by Halie Fewkes
She reached angrily toward the black glass floor beneath her and scorched words into the obsidian with intense, concentrated heat. It was a song with no tune, composed with hatred instead of harmonics.
Vack is a monster. Vack is a snake. It won't bother me if he drowns in a lake.
There are no lakes around, and you can’t even conjure a leaf of water, Vack responded from across the hall. Although, there is always the chance you might cry one into existence.
Ebby clenched her fists together and exhaled slowly, wondering if anybody had ever hated anyone the way she hated Vack. She melted a new line into the glass walls.
He can fall off a cliff or be crushed by a tree. If he’s eaten by wolves, it won’t bother me.
I could fight a wolf with my hands tied behind my back, Vack taunted her.
And so it went. Every once in a while Vack would detach himself from his friends just long enough to shoot mockery across the hall toward the terrible limericks Ebby was using to personalize her room.
She finally ran out of poetic ways for Vack to die right around the same time she ran out of steam, and also right about the time Vack left to walk his friends home. Feeling so livid was physically exhausting, and she would have just gone to sleep if not for the thought of Ratuan.
Vack jumped into her room a while later without opening the door, and although Ebby wanted to scold him for his uncaring callousness, she hated the thought of another confrontation.
“Here’s your precious friend.” Vack threw her a directional thought that couldn’t possibly be right. Ratuan wasn’t in Tabriel Vale. In fact, he wasn’t in a Human city at all, and he wasn’t very far. According to Vack, Ratuan was beneath them.
“Is this your sick idea of a joke?” Ebby asked, her insides writhing as she tried to hold on to some hopeless hope. “He’s not beneath your stupid city.”
“Why don’t you act like an Epic and look.” Vack’s condescension had Ebby ready to throw a lightning bolt at him before humoring him. “There are over a thousand Human kids down there.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Yes it is. There was a battle in a city called Dincara, and we leveled your whole fortress before finding all the kids who were fleeing to the next city. It’s no wonder you all grow up to be such spineless—”
“D-Dincara?” Ebby stuttered, her heart stopping and her breath catching at the entrance to her throat. Reso and Sembla lived in Dincara. Her friend Penny lived in Dincara. She knew the names of the vendors on the pavilion and had a favorite old dog who wandered across the bridge from time to time. “B-but, I would have known.”
Vack laughed. “I guess not. It happened not long after you arrived here. And since your kind lost all their mages in the battle, we’ve been able to start reclaiming whole territories.”
Panic made breathing harder. “My... friends,” Ebby gasped, flinging a hand to the wall to keep from collapsing. They had been dead for months?
Vack stopped laughing. “I’m sure they’re fine,” he said, trying for once to disarm the situation. “My uncles found the kids and brought them here—”
“The same uncles who brought ME HERE?”
Ebby had never gotten the memory of Margaret’s vicious murderers to leave her head, and thoughts of them with their hands on Ratuan again made her violently ill. She sank to the floor as sobs overtook her control, and she felt no shame crawling back beneath her bed as Vack watched.
But he wasn’t wearing a sadistic grin. He had frozen, as though he felt guilt or sympathy or something else impossible.
“You win, alright? You win,” Ebby whispered, leaning against the wall, pulling her knees to her face as her entire body shook. “Please go away.” Vack stayed put, and it didn’t even matter.
How could more of her friends be dead? And Dincara... gone...
There was no reason left to fight. Escaping here would just be an escape to the miserable existence where nothing was permanent. Where everyone died or was already dead. Why even continue?
“Look, I made it sound worse than it was.” Vack crouched and set his hands and knees on the floor. Ebby refused to look up through her breathless sobs. “It’s just the city that was leveled. Most of the people are fine. There was a last minute decision to spare everyone, and we just put them on boats and took them to another continent. Tekada. The one you’re all from to begin with.”
Ebby left her face pressed to her knees and said nothing. This freak niceness would vanish any second.
“Tear-salt?” When she remained silent, Vack crawled beneath her bed and sat against the wall beside her. “Look, I’m sorry.”
