Off Track: A Romantic Magical Quest Series (The Madeline Journeys Book 1)

by P. A. Wilson

  Arabela’s face drained of color. “What thing, Caver? Tell me now, no more begging, no more delay. Only when you have spoken the words can we find a solution.”

  “I reached out to her mind,” he responded in a hushed voice. “I did not think. It has been so long since we have had to guard our magic.”

  “Blu, what can you do?” Arabela ignored the Sylph. “What can we do?”

  “We can only be on guard,” Blu answered.

  “What is the problem?” Madeline asked. “You said Sayer will not notice us unless we do something to provoke his attention.”

  “It is not Sayer we must concern ourselves with,” Arabela said. “There are creatures out in the forest who will only notice our passage if we announce it with the use of magic. Scrying is not that type of magic, it’s a receiving of vision. What Caver did was to send magic out. Damn, this was going too well.”

  She turned to Caver and Light. “What is done is done. We will leave it at that. I thank you for coming forward with this. We can at least be on guard. Go back to your fellows and rest. Tomorrow the road will require us to be alert. As punishment, you will scout ahead and to the sides. Hope that no creature awoke.”

  The Sylph ran to their camp after thanking Arabela for her wise decision. The two guards returned to the small unit that had accompanied them. They were to report to Jode and then arrange for patrols of the camp throughout the night. Blu and Arabela spent a moment discussing the possibilities, then he left to scry the surrounding area for threats.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Madeline asked.

  “You should sleep if you can. I think it is important for you to rest and rise early for your training. I will be joining Blu in his tent for a few hours.”

  Madeline wasn’t sure she could fall asleep with this unknown threat overhead, but she agreed. It was clear Arabela didn’t need anything else to worry about.

  Madeline washed her face and braided her hair back into tight ropes to minimize the morning tangles. As she prepared for sleep, the quiet seemed to roll a blanket of weariness over her shoulders. Riding all day and then throwing knives was taxing on her body, and this was only day two of the journey. How bad was it going to get?

  “Maybe I’ll get used to it,” she said kicking off her boots and curling up under the blanket.

  Five minutes later, she tossed herself onto the other side of the bed. “Crap.” This was going to be one of those nights, one where she wasn’t going to fall asleep. She decided to lay there waiting for sleep, trying not to toss and turn every few minutes. If she were at home, she’d turn on the light and read a book until her mind shut down. Here she had a book, but no bedside light.

  The camp was silent. She knew that somewhere people were walking the perimeter, watching for threats. She was a long way from the edge of the camp in this tent. Madeline heard Simon and Jode come back about an hour after they had left. They were talking quietly about something. She felt comforted by the sound of Jode’s voice. In another world, she might invite him in and burn off some energy while waiting for sleep to come. “No,” she told herself sternly. “He’s off limits unless you commit.”

  She heard Simon say goodnight to Jode, and then Jode walked away from the tent. He must be on sentry duty, she thought. He’ll be tired tomorrow.

  She dozed off for what may have been anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, it definitely wasn’t anywhere near morning. Her skin itched and burned. The camp was still quiet but she could hear whispering nearby.

  “We can just cut it.”

  “No, they will see.”

  “What you think we should do?”

  “Disappear and then walk in, take prize.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  Madeline thought the conversation was odd, what prize would someone be taking from the camp?

  “Cut quick, grab prize, disappear.”

  “Quick, quick, you have potion?”

  “Yes,” a different voice answered.

  Madeline watched as a slit appeared in the side of the tent. She opened her mouth to scream and felt a wet rag cover her mouth. It smelled sweet, and she struggled against the hands holding it, but other hands held her still. She couldn’t see who the hands belonged to, not because it was dark, because they were invisible.

  “Breathe, pretty,” a dry voice whispered directly into her ear.

  She arched her back trying to escape the hands, holding her breath, and praying that someone would come in. But, the arms held her until she had no choice but to breathe. Sweetness entered her lungs and the world turned from dark, to grey, to nothing.

