by Rebecca Daff
Leroy spat onto the ground. His lips puckered. “A bit sour, that one.” He picked another doll off the ground, ready to get things going again. “Bring out another.”
Chris had an idea. She got Micah’s attention again then held up her index finger. Get ready.
The mercenary thudded over to the cage and opened the door to retrieve the next victim. Chris stepped out from behind the tree and into the clearing, Micah following her lead. Leroy looked at her as if running across an old friend, surprised, but pleasantly so.
“Christina,” he said, stepping over the sapped Marked to greet her. “It’s been far too long.”
The mercenary strode toward them, knife at the ready. Leroy simply held up his hand and he stopped. The door to the cage was open and forgotten, behind him. Good, Chris thought.
Leroy shot a quick glance at Micah but then quickly turned back to Chris. “I see you brought your friend.”
Chris took a deep breath and tried to calm herself. Her hands were trembling from the adrenaline. “It’s time to finish this.”
The mercenary took another step forward. Again, Leroy held up his hand, stopping him.
“There’s no need for violence,” he said, glancing at their weapons.
“And what you just did to that woman? That wasn’t violence?” Micah said. He was banging his makeshift club against the side of his leg, the muscles in his jaw working.
“That?” Leroy asked, looking over at the woman. She hadn’t moved from where they’d left her, just knelt there with that dazed look, her hand still bleeding on the makeshift altar. “That’s not violence. That’s just the natural order of things. Magic is for our kind. The gods blessed us with the magic rains long ago and ever since we have held the right to it. What kind of world would it be if everyone had it? How would we support ourselves? We’re barely scraping by as it is. No. That’s not violence. That’s keeping what’s rightfully ours.”
Chris had heard enough. She gripped her sword even tighter and moved toward Leroy. The mercenary rushed toward her, but Micah stepped in his path, club out.
“Don’t even think about it,” Micah said.
The mercenary batted his club away and advanced on Micah with his knife. But, unknown to him, while they’d all been talking, the captive Marked had simply walked out of the cage’s open door.
“Leave him alone.” The man who spoke was young, tall, and dark. He held no weapons, yet there was an energy that radiated off of him that said he was someone to be reckoned with. The rest of The Marked gathered around him. The fear that had been there just a short while before was gone. In its place was anger, years of anger, generations of anger. The mercenary must have sensed it because he turned his back on Micah. They were the bigger threat. As the mercenary charged them, Micah ran after him, lunged onto his back, and bludgeoned him with the broken branch. The creature sliced the air, trying to cut Micah, but then the crowd was yelling, some screaming in rage, swarming him. He caught some of them with his knife but was quickly overwhelmed by their sheer numbers.
Chris raised her sword to the side, lifting it with both hands, and ran to Leroy. He didn’t even move. He just raised a hand and swiped the air in front of him.
“What are you doing?” Chris’s mom asked.
Chris looked around, disoriented. She was in her home, in the kitchen with her mother, stirring a pot of chili, her mom rummaging through the cabinets. “I asked you to help me find the garlic powder. Stop stirring that and give me a hand.”
Looking around the room, Chris had the strange feeling she had just gotten there, that she’d been somewhere else just moments before even though she was wearing an apron with chili spattered on it. The muscles in her arms ached and she thought it was because she’d been stirring the pot.
“Christina!” her mother said, exasperated. Her hands were on her hips, her face drawn into the I mean business look she always had whenever Chris was in trouble. “Drop that spoon and give me a hand right now.”
Chris looked down at the metal spoon that was so much heavier than it should have been. The chili was bubbling, an orange froth around the edges of the pot. If she stopped stirring it was going to boil over.
“Now, Chris.” Her mother sounded angrier than she’d ever heard her.
A bubble burst and the chili spattered on Chris’s arm. She sucked in a breath, still holding the spoon, and inspected the spot where she had been scalded. There, on her wrist, was a dark crescent-shaped mark. Searing pain radiated from it, delving deep into her flesh, penetrating her tendons and bone.
