Chapter Five. In Which the Girl Barely Escapes from a Massacre
CHAPTER FIVE
In Which the Girl Barely Escapes from a Massacre
Risa screamed.
Yes, she had considered the possibility of an attack several times as the group marched through the Bosque—in the same way she considered the impossibility of farmers growing crops in the sodden soil of Barrow.
No, she hadn’t formulated a plan.
She flung herself onto the ground, and another arrow sailed past where her face had been moments before. Javi followed suit, flattening himself until he practically fused with the ground.
“We’re under attack! We’re under attack!
” the golden soldier shouted as he rushed from the military tent.
He pulled a sword from the scabbard that hung at his side.
His stance widened, his shoulders rolled back, and for a brief moment he glowed like a storybook hero in the green firelight, ready to save—
He slumped onto his knees. An arrow protruded from his chest where his row of medals might have been if he’d lived long enough to earn them. A few more arrows landed, wounds spurting as his mouth fell open in a silent scream.
Oh no. Absolutely not.
The soldiers around the fire wobbled slowly to their feet, their pints of ale soaking the thirsty ground as they tried to respond. They hurried to pull weapons free, hands fumbling with hilts.
But the arrows continued to rain down despite the thick cloud of green smoke. Soldiers dropped with heavy thumps, their shouts swallowed up by the eerie trees, their blood mingling with the spilled ale.
Risa glanced to her side to find no sign of the prince; instead, there was a trail of disturbed earth and gouges where he had crawled away from the chaos.
Or been dragged.
This was a direct consequence of her curse. She knew it, as surely as she knew her own name. Her bad luck had arrived in a hail of arrows, rearing its ugly head and nasty teeth. There was no escape from its clutches, not in Barrow and certainly not outside of it, and she was the only one to blame.
Blood pounded in her ears while a strange sensation started in her chest. Underneath the thunderous beating, something that felt like a string pulling taut around her heart tugged at her, a little more insistent with each passing moment.
Another arrow landed inches from her fingertips.
With her eyes, Risa followed the trail of disturbed earth that the prince had left in his wake.
It disappeared into the dark thicket of trees swaying ominously behind her.
Shadows danced across the tree line, cast by the flames that still spit green sparks.
Dread churned in her belly, not at all helped by the insistent tugging at her chest.
She was not going that way.
Instead, she set her sights across the clearing, where the trees seemed less eerie.
She began crawling, spurred on by instinct and the desire to avoid more bloodshed, as arrows whizzed past from invisible corners.
While the arrows missed her completely, many of them struck the soldiers around her.
Bodies went down one after another. The air became thick with sweet smoke as the flames in the firepit leaped higher, painting the scene in garish light.
General Van Houten hadn’t moved from the mouth of his tent, where he shouted at his men and brandished his longsword above him.
The green firelight exaggerated the angles of his angry face and made him look ghastly ill as he searched the wreckage for his invisible foes, eyes narrowed in focus.
But he found no enemies in the encroaching darkness.
Risa managed to pull herself into a cluster of overgrown shrubs. Branches scratched her face, and while most of the clearing was obscured, a clear gap remained where she watched the general, still visible through the smoke, make his last stand.
Something flickered across General Van Houten’s face.
Rage or fear or perhaps a terrible combination of both.
His mouth pulled back into a sneer. One moment, the proud man held his gleaming weapon above his head, ready to strike.
The next, he fell forward. His sword slipped from his grip and sank into the drenched soil.
Three arrows protruded from his side. When his head struck the ground, a sickening crack rang through the trees, but the sound was cut short, swallowed up by the Bosque.
Everything stopped.
Risa waited. Counted the seconds from when the last arrow had sailed through the air, as if doing so could serve as a kind of magical ward. When she reached forty-three, several shrouded figures slipped from the trees, footsteps silent, flashing daggers catching in the firelight.
One figure approached the general, head cocked. They were covered head to toe in black fabric, a red crescent moon sewn on their chest. They threw something into the fire, and the green flames turned an ordinary orange.
