“And the others?”
Zoran sighed. “The Prince of Lust drank deep of the potion, but went off to his room as soon as he finished eating and bolted the door from the inside. Paranoid, I suppose.” He cast a disdainful look at Ace, lying spread-eagle on his bed. “This one was not so cautious, and that is good.”
“He has the key to my shackles in his pouch,” Malin said, shrugging off the soft woolen blanket Ace had wrapped so gently around her shivering body. “Hurry. Bring it to me.”
Zoran did as she asked, returning with the entire pouch. Malin dug out the key he had used before—the bag was stuffed to the gills with other keys and myriad oddly shaped metal parts clearly of Ace’s making. Suppressing the urge to gather them in her hands, to hold each one up and turn it under the light to examine every curve and angle, she freed herself and rose. Zoran had found a sharp steel file in a box of tools next to the work table, and both of them approached the sleeping Prince of Sloth.
“Shall I kill him, or do you want to do the honors in return for whatever he might have done to you?” asked Zoran.
Malin let out a shuddering breath and took the long, razor-edged file from her comrade. “I’ll do it. Stand guard in the corridor. I’ll be out once it’s done.”
Zoran paused, giving her a look. “You do not have experience with killing. Are you sure …?”
“I am completely sure.” She held up the file. “I will repay Prince Ace in the way he deserves.”
“Hurry. We have much to do.”
Malin gave him a quick nod and watched Zoran stride for the door. Then she bit her lip and leaned over Ace. She stroked the smooth planes of his face. Whoever had designed him had done so with devastating efficiency, as if that deity or demon had known exactly how to unlock all the soft, vulnerable places in Malin’s heart. She laid her forehead on his. She pressed her palm to his chest and felt his heart, strong and steady. She smiled as she looked over his brow, slightly furrowed as if he were puzzling over a calculation, and his hair, messy from the way he dragged his hand through it when frustrated. “In another life,” she whispered.
She stepped back from him quickly and lifted the sleeve of her shirt, then sliced the file across her own forearm. It was a shallow wound but bled readily, and Malin quickly knotted a strip of cloth around it, torn from the prince’s bedsheets. When she was done, she pulled her sleeve down, allowed herself to look at Ace one last time, grabbed the file, and jogged for the door.
When she reached the hallway and found Zoran waiting, she held up the file, blood dripping from its edge. “It’s done.”
Zoran smiled. “One down …”
“Let’s go. The Prince of War and his Keeper could return at any moment, and both are deadly.”
Zoran gestured down the staircase. “I caught a glimpse of the control room as I was led to the servant quarters. Saana will meet us there.”
Malin followed him down the steps, along a maze of hallways, past a balcony that looked out on the main hall, which held at its center a massive tree with golden leaves, the kind she had heard tale of as a child, one that called to her, that asked for a long look when she had no time to offer it. Wrenching herself from the view, she trailed Zoran through a banquet room where several nobles lay, their throats slit, blood dripping onto half-eaten food. Fae servants slept next to their masters, also undone by the potent drink. They’d been left alive and untouched, but couldn’t be trusted not to help the vampires, no doubt. Saana was the best at her craft, and these stupid demons had grossly underestimated the newly captured slaves, too arrogant to even consider that the three of them had come to this place with the express purpose of bringing about the downfall of the Princes. Maybe this would work.
Zoran led Malin down another flight of stairs, the air growing cooler as they descended. When they reached the lower floor, Zoran took one turn, then another along the torchlit way. They encountered no one except dead guards. Malin could hear a clanking sound that grew louder the farther they went, and finally Zoran turned left, into a dank chamber.
Malin gasped. In front of her was a massive metal creature, wheels with teeth hooked into other wheels with teeth that could help each other turn, metal beams connected to those, descending down into darkness beyond her view. Saana, who had been standing just inside, scowled at it. “We think this is it, but we do not know how to make it move.”
“I don’t know what else it could be,” said Malin.
