by Halie Fewkes
Ebby glanced at the black gloves on Vack’s hands and didn’t want to match him.
“Now, I need to go,” Prince Avalask said, “but are you alright?”
Ebby didn’t like the question. Not one single thing in her life was alright, but she nodded anyway.
“And Vack? You hanging in there, buddy?”
Vack scrunched his nose and eyebrows, less subtle about his hatred of Ebby. “We’ll go ahead and call that a yes.” Prince Avalask smiled to himself. He stood and disappeared, but Vack didn’t retreat to his rock filled bed, and Ebby fixed her eyes on the gloves to avoid his glare.
“You burned yourself.” Vack pointed it out like a flaw so Ebby couldn’t possibly mistake his words for sympathy.
“I know,” she whispered.
“Why aren’t you putting the gloves on?”
Ebby felt like she might be sick if she slipped her fingers into the Escali leather. Everything about it would be wrong. “I don’t want to.”
Vack considered her silently with his eyebrows drawn low. He finally turned around to shovel the rocks off his bed with cupped hands, and Ebby looked down at the burned fabric of her tunic. She had scorched a hole straight through it near her bellybutton.
Ebby touched her fingertips lightly to the hand-shaped blister on her arm and whimpered at the flash of agony, as bad as the initial scorching. She knew Epics could heal injuries, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work. She crawled onto her bed and curled into a ball, trying to repair her scorched shirt and blistered skin, unable to accomplish either.
Vack finished clearing his bed and climbed back into it, but Ebby kept herself awake for hours more before sleep brought her another round of nightmares. She thrashed against the rough Escali hands holding her and tried to squirm away before they could sink their teeth into her like they had to Margaret. Desperate to escape, she pulled away from them until an invisible force helped her break free and fly away from their dangerous snarling.
And this time she woke with the ground far beneath her. Ebby realized she had drifted toward the ceiling in her sleep, and she flailed her arms as she tried to find something she could grab for support. She quickly lost all control, wobbled haphazardly, and fell, landing on the bed with a crunch that sounded like she had landed in gravel.
Ebby howled and grabbed her ankle, waking Vack for the second time in what felt like hours. The pain in her elbows and rear couldn’t begin to compare to the shattering of her foot. Tears sprang immediately to her eyes and she sobbed as she rolled up her pant leg to see the swelling. If she had ever gotten an injury like this at home, Ratuan would have run for miles to find her help. Margaret and Jelk would have known exactly what to do. All she had now was mind numbing pain shooting through her entire foot, and nobody to rely on but herself.
Vack had crept forward and crouched behind the central table to watch her turmoil. “Don’t try it, Tear-salt,” he said. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll make it worse.”
“What d-did you call me?”
“Tear-salt,” he repeated viciously. “Because all you ever do is cry. You could raze an entire field with the salt from your tears. You could salt a hundred thousand slugs. Stop crying!”
Ebby screamed frustration, took all of the pain from her foot, and threw it across the room at Vack. Ebby’s ankle suddenly felt perfect, as though nothing had ever happened, while Vack jumped up and held his own foot in agony. “Knock it off!” he shouted, and the throbbing shot back into Ebby’s ankle, making her grimace. “I’m offering to help you, you fool.”
Ebby glared at Vack, loathing him. Why would he want to help her?
“Because my father will kill me if he comes back and finds you broken.” Vack edged around the table and entered Ebby’s territory.
“Leave me alone, please. I don’t want your help,” Ebby said, wiping tears from her eyes.
Vack grabbed her foot and replied, “Yes, you do.”
Ebby would have yanked it away from him if it had hurt any less. “You’re just going to break it more,” she groaned. Her teary eyes couldn’t focus on anything other than the spikes on Vack’s bent elbows. Ebby suspected she was the first Human to ever see arm spikes at such a close range while not being murdered.
“Da’ showed me how to fix injuries like this.”
“Your father is a horrible ogre, and he probably showed you wrong!”