  21

  “Madeline, get up,” Arabela called from the central room. “It is sunrise you need to train before we ride out.” She walked out to the training area in front of the tents where Jode was working through some warm up exercises. “I will give her a minute or two, but then I’m going in and pulling her out of bed.”

  “She needs her rest,” Jode said. “We can train this afternoon while you meet the people of Wildfield.”

  “She agreed to train in the morning. You were on duty all night and you are here.”

  “I am used to short sleep. She, apparently, is not.”

  “Well, she needs to be up anyway. We should be on the road early.” Arabela stomped into the tent before Jode could comment. She threw back the curtain in the doorway to Madeline’s room and saw the bed tossed all over the floor, no Madeline. Then she saw the gaping tear in the rear wall. “Jode, come in here, now.”

  He ran through the tent, sword held unsheathed and pointing down.

  “She’s gone.” Arabela pointed out the obvious. “Someone, or something, came last night.”

  “Get Blu,” Jode ordered. “He will find our clues. Damn that Sylph, he will feel my sword in his gut if she is harmed.”

  “We will find her before anyone can do her harm,” Arabela assured him, and then ran to find someone to bring the priest to the tent.

  She returned to the room. “He will be here as soon as they can bring him. I will look around. There is no one here to threaten me. Go and tell Sir Simon, it is not right that he should not know.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” Jode said. “Blu will need to see it as it is.”

  “I know, you oaf.” Arabela pushed him out. “If you weren’t so obviously in love with her I would take affront from your words. Go. Sir Simon will want to be here.”

  Jode ran and woke Simon; both of them crossed the space between the tents as Blu hurried towards them.

  “Sir Jode,” the tiny priest said a little breathlessly. “I am sorry that the consequences fell on Lady Madeline. I know your feelings for her are strong.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Jode tried to keep his voice respectful. It was not sensible to annoy a priest. “We need to find her for the prophecy.”

  “Just so.” Blu nodded. They entered the tent and found Arabela bent over the bedding, carefully not touching anything.

  “There’s a scent here.” She pointed at the pillow. “She was drugged, I think.”

  “That explains why no one heard anything,” Simon said. “If she’d had a chance to yell, we’d still be trying to stop the ringing in our ears.”

  “Please,” Blu said. “Stand where you are while I look at everything.” He walked slowly around the bedding and then over the floor to the slit in the wall. “See here, the foot marks in the dust.”

  “Dray,” Jode said. “Damn.”

  “What are Dray?” Simon asked. “What are they going to do to her?”

  “Scavengers,” Jode answered his face white. “I do not know what they will do to her. They are unpredictable, and Madeline is not the kind of person they are used to dealing with.”

  “Blu,” Arabela said. “Can you find them?”

  “Probably not, but it is worth a try.” The priest cast out his arm and spun in a full circle. “We are protected here. Does anyone have anything that will reflect an image?”

  Simon looked aro
und the room and patted his pockets. Arabela shook her head, but Jode pulled out his sword.

  “Here, the side of the blade should work.” He handed it hilt first to Blu. “Hurry, we don’t even know how long she has been gone.”

  “Be as calm as possible,” Blu said, touching Jode’s shoulder. “Everyone, clear your mind, or leave.”

  Simon shook his head and stepped outside the tent. “Even if I knew how to, I don’t think I could.”

  As soon as he stepped outside the other three moved close together over the surface of the sword. Blu had wrapped the ends in the edges of his robes and held it through the cloth. The gleam of metal suddenly flickered as though a light had been turned on inside the metal.

  “Think of Madeline,” he said in a quiet voice. “Ask the question, what happened here, and the sword will answer.”

  Three voices spoke the question in unison. The light within the blade flickered and came back dimly. In the reflection, the tent was dark. Madeline lay in the bedding, apparently asleep. She moved suddenly, sitting up and looking to where the rip in the tent would be.