“What?” Ebby snapped her head up to see Vack looking at his knees.
“Oh come on, you heard me. I said I’m sorry. I’ve seen that Margaret-woman in your head so many times that I want to hate my own uncles. I still don’t like you, but I’m sorry that happened.”
And that was, hands down, the nicest thing Vack had ever said to her.
Stop that. You know I can’t be nice to you, Vack thought. If we treat each other like friends, that’s eventually what we’ll become. Neither of us want that.
Yeah... I know. But Ebby would honestly prefer this weird, kind version of Vack any day.
“I just... feel bad,” he said, biting at his fingernails as he wrapped an arm around his knees. “I’ve never seen anyone killed, but I know what it’s like to have somebody and then suddenly not have them anymore. And you went from having lots of somebodies to nobody. And who even knows where your parents are. I at least have one...”
“You’re not very good at being nice,” Ebby said, though she knew this was the closest he was capable.
A knock on the door startled them both, and Ebby used magic to peer into the hallway as she went invisible, feeling her heart freeze with dread as Vack whispered, “No… They must have followed me back.”
Two Escalis stood outside her door. Vack’s uncles, Savaul and Gataan.
Chapter Eight
Ebby
Vack leapt up from beneath the bed as Savaul pushed the door open. “Vack!” he exclaimed, delight masking the evil in his eyes. “We haven’t seen you in months! Get over here.”
Savaul stooped with his arms outstretched, and for having just admitted that he didn’t like his uncles, Vack didn’t hesitate to hug Savaul. I’ll get them out of here, he thought quickly to Ebby as she masked the sound of her heartbeat.
Where in life was Prince Avalask when she actually needed him?
“You’ve gotten so big,” Savaul said with a genuine grin, still made scary by his cloudy eyes and the spikes of bone protruding from his elbows. Gataan, the brother whose teeth had torn into Margaret, stood as a quiet looming force, smelling the air with interest. “Seems like your father’s been keeping you busy, hasn’t he?” Savaul asked, glancing around the room. “Teaching you the ways of the Epic?”
“Yes. You should see what I can do now. I can light things on fire, shoot lightning, turn rocks into dust, and shield myself.”
“I’ll bet he’s taught you a lot about shading too, so the Human mages can’t find you? Or anyone you’re trying to keep hidden?”
Everybody knew Savaul was trying to bait him into bringing up Ebby. Vack replied, “That was the first thing he ever taught me. Years ago.”
Savaul studied his nephew for a moment, then asked bluntly, “Do you know where she is?”
“Yes.”
Ebby wasn’t going to wait for her fate, invisible beneath her bed. She crawled to her feet as silently as a rabbit on glass and edged toward the doorway where the larger brother stood.
“What would it take for you to tell me?” Savaul asked.
“My father’s permission,” Vack said, making his uncle chuckle.
Gataan, the larger brother of so few words, said, “She’s here.”
Savaul squeezed Vack’s shoulder in reassurance. “We’ll take care of her for you. You don’t even have to do anything.”
Vack froz
e and Ebby could feel his mind spinning, trying to find a way to stop exactly that from happening. He didn’t want her dead, but Ebby couldn’t see him standing up to his uncles either.
She became visible for two seconds and ghosted through the back glass wall, emerging in the hallway to sprint away as she heard calmly behind her, “There she goes.”
Ebby was faster than her pursuers and her footfalls surprisingly quiet. At this speed, her biggest problem was actually that every corner of the glass tower was like a sharpened knife waiting to cut into her.
She reached an intersection with another hallway and grabbed the corner to push off in a new direction, shrieking as the black glass sliced her palm wide open. She sprinted on, past at least twenty doors in the glass. At the next intersection, she tried to stop her momentum to turn, and only barely touched the corner of the wall, but received another slash across her fingertips like the bite of a hundred hornets.
Ebby clenched her teeth and pushed herself to keep running as she heard heart-stopping laughter behind her. “She’s bleeding,” said one of her pursuers, and Ebby tried to keep her despair from coming out in a sob as she descended three steep staircases in a row.