“Drop the spoon, Chrissy!” her mother yelled.
God, it hurt so much. Chris doubled over, squeezing her eyes shut. When she closed her lids, she saw trees. Micah was fighting a monstrous scaled beast alongside ten or fifteen other people.
“Hurry, Christina,” her mother said, placing her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Drop the spoon before it’s too late.”
Too late for what?
Chris was back in the kitchen. The burning sensation in her wrist was so intense she was sure the mark had eaten its way through to the other side. She no longer knew why she was holding onto the spoon or why it had seemed so important in the first place. She was about to let it go when she happened to glance at the hand resting on her shoulder. A fresh wave of pain coursed up her arm and she could clearly see what she hadn’t noticed before: pointed black nails. Her mother saw what she was looking at and a swift change came over her. She no longer had that look of motherly concern. Instead, she scowled and dug her nails into Chris’s shoulder.
“Drop the damn spoon,” she said in a voice that was not her own.
Chris cried out in pain. She didn’t know which was worse, the nails digging into her flesh or the burning in her arm, but through it all she managed to eke out a single word. “No!”
She saw the trees again. There was water too. And the oppressive humidity of the deep South. The beast Micah had been attacking was on the ground now. The people around it kicked it until it covered its head with its hands, cowering in fear.
“No,” she said, standing upright.
Chris’s mom looked surprised. Beneath that surprise was fear. She stumbled backward and the illusion shattered. It wasn’t her mom. It was Leroy. And they weren’t in her kitchen on Earth. Chris was on Kellet in the middle of a swamp.
“But, but you were charmed,” Leroy said, looking down at his hands, searching for what went wrong.
The pain in Chris’s arm was slowly ebbing away. She felt emboldened, more powerful than she ever had. “Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think that works on me anymore.” She pulled her sleeve down and showed him the mark. His eyes grew wide and she seized the opportunity, slashing out at him with the unwieldy sword she held. He tried to dodge her attack but she caught him anyway, the blade slicing diagonally across his torso. Blood pooled on his skin. He touched the wound in disbelief. Chris lifted her sword again, and Leroy did what he should have done the first time. He ran.
Chris chased him across the clearing, but he plunged into the water before she could catch him. She sheathed her sword and dove in after him. The water was murky, a mix of mud and algae, and Chris forced herself to keep her eyes open instead of shutting them against the gunk. The water was cluttered with the thick roots of ancient trees in clusters and tangles. Chris wove between them, following Leroy’s figure which kept diving further into the water’s depths. Her cloak snagged on one of the roots and instantly she was a child again in a creek, her blanket tightening around her neck. She blinked hard, focusing on where she was, and with her free hand unclasped the cloak, letting the roots have it. Her lungs were already starting to burn, but she knew if she didn’t kill Leroy now she may never have the chance again. She fought the pain and kept diving.
Suddenly the mud and algae cleared and she was in blue-green water. In front of her was a massive dwelling, a mansion shaped out of precious Kelletian metal. If she were on earth she would call it a palace. It even had a bubb
ling fountain out front. Leroy swam through one of the window-shaped holes on the third floor. Chris wanted to follow but she was running out of air. She did the only thing she could do short of returning to the surface. She used the last of her energy to swim down to the fountain. Bubbles erupted from its basin and she held her face over them. When she couldn’t fight it anymore she opened her mouth.
It was like sucking in a lungful of air in the most stifling humidity ever, like trying to breathe through a steaming towel, but it was breathing. Chris took in great gulps, her lungs aching. Through the bubbles, she could see Leroy peering out of one of the mansion’s windows. She took another deep breath before swimming inside.
As soon as Chris swam through the front door a giant frog lunged at her. It was so large that when it reared up on its hind legs they were face to face. A collar circled its neck. It must have been Leroy’s pet. When it lowered itself back down she edged around it and cautiously swam farther into the room.
