by S. M. Boyce
He was at most a few years older than her but in much better shape, with broad shoulders and toned arms. Though his clothes were torn, there weren’t any scratches or cuts on his skin. He caught her eye and cocked an eyebrow, and it was then that she realized her uncontrollable breath came in quick, shallow bursts. She was hyperventilating.
“Hey,” he muttered. “Calm down. You’ll be fine.”
“Like hell!” She stared out at the throngs of soldiers marching, steam oozing from their pores. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“Relax. We might not. Look at me.”
She glared at him, fitful butterflies dancing a tarantella in her gut.
“Good. Tell me your name.”
“Kara. Yours?”
“Braeden. I don’t mean to be rude, Miss Kara, but what are you even doing here?”
“I was hiking! And then there was this door, and these roots—”
“Wait,” he interrupted, his eyes flitting once over her. “You’re not a yakona? What are you?”
“I’m human! And you’re what, an elf? Are you a yakona?”
He chuckled, but the laugh didn’t make it past the thin wrinkle at the corner of his mouth. He shifted his weight without answering and brushed her leg with his boot.
“Sleep. You’ll need your energy.”
“I couldn’t possibly—” She yawned and rubbed her face.
A sudden rush of exhaustion swept from her toe to her head, as if his touch had summoned it. She leaned into the bars. Her breathing slowed, and she heard him mutter something as she pressed her cheek into the iron. She slept.
A beam of light broke through the corner of Kara’s eye. Her skin prickled with cold, and bits of ice stuck to the ends of her eyelashes. She shivered, and her body swayed, but the cold metal of a rod against her face kept her from falling over in her half-asleep stupor. It was almost like she was still in that cage.
She jolted awake.
A snowcapped dirt road faded into trees behind her, visible through the thick bars of the jail. A white blanket coated the forest to her right as the hot wisps of her breath froze on the air. She shivered.
Her cellmate remained curled in his corner. Behind him, the road dropped off in a sheer cliff shrouded by the fog of a low cloud. The gorge was hundreds of feet deep, its floor masked by a black mist that convulsed and spun. Giant shadows with no shape sped through the haze, churning it.
Braeden stirred, shifting his weight in his sleep. Dark smudges lined his jaw and neck, and he wore a green tunic with dark pants. His clothes definitely weren’t something Kara could find at the mall.
The cage rocked and thudded. The wheels clattered over cobblestone. They passed a tall gate, and its broad doors shut behind them. More gray-skinned men walked along a battlement above the gate, shouting to each other.
Crowded black buildings dotted the edges of the new road, each a dozen stories tall and squished beside its neighbors. Frost sprawled across every window.
Braeden shifted away from her so that, for the first time, she could see his hands. Thick metal shackles dug into his bruised wrists. Trails of a black liquid coursed over the handcuffs, dripping from his fingers onto the wooden floor of their prison.
Something rustled in the far corner. She spun around, but instead of a gray soldier or the brunette woman, she saw only a small white fox. The little creature leaned against the bars and cocked its head, eyeing her as its giant ears flicked around to absorb the trolls’ hulking movements.
The fox trotted over and sniffed the torn hem of her jeans before looking up with its striking blue eyes. She reached out with her bound hands and gently scratched its chin. It hummed with pleasure. Kara grinned.
“At least not everything here is scary,” she said.
The little fox popped its eyes open and stared at her for a moment before it changed shape. Its fur melted away into the wet scales of a red lizard with a single black stripe running down its spine. Kara yelped as the fox-now-lizard creature scurried over the wood and out of sight. She covered her face with her hands and cursed beneath her breath.
She stifled a sob. “I want to go home.”
“Ourea isn’t the sort of place you can leave. It always drags you back,” Braeden mumbled, awake now.
“More comforting words of wisdom?” she asked, peering through her fingers to catch his bruised and battered gaze.
“No. You hardly seemed fond of that.” He stretched his fingers out behind him, and drops of the black liquid fell faster from around the cuffs as he moved.
“What’s wrong with your hands?”
“These shackles have poisoned spikes.”
She whistled. “Wow. Can I do anything to help?”
“No, but thank you.”
“Is that black stuff the poison?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Is that a yes?”
Braeden frowned. “It’s my blood.”
“Wait, your blood is black?”
Well, it wasn’t the weirdest thing she’d seen in the last twenty four hours. She had yet to recover from those stupid roots and the book that turned its own pages.
“You know, blood is kind of important, Braeden. It’s not usually a poisonous thing.”
“It’s a long story.”
She gestured at the cage. “I’m not exactly going anywhere.”
“I think everything will become painfully obvious if we are headed for the same place, which I hope we aren’t.” His expression darkened, his eyebrows casting a shadow over his eyes. He looked up at her, and a chill crept down her neck.
