Fear of Fire and Shadow

by S. Young

  I jumped to my feet, flinching at the forgotten blisters, and shook myself out. Not sure I was safe from the insects, who obviously liked the Aran root as much as I did, I curled into a ball in the open soil, glancing around to make sure there was nothing else near me.

  Oh haven, I hated this.

  Thankfully, I must have drifted back to sleep for I woke up lying flat out on my back, the forest ceiling above me now giving way to the blue of the sky.

  The blue of the sky!

  What time was it?

  I cried out and lunged sleepily for my things. It was definitely past sunrise. Probably midmorning. I’d missed a good few hours of light for walking. Grumbling at myself, I chewed on a biscuit and sipped from my canteen as I hurried upward, remembering to hold back the whimpers from the pain in my feet and body. Those first few steps were agonizing. I sucked in air and took a few more tentative steps, building momentum and chanting Haydyn’s name as incentive to keep moving.

  At the thought of Shadow Hill, I chanted inwardly, sure I was close to the town by now. I didn’t want to be heard.

  By afternoon, the sun was stronger than ever and wearing me down. But my feet. The pain was unbearable. At the constant sound of the stream to my right, I gave in. It didn’t deviate from the direction of my magic, only from the worn track that kept me from the thick of the woods and all the plants and twigs that would trip me. The thought of cold water against my sore feet was too terrible a temptation to ignore.

  I headed off, stepping carefully, until I found the wide stream rushing past. I could almost feel its soothing, cool liquid. I smiled wearily and sat down to remove my boots.

  “Ahh … hsss …” I whimpered and hissed as the boots knocked against sores. I pouted like a little girl as I peeled off my stockings, a garbled shout of pain escaping before I could stop it, as the stocking, stuck with sweat, ripped open a blister.

  I glared at the boots.

  Perhaps taking them off hadn’t been such a good idea. They might not go back on without a fight. Slumping at my losing battle with my feet, I slid them into the stream, wincing at the stings. And then the cold water did what I had hoped it would, numbing my swollen appendages until I didn’t feel a thing.

  When they’d had enough, I kneeled and ripped off the jacket and waistcoat and scooped water up to clean my neck and behind my ears as best I could. Feeling sweat along my hairline, I tugged off the cap and uncoiled my hair, sighing in satisfaction as my scalp drew breath.

  The crack of a branch made me flinch and stiffen.

  I was terrified to look behind me.

  I heard the heavy breathing and my heart spluttered in absolute horror. A smell drifted upwind. Stale. Dirty. Human.

  “What be here, then?” he growled in my ear.

  Chapter 24

  Huge arms encircled my waist, dragging me back from the stream as if I weighed nothing more than a sack of flour.

  I shrieked and reached behind me, clawing at skin and pulling at hair. The stranger merely grunted until I was shunted up onto his shoulders, high off the ground.

  He was huge.

  I wriggled and screamed and fought and pummeled, and was merely slapped at for my troubles. My heart raced so fast it hurt, bile threatened to rise in my throat, and I was shaking so hard, my teeth chattered.

  Frustrated tears welled in my eyes.

  I was so stupid.

  Brint had warned me about the Shadow Hill people. Had I listened? No. I’d wandered off the path because my feet hurt! Not only that, I’d unbound my hair.

  I beat at the man’s back once more with fury. “Put me down!” I cried, exhaustion making my voice weak.

  How was I to escape these people? My feet hurt, I had no energy, I was useless. Once again kidnapped and taken. I could only hope the people showed me mercy.

  The stranger’s hand slid around to my buttocks and he squeezed, making me blanch in revulsion. “Good,” he commented gruffly. “Very good.”

  What the haven did that mean?

  The more we trekked, the more my magic wailed at me to turn back. He was deviating from my path!

  Just as I was about to yell at him again, he slowed, walking up a few stone steps before I heard the creak of a door. I swung my head up, looking around us. We were still in the woods! As we entered the dimness of a tiny shack, an awful realization dawned on me. He wasn’t one of the Shadow Hill people. And we were all alone.

