His voice was nearly a whisper. “They taught me to see the truth, that if my friend had not been the only gifted one in the court, someone might have stopped him. So, yes, there is a bit of blood involved, but think about it! We’ll redistribute the wealth so all have access to such strengths!”
“So you want me to find the gifted so you can take their gifts.” Elaina’s patience was wearing thin. “I could never partake in such darkness.”
“I once thought so, too. But,” his eyes gleamed, “the enchanter taught me that once you learn to empty yourself of all your shackles, the burdens of restraint that weigh you down, there is room for so much more power!”
“You mean Sorthileige!” She glared at him. “That’s how you steal their gifts, isn’t it!” She looked down at the dagger he still held. “That’s how you control it . . . all of it!”
“You needn’t be afraid!” He brushed her hair back with his hand, ignoring her flinch. “I can teach you just as the enchanters taught me! It’s really not as frightening as it seems! You see, when you learn to empty yourself of all your preconceived notions, as I did, you can also learn how to control the gifts, putting them in here,” he held up the knife, “and taking them out again.”
“Sorthileige is the poison of evil.”
“Poison to those who haven’t created room for true knowledge inside them. But the more you empty yourself to partake of it, the easier it becomes!”
“And the more you need.” Elaina leaned as far back as she could. “If you truly knew me as well as you claim, you would know that I would never ask the stars to help me spread such violence . . . such insult to the Maker who gives the gifts in the first place!”
“I thought you might say that.” Alistair looked quite sorrowful as he raised the knife to Elaina’s temple. He moved its sharp tip slowly, his eyes trained on her temple with a thoughtful frown as though searching for a particular spot. “Believe me, this is quite difficult for me to do. Your gift is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”
Elaina felt a sharp pain in her temple, followed by a warm trickle down her cheek. She cried out, but he only hushed her and gently wiped away the blood with a handkerchief. Then he pulled a little clay bottle from his belt and uncorked it and placed it on the floor. “And you’re sure you don’t wish to come with me instead? To make available such gifts to others as you’ve been given yourself?”
Elaina had nearly worked off the knot that held her wrists tightly behind the chair, but she was struggling to get the final twist. “Available to everyone with money, you mean,” she snapped.
He shrugged and began to run the tip of the knife along her temple again. “You see that clay jar on the floor?”
Elaina stopped struggling for a moment to peer down at the jar, but she couldn’t see its contents.
“Sorthileige isn’t cheap. Once I discovered how to remove and interchange gifts, I had to sell everything I owned to purchase my first few drops.”
Elaina’s blood ran cold when she realized what darkness sat just inches from her feet. Send King Everard, she begged the Maker. But even as she finished her prayer, Alistair’s knife tip seemed to have found its place. She cried out again as he made another cut to the side of her face.
“If you plan on taking my gift to get information from the stars,” she panted, leaning her head as far from his knife as she could, “you should know that it doesn’t work like that. The stars tell me what the Maker wants me to hear! Not what I want to hear!”
Something whizzed past Elaina’s face, just missing her cheek. Alastair jumped, and his dagger clattered to the ground. He let out a curse as he dove after it, knocking Elaina’s chair on its side.
Elaina tried desperately to loosen the last part of the knot, but before she could finish, Nicholas was standing over her. He cut her wrists and ankles free with one hand while holding his sword up with the other. Elaina rolled out of the chair and onto the ground.
“Run!” he shouted.
Elaina began to obey, but then she realized that Alastair still had the dagger. Spinning around, she found Nicholas and Alastair facing one another. Alastair held his dagger high, but Nicholas blocked his view of Elaina, his sword held defensively as he crouched down before them.
“Give it up,” Nicholas said in a low voice. “King Everard will be here any moment to put an end to that evil you carry. I’ve already told him exactly how you use it.”
“King Everard isn’t near at all,” Alastair spat out. “He’s off chasing Conrad. In fact, I’m assuming he’s met the ambush by now.”
Elaina’s heart stopped.
“It wasn’t that hard to find a number of individuals with a grudge against the good king.”
Nicholas lunged, but Alastair ducked.
“Nicholas, the jar!” Elaina shrieked.
Nicholas was able to avoid stepping on the lethal jar, but the jerk caused him to stumble. As he did, Elaina watched helplessly as Alastair dipped the tip of the knife into the little jar on the floor, sliced his own palm with the dagger, then grasped the orb with his bloodied hand.
As Nicholas righted himself, Alastair began to change. His body grew translucent like a cloud. And like a cloud, he rose up off the ground and began to float toward Elaina. Elaina ducked and covered her head, but in the time it took for Nicholas to reach her, Alastair had thickened again on the other side of the room, cutting her off from the door.
This time, he began to shrink. Nicholas was forced to bend in order to meet Alastair’s vicious attack from below. Then, without warning, Alastair grew to twice his usual height. He shoved Nicholas into the wall as he did, and it was all Elaina could do to scramble out of the way as the two men engaged again. And again. And again.
Even in her fear, Elaina marveled. Nicholas was the most adept swordsman she had ever seen. He bent and rolled and attacked and parried in smooth, elegant moves.