“Wow. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, too. To think, I was going to take those cuffs off you.” She leaned against the cell wall as they took another bend in the road.
“As kind an offer as that is, only the person who put them on can take them off. And I meant only that you will not want to go where I’m being taken.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”
He shrugged and stared at the floorboards. “I’ve been running from Carden for a long time. I always wondered when he’d catch up to me.”
“Who’s Carden?”
He glanced past her. “I think you’re about to find out.”
Deirdre appeared at the end of the cage. “All right, kiddies, we’re home.”
The prison skidded to a stop. Its back doors swung open on their own, slamming against the metal bars with a bang. Several gray guards climbed in and grabbed her arms and waist with sweaty hands, pulling her to her feet before she even had a chance to stand. Her cellmate stifled several sharp cries of pain from behind her as other soldiers shoved him forward as well.
The guards steered her out of the cage and toward a flight of steps that led to the main doors of a castle. Black spires and spiked battlements soared on either side of the palace, stabbing the overcast sky while mountains and a dark forest crowded the horizon.
The soldiers cleared a path so that Deirdre could lead the procession into the castle. Guards hurried Braeden through after the brunette, but he didn’t resist. He watched the floor, furrowed creases distorting the skin around his eyes.
A guard’s grip tightened around Kara’s arm, and his breath tickled her neck, making her shudder. He laughed and forced her through the doorway into a throne room teeming with hooded figures and gray faces.
Black marble layered the walls and floor. Thick, evenly-spaced columns dotted the vast hall and supported a giant stained glass dome above, which cast red and gray light across the throngs of monsters below.
The crowd had been jeering and laughing when the doors opened, but the room hushed when they saw Braeden. Bodies parted to give him a clear path through to the end of the hall, and Kara caught her breath. Hundreds of tall, gray-skinned men and women filled the room, their faces twisted in snarls, but they were outnumbered by creatures that were even more frightening. Centaurs reared to better vantage points, kicking others in the head as they did. Several hairy minotaurs snorted, s
not dripping from their noses as they gazed at the procession without blinking. Wolves howled from some unseen place.
Three black marble thrones sat on a raised platform at the end of the room, growing ever-nearer as Kara’s silent convoy walked closer. Another gray-skinned man sat in the center throne but stood as the crowd parted. He was even taller than the soldier who had examined her back in the cave, his skin a deeper charcoal color than the rest. He sneered.
When they were close enough, the soldier’s grip on her arm tightened. He kicked the back of her knee, forcing her to the tile floor. She winced and glared at the man by the thrones, but he was smirking at Braeden and apparently uninterested in her pain.
“It has been too long, son,” he said, beginning down the platform’s steps.
Kara couldn’t place his accent. He drew out his vowels and overly enunciated his consonants, as if pausing to adore the sound of his own voice.
She looked at the gray man and turned back to Braeden. Their jaws were both square, their hair dark, but Braeden’s olive skin tone contrasted starkly from his father’s ashen complexion.
“Now look. The human is confused.” The man turned to Kara, and the edge to his voice made her skin crawl.
“Stop, Carden,” Braeden said, gritting his teeth. Something clicked in her mind, and she thought back to their short conversation in the mobile prison: Braeden had been running from his own father.
Carden crossed his arms. “Why are you not in your natural form, boy? You look hideous.”
“No.” Braeden shook his head. “Never again. Not willingly.”
“Unwillingly, then.”
Carden grabbed the crown of his son’s head. A gray light rippled across Braeden’s skin, and his body convulsed, the skin fading from its olive tone to the same charcoal gray color as his father’s. The green shirt tightened as he grew taller, and smoke poured from the rips in his clothes. Kara gasped.
Carden laughed and released his son’s head, allowing Braeden’s skin to fade back to the olive hue she recognized. Braeden caught her eye with a sharp glare before shaking his head and returning his gaze to the floor.
“Welcome home, boy!” Carden’s voice boomed.
“I don’t want this!” Braeden’s voice echoed over his father’s and commanded the hall’s attention. “All I want is to be left alone. I won’t get in your way. I never have.”
“You haven’t yet, no. But when I couldn’t produce another Heir with the bloodline, I realized you weren’t dead. You have a duty to your people to help me turn the tides of this world. Our banishment will end in my lifetime, and I must have an Heir to follow me. You don’t have a choice.”
Kara glanced from the king to the prince chained at his feet before she turned to look at the plethora of monsters in the towering throne room. Not only was he a prince, but he could change shape to look like the gray-skinned creatures all around her. She shook her head and shivered. She was in deep.
“Why is the human here, isen?” Carden asked.
