Chapter 21 Gnarled Antlers
Gnarled Antlers
She lands on her side, the rough-hewn onyx of the breastplate digging into her rib cage.
The walls of the Labyrinth are twice her height, slick and lustrous as though cut from the earth with a heated blade.
The passageways are narrow; now standing, she can touch each wall if she spreads her arms. Above the Labyrinth, she can make out the elves.
They’re hollering at her, heedless of the fact that she can’t understand a word.
Yet the Queen is serene. At the foot of her dais, Nugau is slumped on his hands and knees, the black grip of the Queen’s power around his neck.
This is the only thing I’ll ever do for you, human. Try not to waste it. Nugau risked this anger, this punishment, for Sascia. He made the Thistha Ren, the Heart Claim, to save her life. He asked his friends to help her. Sascia can’t fail him, or fail this Trial.
The two sides of the passageway look identical, but she needs to be careful with her choices.
In the corn maze she and Danny once visited while their aunt Sophia lived in Vermont, they had been advised to keep their right hand against the wall of cornstalks and follow it out.
In the myth of Ariadne, the princess gave Theseus a thread to unspool to find his way out.
But Sascia has no thread and no time to waste.
What she has, the whole point of this damned kerfuffle, is Mooch.
“Little guy? Are you here?”
Wings caress the soft skin of her neck. The moth nibbles at her earlobe. A friend, Nugau said. Sascia feels it now, as she always has: Mooch protects her and she protects it. Nugau has not made a false Claim—she is a friend, not a foe.
“Can you help me get out of here?” she asks. “Please?”
In response, Mooch launches down the left end of the passageway.
Indignant sighs carry down from the elves on the perimeter of the cavern.
Sascia smothers her smile—take that, you disbelieving gremlins!
—and follows Mooch, picking up speed. Sharp turns and endless black walls fly past for several minutes.
Then, just as Mooch dives low down the path, the wall shifts.
Stone whooshes past to bridge the opening that had been there before. Her mind registers the change too late—she smacks face first into the wall. Above, the elves burst into a wave of snickers.
Sascia won’t give them the satisfaction of her anger.
With a step back, she surveys the new obstacle.
The edges of the wall have smoothed over, swallowed into the rest of the rock.
Sascia pokes at it with the reliable sturdiness of her Doc Martens; the wall is hard stone, but its foundation is a liquid kind of black, the tip of her boot sucked into its depths.
The Labyrinth is made of Dark.
She snaps her foot back with a sharp inhale. If the maze is constructed of the eerie void that makes up the Dark, then the Queen can command its essence with a mere flick of her wrist. She can change its pathways and turns, sending Sascia on a wild goose chase through its walls.
This game has been rigged from the beginning. The Queen only accepted this Heart Claim because she knows a human girl has no chance of winning this Trial.
Blood and fright pulse vivid at Sascia’s neck. “Mooch?”
The moth had been on the other side when the opening closed. At her call, it emerges, squeezing through the Dark at the base of the wall.
“How am I supposed to do this?” she mutters. “If the Queen can control everything?”
Mooch twists around and swoops in the air, diving low before it disappears into the wall. Then it reappears to hover in the air on the level of Sascia’s eyes. It looks at her; she looks at it.
“Oh,” Sascia says. “You knew it was going to do that. You were telling me to go low.”
In reply, the moth surges forward to boop her on the nose. Silly, wonderful creature.
“We move fast,” she tells Mooch. “We stop at nothing. Straight to the exit, before she realizes you know how she will manipulate the Labyrinth. Yes?”
The moth boops her again.
Sascia rubs the tip of her nose. “I’m not too sure I like this new means of communication. Ready?”
Evidently, Mooch is one hundred percent ready, because it launches in the air, faster than Sascia can follow.
She breaks into a run after the moth, turning when it twists, jumping when it flies high, crouching when it dives.
The Labyrinth becomes a blur; she senses the whoosh of air when a wall comes down to block her path—but Mooch has already instructed her to slide beneath the dropping stone.
She stumbles when a wall sprouts from the ground to cage her in a dead end—but Mooch warned her to jump over it.
