The Orphan's Secret

by R. J. Francis

  She found herself holding on to the locking bar of a greasy spreadcaster: a mounted weapon designed to send volleys of flaming bolts toward the deck of an enemy vessel. The ship was in fine shape; at least on the upper deck, there was no evidence it had seen combat.

  Timing the ship’s lurching, Elaina seized a horizontal moment to cross to a rail near an open hatch amidships. An iron ladder led her down into the vessel’s belly. She hopped onto the rust-encrusted threshold of an open doorway to avoid a churning puddle of seawater.

  She stepped into a long, cramped cabin. Human-shaped lumps slumbered in the double bunks on both walls. The only light shone from a lower bunk at the cabin’s far end.

  Floating her fingers along the top bunks for balance, the dream Elaina made her way toward the lit berth. There sat Alessa—the teenage Alessa—with her back against the polished cabin wall. A baby in a gold blanket slept in her arms. A lamp on a hook rolled back and forth with the pitching of the ship.

  “Ina deala,” Alessa said to Elaina.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t feel well.” Alessa said in a strong accent. “It must be something I ate… Will you please hold her for a minute?”

  “Of course,” Elaina said. Alessa did look as if she might vomit upon the very next heaving of the ship. She handed the girl to Elaina, then disappeared into a hatch at the end of the room. Elaina sat down and studied the bundled child, who was lost in a dream.

  Someone rose from a lower bunk near the door and approached Elaina. It was Alethea, and she looked even sicker than Alessa. She said, “Gulakkomnen kok sopeum. Ar dealoei?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Elaina replied. “I don’t speak your language.”

  “It’s my stomach. You don’t feel sick?”

  Elaina was beginning to feel a bit queasy. “Surely it’s just the sea,” she said.

  Alethea shook her head, said “No,” and left the same way Alessa had.

  Elaina closed her eyes halfway, trying not to let the shadows cast by the solitary lamp nauseate her with their sweeping back and forth. Alessa soon emerged from the hatch, wiping her mouth with a brown rag. “Got it out,” Alessa said. “Now, wake up.”

  “I am awake,” said the dream Elaina.

  “No,” said Alessa. “I need you and Jaimin to wake up.”

  Elaina was stunned when she opened her eyes and saw black battle gear on the real Alessa standing above her. “Now, lovers,” Alessa said. “We need to go.”

  “What’s the matter?” Jaimin asked, shocked out of a sound sleep himself.

  “Get your boots on,” said Alessa. “The kingdom is under attack.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Tap, tap, tap, tap.”

  Nastasha rubbed her eyes. What time is it? The apartment was utterly dark.

  “Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”

  Again, the beckoning at the door. The tapping wasn’t loud, but it sounded urgent. Nastasha rolled out of bed and shambled toward the noise, holding her arms out to detect obstacles.

  “Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”

  When her fingertips met the stone wall near the bookcase, she knew she was way off course. She groped along the wall to locate her bedroom door. From there, she had a pretty good idea which way the front door was, so she picked up speed.

  “Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”

  “Who’s there?” Nastasha called.

  “Please,” came the reply in a loud whisper, “it’s Kotaret.”

  “Kotaret?” She undid the latch. A young man she hoped was Kotaret slipped into the room and pulled the door closed. The brief burst of light from the hall had zapped Nastasha’s eyes; now a glowing purple line hovered wherever she looked.

  “Nastasha,” said the visitor. He didn’t sound well. “I think the castle is under attack.”

  Yes, this was Kotaret. “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “I heard my parents wailing. When I checked on them, they were on the bed, face down, still.”

  “Oh…”

  “They were both were just out. I ran out to summon the doctor and saw soldiers down the hall. And they weren’t ours.”

  “Outsiders? Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I ducked behind a pillar and they didn’t see me when they passed.”

  “I must check on my mother.” Nastasha got into her parents’ room as swiftly as she could in the absolute darkness, leaving Kotaret where he was by the door.

  He heard someone out in the hall run past.

