A/N: Thank you for reading!

This book is my newest project, inspired by Ocarina of Time, Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, and all my other sources of inspiration. I'll say nothing more and allow it to speak for itself. 

Enjoy!

~CRH

 

TRANSIENTS

Part One 

Chapter One 

The bass line of the music shook the London disco’s walls until the very air within seemed to vibrate, a 180 beat-per-minute pulse that drove the teeming crowds to sway and pulse like a wave crashing over their heads. Outside, the night was chill and damp, and seemed to resist with true British stubbornness the realization that it had been summer for several weeks past, but inside the heat was inescapable, and a sheen of sweat coated every inch of bared skin on the dance floor. 

Right in the center of the undulating mass, one young woman with more skin bared than most was dancing with wild abandon against a good-looking stranger in black jeans, spilling beer from the cup in her hand with every movement. He was not her first suitor that night, but he was by far the most tenacious, having lasted more than one song before she forgot he was there and moved on. She was blonde and pretty, her eyes pale blue amid a smoky haze of makeup, and when she turned and shouted to be heard over the music, her American accent was obvious. Whatever she shouted, her dance partner did not hear, and understood only when she pointed to the dwindling drink in her hand. He nodded and pointed to the bar, and the blonde took his arm with a giddy laugh and tugged him through the crowd. 

At the bar, where the music was a few decibels lower, the stranger put his mouth to her ear as he signaled for more drinks. “What do you say we get out of here?” His accent was from northern England, with a hint of a Scottish brogue, but it was doubtful whether the blonde could tell the difference. “I know a great pub down the street a ways.”

“Okay!” the blonde called back, her blue eyes bright with excitement and more than a bit of tipsiness. “Can we bring my friend, though? That’s her over there, see—? Hey! Hey, Kat!”

She stood on tiptoe and waved an arm enthusiastically over her head until she caught the attention of another young woman leaning against the wall in a far corner. The new girl was dressed similarly to the blonde, in a low-cut lace-up top and a tiny skirt, but she looked distinctly uneasy in them, seeming much more comfortable in her beat-up old boots with her long brown hair pulled back unstyled. She had her arms folded as she surveyed the disco and its patrons, looking both annoyed and intensely uncomfortable, and when she first saw the blonde and her companion, the gaze she turned on them could have sliced through stone. 

“That’s my friend, Katrina,” the blonde babbled happily. “We’ve been friends forever, she’s like my sister, you’ll love her, and she’ll cheer up once we’ve found her someone to dance with—you’ve got a friend for her, right?”

Th\e tall stranger visibly winced at the sight of the brunette, even when her expression softened and she waved to the blonde with a halfhearted smile. The blonde waved for her to join them, but the stranger hastened to take her hand, leaning in with a roguish grin. 

“Of course she’ll come,” he assured her. “I’ve got a couple mates just for her. Come and meet them now, love, over here….”

Across the dance floor, Katrina watched her friend take the stranger’s arm with a sigh. Leah always dragged her to these places, dressing her up and doing her hair and makeup as if she were a gigantic Barbie doll, and always insisted that she would enjoy herself if she would only loosen up. It wasn’t that Katrina didn’t like drinking or dancing, in the right company, but a thousand drunken strangers thrashing around to deafening electronica and trading pound coins for small chalky pills in the toilets were hardly what she would consider her ideal party guests. She had a drink in her hand, the third one that Leah had pressed upon her so far, but despite the reek of cheap liquor the drinks had failed to relax her the way Leah had obviously hoped. As far as she knew, there was no amount of alcohol in the world that could make her forget where they were and who surrounded them. 

It wasn’t that she hadn’t enjoyed their trip abroad; she had, enormously, and she would be sorry to leave London behind. But Leah was enough of a handful back home. Here, in an unfamiliar city in a foreign country, surrounded by strangers, she felt more tightly wound than ever, and kept a close eye on Leah as she followed her latest boytoy over to his knot of friends. They were quite handsome, and Katrina had no complains at all about their accents, but Leah had never been sensible, and if Katrina didn’t watch her closely, she could easily make a fool of herself, or….

Katrina stiffened and stood on tiptoe, squinting over the heads of the crowd. The movement had been so smooth that she could not believe what she was seeing even as she watched it happen. The stranger with his arm around Leah had ushered her gently toward his friends as the bartender held out their drinks, and before his fingertips had even left Leah’s back, he had scooped up the drinks with a practiced movement while scooping up the scattered bills that were his change. But as his hand returned to his jacket to tuck the bills away, they passed over Leah’s drink in the oddest fashion, with two fingers prying gently loose from the rest. Katrina knew that she could not make it out from this distance, but she almost thought she saw a little white pill fall into the drink, almost thought she heard the tiny splash. She blinked, gaping, certain that she had imagined it, but then he gave the drink the tiniest stir, gently swirling the contents inside, and she knew. 

“Leah!” Even she could not hear her own voice over the pulsing thump of the music, but still she shouted as she leapt forward, shoving her way through the crowd, hardly caring how many people she knocked into or how many drinks she spilled. “Leah!” 

But Leah never heard her, and Katrina, watching horrified as she pushed closer, was powerless to stop her from taking the drink from the stranger’s hand with a flirtatious smile, raising it to her smeared red lipstick, and taking a sip. 

“God dammit—LEAH!”

Finally, belatedly, Leah heard her, and looked up, confused, just in time to see Katrina shove herself between Leah and the stranger and knock the drink out of Leah’s hand. Cries of outrage echoed around her from the man and his friends, and from Leah as well, but Katrina ignored them all, grabbing Leah by the elbow and pulling her away. The boys crowded in, their faces drunkenly furious, and the leader, the one who had drugged Leah’s drink, reached out to pull Leah back, his mouth opening in a snarl. Katrina acted without thinking, her fist making contact with his eye before she even knew what she was doing. He recoiled with a string of loud curses, but it was all the opportunity that Katrina needed to haul a bewildered, stumbling Leah through the crowd, heading for the glowing exit sign as fast as she could. 

They left quite a commotion in their wake—Katrina could see the shift in the movement of the crowd, the craning necks and echoed questions—but she hardly cared, and when they reached the door her only thought was gratitude that they had gotten away. She shoved the door open with her shoulder and pulled Leah out into the night. They stepped into a narrow alleyway off the main street, lit only by a yellowish streetlight next to the sidewalk, as a faint drizzle began to fall. 

Katrina expected outrage from Leah, yelling and scolding, but when she looked back at her friend, she saw only confusion in Leah’s expression. No, more than confusion: she was frowning to one side of Katrina as if focusing on something that only she could see, swaying slightly on her feet, her eyes glazed, sweat beading on her suddenly bloodless face….

“Leah!” Katrina caught her just as she stumbled, her knees sagging under her friend’s weight. Leah was not heavy by any means, a slender birdlike girl who came an inch short of Katrina’s height even in high heels, but her sudden collapse into a hundred pounds of dead weight caught Katrina by surprise. Leah grabbed weakly at Katrina’s arm as she tried to find her feet, frowning at the grimy paving stones beneath them as if searching for the answer to an impossible riddle. 

“Kat…?” she mumbled, her voice faint and hoarse. 

“I got you, Leah, I got you—help!” she yelled toward the street as loudly as she could. She felt panic begin to rise in her chest, closing around her throat, coloring her voice. Leah was sick, drugged, and they were stranded in who even knew if it was the middle of London, with no cell phone, no other friends nearby, and, since they had taken a cab here, no way home. “Somebody help!” she shrieked toward the empty sidewalks and the cars that trundled by on the road. “Help!” 

At first, the street seemed deserted but for the sporadic cars, and Katrina thought she would scream in terror and frustration when no one passed them by. But then, miracle of miracles, two people emerged onto the sidewalk, pausing at the sound of Katrina’s shouting. Katrina’s heart leapt to her throat as they turned and strode toward her; it was all she could do not to sob in relief. 

But then the two stepped into the light, and an iron fist clenched around Katrina’s stomach. They were both men, towering and burly, with arm muscles thicker than Leah’s waist. Their dark eyes were flat and emotionless, showing not a trace of curiosity or concern. And as they approached, they reached into their jackets and withdrew two pistols, glowing dully in the dim light. Not knives, the main weapon of choice since the United Kingdom’s strict ban on guns; pistols. A Smith & Wesson and a Glock, American police-issue, with bullets that could tear a fist-sized hole through a man at point-blank range. And both of them were pointing straight between her eyes. 

Katrina had just enough time for one piercing scream before they fell upon her. Leah was ripped from her arms; a rock-hard hand grabbed her fist as she tried to punch, and another closed around a handful of her hair. She hit and kicked and flailed and fought with all she was worth, yelling at the top of her lungs around the tobacco-stained fingers that clapped against her mouth, but they were pinning her arms behind her back, forcing her to the ground….

With one final surge of power, she bucked against her captors, arching her back and thrashing wildly against the paving stones. She felt one of the hands gripping her loosen, heard a muffled curse in an accent and language that she did not recognize—

Then something crashed against her head, and she fell back, stunned, and collapsed on a heap in the alley. 

The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was a hulking man crouching over Leah as she lay flat on her back on the ground, staring up at the falling rain. He scooped her up and tossed her limp body over his shoulder, stepping out of sight. Katrina felt herself rising up into the air as well, slowly, as if moving underwater, but then the dull throb in her head sharpened to a knife thrust in her skull, and the world faded into darkness around her. 

2: Part One: Chapter Two

Chapter Two

On a day such as this, even a man like Captain Eldrus Valeth could see why the Sunset Sea had been blessed with its poetic epithet. It was late into autumn, with an icy bite creeping into the northerly wind, but the sky had not yet turned the steely gray of winter; it had been a bright, piercing blue all day, with barely a cloud to be seen from one horizon to the other. Now, as the sun sank below the hazy line of water in the distant west like a red-hot ember, the few cotton-fluff clouds clinging to the horizon framed it in a fiery harmony of orange and red and deep purple, the edges dancing with yellow fire. Another wavering sun glowed atop the waves near the horizon, floating gracefully among water that flowed endlessly between deep indigo, dull jade green, dark-crested plum, and persimmon-orange, changing with every capricious whim of the sea. 

The beauty of the scene, however, was utterly wasted on the captain, who spared only a vague glance of annoyance toward the burning orb as he turned his spyglass starboard, toward the distant shore. Westward they were headed, so westward they must go, but the glare in the midst of the dying light made it almost impossible to make out anything on the water before and behind them, as well as even the slightest detail on the shores to either side. Squinting, he could make out the treeline of the northern shore, and the mountains far to the northeast, but that was all. Frustrated, he lowered his glass and filled his lungs, preparing to shout to his first mate to change course a few notches so he could at least see where they were headed. But before he could bellow as much as a single syllable, a cry from above stopped him short. 

“Ship ho off the starboard bow! Ship ahead, Cap’n!” 

“What?!” The captain fumbled with his spyglass, pointing it hastily toward the northwest. He scanned the horizon twice before he spotted it: a black smudge on the water, barely distinguishable from the shoreline. He did not look up when the lookout, sliding down the rigging from the crow’s nest, landed with a heavy thud onto the deck beside him. “What vessel is she?” he demanded. 

“A caravel, Cap’n, flyin’ Angard colors. She sails alone, Cap’n.” 

“READY ABOUT!” The captain roared, so suddenly that the scrawny runt of a lookout jumped and scrambled aside. “TWENTY NOTCHES LEEWARD AND PREPARE FOR BOARDIN’!”

“AYE, CAP’N!” called a dozen voices at once, and the crew leapt into action around him, every last man running this way or that to make himself useful. The boatswain began yelling orders left and right, and Valeth’s mate, at the helm, turned the ship so sharply that a couple of the men, new recruits who had yet to develop their sea legs, stumbled; the captain, however, kept his balance with practiced ease, his spyglass steady as he trained it onto the distant smudge. As the ship cut through the waves in a froth of spray and foam, as the sails unfurled and pulled taut against the wind, the smudge grew ever larger and clearer, until slowly the sleek polished sides and graceful sails of the caravel came into focus. 

Valeth’s smirk widened as he studied the ship with a hungry gaze. It was a beauty of a ship, brand-new by the look of it, the red wreath of Angard bright against the pristine white cloth of the flag. It rode high and proud on the water, clearly unburdened by excess guns or powder. And it sailed alone, with not so much as a dinghy to be seen for miles around. Valeth grinned and closed his spyglass with a snap, plucking a flask from his belt and taking a deep drink before marching across the deck, whipping his crew into a frenzy with his harsh voice and leathery lungs as they readied guns, cannonballs, chainshot, grappling hooks, and a boarding plank. Slowly, steadily, they closed the distance between the pirate vessel, rough and squat and scarred by a hundred sea battles, and the caravel, which sailed innocently onward, blissfully unaware of the threat that crept nearer. 

Valeth took the wheel himself as they approached, nudging the bowsprit bit by bit until it pointed straight at the center of the caravel’s hull. “Steady,” he called to his men, “steady as she goes….”

Four hundred meters. Three hundred fifty. Three hundred.

“Ready at the chain!” 

Several men responded, but none of them moved; they were already prepared, the cannons loaded and aimed. Valeth held his breath, his eyes raking the distance between his ship and the caravel. At two hundred yards, he released the breath in a tumultuous roar. 

“FIRE!” 

Two cannons at the bow fired within moments of one another, and from their ends exploded the spinning, slicing fans of chain and lead that formed their chainshot, whistling ominously as they tumbled through the air. 

The first crashed into the deck, ripping straight through a chunk of the railing. 

The second wrapped around the base of the mainmast. 

There was a sharp, splintering crack, loud enough to be heard clearly even at a distance. Then, with a creak of rope and an anguished groan of straining wood, the mast began to fall. 

 

Below the deck of the caravel, a tiny space intended as a cargo hold had been stuffed corner-to-corner with elegantly carved furnishings, including a narrow bed, a polished writing desk, and a graceful lantern swinging from a hook on the ceiling. Atop the embroidered silk bedspread lay sprawled a young woman in her late teens, her fine white dress lined in ermine and her bodice and cuffs embroidered with flowers, her blonde curls spilling in a long waterfall over the footboard. Alaine was fast asleep, one hand resting limp on the open pages of a small leather-bound book, the other arm thrown up over her face—so deeply asleep, in fact, that it was not until the mast was struck, and the entire ship pitched sideways with enough force to throw her across the room, that she woke up, aching and dizzy and lying in a heap amongst her bedclothes against the opposite wall. 

Newly awoken as she was, she could not remember if she had cried out in reality or in a dream. “Micah!” she called just in case, holding a hand to her aching head. “Micah, I need help!” 

There came no reply, only silence. Normally, this would have infuriated her—she had been allowed no servants, no comforts whatsoever, only because the captain had given his word that a guard would be by her door night and day to assist her, and now, when she needed them most, they had abandoned her! But as she clambered free of the tangled bedclothes and straightened her heavy skirts, the only emotion she could conjure was fear. She did not need the feel of her heart beating violently against her ribs or the sickening knot twisting in her stomach to know that something had gone terribly wrong. 

She picked her way carefully over to the door—the floor was littered with spilled papers and broken ink bottles from her desk, and the ship seemed to be listing slightly to one side—and threw it open, her lungs already swelling to call for Micah. But what she saw in the corridor beyond froze the words in her throat. Micah was there after all, lying crumpled at the far end of the corridor with a trickle of blood snaking out from under his hair, clearly thrown against the wall by the force of the crash; dead or alive, she could not have said for sure. And what was worse, she could hear shouts and crashes and clanging metal overhead, the unmistakeable sounds of a fight. 

Alaine was no fighter, not by any stretch of the imagination, but nor was she a fool. Her nearest guard was either dead or unconscious, and the other score of them might be in little better shape. Right now, it was up to her to protect herself. She darted over to Micah’s limp form and bent over him, checking him hastily from neck to belt. She felt no pulse, and several troubling dents in his steel armor, but there was no time for a more thorough check; her real goal was his sword, still sheathed at his hip next to the handheld steel contraption, the one that made a deafening explosion and sent tiny cannonballs flying everywhere, that he had called a fireblade. It was, she knew, very deadly, but it could only fire once, and she was far more familiar with steel than handheld cannons. With an almighty heave she managed to jerk the sword free from its scabbard, at least an inch or two; from there, another pull had it free, though it was so heavy that she could barely lift it. She murmured a silent apology to Micah as she fled back into her room, praying that he would be all right, praying that she would have no need of the heavy weapon he had unknowingly given her. 

When at last they came—these strange, unkempt, uncouth men with their foul curses and patched clothing, heavily burdened with countless knives and swords and fireblades strapped across their bodies—they found Alaine standing in the middle of her room with her silk slippers planted firmly on the rough floorboards, leveling the point of her sword at the open door with arms that shook violently from the effort. They paused in the doorway, four or five of them crowded shoulder to shoulder in the corridor, but only for a moment; then they shared a gleeful look and a raucous laugh before pushing forward. 

“Stop!” she cried in her most commanding voice. “Stay where you are!” 

The men did, though with gales of fresh laughter. “Ho, pretty,” one of them said, his voice as deep and hoarse as a bullfrog’s. “Don’t be foolish, now. We wouldn’t want ye to get hurt.” He raised his hands in what he seemed to think was a soothing gesture, grinning wide enough to show several missing teeth, and made to step forward—but Alaine stopped him with a violent jab of her sword. 

“I’m warning you,” she snarled with all the venom she could muster. “Take one more step and you will regret it!”

The men hesitated again, sharing looks of confused derision; it could not be clearer that they were wondering if she were touched in the head. Alaine took advantage of their momentary pause to issue her edict, her voice loud and clear and steady. 

“You will take me to your leader,” she commanded them. “You will escort me to his or her presence without laying a single hand upon my person or harming any of my men unprovoked. And you will stand down while I discuss my terms in a civilized fashion. Do this, and you will be permitted to take your gold and leave. Fail to do this, and you will invoke the wrath of persons more powerful than you can imagine. Do you understand?”

The men threw back their heads and roared with laughter, continuing until she wondered if they would ever stop. At last, one of them fell silent with a slow shake of his head, wiping imaginary tears of mirth from his eyes. “You’re a funny one, girlie,” he chortled. “All right, lads, let’s bring her topside—the captain’s going to want to meet this one for sure.” 

The other men chuckled and snickered in reply as the man started forward, extending his hand to her after a short, mocking bow. But Alaine held up one graceful hand and swept past him without touching him, reminding him firmly of his place. Her manner only seemed to amuse the brigands, but as she walked past, her eyes staring straight ahead and her head held high, none of them dared to lay a hand on her. She kept a firm grip on her sword as she made her way forward, trying not to show how heavy and bulky it was, and spared the men who swarmed around her neither a glance nor a comment as she climbed the ladder and emerged onto the deck. 

The scene that met her eyes was much worse than she imagined, and it was all she could do to keep her face expressionless as she surveyed her ship, which had, mere hours ago, been as beautiful and tranquil as she could have wished. Now the solid deck ringed by its pristine balustrade was riddled with jagged holes, great chunks of it ripped out as if a giant creature had swooped down and torn out great mouthfuls of wood and rope and canvas. The mainmast was hanging on by fragile splinters, resting on the shattered railing, the weight of it causing the ship to list to the right; the remaining masts and sails were in little better shape than the rest of the vessel, riddled with torn holes that smoldered gently at the edges. What was left of the deck was littered with corpses, and most of them, it pained her to see, were her own men; the four survivors knelt in a huddle by the helm, bound at the wrists and guarded by two of the invaders. The rest of the pirates hurried this way and that across the deck and the thick plank that connected her ship with theirs, barking orders at one another, stripping weapons and armor off of the dead like carrion, and lugging the crates and barrels that carried her ship’s supplies into their own cargo hold. 

The captain was immediately recognizable as the tall, broad-shouldered, thick-bearded man standing at the helm; he was shouting the loudest orders, doing the least amount of work, and clad in the most layers of faded silks and tattered velvets and gaudy jewelry beneath his many weapons. Alaine strode right to him without waiting for guidance or command, maintaining a calm facade and a straight back even as he turned toward her and looked her over with obvious greed, laughing uproariously with his men. 

“Well, well,” he crowed as he strutted forward like the pompous peacock that he was. “What have we here, boys? A pretty little companion for the ride home?”

He reached forward, making to put an arm around her shoulders, but Alaine stepped politely out of his reach. 

“Sir, I believe you have committed a grave injustice,” she said coldly. “Had you attempted peaceful communication with us prior to boarding, I’m sure you would have found my men and I more than amenable to work out a compromise with you that would have made you very wealthy indeed.”

The men surrounding the captain howled with laughter, but she pointedly ignored them; they seemed to find even the most basic of manners quite hilarious, and there was no point in encouraging their impolite behavior with a response. She kept her eyes on the captain, whose smile took on a sly twist at the corners. 

“Your men, Milady? You must be mighty important, having so many fine soldiers taking yer orders.”

“Indeed,” she told him. “I assume you will want compensation, Captain. That can be arranged; I have quite a bit of gold. You may have it and be on your way.”

“Gold? You mean this?” The captain nudged a small chest beneath the wheel with his boot; it half-opened to reveal a gleaming pile of gold and silver. “Ah, but this is already mine, sweetsage. Who are you to stop me taking it and taking you, eh?”