She edges sideways and scurries through when the walls narrow in on her.
Somewhere above, the gong echoes with two strikes. God, she didn’t even hear the first one. How long before the next and final strike?
“How far away are we?” she calls up ahead to Mooch.
In response, the moth doubles its speed, soaring in an arc to let her know she needs to jump over an obstacle.
As a wall of cut stone surges from the ground, Sascia makes a split-second decision (arguably, her forte).
Instead of over it, she jumps on it. Her arms flail, desperately trying to balance as the wall grows to its full height.
Sascia is suddenly standing on top of the Labyrinth, a view of mazework and elves stretching all around her.
Her trick is met with equal parts excitement and fury.
Howls and whistles echo down to her, far louder here than in the passageways of the maze.
Up ahead, the way out is marked by a simple absence of wall at the end of a path, barely as wide as a door.
Sascia takes stock of the space that separates them: if she uses her good balance and light steps, she can make it to the exit on top of the Labyrinth.
But that’s not happening if she’s being weighed down by what feels like twenty pounds of metal. Steeling her legs, she begins stripping. Down clatters the breastplate. She’s tugging the chain mail over her chest when the wall beneath her quakes.
Shit. The Queen is onto her.
The royal elf stands at the edge of the dais. Her fingers rotate—on her end of the Labyrinth, its entrance, the passageways begin to crumble. Puffs of black dust rise from their collapsing forms, rousing a cheer from the elves.
Time to skedaddle. Sascia lets the chain mail fall back on her torso, crouches down, and jumps. Mooch is right there with her, fleeting in and out of her vision as she lands smoothly on the opposite wall and keeps going.
Behind her, the roar of crumbling stones is growing closer.
Ahead, the way out is only fifty feet away.
Then, from the corner of her eye, she sees it.
For the first few seconds, it is nothing but a shadow scurrying down a passageway.
Then its body comes together out of the Dark: abnormally long limbs, a curved spine and skeletal torso, a head topped with twisted, menacing antlers.
It looks like a were-creature, half man, half deer, except it has no eyes and no fur—its body is coated with a liquid darkness that splatters the walls with blotches of tar.
It’s the most terrifying Darkcreature she’s ever seen.
With increasing speed, it propels itself off the opposite wall and launches into the air.
The impact of its landing sets the wall trembling.
Sascia slows to a stop, crouching low. The creature is blocking her path.
It stands on all fours, its taloned feet scraping against the stone, a horrible, grisly sound.
Its nostrils flare. Its sightless head snaps to her.
It moves like a half-dead thing, joints creaking and bending in unnatural ways, steps wild and erratic, skin dripping that black, rotten pus onto the wall.
Sascia’s legs have gone weak. If it lunges—when it lunges—there’s nothing she can do to stop it.
Its fangs are a row of jagged, broken teeth, its lips so wide they reach up to its antlers; in some twisted, horrid way, it looks like it’s smiling.
One swing, and those fangs will sink deep into her flesh.
Even with the stupid chain mail, she doesn’t stand a chance—
The chain mail. It’s little protection against the creature’s long, thin teeth, but it doesn’t have to be protection. It can be a weapon, instead.
Slowly, Sascia begins backtracking, staying low as she slips her arms out of the sleeves of the chain mail. The Darkcreature follows, its movements shifting between cautious and jerky. Sascia tugs the chain mail over her head. She’ll have to be fast now, and attack first—
“Mooch!” she screams.
The moth has been cutting frantic circles over their heads, but in a lightning-fast move, the Darkcreature straightens to its full height, opens its snout so wide that its lower jaw touches its chest, and closes it around Mooch.
Oh hell no.
Fury pumps into Sascia like a shot of adrenaline.
She lets impulse take the wheel: she holds the chain mail like a net between her arms and jumps at the Darkcreature.
The wetness of its skeletal body smears her skin as she wrestles the net around the creature’s head.
It thrashes about, trying to dislodge her—gravity takes over.
They drop like a stone back into the Labyrinth.
Pain shoots up her leg where her ankle twists at the landing, but she wiggles herself over the creature’s back.
