by Tracey Tobin
Tori had heard enough. She gave a hard yank on Ashes’ mane and sent the horse into a gallop that almost went over through the fiery-eyed Kaima, who dove out of the way with a growl.
“Coward!” the cry followed Tori as she streaked off into the woods.
Tori put her head down and rode hard. Coward! The word kept echoing in her head, filling her with rage. The last thing I am is a coward! All I want to do is go home! Is that so god-damn wrong?! By the time she’d ridden two or three miles away from the village the anger had built to a breaking point and she let out one short, fury-infused scream.
She knew she’d made a mistake the second the other scream echoed back at her. It was a wild roar that made the blood drain from her face and threw Ashes into a panic. It echoed back a second time and seemed to be coming from every direction at once. For the first time in her city-girl mind, Tori considered the fact that she’d just run off alone into the forest, and that all forests have wildlife.
“Run, Ashes!” she cried, though the mare had already doubled her pace out of pure fear. “Run as fast as you can!”
The ash-colored horse ran for its life, with Tori struggling to hold on from behind. They flew through the forest, over roots and felled trees, under low branches, moving with such speed that Tori couldn’t focus on the landscape whipping past them. And then, somehow, the creature that had screamed had gotten in front and was barreling straight for them.
Ashes reared, and Tori went tumbling to the ground. Her head hit a large root. Bells rang behind her ears and bright lights flashed in front of her eyes. Ashes took off without a second thought. Tori tried to stand, but she felt like her body was moving through molasses.
The next roar sobered her immediately. Her gaze went up, and up, and up. Standing before her, risen up on its hind legs, was a bear-like creature twice the size of any she thought existed in her world. It’s pure yellow eyes flashed down at her with both rage and hunger. She was too terrified to even scream, too terrified to move a muscle. One part of her brain screamed for her to play dead and another part screamed to get up and run like she’d never run before.
The beast raised an enormous paw tipped with razor-sharp claws, and suddenly Tori found her voice. She shrieked; the sound bounced across the forest for miles. The piercing tone of it only seemed to enrage the beast, who roared his rebuttal and sent streams of spittle flying in Tori’s face. She was looking directly into a mouth full of teeth longer than her fingers and she was quite certain that she was about to take her last breath.
“Back!” cried a voice from behind. She was too frozen to look, but she recognized the voice and it made her heart constrict. Jacob leapt between her and the beast without hesitation, sword in hand. He swung in a wide arc, trying to frighten the creature off, but the hungry beast was having none of it. It batted at the sword defiantly, intending to have its meal. With few options available to him, Jacob took a chance, leaned into his swing, and raked the sword across the creature’s eyes. In the half a moment before the beast began raging in every direction, Jacob snatched Tori’s wrist, hauled her up off her feet, and took off running. The yellow-eyed monster-bear tried to follow the sounds of their escape, but in his blindness and wrath he collided with several trees and eventually got left behind.
Tori didn’t breathe easily until they were far enough away to no longer hear the tirade occurring behind them. She wanted to sigh with relief, but when they finally stopped to take a breath Jacob turned to look at her with something like blind anger, confusion, and sadness all rolled into one.
She wanted to say that she was sorry, and she wanted to thank him for saving her life, but the only words that would come out, in a tiny voice, were, “How did you know I’d gone?”
Jacob closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let himself fall backward against a tree with a huff. Tori thought it looked like he was counting to ten, but it was closer to thirty seconds before he replied. “I heard Kaima yelling after you and she pointed out the direction you’d gone.” He opened his eyes to look at her, and he looked as though he’d aged a hundred years in half an hour. “Why did you leave without saying anything to me?” he asked. His voice was very quiet. The anger and confusion had disappeared, leaving only sadness behind.
A hundred possible excuses ran through her mind, but none of them were good enough because she found, with a little pain deep in her chest, that she genuinely cared about Jacob’s impression of her. In the end the only thing she could offer was the truth: “I just wanted to go home, and I thought I might have figured out how.”
Jacob sighed. It was a truly exhausted sound. “You should have told me,” he insisted. “I would have escorted you and made sure you got there safe.”
That honestly never occurred to me.
Tori flopped down on the ground and pulled her knees close to her chest. “I figured you would try to stop me,” she admitted. “You’re saying you wouldn’t have?”
Jacob gave her a long, hard look. “It’s not my place to try and stop you,” he told her. With a frown that extended to his eyes, he sat himself down on the ground next to her. Just when Tori was wondering what to say to fill the silence he saved her the trouble. “Do you know what Eden told me after you left the council room last night?” he asked.
Tori shook her head.
Jacob took a deep breath. “She told me that my father was supposed to be the one to lead you on your journey. She told me that since he was the only royal soldier not killed or controlled by Iryen, that made him the last true royal knight sworn to the heir to the throne, and that he’d made an oath to wait for you to return and keep you safe. And then she told me that because my father is gone, that role now falls to me. She told me that I was to become your guardian, to protect you, to follow you, and to do your bidding.” He stopped and looked sideways at Tori. “I didn’t know what to think at first, but when I gave myself some time to consider it I decided that my father would want me to take up this task. And also… I want to do it, because I’ve seen the evidence of magic in you, and I believe that you truly could save the kingdom from this evil that has poisoned it.”
