Chapter 2 #2
Magdala felt rather than heard the coach as it rolled behind her. The vibration tickled the soles of her boots. The villagers grew more frantic, their voices a roar.
Julian wavered.
“No,” Magdala gasped, tightening her arm on his. “Hold!”
Someone knocked into her, and her helmet was jostled from her head. It fell to the ground with a thud and disappeared in the forest of legs.
Julian’s grip weakened.
“NO!” Magdala commanded. Her hair stuck to her forehead, and stinging sweat dripped into her eyes. She bared her teeth, braced her stance, and meant to hold like a stone bastion.
But Julian’s arm relaxed and then, all at once, slipped from her grasp.
The villagers slid through the crack like water from a broken pitcher.
Magdala’s instincts drowned out her father’s voice in her head and her own hatred.
Trying to stop them, she grabbed arms and shirts, yanking desperately, but her feet lifted from the ground.
Her back struck something solid and hollow.
Hands tore at her, bodies crushed her. She could not breathe.
She was being smothered. Panicked, Magdala groped along the smooth wood behind her until her fingers found a metal handle.
She pulled on it. It held, locked, but Magdala was frantic.
She drew her knife, jammed the blade into the crack in the door, and slammed it downward.
The latch clicked and the door gave. Magdala drew her sparkstick and zapped the nearest body.
For an instant, the pressure relented. Wrenching the coach’s door open, she scrambled inside.
Magdala gasped, her lungs inflating again.
The door clicked shut behind her, muffling the screams and jeers.
Before she could turn and apologize to the prince and his valet, fingers buried in her hair and wrenched her head back.
A clammy hand closed over her mouth. Why were they treating her like this?
She was a royal guard. She was here to protect them.
Magdala tried to shout, “I’m a royal guard,” but someone stuffed a grimy cloth in her mouth. It tasted of salt. It was dark in the coach—so dark she couldn’t make out their faces, and they could not see her uniform.
“Hold her! Don’t let her go!” said a deep voice from across the carriage.
“What do we do with her?” rasped the man holding her. He sounded younger than the first man, and he was strong. Stronger than Magdala, which frightened her.
“Shoot her and toss her back to the mob,” the older man growled. She assumed this was the valet.
“Brilliant plan,” the young man replied through his teeth. “Since I’m already so popular.”
“Make an example of her.”
Magdala slammed her head back into her captor’s throat and he choked, loosening his grip on her arms. She dove for the large window that led to the driver’s seat, but as she clambered onto the upholstered bench, arms wound around her again, and in her terror, she brought her elbow back, striking the younger man in his cheekbone.
He sprawled on the floor, cursing, and the other man cried with an edge of irritation, “Ash!”
Magdala’s heart froze in her chest. She’d struck the prince. The next ruler of Allagesh—knocked him flat on the floor.
They would hang her for this. She needed to get out of this coach before they reached the palace, before they saw her face and tossed her in the dungeon.
With renewed panic, Magdala cracked the window glass with her elbow and dove through it, the shards cutting her hands and scraping against her cork-filled vest. As her shoulders slipped into the hot, teeming air, the prince and the valet caught her legs and dragged her back into the coach.
She screamed, thrashing, and they tumbled into a violent knot of limbs on the floor.
“Just shoot her, Ash,” the valet grunted.
“I’m not murdering a villager, you bloody old lunatic,” the prince replied. “Let me think!”
“Nothing good comes of you thinking.”
“Thank you, Zeph,” Asherton grunted. “You always bolster my self-esteem.”
The roar of the mob blew through the window like a gale.
“Tell me when we’re passing over the bridge,” Prince Asherton said. The valet pressed his weight down on Magdala. Her head spun. Her face began to tingle and go numb. She couldn’t inhale. She was going to die here, in this coach, accidentally killed by the prince who stole her birthright.
“Don’t smother her to death,” the prince grumbled.
“If she’d stop fighting,” the valet hissed, “I would let up.”
Magdala nodded frantically, and the weight on her chest lifted. Her mouth stuffed with cloth, she inhaled through her nose, the air whistling in her nostrils.
The valet glanced out the window. “We’re passing over the bridge.”
The bridge? Her eyes shot open, wild as a deer caught in a trap. The bridge ran over the river, and Magdala could not swim.
NO! She tried to scream, but it came out garbled. Tears welled in her eyes. This wasn’t happening. This could not be happening.
Asherton grabbed Magdala by the back of her vest, dragged her across the coach, and pushed open the door.
She wasn’t ready to die. She should have stayed in the Wildlands with her mother.
She never should have taken the position on the royal guard.
There was so much she wanted to do. She’d never been kissed.
She’d never slept with a man. She needed more time to run barefoot over cold grass, dance in a ballroom, fall in love.
Oh, she hoped Julian had been trampled to a pulp.
A rush of warm air blew on Magdala’s tear-stained face.
They were passing over the bridge to the palace, the river running smooth and slow beneath them.
Asherton and his valet lifted Magdala. She fought them with everything she had, but they tossed her over the edge, and she plummeted down and down and down.
Two lives flashed before her:
First, Elegy and its clear ponds and paneled halls.
She felt again the pinch of her stiff leather shoes and the wonderful click her heels made on the ballroom floor, where she was never allowed to go barefoot.
She envisioned her father in his velvet coat, smiling as she twirled on the tile, surrounded by a mural of dragons curling through apricot trees.
And then she saw her mother strolling through the heather in a red-and-green plaid skirt, free and happy, like Seamus was an ill-fitting coat she’d left behind.
Magdala remembered her own childish voice raised in song as she wandered unshod over the endless moors, grouse and grackles, hinds and foxes watching her, unafraid.
The cold water shocked her back to herself.
It closed over her head and pulled her down.
She thrashed, her arms and legs discordant and untrained.
But then she was moving upward, pulled by some miraculous force.
She bobbed back to the surface, spitting and spluttering.
How was she alive? She cast around for her rescuer, but she was alone, floating in the gentle current.
And then she remembered the cork-filled vest. Magdala laughed. Pulling the ties at her chest tighter, she thanked the Only that cork could float.
Above her, the coach rattled across the bridge. She glared at it until it was out of sight and hoped one day her knife would find Prince Asherton’s throat.