  Kotaret felt around by the door for something to put on his feet, which were still in socks and growing quite cold. He found a pair of fleece-lined leather boots. He put them on. Behind him hung a heavy sable cloak. It fit him well. Soon, he heard muffled sobbing coming from the bedroom.

  Shadows fluttered when Nastasha came back in holding a lamp. She was shaking, and tears slid down her face as she moved, but she moved quickly. “She’s dead,” she said. “I suspect your parents are too, and probably others.” Her voice crackled, barely audible. “It’s poison. You have to get out of the castle. Come with me.”

  “Poison?” Kotaret would never think of doubting Nastasha, but…his parents? Dead?

  In a daze of denial, he followed Nastasha into her bedroom. She set the lamp on her dresser, pulled some pants on under her nightdress, and slipped off her gown. “Hold my hair up for me,” she said, twisting the golden mass loosely. He held her hair high while she buttoned on a grey shirt. Next, with two hands she yanked a blanket from beneath her bed—atop it was a full set of leather armor. He tried to help her fasten it, but backed off when it was clear she had practiced this and knew quite well what she was doing. Once she was suited up, she slung on her crossbow and quiver.

  “Wait here,” she said, grabbing the lamp and heading back into her parents’ room.

  She returned with a leather pack, and sheathed long and short swords. The short one she kept for herself, and Kotaret slid the long one under the drawstring waistband of his pajama pants. She looked like a capable warrior. He just looked silly.

  “You have a plan, then?” he asked. “Where do we go?”

  She unrolled a scroll on her desk: a map of the secret tunnels. “I’m giving you an assignment,” she told Kotaret. “Can you handle it?”

  “Anything. Just tell me.”

  “This map,” said Nastasha, “shows a network of tunnels that connect all the rooms in this part of the castle. There’s a secret door in the back wall of each cloak closet. The tunnels connect here, and this passage leads out to the northern forest.” She drew nine x’s in various locations on the map. “I have a theory about what happened tonight. If I’m right, these are the rooms where you might find survivors. Save as many as you can, and then meet me at Three Falls. You remember where Three Falls is, right?”

  “I… think so.”

  “Of course you do.” She handed Kotaret the lamp and the map, and then she moved aside the cloaks in her closet and pressed the combination of stones to open the secret door. “Keep quiet,” she told him. “Keep the secret doors concealed, and put out your lamp before you go out into the forest, no matter how dark it is out there.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “Follow my intuition.”

  She struck up another lamp for herself, donned her cloak and boots, hung her pack over her shoulder, and followed the secret passage in the opposite direction.

  Nurse Isabel, decked out in her finest striped pajamas, traversed her teaching laboratory clutching a lamp, a water skin, and a linen-wrapped loaf of bread. The lab tables were well stocked with the requisite instruments of science. Perched on helical stands here and there were small glass jugs containing liquids of various colors: dark and metallic, glowing red, ochre, carrot orange… The mysterious substances lent the room an unhealthy stench.

  Behind Isabel’s demonstration table there was an alcove where three plump oak barrels sat. One conta
ined a fatty liquid the color and consistency of melted butter, the next a viscous black fluid, and the third a red gelatinous substance. The nurse pushed a stain-splotched stepladder up to the last barrel, and climbed into it. Casually, she sank down into the rosy ooze until it was up to her chest, and then she worked a latch with her feet and dropped further into the barrel, still clutching her bread, lamp, and water skins as if she were waiting for a coach.

  The hydraulic lift on which she was standing pulled her smoothly and silently beneath the floor. She held her breath as her head passed through the plug of jelly, which stayed in place without any bit of it sticking to her or what she carried. As the lift continued to lower her into her secret lab, she surveyed the tables below, trying to decide which she would make her bed on tonight. Her head was heavy with thoughts, and she knew just the potion to put her blissfully out for the night.

