25 | Kiandah
Orias highway line
Escaping the city is easy with the help of our industrious little friend and aided by the fact that most of the Crimson Riders seem to be gone — likely with Yaron scouring Paradise Hole and securing our northern border. It’s finding a horse once we’re in the village that’s difficult.
I didn’t think about money when we left and even though we aren’t tossed out on our asses when we approach several vendors — not like I was a fortnight ago — no one readily offers up their horse for our clandestine use. Instead, we manage to secure passage with a pair of merchants heading west along the highway line that splits from the Orias highway line and leads to Shadow Ridge.
They’re headed to the mining town just south of the Cliffs of Oblivion, Heatherlen, but have agreed to take us as far as they can. I anticipate that we’ll have to walk a good bit of the way to reach the cliffs, which means we’ll only arrive by nightfall. Yaron will have discovered my absence by then. I try not to outwardly wince every time the thought crosses my mind, but it’s difficult. It crosses my mind often as the cart, dragged by two horses, makes its towards Owenna and whatever else awaits. Whoever else.
Instead of dreaming up horror scenarios about what might happen when we arrive and what will happen if we have to confront Trash City, I try to focus on our surroundings. I’ve never been down the Shadow Ridge highway line before and, if this were any other journey for any other purpose, I’d have found it thrilling. The South Island has such beautiful topography. Microclimates separate regions that are pressed up against each other so tightly, it feels like walking through doorways to new worlds when they change. Today, the sky is even clearer than usual, helping me to see what lies before our doomed westwardly way.
Unlike the Undoline highway line, which leads to more rolling fields and grasslands, or the Gold City highway line that leads south from Undoline through dry, arid deserts studded by high sandstone mountains or the Hjiel highway line that leads south from the keep through increasingly cold and harsh temperatures, the Shadow Ridge highway line will take us to stark, rocky hills and eventually, a harsh sea and winds that clash over jagged cliffs.
Already, I can see the rising of Shadow Ridge on the horizon as the road cutting to it veers ever closer to the forests of Paradise Hole to the north. The trees once sat well back from the highway line have started to encroach, especially with no heart trees left to contend with them.
In some places, dark roots looking like the limbs of an ancient god claw their way out of Gatamora’s black heart to cause massive bumps in the road. I watch them now with concern and suspicion. I worry that Yaron’s forces will have headed this way. I don’t know where they went within the dark woods, but they could be close. I stare into the trees, searching for any sign of a red cloak, but see nothing. Only shadows.
Shivering, I sit up straight and look at Zelie. We should probably come up with some scenarios around which we can form some loose tendrils of plans, but the wagon we’re on is small and I worry about our drivers overhearing us — they might not want to abet our insurrection if they know where we’re truly headed and who we’re planning to meet.
The two men driving the horse cart are father and son. The younger of the two appears my age, and when I try to get Zelie’s attention, I realize it’s on him, not me. He’s pointing up the road to a tall tree on our lefthand side. Its thick red trunk and vibrant dark blue leaves are a distinct contrast to the trees on the other side of the highway line, which are grey and darker grey.
“Do you see the tang bird’s nest? They migrate here and roost every year, coming all the way down from the North Island. They aren’t water birds and it’s incredible they make it, taking rests only on the boughs of crossing ships.”
I’m so caught up in wondering if the birds will have a way to make it back home or if they’ll all drown in the sea now that the port of Ruby City has been destroyed that I don’t immediately notice Zelie smiling and blushing and tucking her twists behind her ear.
“The birds are very beautiful, Desmond,” she offers coyly. Coyly. As if Zelie has ever once in her life been known to be coy.
Wait a second… This whole time that I’ve been sitting here panicking, has Zelie been flirting? I guffaw loudly and unattractively. Zelie shoots me a dirty look, but the younger of the two men — Desmond, apparently — doesn’t notice.
He prattles on about the birds and other interesting facts about the landscape while his father gives a chuckle every once in a while and Zelie’s skin darkens and flushes. At one point, he makes a pretty poor joke about the state of the Paradise Hole trees and she giggles. Giggles. It fills me with both irritation and glee.
