17. Tabitha
Tabitha
The trouble with a doom prophecy is that it doesn’t stop the ordinary dangers of hell from having a go at you on the walk home.
We’re half a day out from the Oracle’s pond, all of us chewing on what she said, when the ground ahead of us splits and a river of molten fire cuts across our path, wide as a road, and on the far bank a whole pack of somethings lifts its heads and looks at us with far too much interest.
“What now?” I groan.
“Ash hounds,” Luka says, going tense. “A pack. They hunt in the fire-rivers. Fast, and there’s a lot of them, and they’ll go for you first.”
“Naturally. Everything goes for me first. I’m very popular.” I eye the fire-river. “How do we cross that without becoming a Queen-kebab?”
“You don’t,” Azaan says, already lifting off the ground on a curl of wind. “I carry you over. The boys handle the hounds.”
“That’s not a plan, that’s you getting me alone. Again.”
“Two birds, little one.” He grins, and then a hound the size of a pony comes boiling across the fire straight for me, skin cracked and glowing like a coal. There’s no more time for banter.
We fight. God, we fight, and I’ve stopped being frightened of the fighting, that’s the thing that gets me every time now, how far I’ve come from the girl who froze.
The hounds come across the fire in a molten wave and my men meet them, Luka a snarling wall of panther, Gavriel’s ax rising and falling, Valerian’s violet turning three of them to ash mid-leap.
And me, I don’t hang back. I let the HellCat run up my arms and I catch the big one that comes for my throat and I burn it out of the air, and the fire-river doesn’t scare me because I’m made of worse fire than it is.
Here’s the thing I notice, in the middle of it.
The realm helps me. Not the men. The realm.
When a hound gets behind me, a fire geyser I hadn’t seen erupts under it, gold not red, and cooks it.
When I stumble on the cracked ground, the ground steadies.
It’s small, and it’s new, and it’s been happening more since I sat in front of that pond, since I started, maybe, to believe even a little that this place might be mine.
“Did you see that?” I yell to Valerian, torching a hound. “The geyser! It helped me!”
“I saw it,” he calls back, delighted and fierce. “The realm knows its Queen, little kitty, even when the Queen won’t admit it. Keep going. Let it in.”
I let it in. And between me and the realm and my four ridiculous men, the pack breaks, the survivors slinking back across the fire to lick their wounds, and we’re left standing, singed and grinning, on the near bank.
“See?” Azaan says, dropping down beside me. “Popular. Everyone wants a piece of the HellCat Queen.”
“They can queue.” I wipe ash off my face and look at the fire-river still cutting off our path. “Now carry me over this thing before I decide to walk it out of spite and lose a life to my own stubbornness.”
“With pleasure, my Queen.” He scoops me up, and the others shift and leap and blur across in their own ways. As Azaan lifts me over the river of fire I look down at it, at my realm burning red and gold beneath me, and for one second, one clean second, it doesn’t look like hell.
It looks like home.
Then Tabeitha stirs, deep down, sour and patient, and reminds me the walk isn’t over, and neither is she. The clean second passes.
But I had it. That’s the thing. A year ago I couldn’t have had it at all.