She could outrun them for a while, but she couldn’t hide. Escalis were built for tracking, for hunting — and she was leaving a blood trail.
She wasn’t about to turn and face them either, so she took a deep breath, got a running start down the next narrow glass hallway, and leapt into the air to vanish.
But instead of landing outside this time, she reappeared at the end of the same hall where the glass floor dropped abruptly to another black set of stairs. She skidded right off the uppermost step and tumbled immediately down, throwing her arms in front of herself in a plea for survival. A shimmering golden barrier prevented the steps from shredding her into a bloody mess, but she still crashed down the whole flight of stairs and landed at the bottom, bruises everywhere and her spirit broken.
Ebby curled into a ball as pain enveloped her the way it had nearly every day of the past month, and she whispered to the uncaring world, “Just let them end this.” She let out a long, resigned sigh and closed her eyes, ready.
Gataan’s deep voice rumbled from the hallway above, “Her scent ends here.”
“What?” Savaul exclaimed before swearing loudly. “She can’t know how to jump yet. She wouldn’t still be here.” He paused and said, “She must have turned invisible and backtracked past us.”
And right before the twins reached the staircase, they turned around to hastily retrace their steps, giving up an easy view of helpless prey. Ebby took a deep breath and lay still, certain this stroke of luck had to be imagined. She rubbed her arms and focused on healing them, silent and unmoving for several minutes of disbelief, until an ornately carved door at the end of the hall began calling to her.
She’d lost track of how far she’d just run, and delirious hope suggested that Ratuan might be on the other side. Ebby set her hands on the cold floor, where a thousand lines of grey rock spider-webbed through the glass, and she pushed herself to her feet. She could have stopped to read the multitude of Escali symbols carved into the door, or even used magic to look past them to the other side, but she ghosted herself straight through instead, stepping into a several degree colder space as the only living being.
She’d joined twelve looming statues of black glass that were larger than life — all of them Escali women — and after a calming breath, she slumped back against the door to marvel.
They looked like queens, each of them draped in glass imitations of thick furs and leathers. Each stood with the confidence of a woman who had an army behind her and a few held knives while others had falcons landing on a shoulder or an arm. Ebby stepped forward so she could lay a hand on one of the cloaks. Somebody had been talented enough make obsidian look and feel like frozen fur, which meant there were Escalis who cared about creating instead of destroying. And for whatever reason, they had created just one of the Escali women from solid gold rather than black glass.
Ebby saw the splitting lines of a family tree carved into the back wall and crept closer to see a name she recognized, spelled in tiny gem stones at the bottom.
Vack.
It was clear that only the Epics’ names glittered, as Avalask’s shone the same above him. A thin line connected Prince Avalask to a woman named Dreya, obviously Vack’s mother, and then a thicker line led to his siblings, Savaul, Gataan, and Glidria. The father of the four also had a name of gemstones, Gramsaf, and a thick line connecting him to Izfazara, a name gilded in gold, probably to show he was the king. Ebby’s eyes roamed all the way to the top, to the first Escali Epic, Juhdect, whose brother was also a king. In fact, every Epic on the tree had a king for a brother.
A latch rattled lightly behind her and Ebby released an exhausted breath, too tired to keep running, hiding, and wiping tears from her eyes.
The massive door swung very slowly inward, stirring dust into the still air, and Vack’s friend Jalia stepped cautiously into the room. Her slightly cloudy eyes were piercing, and her intense observance led her to a hundred theories about Ebby within seconds, all of them scarily accurate. The ratted clothes, the dark circles beneath her eyes, the way Ebby stood so loosely and resigned, they all gave her away. This incredibly perceptive girl actually understood her brokenness, and that thought made tears well in Ebby’s eyes.
Jalia tilted her head and said, “Vack told me you were a crier.” Ebby laughed to herself. These Escalis were all the same. “Why are you crying?”
Ebby gave her a tearful shrug. “I don’t even know anymore.”
