by Lucia Ashta
I sensed the shift in the magician and opened my eyes quickly to confirm my suspicions. I looked into bright blue eyes that were back, returned from wherever they’d gone. I realized the tipping point had been reached. The five elements had freed the man from the darkness enough that he could defeat it completely as his own strength returned.
The shrieks of complaint grew in intensity, and I wondered desperately if I could already let go. As if he could read my mind in that febrile nowhere place returning from the threshold of death, Mordecai gave a nearly imperceptible nod of his head. I understood what he meant.
Immediately, I released his hands, and ran to bridge the gap between the two men who’d both kidnapped and tried to kill me. The irony of saving their lives now wasn’t lost on me. I didn’t hesitate. Like the rest of us there, they were victims of circumstance. Right was right, even if they might try to do me wrong as soon as I helped them break free of the darkness their master inflicted on them indiscriminately.
I might be forced to kill them later in the day, but I wouldn’t let them die like this, not when there was still hope for them. Salazar was a victim, the product of a mad man’s cruel manipulations. I didn’t know Winston’s story, and maybe there was no excuse for his own cruelty. But a man was rarely the way Winston had shown himself to be without a reason.
I knelt on the floor next to them, where each of them promptly kicked me. This time, they hadn’t meant to inflict pain on me. The blobs had left them as mere fractions of what they’d been, and the men couldn’t help themselves. Their bodies were soaking up the darkness like cloth absorbs water. From looking at them, they seemed to be attempting to writhe out of their skins, leaving bodies and pain behind.
Sylvia yelped and the sound frightened me. The firedrake didn’t sound as strong as she had moments before. Roughly, I planted a knee on one thigh of each man and dug a hand into the neighboring thigh.
Hang on, Sylvia. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Just a few more moments. Hang in there, girl.
Sylvia yelped as if to say she didn’t know if she could and I shut my eyes ferociously. I would kill both of these men if helping them cost me the life of my firedrake friend, who had done nothing but put our lives before her own.
I clamped down with my returning strength, as if that was all it took to rid the men of the dark leeches. I waited, searching for patience I didn’t have and couldn’t locate despite my knowledge that it was essential. I prayed this would work despite my lack of presence. I was jumping out of my skin as much as the men beneath me, rearing to get to the other side of the room.
And what about Gertrude? I hadn’t heard any cat sounds since this all started. My heart thumped so furiously that I almost let the men beneath me go. Many, perhaps even my allies in the room, would say they deserved what they got. Still, I could not. I wanted to, I really wanted to go to my loved ones and to hell with logic and the right thing to do.
But I stayed, and I prayed I wouldn’t regret it even while I knelt into Winston and Salazar’s thighs so severely that I knew they would bruise. My heart thumped too many times, and I knew it was taking too long. Sylvia’s shrieks were now whimpers, and the silence of the rest of the dungeon weighed on my heart like an anvil.
My heart thumped again, and then I blew out in pregnant relief. My hands were hot, and the men beneath me stilled suddenly, as if death had finally delivered the relief for which they yearned. But it wasn’t that.
Their muscles relaxed some of their tension, and I risked opening my eyes. The magic of the five elements was spreading across their bodies, making them glow with a light they had likely never felt before. Like the center of my chest, they began to radiate light. Within them now, rooted inside them, the light pulsated on its own. Each pulsation pushed the blobs out of their bodies a fraction of an inch, yet the progression was in the right direction.
Sylvia cried out weakly, and I let go of the men. I raced to Sylvia’s side, only half-noticing that Mordecai had slumped to the floor and sat stunned yet wide-eyed.
“It’s all right, girl. I’m here now,” I said while I flung myself at her, sliding through the last steps to reach her. My hands, still hot, clasped head and tail at once, abnormally near each other due to the contortions of her body.
Worry thumped through me along with my heartbeat. Her writhing had stilled, and I could no longer see the dark blobs latched onto her scales. With a sinking heart, I realized what that must mean: her body had absorbed the blobs.