“Oof, that’s gotta hurt.” Another figure, also dressed in black with a matching crescent moon sewn on their chest, stepped out from the dark like a blooming stain. The figure dug the heel of their boot into the stomach of a fallen soldier and asked, “Where’s the prince?”
They received no response.
Risa’s heart was so loud she was sure the assassins could hear it across the clearing.
She wanted to flee. She wanted to throw up.
She wanted to go to each guard and ask for forgiveness.
But a viselike grip wrapped tight around her ribs, making it almost impossible to breathe.
Her skin tingled, and sweat lined the back of her neck, spine, hands.
It occurred to her, with a dreadful sinking in her stomach, that this was not ordinary panic. It wove through her like vines and made her muscles tense and her limbs rigid. It was Brunhilda’s curse at work, reminding her that death was the consequence for abandoning the prince.
Risa’s vision suddenly tunneled. The crackle of the fire and the sound of the assassins’ conversation became muffled as the pressure in her chest increased.
“Musta gotten away,” another voice answered, though it sounded very far away.
Risa slowly released what was left of the air trapped in her lungs and watched the shadow-clad figures kick at the fallen soldiers. When their backs were turned, she took a shallow breath, then another, and found it was enough to keep her from becoming lightheaded.
She hoped that meant the prince was somewhere close.
But of course, now she had to go find him before Brunhilda’s new curse managed to rob her of life.
She snaked out of the bush, careful to move only when the figures were kicking at rocks or dead soldiers. When Risa’s hand grazed a thick branch left to rot on the ground, she wrapped her fingers around it.
The assassin standing over the motionless General Van Houten clicked their tongue. “He sure isn’t gonna be happy about this.”
“We were kinda sloppy,” another companion agreed.
This one was shorter and stockier than the first two, their muscles straining through their tunic.
They surveyed the area with chipped-jade eyes—the only thing their mask revealed—and stomped toward the bushes hiding Risa. “Think anyone else managed to escape?”
That was enough to spur her into action.
Risa flung the branch over her right side, launching it as far as she could manage.
The assassins’ heads snapped in the direction of the whomp it made against a tree.
The noise sounded wrong in her ears, but she did not pause to consider why as she scrambled backward, palms skidding over rocks and twigs.
When she thought she was sufficiently hidden by the trees, she leaped to her feet and began to run.
Foliage sprang in her path, sprouting beneath her feet like mushrooms. Strangled roots that looked like veins crawling across the forest floor grabbed at her ankles.
Sharp fingerlike branches scraped at her and caught on her clothes.
Not once did she stop; she knew from storybooks that doing so would cause her to stumble, giving the monster at her back enough time to catch her.
She blindly zigzagged her way through the woods, praying to any god or witch or mythical creature that she would make it out alive.
Her breathing came in painful bursts, the witch’s curse tickling beneath her skin like an incurable itch. She willed the curse away, recalling how it had felt to break Brunhilda’s silencing spell, how the snap in her chest had reverberated through her bones.
Please break, please break, please break.
All she wanted was a life of her own. One where she didn’t need to think about being cursed, escaping assassins, surviving the night, or making it out of cursed woods. Where she wasn’t bound to the expectations of others. Where she wasn’t hurting anyone.
She ran faster, legs pumping, adrenaline rushing. There should have been something to suggest a chase: snapping twigs, the whip of a branch, crunching leaves. But there was nothing. Only silence as the Bosque swallowed up the sounds she made.
Momentum brought Risa crashing into an empty, moonlit clearing. She barely had any time to catch her breath before her foot caught on something that sent her sprawling. Dirt filled her mouth. She rolled onto her back and coughed up rotted leaves as the nearly full moon stared down.
A stinging sensation sprang behind her eyes. A knot formed in her throat. Her heart hammered in her ears, drowning out the sound of her own heavy breathing.
Waves of tears rushed over her.
It had been a long time since she last cried. So long, in fact, that she was surprised her body remembered how. It was a remnant of her childhood, when the townspeople’s whispers spoke of the awful monster masquerading as a girl in the mayor’s home.
Her curse had assisted in the massacre of twelve innocent soldiers.
