by Halie Fewkes
“Tallies?” Vack asked to no one in particular. He flicked his gaze between each face, then turned his unnerving attention to Archie in the intrigued, wolf-like way I expected from an Escali.
Archie, in return, lowered his shoulders very deliberately, not the least bit welcoming.
“I’ve wanted to meet you,” Vack said, taking a bold step forward.
“You are going to leave me alone,” Archie replied, sinking into a dangerous crouch.
Vack smirked exactly like his uncle Sav, and asked, “Who’s going to make me?”
I was ready for Ebby to step up, as she was Vack’s only equal in the room, but it was Emery who lunged, grabbed Vack by the shoulders, and shoved him to the ground.
Vack snarled from the stone floor and shot a wave of green flames at Emery, which never made contact because Archie dashed to his side and threw his shield out to block the magic.
Emery stood with his arms crossed, utterly calm as Vack’s green flames collided harmlessly against Archie’s shield. As Vack let up his assault and got to his feet, Emery unfolded his arms and lit both of his hands with angry red flames.
He raised his eyebrows and said, “Get. Out.”
Vack vanished on the spot and we all looked to Ebby, whose eyes were wide in shock.
“Where’d he go?” I asked.
She shook her head quickly. “I don’t know. He’s shading himself. I can’t track him.”
“Thanks,” Archie said, giving Emery a rough clap on the shoulder.
Emery shrugged with an air of triumph and said, “I knew you’d have my back.”
Archie sighed and glanced around the room before saying, “I should probably go fix this.”
Emery’s gloating turned into a scowl of disbelief. “Why? You don’t have to explain yourself to him.”
“I know. But we’ll be better off in the long run if we smooth things over. I’ll be back.”
As Archie pushed through the doors to venture out alone, Karissa moved next to me and muttered, “Just so you’re aware, everybody else in the room understands what that exchange was about… Except maybe Ebby.”
“I’m ready to hear about it,” I said, turning to look straight at her. “If Archie doesn’t find out that I know.”
Karissa blew air through her lips like my words were a stale joke told for the hundredth time. “Not a problem. We never tell Archie what’s really going on.”
“What? Why?”
“Because he can’t handle things like the fact Jonnath died with the rest of our mages on Tekada. You know how they tear him apart.”
“What?” I exclaimed.
“Sh! I’m telling you. Jonnath was from Dincara, so he was feeding them information about the Escalis and ended up getting involved in the battle and sent to Tekada. We’ve all agreed to keep that little fact on the down low from Archie though. He falls apart at stuff like this.”
“And you’re… sure? You know for sure?”
Karissa nodded bitterly and I gaped at her, expecting to feel dreadful hurt in my chest, but the news barely registered. I’d hardly met him, and knew nothing about him for which to miss. Just one more thing the world had stolen from me.
Robbiel had opened the book in Ebby’s hands to show her something within the pages while Emery and Corliss both had suspicious eyes on our whispered conversation.
Karissa shot a glare at Emery and said, “I’m about to tell Allie Archie’s big secret. You going to try to stop me too?”
“Nope,” Emery said flatly. “I’d rather not see her die because Archie’s being a little girl about the matter.”
Karissa lost her focus, distracted by the hands touching her book.
“Did you show her the section about always cleaning your tools?” she asked Robbiel as he flipped the pages.
“No,” he replied, “But it’s in chapter one.”
Karissa moved closer to point in the margins. “I’ve written all sorts of notes in here,” she said, “about things I’ve tried that have and haven’t worked. There are some especially important ones you should look at in the section on open wounds—”
“Karissa?”
“I just need two half-seconds,” she said with a dismissive wave, pulling the book from Ebby’s hands to flip toward a few of the more riveting sections.
I gave Corliss an impatient look and said, “Can you make Karissa understand we’re short on time? I’m going to run and grab my short swords, and then we need to find Prince Avalask to tell him about the kids.”
