by Halie Fewkes
“She shouldn’t have been running,” he growled, crouching over the stump in front of him to distribute some of his weight to his hands. I got the impression he was comfortable on all fours, and possibly about to spring.
The cloudy eyed woman replied, “She’s done running. Let’s take her before those mages get here.”
The male Escali pulled out his bladed staff and I cringed against the massive tree, aware that I had nothing I could grab to prevent them from dragging me off.
“Do you not speak?” He took a step closer, head cocked to the side. “Say something.”
My inner mind pounded on my awareness, demanding that I match their aggression with my own pride. “I’m not afraid of you,” I snarled, surprising myself with how convincing my lie sounded. “What do you want?”
The Escali’s eyes narrowed as though he found my question humorous, and he put the blade of his staff to my throat. “You have a lot to atone for. We’re taking you back to Dekaron.”
The brown flecked falcon swooped down and landed on the staff, inquisitively watching me.
“Atone for?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “What did I do?”
I angered him by asking, and he said, “Your stupid questions aren’t fooling anyone. You’re the Tally we were told to pursue.”
The woman crouched defensively, and with her eyes on the trees behind me, she hissed, “Their mages are almost here.”
When the male froze to listen as well, I thrust the blade away from my neck, grabbed the falcon, and dashed back from his irate response.
He bared his teeth and leapt toward me. “What are you doing?” He only stopped because I was ready to break the falcon’s neck. “I swear to you, girl, if you kill my bird you’ll follow it straight into oblivion!”
The falcon shrieked and flailed, trying to free itself, but I kept my grip on it through the talons and snapping beak. My knee still bellowed agony to me, begging me to sit down, but I shoved the pain from my mind.
The woman said, “We need to go. Now! We’ll send someone else out for her later.”
“Not if she’s dead,” he growled back.
“You know we can’t kill her,” the woman replied. “Not this one.”
“Nobody said I had to bring her back with both her arms,” he said, but I heard another tiny voice whisper to me.
“Duck.” The voice was a woman’s, but nobody else was near me. “Get on the ground. Now!”
I had no idea who was instructing me, but I dropped the falcon and flung myself down as a wave of fire slammed into the two Escalis. I could hear the footsteps of a half-dozen mages who guarded the woods.
Gravity pushed me into the dirt harder than ever before, and I saw the same pressure hindering the Escalis as vines sprang up to entangle them. Both attempted to remain on their feet, and I used a strange combination of rolling and crawling to get myself away from the snarling predators.
“Is that Allie?” one of the women asked as the pressure lessened and I got painfully to my knees.
“It figures she’s the one in trouble again,” another man answered, his arms stretched toward the Escalis with an orange glow in his hands. I didn’t even look back to see what magic they used to combat the monsters now. As soon as I had my feet beneath me, I took off.
I favored one leg over the other, resulting in a weird skipping run, but it was enough to get me away from the danger. I could still hear shouting behind me as I stopped to lean against a tree, pulling my knee in close. Gripping it tightly with both hands kept the pain at bay and gave me a chance to catch my breath.
I looked back just in time to see the entire sky dim as two black lightning bolts struck near the conflict. A crack of thunder rumbled through me, rattling needles free from the branches overhead, and I ran again.
I was almost to the Dragona, so I ignored the pain in my knee and picked up as much speed as I could. I came out to a grassy clearing near the base of a massive, snow-capped mountain, but I saw no buildings. The Dragona had been right here on the map in my mind. I was sure of it. Yet I couldn’t find any evidence of life in the empty field. Had I been horribly wrong? I didn’t want to retreat to the mages to ask, and I stuck a fist in my mouth to keep from whimpering, wishing with my entire being to just be home and safe.
“Allie!” a guy who looked my age shouted, running toward me. Paranoia had me on the verge of fleeing again, but he was clearly Human and knew my name. “What’s going on? We heard something about your memory, but it’s a joke right? You do know who I am?”
Taller than me, he had messy brown hair and handsome dark eyes I couldn’t remember seeing before.
And though it was entirely irrational, I flung my arms up and grabbed his shoulders with a grip that could crush rocks. “Who are you, and how do you know about my memory?” I had to be suspicious of everyone. There was a chance he could read my mind, after all.
His eyes were wide with disbelief and only a hand’s-breadth away from my face. “I’m West. I’m one of your friends. Allie, this crazy troop of bakers just came stampeding through the Dragona, saying they’d found you. They said something about your memory, but that they lost you again.”
I responded with a choked mix between a laugh and a sob, picturing the bakers flailing their arms and exclaiming they had lost me. I glanced around again and let go of him. “Where is the Dragona?”
“You’re at the Dragona.”
I gestured frantically to the empty evening. “Then what? It’s invisible?”
“No,” he replied, “It’s underground in the caves. This really is bad, isn’t it? Do you even remember who Liz is?”
“I know she’s my sister,” I said. I quickly squashed the hope in his eyes as I added, “But only because I found a scrap of paper that said so. West, can you tell me who I am? What was I doing that made me lose my memory? Why are the Escalis targeting me?”