“It’s very kind of you to deliver us all the way to the western ridge crossroads. No one else was willing to take us so far.”
“It’s no problem,” Desmond answers with a wink that borders on the salacious. It makes me concerned that he’s just a flirt and that Lord Yaron is right — we Ubutu sisters don’t get out much.
“My boy is wrong,” his father says.
Zelie’s head sinks into her shoulders. His son gives him a stern look. Flustered, I prattle, “I’m — we’re — so sorry…”
“I wasn’t finished, m’Lady. I was going to say, we’re honored.” The boy’s father looks over his shoulder at me and smiles, his teeth glowing bright in his wind-chapped white face. “It isn’t every day that humble steel workers like us get to drive the Shadow Lady and her kinfolk to their destination. And we’ll take you all the way, m’Lady, if the cliffs are where y’all are headed. Don’t you worry about that.”
“Oh…I…” I hadn’t realized he knew who I was. I hadn’t realized anyone would know who I am. And I’m also not who he says…yet. Yaron may have made me an offer, but that was before I ran away. Again. He’s going to be angry. He’s not going to accept me on my return — I refuse to think about that, lest I puke. I forcefully return the father’s gaze with a smile of my own, no matter how brittle. “Thank you so much, sir, but we couldn’t ask that of you.” It’s too dangerous.
“Lucky for you, then, that you didn’t ask, m’Lady.” He winks and I feel a warmth in my chest astride the uncertainty that’s plagued me ever since we left the keep. Leaving was so easy. So impossibly easy. Maybe, we should turn back.
“I…” I don’t want them to come. I can’t be responsible for their lives. But I can’t think of any words to say that will make him change his mind. “Thank you,” I tell him.
“It’s what anyone should do for their Lady.”
I wipe my brow. He’s doing nothing for my pulse, which has lost its mind. I lean forward over my knees. “Zelie, we should turn back. We’re going to get these people killed. And ourselves along with them.”
“What? I can’t hear you when you’re mumbling.”
The cart is empty between Zelie and I save for a few canvas tarps, so there’s nothing to stop me from getting up and sitting beside her. I do just that, wobbling as we go over another rut in the road. I bounce down onto the seat beside her.
Zelie chuckles as she catches my arms and helps me untangle my skirts. “What are you saying, Kandia?”
“I’m just thinking,” I say, lowering my voice even further and speaking directly into her ear. “What if…maybe this is a bad idea.”
Zelie gives me an incredulous look. She looks so much like our father in that moment, I’d have laughed if I weren’t feeling so appropriately scolded. “Are you for real?” she hisses, grabbing my wrist and yanking me towards her even though there isn’t anywhere left for me to go. When I don’t answer, her voice shoots up an octave. “We’re more than halfway there now! And Owenna — ”
“It’s about Owenna,” I whisper-hiss loudly enough to cut her off. I pull back just enough to be able to look into her eyes, but still smell the scent of clean shea butter on her skin and Mama’s signature hair grease in her curls. “What if Owenna doesn’t want to be found? What if Owenna issued those warnings to us through that girl as just that — warnings? Maybe of what’s to come. What if Trash City is planning something? What if Owenna is in on it?”
Zelie’s eyes are wide. She hadn’t even considered it. I feel like an ass for daring to have such a low opinion of my own sister, but I can’t help it. She already betrayed us once. “You think she left to rejoin them? After everything we went through? After what Lord Yaron did for us?”
I wince, hating that I don’t…that I no longer have trust. “I mean…” I glance away, then back again and shrug.
Zelie quiets, expression growing distant and more thoughtful. She’s staring down at our linked hands, dark brown skin against dark brown skin. Little scars on her wrists. I know the provenance of most of them, but not all. Because I am not her. I am not my family.
But I do love them, though.
My mind flashes with Yaron’s face, a yearning I can’t suppress accompanying it. My whole body floods with the sudden urge to return to him and I open my mouth to tell Zelie as much, but she’s already talking. “I think we should…”
“What’s this now?” the older man says and suddenly the cart rolls to a jerky stop.
“Hey! Get out the way!” Desmond shouts.