Glass chandeliers dangled from the ceilings. Expertly crafted chairs floated in what Chris assumed was a parlor. A dozen more hung suspended in the green water around a twenty-foot-long dining table in another room. Plates and teacups bobbed in disarray. Everything you would expect to be there was there, but it had the air of neglect, of abandonment, as though some disaster had occurred and Chris was looking at artifacts of something lost.
She swam from room to room looking for Leroy. Up pointless stairwells, down empty corridors. She needed air, but she was deep in the building’s underbelly in an old kitchen with, of all things, a wood burning stove. There were no windows, no way to get to the fountain in time.
Leroy glided through the kitchen’s doorway. He tilted his head to the side and took a deep breath, his chest puffing out, then exhaled, smiling. Chris didn’t know how much longer she was going to last.
“Your magic is going to be very valuable,” he said.
Chris wasn’t surprised she could hear him underwater. Nothing surprised her anymore.
“I haven’t seen magic that strong in a long time.” He swam toward her, bringing a pointed nail to her left arm. He wasn’t worried about the one that held the sword. It dangled uselessly at Chris’s side while her air ran out. “Let’s do this right this time.”
Chris waited for the pain, for the moment when he pierced her flesh to put her into a doll forever, but just then the frog that had greeted her at the door bounded into the room.
“Get out of here!” Leroy yelled. “Go on!”
Chris wanted to take a breath. She tucked her lips between her teeth and bit down, forcing herself not to.
The frog ignored Leroy’s command, paddling over to Chris. He was right next to her when his throat bulged out. It swelled so much his collar snapped and broke. He opened his mouth and let out one humongous belch, releasing Chris’s dagger into the water. Quickly, she grabbed the hilt and thrust the blade into Leroy’s throat before he had the chance to stop her.
Leroy backed away from her, convulsing, trying to stop the bleeding and failing. It pooled in the water around him, billowing from his wound until it was a great black plume.
Chris couldn’t fight it anymore. Her mouth opened and water rushed into her lungs. She kicked and writhed, her body desperate for air but finding none. Both she and Leroy were drifting toward the ceiling. She spasmed uncontrollably for one long moment then relaxed as the world around her lifted.
Chris had the sensation she was in a swing, her legs dangling beneath her. Her eyes drifted downward. The top half of her body was still in the water, but everything below her was dry. As soon as she realized it, she was dropped unceremoniously to the kitchen floor, landing with a wet thud that knocked the water out of her lungs. She turned onto her side, coughing all of it out onto the floor then sucking in huge breaths, her mouth opening and closing like a fish on dry land. Her chest heaved and she flopped onto her back to watch the last of the water recede through the ceiling.
She didn’t have time to rest. The water could come back at any moment. Chris turned over and searched the floor for her dagger. It was lying next to Leroy. His body was limp, his eyes staring up at the ceiling, vacant as his victims’ eyes had been. Chris picked up the blade, stepping over Leroy’s corpse on her way out.
It was difficult to get her bearings. All the stuff that had been floating around before, the miscellany that demarked which room was which, was lying in a cluttered mess. But she finally managed to find her way to the ground floor, to the place where she’d come in, and when she looked outside the mansion’s windows she saw that not only had all the water in the mansion been drained, but the entire swamp was dry. Chris stepped through the front door and looked up. Tree roots still hung suspended far above her, and what water remained was retreating toward them.
“Holy shit,” she said under her breath.
Leroy’s frog bounded out the front door and sat next to her.
“Thanks for what you did back there,” Chris said. “I have no idea how you did it, but thanks.”
She looked up at the trees again. “Now how in the world am I supposed to get out of here?”
The frog bounced up and down excitedly then nudged Chris with his nose. When she didn’t do what he wanted, he turned to face away from her and then hopped in place again. She finally understood.
“You sure?” she asked.
He hopped impatiently.