“Very well,” said Alaine stiffly, though her stomach sank at the implications of his words. “If that is your wish, Captain, then I believe a ransom could be arranged. However, a man such as yourself will of course be aware that if any harm should come to me, your reward may be forfeit. In addition, I will promise you an additional sum if the remainder of my men are allowed to go from here unharmed.”

The captain eyed her curiously, stroking his matted beard with one hand. “And who be you to make such a promise, eh?”

“My name is Lady Taiene,” she informed him, giving the first name that came to mind. “My father is a very wealthy, very powerful lord in Angard, and he will pay you a handsome sum for my safe return. That is all you need to know until you deliver me to back to Kiindine.”

“Kiindine?” The captain chuckled, shaking his head in disbelief. “I weren’t born yesterday, Lady. That may be where you started, but it sure ain’t where you was going.”

“My business abroad is my own,” Alaine said firmly. “If you want your reward, you will set sail for Kiindine with all haste. And you will leave my men behind.” As she added this, she chanced a look at the captives. They said nothing, but the ship’s captain, his face bruised and bloodied, shook his head a fraction of an inch to either side. She gave him a small smile, silently apologizing for his pain and thanking him for his loyalty. There was nothing more he could do for her now, and all she could do for him and his fellow prisoners was try and get them to safety. 

“Ar, all right,” said the captain at last with a careless shrug. “What’s it matter, eh? We got more than we thought already, and if your father’s as rich as you say….”

“He is,” Alaine assured him. “You will not be disappointed.” 

The captain grinned, turning to his men with arms held wide open. “You hear that, lads?” he roared. “When we reach the mainland, Lady Taiene here is buyin’ us all a pint!” 

The men burst into deafening cheers and applause, though Alaine heavily suspected that they were mocking her again. She remained still and stone-faced, watching the captain carefully as he barked incomprehensible orders at the other men. When he turned back to her at last, it was only to give an impatient gesture to a huge beast of a man with half a dozen golden rings in each ear, who took Alaine firmly by the elbow and led him away. Alaine did not protest, but as she stepped onto the makeshift bridge between the ships, she twisted around to cast one more grief-filled look at her remaining men. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed at them. Then, with an impatient tug at her arm, the earringed pirate marched her across the gangplank and onto the deck of her new prison. 

3: Part One: Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The low, steady rumble of tires over asphalt lured Kat slowly out of her deep slumber, louder than she had ever heard it before; the noise seemed to vibrate her teeth inside her skull. For a long time she drifted in a twilight state between lucidity and unconsciousness, her thoughts slipping out of her grasp like tendrils of smoke in the wind. Then, with languid slowness, she opened her eyes and looked around, awareness of her surroundings soaking gradually into her brain. 

She was curled up somewhere small and pitch-black, the only illumination coming from tiny, muted flashes of light through a slit in the wall straight ahead. Rough material scratched at her cheek and at every exposed bit of skin on her right side. Her neck was twisted uncomfortably against something hard and curved, and several things prodded into her side, legs, and back, some of them malleable, others rigid and sharp. Her hands were behind her back, and when she tried to move them, she couldn’t; nor could she move her legs, or her torso, or anything else. There was no way of knowing why; in her confused state, it was completely possible that no matter how many times she told her body to move, it was simply refusing to listen, like it sometimes did when she woke up still trapped in the throes of a bad dream. 

But this dream refused to go away, and slowly, painfully, reality crept into the tiny space, seeping into her bones and muscles, bringing aches and cramps and fear. Something was covering her mouth, making it impossible to speak or breathe, save through her nose. Her head and legs could move a little, but after an inch of nothingness they merely struck the same hard metal wall. Her arms, bound behind her back, could not move at all, though her shoulders burned and ached from the strain of trying. And her fingers kept brushing against something that felt very familiar, if only she could place where she had felt it before….

Leather. It was leather. Or, more accurately, pleather, conjuring the image of something short and black and smooth—Leah’s skirt. She struggled closer, fighting to roll over, but she couldn’t; however, she could feel brittle, hair-spray-soaked curls brushing against her arm as she tried, and if she held her breath, she could hear soft breathing, and smell a trace of sweat and expensive perfume. Leah was here. Leah was alive. After that blow to the head, she had thought….

The memory of the night rushed in all at once, and a thrill of terror squeezed around Kat’s heart until she no longer remembered how to breathe. That stranger in the club whose hand had passed over Leah’s drink. The odd, glazed look in Leah’s eyes as Kat pulled her outside. The strange men in the alley. The sharp burst of pain as something crashed into her head. And now, in the sudden rush of clarity, she knew exactly where she was. This was the trunk of a car—a sedan of some sort, by the look of it—and her mouth, wrists, and ankles were bound with duct tape. Leah, curled up behind her, was likely in the same state. 

Kat’s eyes bulged as she looked wildly around, her eyes slowly adjusting to the lack of light, but she forced herself to breathe slowly and calmly. If she allowed herself to have a panic attack now, she would only drive herself to tears, which would block her nose and suffocate her, or hyperventilate until she passed out. She could not allow herself to panic, even if she had been abducted and locked in a trunk, and she couldn’t move her arms or legs, and her kidnappers were taking her God knew where, and the claustrophobia made her want to scream…. No! she snarled at herself. Get it together! Don’t panic! Leah’s counting on you!

There had to be a way out—a weak point, a release lever, something installed for just this purpose. If she could just find it… She found that by twisting her abdomen, she could lift her bound legs and kick at the roof of the trunk, the door, any place that she could—only to bruise her heels within seconds on a harder, sharper surface than she expected. Wincing, she peered into the darkness, her stomach sinking as a slanting stream of yellow from the lights of a passing car illuminated the obstacle. They were steel reinforcements, thick and curved, bracing the wheel wells and the door, especially the bottom seam where the door latched. And as Kat fell back with a huff, her cheek brushed once again against the floor, and she realized that the fabric was not the thin carpet typical of cars, but something else, rougher, looser, that filled her with a leaden lump of dread. Not because she knew what it was, not even because of the fabric, but because it meant that this trunk was custom: it had been gutted and refinished from top to bottom to fit this exact purpose. There would be no release lever, no weak points. These men knew what they were doing. 

At that moment, the car turned, and Kat heard the tires crunching over gravel. Her blood turned to ice as she felt the car slow, and, panicking, she lifted her boots again and slammed them again and again against the trunk, those army surplus boots that Leah hated so much, had begged her not to wear, but there was no time for those ridiculous high heels, not if it was going to save them, and the reinforcements only made her all the more desperate to escape, for she could only imagine the horrible things that men like this were capable of…. 

The car stopped abruptly, and Kat fell back, her heart racing, trembling at the sound of the engine dying, the car doors opening. There was a long, dragging minute of silence; then both car doors slammed shut, two loud thuds that trembled the car beneath her and made her heart skip a beat. The men began to walk, and Kat flinched at every footstep crunching on the gravel. Just go away, she begged silently. Please, just leave us here, I don’t want to see what happens next, I don’t want to know—

Then the trunk flew open, and the blinding-white beam of a flashlight swung down and landed on her face. She winced and tried to squint past the light, tried to see her captors’ faces as they spoke to each other in low, rough voices, exchanging comments in a language that she did not recognize—indeed, a language so strange that she could not even place its continent of origin. A huge, callused hand reached for her, black against the bright light, and Kat, panicking, shrieked beneath her duct tape gag and kicked frantically at the dark shapes. Her feet made contact, and she heard a grunt of pain, but the hand closed tightly around her arm and hauled her upward as easily as if she had made no struggle at all. The man flung her over his shoulder like an empty sack, and there she dangled, her nose pressed to a scratchy shirt that reeked of week-old sweat, feeling horribly, sickeningly exposed as the wind attacked her bare arms and shoulders and legs, flew in frigid gusts up the tiny skirt that she desperately wished Leah had not made her wear. Before, in the club, she had, despite herself, felt almost pretty, but in that moment, she would have given anything to be wearing her brother’s old cargo pants and a tank top, or army combats, or leather armor, or the pocketknife that airport security had confiscated from her—anything, anything, but Leah’s too-small, too-short, wildly impractical lingerie-masquerading-as-proper-clothing. 

The trunk slammed shut again, and Kat, arching her back and craning her neck as far as she could, caught a glimpse of another man and another duct-taped prisoner. Kat could not see her face—the blonde curls spilled past her neck and shoulders, obscuring everything but the faint glimmer of gold at her ears—but she recognized Leah’s tall slender figure and stiletto heels before the man carried her out of sight. Kat’s captor followed, and for what felt like an eternity, all she saw and heard and felt was the back of the man’s shirt, the crunch of gravel, the biting air, and the nausea and dizziness, slowly increasing, from being held in such an awkward position. 

Abruptly, the footsteps stopped—and Kat, twisting her neck painfully, caught a glimpse of a building so stunning, so unexpected, that she felt her own eyes bulge in their sockets. A castle. The men were taking her into a castle—a real-life, honest-to-God, medieval era castle. She could see the wall curving away in the distance, the shadows of the turrets from the floodlights on the lawns, the giant metal grate that they had passed beneath, the thick iron-fortified wooden door with whose iron chains the men were now struggling—and as the chains fell away and the men continued, she saw more. A courtyard with packed dirt on the ground. A crumbling watchtower. Stone steps on the inside of the wall, worn and pitted with use. A formless statue keeping watch on one of the rough stone walls that rose up and up until it disappeared from sight. This was Camelot. This was Winterfell. This was Fort Dawnguard, or Helm’s Deep, or Cair Paravel, or one of a thousand other medieval castles from all the stories she’d read. If not for the floodlights, and the red LEDs glowing from the security cameras, and Leah’s absurd clothing suffocating her, she would have wondered if she had stepped back in time. She had known, intellectually, that England had hundreds of castles, but she had never dreamed she would see one like this. 

Her first thought as they moved into a dimly lit entrance hall, so huge that the sound of footsteps echoed eerily from wall to wall: Oh God. I’m inside a castle—a real castle! 

Her second thought: Oh God…why are they taking me here? 

The fear, so briefly and blissfully fleeting, returned in full force as her kidnapper carried her down several winding staircases, and it only strengthened as she saw stone after worn stone pass beneath her, patches of them illuminated by what she could have sworn were actual torches resting in brackets on the walls. She could think of many, many reasons why people like this would take two teenage girls to an abandoned place, and absolutely none of them were pleasant—and as for the castle, that she could not guess with even the wildest of imaginations, though she knew that it could not possibly be good. She tried to struggle, but the man carrying her ignored her utterly; she tried to look around, but it was too dark to make out anything within her limited field of vision. All she could do, in the end, was dangle helplessly as she was carried down long, twisting corridors, past black, empty rooms filled with ghostly dripping and wailing, deeper and deeper into the darkness, her terror and dread growing with every step her captor took. 

Then, without warning, the journey ended. 

Kat yelped behind her gag as she felt herself pitched forward, shrieked in pain as she landed facedown on the ground, her head smacking painfully against hard stone. She squirmed and wriggled and flailed in a furious effort to roll over, breathing hard out of her nose—but her captor’s rough hand grabbed her by the hair and dragged her upward before she had the chance, forcing her roughly to her knees. She heard grunting behind her, and clinking metal, but horrible though those sounds were, she could not pay them any mind, for the other man had just dropped Leah on the floor in front of her. 

For the first time since the alley, she saw Leah clearly, and the sight of her friend’s ashen face, coated in dried blood from a cut beneath her hair, wrenched from her throat a wail of despair that nobody could hear. 

This can’t be real, Kat thought wildly. This can’t be happening….

The man took something from the floor, something that clinked and rattled just like whatever the first man was messing with behind her, and as he bent to fasten it around Leah’s neck, Kat felt something hard and cold close around her wrists, and her insides turned to water as she realized what they were: chains. And, looking around, she saw her surroundings clearly for the first time. They were in a dungeon, complete with bars forming one wall and rusted chains dangling from hooks wedged into the mortar between stones. And the men were standing up and walking away, snapping a shiny new padlock onto the rusted iron latch of the barred door…leaving them alone in the dark

“No!” she tried to scream. “WAIT! COME BACK!” But the tape covering her mouth did not give, and all her own ears heard were small, muffled sounds of distress that fell upon apparently deaf ears. The men disappeared, and soon even the sounds of their footsteps were gone, leaving only darkness, and silence. 

4: Part One: Chapter Four

Chapter Four 

It took another full hour for the pirates to finish loading their plunder into their cargo hold, but Alaine was not there to see it—for which she was grateful; it galled her to sit helplessly in the dim, smoky captain’s cabin while murdering brigands made off with her possessions. The huge earringed pirate stood guard over her, his arms crossed and his boots planted firmly in front of the door. Alaine turned her chair toward the grimy porthole and tried her best to ignore him, watching the ocean sway in and out against the hull as her freedom slid slowly away from her. 

When at last the door opened, it was to admit two burly ebony-skinned pirates that carried her chest of clothes between them, the cask of gold and silver perched on top, both of them secured with chains and a heavy padlock. As they dumped it unceremoniously beside the captain’s bunk—generously dubbed; it was little more than a plank suspended from the wall on chains with a cluster of yellowed blankets and pillows on top—the enormous man grabbed Alaine’s wrist and yanked her to her feet. She twisted free and walked out onto the deck on her own, refraining from glaring at the hulking beast with great difficulty. 

The last of the cargo was sitting in a small pile by the mainmast, but otherwise the ship was ready to leave; pirates swarmed over the deck and the rigging, unfurling the sales and securing the hundreds of ropes that crisscrossed the beams and sails overhead. They began, slowly, to pull away from the caravel, and Alaine watched sadly as the ragged ship grew smaller and smaller, bobbing sadly atop the waves until the snapped mast, torn sails, and battered hull were no longer in focus. 

That was when she noticed the smoke. 

“The ship is—Captain!” she yelped, whirling around. “Captain, turn back! Captain!” 

But the captain was nowhere to be found, only hard-faced pirates who spared her one sour glance or derisive sneer before returning to their work. She ducked past her guard and ran up the rickety steps to the stern, leaning as far over the railing as she dared. The caravel continued to recede, but the plume of smoke remained—was it growing, or only her imagination? Her guard followed and grabbed her wrist, but she danced free and continued to shout, panic rising to a strident pitch in her chest. 

“Somebody do something!” she yelled, turning to the horizon and to the men and back again. “Turn the ship around! We have to help them!” 

The huge behemoth of a pirate laughed, a low rumble that made his earrings rattle against each other. “What think you mean the dragon fang?” he asked her in a slow, harsh rasp of an accent. He pointed to the ship’s tattered flag, where an earringed skull pierced by a dragon’s fang fluttered in black on a red background. “We do not leave survivor.”

“You—?” It took her a moment to realize what he had said, one full moment to fill her lungs before fear and guilt and fury wrapped her chest in iron bands and squeezed. “How—how dare you—how could you—” She shook her head so hard that her curls whipped across her face, unable to choke out the words. “Captain!” she howled at last, darting back down the stairs. “CAPTAIN!” 

“Oy, quit your squawking, girlie.” Alaine swiveled around as the captain emerged from a knot of men clustered around the final barrels of cargo from Alaine's ship. “I ain’t got nowhere to go, now, do I?”

Alaine marched over to him on the balls of her feet, holding herself as tall as she possibly could, the better to stare down her nose at the odious, grinning man. “Captain,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion, “you swore to me my men would not be harmed. You gave me your word!” 

“Did I, now?” The mock confusion in his tone was almost completely obscured by coarse amusement. “Well I’m sorry, milady, but I also promised my men that they could set somethin’ afire, and there’s more of them’n there are of you, if’n you understand me.” 

“How dare you?” hissed Alaine, clenching her fists to steady herself; she had never before thought it was possible to literally vibrate with rage. She emphasized her words with a finger leveled at his heart, prodding viciously at the air between them. “You will turn this ship around, right now, and see my men safely to shore, or I will personally see you thrown into the foulest, filthiest commoner’s prison that I can find, and I will see you hanged and thrown into a gibbet before you see one single coin of r—augh!”

The man’s grin did not fade, his body did not move a single inch in preparation, but his hand shot out without warning and grabbed a handful of blonde curls. Alaine shrieked as he pulled her closer, leaning forward to speak into her ear with breath that reeked of stale liquor and soured meat. Aside from her cries and whimpers, the ship had gone utterly silent, every man standing frozen as he watched the scene unfold. 

“I don’t know who you think you are,” the captain said quietly, with only the softest hint of menace in his tone. “But if you think that you have any power here, you are very much mistaken. Oh, we won’t hurt ye, rest assured; we’ll deliver you nice an’ cozy to yer daddy, then collect our coin an’ be on our way. But you’d best not ferget that yer a prisoner here, girlie, and ’tis I who makes the rules.” 

Only then did he release her, pushing her firmly away. She stumbled, whimpering and clutching at her throbbing scalp, right into the arms of her guard, who placed his hands so firmly on her shoulders that she might as well have been nailed to the floor. Not that she had any intention of moving, perhaps ever again; she hid her face behind her arms as she pressed her fingers against her scalp, trying desperately to hide the shock and fear that shook her from head to foot, that must have shown clearly on her face. 

“Now, if’n there be no more problems,” she heard the captain say, as if from a great distance, “let’s see about these barrels, eh? What’ve we got in these?”

“Fresh water, Cap’n.”

“Fresh water? Well put it below then, or in the galley if there ain’t room, what in blazes d’you need me for?”

“Well, Cap’n, it says it’s fresh water, but we can’t be sure, as we don’t know what they were carryin’. ’Tis strange, they only had food’n a guns aboard, ’n not much o’ that either. No cargo at all.”

“Hmm. What a waste o’ time. Still, though, we could use the water, I don’t want ta stop at an Angardian port for a while if we don’t—”

“But Cap’n, I don’t think it’s water. Too heavy.”

Alaine, still regaining her composure, peeked at the captain and his companions from between two locks of hair. Something about the situation, something she could not quite identify, lured her attention toward the water barrel and the men arguing over it, a strange pull of intuition in her stomach that had been irritating her for days. She had shrugged it off as nothing, before, but was it possible…?

“Well, what else would it be?” demanded the captain. “What’s heavier’n water? If it’s wine, all the better—could be liquid gold for all I care! Ha!”

The man being questioned did not laugh, nor did he answer; instead, he grabbed the barrel next to him and gave it a rough shake. The cork near the top had been pulled already, but there came no sound of sloshing or splashing from within; nor did the barrel spin and wobble as freely as an empty one should. The captain’s grin slipped from his face. 

“Open ‘er up,” he said sharply. 

Somehow, Alaine knew what would come of the barrel even before the pirate pried it open with a crowbar and shoved it onto its side—but still she shrieked and cringed away at the sight of the teenage boy who tumbled out onto the deck, barefoot and ragged, his arms and legs still curled like the limbs of a dead spider after his cramped imprisonment in the barrel. In between coughs, he sucked in as much of the fresh sea air as he possibly could, though he kept his arms raised up over his face as if to shield himself. 

“A stowaway?” the captain growled, crossing over to the boy in two strides. “Get up, boy,” he shouted, grabbing the boy by the back of his shirt and hauling him to his feet. “Get up!” 

But the boy couldn’t stand. He crumpled immediately as his legs collapsed beneath him, holding himself up with arms that wobbled like tendrils of moss in the breeze. He was the filthiest human being that Alaine had ever seen, or, indeed, smelled; his tattered shirt and pants could have once looked like anything, even royal finery, and it would have been impossible to tell. Dark eyes bulged in terror beneath long, lank hair, and when he opened his mouth, it took several rasping attempts before he could finally speak. 

“I’m—sorry,” he gasped. “I didn’t—mean to—please—”

“Do you know where you are, boy?” The captain loomed over the boy with intentional menace; Alaine could see that even as furious as he was, he enjoyed the sight of the boy flinching and cowering before him, enjoyed the power he wielded and the fear he cast like a spell over his victims. “Do you know what we do to stowaways on my ship?” 

“I—p-please,” the boy begged. “I didn’t—I don’t know—where—” He looked desperately around himself, for some landmark that he knew, for some kind soul that would help him. His searching gaze fell upon her, and Alaine saw a face transformed by the sort of raw, visceral terror that she had only ever seen in spooked horses and prisoners being led to the gallows. It was a fear of an unknown fate, a fear made all the worse by the powerlessness that it accompanied. 

It was at that moment that Alaine realized that she could not take any more. She slipped free of her captor yet again—the man was too distracted by the stowaway to stop her, though he did make a desperate lunge to snatch her back—and flung herself between the boy and the captain, her arms outstretched. Oddly, she was not afraid, or at least not afraid for herself. She could practically feel the boy trembling behind her, and it gave her an odd sort of strength, the strength she needed to protect him. 

“Stop!” she commanded them all, barring the way with her hands. “You must not harm him, Captain!” 

“Girl,” the captain snarled, clearly at the end of his patience. “If I have to tell you one more time—”

“Please, Captain.” Alaine softened her voice to a more soothing, more coaxing tone. “Please. It is clear to me that he was trying to stow away on my ship, not yours; as such, he is as much my responsibility as the other men who accompanied me. I know I have no power to make demands of you, Captain, and I respect your authority completely, but I also know that you are not an unreasonable man. It would be pointless to kill him, and cruel. Perhaps instead, we could come to an arrangement?” 

The anger faded slowly from the captain’s face during her speech, but the expression that replaced it was little better, with eyes cold and calculating as they watched her. He remained silent for a few moments more after she spoke, and she noticed with an inward shudder that his eyes drifted pointedly to her bosom as it heaved with the force of her breathing. 