  When the lift neared the floor, she stepped off. Whuk! Something swept her feet from under her, and whomp! the next thing she knew she was on her back on the cold stone tile, her lamp skittering off into the corner. Nastasha, looking ferocious, stood over her, aiming the point of her glistening short sword at her neck. Isabel scooted backward a bit and pulled herself up against the side of a steel desk. Nastasha kept her sword at the woman’s throat.

  “Oh, you poor child.” The nurse’s voice quivered and she tried her best to smile. “You must be terribly confused by everything that’s going on tonight.”

  “Not at all,” said Nastasha. “It’s perfectly clear.” Using both hands and all her weight, Nastasha drove her sword straight through Isabel’s chest until it hit the steel desk behind the woman. Isabel’s mouth and eyes froze open in shock. Her arms fell limp.

  Nastasha felt the woman’s skewered heart flail on the sword like a fish on a spear. She gave the hilt a firm clockwise twist. A heinous scraping sound rang through the lab: the tip of the sword against the steel desk.

  The nurse wheezed her final breath, and her heart gave up its battle.

  Stationing her boot on the nurse’s abdomen for leverage, Nastasha drew the weapon back out, wiped it clean of blood on Isabel’s sleeve, and sheathed it.

  The dead woman’s eyes were still open. “They trusted you, snake,” Nastasha said fiercely, and she backhanded the nurse in the jaw, knocking the body over onto the floor.

  Fighting back tears, she took the bread, water, and the evidence she’d found, re-lit her own lamp, and escaped back into the walls.

  Using her memory of the map to guide her, Nastasha coursed through the labyrinthine network of passages. First, she checked in on Jaimin. He wasn’t in his room, and his elixir flask was still full. She hoped this meant he had stayed at Alessa’s house. She tossed his elixir into the toilet just in case, stuffed his favorite crown and some of his other treasures into her pack, and moved on.

  Back inside the walls, she followed a side tunnel that sloped downward, curving to the right as it descended. She had to tread carefully; the stone floor was slick, and if she fell and her lamp went out, she could get lost, or, at the very least, lose precious time.

  The dungeon was her destination. With Isabel successfully dispatched, Nastasha intended to deliver the same fate to Devon and Raquel. She expected that they would still be hooded and bound, and therefore would make easy targets, but when she got to the dungeon all the cells were vacant.

  Dammit! Those two are too dangerous to be loose! Devon knew the locations of the army’s reserve base and the court’s evacuation site. And Raquel knew about the castle’s secret passages. Nastasha would need to find and silence them at once.

  She got between the walls again and hurried back up into the residence wing. Once the floor leveled out, she started to run, but when she heard girls screaming in a room she was passing, she set down her lamp, tugged open the room’s secret door, and slipped in among the coats. Opening the closet door a crack, she peered out.

  A young soldier had just entered the apartment with his sword drawn. Little Thalia and Erika were cowering in a corner, both of them shrieking. Radovan’s golden wildcat crest embroidered on the intruder’s sleeve left little doubt as to his allegiance. Nastasha aimed her crossbow and shot.

  Her bolt pierced the soldier’s skull through his left eye, and he fell. When Nastasha stepped out of the closet, the twins ran up and clung to her, making it hard for her to get to the door to bar it. “Girls, help me bar the door,” she told them.

  They all threw their weight against the front door, pinning another invader by the arm just as he was coming in. A gap in the man’s body armor just below his armpit allowed Nastasha’s sword entrée into his torso. She pulled him into the room, shook his body off her bloody blade, and barred the door. The twins, wide-eyed and tearful, clung to one another. Nastasha yanked two cloaks from the hooks by the door and threw them to the girls. “Put these on. Get some boots, too,” she said.

  She knelt over the soldiers. Neither showed any signs of life. The second one looked even younger than the first—maybe even younger than she was. On their backs were the modified crossbows she’d read so much about. She appropriated their weapons, their bolts, and a rope, and then she showed the sniffling girls into the closet.

  “Where are we going?” asked Thalia.

  “We’re escaping from the bad men,” Nastasha explained. “You’ll need to be quiet as a mouse or they’ll discover us.”