A prince of Kheadon was dead, or worse—kidnapped, getting tortured, or being held for ransom.
Brunhilda never should have dumped Risa off on this ill-advised journey, never should have lied to the royal and his guards. Another tragedy that would haunt her.
Risa was aware that she was lying out in plain sight for anyone to see.
Even if the woods could gobble up her sounds, her sobs and gasps were too frequent, too loud, to be swallowed in time.
Still, she could not bring herself to stop, because she was feeling very sorry for herself and she could feel mud between her toes.
Distress was a place. It had made its home in Risa’s bones, had settled over her like a bedraggled coat.
Eventually, the tears dried. Her clothes were ruined. Her hair had escaped its twist and was now an unruly, tangled mess. And while she had definitely been traumatized, she was alive and mostly uninjured, which had to count for something. And that’s when she heard it.
Footsteps. The crunching of undergrowth that cut off too soon. Drawing closer until finally it stopped.
Risa closed her eyes. Counted the seconds between her breaths and waited for her last.
“Huh. I guess we all have our flaws.”
Her eyes flung open. There, impossibly lit by the moon in swaths of silver with nary a hair out of place or a speck of dirt on his white suit, was Prince Javi.
“What?” she asked with a shaky breath.
“You’re an ugly crier.”
She should have scowled or huffed a laugh, but instead she hiccupped and realized that the strange tightness in her chest had slackened without her noticing. All that was left was the regular fear expected from a brush with death.
“How did you survive?” She was unable to keep the wonder from her voice.
“Sheer willpower.” His eyes roved over her with distant assessment, as if in search of injuries. “I’m assuming it was your good luck. Though it didn’t seem to help my soldiers back there.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “I thought you were right behind me.”
She should tell him she was a dark omen beckoning misfortune. But she couldn’t.
Instead, she swallowed the words down and locked them in the same place she kept her other griefs, tucked between her ribs.
Prince Javi went on, “Should we discuss the very tragic circumstances that have led us here, or do you need silence to magic us out?”
Risa glared at him as she struggled to her feet, acutely aware of the exhaustion in her bones and the sting of new cuts all over her body.
“I’m not a witch, you fool. I don’t have magic.”
“I have been called many things, and foolish is at least the third worst.”
The prince, for having borne witness to the massacring of his general and guard, looked rather …
unbothered at first glance. The more she stared at him, however, the easier it was to see where he’d come undone.
His shirt was untucked from his trousers, the ends flapping beneath his doublet.
There was a haunted look behind his amber eyes as they shifted with unease.
He was holding himself together by a very thin thread.
And she couldn’t blame him: He was unprotected and stuck in a cursed forest with a pathetic magical girl, all while assassins were searching for him.
Risa realized she might not like him very much, but she couldn’t let her bad luck finish the assassins’ job.
He was a dead man walking with her. It didn’t matter that Brunhilda’s curse would kill her; she didn’t want to be the reason for another senseless death.
Even if that meant leaving him. In an evil forest. At the mercy of assassins. Who would probably kill him anyway.
Still better than staying with her.
“Well, this has not been fun.” She dusted off her trousers. The mud caked onto her thighs did not budge. “But I should be on my way. Best of luck.”
Bottom lip tucked between her teeth, she gave the prince a wobbly salute before marching through the small clearing with no direction in mind. The trees on her left looked less terrifying than the ones on her right, so she veered that way.
Prince Javi fell into step with her, hands stuffed in his pockets. “You can’t go off on your own. What do you expect me to do without you?” He wore the expression of a man who had never been forced to do a single thing for himself his entire life.
“I don’t know. Find a way out of the woods and go get married. It’s not any of my concern.”
He stopped her with a light touch on her elbow, his fingertips trailing down her arm until they gently grasped her hand. He brought her knuckles to his lips, hooded eyes beseeching, lashes fluttering like leaves on his cheeks. His touch was molten.
“I need your help.”
Her heart pulled. A side effect of Brunhilda’s curse, surely. Dangerous business, walking around with a faulty heart like that.
“No thanks.”
She forged into the darkness and left Prince Javi behind.