“Sure, but it’ll probably be several half-minutes before she even hears me talking to her,” Corliss said with a smirk. Karissa missed the joke, as she was too absorbed telling wide-eyed Ebby the order in which her book really should have been written.
I headed out the doors and straight for my room, trying to conjure feelings of loss and sadness about another death among the people I cared about. But they weren’t coming. It was cruel, the way the world had turned all my friends into strangers.
I reached the hall of doors, and fury leapt into my throat when I realized my short swords were no longer propped against the wall where I’d left them. Whoever thought this was a funny prank was about to meet their end. There are some things you just don’t touch.
I almost stormed back to the group in outrage, but thought twice and realized one of them may have just moved my possessions inside for me. I pushed my door open and shrieked in surprise at the sight of my short swords in the hands of Sav, sitting on my trunk, casually sharpening them.
Chapter Seventeen
Allie
I flung the door back shut like I’d just stuck my hand in a nest of spiders, and I shriveled back against the wall, glancing both ways down the corridor, ready to make my escape.
I heard a dark chuckle resonate through the tunnel, but absolutely couldn’t tell from which direction it’d come. It had to be Gat. He must be waiting to give chase when I ran, and I would rather take my chances with Sav.
I threw the door back open and demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”
Sav tilted his head sharply and said, “You must have a death wish, talking to me like that.”
I was tempted to throw a hand over my eyes and admit that yes, I must.
“Why are you here?”
Sav looked me up and down in a way that made me shudder, like he was taking measurements for my coffin. “Please, have a seat,” he said, motioning toward my hammock, dangerously close to him. “I think you’ve forgotten who owns these caves.”
“You’re not king yet, Sav.”
“You speak the truth, but since my father was killed in the Dincaran spire explosion, there’s no longer any doubt that I’m next in line. It’s about time you showed some respect.”
Several lethal looking etching tools lay next to Sav while he carved a design into the face of a short sword. My short sword.
“Believe it or not, I’m here to offer you assistance,” he said.
I peered skeptically. “No. You’re not.”
Sav shrugged and then dug the sharp engraving tool into the steel face of my blade, as though content to not tell me if I didn’t want to hear it.
“What’s the offer?” I asked.
“I’d like to help return Ebby to Sir Avery.”
I snorted with disbelief and asked, “Her wellbeing is suddenly of importance to you?”
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said, his full focus on carving the next swirl in my blade. “We both know I’d like to put her in the ground, but I can’t with my brother protecting her, and she’s turning our new Epic into a sympathetic fool. I can’t let this continue.”
“No… something’s missing,” I said. “You should be plotting to kill her, not to help her escape.”
Sav glanced up at me with his wicked grin. “You are one of the more intelligent Tallies,” he said, adding a casual shrug as he switched tools and began to deepen his lines. “The simple truth is that I’m patient. We have an old family tradition w
here kings make the decisions, and the Epics execute them.” He lingered on the word execute, and I hardened my gaze to hide how his words chilled me. “When power passes to me, I can send Vack after her. But it’s important to me that Vack not become a soft little flower in the meantime. His father is trying to ruin him.”
“And how are you going to help me return her to Sir Avery?” I asked.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of interaction spells. Every member of our family has one to keep us safe, but give Sir Avery this. I need to speak to him.” Sav lifted an envelope wrapped in what looked like silver spider webs. “It includes a time and a place for him to meet me so I can introduce myself. And if you open it, lose it somewhere, or let it fall into the wrong hands, I will see to it that every Tally in these caves is violently tortured and killed for it. You understand me?”
I reached and took the message from him, nearly laughing at the fact I was becoming Sir Avery’s personal secretary. Sav’s threat rolled off my back. I believed him, but I believed he would try to do exactly that, whether this letter reached Sir Avery or not.
“Out of curiosity, Sav… If you ever do become king, does peace even interest you? At all?”