But whoever it is does not get out of the way. The road has been almost completely empty, save for three other wagons that rolled silently by since we branched from the Orias highway line. That’s no surprise. Trips from Orias north are common, east less, and west even less than that. South beyond the keep, least of all.
When the cart comes to a complete stop, I use Zelie’s shoulder to stabilize myself as I stand up. And what I see standing in the center of the highway line couldn’t have shocked me more than the sight of a sunny, cloudless sky. No, not what. Who.
A woman with a shock of blonde hair stands directly in the middle of the road. She doesn’t have a horse or a wagon. She’s completely alone. She’s wearing rags and has goggles pushed up onto the top of her head now, but as she turns to face our horse cart fully, she lowers them.
I lurch forward, stumbling over the uneven slats of the cart beneath my feet, and practically fall onto the father in my haste to move forward. “Sir — sirs, we need to turn back. With great haste. This woman is not a friend to us.”
The father, much to his credit, immediately snaps his horses’ reins and starts to turn the cart around, bringing Zelie and me closer to Merlin. Merlin, who I remember clearly from the dungeons and who I’ve heard much more about since. She looks better than she did then, dripping in rags and blood, and no less spirited. Her rags have been replaced, her wounds evidently healed enough for her to be able to walk upright and without difficulty — I shouldn’t have let her go, I know that now, but back then I feared Yaron. I still fear Yaron and what horrors he’s capable of inflicting on his enemies. I don’t want him to be capable of such violence. Of such…inhumanity…but…
I know now, meeting her gaze through her murky goggles, that if granted the opportunity, I would not make the same mistake I once did. She is dangerous, this woman.
“Can we move any faster?” Zelie says, voice trembling.
Desmond encourages the horses along with light swats to their behinds with the prod. “She stands alone. She can’t be such a threat. You can calm yourselves. We’ll be out of her vicinity soon,” he says to Zelie and me, but I’m not listening. My focus is on Merlin.
She smiles and winks and waves at me. “My Lady, don’t be discouraged. You’re just the woman I wanted to see,” she shouts over the sound of the horses stamping their feet.
I shudder while my heart slams against my chest. I’m feeling nauseous on my regret. The cart turns all the way around, but I continue to pivot so that I can keep Merlin in my sights. I scarcely dare to blink. What is she doing here? I glance worriedly towards the woods, wondering — knowing — that she must have more members of her tribe hiding somewhere close, ready and waiting… Is this an ambush?
I glance around, suddenly horrified that these two men are being dragged into this alongside us. I’m petrified for them. They did us a favor and how do we repay it? By getting them killed? No. No, I won’t let that happen. I clench my hands into fists and try to give Merlin my best, most courageous gaze. She smiles wider, to show all of her teeth. Some are black or missing. She tongues the gaps as Zelie tugs on my wrist.
And then Merlin mouths words I can hear as if she’d shouted them, “You should have killed me when you had the chance.”
“What the…” Desmond’s voice murmurs, followed by his father’s lower baritone, “Is that…a relation, m’Lady?”
“Kiandah!” Zelie shouts, yanking hard enough on my wrist to break the spell Merlin had me under.
I flinch and look back over my shoulder, meeting Zelie’s gaze. She points forward and I look over the top of Desmond’s and his father’s heads, but my mind blanks as I take in the strange sight. The strangest I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Stranger than seeing the leader of Trash City alive and not dead and just standing in the middle of the Orias highway line like she owns it.
There’s another female standing in the road. Unlike Merlin, she wears no rags, but a dress in dark crimson. It swirls around her ankles. Its corseted middle accentuates curves just as subtle as the ones visible through my own dress — a dress that is the exact same color and nearly the exact same style, minus the lower cut of mine and the higher cut of hers, which has a collar that cinches tight around her throat.
The woman has medium brown skin, the exact same color as mine and Zelie’s, thin box braids that fall to her waist, just like the ones I used to wear, and one brown eye that’s shaped so eerily like my own it almost feels like I’m staring into a mirror. It almost does, except for her one blue eye. That blue eye and that brown eye are fully focused on me as her pale brown lips curve in an expression that could only bracingly be considered a smile. It’s carnivorous, whatever that expression is, flashing white teeth that could be fangs for what they do to me.