  “I’m so frightened,” Erica whimpered.

  “Shh…” Nastasha said. “Be a mouse.”

  Nastasha and the twins had almost reached the passage leading to the woods when they saw the light of another lamp far down the corridor in front of them. Nastasha set her lamp on the floor, herded the girls backward, and had them squeeze against the wall. It’s probably Kotaret, she thought, but she couldn’t afford to be wrong. When Kotaret put down his lamp too, she recognized his face in the dim glow.

  She showed herself, and the two parties met up near the exit passage. Kotaret had a long line of survivors behind him. “How many are with you?” Nastasha asked.

  “Thirteen,” he said. “There were the nine where you marked, and Carrine, and three babies.”

  “Babies, of course!” she said. “Well done, my friend. Let’s do our best to keep the babies quiet.”

  “Two of them are asleep,” said Kotaret, “and the third is sucking on Sylvia’s finger.”

  Nastasha uncoiled the rope, retaining a grip on one end. “Pass this back,” she said. “I don’t want to lose anybody in the darkness. I’m glad we met back up. I just thought of a safer way for you to reach the cold caves—an old quake fault. It’s cramped, but safer than going the whole way through the forest.”

  She passed the extra swords down the line of survivors for anyone who wanted one, and gave Kotaret the modified crossbows to hold. She didn’t know how to use the hybrid gun-bows, and she didn’t want to blow off any of her body parts by mistake. “Bring these with you,” she told him. “I want my father to have a look at them.”

  “You’re not coming with us?” Kotaret asked.

  “No,” she said. “I shall take you part of the way, but I’ve more to do.”

  The train of survivors covered the short distance through the woods to the hole that led down into the old fault without encountering any of Radovan’s scouts. Once she’d shown the last of her friends into the rocky chute, Nastasha camouflaged the hole and headed back toward the castle, concealing the more obvious tracks the group had made.

  From a dense patch of brush at the fringe of the forbidden forest, she spied on the action near the castle’s northeast wall. A freezing mist hung over the kingdom. With the moon new, the city’s street lamps were the only sources of light. What a perfect night for an attack, she thought.

  A smattering of Arrans on horseback darted from the city into the forest. Then more fled. The Arran army was in retreat! The city must already be under enemy control, she thought.

  A mounted Arran soldier, pursued by a Destaurian, tore around a buildi
ng and headed past Nastasha on his way into the forest. As the enemy passed, she tracked him with her crossbow and let a bolt fly. Clink! It struck his helmet. It didn’t go through, but it knocked him off his horse. She dashed out of the brush, and before the dazed man even noticed she was there, she grasped his helmet and snapped his neck.

  Perfect! No blood. Just a little dent on the helmet. And the three stripes on his insignia told Nastasha that her victim held some rank. She pulled his body into the brush, took off her cloak, and put on his overshirt, cloak and helmet. She located his horse and gained its cooperation.

  She wrapped the pack containing Jaimin’s valuables in her own cloak and stashed the treasures deep in a hollow stump where, as young children, she and the prince would hide the gems they found in the caves, pretending they were pirates stashing their booty. It was the only place she could think of where Jaimin might look one day if she were killed.

  Next, with the insignia of the dreaded Radovan on her sleeve, Nastasha rode into the city, hoping to find Devon and Raquel before they betrayed the kingdom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Shivering, cramping, and drenched in sweat, Princess Tori wriggled about in her bed. Before long, the urge to vomit forced her to abandon the safety of her sheets.

  She slid out of bed and crawled to an empty laundry sack propped against her wardrobe. Her stomach seized, launching its contents into the canvas bag—once, twice, again, and again. When nothing more came out, her stomach still quivered and clenched. Please stop! she cried. It’s all out. It’s all out. She wiped her mouth on the bag’s rim and spit out the last glop of pink nastiness.

  In a dizzy daze, she stumbled to her dresser to fetch her night-lamp and stuffed rabbit toy. Then she stepped into her slippers and shuffled down the hall toward the master suite.