In spite of his skill, however, Alastair’s continual tricks kept Nicholas and Elaina running around the small circular room, barely managing to stay unwounded.
“What do we do?” Elaina shouted out to the stars as she neared the open balcony.
Watch, the stars replied.
Elaina wanted to retort that such advice was unhelpful when she realized that Alastair had begun to flicker. Only then did she understand.
His powers were beginning to fade.
Nicholas seemed to realize this as well, for he began to back Alastair into one of the walls. As he did, Alastair held the dagger up to his palm, but before he could draw more blood, Nicholas threw his own knife. With expert aim, it pinned Alastair’s arm to the wall. Alastair let out a cry of rage and pain, and with his other hand, released a cloud of smoke that filled the room.
Nicholas fell to his knees as he made choking sounds, and Elaina began to cough as well. Still, she could see through the smoke well enough to spot the orbed dagger on the ground. She got on her hands and knees and began to crawl toward it, but as the smoke cleared, she realized that the orb’s glass had broken. A sphere of light the color of blood rose slowly into the air and hovered before her. Elaina stood and took a step toward it.
“Don’t touch that!” Alastair screeched. “Don’t touch it!”
“Elaina, wait.” Nicholas choked. “You don’t know what that will do!”
But Elaina was unable to look away. In the circle of red light, she could see exactly what Alastair was going to do.
He would use every bit of power on himself, even if it drained his stores of gifts and Sorthileige in the process. Then he would gather more and continue to hunt until he died. She could hear echoes of her father’s men as a cloud of darkness enveloped their ship. She could hear her mother’s scream and hundreds more like it. Beside her, she could still hear Nicholas gasping for breath.
Unopposed, Alastair would never stop. He would kill and kill and kill again.
Elaina reached her hands up in the air and clasped them over the sphere of floating red light.
59
> Good for Nothing
A strange pulsing filled Elaina’s body. The world around her began to change, its colors separating as though her surroundings all lay swathed in a rainbow. Alastair’s screaming grew so loud that it threatened to make her ears bleed, yet at the same time she could hear the music from the ball below floating up to them as if on a cloud. One of the flutists was horribly flat. The smell of the fat someone had thrown in the garden near the kitchens made Elaina dreadfully nauseous, and the floor beneath her seemed to tilt. Breathing grew difficult for the thick water floating in the air around her.
On the back of her tongue, Elaina could taste metallic smoke. She fought the urge to fly, disappear, and dream all at the same time. All kinds of impossible actions and sensations were at the tips of her fingers, and Elaina stared at them in wonder. Had her hands always been that shade of blue?
She was going to explode into a million tiny pieces.
Ignoring Nicholas’s pleas and Alastair’s furious shrieks, Elaina fled. Down the winding stairs she ran in a daze, stumbling and tripping in her mad attempt to make it down. She had to get to the ocean. She had to quench the fire that was now burning in her blood. Her whole body felt as though it had been set aflame. Only the parts of her feet that touched the slippers were cool, and Elaina prayed through the fog in her head that the ocean water might bring the same kind of relief as the glass.
As she ran, the thousands of sounds that had overwhelmed her at first were drowned out by the sound of her own heart pounding and the toll of the midnight bells. She came to a halt at the bottom of the tower stairs and slumped against the cool stone wall. In an attempt to focus, she scrunched her eyes shut only to realize that she could still see even with her eyes closed. What was happening to her?
The burning intensified, and Elaina took off again. Somehow, she managed to make it down to the ballroom. She ignored the cries of disdain and surprise as she shoved her way through the crowd. She did notice that her magnificent gown had disappeared and she was once again wearing her old tattered one in its place. But that was the least of her worries as she fought her way to the entrance.
Before she reached the doors, however, a hand grasped her wrist and yanked her back, throwing her to the ground. She found herself on her back, staring up into a face that she should have known but couldn’t place.
“My master’s been looking for you.” He sneered.
Elaina frowned up at him, but couldn’t remember how to make her feet move.
But just as he reached down for her with his other hand, another figure shoved the first aside. A flash of golden hair.
“Run, Elaina! Run!”
The sound of Lydia’s voice brought Elaina enough focus that she was able to push herself to her feet and stumble out into the night air. In the distance, the moon glittered on the ocean’s dark waves. She was almost free.
As she ran down the steps, however, she tripped, and her right slipper fell off. As soon as it was gone, her right foot grew as hot as the rest of her body. Elaina turned to search for it, but blurry figures at the top of the steps appeared. Rather than face them, whoever they were, she continued down the grand steps in her frenzy to reach the water.
But running in one shoe was difficult. Once she hit the gravel and began to sink into the stones, Elaina gave up and yanked the other slipper off. Squeezing it to her chest and gritting her teeth against the added burning in her feet, she continued on toward the water.
Just as she was about to reach the prince’s private dock, she was again flung to the ground. Hands pressed her against the grass.
“Quick, get her feet.”
Why was that voice so familiar?
“Look at her shoe!” another familiar voice gasped.
“I want that.”
“Dinah, I saw it first!”
“Girls!” The first familiar voice spoke again in its cutting tone. “Keep her arms down and do something right for once in your lives! Now, what do we do with her?”