He had to process the shock of everything I said before replying, “I don’t think the Escalis are after you specifically, Allie. They just like to hunt people in general.”
“They just told me I have something to atone for. They were trying to take me alive.”
“What?” West said. “Allie, Escalis can’t speak our language.”
“These ones could!”
West must have run out of logical reasoning for me, because he said, “We need to get you to Anna. Come on, one of the Dragona’s entrances is hidden in the rocks over here.”
My knee still hurt, but I was already able to hide my hobble as I followed West. I must have seriously overreacted to the injury, thinking it was broken. It definitely wasn’t.
“Who’s Anna?” I asked as we climbed over a mossy jumble of stones to enter the concealed tunnel system.
“Anna and Sir Darius are the Dragona’s leaders,” West replied. “Anna’s a fire mage, and I know she’s probably the more dangerous of the two, but she’ll be the better one to talk to. Trust me.”
I wouldn’t be following him through an underground maze if I hadn’t placed some sort of trust in him. The rock walls of the tunnel were rough and jagged while the floors had been smoothed by years of foot-traffic, and I followed West blindly as the sight of the Escalis flashed across my mind. As terrifying as they were, the mages were just as dangerous. I was lucky they were on my side and not suspicious of me.
When the cave forked we took a right, and then we headed left as it split into two more tunnels. West and I approached the wooden door of Anna’s study, and it opened before we had a chance to knock. When we entered a small room, which smelled like the aged pages of a book, I needed a second to absorb the peculiar appearance of the woman who let us in. Taller than me and with bright green eyes, she retreated behind a desk littered with scrolls and leather bound tomes. I didn’t need an intact memory to know staring wasn’t polite, but still…
Red as a hair color?
It was an abnormality that distracted me from launching immediately into my saga.
Anna
raised her eyebrows and said, “You should probably stop staring at the red hair, Allie, and tell me what’s going on.”
I only felt a tinge of embarrassment as she called me out, but my cheeks flushed as though I bore the shame of a coward. I swallowed and said, “Where do I start? I just woke up in Tabriel Vale, and I literally know nothing. I was chased down by these two Escalis on my way back here. They were specifically after me, saying I had something to atone for.”
Anna remained composed, but the squint of her eyes gave away her concern.
“I told her they can’t speak our language,” West said. “Maybe that’s Allie’s power? She can understand other languages?”
“Some Escalis can speak our language,” Anna said. “They train a select few to do it, and it’s no coincidence that those are the ones who found you and let you live. That never happens. It’s possible they were trying to plant false information with you. Did they give you a message? Or seemingly let something slip?”
“No…” I said. “I don’t think they did.”
“Think! Think of any way they tried to mislead you.”
I wrung my hands as I tried to recall their words. “I don’t know. They were calling me a Tally and saying I was in trouble. They were going to take me somewhere. I don’t remember the name of it, but they would have dragged me off if the mages hadn’t come.”
Anna nodded solemnly. “They are good at carrying people off.”
A quick knock preceded a frazzled woman bursting into the room, declaring, “I’ve got a minor emergency with the Eclipsival setup.”
Anna folded her arms and tipped her head to the side before she replied, “I’m in the middle of one that is much more important right now, so I suggest you either solve it, find Sir Darius, or wait until I’m through here.”
The woman glanced around at the three of us, backed out of the room again, and softly closed the door. I wasn’t sure which element of the situation convinced me I liked Anna, but I knew that I did.
Her theory also made sense in every way except the lack of any message from the Escalis. They hadn’t told me anything except that somebody would come after me later.
“Allie,” she said, moving past the interruption, “Do you have any idea what happened to your memory?”
“None,” I replied. I proceeded to tell her about coming to my senses in the woods and meeting the Travelling Baking Show, but she agreed through the unease on her face that none of it was useful information. I ended by asking, “Why was I in Tabriel Vale?”
“You shouldn’t have been,” she said. “Nobody is supposed to leave the Dragona without permission, but that’s never been a rule you’ve followed. This isn’t the first time our mages have saved you from Escalis in the woods, and word has already reached me that your attackers got away, so we won’t know what they wanted.”
“They got away?” I repeated, unable to believe it. “But the mages were incredible.”
“And the Escalis are incredibly resilient,” Anna replied. “Knock them down, and they’ll get right back up to bite you.”
“They’re going to send more after me,” I told her. “They said they would. What should I do?”
“As long as you’re in the Dragona, you don’t need to worry,” Anna said. “We keep the Escalis fooled into thinking this is a mountain of wild dragons, so they won’t know to look for you here. We also patrol the woods often in case one strays this way.”
I asked, “How can you be sure—” but was interrupted when the door to the study flung open again. I only had a fraction of a second to see the running girl, with dark hair and brown eyes on a face about five years younger than mine, before she collided barreled into me, almost knocking me over.