Why? Why would you believe in me like that?
Tori wanted to tear the skin from her face to show him who she really was underneath. “Oh, Jacob,” she groaned. “You just don’t get it. I’m not the person you’re imagining that I am.”
Jacob gave her a warm, safe smile. There was a confidence in his eyes that almost broke Tori’s heart. “I know that you’re a good person,” he said. “I feel it. And that’s all that really matters.”
Tori’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, do you?” she scoffed at the ground between her knees. “You might not think so if you knew what I had done back home.”
“Why don’t you just let me be the judge of that?”
Tori looked up to find Jacob perfectly somber and serious, looking back at her with eyes that said, “Fess up.” He really was so much like Jared, despite the differences of experience and environment. A little voice in the back of Tori’s mind urged her to trust him, to confide in him, to take this opportunity to actually say what she was feeling for the first time since...
She bit her lip hard.
“Do you remember,” she began slowly, “that I said my parents both died in an accident?”
Jacob nodded.
Tori leaned her chin back down on her knees and sighed out a well of emotion onto the forest floor. “The accident was my fault,” she confessed. “They were rushing me to the hospital - I guess you might say a healer? And anyway, my father was so worried, and he was driving so fast that he wasn’t quite watching where he was going. The truck came out of nowhere and-” She trailed off.
Jacob frowned toward her. “I’ll be honest: your story is confusing to me and I don’t really understand. But, that sounds like the very definition of an accident to me,” he said. “Surely you’re not saying that it was your fault that you were ill and in need of a healer?”
Tori moaned and buried her face i
n between her knees. “But it was,” she cried into her dirty jeans. “It was my fault! If I hadn’t gotten pregnant-!” Her breath hitched as she realized she’d just spoken the words out loud for the first time, the secret that she hadn’t even admitted to her only friends. She shuffled to the side and buried her face in her hands so that she wouldn’t have to see the reaction on Jacob’s face.
The kind, sympathetic voice that followed was a genuine surprise to her after weeks of quiet whispers and vicious rumors. “You were with child?” he asked.
Tori nodded without looking at him. “The guy and I had been dating for a long time… I really thought that he loved me and that we’d be together forever, and so we ended up…” She felt a pain in her chest and stomach just remembering. “But we weren’t careful and then I wound up pregnant and he just- He lost it. He said he didn’t want anything to do with being a father and that he wasn’t ruining his life for me.”
Jacob made a sound like he was being strangled. When Tori looked up the fury on his face was as though he’d just witnessed someone stepping on a puppy’s head. “That craven, despicable bastard,” he growled.
Tori gave a non-committal little shrug. “Yeah, well, be that as it may…” She sighed, and without really thinking about it her hand fell to her abdomen. “As it turns out, lots of stress is a super-bad thing for pregnant women and, well, suddenly there was all this blood, and… Yeah, that’s why my parents were rushing me to the hospital.” She recalled the recurring dream, the shadow falling over her parents’ car, and she felt a chill go through her body. “I don’t really remember much of the accident itself. I must have passed out or hit my head or something. The next thing I knew I was waking up in the hospital and they told me I’d lost the baby, and both my parents too.” She trailed off and let her head fall back down to her knees.
Jacob stared out into the forest for a while and said nothing, his eyes haunted with the story.
“So do you understand now?” Tori asked quietly. “How can I be responsible for other peoples’ lives when I wasn’t even responsible enough to make good decisions for my own? How can you expect me to be the ruler of an entire kingdom when a few extremely stupid choices cost me everything I had?”
She’d expected silence, but without missing a beat Jacob turned and gave her another long, hard look. “Victoria,” he said, “I want you to listen to me carefully, okay? You are not responsible for your parents’ deaths. It may feel that way, but that’s not how it is. What you’ve been through was an unfortunate string of very terrible occurances. Maybe this guy was a bad decision, but everyone makes stupid decisions when they’re in love. And the accident was nothing more than that; you wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Accidents happen every day, on every corner of the planet. A man falls from his horse and breaks his neck. A woman stumbles across the path of a poisonous snake. Horrible things happen sometimes, without rhyme or reason, and it’s just unfortunate that such a thing happened to you and your family at the time that it did.”
“But,” Tori argued, “if I hadn’t made such a stupid mistake we wouldn’t have been in that place at that time, and my parents wouldn’t be dead.”
“Or,” Jacob retorted immediately, “they could have gotten into a completely different accident that had absolutely nothing to do with you.” He turned his body toward Tori to ensure that she was looking directly into his eyes. “Sometimes when bad things happen we react by looking for all the things we could have done to keep them from happening, but that’s just our stupid way of torturing ourselves and wishing desperately that things had been different. Sometimes the fact of the matter is just that an awful thing happened and we have to live with it.”
Tori examined Jacob’s face. In that moment she thought she saw a little something of herself in his eyes. “Your father,” she realized.
