near a window, laid her down and pulled a curtain around it.
The others rushed off to help with Ian, but David pulled up a chair and sat by her bedside while Healer Thorryn examined her.
He shook his head, never once looking in her face, but his hands were gentle. “Badly bruised. Perhaps broken,” he said after feeling every inch of her ribs. “You’ll be staying here tonight.” He went off to get her something to change into. She looked at David out of the corner of her eye. He wasn’t watching her, just sitting there, being with her. She wanted to say thank you, but there were too many conflicted emotions to sort through, and she couldn’t bring herself to speak just yet. She thought if she did she would probably start crying.
David waited outside while she gingerly changed into the cotton nightgown, then sat by her side as she drank the sleeping draught Thorryn gave her. He was still there when she fell asleep.
When Arabel awoke, she lay blinking up at the ceiling for several long seconds. She felt like she had been pummeled. Her whole body throbbed and ached, and her head pounded, spots of black winking in and out of her vision. A heavy, pungent odor hit her full in the face.
“Just a moment, now,” Thorryn said. “Hold still please.” He tucked a thick poultice between the sheets, pressing it up against her ribs, took her pulse, sniffed her breath, then strode away muttering to himself.
“How are you feeling?” came the soft voice of Oswald. She tilted her head, creating a fresh explosion of colorful stars. When these cleared, she saw him sitting gravely by her bedside.
“Is Ian OK?” she asked, and Oswald’s expression gave her her answer. She closed her eyes, her stomach dropping.
“It’s not your fault,” Oswald said. “No one would have expected an eidolon of that size to be this close to the castle.”
But it was her fault. She had been taunting Naomi. Purposefully doing exactly what David was always telling her not to do.
“As guardians, we expect to give our lives in this fight.”
Arabel swallowed. But not to protect people who were being stupid.
&n
bsp; “If you had known Ian—” Oswald started kindly.
“I did know him,” Arabel snapped. “He was my father.”
Oswald’s face slackened and he sat back in surprise. The expression on his face changed from shock, to calculation, to sadness.
“I can see why he might have thought that,” he said softly.
Arabel’s breath caught in her chest.
Oswald looked at the ceiling, steepling his fingers and taking a deep breath.
“I’m sorry, Arabel. I—I believe in telling people the truth.” He looked back at her. “Ian was not your father.”
“How would you know that?”
“I just know.”
“How?”
“I believe you know how I know. Which is why you broke into my office.”
Arabel shot straight up in bed. A dizzying wave of pain seared up from her ribs and she gasped, tears starting in her eyes. “I told you, I didn’t break into your office. I was with Avery.”
“We both know Avery was lying,” Oswald said softly.
“OK, fine, yes, she was, but I’m not. I didn’t break into your stupid office.”
Oswald contemplated her. “You broke into my office to retrieve that part of your father—your real father—that I am keeping there.”
“What?” Arabel spluttered. “What are you—you have a piece of Cecil?” She thought back to her first night here. That jolt of recognition. He’d been carrying a piece of Cecil’s soul?
Oswald nodded, watching her expression carefully. “That is how I know you are his daughter. The fragment has an affinity for you that we only see in family members. Usually I keep it here,” he laid a palm flat on his chest. “But I left the fragment out for you to see the first time you came to see me in my office. And later that week it was broken into. Of course, by then I had taken it back into myself. The eidolon you released was my love for Esme.”
The Eidolons of Myrefall Page 19