Fear swells in my chest and the woman lifts her hands, both of them, palms up to the sky. Flames dance at her fingertips. “Get down!” Zelie shouts, yanking on my arm at the same time that Desmond curses and his father shouts, “Fates!” Whether he means it as a curse or as an identification, I’m not sure, but he’s right either way.
I’m not given long enough to dwell on the fact that the Fated Fire Omega is here, standing before me, wearing my face.
The flames between her hands swell in a brilliant wall of red before crashing down on me and my sister and our two unsuspecting travel companions in a wave of terrible vengeance.
Zelie screams. My body takes flight. One of the men shouts and the other is eerily silent. I feel energy pulsing through my arms, but they’re shaking and the breath is knocked clean out of me as I hit the packed earth. Our horse cart. My head. The explosion. I glance around, disoriented.
“No, wait! Please!” a male voice says. I look up to see the splintered remains of the cart and the horses struggling to free themselves from flaming debris. The Fate lords above the two men who are further down the road, closer to her than Zelie and I are. Zelie is trying to get to her feet, struggling. I don’t have time to move at all before another wave of fire pummels the men, attempting to engulf them.
I don’t have to move at all, but I can feel…not an energy, so much, but a desire, a will — my will — beating through the fire, pressing it back with such ferocity, it causes the Fate to stumble. Her red fire disappears.
“Run!” I tell the men.
They don’t hesitate, but head straight for their horses. The father cuts the animals free and grabs the first horse by the reins. He vaults onto its back in a surprisingly agile movement for someone his size and looks back to his son. “Come on, Desi!”
But Desi is rooted, his hand on his horse’s back, looking at Zelie and me. “Come on!” he roars, his white cheeks splotchy with pink, his brown hair tousled in the wind that I created.
“Go, Zelie!” I shout and another breath of violent wind pulses from me, pushing Zelie in the boy’s direction.
She launches herself towards Desmond and a blast of fire chases her that I beat back, pushing up onto my knees. The flaming bits of horse cart are hot, but I suspect that isn’t the reason for the sweat pebbling on my hairline and the back of my neck.
Zelie sways, unsure on her feet. She trips over a piece of burning wood and goes down hard among the embers. I’d have called her name if I could find my voice, but as it is, all of my concentration goes into keeping her from being burned alive right in front of me.
Another wave of fire.
Another burst of air that redirects it.
Another clash of vibrant red and orange flame against the wind that I create only this time, the flames just die. I manage to will the air to swallow them up.
Zelie makes it to Desmond, who grabs her and tosses her up onto the horse before climbing up himself. He looks at me but I shake my head and he takes no more direction than that before charging after his father, who takes off after him down the rocky hill covered in dark grey grasses and rich green mosses. It’ll be a hard ride to Orias Village from here across the wilds, but they’ll make it. They’ll make it to the keep.
I can hear Zelie shouting, screaming, likely wanting to go back for me, but I know that I’m not getting out of this now. This woman, this Fate, this doppelganger of mine, came here for me. She’s looking at me now, her hands down at her sides, a considerate expression strung between her mismatched eyes.
“So you’re my counter,” she says, and I’m shocked by the sound of her voice. Ancestors help us all, she sounds exactly like me. She smiles and laughs wickedly, her skirts swishing through the flames, dousing them, as she takes a few steps towards me over flaming chunks of wood. The acrid scent of smoke fills my lungs, but I inhale it without feeling faint from it. It feels as familiar as she.
“You seem so surprised. Did your sweet Lord Yaron not think to warn you about me? He must have known who you were the first time he saw you.”
Stunned, I don’t need to answer. She can read everything I don’t want her to in my expression alone.
She laughs louder, her hand on her belly. It’s flatter than mine. A lifetime spent enjoying food clearly treated me well. Much better than whatever hate she was up to. “Oh my. He doesn’t trust or respect you at all, does he? He must know already what we all do, all of us that matter, anyway.” She pauses, as if giving me time to answer. I don’t have anything to say. “You are no match for me, my sweet little Fallen Fire Omega. Can you even produce flames on your own, or do you require a catalyst?” She waits again and then shakes her head, her smile falling. “You don’t even know, do you? Have you even been given a chance to explore your powers at all?”