Jacob nodded. “For months after his death I wrestled with this idea that if I had gone with him on that hunting trip instead of staying home with the horses I might have saved him. But the truth is that if I had gone, I’d probably be dead too, and how would that have made the situation better?” After only a slight hesitation he reached out and placed his hand gently on top of Tori’s. He gave her a sad smile. “You are a good person, Victoria, I’m sure of it. So why torture yourself imagining a possible outcome that may have never even occurred anyway? All we can really do is move forward and try to create the best future we can with what we’ve got.”
Tori’s gaze dropped back down to the ground because she knew he was right, but she also wasn’t too keen on the implications he was making. “So, in other words,” she sighed, “you don’t want me to go home.”
“I don’t,” he answered honestly. “But that’s also not my call to make. I am your humble servant, princess,” he said with a coy smile, “and if your decision is to return to that other land, then I will escort you to ensure that you make it there safely.” On the last word he bounced to his feet and offered her his hand.
Tori looked at the hand, and her heart felt like it was ripping in two.
What should I do?
She didn’t get a chance to make her decision.
Jacob’s head whipped to the right, his gaze focused deep into the trees, and his hand flew to the hilt of his sword. Tori recognized the look on his face and immediately scrambled to her feet.
“Is it the monsters again?” she whispered.
“Shadows,” Jacob replied. “Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Listen.”
And she noticed what she hadn’t the first time they’d crossed the Shadows’ path, which was silence. No birds, no chipmunks, no humming insects. The forest had gone silent.
“We’ve got to find Strider,” Jacob hissed. He snatched Tori’s hand and they were off through the forest at a run. Tori tried her best to be quiet, but she was sore and exhausted and she clumsily tripped over roots and fell into piles of dead leaves. Every sound she made seemed to echo in every direction, giving away their location.
She didn’t know how Jacob could find his way so easily, but suddenly the larger horse was in front of them, stomping his hooves nervously. Instead of offering her a hand, this time Jacob snatched Tori up around the waist and practically threw her up into the saddle.
“What are you doing?” Tori gasped. “Aren’t we going to hide like last time?”
“There were only a few of them last time,” Jacob replied in a rush. “Hiding and staying quiet was an option because fighting would have been the plausible plan B. But right now we are surrounded on all sides so we have to try to run, no matter how much noise we make.”
As though they’d been waiting for him to say those exact words, three Shadows appeared to their left and another five to their right. Their inky limbs trembled with excitement. Tori felt her face go white.
“Time to go,” Jacob announced, but just as he was about to hop on the horse behind Tori another two Shadows appeared through the trees directly in front of them.
The creatures had no eyes that could be distinguished within the pools of darkness that were their bodies, but somehow Tori could tell when the gaze of those two Shadows fell on her crystal pendant and the royal insignia within it. Their bodies seemed to shudder - with pleasure or rage or something else, she couldn’t tell - and then suddenly their horrible voices were shrieking in harmony, a terrible, dissonant noise that made the heart go cold.
Jacob made a decision in that moment. It was the kind of decision that Tori couldn’t ever imagine someone making on her behalf. Without explanation he unsheathed his sword and whispered in Strider’s ear, “To the village, as fast as you can go.” Then he let out a cry and leapt for the two Shadows as the horse reared and burst past at a hard gallop.
“Wait!” Tori cried. She yanked backward on the reins, but the horse was stronger than her, and he had absolutely no interest in listening to her pleas. She fought and screamed, and when he refused to react she struggled to twist and see if Jacob was okay
. What she saw instead made it feel like all the blood had drained out of her body all at once.
The Shadows were following her.
Chapter Eight
Tori clenched Strider’s reins and forced herself to look forward. Jacob’s stallion rode as if its life depended on it, and Tori urged him on because her life almost certainly did. The air beat against her face as they tore through the forest as fast as they could, but the Shadows had an unfair advantage: they didn’t need to leap or swerve around trees because their bodies shifted at their whims, slithering around everything in their path as though there wasn’t even anything there. They caught up to the fleeing pair with so little effort that Tori would have sworn they were actually flying, and soon the squealing creatures were surrounding her and her steed. Their ichor limbs continued to move inexorably forward even as their horrible heads twisted to stare at Tori with eyeless faces. She tried to keep her gaze focused on what was in front of her, but she could feel theirs burning into her from every direction. Though she’d never been a religious person by any means, she began to pray that this was another nightmare, that she’d somehow fallen asleep and would wake up safe and sound in the Maelekanai village any moment now. Barring that, she silently begged every deity she had ever heard of to let her make it to the village before they-
It struck her all at once, like a lightning bolt straight to the chest. She wasn’t getting herself to safety; she was leading the Shadows right into the village’s magical protective cloak.
“Wait!” she shouted down to Jacob’s horse. “No! We can’t go there! Turn around! Turn around, dammit!” She hauled back on the reins as hard as she could, but the horse was strong and stubborn and barely even seemed to notice her presence. She was like a fly trying to beat down a glass door. “Dammit, Strider, no! We can’t!” Tori cried, and then when it became clear that her pleas meant nothing to the beast, she began to scream as loud and hard as she could. “Everybody run! The Shadows are coming!”