“He is for trapping me in here with you,” Vack said as the pain in Ebby’s foot began to seep away.
“I am trapped in here too, Vack! And how dare you make fun of me for crying. My life was fine until your family came in and tore it apart.”
“I’m in exactly the same situation, Tear-salt, and you don’t see me crying.”
“No you’re not,” Ebby said. “You weren’t kidnapped. You already lived here! Your mother wasn’t killed, and none of your friends were hurt by monsters in order to trap you here.”
Vack dropped her healed foot onto the wooden bedframe and shifted his eyes up. “My mother, aunt, grandmother, and every woman in the past three generations of my family have been killed. All by your people.” He stood tall and walked back to his side of the room.
Ebby didn’t want to feel bad for Vack, but she couldn’t help having empathy. She wouldn’t wish the horrible gut wrenching loss that she felt for Margaret and Ratuan on anybody else. Not even Vack. But he had already been through the same thing. Maybe they weren’t so different after all.
“You and I have nothing in common,” Vack said in response to her thought. “Don’t forget it. My father can’t keep us in here forever.”
Ebby gazed down at her foot and twisted it in a few painless circles. And she knew her gratitude wasn’t wanted, but she would feel guilty if she didn’t thank him.
“Vack—”
“Tear-salt! No thank yous!”
Ebby watched him carefully, and then asked, “Can you hear every single thought I have?”
“Yes, and it’s torture. I would ask Da’ to teach me to block them out, but I can’t because of you.”
“I can’t hear the words in your head,” Ebby told him.
“I’m not surprised.”
“No, I hear more of your feelings. Your emotions.”
Vack finally gave Ebby his full attention, as though such an idea had physically harmed him. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“I can't really tell what you’re thinking, but I can tell why. Like the way you call me Tear-salt. I can tell that it’s the most offensive name you know, and you use it because you think it will keep you from liking me. I can tell when you’re afraid, and angry, and jealous—”
“I am not jealous of you!” Vack snarled. “Whatever you think you’re sensing is wrong. I am not afraid, I am not jealous, and I do not worry about befriending you. You’re everything I despise.”
“I don’t want to be friends with you either, Vack. But you don’t have any reason to hate me.”
Vack pointed to Ebby’s elbows and then to his own — the difference between them. “I have every reason. You Humans kill everything in your path.”
“Escalis do exactly the same thing! And I’ve never killed anybody… Have you?”
Vack stared at the ground, relieved to hear so, before he answered, “No.”
Ebby was an eleven year old girl. How could Vack think for a minute that she might have killed somebody?
Vack scowled and said, “You’re the one who thought I was here to eat you.”
Ebby rolled her ankle around a few more times before she admitted, “I guess we’ve both been a bit misinformed, haven’t we?”
“No. Only you. And why are you still here? Is anybody even looking for you?”
Ebby gripped her left hand with her right as she tried to hide how much that question terrified her. “Of course they are. They have to be.”
Chapter Four
Allie
Archie was about twenty paces behind me while the sun punched through a breezy forest
canopy and danced across our steep slope. I pushed my protesting legs to hike faster in hopes that I could ignore the past three months running through my mind. My calves burned with resentment for hills and my breathing grew ragged, but distraction was difficult to come by when so much was wrong.
I stepped on one twig and cringed as it snapped beneath the palm of my foot. I stopped my quick ascent toward the ridgetop to glance back at Archie, whose brows were raised to ask, Are you happy now?
The joking smirk on his face didn’t prevent me from flicking my eyes up to the sky in irritation, and then I shot a look back that said, We will never find anything at your pace!
We usually split up so I could hike in wide arcs and push skittish deer toward him, but today we’d decided to stay together, resulting in the struggle of me trying to drag him along and him trying to pull me to a near stop. It was true, Archie often spotted animals I’d blazed straight past, but I couldn’t handle moving ten paces an hour to look for them.