I find her sentences funny, strung together in an order I don’t understand. She speaks to me as if power is all that there is. I worry now for her, that power is something she does not understand.
“He uses you,” she snarls, expression becoming vicious as I continue not to respond. “Controlling you like a puppet.”
What?
“Oh, don’t even attempt to convince me otherwise. Alphas are all the same. He probably orders you to repress your powers, fearing the damage you could wreak if you were truly untamed, truly unleashed. This is why you wield fire like a frightened little girl. Like a frightened little Beta. Or do you even wield it at all? Do you only use your gifts over air?” She waits for me to answer like I’d have one, but even if I did — which I don’t — I wouldn’t know where to start. She’s gotten me so, so, so wrong. And Yaron?
I can’t help the small twitch of my lips, begging a smirk as she speaks of domination from the Berserker beast who wants only to be dominated by me.
The Fate stills, the corners of her lips twisting downward, her brow knitting together so that her thin black eyebrows bunch together over her nose. “You mock me?”
“No. No, not at all.” I have to clear my throat. It’s full of hesitation and fear, the sensation like choking on wet cotton balls. But I also feel strangely…sorry for her. My lips quirk up where hers went down and I say as loudly as I must, “I think Yaron would actually like me a lot better if I were more like you.”
She frowns and swishes her skirts, coming even closer. We’re only ten feet apart. It feels like so little. It feels like I’m staring into a dark mirror where I can see how my life might have looked if I’d been born without the love of a family…or a Berserker who would and does and loves to drop to his knees at my feet. It is hard not to pity her. She must have had a hard, long and miserable life, one full of fire and the scent of burning things, instead of the rich smell of Orias rice and charred chicken wings…
She must see something on my face because she stills. Fire flicks up her fingertips to her wrists, but carefully avoids her sleeves. “The fact that you care what he thinks of you disgusts me. You know the beasts cannot be trusted.”
This woman looks just like me, more like me than any of my true sisters. I just didn’t…couldn’t have fathomed that the Fire Fate would be my twin in likeness, and my opposite in everything else. Her heart is made from something that mine isn’t. Her heart is barbed wire wrapped around pulsing hate. Mine is just a heart. Nothing different from any other heart, soft and squishy and happy to simply beat.
“What do you intend for him?” I muster the courage to ask.
“What we intend to do to all Berserkers. Use them to rewrite the world. Betas on the bottom, Omegas on top and Alphas erased.”
I frown, uncertain. How can she mean that? “I…we’ll stop you,” I correct. And something about that correction sparks something inside of me. We, I said we.
Before I can lift my hand to stop her, she’s already pummeled me with a fiery blast. I feel it against my skin, a sublime heat that hurts, but doesn’t burn anything except my clothing. The force of her strike has taken me off of my feet and I tumble over the ground, the dirt on the highway line luckily putting out the flames before they can render me completely naked. When I come to, I’m lying on my back and a white face shielded by goggles is staring down at me with a smirk.
“Well, come on then, killer,” she says with a laugh. “Let’s get you to the cliffs.”
“Cliffs?” I croak, trying to sit up. But Merlin steps on the center of my chest, her boot heavy and caked with dirt. She leans her weight onto that foot, squeezing the breath out of me.
“‘Course,” she replies. “Cliffs of Oblivion. We need your beastly friend to meet us there so he’ll be nice and out of the way when we take the city. And you’re the bait.” She grabs me under the armpits and hauls me upright. She drags me so that I can’t catch my footing and when I try to fight back, try to bring fire and flame and strike them both down, I can’t. I wasn’t built to kill anybody. All I can do is struggle feebly when she drags me to a wagon that’s pulled out of the woods by horses with rotten pelts and matted manes, driven by riders that have bones sticking through leathery skin in places and guarded by more of the undead.
The undead, wearing tattered crimson cloaks, drag me away.