To his credit, Sav did pause to consider before he said, “Mankind doesn’t deserve to exist after all they’ve done. Some acts can never be forgiven.” I frowned, and he added, “You can go now. I’ll be finished with this shortly.”
“What happened?” I asked as he returned to his engraving, the eerie squeak of metal on metal sending a shiver across my shoulders. “The entire Human race can’t have done you wrong, Sav.”
Sav jerked his head up to look at me with sudden realization. “Your Tally friend hasn’t told you, has he?” I froze and tried keep my expression hard as disbelief lit Sav’s eyes. “He’s letting you run around and take care of him, and he hasn’t told you who he is?”
I heaved a heavy sigh through my nostrils because I was truly the last person alive to know Archie’s secret.
“You probably just think I was born hating Humans, don’t you? You have no idea how hard they worked to earn this,” Sav said, pointing my blade at me as I scoured the room for a weapon not already in his hands. I had a knife in the laces of my sandal, but nothing else. “I might have been able to move on after seeing my mother murdered. I like to think of myself as an understanding man. I may have been able to forgive Humans for killing her in front of my five-year-old self, given enough time. I was almost killed as a kid too — would have been, if Gataan hadn’t saved me from the three men drowning me in a pond. I like to think I could have gotten over that too. But my sister...”
Sav narrowed his eyes, thinking of something outside this room and outside this time, where anger tore at him with claws I knew too well.
“I’ve heard of her,” I said, keeping my voice as flat as possible, afraid he might lash out like any wounded animal. I’d actually just heard of her, when Ebby’s thoughts had wandered to the royal family’s curse. “People called her the Golden Princess.”
“Whatever you’ve heard of Glidria was wrong.” Sav slammed the etching tool onto the trunk beside him, nearly causing me to scramble back. “You’ve probably heard she was beautiful, but you have never known the meaning of the word. You’ve probably heard that her hair gleamed brighter than gold, or that she fought with unmatched grace, but nobody knows how she took care of us. They can never know how many hours she spent teaching Gataan to fight, teaching me to read, cooking dinner every night and demanding that we all sit together to eat it. She and Avalask were much older than us, but even after she married, she still ate dinner with us every night. The four of us were powerfully close.”
“I know what happened to her,” I whispered, my calm becoming more and more forced.
Sav repeated, “Whatever you’ve heard about her capture was wrong.” He moved to the edge of the trunk, perched to spring. “Avalask, Gataan, and I were frantic when she was taken, and our world erupted with the kind of outrage that turns into an army overnight. Every Escali alive came together to help rescue her, yet it still took us an entire month to get her out of Human hands.”
“And she had gotten sick during her capture,” I said, wanting to end his story quickly so I could put distance between us. “I still don’t see what this has to do with Arch—”
Sav stood very suddenly, which sent me nearly into the hallway in my startle. “To say she was sick,” Sav’s words caught in his throat, as he took a step toward me, “is the most disgusting perversion of truth in history. That disease she picked up killed her when it crawled out of her nine months later.”
And those words struck me like a bolt of my own destruction. She must have had a Tally, one with her beautiful golden hair.
Sav took another step toward me, teeth bared. “And past that, her only living daughter grabbed the creature before it could be dealt with, named it, and then disappeared with monster in hand, never to be seen again.” Another step closer. “But you know which part was truly the most hideous insult to the Escali race? We could have eradicated mankind that afternoon. Every Escali alive would have joined together to do it if they’d known what killed her. And instead, Izfazara ordered her abuse and murder a secret. Our own uncle ruined our chance to avenge her, and still to this day, that truth remains buried.”
Sav was within two steps of me, and his eyes bored straight through me, making it almost impossible to draw a breath.
“Sav...” I whispered, gathering my wit. “How... How can you possibly blame Archie for this? None of us chose our parents. It’s not his fault—”
“I think you’re missing everything important in this story,” he breathed as I stepped back into the tunnel, only stopping when my back pressed against the opposite wall. “I’ve continued existing for one purpose, Tally, and that is to bring justice to the most disgusting crime of our age and avenge my beautiful sister’s death.”