“Aye,” he said at last, giving her a brisk nod. “We’re agreed, he’s your responsibility. Come, now.” 

He held out his hand with a small bow, just like a gentleman at court, and Alaine, with enormous relief, gave him her arm. He lunged for it like a striking snake and hauled her forcibly forward; the ship spun around her in a blur, and when her vision cleared she stood pinned beside him, her arm painfully trapped beneath his. 

“Let me go!” she shrieked. “Remove your hands from me this instant!” 

But the captain ignored her words as determinedly as he ignored her fruitless shoving and twisting. “Cat o’ nine,” he barked at one of his men, who hurried off at once to obey this inscrutable command. “Lady Taiene here has thrown her lot in with you,” he told the boy, who looked wildly around in confusion as the pirates around him echoed the captain’s mocking laughter. “Seeing as you have no coin to spare, she will kindly be paying for your upkeep while you insist on taking up room on my ship. Unfortunately for you, however, the lady is a troublemaking little spitfire who don’t know when to keep her mouth shut, and we can’t lay a finger on her t’teach her proper manners. You, on the other hand….”

The pirate who had rushed off reappeared, handing the captain a strange, cruel instrument: nine thin leather straps tied to a rough wooden handle at one end. The boy paled so violently at the sight of it that Alaine thought he might faint. At a gesture from the captain, the pirates closed in, and Alaine, uttering a long silent scream inside her head that could not seem to make it to her lips, felt a strong wave of triumph and relief when the boy dodged his captors and darted through a gap in the crowd. He moved quickly for someone so weak and shaky, much more quickly than the pirates appeared to expect, but they caught him half a yard away from the railing, and Alaine’s inward cheers turned into a high-pitched whine of inward panic identical to the sounds the boy made as they dragged him back. She struggled harder still, but the captain never loosened his grip. 

The boy was staring pleadingly at her and the captain, his wide eyes flickering between them in rapid succession, and Alaine wished she could close her eyes against the sight of him thrashing and fighting against the pirates, could block her ears against his incessant broken pleas and the sound of ripping cloth as they tore open the back of his shirt. But she could not look away, could not make herself look away, not even as the horrible nine-tongued whip was raised. The tears that blurred her eyes stopped her from seeing it fall, but they did not stop the awful crack and swish it made as it tore through the air, nor the bloodcurdling shriek it ripped from the boy’s throat. Again the whip lashed out, and again he cried out, and it went on and on no matter how hard she struggled or how many tears she shed. At some point near the beginning he tried to stifle his own cries, tried to grit his teeth and brace himself against the pain, but the screams were torn from him all the same, made somehow much, much worse by his efforts. Alaine was sobbing uncontrollably long before he fell silent—but as she saw the whip rise again, she screamed as loudly as the boy had at the first lash. 

“Stop it! Please! You’ll kill him, stop, stop—”

The captain shoved her angrily away, back into the arms of her hulking guard, but the whip did not fall again, and for that she would have gladly suffered more than a bruised upper arm. 

She could not see the boy anymore, surrounded by pirates as he was, but for that, she was quite grateful, especially when the captain crossed over to him and prodded him sharply with his boot. “Get up!” the captain snapped. “Someone get him up, I don’t have time for this—”

One of the pirates snatched a bucket of water from beside the railing; there was a loud splash, then a low, agonized groan. Alaine felt the guilty knife twist even further into her heart as she realized that the pirates had, in their cruelty, doused him with salt water. The noises continued, softer and duller now, a sound somewhere between a moan and a whimper, and she caught a glimpse of a facedown, blood-drenched someone moving weakly on the deck amid the knot of pirates. 

But her guard pulled her away then, his massive hand pressing against her back to turn her away with surprising care. She felt an instant, inexplicable rush of gratitude toward him as he led her back to the little cabin and sat her firmly on the makeshift bed, and even more so when he shut the door and left her alone. She made no attempt to escape, or undress, or even move from the bed; she merely sank onto the blankets and buried her face into the soothing darkness. Worse even than the guilt over what she had done to the boy—made worse still by the mere possession of the thought, though she could not force it away—was the horrible, sinking feeling that the same would happen to her, and soon, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. For the first time in her life, she was stripped of all protection and authority, left naked and powerless amidst a pack of ravenous beasts, and nothing she could see could reassure her that the setting sun would rise with even a slim hope of survival and escape, not even the irresistible tug of that insistent hook behind her navel, coaxing her with a whispered siren song toward the stranger whose fate was now tangled with her own. 

 

*

 

“C’mon, girlie, up and at ‘em. Quit yet sulkin’, now.”

Alaine was not asleep, merely hiding her head under the blankets, but still she squinted and blinked in the sudden light as the blanket was pulled away. She sat up with a frosty glare at the captain, who, of course, had not had the manners to knock, or even to check that she was decent before exposing her to the chilly air. Of course, she was unlikely not to be decent, as she had nothing at all to change into; she looked, she imagined, just as she had the day before, albeit a bit more rumpled and careworn. 

“Good afternoon, Captain,” she said stiffly, refusing to look anywhere but straight ahead. “I do hope you’ve come to unlock that chest so I can retrieve my dresses. Or at the very least my hairbrush.”

The captain chuckled merrily, as if she’d made an incredibly clever joke. “‘Fraid not, Milady. I saw that thing, and I’ll be snared if it ain’t pure silver. An’ those clothes look like you took ‘em from the queen herself! No, no, we’ll be sellin’ those the first chance we get.”

“Delightful,” said Alaine coldly. “If you would please excuse me, Captain….”

“Hold on, now.” The captain crossed over to the chair behind his desk—she noticed for the first time that he had a pronounced limp, probably from some old injury—and dragged it over to her bunk. He sat down facing her, resting his bearded chin on his steepled fingers. “You an’ me, I think we need to have a talk, girlie. I got some questions for yeh.”

“Well, Captain, I have no interest in speaking with you,” she informed him. “Especially if you refuse to address me by my proper title.”

The captain reddened and his shoulders tensed, and for one tense moment, Alaine feared that he would strike her. But he managed, with obvious difficulty, to restrain himself. “All right…Lady Taiene,” he said between clenched teeth. He took a slow breath, and that seemed to calm him a little. “I’m Captain Eldrus Valeth. Right, now, see? Startin’ on a fresh leg, as we pirates say.” He jerked up the left leg of his pants, and Alaine was startled to see wood in place of flesh nestled in his boot. “Now.” The wooden leg disappeared, and Alaine, feeling a little queasy, turned back to Valeth. “What be your family name, Milady? Who’s this father o’yers, an’d how do I know he’s got the coin to pay for yeh?”

“That is none of your concern, sir,” said Alaine, smoothing her hair with her fingertips; it was meant to show disrespect to him, as if she were so uninterested in his existence that she did not even care if he saw her grooming, and without her gloves or her shawl as well—she might as well have been naked. “Were I you, I would worry more about what will happen to you when I tell my father how I’ve been treated under your care.” 

“Ah, now, see….” Valeth leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers smugly behind his head. “I ain’t too worried about that, pretty. Let me ask you, now: if you were an enterprising fellow like meself, and you had a very valuable package in your possession, meant for a spoiled lord in a distant country, then were told it would blow up’n yer face once you handed it over—if you had that in your hands, what would you do with it? ‘Cause I can bet a snakeskin to a dragon that you’d take that package an’ sell it to the highest bidder at the nearest port, an’ never once look back.”

“I beg your pardon?” demanded Alaine. “What exactly are you trying to imply?”

“Imply? Was I not clear? My apologies. You see, Milady, I am a man with little time or coin to spare, but I like to pride meself on havin’ a good head on m’shoulders. I ain’t stupid enough to wear holes in my bootsoles prancing around for a pile o’ coin that I’ll never get to spend, because my head won’t be on my shoulders long enough. I plan to live to a ripe old age, sweetsage, and I don’t care if you have a king’s ransom waiting on shore for yeh—it ain’t worth that kind o’mess. Now, we have two ways we can go here. The first is, I hand you back to yer daddy, he gives me a mountain of gold, you tell him I never laid a hand on yeh, and you’d not be lyin’, now. The second…well, luckily for you, yer a pretty young thing. If’n you were a filthy little biter like the boy, I’d slit yer throat and throw yeh off the side. But we ain’t far from Beldeen, and I’d bet the slavers there would snatch you up for a good price. And they ain’t likely to hang me over it. Do we understand each other?” 

Alaine realized that her hands were clenched tightly around two handfuls of her dress; she forced herself to let go, busying herself with smoothing the wrinkles while she took a deep, composing breath. “I…I see,” she said at last, praying that he could not see the despair that had dropped into her belly like a leaden weight. “I think we do have an understanding, Captain.” She swallowed, brushing her hair carefully over her shoulder. “I’m sure we can also reach an understanding about the standard of treatment that you and your men show me.”

The captain snorted. “You can keep this cabin. You can keep that dress. An’ you can keep the bodyguard. What more do you want?”

“The bodyguard?” She glanced toward the door and the deck beyond, confused. “Do you mean that boy?”

“Of course not, you silly—” Valeth bit off the forthcoming words with a snap of his teeth. “Have you not noticed the dark hulking beast followin’ yeh around? That’s me first mate. I’ve assigned him to protect you. Half the reason you’re in my cabin, missy, is to keep you away from my men, not to make sure you get a sound night’s sleep, do you understand? You stay in here with the rest of the valuables, Henley guards the door, you get home in one piece, everyone’s happy.”

“You can hardly expect me to spend a fortnight’s journey trapped in here,” Alaine protested. “If I have a bodyguard, why should I be worried?”

“Burn alive, lady, do you know nothing about pirates?” demanded the captain, throwing up his hands. “Walk around all you want, girl, but on your own head be it—I ain’t takin’ any less for you when we reach Kiindine. It is Kiindine you want, isn’t it? ‘Cause yer ship sure wasn’t headed that way.”

“My father can be found in Kiindine,” Alaine said frostily. “So that is where you will go. When we dock, I will show you where to find him, but not before. If you want your reward, you’ll have to be satisfied with that.”

Valeth grunted, climbing laboriously to his feet. “I ain’t gonna be satisfied until I’m back onto the open sea, with a pile o’ gold in here instead o’ you. ’Til then, Henley will get you whatever you need, and you’d do best to keep him close.”

“Captain—” Alaine jumped up, and the captain paused with his hand on the door. “Captain, what about the boy?” 

“What about him?” the man said with a snort. “I’m about a finger’s breadth away from throwing ‘im overboard. More trouble’n he’s worth, an’ that’s assuming someone in Beldeen will offer a decent price for ‘im.”

“Oh—no, please don’t sell him,” Alaine begged. She knew she mustn’t show such weakness, lest she lose ground in her negotiations, but she couldn’t help it; she still felt sick with guilt over all that had happened. If she could help him at all, it would be the very least that she owed him. “If you keep him, I’ll reward you. I’ll reimburse you for his boarding, his food, the price you’d fetch for him, everything.”

Valeth shook his head as he turned back to the door. “You’re joking,” he said dismissively. “That weak little streetrat ain’t worth the food it’ll take to keep him alive.”

He pushed open the door. Alaine, desperate, called out to him as he made to step through. 

“Five hundred gold, Captain. Five hundred gold on top of my own ransom, if he can accompany me to my home.”

The captain froze on the threshold, giving no sign that he had heard her. Then he took a step back, shut the door carefully behind himself, and turned slowly on his heel to face her. 

“If he’s worth that much,” he said, “then how much are you worth, exactly?”

Alaine told him. Valeth stared at her, his eyes bulging and his mouth gaping, too stunned to care about what little dignity he had left. His mouth worked soundlessly for a full minute before he managed to croak out an unintelligible response; then he stumbled drunkenly out of the cabin, his face as blank with shock as if he had just seen a ghost, leaving the door wide open. Alaine suppressed a very unladylike grin as she glided behind him, pausing at the doorway to breathe in the fresh, sharp scent of the sea. 

“Do you know where I can find some food?” she said brightly to her bodyguard. “I’m absolutely starving, aren’t you?” 

5: Part One: Chapter Five

Chapter Five

At the dull rasp and crash of banging metal echoed in her ears, Kat’s eyes snapped open, and in an instant, face-to-face with the dust-coated floor, the memories came rushing back with the same force and intensity as the painful cramps in her arms and legs. Facing the wall as she was, she could see nothing, but the sound of heavy footsteps entering the cell could mean only one thing. 

They’re coming back. 

This, she knew, was it: she had been waiting for this for hours, curled up on the floor because once she had fallen over she could not get up again, catching a few fitful minutes of sleep at a time before the iron hand of fear clenching around her stomach inevitably jerked her awake. And now they were here, coming to take her away to a place or fate much, much worse than this dungeon, and even as she began to squirm and struggle and scream through her duct tape gag, she knew that it was no use. They were massive, and she was helpless…. 

A meaty hand grabbed her shoulder and hauled her upright; she came face-to-face with one of her captors, so close that she could smell garlic on his breath, and caught one glimpse of dark eyes beneath heavy black eyebrows, a hooked nose and thick lips, before his other hand grabbed the corner of the piece of tape covering her mouth and ripped it away from her skin. Almost before she felt the sting on her skin, she opened her mouth and screamed—but the man swung his arm back, and something struck her cheek so hard that her head snapped back, so hard that for a few desperate heaves of her lungs, she was left blinded and breathless. Then her cheek began to burn and throb, and her eyes stung with sudden tears—and once they began to fall, she couldn’t stop. She sobbed like a frightened child as he ripped the tape from her legs; as the last of it was torn from her skin, in a vain attempt to assert some control over herself, she swung her leg up and tried to kick his teeth in with the heel of her boot—but he caught her foot in midair with one hand and slapped her again with the other, all the time showing no change at all in his expression. When he released her foot, she cringed away, keeping very still as he removed the tape from her wrists, though still she could not stop herself from crying. Off came the chains, next, and then…and then any number of unspeakable things could happen, or he could carry her off into a world of infinitely more terrible possibilities. And she would fight—she promised herself that she would, even as the sobs kept forcing themselves out of her with every fresh throb in her cheek—but in the end, they would overpower her….

But as soon as the tape was gone, to Kat’s surprise, the man turned away from her and climbed to his feet, grunting in that strange language in the direction of his companion. The other man, who was holding a metal plate and metal bowl, grumbled a reply and dropped both onto the stone floor. Kat, remaining completely motionless as she watched, saw what looked like water splash from the bowl onto the floor, and slices of bread—plain white bread, such as could be found in any store in America—sliding over one another as the metal plate clattered against the stone. Dumbfounded, she stared at the men, who turned their backs and walked out of the cell as if she were not there. One of them drew the gate shut and clapped the thick padlock over the latch. 

“W-…wait!” she cried, wincing at the hoarse rasp of her own voice. She wriggled furiously against the stone, fighting to loop her chained wrists beneath her legs to bring them to her front. “Wait, please just—just tell me what you want! Please! I have money—m-my friend needs a doctor or—WAIT—!” 

But the men, walking back up the corridor, acted once again as if she had not spoken. Soon, even the sound of their footsteps was gone, leaving behind no trace of their visit—not even the duct tape, which they had taken with them—except for the food, the water, and the torch left burning in a bracket on the wall. 

A torch, thought Kat, dumbfounded, as she watched it flicker. Unbelievable…. And bread and water too, on cheap metal dishes, and manacles on her wrists that fastened to the wall. It was as if they were trying their hardest to give her the most authentic prison experience possible. All that was missing was a cannonball chained to her ankle. 

Sick and nauseous with hunger as she was, however, she could not have turned the stale bread away even if she’d tried. She crammed the first three slices into her mouth so quickly that she nearly choked on the crumbs, realizing only as she struggled to swallow that half of the food was meant for Leah. It was with a guilty conscience that she licked the last of the minuscule crumbs off of her fingers and turned to her best friend. 

Leah looked no better than she had when they had arrived in this dank cell; Kat had neither seen her move nor heard her make a sound, but she must have shifted somehow, for now she was lying on her back instead of on her face. Kat, praying fervently that this movement was of Leah’s own volition and not from being manhandled by the kidnappers a minute ago, leaned over her, studying the color of her skin and lips, the deep cut beneath her hair, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Kat’s mother was a paramedic, and before that had been a medic in the US Army, so she knew what to look for—and knew enough to see that Leah was in bad shape. The cut was no longer bleeding, but it was an unpleasant shade of cherry red around the edges, in stark contrast with the grayish pallor of her face and lips. Her pulse was weak, her blood pressure low, her breathing slow and unsteady. She bit down on her lip, stubbornly repressing the urge to fall into despair, and patted Leah’s face gently with her fingers, smoothing her hair back from her forehead. 

“Leah?” she called softly. “Leah?”

“Mmmnn….” After a full minute of gentle pokes and prods, Leah finally responded with a groan and a stir of her head. Katrina, thanking God with every other thought, leaned over her so that her face, and not the dungeon around them, would be within Leah’s range of vision. 

“Oh, thank God, thank God—Leah, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

“Mmm…not….” Leah’s eyes, stubbornly refusing to open, fluttered slightly, and Kat caught a flash of blue and white between her mascara-caked eyelashes. 

“Leah? Leah, honey, talk to me.” Good Lord, she sounded just like her mother—all she needed was to slip in a few passive-aggressive phrases in Spanish. But if anyone had ever needed Esperanza Núñez-Viator, it was Leah, right now, so if there were ever a time to channel her…. “Leah, I need you to talk, I need you to tell me something, Leah. Can you hear me? Leah?”

“Kat…?” Leah sounded like a drunken sleeptalker, her voice so slurred that Katrina could barely make out the words. “My arm hurts….”

“Your…arm?” Katrina had seen nothing on Leah’s arm, not even a scratch. “How’s your head, Leah? Does it hurt?”

“My arm hurts,” Leah insisted. She rolled onto her side, one shaky hand rising to her temple, her eyes roving around the dungeon. “Do something, Kat…it really hurts….”

“Um…Leah?” 

Kat leaned into Leah’s field of vision and had her suspicions instantly confirmed: Leah’s eyes were not focused, and moved in a random fashion around the room, clearly taking in nothing that they saw. Kat waved her hand, and Leah’s eyes flickered to the movement momentarily, but did not linger. 

“Leah?” Kat could hear the fear in her own voice, the dread, despite how much she fought to suppress it. “Are you okay?”

“No,” said Leah firmly. “Dizzy…I’m so thirsty, Kat….”

“W-well—here. Just lay down, don’t move, and I’ll get you some water…. No, Leah, stay still….” 

Leah, attempting to sit up, fought weakly against her for a moment, then gave in; she fell back, and her head thumped against the stone loudly enough to make Katrina wince. She grabbed the metal bowl of water and held it carefully for Leah, brushing her hand away when she tried to help, doing her best to dribble the water in very slowly without spilling it everywhere. A metal bowl…Katrina’s temper flared unexpectedly at the sight of it. They might as well have given her a dog bowl. 

Leah’s eyes drifted shut as she drank, and when she coughed, Katrina took the water away at once, scared that she might choke. She pulled Leah gingerly into as comfortable a position as was possible in their environment, leaning against the wall and resting Leah’s head and shoulders in her lap. Leah let herself be moved with barely a grumble, and made no attempt to shift against the stone or make herself more comfortable; she simply lay there, her eyes closed, and tried to drift off to sleep. Kat flicked a few drops of water at her, and her eyes opened again, roving blankly from one side of the stone floor to the other. 

This, Kat was sure, was a concussion—unless it was a side effect of whatever drug they had given her. But rohypnol didn’t work that way, or at least Kat didn’t think it would…but if they gave her something different…. Drugs or concussion? In a hospital they would need to know, but here, in their muggy, icy cell, the treatment was the same. All Kat could do for her was try and keep her warm and hydrated and awake, preferably talking, until….

But there was no “until.” Looking around, at the stone and the bars and the chains, Kat could see no indication of what time it was, of how long they had before anything changed. Maybe their captors would come back before the torch burned out, or maybe they would come back long after the two of them starved or froze…. And the worst of it was that it didn’t even matter, in the end, because no matter what would happen, there was nothing else Kat could do. Nothing, except sit and wait, and stroke Leah’s hair over and over in a gesture more comforting to its giver than its recipient, and wait for the rise of a sun that she might never see again. 

 

6: Part One: Chapter Six

Chapter Six 

The eyes that followed Alaine all the way across the deck and into the galley made her deeply uneasy, and not only because they belonged to strange men. She knew quite well that she was an oddity, something to be gaped at, questioned, even harassed—but the pirates she passed did no such thing. There was no curiosity in their eyes, no confusion, no greed or lust. Only a cold, calculating expression, mirrored in every face she saw, as if each of them were stripping her down to the skin with his eyes, measuring every inch of her, and calculating how much each separate piece of her was worth. She held her head high and swept past as if she did not care, but her insides had turned to water, and it was all she could do to suppress a shudder every time those heartless eyes raked over her. 