I killed a sob as it wanted to race up my throat. Had I allowed my friend to die to save two cruel men? Could life be that unjust? Could doing the right thing carry such a heavy price?
I leaned across the firedrake, without a thought as to whether my fiancé, still squashed beneath her, had lived or died. Sylvia required all my focus.
I closed my eyes as if her life depended on it, and I forced myself to stillness so as to allow the five elements to work through me.
Several minutes passed—too many—and then I heard shuffling footsteps. The old magician dragged his feet more than lifted them and collapsed beside me into an inelegant sitting position. I felt the sleeve of a cloak brush my forearm, and I focused even harder, now for the sake of both a selfless pet and her loving master.
Come on, Sylvia. You can do it. Yet even as I thought it, I didn’t know if Sylvia could expulse the blobs now that her body had absorbed them. The light of the five elements had interfered before the blobs’ possession was complete with the rest of us.
None of us were a firedrake, however. I hoped, trying my best to dispel a sinking feeling that spoke to the contrary, that being a firedrake was a sufficient factor to be the telling difference between life and death.
Chapter 31
I didn’t find out whether Sylvia or Marcelo lived, nor was I able to look for Gertrude or settle my nerves and my breath. Before I could even exchange a questioning glance with Mordecai, whose hands still clasped the firedrake, I began to fall.
I registered that falling made no sense. After all, there was—or rather, had been—a very solid and very real dirt floor beneath my feet. But, although it made no sense, I couldn’t deny it was happening. My companions and I were in a free fall, a terrifying, disorienting, stomach-lurching free fall.
There was no apparent end to our descent. Beneath us, as all around us, was a penetrating darkness such as could only be experienced deep within the earth. I couldn’t tell how many of us were falling, although I suspected that the master puppeteer of Castle Washur was exempt from our tumble. It was impossible to distinguish the jumble of bodies as we sank beneath, to a place that shouldn’t have existed.
We’d been in a dungeon. There should’ve been no underneath, at least not one that wasn’t accessed through stairs carved from the earth.
No, this was something else. This was a magic for which I had no protection. And it was something I couldn’t deal with, dammit. Even Mother might allow for some unlady-like language, under the circumstances. For all I knew, Gertrude was succumbing to consumption by blobs even as I fell inelegantly, arms and legs sprawling in every direction. There was no control to my movements just as there was no control to my fall.
My heart ached and I was tempted to give up. I wasn’t powerful enough or knowledgeable enough to combat an undead wizard, who knew all the tricks in the forbidden book. It was a fight I’d never wanted to take on, and I wanted to take it on even less now. All I wished was to get my sister out of there, leave with those friends I’d grown to love, and never see the dastardly Count or his devastating castle ever again.
I didn’t care about vanquishing darkness. Not truly, not at this cost. The cost was already too great, and I suspected the Count was only just beginning to reveal what he planned to do to us.
My head swung painfully to and fro, tumbling with the rest of me, scrambling my thoughts.
At this rate, if we were actually falling into a physical place, we’d have to be many stories beneath the ground. And if we weren’
t tumbling toward a physical place, arriving at the Count’s intended destination might be even worse than a final splat that pulverized organ, bone, and tissue indiscriminately.
I couldn’t calm myself enough to focus on anything or anyone. Falling without control, without knowledge of when, or if, it would ever stop, overpowered my mind. I imagined this was happening to all of us.
We tumbled heavy as stones and plummeted to the bottom of nothingness quietly. It was the type of silence that heralded chaos, the predecessor to catastrophic destruction. No one said a word. No one whimpered or breathed too quickly. Nausea welled and swirled in my stomach, and I surrendered. In that moment, the Count had won.
The farther we fell, the faster we fell. When I was upside down, my skirts lifted to cover my face. When I spun back upright, they flipped to cover my feet. Back and forth went my dress, with just as much nonsensical movement as the rest of me.
After an interminable amount of time, I heard a sound.
Eventually, I realized that the sound was words. Later still, I grasped that the words were in Mordecai’s voice. But I couldn’t make sense of them any more than I could of our free fall.