“But what will that take? Is watching Archie die going to fix anything?”
Sav regarded me for a moment of disbelief before he threw his head back in vicious laughter.
“You think I’ve spent all these years plotting his death? No, when I become king, everybody will discover what happened to their beloved princess.” Sav closed the remaining distance between us and towered over me. “Killing your friend would be easy. I would rather account for the grief that crippled every Escali on the day he was born. An entire race cried for the loss of my sister, and your friend can only make up for that by grieving over the loss of the entire Human race. I will not let him die until he watches every building burn and every child rot unburied in the fields. And lastly, Tally, after you’ve served your purpose, your time will come.”
Sav pinched a strand of my hair between his fingers and tucked it behind my ear, making me want to throw up, cry, collapse, and run, a chaos that kept me rooted to the spot in horror as he leaned forward to whisper, “So grow closer to him. Because there will come a day when you are the only hope he has left, and I want him to have to hold you the way I held Glidria in her last minutes, watching your chest rise and fall without knowing which will be the last.”
Sav and I were both startled by a snarling commotion, further down the hallway.
“Sounds like Gataan found your friends,” Sav said as a shriek echoed off the stone.
I glanced at Sav before dashing from reach, straight toward the raucous snarls and swearing. I got there just in time to see Gat throw Emery into Karissa with a sharp yelp before she vanished.
Robbiel darted around Gat to keep him from pursuing Emery and Karissa, landing punches and kicks to the knees, ribs, and every exposed part of the larger Escali, infuriating him.
Emery got back to his feet with a snarl as Gat managed to grab a piece of Robbiel’s clothing, taking the opportunity to tackle and flatten him. Emery had blood all over his back, but that didn’t prevent him from jumping onto Gat to bite him and try to pull him off by his snarl of a pony tail.
The second I rea
lized Gat was trying to get his teeth around Robbiel’s throat, I ran at him too, lightning in my hands. “Get off, get off, get off!” I warned, mostly to Emery, even though I knew he wasn’t going anywhere. I threw my hands around Gat’s neck and released a crackling, explosive current of destruction. Emery, Gat, and Robbiel screamed as I shocked the fighting spirit out of all three and immediately shoved my shoulder into Gat to roll him off. His jerkin bunched up near the shoulders where Karissa had also grabbed to help drag him.
Everybody who’d been hit groaned in pain, but Gat was nearly back to his feet when Sav came in behind me and said, “We were just leaving.”
Emery rolled into a ball on his side in agony, but still managed to say through gritted teeth, “You were never welcome.”
Gat got strenuously to his feet and growled, “Let me finish this.”
“Another day,” Sav replied, looking pointedly at each of us. “This won’t be forgotten.”
I didn’t think Gat was going to be able to walk away from the fight, but he surprised me with each step. His grumbled argument with Sav echoed faintly as they retreated into the distance.
“I’m so sorry,” I said as Emery curled in tighter and wrapped his arms around his head.
“Thank you,” Robbiel said, also on the ground, clutching at his throat, double checking it was present.
Karissa reappeared, looking positively giddy. “There’s blood everywhere!” she exclaimed. “Do you know what this means?”
Emery scrambled to get his bloody back to the wall. “Absolutely not. I’m fine!”
Robbiel pulled himself to his knees, took a moment to collect himself, and leaned in to see the back of Emery’s bloody shoulder. “You may actually want to let us take a look at it,” Robbiel said. “He got his teeth in pretty deep.”
Emery stumbled to his feet to get away from them, but Karissa got right in his way as Robbiel slowly stood. “I’m not one of your rescued animals,” Emery growled at Robbiel. He turned to Karissa. “And you are a demon. The two of you need to stay away from me.”
Emery brought a bright flash of flames into his hands as they closed in, and he said, “Oh, I will shanking murder you both.”