  As he set me on my battered feet, I ignored the pain and tried to dart away from him. His huge sweaty hands wrapped around my waist and he yanked me back against him. I trembled at the feel of his wet lips against my neck and fought the urge to be sick. I yelled in outrage and raked my fingernails along the skin of his hands. The stranger growled and whipped me around. I caught a glimpse of a rough face, drooping eyes and a toothless mouth surrounded by a beard, before his meaty hand walloped me across the cheek.

  Ringing burst into song in my ear as I crumpled to the ground, dazed, my left cheek blazing with heat and throbbing with pain. Disoriented, darkness fell over my eyes.

  A few minutes later, as I came to, I felt a tugging at my feet and looked to see the huge mountain man tying my ankles together with rope. Disbelief cleared my head and I thrust my legs, trying to get away from him. Horror flooded me when I saw he’d already tied my wrists so tight with rope that the slightest movement caused the scratchy material to chafe.

  Distantly aware of his hands sliding along my legs, I searched the room, looking for anything—a weapon, some way out. I lay on a soggy pallet in the far corner. And there was nothing. Nothing else in the room but a large hunting knife, a pail, and a door. There was one window. Tiny. Not nearly big enough to climb out.

  No. No!

  My eyes widened as his hand crawled up the inside of my thigh. I snarled and shook him off me. Mountain man did nothing but smile and crawl alongside me, the stench of his body odor making me gag.

  “Now, now,” he admonished, and I shrunk back at the bright lust in his eyes. My stomach roiled and my lips quivered. Tears splashed down my cheeks.

  I choked on a sob and he grinned wider. “No tears, wife.” He shook his head as he touched me between the legs.

  I roared like an animal in his face and he flinched back in surprise. Then he gave a huff of laughter. “Good wife.”

  “I’m not your wife!” I screamed through tears and snot. “Let me go! I’m not your wife!”

  I was rewarded with another heavy slap, across my right cheek this time. My teeth pierced through my lip at the impact and I tasted blood on my tongue.

  Glaring through my lashes at the mountain man, I noted his fascination with the blood staining my lip. My heart stopped at the brightness in his eyes. The lust had deepened. I swallowed back a rush of vomit.

  Mountain man reached out and touched my cut lip. “Yer ma wife,” he growled, pushing his face into mine. I closed my eyes, holding my breath so I didn’t have to inhale his stink. “I find ye. Ye be ma wife.”

  Brint had warned me. Brint had told me there were people out here who had gone crazy with the isolation.

  “I’m goin’ huntin’. But I be back. I be gone awhile. But I be back, wife. I be back and feed ye, wife. And then ye be seeing to my husbandly needs.” He stroked himself and I turned away, biting back screams of denial.

  Whimpers escaped between my pinched lips.

  I shuddered at the feel of his fingers on my face. He gripped my chin, jerking my head around. I didn’t have to open my eyes to know his face was inches from mine. His lips came down wet and hard on my mouth, his beard scratching me as I struggled against him, my lips tightly closed. A large hand encircled my neck and squeezed. I gasped, giving him the opening he needed. His tongue forced its way into my mouth. I gagged on the foul taste of him, his rancid stench clogging my senses. No matter how much I jerked my head this way and that, he followed, his lips drinking me in like a fish gulping for air. The skin around my mouth was raw from his beard and wet from his fetid saliva
. I was running out of air, close to hyperventilating, when I felt his hand squeeze my breast.

  My anger turned into a blaze of fury.

  Fury at myself and my stupidity. At this man, this mountain man who thought he could just take me like I was a deer in the woods. It coursed through me in an unthinking rush. Instinctively, I brought up my tied hands, suffusing as much strength and force into the upswing as I could, and abused him between his legs.

  He broke away from me with a strangled shout and fell back, clutching where only minutes before he’d been stroking. I immediately vomited on the crude wooden floors beside the pallet. The room now reeked with the vilest of human stench, and I emptied what was left in my stomach.

  I struggled to draw breath, the room spinning. I had to get out of here. I had to.