“I thought it would be bigger,” said Zoran. “The gates are five times the height of this room, and they must be hundreds of times heavier. These wheels are big, but the gates are bigger.”
Malin smiled as she examined the machinery in front of her. She was fairly sure she knew who had designed this iron animal. “If you have levers and gears to transfer strength, you do not need such massive controls.”
“But the gates are a league away. How can this thing really open something that far from the castle?”
“There must be machinery underground, and more of these toothed wheels at the gates. If we find …” Malin looked around. There was some sort of stick rising from two wheels in the corner that seemed to be lying on their sides, and next to that a crank. “The controls. It must be one of these.”
Saana grabbed the stick and shook it, causing it to make a loud clanking noise, but despite that, it barely moved. Then she tried to turn the wheel with the same results. “I’ve already tried.”
“Let me,” said Malin, approaching it as Saana moved out of the way.
Zoran, standing nearest to the hallway, leaned out. “I think I hear something. The Prince of War may be returning.”
“We’re dead,” said Saana, though she didn’t look particularly upset about it. Instead, she drew a carving knife from beneath her tunic, the blade already stained with blood. “But I will take the Prince of War with me.”
“Don’t go running off quite yet,” said Malin, who was now squatting next to the controls.
“Malin’s already killed the Prince of Sloth,” said Zoran. “Quite a prize for a first kill.”
“That prince was no prize,” Saana said with a laugh. “He seemed like an addled bird to me.”
“He’s a genius,” Malin snapped, then cleared her throat. “Or, he was, until I killed him. And we need to warn Ekan—because that addled bird has created a weapon that could cut us down by the dozens in one blow.”
“I definitely hear movement up there. We either get out now, or we don’t,” said Zoran. “Do we open the gate, or escape to warn Ekan?”
Malin smiled as she examined the elegant genius of the gates. But as she thought about what she was about to do, her grin melted off her face. “Perhaps we should get out—once Ekan’s fighters are inside the gates of this realm, they are more vulnerable, and until we develop a defense against that weapon, we are facing almost certain defeat,” she told her fellow rebels. “We’ve been inside this castle now. We’ve seen how well armed they are.”
“Exactly,” said Saana, her eyes fierce and glittering in the dim light from the corridor. “When Ekan overruns this palace, he will have a store of weapons to use as he invades the other realms.”
Zoran peered at them from the doorway, looking troubled. “This was meant be our launching point. Our entire strategy relies on taking this palace.”
“Besides,” Saana added, her voice full of disdain. “The guards are soft. The nobles softer.”
“My guess is they’ll be ready for a fight once Fenris Vane realizes what we’ve done,” said Malin. “Yula extract won’t work more than once.” She suspected the famed Kal’Halen would make sure of it.
“Enough,” Saana snapped, brandishing her carving knife. “Ekan told me you might try to sow doubt in our minds. He only sent you for this task of opening the gates, and if he could have sent someone else, he would have. He told me that for all your reputed cleverness, you do not have sufficient courage, and I see he is right.” She jabbed the blade toward the controls as she glared at Mali
n. “So I will help you complete this mission. Do your part, or I will gut you right here!”
Malin’s gaze had been pulling apart the design of the control casing while they argued, imagining it sketched with charcoal on parchment in a hand shaky with the joy of invention. “I will do my part,” she said grimly. “But for the sake of all our brothers and sisters, we must warn Ekan.”
“Very well. Just do it!”
Malin slid her hand between the lever and its toothed wheel and pulled out the grooved pin that had been holding it fixed. She then pulled out another two pins to free the crank. Saana immediately leaned forward and pulled on the crank, then growled when it remained stuck. “It didn’t work!”
“Calm down,” said Malin. “This was designed to require deliberate decision-making, not impulsive action.”
Saana rolled her eyes.