I could smell game in the air, so I turned to face the wind and climbed until I crested the hill to find a herd of fifteen deer far below, picking away at the valley’s greenery where a tiny stream snaked back and forth throughout the grass. Archie caught up in silence and jabbed his elbow into my side.
“Will you lighten up?” he breathed as I jerked my gaze toward him. “This is supposed to be the calming part of our lives.”
I glanced back to the valley to make sure we hadn’t been noticed as Archie crouched from the sight of the herd, and then I narrowed my eyes at him. Calm was beyond reach right now, at least for me.
The battle in Dincara had put Humanity in a horrible position. Escalis had overrun the place, killed Dincara’s beloved leader Sir Laud when they entered his rigged-to-explode spire, and then they’d shipped the survivors off to Tekada, the continent where Humanity originated.
That left us with fifty-four escapees from the battle who’d now taken refuge at the Dragona, most of them not even mages. Sir Laud’s son, Tarace, had stepped up as the closest thing to a leader we could find since both Anna and Sir Darius were killed in Dincara, but leadership was obviously new to him.
Archie and I had immediately volunteered to hunt for the Dragona’s food so we could try to find the children who’d fled the battle. They’d been instructed to run to Kellington if Dincara was lost, but they never arrived.
And we still hadn’t found them.
Archie grabbed my shoulders to give me a rough shake, then dug his fingers playfully into my hair to mess it up.
“Will you knock it off?” I snarled quietly, ducking away.
“Sure, if we can worry about the Dincaran kids and Sir Avery’s daughter later,” he said. “The Dragona’s going to starve if we lose our minds out here.”
I stared down at the undisturbed herd, now distracted by thoughts of Sir Avery’s daughter too. I only had one fleeting memory of her — the sight of her screaming while Sav grabbed her and ran. If she wasn’t dead, she was certainly locked away in a dungeon somewhere, and knowing Sav’s nature, she was probably beaten and starving.
“Can I borrow these?” Archie asked, pulling my bow from my hands and my quiver off my shoulder.
“What are you—” my eyes doubled in size as Archie turned and launched my bow into the branches of the closest pine tree, watching it catch and stick in the needly twigs.
I made a quick snatch to grab his bow off his shoulder in retaliation, but Archie jerked back from reach.
“What do you want me to do now?” I hissed, gesturing at the deer below. “You want me to whistle and hope they come running to me?”
“I never know what you’re going to do,” he replied, his eyes playful. “If you went running down the hillside and tried to bite them, I’d have to throw my hands up and say ‘there she goes.’”
I grabbed a piece of bark off the nearest trunk and threw it at his knee, watching it rebound off the shimmering barrier that was his power. Archie squinted back, putting a finger to his lips to be quiet.
Now wasn’t a good time to mess around, but in fairness, there never was a good time anymore. I could count on my fingers the instances Archie and I had been alone in the past few months, and it was only to exchange a quick joke about sleep deprivation before parting ways to steal a nap.
We’d stayed up twice when I had too many Tally-related questions to ignore, and Archie’s stories had turned into all-night affairs each time. And twice, we’d paid for it the next day when neither of us had enough energy to locate a single animal.
I dropped my hunting pack on the ground and glanced into the limbs overhead to pretend I was going after my bow, then I spun and rammed into him. Archie barely stumbled back as I collided with his shield. I could only touch him if he touched me first, but he made the mistake of trying to push me away on reflex, which meant his shield didn’t stop me from wrapping an arm over his shoulder to grab at his bow as he held it at arm’s length. Archie used his free forearm to push me up against a tree, pinning me just long enough to lob the weapon up into the limbs where it settled to rest comfortably next to mine.
I turned my head to the side and ducked forcefully beneath his arm, darting past him so I could leap into the branches. But instead of trying to stop me, Archie snatched my pack off the ground and dashed back. I took a quick second to retrieve both bows, and then leapt back to the ground and pursued.