“Then stop.” Jalia clearly didn’t have patience for something so irrational. “What do you need?”
Ebby bit her cheek with uncertainty. In the silence that followed, Jalia repeated, “What is going to make you stop crying?”
The question made her want to dissolve into further tears, but the supportive nature of Jalia’s thoughts made her realize this was some weird version of a friendly gesture. It wasn’t kind or gentle, but at its heart, it was an offer of assistance.
Asking Jalia to help her escape Prince Avalask would be a waste of a wish. There had to be some way Ebby could actually use this kindness. “I have friends beneath this city, and I don’t know how to get to them.”
“The kids from Dincara?” Jalia asked. “You’re an Epic. Just jump down to them.”
“I don’t know how,” Ebby replied, painfully aware that Vack was already practicing jumping. The way Jalia frowned, as though Ebby was wasting her precious abilities, made her feel further sick. Here Ebby was, the hope for the Human race, and she was as close to useless as could be.
“Can you at least turn invisible again?” Jalia asked.
Ebby vanished on the spot, but not to impress. It was because Vack’s other friend, Mir, slipped through the open doorway and peered quickly into every corner.
“She could understand you?” he asked Jalia warily, worried about the threat of invisible ambush, unaware that Ebby was actually crouching behind the gold statue now.
“She understands,” Jalia said. “And she’s learning. You can’t hear her heartbeat this time. She found a way to hide it.” The boy froze and Ebby felt a sense of cautious trust from him that Jalia had the situation under control.
“Why did she come here?” he asked.
“She’s here by accident. She doesn’t know what this room is,” Jalia replied. Even mind-reading Ebby didn’t know how Jalia had figured that out. “And I’m going to take her down to see those captured kids beneath the city.”
Panic and excitement flooded Ebby at the thought of seeing Ratuan, but Mir turned on Jalia and demanded, “Did you eat stupid-meal for breakfast?”
“No I didn’t, Mir,” she snapped back. “But you’re stupid if you haven’t realized what Prince Avalask is doing. Obviously he doesn’t want her to grow up and murder us. Only an idiot wants to make an enemy of the deadliest weapon in the world.”
“I would rather be an idiot than a groveling coward. You can do her all the favors you like, but she’s not going to spare you in the end. Not you, not any of us.”
Jalia shook her head and said, “I’m done with this conversation. Go let Vack know we found her, and I’ll meet you both in his room when I’m back. It’s a long walk down there.”
“This is a bad idea,” Mir told her as both kids turned and promptly exited the room.
Ebby’s jaw had fallen open and landed on the cloak of the statue in front of her. Neither of the friends saw that conversation as anything more than a pleasant exchange of thoughts and ideas. This was normal. And since Jalia had declared the conversation ended, they had both immediately taken off toward their next intended goal. Jalia had already covered a long hallway and turned the corner by the time Ebby got her invisible feet moving to pursue.
The grey veins of rock beneath Ebby’s feet grew thicker and more wildly abundant as Jalia led her deeper. Then they began passing Escalis. There was a room full of them on the right, gathered around a large table and laughing scary, throaty laughs.
“Are you following?” Jalia asked as she walked, keeping her eyes fixed straight ahead.
Yes, Ebby projected her thoughts, too frightened to speak. Jalia gave her the slightest head nod that meant she had heard. You were right, about that room, Ebby added. I didn’t know what it was.
“It’s a room of remembrance,” Jalia said. “For all the women in the royal family who have been killed by the curse.”
Ebby frowned to herself since nobody else could see her. Curses aren’t real.
“This one is. It was your Epic grandfather who put it on them, and now every woman in the royal family is dead. Murdered, drowned, killed by freak illnesses — the royal family has had to watch them drop, one after another, and couldn’t do a thing to prevent it. I’m fairly surprised that Vack can stand the sight of you, actually.”
Ebby distinctly remembered Vack saying they’d been killed by Humankind, so he must believe curses were real. Well... If there are no women left in his family, then there’s no reason left to hate me. It wouldn’t matter anymore.