  She struggled against unseen hands, and seemed to resist breathing until finally she took in a deep shuddering breath and closed her eyes, falling limply into invisible arms.

  “Definitely Dray,” Arabela said. “It looks like it happened in the darkest of night. When they entered through the hole there were no stars, or fires.”

  “She has been gone for four hours,” Blu agreed. “If there were many of them she will be a long distance from here.”

  “That’s only if there were ten or twenty of them,” Jode said. “If there had been more than three or four, we would have smelled them.”

  “True,” Blu said. “We can extract one more question from the sword. What is it to be?”

  “Is she still alive,” Jode said. “It is vital to know that.”

  “Where is she, is a better question,” Arabela said.

  “No,” Jode whispered. “If we ask that it may show us the interior of a cave. Of what use would that be?”

  “And if we find she is alive, but do not know where, what good would that be?” Arabela snapped.

  Blu placed the sword on the bedding and stepped back gesturing for the others to do the same. “You are asking questions and I do not wish the sword to answer the wrong one.”

  “What do you think we should ask?” Jode asked his voice tight with tension.

  “I think we should ask ourselves what is the most important thing we cannot find out by other means.”

  “If she is alive,” Jode said. “We cannot know that by any other means until we find her.”

  “And, what if she is?” Blu asked. “And what if she is not.”

  “Do not say that.” Jode stepped forward then checked himself. “I am sorry, but do not curse her.”

  “I am not,” Blu waited for the answer.

  “If she is alive, we will move quickly to rescue her,” Arabela answered for Jode. “If she is not, I pray that is not so, then we will move to recover her body. The prophecy was clear that she needed to be there at the end of the quest. It did not specify she would need to be alive.”

  “I think we should ask, not where she is but for directions,” Jode said. “Ask in what direction she was taken. We will still need to track them but we have people to do that, it would gain us time to know which way to set out.”

  “A good question,” Blu said, but did not reach for the sword.

  “What if we ask how we can get her back?” Arabela blurted.

  “These are Dray, we will need to negotiate,” Jode said.

  “Yes, but what with. Dray do not always respond to money. Sometimes they value things we do not understand,” Arabela said then turned to Blu. “Is this a better question?”

  “I think it is. It maybe we will not understand the answer until we are with the Dray, but it is a good question.” The priest bent and picked up the sword. “Focus your minds on that question. Jode, do not consider the other questions or we may have an answer to something else.”

  “I am ready,” Jode answered.

  The three heads bent again over the sword and muttered the same words. The light flared and encompassed them in a bright white ball, then faded away leaving only the metal.

  “We must leave quickly,” Jode said. “Sir Simon, come back in, we are done.”

  “What happened?” Simon pushed back through the curtain. “There was nothing going on. How come you are all ready to get going?”

  Blu handed the sword back to Jode. “The protective spell stopped you hearing or seeing what occurred. We know that Lady Madeline was indeed taken by Dray. We will explain Dray as we ride. We also know that to get her back we will need to tell a secret.”

  “No, a lie,” Arabela said.

  “No, the truth,” Jode said.

  Simon threw up his arms in frustration. “Great, where do we start?”

  “Call for the Sylph Caver, and the Fay AaLa,” Arabela said. “And get yourself ready to ride.”

  “That’s it? No tracking animals, no broken twigs leading the way?”

  “The Sylph will provide secrecy by muddling the minds of any person or creature who approaches, or notices us. The Fay will ride behind you while casting for Madeline.” Arabela picked up the hairbrush and pulled at the bristles. “Give her this hair, and she will follow a trail to return it to its owner.”

  “But isn’t magic how we got here in the first place?” Simon asked before he turned to the curtain again.

  “If there are Dray about, there is no other creature for us to worry over. This is small magic, in any case,” Jode started to leave. “Hurry yourself. I will collect the Sylph and Fay and meet you at the horses.”