Archie was already in the process of scattering everything I owned across the ground. He had removed my wool blanket, unrolled it, and wrapped it around a small flower, as though worried it might catch a chill. He had also unfolded my map and stabbed my pocket knife through the top of it to nail it to a tree. He had unwound my entire ball of twine and now sat on the ground, wrapping it at weird angles around his fingers with a piece of my jerky between his teeth.
I dropped my jaw and glowered, my eyes demanding how dare you?
Archie shrugged and held the crazy pattern of twine out to me with both hands, like it was a game and the next move was mine. I ran at him and he leapt back to his feet, abandoning the twine to grab my dragon skin quiver as I grabbed my satchel. I started to stuff everything back into my pack as Archie began tossing arrows into the air, one after the next, like confetti. I shot him a gaping grin and mouthed, “Knock it off!” I threw a handful of dirt and leaves at him as an entire bundle of my arrows was strewn across the ground.
Archie tilted his head and frowned like he couldn’t understand, so I abandoned my repacking and tackled him, taking him down to the ground as silently as we could land, careful not to hit any of the scattered arrows. I grabbed the quiver out of his hands and threw it from reach.
“You don’t know how lucky you are that I like you,” I said, trying to glare angrily even though a silly smile had taken over.
He grinned and lay his head back against a mossy rock. “Also lucky that half the local wildlife was born deaf.”
The deer below had ignored our entire battle, but one doe lifted her head and perked her ears at the word deaf, purely for the sake of irony.
We both froze and waited for her to decide she hadn’t heard anything, but the longer we stayed still, the harder it was going to be to get up.
I couldn’t necessarily say I had Archie pinned, but I did have enough of my upper body on top of him to put a strange longing in my chest and a nervous flutter in my stomach. He chuckled and glanced up, reminding me how heart-stopping the color blue could be on smiling eyes.
“Hey, Archie?” I whispered. His grin faded as I leaned closer, closing what little distance remained between us as a sudden, panicked voice in my mind screamed, Don’t do it!
Archie rolled out from under me in a forceful hurry, and I had to throw my hands to the ground to keep from eating dirt.
“We’re going to lose them,” he whispered, eyes fixed on the valley where two more were now wary of us and the first doe stamped her foot nervously. “I’ll go down and push them up to you.”
“Alright. I’ll get this
repacked,” I said, snatching up a handful of arrows to keep my reddening face hidden.
This was the second time I had tried to make a move. I’d convinced myself that the first one was a fluke, that he truly hadn’t noticed my nervous attempt to kiss him when it felt so enticing, and so easy, and so right. And I hadn’t been hit with an unwanted panic attack the first time. It had been months since my instincts last leapt into my conscious thoughts to save me from danger, and I wasn’t sure why they picked now to come back. Although being rejected twice had a certain sting to it, kissing Archie wasn’t a threat to my life. He just didn’t want the same kind of relationship I did, and I didn’t know why.
Alright, yes I did… All our fighting, our sparring, the fun we poked at each other, it was just fun between friends. I wasn’t good at taking directions, or listening, or keeping my temper in check when something upset me — to sum it all up, I was missing at least half the feminine traits I should have been born with, and I wasn’t the only person who thought so.
Archie took off to circle behind the herd as I moved to grab my bow, and one of my dumber concerns made its way to mind.
“Guys want to be with girls who look and act like girls.” That was what Jesse, the ugly coward who’d also escaped Dincara, told me last week when we’d gotten stuck chopping firewood together. I should have kicked him in the shins and told him he was an idiot, but I’d stopped my axe mid-swing instead to consider him over my superior pile of chopped wood. “I’m just saying, Allie, that you’re more of man than I am. Good luck finding somebody who’s into that. I can guarantee it’s not Archie.”
I smashed a pinecone in my fingers now, angry that such an unimportant comment could be bothering me when I had so many other things to worry about. Jesse and I were decided enemies, and I knew he’d do anything to get under my skin… But his cruel observations were nothing short of truth, and hearing them aloud made them harder to ignore.