Chapter Four
I saw how closely her face resembled mine right before she flung her arms around me. I could guess exactly who she was, but I held my hands awkwardly away from her, not ready to return the hug or stroke her straight hair like a sister probably should. She pressed her face into my shoulder and squeezed her arms tightly around my middle.
“Liz?” I didn’t say her name as a question of her identity; I just hoped I might find familiarity somewhere in the name, the hug, or her response.
“I told them you wouldn’t forget me,” she replied into the base of my neck.
I clenched my hands together as guilt wound into my stomach, even though nothing was my fault. I opened them again and set my palms on Liz’s shoulders to push her back from me, trying to match her face with some sort of memory.
Liz stared straight back at me, and her voice shook as she said, “This isn’t funny.”
“Believe me, I know,” I said, searching her eyes. Devastation and terror widened them as tears collected in the corners, giving me a sense of how close we had been. All it took was that one look, her eyes telling me that I meant the entire world to her, and I knew with all my soul that I would do anything for this girl. I would kill without remorse if she was ever in danger and give up everything dear just to see her laugh. All this I knew, but I couldn’t remember anything about her.
“Liz…” The wrenching sadness and guilt were worse than the fear that had twisted my guts all day long. “I’m sorry. I thought I would be able to recognize you when I saw you, but I can’t.”
She squinted to watch me closely, and then a scornful smile played at the edge of her lips. “I just heard you use my name. What are you trying to pull?”
“I only know your name because I’ve already heard it. And it’s not just my memories of you, Liz. It’s everything. It’s as though my whole life has never been lived. Everything I used to know is gone.”
Liz wrenched herself away from me, as though I was suddenly offensive and Anna was more worthy of her attention. “How can we fix her?”
I felt like my heart was being crushed as Anna replied, “I think we just need to give her time.”
Liz flicked her gaze back to me and said, “I don’t want to give her time. I need Allie. The real Allie. What about the mind mages? One of them can help her, right?”
Anna replied, “Liz, you need to calm down and quit acting like this is her fault. There are four mind mages in Kelianland who should be able to help, but none of them are here. The irony is, they were all here this morning for the Eclipsival, but Sir Avery came in this afternoon with a special assignment for them. As soon as they get back, Allie, one of them will be happy to look into your lost memory. I’m sure they’ll be able to help you get it back.”
“That would be fantastic,” I said, feeling relief on one small level. Knowing I had hope made a world of difference, but Liz’s words still stung. I wanted so badly to hold her and declare it all a joke.
“Why can’t Sir Avery help her?” Liz demanded. “He could probably fix her problems in less than a minute.”
All Anna had to do was look at Liz. She didn’t frown, didn’t raise her eyebrows, and didn’t even need to deviate from her stern gaze. “You can ask him if you’d like.”
Liz’s demeanor shifted quickly from demanding to resigned, and she muttered, “I know, we can’t go asking personal favors of him. Shouldn’t have asked.”
“Who is Sir Avery?” I asked. I was ready to march up to anybody who could possibly salvage my memories and ask for help. The very worst they could do was say no. I didn’t have much else to lose.
I watched three jaws drop around me, which was probably a response I needed to get used to. West muttered, “Oh holy life, you really did forget everything.”
It visibly pained Liz to tell me, “He’s our Epic. The hero born with every mage power in existence? He’s probably too busy to help though.”
Anna said, “Give it time. Tomorrow is the Eclipsival, so let’s just get you through that first. There isn’t much else we can do right now, and I should probably tend to this Eclipsival crisis waiting patiently outside my door. Elira, you can come in.”
The eager woman was back inside the room within seconds and had already launched into the detai
ls of the catastrophe before we could leave. We heard all about how the ice mages and water mages had been practicing when one of the water mages broke her leg, and even though they were able to fix it, she was afraid to be thrown in the air which was keeping the entire team from practicing — and the high-strung woman hadn’t even stopped for breath by the time we were out the door.
West had just barely pulled it shut when Liz lunged at me, demanding, “How could you do this to me?” I lurched back to avoid her clawing hands, West grabbing her arm as she tried to take a swing. “You know how much I need you!” she shouted.
“How could I… to you?” I repeated. I needed her. I needed her more than my memories, more than my identity, and more than anything else important in the world. To have her spit accusations at me when I was vulnerable was beyond cruel. “I am the one who can’t remember anything. And I didn’t purposely forget my life to spite you! Do you hear yourself?”
Liz wrenched her shoulders to either side to make West let go, then clasped her arms across her chest in a huff. “You just can’t do this,” she said to the ground. “You’re all I have.”
The despair in her scrunched eyes made my whole chest ache even worse, as if this really was my fault. “Don’t we have any other family?” I asked.
“No. We were the only ones left. The Escalis killed everyone else, and let me guess. They’re probably the ones who took you from me too.”
“I’m right here, Liz. Not dead,” I said, resenting the implication.
“Well the Escalis will be when I get my hands on them!” she exclaimed with fiery hatred. She spun on one foot and took off down the tunnel, apparently beginning her vendetta right on the spot.
“And how are you going to do that?” I asked to her back as she marched away.