Chapter 28 #2
I drew breath and slithered my free hand deep into rotten mud.
I shivered as I brushed against dead things.
There was no life here, never had been. The trees had never known the soft caress of their own leaves.
They had existed for a thousand years and would exist for a thousand more, but they had never lived.
Pain swept sharply through me, from the heart of this forsaken land into mine.
I bit back a sob and delved deeper into the reeking mud. Deep down sprawled the darkness, far and wide. I no longer feared that darkness, nor the monster that lived in its depths.
With the weight of the still-warm pebble in my palm, I stepped through the veil. Magic trickled warmly through my veins. I gathered it in my shaking hands like a warm, golden light. The earth sang as life flooded its withered veins.
The thorns released me with a sigh. I drew air into my aching lungs.
Adrik’s mouth hung open in a silent scream.
His hands were like a vice around my ankle, the knuckles white as snow, his face dark as night.
The earth shuddered and cracked. From the fissures burst roots eager to protect me, thorns keen to restrain Adrik.
They coiled around his thighs and chest, curled around his arms and yanked him with a hiss off me.
He did not attempt to fight, too great was his terror, his fear.
He feared me.
I reeled back the magic, soothed it. Gentle, I urged. The roots trembled and withdrew a sliver, sprawling like a birdcage around him. A thorn, as sharp and long as a handknife, lingered at his throat.
A twig snapped in the thicket. A hollow cackle slithered over me like ice. “Hello, little bird,” cooed the lordling. A flash of tar-black hair between the stems, too quick for me to follow. “Oh, how long, little bird, how long it has been. Come home. Come home to me!”
I shuddered, sick and stunned with terror.
A flash of red from the thorns. He was playing with me.
Just to remind me that I belonged to him—like the stars belonged to the moon, like the waves belonged to the river.
These were the words he had whispered to me that night in the dark, ten winters ago.
These were the words that still clung to me like the rotten touch of his hand—
Through the thicket, I caught a glimpse of black rope, snow-white curls and sun-gold silk. I muffled a sob and edged closer to the treeline.
Zora stirred, raised her gaze. I sobbed with relief. She was smiling. She was smiling as our eyes met. Hers were dark, glinting like coals. The withered shrub around her burned, then the rope. Still, she smiled.
A shiver came over me. It was a hollow thing, that smile. A wicked thing. An echo of another… I realized a moment too late what it meant. A flame burst alive in her palm and it came—
It came for me.
I leaped aside, landing in the bramble. A flicker of scorching heat flashed past me, hissing in my ear and missing me by a breath. The flame tangled with the twigs. It cackled and crackled as it devoured the bone-dry wood; as it neared me, ensnared in the thicket.
Another flame danced in Zora’s palm.
I flung a sliver of my magic at her. The wind stole her fire, roots caught her wrists—they turned to ash against her smoldering skin. A flame climbed the twisting branch near me and licked at my fingers.
The water… That murky, rotten water. I sent a thread of magic into its depths, full of dead things.
Its sigh went through me like a tremble.
At last, warmth. At last, life. I beckoned the tide near.
With a flick of the wrist, I commanded it to wash over the blazing thicket, retching as it coated me with slime and mud.
Zora shrieked in fury as the water rose around her, drenching her and stealing the flame at the tip of her fingers. It stole the fire in her eyes, too.
“Ah,” cooed the lordling. “You have learned well, little bird.”
On a withered branch perched a crow with eyes like drops of blood.
I let vines burst from the ground to snare him, but he was too quick.
He made a chirping sound and was a bird no more.
He was a wildcat, leaping nimbly to the ground.
My thrashing roots missed him by a hair.
Another glint of red, so very near. I braced for a strike that did not come.
He was a bear, then a wolf, then an owl.
He was the many-faced faerie of the swamp, and I had no chance of catching him.
A roar of pain sharpened my blurred thoughts. I twisted in the thicket. Adrik hung limply in the cage I’d woven for him. The lordling loomed with a shrieking cackle over him, smiling as he lifted his long, bony foot. Adrik’s arm, slack in its socket, snapped with a crack.
Oh.
I blinked once, sharply awake.