Chris climbed onto his back and wrapped her arms around his neck. One bounding leap and he was sitting on an eave above a window on the second floor of the mansion. Chris felt her stomach bottom out but before she could recover he hopped again and was on the third floor. On and on it went until he was at the mansion’s highest point. They were probably twenty or so feet from the nearest cluster of dangling roots. Chris held on as the frog closed the gap, leaping toward them then grabbing them at the last second like a trapeze artist. Then he launched himself and Chris through the water above them and back out onto the clearing.
Water from the swamp continued to lift into the sky. Micah and the Marked that had helped him tackle the mercenary fell to the ground, dropping from where they had hung suspended in the liquid.
“Micah!” Chris said, climbing off the frog’s back and scrambling to where her friend lay gasping for air. She thumped him on the back, helping him expel the water from his lungs. All around her The Marked were doing the same for each other. When he could finally breathe again he tried to speak but broke into a fit of coughing.
“Where’s the mercenary?” she asked, rubbing his back. Before he’d even pointed she saw the wet and crumpled body. Then something else, something she couldn’t believe she’d forgotten about, sprang to mind. Something pretty damn important: the remaining Swampers.
Unlike everything else around them, the Swampers had stayed in place while the water rose above them. Their blue lilies still dotted the swamp, but as the last of the water was sucked into the clouds the swampland began to dry. The grass and mulch Chris knelt on started to brown, the mud beneath it drying then finally cracking like the ground had been cracked in the desert outside Nightwell Hold. The moss and leaves on the trees browned and shriveled before flaking to the ground.
One of the Swampers cried out, then another and another. They screamed, pulling themselves out of their pits and onto land. Chris watched their skin begin to dry out, wrinkling, the iridescent blue-green shifting to a sandy brown.
The Swampers shriveled and shrank, their clothes becoming baggy until they were completely engulfed by them. When the Swampers had all but disappeared, a lizard skittered out of one of the piles of clothing. And before Chris knew it, lizards were scurrying out of all the piles. The Swampers had been reduced to nothing more than harmless desert creatures.
Chris thought she should laugh or cry or hug Micah, but she was too tired for any of that. She wanted nothing more than to finish the one last thing they had come there to do.
She and Micah searched the cage for Hannah’s body, but she wasn’t the
re. They looked for the tell-tale mound that demarked a grave, for bones littered around the clearing, but there was no sign of her. Frustrated, Chris stopped and peered through a mess of tree roots. The once-captive Marked were resting in the middle of the clearing, waiting for Chris and Micah to finish what they were doing so they could all leave for Nightwell together. There were so many of them. More than Chris had originally thought there were.
She was looking at their faces, the wrinkles and smiles and tears when one of The Marked brushed his hair out of his face and she recognized him. It was the man Hannah had tried to save at Polaris. His hair had grown out, his clothes were tattered, and his blue eyes peered from a face caked in mud, but it was him. He was alive. Slowly, as if in a dream, she walked to him.
“You were at Polaris,” she said.
Confusion filled his face, and for a split second Chris thought she had made a mistake and it wasn’t him after all. But then his countenance changed as he remembered. He spoke in the same language he had at Polaris and the prisoner who had stood up against the mercenary translated for her.
“You were yelling for her,” he said. “When the mercenary killed her they had to pull you away.”
She nodded and even though Polaris seemed so long ago she still felt a lump form in her throat. “Her name was Hannah,” she said. “She was my friend.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Where did they put her body?” she asked.
He looked at her with something close to pity. The other prisoner said, “They left her at Polaris. King Karniv told one of the guards to take her body to the holding cells, that he would take care of it himself.”
Chris felt like she should have been surprised, or disappointed, or angry but part of her had known that Hannah wasn’t going to be in the swamps. She had searched in the hopes that she was wrong, but her gut had told her long ago that Hannah was gone, that the girl and man that the oracle had told Chris she would find in the Swamplands had already been found in the vultures’ roost. Chris had been looking for her father and sister ever since their deaths without even knowing it.