Alaine was ravenous, not having eaten since the previous day, but the stench of fish and garlic curdled her stomach as soon as she walked into the galley. It was a small, dim, dank little space not much larger than her cabin, empty but for a short, stout man scrubbing at a filthy pot with an even filthier rag. The man and her bodyguard (whose name she could not recall; Lenley or Renley or something common like that) exchanged a few words in a foreign tongue—Eyardüne, she thought, but they spoke either in slang or in a dialect that she did not recognize—and the man slopped something chunky and dun-colored into a bowl and shoved it across the table at her. A wooden spoon followed, clattering across the rough wooden surface; then, at a word from her bodyguard, the stout man grumbled and tossed something toward her. She caught it clumsily at her breast, and was relieved to see it was just an ordinary ship’s biscuit, slightly warm, of the same variety they had had on the caravel. It occurred to her, glancing suspiciously into the bowl, that the cook must have already used some of the ingredients acquired from the caravel, though he did not seem to know how to use them properly; the stew was an odd medley of what looked like fish, onions, potatoes, peppers, and garlic cloves, a pungent combination at best. 

“May I have two?” she inquired in Eyardüne, holding up two fingers for clarity. 

The stout man slammed the pot back down and rounded on her, shaking his fist and uttering a sharp, rapid maelstrom of words that she was quite glad she did not recognize—but at a sharp word from her bodyguard, the man’s cursing faded into a low grumble and, grudgingly, he turned back to the stove. Another bowl slid her way, more roughly this time, and he practically hurled the spoon at her head. She tried to catch it, dropped it, picked it up, gathered the two bowls in her arm, briefly debated asking for another biscuit, decided against it, and fled the galley before the man lost his temper completely. 

Once on the deck, she climbed up the steps to the helm, leaning casually against the railing as she surveyed the ship. Her bodyguard followed one step behind her like an overgrown shadow, and when she paused, he lingered nearby, far too close for comfort, and remained there like a statue with no conception of personal space. She still could not remember his name, but she decided to call him Bat, since he was dark and irritating and hovered constantly overhead. 

From her vantage point, she could see the entire deck, including the ‘fore deck, but there appeared to be nothing of interest, just pirates and ropes and splinter-filled wood. Sighing, she descended the stairs again, casually, as if it had been her plan all along, and picked her way down the narrow spiral staircase that led down into the bowels of the ship. 

The last step opened onto a large, dim, undivided space with hammocks strung from the ceiling and bunks like her own lining the walls, illuminated only by a few grimy portholes that occasionally sank beneath the gray-green surface of the water. And in the corner, exactly where she had hoped to find him, was the boy, scrubbing determinedly at the floor with a chunk of pumice, a bucket of seawater at his side. His wrists were clad in heavy manacles, connected by a thick chain that clinked dully with every move he made. He gave no sign that he had seen her, but she had the feeling that he had not been working so diligently a few moments ago. 

“Psst,” she whispered sharply, casting an uneasy glance back up the stairs; Bat would be following soon, and she did not want him to hear her. “Hey! Psst!” 

The boy did not look up, but she saw him eyeing her beneath his arm as he leaned forward to scrub a distant patch of floor. She made a frantic gesture to summon him, then pushed her palms slowly toward the floor, indicating that he should stay quiet. He froze for a moment, his expression inscrutable in the semidarkness, then continued scrubbing with a vengeance. 

That, Alaine thought, was the best response she was likely to get. She darted back up the stairs just as Bat’s heavy footsteps thumped down the steps above and sat at the edge of a step right before he came into view. He paused and stared at her for a minute, his neck bent so his head would not hit the low ceiling, while she ignored him, primly eating her stew; then, to her immense relief, he disappeared again, no doubt to stand somewhere more suited to his size and guard her from there. She began to hum loudly as she ate, a simple little tune that her youngest sister liked to sing, both to prove to Bat that she had not moved and to signal to the boy that she was still there, and still waiting. 

Her bowl was nearly empty when he finally appeared, so suddenly that she jumped; he moved like a shadow, even with the sloshing bucket in his arms. He did not speak to her, did not even look at her, but moved his way slowly up the steps, cleaning as he went. She winced at the sight of his back beneath his ripped shirt, which had fallen, leaving one shoulder bare; the skin was sliced from neck to waist with thin red lines crisscrossing in every direction, each one crusted in dried blood. He was moving quite slowly, and being needlessly thorough, as if he were frightened to approach her, so she leaned forward and held out the extra bowl of stew without waiting for him to ask. 

“Here,” she said quietly. “I got this for you.” 

The boy looked up just long enough to spare her a fleeting glance, and she drew back in shock, nearly dropping the bowl, as she saw the hatred and fury in his eyes. “What do you want?” he snarled, though he kept his voice no louder than hers.

“I—I just—wanted to say I’m sorry,” she told him, and she meant it. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for all of that to happen—”

“Well, it’ll happen again if I’m seen talking to you,” he snapped. “Just leave me alone. Haven’t you done enough?”

“I want to help you,” she insisted. “Please.” She reached forward and took his wrist, lifting the stone in his hand gently from the floor. “Please just listen to me. There isn’t much time before Bat—I mean, before my bodyguard comes looking for me.”

He jerked his hand away from hers with unnecessary forcefulness and returned to his work—but not before she saw the palm of his hand, which was pink and raw from the stone, and the angry red blisters beneath the manacles on his wrists. He was angry with her, there was no doubt, but she thought he looked tired as well, so exhausted that he could have easily curled up right there on the steps and fallen asleep. She wondered where he had been hiding on her ship—in that cramped water barrel, or somewhere else?—and how long it had been since he’d slept or eaten properly. 

“How could you help?” he demanded, making no effort to hide the bitterness from his voice. “You’re as much a prisoner as I am! You can’t even help yourself. Just go up there and tell that snake-tongued biter who you really are—he’ll get you there by dinnertime, probably carry you down the gangplank so you don’t get your feet wet.”

“I’d never—!” began Alaine indignantly, but then his words sank in. She set their bowls carefully aside and slid down the stairs between them until she sat perched at the very edge of the last one, close enough for him to hear her every whisper. “You know who I am?” she asked him, her voice shaking with a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the cool sea air. 

The boy threw his stone forcefully into the bucket, sending seawater splashing over the side and soaking into his pants; he, however, did not seem to notice. He turned to Alaine and looked her in the eyes for the first time, and she quailed before the fire that burned in his dark eyes. “Of course I know who you are,” he hissed. “You never bothered hiding it in Kiindine, did you? I don’t know which one you are, you all look the same, but I do remember your little procession coming down the street, with you being carried around so you didn’t get mud on your dress, because it was probably made out of gold and diamonds and dragonhide, and I remember your guard kicking my little sister when she didn’t get out of the way fast enough. The bruise didn’t go away for a week. She was five years old. I know who you are.” He turned away with clear disgust, plunging his hand back into the bucket to retrieve his stone, unable to hide his grimace of pain as the salt water stung the cuts on his hand. “But I don’t care. You can get yourself out of this mess like the rest of us have to do.” 

Alaine stared at him in blank incredulity, but the boy, scrubbing with undisguised frustration at the same small patch of deck, completely and utterly ignored her. She tried to speak, but couldn’t; it took several tries, and an undignified clearing of her throat, before she could say a word. 

“You’re right,” she said. “I am Princess Alaine Turise Andrin vid’Angard, of Venapollina Palace. And you are?”

The boy scoffed, shaking his head. “Aidan,” he snapped. He emphasized the word perhaps a bit too much, as if to reinforce the fact that he had only one name; as far as Alaine could tell, all peasants just had the one. “Arch-Duke of that alley behind the fish markets.”

“Aidan,” she repeated; she hoped that was his real name, and not some peasant joke she did not understand like the rest of it. “I think that you and I can help each other.”

“Oh?” He raised an eyebrow, though he did not look up from his work. “And what makes you think that?”

“Because I know what you have,” she said quietly. “And I know what it can do. And if you can use it to help me escape, I will reward you beyond your wildest dreams.”

She thought she saw his hand slip a little as she spoke, but he continued scrubbing as though nothing had happened, his face determinedly blank. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“I know you have it,” she insisted. She leaned forward, and just that small movement, closing the distance between them by the length of a finger, was enough to make that swooping, tingling feeling deep in her gut tug at her again, so powerfully that she felt as giddy and lightheaded as if she had been physically pulled across the floor. “I can feel it. I could feel it as soon as the ship set sail. My family has one too, don’t you know that? We’ve protected it since before the history books were written. I know what they can do. It can help us escape, Aidan, we can—”

Aiden stiffened and turned to face her; his rough, calloused hand closed tightly around her wrist. “You know about them?” he croaked, his voice suddenly hoarse. “You have to take it, Princess, please. Just take it, I don’t care what you do with it, I don’t want it, but I promised I would only give it to the right person, but your family knows all about it, please take it—”

“What? No, I—I can’t use it,” stammered Alaine, though her heart soared at the thought of holding such a precious thing in her hand. “I’m no good at that sort of thing, it’ll have to be you, Aidan—”

“I can’t use it either! Princess. Alaine. Please.” He looked so panicked, and so desperate, that she wished with all her heart that she did not have to refuse him. But she had little choice. 

“I’ll take it from you,” she promised him, taking his hand in hers. “I will. I’ll bring it straight to my father, and we’ll keep it safe. But I can’t use it. Believe me, I’ve tried. You’ll have to be the one who gets us out of here.” 

“I told you, I can’t,” he insisted. “I can’t do it, I’ve just been carrying it around, it’s not mine! My mother gave it to me before she died, she made me promise not to get rid of it—”

“But you can use it,” Alaine said, speaking over him in her excitement. She had never in her life believed she’d see such a precious artifact in person, and now, when she was most in need of help, it had fallen straight into her lap; it was nothing short of a miracle. “Please. Just once. And then my father can have it, and we’ll keep it safe, and use it to help our country, I promise.”

“But I can’t! I already told you, I don’t know how!” 

“Yes, you can! I know you can, I can feel it! I can show you how, I’ll teach you—where is it? Is it safe?” She lowered her voice to a whisper at this last. 

“It’s safe,” he said, with a dry, humorless laugh. He rolled up his sleeve and shoved the crook of his elbow toward her face. “As safe as I can make it.” 

For a moment, Alaine did not know what he meant—but then she saw a faint lump growing beneath his skin on the underside of his upper arm, straining at a faint pink scar stretching right down its middle. It looked frighteningly like the large, uneven bulges that sometimes grew on people who were dying of horrible diseases, but when she reached out to touch it carefully with her fingertip, it was too hard, too smooth, too perfect to be anything but what it was. A strange power seemed to resonate from the mound into her finger, sending pulses of electric vibration through her entire body. 

“Gods above,” she whispered. “Which one…?”

“I’m not sure.” He withdrew his arm, pressing his hand protectively over the lump. “It’s, uh…it was clear. Like glass.”

“Wind,” she breathed. “Of course. Do you know what this means, Aidan? Do you know what we can do with this?”

“No,” he snapped with unneeded aggression. “And I don’t care. I just want you to get it out of my sight.” 

“Well, when you get us out of here, I will,” she promised. “And I’ll have my father give you enough gold to buy your own kingdom.”

“I can’t. I told you, I don’t know how!” 

“You can do it,” she insisted. “I can show you how. Aidan, please, I have to get out of here, I have a very important job to do. If you can help me, I’ll give you whatever you want. Please.” 

Aidan hesitated, his fingers probing at the lump beneath his skin. “I have to go,” he muttered. “I don’t want them to see me with you.” 

“Aidan,” she begged him, “Aidan, please—”

“No.” He reached over and squeezed her arm, silencing her with a quelling look. “Later,” he said quietly. “I’ll find you.” He released her, but his gaze lingered, cold and hard again. “But you’d better have a plan.” 

Then he turned away, pointedly beginning to scrub the deck again. And Alaine, for the first time in her life, found herself quite clearly dismissed. She rose to her feet and brushed the dust from her skirts, gathering what was left of her dinner. But before she left, she touched his shoulder gently with her fingertips, a silent gesture of solidarity. He gave no sign that he had noticed, but as she left, she thought his look of weariness and despair had softened, just a little. 

7: Part One: Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven 

This isn’t happening.

This isn’t real. 

This isn’t happening.

This can’t be real….

Yet the dungeon around Kat still felt and looked and smelled just as solid and tangible when she awoke as it had before; the floor was just as cold and hard as it had been when she had fallen asleep on it hours earlier. This was real: this stone box, the iron bars and chains, the manacles that bound her, all felt as real as any furniture on which she had ever sat or climbed or stubbed her toe, as real as any fence or screen door she had ever opened, as real as any bracelets or anklets that had ever dangled from her wrists. In fact, if she were honest with herself, it felt even more real, and more still the longer she remained stuck in this freezing hell. The outside world seemed to be slowly fading from her memory, the faces of her father and mother and brother, the feel of grass and fresh air, the taste of a hamburger or pizza or her mom’s homemade Mexican food, until everything she had ever experienced seemed to be glimpses of a fleeting dream snatched between stretches of imprisonment that seemed to stretch on and on into eternity. 

Her sense of time was, in the absence of sunlight or a regular pattern of sleep, completely confused; she could not have said if a day or a week had passed since they had been brought here. On occasion, one of her captors brought another tray with stale bread and a water bowl, as if determined to make her prison experience as authentic as possible, but this happened with no consistency whatsoever. Nor could she judge time by her hunger, for she was always hungry now. At first she had shunned the stale bread, and after finding spots of mold inside one of the dry, chalky loaves she had vowed not to touch it again, but hunger always got the best of her eventually, and even the slight nausea from the mold was better than the gnawing pangs of hunger. 

She always interrogated the kidnappers when they came by, though it never did any good; no matter how many questions she asked, no matter how much she pleaded for release or answers or a doctor for Leah or even a blanket, they ignored her utterly, confirming her suspicions that they neither spoke nor understood English. Her other suspicions regarding their intentions toward her had not yet been realized; she hoped that they never would. Imprisonment in this dungeon for life, even if that life were cut drastically short by cold and starvation, was a thousand times better than any other scenario that was likely to come true. 

Her back and limbs ached no matter what she did or how she slept, especially in the hours following the removal of the duct tape from her wrists and ankles. Eventually, however, she had recovered enough to stand up and explore. After making Leah as comfortable as possible in the far corner of the cell, and trying everything she dared to keep her awake, Kat had reluctantly left her side to investigate their shared cell. Unfortunately, she had found nothing at all of use. Almost everything was ancient, as if it had been sitting abandoned for centuries, but the chains on the wall did not come out no matter how hard she pulled, and the ones that bound her and Leah had been reinforced. She saw rust everywhere she looked, but it was all superficial, and the lock—the weakest point—was a shiny new padlock clearly purchased just for this purpose. It wasn’t even a brand of padlock that she recognized, which made all the time she had ever spent watching Youtube videos about how to pop open padlocks feel utterly pointless. 

Time passed—she could not be sure how much—in which she memorized every inch of that cell, every pit in the stone and damp patch in the mortar. When she felt restless, she memorized them again, pacing back and forth to as great a distance as her chains would allow. But, for the most part, she sat protectively in front of Leah, hugging her knees and glaring at the wall outside the bars, watching the torch burn down and thinking, thinking, thinking about how they would escape, and what would happen if they did not. This whole situation was a scene taken straight out of an old book, Edmund’s imprisonment in the Chateau d’If in The Count of Monte Cristo, or Jean Valjaen’s internment in the galleys at Toulon in Les Miserables, but Jean Valjean, at least, had been given a wooden bed, and Edmund had lived in relative luxury in comparison with his thin mattress and barred window. Jean Valjean had attempted many escapes (and she cursed Victor Hugo, with more venom than she ever would have thought possible for a long-dead author of a book she’d read in high school, for refusing to include the details of his attempts), but only Edmund had succeeded…though if she tried his method, she would have to wait for Leah to die, and she was not willing to let that happen. Perhaps she could escape like Princess Leia, using her chains to strangle her captor…. She had only fiction as a reference for her situation, only movies and books and other media for fantasy, but it was all she had, so she clung to it with such desperation that she almost believed escape to be possible. 

Sometimes, the urge to tears struck her again, but she never let it overwhelm her as it had that first day. No! Get it together! scolded a voice in her head each time, the one that always sounded uncommonly like her mother. Do NOT panic—it’s your job to get her out of here, and you are going to do it! 

Yes, Kat agreed silently, yes, she would—but looking around, taking in the blank stone walls and the bars as thick as her big toe, she always felt overwhelmed, and exhausted. No matter what she did, time was passing, and there was no way to know when it would run out…or what would happen when it did. All she could do, all she could think to do, was wait. 

8: Part One: Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight 

There was no time to speak to Alaine until the following evening; Aidan could barely even carve out a reasonable chunk of time for himself. He only dared sleep when all his work was done and all the pirates abed or occupied elsewhere; even then, sneaking down into the cargo hold and huddling beneath a roll of canvas, he slept poorly, and not just because of the uncomfortable, hostile place or the chains on his wrists or the constant heaving and rocking of the boat. He had grown used to cramped spaces and ceaseless movement on Alaine’s ship; indeed, this was paradise compared to hiding in that barrel for hours on end every time he heard a noise. But that night he tossed and turned, the lump embedded in his arm seeming to throb every time his mind drifted back to his and Alaine’s conversation. 

There were no portholes in the cargo hold, so he judged that it was time to wake not when the sun rose but when the pirates above began to stir. He darted into a corner of their quarters and began to clean, ignoring the pirates as thoroughly as they ignored him. Slowly he worked his way across the room until it was as clean as he knew how to make it; then he worked his way upstairs and found himself at last on deck. This was where he lingered all day if he could help it. It was worth avoiding nasty looks and stray kicks from pirates to see the sky and feel the wind on his face. He had always been claustrophobic, having grown up mostly outdoors, and these past few days had left him with the torturous feeling that a piece of himself had been ripped away from him when he had cut himself off from the open air. 

Most of his time in captivity was spent doing what pirates called swabbing the deck: the rough planks needed to be soaked in water as often as possible to cause the wood to swell so it remained watertight. It was easier than scrubbing with the chunk of stone, but he was sore and aching and tired, and his hands were raw and cracked and could barely bear the weight of the chains, so he moved as slowly as possible while still appearing busy, avoiding the eyes of any pirate that passed by. Many of them spat curses at him anyway, or kicked him when he got in their way, or smacked him with whatever they were holding when they tripped over him, but for the most part, they left him alone. 

Alaine passed by several times, but he refused to meet her eyes; there were always too many people about, and if he were honest, he was not overly eager to speak with her. Much as he wanted to get off the ship, he knew deep down that it was not possible, and that all his efforts would serve to do was convince Alaine to use the thing herself or find another plan. But he watched her out of the corner of his eye when she wasn’t looking, studying her, trying to figure her out. Throwing herself between him and the captain, barking orders about how he should be treated, sneaking around to give him food—she was either very kind or very stupid, though he doubted that either was the case considering who she was. People did not gain or keep the throne by being generous, nor by being foolish. There must have been some deeper game at work, some web she was spinning around him, manipulating him into who knew what sort of mess. But he could see no way out of this that would not save or damn them both, one way or another; all she wanted to do was get away, and all he wanted was to get rid of the blasted sorcery buried under his skin like a tick. And fortunately, in her mind at least, those goals seemed to coincide quite well. 

Just after sunset, Alaine appeared on the deck again, with her enormous bodyguard tailing her as usual, the man that she had dubbed Bat. Aidan, pausing to catch his breath, watched her as she stood at the railing and tilted her head back to look at the stars. Under normal circumstances, he reflected, he might have found her beautiful; the way that her skirts and hip-length blonde hair seemed to float around her as the wind ebbed and flowed was very striking, especially in the light of the almost-full moon and the swaying lanterns hanging from the rigging. Being a royal, she had the delicate facial features, translucent ivory skin, and well-fed, curvaceous figure shared by many aristocrats; if she were any other woman, he would have hunted after her with a passion, stopping at nothing to convince her to let him see and feel what hid beneath that flowing white dress. But as it stood now, all he could muster at her appearance—indeed, at her mere presence, or even her existence—was annoyance. No one would ever have noticed him aboard the caravel if Alaine hadn’t gotten herself captured, and every misfortune he had suffered from then on was directly and entirely her fault. 

“OW!” 

Something hard knocked roughly into the back of his shoulder, pitching him forward and sending the bucket of seawater rolling across the deck and into the very pirate who had crashed into him, who tripped and staggered, drowning Aidan’s own grunt of pain in a stream of curses. The pirate whirled around, red-faced and furious, and Aidan scrambled backward, but not quickly enough—the man’s rough, callused fist swung out and caught him on the cheek, sending him sprawling onto the pitching deck. Tasting blood, he flung up an arm to protect himself, clutching blindly at the railing as the snarling voice overwhelmed the ringing in his ears. 

“…sneaking viper, watch where you’re at or I swear I’ll skin yer alive an’ throw yer to the sharks, yeh flamin’ biter, yer nothin’ more’n lizard spawn an’ I outta wear yer hide out wit’ a—”

“Excuse me, sir!”  

Aidan barely suppressed a groan at the sound of the high, lilting voice floating on the wind and a spray of blue and gold embroidery swirled before his eyes as they struggled to focus on the embroidered hem of an ivory skirt as it brushed the surface of the deck. Alaine. Of course. 

“Were I you,” Alaine said imperiously to the pirate, her voice ringing loudly across the deck, “I would watch your language in the presence of a lady. And I would keep your hands to yourself as well, especially in regards to Aidan here. Is that understood, or do I have to report every single one of you to Captain Valeth?”