“We’ll take her back to your house. The crown doesn’t keep watch over borrowed land, so she should be well hidden there.”
There was that voice again. A man, the one who had grabbed her in the hall.
“And you’re certain that your master wants it this way?”
“Alastair wouldn’t have rented the house for you if he didn’t,” the man snapped.
Someone stretched an arm out toward her. Just as Elaina felt a tug on the shoe that she still clutched, the would-be thief cried out and cradled her hand. “It burned me!”
“Let her keep it,” the man said as he lifted Elaina into the air. He tossed her onto the floor of what looked like a carriage, but Elaina still couldn’t concentrate enough to be sure. “She’s good for nothing in this state as it is.”
Such a comment should be upsetting. She should set him straight and tell him exactly how useful she thought he was. But it was all she could do to simply curl into a ball on the carriage floor and hold on tightly as the carriage began to bounce along.
60
The One Who Fits the Slipper
“Captain, send birds ordering all the dock keepers and patrols to close down the borders. Shut down the roads as well. I want all travel stopped!” Nicholas shouted, running toward the entrance. Cries of dismay rang out as he barged through the ballroom, but he didn’t care.
“Sire.” His captain joined him at the top of the entrance steps. “What has happened?”
“A terrific question,” Everard’s deep voice boomed as he joined them.
Nicholas was glad to see the king had survived Alastair’s ambush, but he had no time to rejoice. “Alastair’s orb broke, the one on his dagger. Elaina somehow . . .” Nicholas shook his head, searching for the right words. “Absorbed it. Then she took off, and as I turned to chase her, Alastair disappeared.”
“You mean he escaped.”
“I assume so. But as I turned to chase after Elaina, he literally vanished.”
“What’s this about Alastair disappearing?”
Nicholas turned to see his father behind him, glaring at Everard.
“And what is he doing in my kingdom at my palace?”
“Doing what you should have done years ago,” Everard growled.
Nicholas’s father began to reply, but Nicholas didn’t have time for bickering.
“Father, Alastair is the Shadow!”
“You keep saying that—”
“I have seen him with my own eyes! All along, we’ve been harboring the enemy in our own court and feeding him our most precious secrets.” Nicholas rubbed his eyes. “And now Elaina’s gone.”
His father shook his head. “Elaina Starke? I don’t understand. Elaina’s been gone for years. And I’ll have you know that you’ve offended the Seamus family. I don’t even know if they’ll have you now after running out on them the way you did!”
Nicholas rolled his eyes and turned back to Everard. As he did, however, a gleam caught his eye.
Shining like a beacon in the light of the moon, a single glass slipper lay at the bottom of the steps. Nicholas hurtled down and picked it up. As he held it higher to inspect it more closely, he heard Everard groan.
“You know what this is?” He turned to the king.
Everard nodded and closed his eyes. “It’s one of the glass slippers I gave to Elaina the first time I met her, back on her father’s ship.” He took the shoe. “Its power has been awakened.” Turning back to Nicholas, he said, “tell me exactly what kind of power Elaina absorbed back in that tower.”
As Nicholas explained what had happened with the dagger, the king’s face darkened. When he was done, Everard held up the shoe. “She needs this. Without it, that amount of power will kill her.”
At this statement, even Nicholas’s grumbling father grew silent.
“How do I find her?” Nicholas asked, struggling to maintain some sort of composure. “They might try to disguise her.”
“It’s possible. But the Maker chose her to have the
shoes.” Everard took a deep breath. “We will simply have to trust that they will fit only her.”
“What are you going to do?” Xander asked incredulously. “Try the slipper on every girl in the kingdom?” He sounded near hysteria.
Despite his father’s derision, Nicholas met Everard’s eyes and nodded. “That is exactly what I am going to do. And I can only assume that wherever Elaina is, Alastair will be also.”
“Now that his dagger is broken, he might not have the ability to take her gift just yet,” Everard added.
“You’re right,” Nicholas said. “That might buy us some time. He won’t kill her until he has her gift.”
“You cannot be serious!” Xander sputtered. “Searching the entire kingdom for a girl with only a shoe?”
“Xander.”
Everyone turned to see Nicholas’s mother join them. Her face was unusually white, even in the moonlight. “Don’t do this.”
“I am busy right now, wife. Nicholas, this is impossible. You need to send out the guards instead.”
Nicholas’s mother didn’t flinch at his rudeness. “Xander, don’t put our son through the kind of pain you had to endure.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our son has found his true love.” She paused and drew a deep breath. “Don’t make him lose her the way you lost Kendra. Let him go. Let him find her.”
Nicholas could feel his mother’s pain from where he stood, but for the first time that Nicholas could recall, Xander seemed touched by it as well. He tried to speak several times, but failed as he held his wife’s injured gaze. Finally, he simply nodded.
“Very well.”
They stood together on the steps for the better part of an hour, Nicholas, Oliver, and Xander planning together as to how the rescue should be made. Nicholas didn’t miss, however, when Everard slipped away and disappeared into the palace.
Cinders, Stars, and Glass Slippers: A Retelling of Cinderella (The Classical Kingdoms Collection Book 6) Page 41