Oh, but the lordling would regret that.
I laughed as rage cut through me like a knife.
I planted my feet furiously into the festering mud and I fired my magic like arrows into the earth, deeper and deeper.
I’d draw the heat from the center of the earth to kill him if I must. I’d let the stars rain from the skies to scorch him.
I’d let oceans sweep across the land to drown him.
I reached the lowest end of the longest root. At the bottom sprawled the darkness, far and wide. I did not fear that darkness.
Soft things bloomed in the light. But the darkness… The darkness was not dead. It teemed with wild and beautiful things meant for those alone who dared to venture into the night.
I did not step through the dark.
I stepped into it.
I did not embrace it.
I became it.
And I found… I found that this darkness was not the bottom of my powers at all. It was the beginning.
I did not wield the wind, I became it.
The lordling of the swamp was a beast and he was quick, but I was the wild itself and I was quicker.
I cackled madly in his ear as I chased him through branches and twigs—the hunted turned huntress.
Oh, how I adored this power. A magic most curious, indeed.
I became the thorns, beautiful and lethal, and I sank my eager claws and teeth into his vile flesh.
I became the roots and I choked the life from him, and I revelled in the sound of snapping bone—
There was a hiss and a bite of rotten magic.
I tumbled back into my body, swaying on my feet. The wind played wildly with my hair as I stared at the kennel of roots and thorns I’d woven around the lordling—at the cell I had spun from the wild.
It was empty.
I caught a glimpse of him as he vanished into the thicket, his pink rat tail twitching as he scurried off.
He’d slipped through gaps in my roots. He was injured and slow, but not slow enough.
I slumped against a near trunk, blood throbbing from exertion, muscles aflame from the strain of wielding such power.
Another waft of magic so foul it stung my throat. I flung a feeble curse into the skies as the lordling soared. As he became a black dot in the brightening skies.
He vanished.
He vanished, because deep down he was a coward and a weakling and that was why his sister sat upon the throne he desired and why he was obsessed with hunting those who might grant him a sliver of power.
I sank to the mud-wet ground, hands and knees bloodied from thorns, heart racing with disgust. I retched.
A sob built in my throat, and another. I swallowed them.
Not now.
The lordling had escaped, but not unscathed. In the pallid morning sun, his golden blood glistened like dew on the spikes of his abandoned kennel.
On hands and knees I crawled through the mud, numb to the pain of raw palms and bruised ribs. I plucked a piece of bark from the splintered trunk of an old cedar and I used it to collect one, two, three golden droplets.
Behind me, Adrik groaned. Head low, muscles still rigid with the glamour, he hung in the tangle of roots, his arm bent at an odd angle, a thorn grazing his heaving chest. Gentle, I warned. The thorn receded.
“Adrik.” I choked on his name as I approached, careful not to startle him. No reaction. “Adrik,” I said again, with urgency.
A small twitch of his unharmed arm. I kneeled beside him, just out of his reach, and lifted the gilded bark to his lips. He wrinkled his nose. I almost laughed, strangely endeared by the sight of such squeamishness in light of the horror still thick in the air.
“I have watched you mix ground spider eggs with something that looked like a lobworm and hand the elixir to poor Ilvar. You better not tell me you cannot handle a drop of faerie blood.”
His chuckle was hoarse and strangely sharp, but I cherished it.
Blood slid past his lips and gathered at the corners of his mouth.
I bit my cheek to keep from retching. The sickly sweet taste of rot still coated my tongue ten winters later.
Dark spots danced at the edge of the thicket and spread towards the center.
“That is enough,” I murmured, voice dull. “Give the rest to Zora.”
The swamp tilted. I squinted into veiled skies. I did not remember falling, but my head throbbed and a horribly damp chill seeped through the dress. Darkness lurched at me. With my last shred of awareness, I forced myself to whisper the name that echoed through my nightmares.
The name that had cost me my soul—and the kind-hearted miller’s daughter her life.
I used to wish it were me instead; used to burn with remorse and loathing whenever her lifeless eyes stared at me from the darkest corner of my memories.
But as the dark swept me off and Adrik called softly for me, I felt only gladness.
To save him, I would have done much worse.