The man gave a coarse laugh, echoed by half a dozen voices around them as the pirates who had stopped to listen turned their way—though some of them laughed more quietly than others, Aidan noticed, and none of them came any closer to Alaine. There was something about the way she stood, tall and proud and with unmistakable authority, that made even Aidan afraid to cross her; for the first time since they had met, he truly appreciated that she was a princess, accustomed to giving orders and receiving unquestioning obedience. He grabbed the railing and hauled himself to his feet, gritting his teeth against the throbbing in his cheek and the burning of the cuts on his back that still had not healed. It was worth any amount of pain just to stand a couple of inches higher than Alaine, though it did not lessen the effect of her commanding stance in the slightest. 

“The captain don’t give a lizard’s tail about ‘im,” the pirate informed her with a yellow-toothed sneer. “Said we could throw ‘im right overboard if he weren’t worth the trouble no more.”

“Oh, really?” inquired Alaine, raising a delicate eyebrow. “Perhaps I misunderstood our conversation this afternoon, then. Why don’t you go and ask him about it? Just so everyone is clear about his expectations.” 

The pirate glanced uneasily at his fellows, and Aidan had to admit, grudgingly, that she was quite good at what she did. Whether the captain had given any orders or not, the men were wary of him, and she knew it, and did not hesitate to use it to her advantage. 

A different man spoke up, a heavy, thuggish troll toward the back of the pirate gang. “An’ just who d’you think you are, orderin’ the cap’n around?” he demanded. “You got no right t’tell him a blasted thing, you sneaking little—”

“What I discuss with the captain,” Alaine spoke over him, and Aidan was thankful that she did; he knew she would not like what the man would have called her otherwise, “is no one’s business but his and my own. However, it might interest you to know that I did not demand a thing from him. How could I? No, gentlemen; I offered him something much more to his taste. Gold. A fat sack of gold upon my arrival home, to be split amongst all of you, if my companion and I return unharmed. Now, you’ve already harmed my companion, and I find your treatment of him entirely unforgivable. I wonder—should I simply tell the captain to keep your gold for himself?”

The pirates, shocked, thought this over. It looked like a lot of work. Aidan could tell they were in shock, though sorely tempted by the offer; Alaine had certainly found the quickest way into their affections. Then, at last, the ringleader muttered, “All right, lads, c’mon.” And, one by one, some grudging, others clearly relieved, the pirates drifted away. 

Only when the last pirate was out of earshot did Alaine’s regal stance wilt as she sighed in clear relief. She turned to face Aidan, her whole body quivering with the inexplicable concern that every woman alive seemed to feel whenever another living thing might need her assistance. “Are you all right?” she said, whipping a snowy handkerchief from her sleeve. “Here, let me help you—”

“Stop it!” Aidan snapped. He waved her away, ducking to avoid the handkerchief as she tried to dab at his split lip. “What’d you do that for, huh? I could’ve handled it on my own!” 

Alaine’s worried expression flattened instantly into one of icy contempt. “Oh yes,” she snapped, “you were handling it very well, anyone could see that. Couldn’t you at least be bothered to thank me? I didn’t have to help you.”

“No, you really didn’t,” Aidan retorted with all the bravado he could muster, ignoring the pounding ache inside his skull. “Maybe if you’d ever left your castle for five minutes, you’d know not to jump in the middle of a fight that has nothing to do with you.”

“Well,” said Alaine stiffly, brushing a bit of nonexistent dust from her skirts. “In the future, I’ll try not to bother. But I did want to speak with you—preferably alone.”

“I don’t know how you’ll manage that one,” muttered Aidan, casting a dark look at her hulking giant of a guard, who was leaning casually against the mainmast, appearing utterly at ease, though his sharp eyes never once left Alaine. “What do you want?”

“I wanted…hmm.” Alaine glanced swiftly around until her eyes fell upon the aft deck. “Come here,” she said, and before Aidan could protest, he found himself being dragged by the hand across the splinter-filled deck, skipping so quickly in her little silk slippers that he had trouble keeping up. She led him up the steps to the helm and ducked behind the huge wooden wheel lashed in place with thick ropes, gesturing for him to do the same. 

“I did think of a plan,” she said softly as he joined her, leaning against the stationary wheel with relief; even a few moments of sitting still was paradise after these past few days. “If you’re still willing to assist me?”

Aidan gave a weary nod, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hand. “Just get me out of here,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll do anything.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful—thank you, Aidan, I—I will repay you for this.” Her soft hands closed around his, and he jerked upright, startled by the odd sensation. Her eyes were large and startlingly blue; it unnerved them to see them staring into his own, so close he could count each individual eyelash. “I swear,” Alaine promised him. “I swear to you, I will repay you.”

Aidan had to look away; her gaze was too unsettling. “Just…just get us off this ship first,” he muttered, easing his hand gently out of her grip. “How do we do it?” 

“Well, first….” Alaine hesitated, then reached gingerly into the bosom of her dress, pointedly averting her eyes. Aidan stared at her blankly as a wooden handle emerged, then a slim, sharp blade….

“Oh, no.” He felt the blood drain from his face as his hand flew unconsciously to the lump beneath the skin of his arm. “No, no, no—”

“Aidan, I can’t teach you how to use it unless we can touch it,” she insisted. “Please—I’ll be as quick as possible, I assure you, but it must be done—”

“Why do I have to use it?” he demanded, hearing his voice rise uncontrollably but powerless to stop it. “Why can’t you, if it’s out in the open? Why me?”

“Because I—Aidan, you have the gift! I can’t do it, I never could, but I can tell that you can do it—”

“Do what?” Aidan nearly shouted at her. “What the hell does this thing even do, how’s it supposed to work? Just tell me, you don’t have to show me!” 

“Aidan, I wish it were that simple, but it—it’s arcana.” Her voice dropped to a whisper for her confession, so low that he almost did not catch the strange word. Indeed, he was not sure if he had. 

“Arcana?” Aidan had to laugh at that; his voice sounded hysterical even to his own ears, but he could not help himself. “You’re joking—I can’t—” 

“You can, I assure you, and it’s the only way to control the Stone. But it’s very difficult, Aidan—it’s a power within you that’s always been there, that you never knew you had, and to control it…it would be easier to control your own heart beating. I have to show you, the way my teacher showed me—and we have to start right away. It can take weeks to learn.”

“We don’t have weeks!” 

“I know, but it’s the best we can do…Aidan, please.” 

She looked so nervous, so frightened, that Aidan found his grip relaxing on his arm despite himself. After all, did he really have any reason to delay? Could he dream up a better plan than this if called upon? He could think of nothing, and they were running out of time—what could it hurt to let her have it? Was that not the plan all along? He found himself extending his arm toward her, almost against his own will, watching numbly as she cupped one hand gently around his elbow and raised the knife in the other….

But just as the knife was about to touch his skin, he pulled away. “No,” he said. 

“What? Aidan—”

“I’m not doing it.” He hugged his arm protectively to his side, his eyes following the knife that she still clutched in one hand. “Once you have it, you don’t need me anymore. You’ll just escape on your own and leave me here.”

“I—Aidan, I would never—”

“You can say that all you want,” he snapped, “but you and I both know that these men aren’t going to kill you. One way or another, you’ll make it to the next port. I might not. So you can show me how to use it without taking it out, or you can think of a new plan.”

“But Aidan, I don’t know how to use it like that—I don’t even know if it’s possible—and we need it, we need to use it to force the ship back to the shore, I don’t know how we’ll manage it otherwise—”

“I don’t care. You can’t have it. Now how do I use it?”

“It’s—if you don’t know how to use arcana, it will be—” She gave a little huff as she set her knife aside and settled primly on the deck, arranging her skirts neatly around herself. “Arcana is not so much a talent as a state of mind. Many schools of thought posit that any individual could access it and use it, even a child, if that state of mind could be reached. But it is difficult, very difficult, and to find the power within yourself can take years of meditation, although in some cases—”

“Oy. Princess.”

Aidan stumbled back and Alaine whirled around with a gasp as the massive Bat appeared behind her in ghostlike silence, watching them with his unsettlingly expressionless eyes. They climbed clumsily to their feet at once, Aidan taking a large step backward to put a little more distance between himself and Alaine; the last thing he needed was to pick a fight with this giant of a man. Bat did not seem to notice their guilty faces or nervous postures, or if he did, he did not seem to care. 

“We go now,” he told Alaine. “The captain, he want to see you. And you.” He pointed a thick finger at Aidan, who took another involuntary step back. “Back to work.”

“Oh…all right,” said Alaine, looking flustered. Bat reached for her arm, but she shook him off and headed down the steps on her own. As she left, she cast one last look over her shoulder at Aidan, a look of confusion and worry that clearly stated that she did not know what they were going to do, either. Then she was gone, and Aidan, sighing, sank back down to the deck for a few more minutes of blissful solitude before the next pirate found him….

…only to jump up again and rush to the railing, leaning over as far as he dared to catch a glimpse of Alaine and her bodyguard. They were gone, having already disappeared into Alaine’s cabin, but Aidan remained where he was, his eyes fixed on the cabin door, his heart pounding, his body numb and frozen. Princess, he had called her. So casually, so calmly, that it could have been, must have been a joke, an insult, a jibe at her authoritative manner. But a sick leaden feeling in his belly told him that this was no coincidence. 

Alaine was locked in her cabin now, trapped in there with the captain and Bat; there was nothing he could do to reach her now. But he was a vagrant by nature, a thief and a roamer, well accustomed to scurrying along the baseboards with the rats and the shadows. Perhaps there was something else that he could do. Slowly, quietly, avoiding the gaze of any pirate that glanced his way, he crept across the deck and descended the spiraling steps, slipping below the deck and out of sight. 

9: Part One: Chapter Nine

“All right, you sons of bitches,” Kat growled at the empty corridor. “Come and get it.”

In response, the corridor remained silent and empty, as it had been for what felt like days. Yet Kat stood her ground, her back to the wall, the length of chain that bound her wrist to the stone clenched taught between her hands. 

“You hear me?” She raised her voice to a hoarse yell, as loud as it could go, and rattled the chains for good measure. “I’M READY! COME AND GET ME, YOU BASTARDS!”

The echoes of her words rebounded off the stone walls of her cell, bouncing up and down the corridor for a surprisingly long stretch of time before they faded away. Yet again, there came no response. No voices, no footsteps—nothing. Just the same silence and darkness that had shrouded the place ever since the last torch, left by their captors during the last delivery of bread and water, had died out. 

Kat could not rest, could not even bear to let go of the chain. It had been like this for, by the best guess of her circadian clock, two or three days: sometime in between the panic and the hunger and caring for an unresponsive Leah, something had snapped inside her then, something that was holding back all the anger and frustration and violent urges that she’d ever felt, and all of it flooded through her like a tidal wave until she shook with the force of her fury. She could not sit still when possessed by such passion. She had to pace, had to yell, had to contemplate in excruciating detail every way that she’d like to kill the men who had taken them before they had a chance to kill her. 

Strangling them with the chain, she had decided, was the best way; they would not suffer as much as she wanted, or die as quickly as she’d like, but they were very large, and she, being bound to the wall, had very few options. So it was settled: As soon as she came, she would dive at the one holding the torch (and hope that the darkness disoriented the other man before he could intervene), wrap her chain around his neck, and pull until he stopped breathing—and if he pulled her off, or the other one fought her too, then she would cling on as long as she could, and bite and kick and punch, and force them to kill her before she killed them. And then, one way or another, all of this would be done. 

But Kat was tired, and in the darkness, it was easier for her fears and doubts to creep in, easier for the heavy pall of depression and lethargy to find her and weigh her down. It was overcoming her now, and it sucked from her the will to fight before she even had a chance to realize that she should. She leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor, letting the chain fall from her hands and rattle and clink its way back to the floor. She looked to Leah, who had fallen asleep hours ago—it had been impossible to keep her awake—and sighed, her head falling back to rest against the stone. 

She might have cried when these moods overtook her, if she’d thought of it, if she’d had any tears left to shed. But it never occurred to her to cry, and even if it had, she would not have had the strength. She could only find the energy to lean against the wall, her legs splayed out in front of her, and stare blankly at the stones through the bars opposite her, and think. Her mind wandered aimlessly through memories of her mother and father and brother, of her childhood, of Leah, of her cousins and grandparents, of college and high school and grade school, of all the things she’d seen and the classes she’d taken and the books she’d read and the stories she’d heard…. Her life, in short, or at least everything that she could remember. Such a unique collection of thoughts and feelings and experiences, influenced in such a huge way by her unique combination of chromosomes, and yet soon, it would disappear forever, and be lost…. 

At first, she thought endlessly about what her family would do when she didn’t come home, or when they would eventually gave up searching for her, or what she would say to them if she could leave them a letter, or what she would give for just a few moments to say goodbye to them. But that was too painful—and, eventually, too repetitive. Her mind drifted toward them less and less as time went on, less and less toward her childhood and her memories and even herself—how she would never achieve anything she wanted to do, how she would never see the rest of the world, or make any use of all her wasted hours of school, or marry, or have children, or experience more than the tiniest fraction of life.  

Soon she began to think of other things, larger things, things that were bigger than her and bigger than the world and bigger than life itself, for soon she would be beyond all of those things, and no one knew what would happen after that. Maybe the immortal soul did exist, and live on, either inside the body or out of it; maybe there really were a million, million worlds aside from her own, where other Katrinas lived, and she would continue on to one of them; maybe she would go to heaven, or be a ghost, or be reincarnated into some sort of animal; maybe there was nothing, and at the moment of death she would hear and feel and see only emptiness. She reflected upon everything she had ever learned about physics, science, psychology and biology, myths about the undead, the religions of various cultures, trying to discover the facts behind life after death, if there was any biological basis to it. Somehow, it was comforting to consider all the possibilities, and it amused her just a little to think that if she ever figured it out, even for the fraction of a second between life and death, then she, Katrina, would know more than anyone else in the world, and no one else would ever be privy to that knowledge. 

It was during one of these periods of despondency, in which she was deep in thought about the Multiverse Theory and whether or not a soul could be reincarnated into a new universe, that the noises she had so long awaited finally came. At first, sitting bolt upright and straining her ears, she could not have said what it was that she heard—but all too soon, she recognized with sinking dread the hard thud of steel-toed boots on stone. 

In a flash she was on her feet again, the chain clenched in her hands, and time seemed to slow as the footsteps neared. Her thoughts raced, and new doubts emerged from thin air to harry her: what if there was a better plan? What if she had missed some crucial detail that would give her a weapon, help her set a trap, help them escape? What if it would be better to wait, to pretend to be meek and compliant, in order to keep the element of surprise? If she did nothing now, if she waited, she might have more time to…. No—she shook herself mentally, cursed at herself in English and Spanish and French—no, she would not falter now, not if she had to steel every nerve in her body by hand. This was the plan, and cowardice would only ruin it for her and for Leah; there was no room for doubt, no room for fear or….

Then the two men came into sight, and Kat felt the chain slip from her nerveless fingers. The men wore black cloaks over black leather, a far cry from their usual ambiguous and culturally-neutral clothing; this was clearly medieval armor, complete with swords hanging at their hips. And in their hands, instead of food and water, they carried two thin lengths of rope. This was it. The reason they had been brought here, the things that were to be done to them, were going to happen now. 

A strange demon possessed Kat then, a monster of panic and fear and surprising strength, and she felt herself moving forward as if it, not she, controlled her muscles. With a wordless shriek she dove at the nearest of the men, pounding at his chest with her fists—and was repelled, easily, as if the man were swatting away a fly. She stumbled back, but recovered almost at once, taking her chain between her hands and leaping at the man again. He yelled and struggled, but she held on, and smacked the chain against every inch of him that she could reach, and clung with all her might to whatever part of his clothing she had in her grip—

Then the world seemed to spin around her as she flew through space, hurtling toward the floor. She thought she heard herself scream as the ground rose up to meet her—but then they met, she and the stones, and all awareness and memory fled from her shattered mind. In the sudden blackness that obscured her eyes, she became aware of a horrible, icy throbbing in her right shoulder, a pain worse than any she had ever felt. Her hand flew up to grab the injured place and found an odd lump jutting out of her skin, a nub of bone where no bone should have been, and she realized, numbly, that in flipping her head-over-heels while a chain still connected her to the wall, the man had jerked her arm free of her shoulder joint. A dislocated shoulder. It sounded so mild, so simple—but the pain was so blinding that she could not remember what to do about it. A moan was torn from her throat as her whole body ached, like a bruise that had spread over every inch of her skin, with the injured shoulder as the focal point for the daggers of ice and freezing water that tore through her every muscle and nerve. 

Large hands grabbed her and hauled her up, and Kat, whimpering in pain, could do nothing to stop them. She tried—she aimed a punch with her uninjured arm at the source of the loud breathing near her ear, attempted to kick the hands that fumbled with her chains—but for all the notice her manhandling captor took, she might as well not have bothered. Still struggling weakly, gagging at the garlic-and-sweat stench of the man whose clothes were smothering her, she felt the chains fall away—and be replaced, just as she began to feel a glimmer of hope, by thin, rough coils of rope. She fought and kicked, screaming for all she was worth, but the man merely grabbed her by wrist and ankle and pinned her facedown on the stones with a heavy knee digging into her spine as he tied her wrists together behind her back. 

Flat on her belly on the floor, Kat struggled to breathe through the dust clogging her nose as her eyes roved frantically around the cell. Leah, still sleeping, lay on the floor as well, though faceup; her captor was taking his time binding her hands and feet, wrapping the coils with an almost gentle touch. Then he looked up at the other man and made a comment in their strange language, giving a smirk, and the two of them shared a coarse laugh that made Kat turn hot with fury and squirm like a worm on a sidewalk beneath her captor’s grip. But it did nothing—all her efforts meant nothing—all her fighting and screaming, all her idealistic thoughts of killing them or forcing them to kill her, it had all come to nothing. Her eyes burned with tears of fury and frustration and agony as she was hauled to her feet and pushed firmly into the corridor by the man, his companion, carrying Leah like a swooning princess, following as he led her away.

10: Part One: Chapter Ten

Close to midnight, the crew of Valeth’s ship was joined belowdecks by Bat, who sat at the rough wooden table, snatched a mug away from one of the others, and took a long drink without so much as a word in preamble. The crew fell silent as they watched him, each face both apprehensive and aggressive, as if none of the men could decide how they wanted to react to the giant man. When Bat finally drained the mug, he slammed it down upon the table with a solid clunk, leaning forward to look every man there in the eyes, one by one. 

“We do it tonight,” he said, his soft voice carrying far in the silence. “Are we ready?”

“Tonight?” There was an uproar from the pirates as each of them protested, as they argued against each other’s protests, as they demanded answers with overlapping questions. Bat said nothing in reply; he simply sat down, straddling the bench, and waited. At last the noise died down, and the pirates, after sharing anxious glances with one another, turned to him for guidance. 

“Tonight,” he repeated. “If we be prepared.” 

Many of the men nodded, visibly steeling themselves with the aid of the mugs still clutched in their hands. One ginger-haired and -bearded man, however, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand and said, “Why tonight? We got more than a week to Kiindine, we agreed to do it then—if we resupply without Valeth, the port authority’ll come nosing around, an’ they’ll have all our heads if they suspect foul play. Why tonight?”

“Because we do not go to Kiindine,” Bat replied. “Not at first.”

“What—where would we go, then?” demanded the ginger-haired pirate. “The wind’s to the east, there ain’t another port that way for weeks—we spent days working on this, man! We can’t just go changin’ it based on yer fancy!”

“Things have change,” Bat agreed, and the man, though still clearly indignant, fell silent the moment Bat opened his mouth. “Our old plan, it no work. We cannot go near Kiindine.”

“We can’t even—God and Goddess, man, why not?!”

“Because,” said Bat calmly, “the girl is Princess of Angard. If we take her there, we die for certain.”

For a long, long moment, there was absolute silence in the cabin; the only sounds were the ebb and flow of the ocean against the side of the ship, the whistle of the wind as it sought out each and every crack and gap in the hull and sails, and the soft drip-drip-drip of a mug of mead that had been overturned and, ignored by its owner, was slowly pooling on the floor. 

“Princess?” one man finally demanded, his voice hoarse with disbelief and, unmistakably, terror. “But…how….”

“I do not know how,” Bat told them. “But I know is true. I hear her, she plot with the boy to escape. Valeth not know either.”

“But then—then we have to be rid of her!” another pirate burst out. “Throw ‘er over the side, leave ‘er stranded in a tavern—she’s too dangerous to keep around, it don’t matter what she says she’ll give us!”

“We can’t just leave her somewhere, you fool!” snapped the ginger pirate. “She can have the entire royal navy after us, she knows what we look like! We have to kill ‘er. Oh, dragon’s fire, we shoulda killed ‘er the moment we saw ‘er….”

“If we kill her, if anyone finds out—Angard could slaughter us all! They got a giant crystal in that palace that can turn every man in three leagues to dust!” 

“No, you idiot, it’s a dragon’s egg, they’ll wake it up and it’ll burn the world to ashes!”

“No, it’s not a dragon’s egg, it’s a dragon’s eye, and—”

“Enough!” snapped Bat. “You curse us all with that talk! I have a plan for Princess—for her treasure too. But first, we must get it.”

“Then what?” asked one of the pirates, as the rest looked on in clear apprehension. 

“The treasure…I know not what is,” admitted Bat. “But the girl, she say it is valuable. We sail to the Forbidden City. I know of man who will buy them both, treasure and girl.”