The words never gathered strength. They reached me distorted, twisting and twirling in the air just as we were.
And Mordecai’s words never fully formed the spell he intended, with more presence of mind than I could even fathom.
Regardless, we halted. Just as suddenly as our fall began, we jerked to immobility. The sudden stop stressed my body painfully, muscles and tissue instantly bruised from the impact of hitting nothingness as hard as we did.
I vomited into a void that seemed to stretch into eternity beneath us. And I wasn’t the only one.
I hung there, at the bottom of a pile of rag dolls, with limbs and hair that stretched into the eeriness that swelled up from below.
It seemed like forever before we started to move upward, and our ascent took just short of forever. We had a long way to climb, and we did so much more slowly than we’d fallen.
At first, I tensed, as uncomfortable with the thought of a force I couldn’t see carrying me upward as I was with it hurling me downward.
Eventually I relaxed. I had nothing to do but go wherever it would take me.
When I was finally deposited in a familiar darkness, with a rank scent of dungeon haunted by too much suffering, I didn’t think anything could have disoriented me any further.
As usual, I was wrong.
Chapter 32
I blinked several times, attempting in vain to clear the fog from my brain. When I was able to bring clarity to my sight, my breath rushed out in relief at what I saw. I’d worried that my fiancé would die, yet there were two Marcelos within my line of sight. One of them slumped against a filthy wall, and the other running from me to the others.
I blinked again. There was talking to my right.
“I’m all right, my son. I’m all right,” Mordecai said in a voice that sounded anything but. “Check on Sylvia. I don’t know if she made it.”
I followed Marcelo’s clipped paces until they reached the firedrake. Sylvia’s usual poise was alarmingly absent. After our fall and consequent ascent, she no longer lay atop Marcelo. Parts of her body lay piled on top of each other, while others sprawled inelegantly out to the sides.
When Marcelo lifted her eyelids, he saw nothing to reassure him. He turned her head toward him, and let it go for a second while he looked over his shoulder at Mordecai. In the second he didn’t support it, the head rolled to the floor with an unpleasant thump.
Marcelo squatted, and stared at Sylvia long enough for the blurriness to leave my sight completely. I tried to sit up. Marcelo swung around to face me, still in a crouch, a hunter assessing his losses before the time came to avenge them.
He took my hand. “My darling, are you all right?” He petted my hand, and I watched, dazed, as his hand passed across mine, over and over. What had happened to us? I looked at the Marcelo before me, then at the one still unconscious behind him.
When my gaze traveled back, eyes filled with worry closed in on mine. I brought my eyelids down to block Marcelo out. It was too much for now. My head still swirled as if I’d never stopped falling. Nausea lurched inside me again and I reached for my stomach.
“The stomach upset will pass soon,” he said knowingly. “It won’t last much longer.”
How could he possibly know? He hadn’t fallen with us; he’d been the one to bring us back up.
I didn’t think the sensation of stomach-churning would ever end. If I could have, I would’ve nodded to assure him anyway. Instead, I waited him out with eyes closed until he walked away.
Again, the removed voices. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know, my son. I lost track of him long before we began our fall.” A pause while Mordecai groaned. “Somewhere in the castle, I suspect. He isn’t finished with us yet.” I was thankful to hear Mordecai say this with a grimace. It wasn’t just me, the inexperienced one, who thought what the undead wizard had already inflicted upon us to be sufficiently unbearable for one day.
I opened my eyes in time to see Marcelo turn his gaze upward, searching the ceiling of the dungeon as if he could see through it. Could he? I wondered. I also wondered how it was that Marcelo or Mordecai believed I’d pose any kind of threat to Count Washur. I was beginning to realize all too clearly how inadequate I was to fight in this battle.
I whispered, but it was hoarse and inaudible.
Mordecai raised a limp arm and pointed toward me, then he let it drop noisily to the floor next to him, and he allowed his head to fall back against the damp wall, trying to absorb its stillness.