  I thought of my kidnapping by the Iavii people. Of Kir’s rookery gang. None of it had been so bad as this. Nothing this horrific had happened to me in a long time. I didn’t think anything could match watching my parents and brother die. But if I stayed here, if this man used me and broke me …

  I sobbed, tears blinding as I drew my tied hands down onto the floor and used my upper body to drag myself along the wood. The door was just there. I had to get to it.

  A bellow echoed around the shack and I was yanked like a rag doll and thrown against the back of the hut. A sickening vibration shot through my body as my head hit the wall.

  I slumped on the pallet and watched through blurry eyes as the mountain man approached me, his face mottled with hatred, lechery, and anger. I became a little more alert at the sight of the large hunting knife in his hand.

  “Bad wife,” he growled, brandishing the knife. “Teach ye a lesson, I will.”

  I beat at him uselessly with my tied hands as he grabbed me by my shirt. And then he tore open the shirt, revealing the curve of my breasts.

  “No!” I cried out and swung my hands back up, catching his jaw. The mountain man barely blinked.

  “Yer goin’ to behave.” He pointed the knife in my face, and I glared back at him, ignoring the hot tears rolling down my cheek. I took deep breaths as he smiled at me. I let a shaky calm envelop me. If this was to be my end, then I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of enjoying my fear.

  I jutted my chin in defiance.

  The mountain man tutted and gently placed the tip of the blade at the bottom of my throat. It was menacingly cold as he gently drew it down my skin, scratching me, until he came to the rising curve of my left breast. The blade pressed deeper, and I muffled a cry of shocked pain. He scored a shallow cut along the top of my breast, watching my expression. Blood trickled from the wound and clenched my jaw to keep from looking at the injury.

  Mountain man pulled the blade back, grinning the entire time, his eyes alight with excitement. The knife disappeared into a pouch on his hip and he stood. He was huge. Massive. His entire shadow cast me into darkness in the shade of the shack.

  He tugged at his trousers and licked his lips. “I like red on ye, wife. It’s good. When I get back, I be bedding ye, ma wife. Bedding ye with a little more red.”

  At that, he abruptly turned and left, picking up some crude hunting gear I hadn’t seen. It lay near the door. The door opened, and I searched it greedily for a lock. It slammed shut behind him and I heard his footsteps disappear. I blinked, stupefied by what I’d seen.

  There was no lock on the door.

  At his sudden departure, the realization of what had just happened—and what was going to happen if I didn’t get out of there—rushed in like a storm against the cliffs of Silvera. Terrified sobs broke out of me in rib-cracking force, and I shook and trembled, damning my stupid pride and fear that had made me come up the mountains without Wolfe.

  “Stop it,” I bit out, impatiently brushing the tears from my face with the tips of my fingers. I couldn’t just sit here wallowing. I had to escape. The longer I stayed, the more likely he would return. If that happened, we were all doomed. Haydyn was doomed. I had to get to that plant. I had to get back to Haydyn. And when she awoke … I’d tell her all that had happened. All that I had discovered. That there were good and bad people all over our world—that background, upbringing, and proximity to the Dyzvati evocation mattered little.

  I’d lived my life with blinders on, convinced that my harsh jolt out of childhood innocence somehow made me wiser than others. But I wasn’t. I was still a child who’d only been thrust into womanhood on this journey. This journey to save Phaedra from losing the evocation.

  A journey that had taught me—I sucked in a painful breath—we didn’t need the evocation. For centuries we’d feared the fire and shadow, the worst of human nature. But that fire and shadow was a part of us, whether we liked it or not. And it roared and crackled to life when people were treated unjustly.

  What we needed was a stronger government. We needed to take care of our people, no matter the province they belonged to. The evocation wouldn’t change the issues that made people act out as soon as its strength waned. But perhaps a better governing of them could get us closer to fixing the issues. Get us closer to ridding the world of men like the one who had come upon me and taken me as if I were a body without a soul …

  All this I’d tell Haydyn … if I ever got out of here.