Malin spent a few moments on the puzzle of the pins, finally lining up their grooves just so, and they clicked together to form one sturdy key. As Saana stood over her, grumbling to hurry up, Malin pushed the key into the keyhole that had been set into the top of the casing for the lever. Stomping down a terrible sense of foreboding, she pulled the lever, then began to turn the crank.
The giant wheels slid into motion, rumbling along each other, teeth catching, each one moving its neighbor to action. She spun the crank again and again while keeping the lever canted all the way to the right.
“Someone’s coming down the steps,” Zoran said. “They must hear these wheels. They’ll know what we’re doing.”
“Go stop them,” Saana replied. “She’s almost done.” She reached forward and clutched Zoran’s arm. “Die well, brother.”
“Tell Ekan I defended our tribe to the end.” And with that, Zoran ran off in the direction of the noise. Malin watched him go with a feeling of hollowness in her gut. Zoran would not be the only Fae casualty of this rebellion if Ekan proceeded with his battle plan.
The wheels were turning with frightening speed now. If one were to get pulled into their jaws, she’d be crushed in an instant. A shudder rolled up Malin’s arm as the crank stopped abruptly and the wheels ground to a halt. “I think it’s done,” she said to Saana. “The gates will be wide open soon if I’m right.”
“Now we run,” said her comrade.
Even as Saana tugged at her sleeve, Malin knelt next to the controls with Ace’s sharp file and did the only thing she could think of to give her people an escape route.
Together, the two women ran down the hall in the opposite direction Zoran had, because they could hear fighting on those stairs. “If they reach the control room, nothing will stop them from closing the gates again,” Saana said.
“Wrong,” said Malin, panting as they pushed through a door and found themselves in a hay-lined passageway that led to a narrow path along the side of the mountain into which the palace had been built, with the moonlight revealing a sheer drop on the other side. She clung to the rocks and skittered along as fast as she could.
“Halt,” shouted a male voice, and the women turned to see a solider step onto the path, torch in one hand and sword in the other.
“Go!” shrieked Saana, shoving Malin toward freedom. “Warn Ekan of this weapon and do not fail.” Then she turned to face the soldier.
Her heart racing, Malin did as she was told. Her eyes stung and her hands were almost numb with cold. The light from the castle looming above her faded, leaving her with only stars and moon to guide her steps. Behind her, she could hear a struggle, grunts and the clash of metal on metal. Then she heard a scream and the unmistakable thuds of a body tumbling down the mountainside.
Saana.
Malin whimpered as footsteps crunched far behind her. Her limbs moved automatically, fueled by will and desperation. She reached a place where the trail widened and ran for all she was worth, heaving a sigh of relief as the path turned and opened onto a village roadway. She couldn’t believe her luck—she had escaped the fortress of Stonehill! Now she just had to keep going. Her feet sloshed along a muddy alley. Beyond this scattering of thatched homes, she could hear soldiers shouting, assembling, probably trying to figure out what had happened.
She had to get out of this place before they closed the city gates. With that knowledge branded into her brain, she spent a moment hiding in the shadows outside what appeared to be a pub. Horses were tethered to a rail just outside it. As soon as one of the villagers tied his horse and stomped up the steps and into the pub, Malin charged forward. She used the file to cut its rope, swung herself into the saddle, and she was off, leaning over the mount and kicking its flanks.
She waved as she flew past the startled villager manning the gate, knowing that in a minute or two, soldiers would arrive with an order to close it. She could only hope that Zoran and Saana had not given their lives in vain. It was up to her to make sure they hadn’t.
In the darkness of the forest, she steered by the stars, only visible as she rode through occasional clearings. She pushed away thoughts of Ace and how he would feel when he discovered what she’d done. The wound on her forearm itched and ached, reminding her of her decision to spare him, which might have been her biggest mistake of all. Ace was more dangerous than all of the other vampire princes if he wanted to be—in his mind he held the keys to the decimation of the Fae, and this attack might have given him every reason to use them. She pushed away the fear that Ace would use the weapon on her even as she fled.