“He’ll buy a princess?” The pirates gaped at each other in disbelief. “But who…?”

Bat made a waving gesture with his enormous hands, indicating that he neither knew nor cared. “It no matter. He want her, he have many gold, all solved.” 

“Are you mad?” demanded the ginger pirate. “Listen here, man—if anyone sees her with us, if anyone breathes a single word of this, they’ll make us all wish we were dead for kidnapping her. She has to die.”

The other pirates agreed with great certainty, every single one of them, but Bat’s expression did not change. 

“I not tell you what this man pay us,” he said calmly. 

“Yeah?” snarled the ginger pirate. “What?”

Bat told them. Several of the men, the ginger pirate included, choked on their drinks; the rest of them merely stared.

“And that not include reward for treasure,” Bat continued, meticulously brushing a bit of dust from his sleeve, though his clothes were as filthy as any of the pirates’. “But she must be alive.”

The pirates glanced around the table at one another, hesitating—but the greed in their eyes was clear. One by one, their indecision resolved, and they turned back to Bat with jaws set in determination. They said nothing, but nothing needed to be said. Bat’s stony facade creased briefly into a small, triumphant smile. 

“This time tomorrow, we be free men, with mountain of gold,” he promised them. “But first, we take care of Valeth, and the boy.”

The pirates climbed to their feet, their faces splitting in grins of avarice, and began, one by one, to climb up the steps to the deck. And Aidan, hiding behind a cluster of barrels in the darkest corner, felt his hand tighten around his upper arm of its own volition. His thoughts raced wildly in his head, but one idea screamed at him more loudly than all the others: I have to get to Alaine.

They would leave soon, they would have to—they would need to head up to the deck at some point, though whether the captain or Alaine were their first target, he could not have guessed. But if he were to stop them from taking her, and—the very thought brought chills to his skin—killing him….

Slowly, fighting to keep his hand steady, he opened his other hand and shifted the small knife that Alaine had left behind in his palm, holding the blade poised and ready. The steel gleamed wickedly in the lantern light as he pressed it against his skin, just above the lump buried beneath his arm. For what felt like an hour he breathed deeply in and out, his teeth clenched, ordering his hand to make the cut and watching it refuse to obey. But he thought of Alaine, and Bat’s vow to kill him, and all the lashes and kicks and bruises he had suffered at the pirates’ hands, and his little sisters, and he closed his eyes, steeled himself, and—

The initial slice felt cold and numb at first, then burned as if someone had pressed a hot poker to his skin; he winced and clapped his hand to the cut, his face twisting with the effort of keeping silent. But the pain dulled to a steady throb almost at once, and after a few slow breaths, he was finally able to pry his hand away from his arm and inspect the damage. The cut, gushing blood in alarming quantities, was not quite as long as the one his mother had made to put the Stone there in the first place, but if he could just…. He probed gently at the Stone with his fingers, wincing as it slid beneath his skin at his touch. If he looked, he could see it, shining dimly beneath the bright red blood dripping down his arm. But manipulate it though he might, it refused to emerge from the cut. There was nothing for it but to….

Before he had time to think about it, before he had a chance to quaver, Aidan raised his arm and plunged his forefinger and thumb into the bleeding cut. Every tiny fragment of muscle and skin that his fingers touched burned like fire, and it was all he could do not to scream, but, gritting his teeth, he persevered, succeeding at last in pinching the slippery oval between finger and thumb. With a massive force of will, he closed his eyes, bit down on the collar of his shirt, and twisted the stone free; lances of fire shot up and down his arm, and the hole throbbed as if his arm were being struck by a mace with every heartbeat, but he bit back his howl of pain and looked down with watering eyes at the Stone clutched tightly in his bloodied hand. 

Beneath a thick, viscous coat of blood, the Stone shimmered in the dim glow from the lantern behind him, as if it were consciously snaring each tiny fragment of light from its surroundings and multiplying it tenfold. His thumb, passing over it, felt the deep etches on its facade, and a memory surfaced of the Stone as he had seen it years ago, before his mother had planted it inside of him: a diamond the size of a human eye, smooth and oval, with a strange symbol carved into its facade. Aidan had never seen any other diamond with his own eyes, but this, he knew, was the finest in the world; there could not possibly be another so large and brilliant and perfect in existence. And it was warm…warmer than it should have been, even for something trapped inside his body for so many years…warmer than his skin, and growing warmer…. 

It happened almost the instant he closed his palm around the Stone, so quickly, so suddenly, that he did not even have time to draw breath. The Stone began to burn white-hot against his skin, blistering his flesh, yet he could not release it—and from it began to pulse bolts of searing agony through his veins with every beat of his pounding heart, fire and ice all in one, and he shivered and sweated and looked wildly around with suddenly blurred eyes as his shriek of pain roiled trapped behind his clenched jaws. His hands began to jerk uncontrollably; he doubled over as pangs of nausea stabbed at his stomach, threatening to and in his ears rose a howling, whistling crescendo like the wind in a terrible storm, as the ship began to pitch violently from side to side; he heard himself screaming inside his head, but if he cried out, he was deaf even to his own voice. There were whispers drifting into his ears now, soft voices cresting and soaring on the waves of the wind that swirled around him, and he could see them, streaks of white across the faded colors blurring together around him, and outside, he had to get outside, had to taste and feel the fresh air, or else he feared he would die from it—

He did not know he was walking, or even capable of doing so, until he tripped over the first step; he did not know he could climb the stairs with the ship rocking and bucking under the force of the gale outside until he lunged forward, his fingers scrabbling to clutch at the edge of a step, and retched onto the pitted wood. He heaved again, but his stomach was empty, with nothing left to give, and the voices were still calling him, luring him forwards and upwards, promising the fresh air that he had to have, had to, before the stagnant reek of salt and fish closed around him and pulled him into the darkness….

And then, abruptly, his vision returned, and he saw his hands on the deck beneath him, one encroached by a trickle of blood snaking its way down his arm and wrist, the other smeared in bright red blood and clutching something cool and hard. Trembling, shaking, afraid to move, Aidan closed his eyes and swallowed against the foul taste in his mouth, willing the noises to stop. But the howl of wind and thunder had only grown louder, as if the ship had been caught in a hurricane, though Aidan, pulling himself to his feet with the railing, saw nothing but smooth water from hull to horizon, and not a single cloud in the sky to obscure the millions of bright stars overhead. Stop it, he pleaded to no one and nothing, to anyone and anything that would listen, stop this, please— But the wind still howled, rising in speed and pitch, and that strange sensation still pulsed through him so violently that he feared he’d be ripped apart at the seams, ice and fire all in one, electric, pulsing, twisting, though it did not hurt anymore…nothing hurt anymore, not even the gash in his arm, but the voices would not stop…. He doubled over the railing and retched into the ocean, producing nothing but bile, and as he straightened, shivering as the cool wind soothed his burning skin, he saw not the ocean spreading before him, but a dark room, and a bearded face that snarled despite the terror in its beady eyes. 

“You lizard-skinned cowards,” rasped Captain Valeth. “Backstabbing dragonspawn….”

Aidan’s head turned—it must have; there was no other explanation as to how the room shifted otherwise—and he saw what Valeth saw: Bat, surrounded by his half-dozen mutineers, raising his fireblade and leveling it at Valeth’s chest. 

“We be pirates,” he said quietly. “What do you expect?” 

Aidan knew what was coming, but he didn’t want to see it; he wrenched his eyes away and turned his back to the scene, and found, to his surprise, that he was back on the deck once more. He took a deep, unsteady breath, his head spinning in confusion over what he had just seen, and how—but there was no time. Alaine, he thought wildly. As he looked desperately around himself, he caught sight of a door, and once he recognized it, he nearly wept in relief. Alaine. He had to find her, and tell her—tell her something—and beg her to make this stop, she must know how, she had to…. Staggering like a drunkard, clinging to the railing for dear life, he stumbled ever closer to the door, finally taking a blind lunge through empty space and latching onto the handle. It would not turn, and, desperate, he grabbed it with both hands and shook it—and somehow, beneath his grip, the wood around the doorknob cracked and gave, and he was pitched headfirst into the dark room. 

11: Part One: Chapter Eleven

“Alaine…Princess…please….”

Alaine woke with a start and nearly screamed at the sight of Aidan leaning over her bed and shaking her arm, his face only a finger’s span away from her own. She pushed him hastily away and propped herself up on her elbow, shaking her head groggily against the fog of sleep. 

Aidan gave her no chance to speak. “Princess please, you have to help me, you have to make it stop, they’re going to kill me, princess please it has to stop they won’t stop talking and I can hear it I can feel it please please please just get it out of me—”

“Aidan—AIDAN!” Alaine had to grab his shoulders and force him down to the floor to silence him; she sank down beside him, but kept him at arm’s length, for she could see in the moonlight glowing through her porthole that he was covered in blood, his chin was smeared with vomit, and his eyes were bulging like a madman’s. “What’s happened?” she demanded of him. “What did you do? Aidan, what did you do?” 

This last strident question was torn from her as her eyes, raking over him, spotted the bleeding gash on his arm. Knowing what she would see even before she saw it, her heart still gave a painful wrench when she looked down and saw his clenched fist. She reached for it, but he pulled away with a yell. 

“Don’t touch me!” 

“Aidan, don’t be ridiculous—”

“I said don’t touch me!”

His scream was so shrill and so sudden that she released him at once, allowing him to stumble away, as breathless and ashen as if he had just woken from the grave. 

“You got the Stone out,” she breathed. “Aidan, what did you do with it?” 

“I don’t know!” he howled. “I just hear—I f-f-felt—there were pirates, Bat, he was talking, and—and Alaine—” His head jerked upward, and for the first time, his eyes met hers, bright and clear and lucid, though the white ring of hysteria around his dark irises did not shrink. “Alaine, we have to get out of here right now. They’re going to mutiny, they’re going to kill the captain, and you and I are next—”

“They’re going to—? But that has nothing to do with us!” she protested. “They won’t kill us, they know how much I’m worth, and I promised more gold on top of that for you, they’d be utter fools to—”

“HOW COULD YOU BE SO STUPID?” Aidan screamed at her, grabbing her by the arms and shaking her. “THEY KNOW WHO YOU ARE, ALAINE! AND THEY DON’T—WANT—THE PRINCESS—OF THE ENTIRE—FLAMING—EMPIRE—ON—THEIR FLAMING—SHIP!” 

“Let go of me!” Alaine shrieked at him, kicking and twisting to try and pry herself loose—but a sudden noise made them both freeze, holding their breath and staring at each other in horror. A searing crack that seemed to shatter the air like glass, followed in the same instant by a thunderous boom. Aidan paled at the sound, his hands falling limply to his sides. 

“Was that a fireblade?” Alaine whispered. “Who…?”

“Valeth,” Aidan rasped. “They shot him. I saw it. Alaine, they’re coming—make it stop, please, you have to know how, they’re going to kill me, Alaine—”

“Stop what? Aidan, you have to calm down so we can—”

“Alaine, they’re going to kill us! We have to go now!” 

“All—all right, but—”

Aidan grabbed her arm and dragged her forward with such sudden force that her slippered feet slid on the deck; it was only his grip on her that kept her from falling flat on her face. She twisted free of him, but when he ran across the cabin and wrenched open the door, she was only half a step behind him. There was no time for fear, no room for any thought but escape, but her heart was pounding furiously in her ears, and an urgent voice in her head was pushing her to move, move, move as fast as her legs could carry her. 

A gust of wind nearly whisked her off her feet as she stepped over the threshold; she shrieked and staggered back, her hair whipping across her face, her skirts swirling and billowing with enough force to knock her off balance. Aidan, however, did not even seem to notice; he sprinted to the middle of the deck and flung himself against the mast, clutching at it for dear life as he looked wildly around. His gaze rose to the sky, and Alaine saw his eyes bulge in sudden terror, though when she looked up, she saw only a few clouds scuttling from horizon to horizon, a dark shadow crossing between them and the stars. His lips began to move at a frantic speed, and as she staggered across the rocking deck, she heard his voice howling a wild chant over the roar of the wind. 

“—I can’t take it anymore, I can’t, I can feel it, I feel it, oh God oh Goddess make it stop, it’s tearing me apart, I don’t want this, I don’t want—”

“Aidan!” Alaine heaved at his arm, trying to haul him away from the mast, but he refused to budge. “What’s wrong with you, what are you doing, we have to get out of—!”

But the sound of a door slamming open, sharp and loud as a crack of thunder, made her whirl around, her words dying in her throat. From the cabin across the deck emerged Bat, as dark as the moonless night, with a half-dozen men gathered behind him. A fireblade hung loosely from his hand, the end still smoking faintly, and his white shirt was spotted with vivid crimson flecks of blood. Alaine straightened slowly, looking from one pirate to the next, as the men spread out, catlike, stalking, to surround them both. She tried several times to speak, but her throat was so dry that only a hoarse rasping sound emerged. 

“Sirs,” she said at last, her wavering voice barely carrying over the screaming wind that tore with ferocious claws at the sails and whipped at the frayed ends of every rope that secured them. “I hope that we can sit down and discuss this like civil—”

Bat whistled, and the pirates closed in, crossing the deck in two long strides. They were on her before she had time to scream; someone caught her by the arm and twisted hard, driving her to her tiptoes as she shrieked and kicked. Aidan was yelling at the top of his lungs, and she saw out of the corner of her eye two pirates prying him off of the mast and struggling to pin his flailing arms. Then a third man struck him in the groin, and he doubled over; two more pirates dove at him, and Alaine heard him shrieking in pain over the piercing wail of the wind. She screamed and fought even harder—until a flash of steel before her eyes made her freeze and hold her breath, her entire being cringing away from the dagger hovering a finger’s width away from the tip of her nose. Bat held the other end in his massive hand, and he had never looked so huge—nor had she ever seen such cold, deadly focus in his dark eyes. 

“P-please don’t kill us,” she babbled, her voice shrill and trembling; she hated herself for begging, hated herself for opening her mouth at all, but that part of her was too overwhelmed by fear and panic to remain in control of her body. “Please, you don’t know what you’re doing, you can’t—”

“I know, Princess.” His voice was soft, almost a whisper, yet despite Aidan’s shouts and the violent wind ripping at the sails and the creak of the masts and the distant rumble of thunder and the pounding in her own ears, she still heard his words with absolute clarity. Still, it took a moment to register just what had been said—though her stomach clenched the instant he uttered the word princess. “You see too much. You hear too much. You cannot leave here, not alive.”

“You—” The word came out as a terrified squeak; she had to swallow and try again. “You don’t have to kill us. Please. My father will—will give you whatever you want, anything….”

 She flinched as his dagger flashed through the air—but it never touched her. Instead it turned once in an arc of flashing steel and stopped in midair, swaying gently back and forth, with the tip trapped between Bat’s enormous fingers. He turned away from her and barked a command that she did not understand, and the pirates leapt forward, two of them holding Aidan’s arms behind his back. His lip was bleeding, but he was still fighting furiously, his eyes wild and bulging. She could have sobbed with relief at the sight of him still alive and moving, at the sight of his fist still clenched around the Stone. A sudden darkening of the sky drew her eyes upward for a fraction of a second, and she saw dark clouds billowing in at an alarming speed, obscuring the moon until not even its telltale glow remained. 

“We want your treasure, girl,” Bat called over a low, distant rumble of thunder. Some of the pirates looked around, confused, at the sound, but his voice snapped their attention back to their prisoners. “You tell us where is it, now.”

“Treasure?” She tried to swallow again, to stop her voice from breaking, but her throat was so dry that the effort pained her. “I don’t know what you’re—”

Bat barked another command, and one of the pirates turned on his heel and slammed his fist into Aidan’s gut. Aidan groaned and doubled over, choking and coughing as he gasped for breath. The pirate raised his fist again, and Alaine screamed and rushed forward—but Bat’s knife stopped her in her tracks. 

“Tell us where is the treasure!” he snarled. The calm facade was slipping now; she could see true anger in him now, and desperation. He had taken a great risk to get this far, and if he was willing to kill his captain and threaten the princess of the Empire to get his treasure…. He could not possibly know what it was, or he would have checked her clothes and Aidan’s hands right away, but he knew enough. 

“I don’t have anything, I swear,” she insisted, her mind racing; there had to be something she could say to get them out of this, anything, even if it bought them only a few minutes more. “But at my home, there is—no!”

But too late: the pirate struck Aidan again, and Aidan’s head snapped back, his nose pouring blood like a fountain. The pirate struck him again, and again; Aidan struggled wildly and tried to kick them, but one of the men holding him twisted his arm until he screamed. And Alaine was screaming too, pleading at the top of her voice for them to stop, but no one listened; another man stepped up and grabbed Aidan by the shirt, threw him down onto the deck, and they set upon him, kicking him viciously everywhere they could reach as he howled and tried to shield himself with fists clenched so hard that his knuckles glowed white in the dark—

Then there was silence, and Alaine, paralyzed with horror, strained her eyes against the darkness as the black forms of the pirates spread out once more. Lightning flashed with blinding strength somewhere to the south, followed by a rumble of thunder that made the deck vibrate beneath her feet, and in that brief searing light she saw Aidan’s limp, motionless form huddled on the deck, facedown in a growing pool of blood. 

“No—” she choked, and turned desperately to Bat, who was watching her with a deceptive calm belied by the burning fury in his eyes. “No—please—”

Lightning flashed again, and she recoiled, half-blinded, at the searing glare from the blade of his dagger as he leveled it again. “The treasure, girl,” he said quietly. 

“I don’t have it!” Alaine was close to sobbing now, try as she might to control herself. She had never seen such brutality, such cruelty, not once in her entire life, and it struck her suddenly that she was alone, utterly and completely alone, with no one to stop these men from doing to her exactly what they had done to Aidan. “I don’t have any treasure, you took everything that I—!”

Bat’s other hand swung out, so quickly her eyes could not follow it, and the world turned black as a burning pain spread across her cheek like a brand pressed to her skin. She felt the deck tilt beneath her and groped blindly for the mast, barely managing to steady herself; her hand flew to her cheek, and as the taste of blood fill her mouth, she realized that he had slapped her. A sob tore from her throat against her will; nothing in her life had ever hurt so badly. 

“Where is?” Bat demanded again, his voice rising to a vicious snarl. “I have no patience for this, girl!”

“I don’t know—I swear I don’t kn—”

Bat lunged for her with snakelike speed; Alaine screamed and flinched away, but his huge hand grabbed a handful of her hair and hauled her back. Tears sprung to her eyes as her scalp began to burn; she wriggled and twisted, digging her nails into Bat’s enormous hand, but his grip only tightened against the back of her head. 

“Let go!” she cried. “Let go of me, let go—!”

“Where the treasure is, girl?”

“I don’t know! Please!”

“Where it is?!”

“I don’t know!”

“You—”

This time, when the thunder struck, it struck with a roar that shook every inch of the ship from bow to stern, that hurled Alaine backward onto the deck even as it rattled her teeth inside her skull; it struck with a piercing, deafening crack that echoed out over the vast waters; it struck with a flash of white-hot light that burned like hot nails driven into her eyes. She tumbled across the splintered deck and caught herself on her elbows, her ears filled with a high-pitched whine that drowned out the shouts and screams of men, and twisted around, blinking against the sudden blackness and looking wildly around for the source of the blow. And in the darkness glowed one thing, vast but distant: a red fireball blazing overhead, a roiling inferno through which the shadow of the topsail and crow’s nest were barley visible, which tilted slowly as the wind ripped mercilessly at the ship, tearing at the smoking sails, fanning the flames to rise higher and higher, until the whole thing broke with a sharp retort like the boom of a fireblade and fell twisting and tumbling onto the deck around her. 

 

The voices never stopped, not once, no matter how loudly the pirates shouted around him, no matter how hard they hit him; they grew louder and louder with every blow, louder than his own screaming in his ears, and the burning pulsing freezing force that pumped through his veins grew and grew until he was sure it was tearing him apart. He saw, as if through fogged glass, the pirates swarming around him, saw the deck rise up to meet him, saw the blood pooling onto the wood and onto his hands when they rose to his face, but if he felt it, it was nothing at all to him beneath the ice that cracked his bones, beneath the fire that seared every inch of his skin, beneath the pain that consumed him so completely that he no longer knew if it even was pain; it was more than pain, it was bigger than pain; it was beyond all his knowledge of what a human could possibly feel. He saw the blood, he knew that it was his, but it did not surprise him in the slightest, for how could a human not bleed with ice crushing him and fire crumbling him into dust and ash, with the wind slicing through skin and muscle like a hot knife through butter, with the pressing, suffocating weight of the entirety of the air itself twisting and yanking and folding him like a blanket caught in a wringer? It was more than was in his capacity to bear, more than any human could bear, and he could do nothing, nothing at all, but lie on the deck, facedown and trembling violently, and pull each breath slowly and painfully into his lungs like trying to claw enough sand into a sieve to fill before it drained away. 