Its long limbs are spread out, talons scraping grooves into the stone.
It tosses its head this way and that, but the chain mail is twined firmly into its antlers.
Sascia smacks its snout as hard as she can.
Her fingers come away coated in black tar, but she doesn’t care.
The maze echoes with elven shouts. She punches the creature again and again, her whole body aching with the effort of holding its body down, until finally, on the sixth strike, the Darkcreature opens its jaws.
A terrifying screech grates out of its throat—
And so does a small patch of luminescent white.
In its hurry to escape, Mooch bangs into a wall and collapses on the ground. Sascia disentangles herself from the creature and scurries over. “I got you,” she stammers, picking Mooch up. “You’re safe.”
The Darkcreature is dazed, writhing flaccidly against the chain mail.
Sascia grabs hold of one of its antlers and drags it down the passageway as it tosses and thrusts behind her.
Snot is dripping down her nose (is she crying?), something hot is leaking out of a gash on her arm, and her twisted ankle throbs with every step, but she keeps going, because that’s all she knows how to do.
She’s moving fast, spurred by adrenaline, leaving no room for the Queen to stop her. The long corridor opens before her—she makes it through the final opening mere seconds before the third gong sounds.
The room explodes with sound, cheers and hisses and, above it all, gradually building, the sound of fists against breasts, the thudding of a heart.
It carries meaning, this inhumanly slow heartbeat, as though it is a vote cast from the chest, because Sascia is special after all, chosen by their precious god, gifted with the kind of magic that can carry you through a deadly Labyrinth.
In the triumph of noise, Sascia throws her head back and gulps hungry breaths.
She did it. She won.
Tendrils of hair waft in her face as the Labyrinth fades away. Once again, Sascia stands in the middle of the throne room, a bleeding, sweating speck on the expanse of hard stone. In the distance, the Queen sits back on her dais. The heartbeat of the elves’ support dies off.
Footsteps prowl behind Sascia. Hands lock around her arms.
The Queen’s guard is a hulking mass of armor and hard serpentine skin.
In her palm, Mooch’s wings are slick with the creature’s black saliva.
They need to be cleaned, as quickly as possible.
But when she tries to inform the elves, the guard silences her with a taloned grip at her nape.
The precious glow of her victory fades away, draining the drum of special, chosen, magic that beat through her veins only a minute ago.
Reality comes crashing back down. She won her Trial, proved her Claim, but that doesn’t mean they will release her.
They’re going to toss her in a dungeon to rot for the rest of her short, miserable existence, because she already knows too much—that there are thousands of elves gathered in the discontinued train tunnels beneath Manhattan, armed and hateful.
Her neck strains against the soldier’s grip to glance at Nugau. He lies at the foot of the dais, still yoked by the Queen’s plume of Dark.
The threat of tears prickles at her nose.
She did what he told her. She did not waste the chance he gave her.
She crossed a moving, shifting labyrinth and fought the scariest Darkcreature she’s ever encountered and saved Mooch from its jaws.
After what they just saw, surely no one can doubt she is protected by the itka, a lover of the Dark, an ally who only came here to stop a war—
The thought strikes deep, echoing up from the well of her heart.
Special, chosen, magic is her oldest, truest longing, yes, but that is not why she jumped into the Maw, why she saved a poisoned Nugau, why she lowered her nova-gun in Times Square.
This morning, as she lay in bed puzzling out the intricacies of knotted time, the mistakes she has not yet made, she had decided: What she wanted was another chance. A different choice. Peace.
When a Claim is made, it has to be proven through a Trial, Thalla said. The Queen has no choice but to test the truth of your Claim.
As she’s shoved and manhandled down the throne room, Sascia brings her fist to her chest. The sound is soft at first, then, as the elves notice and fall quiet, it rings clear.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
“I make the Thistha Ren,” Sascia cries out. “I make a new Heart Claim. You saw it just now. I protect the itka and the itka protects me. But I’m not just a friend or ally. I make my Claim now and demand a new Trial, to prove what I really am—your ambassador to humans, a messenger of peace!”