She had no idea what exactly the range of the thing was, but she had seen by its construction what it was meant to do—to hurl heavy objects incredible distances. And she had seen what it was meant to hurl—large metal balls filled to bursting with evil iron barbs, each one the size of her fist. She knew what would happen when one of those balls hit the ground, too, as surely as if she had already witnessed it—they would shatter, sending the barbs flying. They would tear anything around them to pieces, flesh, bone, men, women, horses, tents, carts, supplies. They would rain hideous death on any soul nearby. The weapon wouldn’t care who it destroyed. It was a sightless killer, like a plague or a fire, a force of nature that was wholly unnatural.
Imagining what would happen to her tribe if that thing were unleashed, she urged the horse onward, until she saw a flash of fire ahead that revealed a hooded man stepping onto the road, a bow in his hand, an arrow already nocked. Her heart seized in her chest. All she had to defend herself with was the file. And her brain, if she could manage to use it.
She reined in the horse to slow its pace, but as she approached, she let out a cry of relief. The man had a short beard, distinctly copper in tint. “Ekan!”
Her brother grinned and lowered the bow as she dismounted and ran toward him. He threw his hood back, revealing his bright blue eyes. “Sister! Where are the others?”
“Gone,” Malin said, her throat tight. “They gave their lives to the effort.”
Ekan nodded. “In truth, I’m surprised to see you alive.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
He waved away a hurt that had been years in the making. “I don’t have time to bicker with you, and I had hoped that this mission would bring you around to my way of thinking.”
As they stood on the road, others had warily crept from the woods, dozens of Fae rebels loyal to Ekan, surrounding them, watching the road in either direction.
Ekan swept his arm toward his fighters. “But obviously you opened the gate,” he said to Malin. “I was right to have faith in you.”
“Yes,” she said, still panting from the effort of the last few hours. “And that faith requires you to listen to me now. I have come to believe that an immediate invasion is not a wise course. A different strategy is called for, and right now we should turn back.”
The smile disappeared from Ekan’s face as he glanced at the other Fae around them. “You do not think this is wise?” He let out a dry chuckle. “Do you believe that just because you opened the gate, you should be in charge?”
Her stomach went tight. This w
as the Ekan she knew, the one who first cajoled and then scared people into carrying out his will. But this was worth the risk of angering him. “We are walking into a trap, I believe. The vampires have a weapon.”
“And we have many, along with the strength of will to see this fight through to the end,” Ekan said, and several of the Fae held up their bows. “We will rain arrows on their village and then the palace. More of us are coming even now—we are the vanguard, but I have a second group, hundreds in number, who are preparing to march through the gates.”
“It won’t be hundreds in number if the Prince of War unleashes his new toy. You must listen!” Malin turned in place, looking into the eyes of people she had known all her life, men and women she’d foraged with, hunted with, laughed and cried with. “We don’t have to do this,” she shouted. “We can pursue peace, or at the very least, a more careful strategy! We can—”
The blow across her back was so sharp that it knocked her to the ground and stole her breath. Malin coughed, on hands and knees, gasping with surprise. Ekan grabbed her braid and wrenched her head up, and she found herself looking into a face rigid with fury. “I lead this tribe,” he said from between clenched teeth. “You are a tool for me to use, and nothing more.”
Malin couldn’t move her head, but her eyes scanned the Fae surrounding them. Their faces were impassive, their eyes somber. They knew Ekan and how he ruled, and they were scared of him, she knew. Scared he would turn on them, banish them. “You are a tyrant,” she whispered. “And you will be responsible for all our deaths. You are no better than the vampires. In fact, you’re worse.”
Her brother’s eyes flashed with rage as he raised his fist. It was the last thing Malin saw before stars exploded inside her mind and darkness devoured her.
Chapter 5
The Question and the Answer
I’m not sure which is worse: to crave a memory and lose it, or to harbor a memory I dearly wish I could forget … and can’t.
Copper Snare_A Vampire Girl Novella Page 5