Hours or minutes it might have been, days or seconds it might have been—time had no meaning anymore—before he realized that the world around him still existed. Oddly, it was the screaming that did it—not the voices still whispering so loudly in his head that they drowned out almost all else, but the dim clamor coming from somewhere far away, the sounds of thunder and shouting men. A higher-pitched voice drew his focus, a woman’s scream, and that was what made him move. It was the hardest thing he had ever had to do, raising his head, turning his neck, dragging his eyelids open, and his body shook with the effort, and the sight of the swirling colors in the darkness made him feel dizzy and sick—but just knowing he could do it, just feeling his body obey his commands when he had not even known that he had a body to move, made him keep moving, fighting nausea and the leaden weight of his limbs and the shrieking, howling wind that pushed and tore at him, out of sheer stubbornness, just to prove that he could. 

His eyes refused to focus, no matter how hard he tried; the deck appeared as a slight lessening of the darkness spread out before him, with large blurs of color and sound moving at frantic paces back and forth across his field of vision. But there was a flash of white floating in the darkness, dancing in and out of sight, and an image of an embroidered white dress swam into the forefront of his mind. It was Alaine, and she was in trouble—screaming, struggling with something that he could not see, fighting to get away. 

In that moment, something seemed to quake within him, and without warning, the world snapped clearly into focus—more clearly than he had ever seen it. And, looking up, he found he could see more than just the thick, dark clouds obscuring the sky: thin wisps of silvery-white, brilliantly bright as they flickered through the air. At first he thought it was lightning, but there were too many, and they were too small, too delicate, too graceful, and moved in the most beautiful, hypnotizing patterns…. It was the wind, he realized. He could see the wind. 

But there was no time to absorb the shock of this discovery. Alaine screamed again, and Aidan, his head whipping around, saw her struggling in the grip of Bat, who had a knife in one hand and a handful of her hair in the other. Aidan fought to lift himself, but his arms gave way; he thought he shouted, though he could hear nothing over the rain and the thunder and the voices; he reached out, to pull her away, to push him back, he did not know—

And in that instant, as if responding to his distress, a flash of lightning ripped through the sky, so close that the white light was all that he could see, at the same time a crack of thunder shook the deck below him until he feared the wood might splinter into pieces—and, looking up, blinking away the bright spots across his field of vision, he saw bright flames burst into life at the top of the shattered mainmast and swallow the topsail and crow’s nest, which, groaning under their own weight, tipped forward and plummeted to the deck. 

Time seemed to slow as the burning wood and canvas fell through the air, and Aidan watched, frozen, as it tumbled right at Alaine, flat on her front atop the deck and still struggling to rise. He moved as if in a dream, his body no longer under his command: he rolled onto his side and up on one knee in one fluid motion, aware of the pain but ignoring it, and his hand whipped forward and down, his fingers spread and flexed in a position he had never seen before, though it felt as easy and natural for him as taking a breath. 

The flaming rubble stopped in midair, floating on a cloud of those silver wisps. For a fraction of a second both he and Alaine stared at it, wide-eyed, as it swayed gently in the current of the wind; then Aidan, with a sudden spurt of panic, tried to rise and stumbled, staggering backwards on the deck, impulsively pushing the silver strands away as they flickered through the air around him. And the burning piece of the mast spun end-over-end and crashed into the railing beside Alaine, plunging into the ocean amid an explosion of splintering wood. 

Alaine screamed and scrambled away, and around himself, Aidan heard the pirates shouting and swearing, but he did not move; he merely stared at his hands, and at the small stone resting in his palm, as a strange thrill stir somewhere deep inside him. I did that, he thought numbly. I made that happen. 

The stone may have been the source of the power—but he had wielded it, commanded it, and it had obeyed. And if he could do that….

“Aidan!”

Alaine’s shout dragged him out of his daze; he whirled around, his heightened senses aware of someone behind him, and ducked just in time to avoid a heavy cutlass swinging through the air where his neck once was. He tripped and nearly fell as he backed away, and the pirate followed, a snarl on his scarred face, and raised the sword again—

Aidan reacted without thinking, without even knowing what he was doing. His hand shot out again, and even his sharpened vision had trouble following the complex twist and thrust that it performed—but the stone obeyed, and this time he felt the heat surging down his arms and through the skin of his fingertips, this time he saw the silver wisps funnel into a blinding white lance that dived toward the pirate like a thunderbolt. The white lance pierced the man through the chest, and Aidan, who had expected him to stagger at the most, watched in horror as the man crumpled into a heap on the deck, his eyes blank and staring, his chest bleeding profusely from a fist-sized hole punched straight through his heart. 

Aidan’s own heart was racing as if to perform the work of two, but there was no time for fear, no time for thought. He heard Bat’s voice shouting over the wind, and suddenly every pirate on the deck seemed to be converging upon himself and Alaine, surrounding them with weapons drawn. Aidan stumbled back until he knocked into Alaine and stood facing them all, his hands raised, one still clenched around the Stone. 

“That’s it!” Bat howled, drawing a second fireblade from the belt across his chest. “The treasure, get it!” 

Two of the pirates dove at Aidan without hesitation, and he felt his body move quicker than it ever had before, so quickly that he squeezed his eyes shut out of shock and fear of what he might see. But he could still feel the wind as it gathered into an almost-solid force at the command of his movements, as it whipped around him and slashed at the pirates like an invisible sword, and he could feel the disturbance in the air as the pirates shouted and leapt back from the unseen weapon. 

One of them stumbled and choked, and Aidan, opening his eyes, saw a pirate with a long dirty braid double over, coughing and choking, and press a hand to a bleeding gash across his chest as if trying to force the blood back into his body. Before he could do more than stare at the injured man, however, the other man climbed back onto his feet and charged again. This time, Aidan, thoughtless in his desperation, threw up his hands to push him away—and threw the pirate bodily across the deck without even touching him, where he crashed into the railing and went tumbling into the ocean with a strangled yell. He turned, saw another flash of shadow and steel, twisted his wrist in a quick motion, and a massive gust of air materialized out of the scattered white wisps and bowled into the man like a roiling wave of water, tossing him overboard and slamming the man beside him so hard onto the deck that he did not get up again. 

“Get them! Get them!” Bat was shouting at the top of his lungs from somewhere at the bow, and Aidan, turning toward the sound, felt his stomach sink as still more pirates circled around the mast. There were too many of them. He reached behind his back and grabbed Alaine by the wrist. 

“Get ready!” he yelled over his shoulder. 

“For what?” Her voice rose so shrilly that even with the wind and the voices and the thunder howling in his ears, he winced. But he ignored her, scanning the horizons with his eyes narrowed, praying for something, anything, to save them. He did not mean to do it, did not know if it was even he who did it, but as he dragged Alaine behind him to the railing at the helm, he felt the deck beneath them sway and buck and heard the masts creak in protest as the wind shifted. Somehow, he knew what the wind would do before it did; somehow, he could feel it change direction and intensity, could feel the ebb and flow of currents as strong and complex as those beneath the waves. Alaine staggered, losing her balance on the rocking deck, but Aidan’s grip on her never faltered as his other arm looped around a wooden support beam and held on tight.

They loomed up out of the dark waters without warning, sharp and jagged and growing larger at an astonishing speed. Alaine screamed as she spotted them, and all of the pirates leapt into action with a collective roar of panicked shouts, all thoughts of treasure forgotten. All of them, except for Bat. Even from across the ship, even in the pitch-black darkness that fell when the lightning left the sky, Aidan could see murder in his eyes as he strode across the deck, drawing his sword in a sleek, effortless motion. His grip on Alaine tightened until his fingers ached. 

C’mon, he begged silently. C’mon…c’mon….

“Aidan!” Alaine shrieked as Bat, momentarily stymied by the rocking of the ship, headed for them at a full-out run. She tried to twist free, but Aidan refused to let her go, not even when Bat was climbing the stairs to the helm, not even when he raised his sword with a snarl of fury twisting his face— 

“Get ready to jump!” he called over the wind. “Ready—”

“What?!”

“GO!” 

And he leapt, dragging Alaine behind him. 

They plunged deep into the roiling black water, and Aidan lost his grip on Alaine as a current sent him tumbling head-over-heels until he no longer knew which way was up. His eyes burned as he looked blindly around, lost in the darkness that consumed sea and sky both. 

Then a blinding flash turned the ocean white as a dull, splintering crash echoed through the water: the ship, he realized, crashing into the rocks as he’d hoped it would. He twisted around in the water and struck out in the opposite direction, heading for what he hoped was the surface, his lungs already burning for air. 

He had never really learned how to swim, and part of him was very aware that he might die there under the water—but just as he started to fear that he was swimming in the wrong direction, his head broke the surface just long enough to snatch a gulp of air and water and foam before a wave thrust him under once more. Coughing, he clawed at the water until he surfaced again. 

Somewhere to his right, he thought he heard the pirate’s shouts, though he could see nothing; up ahead, he could just barely make out the silhouette of trees. A surge of water pushed him under again, but he persevered, desperate for one more breath of air even if it were his last. 

Then—miracle of miracles—he felt his toes sink into cold sand. 

 

The men around him were running in every direction, desperate to salvage what little they could of the ship, but Bat, standing in the middle of the chaos, made no effort to help. The rocks had gouged deep gashes into the hull below the waterline, and somehow, due to some sick twist of fate, the bow had been struck by lightning at the same moment as the impact. 

At least, that was what the pirates must have believed, but Bat knew what they did not. As the other men rushed to bail out the hull and put out the fire in the bow, as other men heaved desperately on the ropes to slow the ship and steer it back out to sea, he watched the dark outline of the little island that had appeared as if out of nowhere, where the boy and girl must be. He knew these were no coincidences; he knew that all of this had been orchestrated by that boy, the one whose throat he should have slit when he first had the chance. But he could use the Stone, and he had the princess with him. His lord would certainly find that interesting. 

The pirates called to Bat as he strode to the railing, shouting the fake name he had given them long ago, but he paid them no heed; instead he swung himself into the dinghy and chopped through the ropes with his sword, gripping the edges of the little boat for balance as it plummeted to the sea. It landed with a splash, and he began to row, sending the dinghy cutting through the water like a shark with an obsessive purpose in the direction of the island. 

12: Part One: Chapter Twelve

Kat could focus on nothing at first but escape, whether it be by guile or force. She dug her heels into the stone floor and resisted her captor’s grip, but he merely pressed his palm between her shoulders and pushed until she stumbled; she tried to dart ahead, or duck to one side, but his hand tightened on the rope that bound her wrists, and a sharp tug pulled her right back, accompanied by an agonizing throb of her shoulder. She tried to twist free, but it did nothing; the man was as calm and emotionless as a stone, and no matter what she did, he marched forward, stubbornly, inexorably, dragging her along with one hand gripping her bound wrists. If she fought too hard, he tugged, and her shoulder exploded in icy pain until she fell back into her kidnapper’s pace. 

It was then she realized that he was taking her the wrong way: when they had turned right instead of left outside the cell, she had wondered, but assumed that there was another way upstairs, or that she had remembered wrong. But the corridor before her now had a definite downhill slant, and seemed to be winding deeper underground, revealing in the light of the torch nothing more than more and more decrepit cells, each one smaller than the last. 

“Wh-where are you taking us?” For a moment, her voice wouldn’t emerge, and she feared it had disappeared from lack of use; when it finally sounded, it was so hoarse, and came so painfully, that she knew it had been a close thing. “Where are we going? Please….”

But the men, predictably, ignored her—save for the one carrying Leah, who turned and fixed her with a cold, expressionless look that turned her blood cold. He knew what she was asking, even if he couldn’t understand her words. And he knew the answer, too. He would not say—could not say—but that look was enough to force her racing heart up to her throat until it was a struggle to breathe. 

“Please,” she gasped. “Our parents have money—” Well, Leah’s did anyway, enough for both of them—“and they’ll pay wh-…whatever you want…we’ll do anything, just don’t—don’t h-hurt us, please….”

But the man did not even wait for her to finish before turning around and taking Leah with him. Kat’s guard followed, tugging sharply until she was forced to come along. 

The journey seemed to Kat to take hours, frantic as she was to search every inch of every cell and torch bracket that they passed in case there was something, anything, that could help them, but in reality it was only minutes before the winding corridor ended in a staircase that spiraled downward in a tight curve. Katrina was pushed roughly into the stairwell, and, with her bulky captor filling all the space behind her, had no choice but to climb down and down and down, her legs screaming in protest after their long forced rest, her terror mounting with every spiral that the staircase carved into the blackness below. 

When the stairs finally ended, Katrina hesitated at the last step and had to be shoved into the new corridor by her captor; after the cramped staircase, even a narrow passage such as this made her feel vulnerable and horribly exposed. The cold was brutal here, and damp, worming its way aggressively into her clothes and licking at every inch of her skin. She could not stop herself from shivering violently as the man led her forward. She had only been this cold once in her entire life, on a hunting trip with her dad; the temperature had dropped to well below freezing by midnight, and no matter how many sweatshirts and blankets she  had wrapped around herself, she still could not stop shivering in her sleeping bag, staring at the clock and praying that it would move faster, that it would hurry the sun back out…. 

There was a door at the end of the corridor. She could see its black outline up ahead, could make out the glint of its brass handle. But she no longer had the strength to fight it, to run, to say or do anything at all. Terror had a tight grip on her throat, locking around her vocal cords, and now, far from worrying that her voice had withered away, she now feared that she had forgotten how to speak entirely. She was searching and searching for something, anything, that she could say to make these men let her go, but her mind was clawing helplessly at nothing, at darkness, searching an empty room for something that was not there.…

Now, instead of praying for time to move faster, she wished it would slow, she wished it would stop entirely, for that door was approaching far, far too quickly. Her stomach sunk horribly as her kidnapper reached for the handle, closed his gloved hand around the brass, and pulled.

The door opened, and suddenly, there was light: so much of it that she was dazzled, dazed, and could do no more than struggle to keep her feet beneath her as she was pulled further into the room. She looked around wildly, seeing nothing but blurs of light and color, hearing voices overhead that she could not understand—and then she was pushed downward, firmly, until she was sitting on her heels. As the spinning in her head subsided, she was finally able to see what lay around her—though she wished, almost instantly, that she could not. 

They were still underground, but the stone chamber around them was massive, like a half-orb a hundred feet across had been excavated from the bedrock. The floor was paved, again, though rough and warped, but the walls were bare earth and rock save for oil lamps hanging from hooks every few feet. The brilliant light came not from daylight, nor from electricity, but from hundreds of candles, their wax white and red and black and sickly yellow, that rested in tin holders on every surface and in clusters on the floor. Most of them were placed carefully around a large two-step dais, on top of which sat something so bizarre and strange and unsettling that Kat had to stare at it for a long time before she was finally able to accept that she did not know what it was and look away. It was formed from four twisting rods of what looked like black iron—with sharp bits sticking out at acute angles like thorns or dragon spikes—that arced upward as if to meet, but stopped just short of it, their unnervingly sharp tips hovering directly over the center of the dais. It reminded her strongly of an Oblivion Gate, but that was from a video game, even the thought was absurd….

Directly in front of the dais, directly in front of her, there was a table made from the same black material, almost like an alter, with a collection of strange objects resting atop it—but she could see no more than that, not without standing, for a man stood in front of it, his hands resting on the surface, studying the items closely. At a few words from Katrina’s captor, however, he turned. 

After all that she had been through in the past few days, after spending so long in this damned castle that she was no longer sure that the real world existed, this man seemed so normal that the sight of him was almost shocking. He wore a suit, a short beard, and short hair, all three grey and neat and perfectly trimmed; his black shoes were shined to perfection; he stood tall and straight despite the silver-tipped cane that he carried in one hand. He was in his sixties, perhaps, but he would not have looked out of place at all in her world; she had seen dozens of men just like him strolling down the street in London, and many more in many other places back home. Yet something about him struck her breathless; something about him turned her blood to ice within her. Those eyes…they were just a pair of blue eyes, nothing particularly strange about them, but something about them pinned her down and froze her in place so that they could delve inside of her freely, rooting around in her mind until they knew everything about her, everything….

Then he smiled, thinly, and opened his mouth—and if there were any doubt that he spoke directly to her, and not to Leah, nor to the two men, that doubt vanished the instant he said her name. 

“Greetings, Katrina,” he said, in a voice as smooth as silk, in the most perfect unaccented English that she had ever heard. “Thank you for joining me here today.” And the thin smile widened, and the blue eyes burned with a strange, eager light, and Katrina knew in her heart that here, at the hands of this man, was where she was going to die.

13: Part One: Chapter Thirteen

“Aidan! Aidan!” 

Alaine had not stopped calling for him since she had struggled onto dry land, nor had she stopped searching the water in every direction, slipping in the deep sand as she ran back and forth across the shore. The rain continued to fall with a vengeance, and while she had barely noticed it on the deck, when death could have found her at any moment, now she was so thoroughly soaked to the bone, her dress and hair heavy as lead against her, that she wondered if she would ever be dry again. 

“AI-DAAAAAAAAAAN!” Her voice echoed across the water, easily heard by anyone nearby, but she did not care. If she didn’t find him…if he had left her alone on this island in the middle of who-knew-where….

The sound of splashing and coughing drew her eyes to the shore just up ahead, where something dark was climbing out of the water on hands and knees. As she ran toward it—hoping with all she had that it was indeed Aidan, and not some horrible sea creature, or worse, Bat—she saw it stumble and collapse as a wave crashed against the shore, then rise again, crawling painfully up the sand. It began to dig furiously in the sand while the water still swirled around its knees, shoving something deep into the wet ground and burying it with desperate strength. Then it doubled over, panting—only to sit up with a strangled cry and claw at the sand again, plunging its hand back into the ground. She ran faster still, tripping as her slippers sank into the sand, and caught Aidan under his arms before he could start the whole process again. 

“Aidan, thank the God and Goddess—what are you doing, stop that—burn me, you’re so heavy—”

“Let go!” 

“Aidan—Aidan, give it to me, I’ll—”

“No!” He shoved her hand away, his face twisted and his eyelids pressed together as if he were fighting the urge to be sick. He took a few deep breaths through his nose before he was able to speak again. “No,” he said again, the hysteria in his voice barely contained. “I need it. I can’t let go of it. It’s—it feels—wrong.” He groaned, his forehead pressing against the sand, and his arms tightened around his middle until she feared his ribs would crack. “I just want it to stop….”

“Then—then try—here.” She pulled him firmly upright, ignoring his pained grunt, and wrapped the hand holding the stone firmly in his shirt. “Let go,” she ordered him, and she thought he might have tried, but he didn’t seem able to release it. So, sighing, she pried his fingers apart one by one, wincing at the bloody marks his fingernails had made in his skin. The Stone fell onto his shirt, and he snatched at it blindly, but Alaine turned up the edge of his shirt so that when he grabbed it, it was wrapped in cloth, unable to touch his skin. The instant his hand closed around it, she saw his entire body sag in relief. The wind died instantly, the world around them falling silent but for the sound of the ocean and the soft patter of the rain, and only when it stopped did Alaine realize it had been pushing against her the entire time. She had to fight for a moment to compose herself before she could speak. 

“Does that help?”  

Aidan responded only with a grunt of both weariness and annoyance, though a halfhearted one, as he pulled free and crawled above the waterline on his own, one hand still clutching a handful of his shirt at his belly. There he collapsed again, coughing, drenched and covered in sand, facedown with his eyes closed as if he never wanted to move again. Alaine, feeling just as exhausted as he looked, sank onto the sand beside him. 

“Are you all right?” she asked him. Her hand hovered over his back, where the stripes of skin between the red whiplashes shone in the dark; she felt that she should touch him, comfort him somehow, but she didn’t know what to do. “You were out there so long, I thought you’d drowned….” 

“‘M all right,” he mumbled, though only his mouth moved as he said it; the rest of him remained firmly where it was, even his eyelids refusing to budge. “I’m not…” He paused to cough up a bit of water and sand; it sounded painful. Then his head fell limply to the ground once more. “Not a great swimmer,” he said wearily. “Never learned.” 

“Really? Roan used to take us down to the shore all the time. He thought it was very important for us to learn to swim, even when we were small. My sisters are all beautiful swimmers.”

“Yeah?” Aidan laughed, but with that weary, bitter laugh that he always used when he was angry with her for being “spoiled”. He must have thought she was stupid, to not have realized it by then. “Who’s Roan? Your dad?”

“No.” She raised an eyebrow that he could not have seen even with open eyes; it was too dark, and growing darker as the lightning receded on the horizon. “My father is your king, remember?”

“Oh yeah. That guy.” She saw the corner of his mouth twist upward into a smile, or perhaps a grimace of pain. “What’s his name again? I forget.”

“Aidan, that is not funny,” she scolded him. “If I didn’t know you were joking, I would be horrified. Even peasants and beggers should know the name of their own king.”

“Well….” He propped himself up on his elbows, his head rising briefly, then falling forward once again. Alaine thought she saw his face twist in pain from the movement. “I hate to break his heart, but they don’t. It’s not exactly their top concern, most days.…”

Alaine watched him try to rise on shaking arms; they gave way, and he fell back to his elbows, hunched over, making a peculiar wheezing sound as he struggled to breathe. Her heart ached for him, but she knew him well enough to know that he didn’t want her help. “They must know his face, at least,” she joked, but gently. “It’s on all the money.” 

That one made him laugh, though it sounded painful. “Yeah,” he said. “’Cause we have money enough to stare at.” He pushed himself slowly up onto his knees, his free hand hanging limply at his side, still hunched over with his head down. “That’s why I stuffed myself into a barrel on the docks so I could hide on somebody’s ship, because I had more gold than I knew what to do with.”