  Madeline woke in a dingy tent. She was lying on a pile of rags that smelled of sour milk. She closed her eyes again and waited for her vision to adjust. When she opened them, she could see more detail.

  The tent was a low rounded dome. So low that she would not be able to stand. If she were going to escape, it would be on her knees. She tried to sit up and found that her hands and legs were bound. A single rope moved between them just long enough that with her hands low on her back she was able to keep her legs straight. If she tried to pull up her arms, she yanked on her legs. This would require some thinking through, and her head was still foggy from the drug.

  As she rested on her back waiting for the fog to clear, she became aware of voices outside the tent. They sounded like the voices from last night, raspy and harsh like a lifetime smoker. “Keep her,” one said. “Good servant. No more need for us to work. She do for us.”

  “No! Trade,” another one argued. She decided to call him Mo. “Too skinny for servant, too weak. Trade, buy good servant, maybe breeder too.”

  “Who get breeder?” a third voice asked. Madeline named him Curly. “Maybe get more breeders and no servant. I don’t mind doing work for breeder.” The three voices cackled in laughter.

  “Where trade?”

  “Pig Eye,” Mo answered.

  “Pig Eye want to know where we get her. Pig Eye want to know if trouble come with her.”

  “We tell truth,” Curly said.

  “Yes, truth, we hear call of magic, come take our prize.”

  “Good, truth,” the first voice agreed. Madeline called him Larry. “If no prize, why do magic?”

  Madeline’s mind cleared slowly as she listened to the conversation. Pig Eye didn’t sound like her kind of company. “Okay, how to get out of here? Here being a tent where I’ve been tied up by invisible creatures.” The sound of her voice calmed her. She kept talking, quietly.

  “I could try the ‘pull feet through arms’ trick so I can get my hands in front of me. Running bent over will be a lot easier if it’s forward instead of backward.” Her mind remembered they were able to disappear. “Shit, is there someone here?” she asked.

  No one answered. “Okay, that doesn’t mean there’s no one here, but I have to work on the assumption i
t does. Otherwise I might as well just wait for Pig Eye to trade me.”

  She rolled off the pile of rags onto the dirt floor, landing on her back. She thought about the three Pilates lessons she’d taken and drew a deep breath. Holding in her abs, she arched her back and rose up on her shoulders, sliding her arms as far down her body as she could; just under her butt. Then she curled her spine and tried to slide her arms down the back of her thighs while pulling her legs in. It worked. Her arms were straining painfully, but her wrists were at her ankles. She only had to find a few more inches of flexibility. Then her back spasmed and she arched it involuntarily, her arms sliding back down to the small of her back. The spasm relaxed and she breathed through the pain.

  “Okay,” she said on the exhale. “Calm down, rest for a moment and try again.” Four long breaths later, she started the movement again. As she arched her back, a second spasm of pain ripped through her upper body. She collapsed on the floor. “Time for plan B, I guess.”

  “Food ready,” Mo shouted. “You take to prisoner. She wake soon.”

  Madeline rolled onto her left side and closed her eyes. It seemed a good idea not to let them know she was awake.

  “You awake?” Larry asked. He kicked her and Madeline felt his bare toes in the small of her back. “How you get down there?”

  “What happen?” Curly asked close to her ear. “Look she awake.”

  Hands roughly dragged her back to the heap of rags. She opened her eyes and stared right into the brown ones of a tiny person. His teeth were broken and jagged where they weren’t missing, and his hair stood up like porcupine quills.

  He pointed a dirty finger at her, the nails long and hooked. “You stay there, no bruises. You worth less if damaged.”

  She watched as the creature standing beside her slapped the first one. “You not kick, damage.”

  Larry pushed back at Curly. “No damage. Shut up.”

  The two small creatures tussled until the food bowl went spinning and dumped its contents over the far side of the tent. “Now she go hungry. Already too skinny.” Curly smacked Larry and stomped out of the tent.