Icy panic raced through Kara’s chest, but was made worse when she realized exactly what Carden had said. He’d called Deidre an isen, so—according to the letter Kara read back in the library—Deirdre could steal souls. She could’ve stolen Kara’s soul, but had instead brought her here. Why?
“She’s a present.” Deirdre grinned and pulled Kara to her feet.
Carden frowned. “She is too thin.”
The isen chuckled. “Not that sort of present. This is the Vagabond.”
Carden paused, but burst into laughter shortly thereafter. He wiped a gleeful tear from his eye. Kara twisted her arm in the brunette’s grip, but the movement stung the bruises already there from her fall in the dirt room.
The king studied her, and his smile faded. “What is that around her neck?”
She followed his gaze, and a pang of regret made her swallow hard. The completely visible clover pendant hung next to her locket, its diamond still glowing blue.
Without moving from his place on the steps, the king reached for the necklace. The pendant hovered in the air and floated in front of her eyes.
He grinned. “I stand corrected. This is remarkable.”
Carden walked down the final steps by his throne to stand in front of her, and she craned her neck to see his face. He seized the pendant in his thick fingers, but her hands rose to meet his in reflex.
A wave of heat coursed through her at his touch, much like it had when Deirdre grabbed her in the library. It shot through her veins, making her fingertips pulse. A spark cracked in the air between them, and Carden flew backward into his chair on the platform.
The hall was silent. Her eyes widened. She couldn’t breathe. After all, throwing an evil king across the room had to be one of the easiest ways to die. A familiar thought tugged at her mind, but she pushed it away again to focus on the moment. The heat still circulated in her veins, though it was quickly dissolving once more into panic.
Carden snickered, his laughter ringing in a higher pitch than before. The bellow coursed through the crowd of monsters as they followed suit.
“Brilliant! A human who can use magic! She is the Vagabond after all. Have a seat, my dear,” he said, gesturing to the throne at his left. “I am afraid that it has been largely unused by the Queen for some time.”
He shot a look to Braeden, who glared back.
“That’s really nice and everything,” she said, her heart pounding too loudly for her to hear her own voice. “But I just want to go home.”
“To your family?”
“Yes.”
“I would rather they join us here, if that is your only reason for leaving. We are quite entertaining. Deirdre will even find them for you. Simply tell her where they are.”
The isen smirked. Kara wasn’t getting out of this.
“Now, sit,” Carden commanded.
Kara tried to devise a more eloquent argument, but Deirdre grabbed her arm. Before she could resist, or speak, or even look over, the isen dragged her to the throne and flung her into the stone seat. Kara’s back was tender from the impact, a massive bruise no doubt already forming on the space between her shoulder blades.
A quick glance around the room confirmed her fears: each of the monsters in the hall watched her. Everyone knew, now, what she was, despite how the letter had warned her to be careful. Even Braeden studied her with a calculating expression. He glared at her, his stare intense and unbroken until his father commanded his attention again. She took a shaky breath and saw the red lizard from earlier dart through a few soldiers’ legs. It crawled along the floor, squirming and slithering closer to her seat.
She finally let herself listen to the nagging thought which had been floating around the back of her mind since she’d opened the Grimoire:
She wasn’t going to survive this.
The Stele
Braeden eyed Kara as she sat in his mother’s old throne, but he winced and looked away when the spikes jostled in his wrists. The poison circulating through his blood had already scarred every vein. Even when he did get the cuffs off, he would not be able to think straight until he healed.
His knees ached from the chilly marble, so he shifted his weight to ease the searing pain. A spike dug deeper and tapped his bone. He bit his cheek to keep from screaming and hunched his shoulders. In the floor’s reflection, Carden flourished his hands and lectured about duty and obligation, but Braeden tuned him out.
A red lizard darted toward Kara. The new Vagabond stared at the crowded hall, her grip tight on the stone and her knuckles white. She didn’t move. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.
Another flash of color captured his waning attention span as a second, green lizard scuttled behind Carden’s throne. It slithered around the other side and paused, its beady eyes glistening as it looked out over the room.
“It’s time for you to embrace what you really are!” Carden said, loud enough now to catch Braeden’s attention. “Our kind was eternally banished for a failed
coup thousands and thousands of years ago. We are still hunted by the other kingdoms, forbidden to travel through Ourea as they do, out of punishment for an act we did not commit! Did your twelve years with the enemy make you forget your own heritage?”
Braeden could only shake his head.
“I taught you what it means to rule, boy. I built the foundation that made you what you are today. I taught you how to do what must be done to protect your people.”
Braeden glared up at the king. “Is that why you killed Mother?”
“None betray me, not even those I love,” Carden said, so quietly that Braeden had to strain to hear him.