Marcelo scuttled over to me. “Clara, what is it?”
I tried, but nothing came out. “It’s all right, Clara. Take your time, my darling. We have all the time in the world.” Yet, I knew that we didn’t. And so did he.
“Gertrude.” It was all I said, but it was enough. Marcelo’s eyebrows shot up, and he stood, head swiveling to either side of him as he walked. She obviously wasn’t right where we were. His footfalls sounded more and more distant. I had no idea how large the dungeon was.
It took Marcelo a while to return; the dungeon was big enough to swallow the echoes of his steps. When he returned he shook his head at me once, and I closed my eyes again, this time, to shut out the horrors my mind might imagine.
My beloved little sister was in the hands of a monster and I knew of nothing I could do to help her.
Chapter 33
It took a long time to get us moving again. I suspected the sun had traveled far in the sky since we first stepped foot inside the castle, but there was no way to know. No hint of the outside filtered inside the dungeon, neither the warmth of sunshine, nor any other kind of hopeful imagery.
We waited for Sylvia and the injured split of Marcelo to awaken, and in that time I studied my surroundings more closely. Marcelo was bent over Mordecai, who couldn’t yet move, and whispered something to him, that I assumed were his concerns of another attack before we gathered our defenses.
My eyes saw remarkably well in the dimness, now that they had ample opportunity to adjust properly to the lack of light. I noticed shackles, encrusted with the dried and caked blood of several miserable victims. There were at least five sets bolted into the floor. Winston’s foot distractedly nudged one of them, and I wondered, not for the first time, what had made him want to join the ranks of someone like the Count.
My sight discovered dark stains across the dungeon floor, blood again I suspected, aged and set so the pain of others would never be erased. But other than that, the dungeon was an unremarkable space, the product of a man who possessed more hatred than real imagination.
Time moved slowly down there. Marcelo’s concerned eyes marked the passing minutes; each one increased the danger to us. Finally, when he considered the risk of further attack more pressing than the risk of moving before we were ready, he helped Mordecai stand. The old man rose from the
floor with a groan, but eventually stood. Marcelo left him leaning against the wall.
Next, Marcelo crouched in front of his nephew and Winston. They returned his attention wide-eyed. If he wanted to hurt them then, there was little they could do to prevent it.
“We are going to leave. Our plan is to attempt to slip out of the castle without notice and regain our strength.”
I started to complain from the other side of Marcelo and he whirled to face me. “Clara, I know it’s your sister, but we’re of no use to her now. I must get you all out to safety, or there’ll be no chance of ever rescuing her.”
He turned back toward the young men. “You can choose to come with us. We won’t harm you in any way as long as you don’t intend to harm us. If you decide to remain behind with Count Washur, I’ll allow it. But next time we face you, we’ll consider you our enemy.
“Sala—”
“No!” Salazar interrupted. Marcelo’s nephew shook his head briefly, before he was forced to lean it into his hands, stilling it. “No,” he said again, this time little more than a whisper. “Don’t use my name.”
Marcelo looked suspiciously at his nephew, almost a replica of his younger self. Through narrowed eyes, he continued. “All right, then. My nephew, I’d very much like it if you’d join us. My sister would want me to care for you.”
At that, Salazar’s eyes swung up and glared at Marcelo furiously. But the fury was short-lived, and soon unease replaced it.
Marcelo reached a hand out to Salazar, who hesitated, but then clamped Marcelo’s knee anyway. Salazar looked at Marcelo’s hand as if it were a viper, the confused emotions all but apparent on his face. “I loved your mother. I always have.” He stared at Salazar for a moment, and then stood. He took two paces toward me, and then turned to regard his nephew again.
Then he shook his head slightly to clear it, and walked over to me. He reached a hand to help me up. “Can you stand?” No screamed across my mind, but I tried to stand anyway. On wobblier legs than ever, I managed it, and fell into Marcelo’s chest. I wanted nothing more than to remain in his arms, but as usual, there was no time for us. We’d been short on time since the start.