  With renewed determination, I thumped my bound hands down onto the floor, ignoring the bite of splinters from the wood. I dragged myself along the ground. I didn’t have great upper-body strength but I might have managed more easily if it weren’t for the stinging pain of my feet and the throbbing cut on my breast needling my brain and slowing me down.

  I made it to the door, but I was already soaked with sweat. It took another five minutes to wobble up onto my feet so I could pry open the door. As soon as it opened and the fresh forest air rushed against me, stealing me from the stink of the shack, I was submerged in dizziness. I leaned against the door frame to collect myself.

  Finally, I opened my eyes. My magic reached out to me, beckoning me back onto the path. If I could manage to hobble far enough, perhaps I could find some way to untie the ropes. Carefully, concentrating, I balanced my body just right and hopped down onto the first step out of the shack. I wobbled a little, making my heart pitch in fear, but I was still standing. I took another breath and hopped again. This time I lost my balance and crashed with a painful “oof” onto the forest floor. A little winged bug stared up at me before flying off. I growled in frustration and tried to pull myself into a standing position. Five falls later and I was back up.

  That was the pattern of how my day continued. I couldn’t even remember how far I had fallen, hopped, and dragged myself. I kept freezing at every sound, trying to hear over the blood rushing in my ears. By nightfall, I was covered in sweat and mud and forest. But with no coat and a ripped shirt, I was thankful for the heat of the exertion. The shack seemed long gone now, but still I remained terrified. I had no idea how far I’d traveled.

  Night had fallen a few hours past when I heard a loud snap of a tree branch. I stilled, my heart fluttering like a snared animal. I glanced around, trying to see in the dark. A large plant rustled and I whirled around. I could feel eyes on me. Boring into me. Trapping me.

  Terror taunted me.

  A rush of warm fluid slid down my leg.

  The rustle sounded again, another crack of a tree.

  Beady eyes appeared in the dark, low to the ground. I let go of my breath, my whole body sagging as some kind of opossum darted out of the bush and away from me. Realization dawned, and I looked down in the dark at my trousers. I could smell the stench of urine.

  Silently, I began to cry.

  I made another mistake.

  Sometime during the late night, perhaps early morning, my mind blank with agony and exhaustion, I had fallen again. I had only intended to take a minute to collect myself. But when my eyes finally peeled back open, it was because a stream of sunlight was begging them to.

  I blinked, confused. Where was I?

  “Finally,
ye be wakin’.”

  The nightmare that had unbelievably been real came rushing back at the sound of the mountain man’s voice. I closed my eyes as I was roughly turned around; I tasted soil on my lips.

  “Open yer eyes!” he bellowed in my face, the putrid breath bringing back memories of the day before.

  Not wanting to, but somehow needing to, I did as he demanded, opening my eyes to see his ugly face inches above mine, his large hands gripping my upper arms.

  His eyes blazed with rage. “Ye goin’ to be gettin’ it bad, wife, for runnin’ off.”

  He dragged me into his arms. I struggled. I was in so much pain already, his pinches and slaps didn’t stop me from giving him hell as he strode in long lurches back to his shack.

  The magic screamed at me again as he pulled me from its path.

  When the shack appeared, I stopped struggling, slumping in his arms. We had walked perhaps thirty minutes using his long strides.

  It had taken me hours to get thirty minutes away from this beast.

  I gave a roar of rage and clobbered my bound hands against his head in impotent wrath. He snarled at me, giving me a wounded look as if he were the victim, not I. The fact that this man was deranged made my fear increase. There would be no reasoning with someone like him.

  I was thrown down on the pallet as he slammed the shack door shut. The stench of dead meat filled the small room, and I gagged at the sight of an animal in the corner. But the carcass was the least of my worries.

  My heart froze as the mountain man began undressing. I struggled away from him, my back pressed against the wall of the shack, frantically searching for a weapon as he loomed over me, naked.

  Fuck the chafing! I pulled my wrists back and forth, desperate to be free. I could hear him laughing as he lowered himself to the ground, but still I rubbed my wrists together, growling and crying at the agony as I ripped my flesh raw. Saliva and tears dripped off my chin as I refused to look at the man.