The Beautiful Ajatara #3
“If they did,” Lucie said, “they did so without erasing the pentagram they had chalked on the floor.”
Cordelia’s eyes flew wide.
James whistled. “Next time, Lucie, do begin your story with that.”
—
Krog she was lifted off her feet, her red hair whipping about her face, before being spun away into darkness.
Cordelia was gone.
The Beautiful Cordelia blinked up at her world as if seeing it for the first time.
How could the heath be so impossibly green, the sky so impossibly blue?
The landscape was dotted with castles of all shapes and materials, glass towers abutting crystalline spires beside stone and brick monstrosities, each of them surrounded by various colors of an impassable moat.
In the distance, in one direction, were rolling hills.
In the opposite direction was a jagged cliff overlooking a majestic sea.
It seemed utterly alien to her, but also wholly familiar, as if she had been wandering this land for a lifetime.
She felt a strange tug at her heart, as if it was saying, Press on, Cordelia, for you have a long journey before you, and love is calling you home.
But where, she thought, is home?
And where in the world, or any world, am I?
James was frantic. White-faced, he paced the room with his hand at his hip, where a short sword rested. “Lucie. Think. What happened? Where did she go?”
“I don’t know.” Lucie was close to crying. “You’re the one who knows about dark magic—”
“Yes,” said James, “but this is Cordelia,” and Lucie knew exactly what he meant. He couldn’t think rationally where Daisy was concerned. Lucie didn’t blame him.
Concentrate, Lucie. You brought them here, this is your fault. Think.
She moved to the lectern where Cordelia had stood. Lucie’s novel rested there quietly, open to the last page Lucie had written. Below that section, there was white space; this was a book still awaiting completion. Awaiting a happy ending.
Lucie remembered. Daisy. Daisy reaching to pick the book up, and then—
Out of the corner of her eye, Lucie saw a flicker. Something moving across the white space of the unfinished last page. As Lucie stared, words began to appear, one after another.
“The book,” Lucie whispered. Her mind was whirling. It simply wasn’t possible. It wasn’t. And yet—
“What?” James demanded, his golden eyes wild. “Did you see something? My back was turned. I heard Daisy scream and—”
“Look,” Lucie said, pointing down at The Beautiful Cordelia.
“Lucie, now is not the time to worry about your silly book.”
It was also not the time to be offended by the characterization of her book as silly, Lucie reminded herself, and filed this insult away for later. “No,” she said, heart singing with terror for her best friend. “Look!”
James obeyed, reading aloud the lines she was pointing at, but careful not to actually touch the page.
The Beautiful Cordelia tried to make some sense of these confusing events. One moment, she had been standing in the drab little publishing office on Fleet Street, and the next, she found herself here, on this strange, lonely road.
James looked up at Lucie in alarm. “When did these sentences appear?”
“Just now,” Lucie said. “I certainly didn’t write them. There was no drab publishing office in The Beautiful Cordelia. People want to read about castles, not publishing.”
“So Cordelia is somehow inside this book?” James said.
As they watched, more words slanted across the page, in a handwriting very unlike Lucie’s.
Suddenly a woman materialized on the road, swathed in luxurious white furs.
Her skin shone radiantly with an ethereal pulchritude, and the Beautiful Cordelia suspected instantly she was not of this world.
As usual, the Beautiful Cordelia’s instincts were as acute as her beauty.
For this was no ordinary woman. This was the deadly demoness Ajatara.
“Is this…describing what’s happening to Cordelia?” James rubbed at his temples. “Our Cordelia? Not the fictional one. Is she somehow—inside the world of the book?”
“It’s awful,” Lucie wailed.
“It certainly is, if Cordelia is trapped in a book! How could such a thing possibly even happen?”
“I meant the prose,” Lucie said. “Pulchritude? Really?”
“Lucie.” James gave her the kind of look that only a big brother can, the kind that suggested that if he weren’t her very loving big brother he might at this moment be tempted to swat her like a fly.
Lucie swallowed her indignation at the idea of a verbally clumsy demon appropriating her novel and focused on the crisis at hand. Cordelia.
“I’ve never heard of this sort of magic,” she said, as words unspooled on the page in bloodred ink. “How can Cordelia be trapped in a place that isn’t even real?”
By this point, more sentences had appeared.
“The Beautiful Cordelia, I presume,” Ajatara said, as she approached. “Though if you ask me, the name is a little much. I’m willing to grant ‘reasonably pretty,’ but ‘beautiful’?”
“How rude!” Lucie exclaimed. It was one thing to massacre her story, but no one was allowed to insult her parabatai.
“Halt, demon!” the Beautiful Cordelia called.
And perhaps her instincts were not so acute after all, as she reached in vain for a weapon—and realized she had left all her weapons behind in that other world, along with her stele and the powers it granted.
In this world, she was nothing but an unarmed maiden forced to survive on her beauty and her wits, to whatever degree she could muster either.
“I don’t think I will,” Ajatara said. “And I don’t think you’ll want me to, once you hear what I have to say.”
“I demand you set me free from your hellish demon realm,” the Beautiful Cordelia said.
“I’ll grant you that the color palette is a little…garish for my taste,” Ajatara said, “but hellish is a bit strong, no?”
“Enough banter,” Lucie grumbled. “Let’s get to the plot. What’s happening?”
“Perhaps you’re wondering how you’ve ended up here,” Ajatara said. She laid one of her furs along the side of the road, like a picnic blanket. “Come, sit. Listen. And I shall tell you quite a tale.”