“It wasn’t a bad plan,” Alaine admitted, smiling. “It works in all the stories.” 

Aidan straightened up at last and looked at her; he was still ashen and shaking, and looked half-drowned even up on the shore, but he couldn’t stop himself from smirking at her joke. “Not the ones I’ve heard,” he said. “Those always end up…well. Like this.” 

He looked around, and Alaine mimicked him, studying their surroundings. This island seemed mostly sand from where she sat, but there were trees not too far away, swaying palms bending in the infrequent gusts of wind that made them both shiver. Behind her—to the south, she thought, though she was not sure—the island ended in a blunt mound of sand and rock, but up ahead, it curved inward, then away again, a strip of sand and palms that disappeared behind itself. Out to sea, a few jagged rocks stuck up out of the water, and a distant flame on the surface told her that the pirate ship was still afloat, for the moment, but was far away. She and Aidan watched it recede for a few minutes, and she wondered, glancing at his face, if he were relieved or afraid to see it go. As for herself, she felt both in equal strength, for there was no other way off this island without it.

“We have to move,” Aidan said at last, though his eyes tore away from the ship only with great hesitation. 

“What?”

“They could come back. We have to get somewhere out of sight. Somewhere out of the rain.”

Alaine would have objected, but Aidan pushed himself to his feet without waiting for her reply—then staggered and nearly toppled over. Alaine, moving swiftly, managed to catch him under the pretense of using his arm to steady herself. Slowly, they moved up the slope of the dune, Aidan supporting Alaine, Alaine supporting Aidan. On the other side was more sand and blunt-edged rock, but also some scrubby plants and a few thorny-looking bushes, and piles and piles of dried seaweed against the trunk of the palms. It was small and damp and miserable-looking, but it was the closest to a palace that they wound find within bowshot, and they were both too exhausted to keep searching. They slid down the dunes and fell to the ground, reclining against the sand as if it were a mound of silk pillows. The palms, the seaweed, the bushes, and the dunes combined to give them decent cover on every side, enough, at least, to feel a little safer. Rain still fell on them in stray droplets, but the storm was passing, and the palm tree above them offered a little protection; that, at least, was a comfort. 

“My dress is absolutely ruined from the salt,” said Alaine with a weary sigh. “I don’t think even Massika could repair it. She’ll be devastated.”

Aidan’s eyes did not open, but his mouth twitched. “If I didn’t know you were joking…” he mumbled. 

She turned and looked at him for a second, really studied him in the darkness. Had she seen him in the streets in Kiindine, she would have thought nothing of him: there were plenty of poor men and women dressed in rags, unkempt and filthy, and most of those had dark hair and eyes like his. It would have been much rarer to find someone that didn’t resemble him. Yet all along, he’d had one of the Stones that her family had sought for centuries—and what was more….

“Aidan?” she asked quietly. “That storm, and…whatever was happening back there…were you…did you….?”

Aidan turned his face away from her; she could not read him, nor even see if his eyes were open or closed. For a moment, she wondered if he had even heard her. But then, at last, he answered. “Yeah,” he said. “It was me.”

Alaine fell back against the sand and looked up at the palms, shuddering as a stray breeze made the fronds tremble and sway. It was so much to absorb, too much all at once. After searching for the Stones for so long, she had stumbled upon the Wind Stone by accident, had found its Bearer, had seen it in action, all in what felt like one neverending day that was finally, finally, over. Yet as she glanced at Aidan, she felt neither relief nor anything akin to it. A Stone Bearer…. Not even her father, the king of an entire empire, the most powerful man in the world, could use the Stone that he possessed. She had only one burning question for anyone who could. 

“How?”

Aidan shook his head, wearily, like an old horse bothered by flies. “I don’t know. It was…it just…I-I couldn’t keep it in. It was tearing me apart. I didn’t mean to do any of it, I didn’t know I was doing it. It just…came out.”

Alaine sat up and leaned closer, wrapping her fingers around the wrist of the hand that held the Stone. “What do you mean? Weren’t you commanding it?”

“No.” He sounded hoarse, winded, so exhausted that she feared he would pass out mid-sentence. “It was…I thought it would kill me, the way it felt, it was too much, but then…I never told it what to do, I never told it to cut them to pieces like that, but I wanted them gone. It’s almost like it could hear what I was thinking.”

“Aidan, it could.” Alaine was dumbfounded that someone could possess so much power, so much talent, and yet be so ignorant of the magnitude of what he had done. “That was arcana. It responded to your will, just as your body does when you want it to move or speak. But God and Goddess, to do all of that just by instinct….”

“It wasn’t me,” Aidan snapped, though the weariness in his voice softened all the sharpness of his words. “I didn’t want this, I didn’t want any of that to happen. As soon as it’s light, I’m throwing the blasted thing into the ocean.”

“But Aidan—”

“Save it,” he cut across her. “You want it, you can have it. I’m never using it again.” Yet his grip did not loosen around the Stone in the slightest as he jerked free of Alaine and rolled away from her. 

Alaine wanted to argue further, but she could not speak; absurd as it was, no one had ever spoken to her so, and it was all she could do to hold back her tears. She settled back against the sand, shivering as a gust of wind snaked between the palms; she told herself it was just because of the cold, just because she was soaked to the skin, and that Aidan couldn’t possibly be doing it, but the memory of the invisible wind tearing a hole through that pirate’s chest haunted her when she closed her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and huddled deeper into her dress, wishing with all her heart that she had never left her warm, soft feather bed in her beautiful room in the palace, surrounded by guards who protected her, servants who looked after her, sisters who loved her….

Something pressed against her back, making her jump—but it was only Aidan, settling carefully behind her as one warm, strong arm draped around her waist. His warmth soaked instantly into her skin even through their damp clothes, but still she felt her cheeks burn as she fought the urge to squirm away. 

“Aidan, this is hardly proper…” she whispered. 

“Shut up,” he mumbled. “It’s cold.”

Her doubts were hardly assuaged, but Alaine decided not to protest; it was very warm and comfortable, after all, being held like this, even if his clenched fist was pressed awkwardly against the small of her back. She had never been embraced like this before, as if by—the thought made her stomach churn—by a lover….

Aidan’s breathing slowed almost at once, his arm growing heavy and limp around her, and Alaine felt herself drifting off as well, gradually, lulled by the rain and the tides. 

14: Part One: Chapter Fourteen

“P-P-Please…Please….”

Those were the first words Kat was able to speak—and only long after the man had turned away, finally freeing her from the snare cast by his eyes. She felt pierced, stabbed, broken, as if he had plunged a freezing lance straight through her chest and embedded it into the ground, paralyzing her, leaving her helpless as her blood poured out onto the ground. “Please….” Her voice was so hoarse, and trembled so badly, that she could hardly even hear herself. 

Yet the well-dressed man, whomever he was, heard her. He paused in his conversation with her captors—speaking with them in their odd, twisting language as if he had never spoken a word of any other—and turned to her with cold politeness, as if a stranger had tapped on his arm at a party. 

“Please,” she said again, desperately. “My friend is…w-we…I want to go home.” In the end, she could manage only a whimper, and only that which she had wanted to say from the very moment that she had knocked the drink from Leah’s hand. “Please….”

The man raised an eyebrow, then turned his back to her, continuing his conversation as if she had not spoken. Had she hallucinated that he spoke English? Had she had a strange savant moment in which she had briefly understood his language, whatever it was? But no—he had said her name. He knew her name. He could not have known that if he didn’t speak English. Could he?

She wanted to say more—she needed to say more, if ever she were to convince him—but he stopped talking then, and walked back to his black table at a brisk pace. From the stiffness of his neck and hands, from the way he leaned over the items on the table, Katrina could tell that he was very excited about something—though what, she dreaded to know. She had gotten a glimpse of the items on the table earlier, and they were so troubling, so unholy, that she prayed with all her heart that the whole setup was some kind of sick joke. A cluster of animal skulls, polished to a shine, beside a small pile of bones that she did not recognize, including one with a hole through it that could have fit her entire fist…a dead raven, its belly split open…a black bowl, empty, carved with silver runes…vials filled with strange-colored liquids…glittering crystals of every color, arranged in a neat row…dried bunches of pungent herbs resting on a silver tray…and a jeweled dagger, curved and jagged on its inner edge, made from that same black material, which she was beginning to suspect was obsidian. It was like what goth teenagers would gather for a night of Ouija and satanic rituals, playing a part in a game that they knew would have no consequences. But part of her, deeply buried, knew that this was no game that he played tonight. 

Kat realized then that her mouth was open, and realized too that she should say something—anything—but she could not. A whine of panic was growing louder in her ears, a high-pitched ringing like what she used to hear after spending time with the high school drumline in a confined area, and she found that all thought, all reasoning, dissolved instantaneously underneath that aggressive monotone. She could neither think nor speak, only shiver on her knees on the floor, hyperaware of the cold and her aching legs and her throbbing shoulder and the stabbing pain behind her eyes and how horribly exposed she was here, on her knees in a miniskirt and a tight, low-cut top, beneath the eyes of three armed men that clearly meant to cause her harm….

She might have cried then, or screamed, or done something, anything, to break the tension within her—but the man turned toward her then, and she was pinned beneath his icy stare once more, like a mouse looking into the eyes of a viper. He made a comment in the other language as he stepped toward her, and her captor hurried over and dragged her to her feet, holding her in place with a rough grip on a handful of her hair. Katrina fought with all her might not to whimper in pain and fear as the man inspected her from head to toe, his nose at times only an inch away from her skin; his ice-cold fingers brushed against the skin above her collarbone, and she flinched and shuddered, squeezing her eyes shut and twisting her face away. Her captor forced her head back around with a painful jerk, but she kept her eyes closed: she could feel the man’s presence as he circled her, could feel his breath on her skin, and she did not want to see the look on his face as he inspected her from tip to tail like an animal he intended to purchase and slaughter for dinner. His fingers touched her again—on her cheek, on her injured shoulder, on her spine between her shoulder blades—and when they brushed against the top of her breast, directly over her heart, the whimper that she had been fighting so hard to suppress escaped her at last. The fingers withdrew at once, but there was a long pause before the man finally withdrew. She felt his hand move near her hair as he moved away, taking with it a few stray strands, though she barely even noticed the slight sting as hair and scalp parted in her sudden flood of relief. . 

She opened one eye just a little, squinting through her eyelashes in search of the man—but before she could see a thing, her captor tightened his grip on her hair and forced her back down to her knees. Then he released her again, and she turned, eyes watering, to see the man had moved several blessed feet away from her in order to inspect Leah. Leah had not moved or spoken or opened her eyes in all this time, and she remained asleep—no, Kat corrected herself, with a nauseating twist of her stomach: unconscious—as the man looked over every inch of her, touched her arm and her collarbone, even lifted and studied a lock of her hair. Kat knew she should be furious, but she couldn’t muster anything but fear—not least because the man’s interest was clearly neither lecherous nor crafty, but rather academic, as if Leah were a specimen of some newly discovered species. Still, when he stepped away from her, Kat’s relief was nearly overwhelming—at least for a moment, until she remembered where they were and how much danger still lay in wait around them. 

The man strode back to his table then, and she was distracted from her fear momentarily by the oddness of what he did. He was muttering under his breath as he pulled a mortar and pestle to the front of the table and tossed in some of the herbs, grinding them into powder with a few forceful twists of the pestle. A handful of different herbs followed, accompanied by more muttering—and then a small bone, snapping and crunching horribly as it was destroyed. Kat jumped at the sounds, startled, terrified—were tiny bones supposed to shatter so easily?—then, soon afterward, sickened, for he repeated the process with several more bones, many of them clearly human, all of them crushed beneath his pestle. Last of all, he dropped in a few stray hairs, long and wavy, and Kat knew instinctively that the dark ones were her own. He touched the ends to a candle before he dropped them into the mortar, and Kat shuddered as she watched her own hair turn burn, turn to ash that was then mixed in with all the rest. 

At this point he stopped and turned, and Kat flinched—but he merely barked a command at the kidnapper who still held Leah, who took a small hatchet-like tool from his belt and handed it over. The man held the point of his knife against the corner of the huge bone, the one with the hole through it, and gave the pommel a sharp rap with the flat of the hatchet blade; a chunk of bone was sliced away, as easily and effortlessly as if the thing were made of cheese. The thumb-sized piece of bone went into the melange with all the rest. The last bit to be thrown in was the raven’s beak, which he ripped free with a sharp twist of his wrist before grinding it into powder. 

The muttering grew louder now as the man raised his voice, and Katrina realized that it was not muttering, but chanting: it had a rhythm to it like a mass in Latin, though she could not imagine a more unholy perversion of a mass than what she saw before her. The powders were emptied with the utmost care into the crystal bowl, and, taking it in hand, the man began to circle the dais, still chanting, tossing pinches of the dust onto the dais and the arch. The fine mixture hovered in the air for some time after he spread it, like chalk dust, the pale grey plumes finally settling vividly onto the black surfaces. The man circled two more times with his dust, chanting throughout, ensuring that there was no inch of black left unsullied. 

At any other time and place, if she were watching this in a movie or on TV, Kat would have found it absurd, perhaps even funny—but this scene playing out before her was no joke. The chanting was not a string of nonsense, or some dead language, and these rituals were not the macabre playing of a bored teenager or a deluded cultist. This, whatever it was, had real power. She could feel it, like a static charge to the air; strange as it seemed, she could almost hear it, like an air conditioner in a distant room or the noise of the ocean from far away on a still night. It was a…a humming, low and soft, so quiet that she was not sure it was even there. But she could feel something gathering in this room, ticking the tiny hairs in her ear, spreading goosebumps down her arm, sending a wave of icy pinpricks across her scalp. Whatever the man was doing, it was working. 

The chanting grew louder still as the man returned to the altar, taking on a strange, lyrical quality, as if he were singing—and the feeling grew, intangible yet but strong enough now to feel oppressive, as if some great, prowling creature was hovering over her that could not be detected by her normal senses. She flinched and looked around wildly, her eyes nearly bulging out of her head, expecting to see some sort of horrific monster—but then her captor grabbed a fistful of her hair and wrenched her head back around, holding her firmly in place. Panic clawing up her throat, she tried to wriggle free, for whatever was coming, whatever was happening, she could not bear to see it…. 

Crystal bowl in hand, the man began chanting again, his eyes closed, his hand passing in slow circles over the crystal; then, still chanting, he reached for vial after vial from the altar and emptied each one into the bowl. Black sludge, green fluid that looked like pus, some sort of pungent spirit, thousands of shiny black spheres the size of pinheads that she suspected might be beetle eyes, a splash of some pungent spirit, a large quantity of different kinds of blood—all of these he added until the powder was bubbling and dissolving in a sea of dark reddish liquid. At last, he drew his knife, and with another stream of chanting, he pressed the blade to his own palm. Blood welled thick and fast from the cut, and Katrina counted one, two, three drops falling into the mixture before he took his hand away. 

Was it her imagination, or were the candles growing dimmer? No, surely it could not be—but when she looked to the dais, she was no longer sure, for the runes that ringed the dais seemed somehow lighter, as if illuminated faintly from within—and did the strange archway always have similar runes carve into it, or did they simply appear out of thin air? Could she have simply missed the complex design carved into the floor of the dais like a cross between a pentacle and an alchemical array? And those fist-sized stones surrounding the archway, the barely-noticeable lumps in the dais—how had she not known that they were gems? How could she not have seen their deep amethyst hue when now, even under the thick coating of dust, it was unmistakeable? It was absurd, impossible—but so was the sudden shift in the air, here in a chamber hundreds of feet below the ground, as if a terrible storm were rolling in. 

Then, abruptly, the chanting stopped—and the man turned from the altar to face them with the black knife gleaming in his hand. 

It was then, in that moment of utter silence, her eyes powerless to tear away from the wickedly sharp tip of that horrible knife, that Katrina finally found her tongue. 

“N-N-No…” she stammered. “No…please….”

The man, testing the edge of his knife with his thumb, ignored her utterly. Satisfied—Kat thought she saw a bead of blood form on his skin—he strode toward them, unhurried, unmoved, and unstoppable. 

“Please,” Katrina begged him. She wanted to shriek, wanted to sob, wanted to grab him and shake him and force him to hear her. “Please let us go, just let us go, please….”

For just a brief moment, the man’s steps seemed to slow just a little, and Katrina could have sworn that his eyes flickered to her. But she saw no pity there, no remorse, nothing—just as she saw when he turned his gaze to Leah. 

“No—STOP!” Kat began to struggle at her captor, fighting through the agony in her shoulder, trying to kick, bite, anything that she could do. “No, not Leah, she’s sick, leave her alone—stop it! NO!”

The man gave a soft command, sotto voce, to Leah’s captor; the kidnapper nodded deferentially in response, and followed like an obedient hound when the man turned and walked back to the dais, taking Leah with them. 

“What are you doing?!” Kat shouted at them. “Leave her alone, don’t you understand English? Para, déjala sola! Permite que dejemos, AHORA!”

Followed by his servant, the man climbed the steps up to the dais, slowly, regally, though Katrina could sense his electric anticipation just like she could sense the strange energy he had summoned. Leah’s captor, at his command, laid Leah gently to rest at his feet. 

“Arrêtez-vous!” Katrina howled, racking her brains desperately for anything that she could say, in any language, that would make him understand. “Arrêtez, s’il vous plaît! Nein—nein, bitte, nein!”

The man set the bowl down in front of Leah, then dropped to one knee and lifted her by her arm with surprising gentleness. Leah’s head lolled, and a faint moan escaped her throat; the man lifted her chin with his fist, inspecting her with an inscrutable expression. His hand ran carefully through her hair, smoothing it back from her face—then grasped a fistful of dirty blonde curls and jerked her head back until her chin pointed to the ceiling. His other hand slowly raised the knife—

“NO!” Kat screamed. 

—and the blade flashed as it plunged downward.  

 

15: Part One: Chapter Fifteen

“Aidan…?” 

The quiet voice, the soft touch of a hand on his arm, dragged Aidan slowly into consciousness as if through a vast expanse of deep, still water. Gradually, like grains of sand trickling through an hourglass, the details of his surroundings presented themselves: the feel of cool sand against his back, the low rumble and hiss of waves breaking onto the shore, the sound of the wind in the palms. And pain—soreness, throbbing, burning—across every inch of him, binding him like a leaden cloak wrapped around his limbs. He tried to move, but all he managed to do was ease a low groan out of his throat. 

“Aidan? Are you all right?”

“‘M fine….” Every word, every breath, dragged through his throat like broken glass. “What…?”

He opened his eyes at last to find Alaine leaning over him, her damp hair tickling his nose, her blue eyes filled with concern. Could he possibly look as terrible as he felt? His face burned hot under that piercing gaze, and, gritting his teeth against the pain, he pushed her aside and forced himself to sit up. 

The sun had risen over a beautiful, tranquil day that showed no sign at all of the violence of the previous night. The ocean was still and calm, with only the slightest ripple along the shoreline to give any indication that the moons still pulled on the tides. All that had happened the night before might have even been a dream—if he had woken in Kiindine with his sisters instead of on a tiny island in the middle of the Sunset Sea with a princess and a magic rock. The Stone, he was relieved to see, was still wrapped in a scrap of his shirt and clenched tightly in his fist…though he was almost immediately angry with himself for feeling relieved at all. The sooner he could be rid of the thing, the better. 

Alaine settled back on her ankles as if the sand were a silk cushion, though she seemed anything but relaxed; her hands kept brushing her hair over her shoulder and wringing it as if to squeeze out what little water remained. Every few seconds her fingers would comb through her curls, but when they snagged on a tangle, Alaine would pull them away, as if only then realizing what she was doing. 

“What is it now?” he grumbled. “God and Goddess, don’t tell me it’s more pirates….”

“Well—it—it could be. I don’t know.” She gestured toward the rest of the island, chewing on her full bottom lip. “I thought I heard something, but….”

Aidan hauled himself up to his feet before she could finish and climbed back up the sand  dune, keeping as low to the ground as he could. He had thought himself incapable of moving another inch, but—not for the first time in recent days—he had surprised himself; the rush of fear through his limbs helped with that, as well as the nauseating dread that dropped into his stomach like a cannonball. If there were pirates here, if the pirates had abandoned their ship to come and find them….

But there was nothing on the other side of the dunes, nor further down the shore, nor—he stood up and squinted toward the horizon to be sure—anything moving at all, not for a league in any direction. Nothing remained of the pirate ship but a few stray splinters from the crash that had washed up on the sand in the night, not even a speck on the horizon. It was calm, quiet, peaceful…he doubted that anything lived here at all, even a lizard or a bird. 

Just as he turned to back, however, something made him stop and listen hard. Was this what Alaine had heard? No, that couldn’t be, for it was not a sound—it was more a feeling, as if something were signaling to him that his other senses simply could not interpret. His ears ached ever so slightly, as if in response to a piercing, high-pitched note, and he could feel a subtle shift in the air, a movement, though not quite a breeze…. But then it passed, as quickly as it had come, with nothing in the world around him to suggest that anything had changed at all. He turned back toward their hiding place, shaking his head to rid his ears of the odd sensation. 

“Nothing.” He slid back down the dune, managing, to his relief, to land on his feet; he did not think his dignity could take another blow. His legs supported him just long enough to walk back to Alaine and sit beside her. “Nothing at all.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Alaine breathed, closing her eyes for a moment. Her hands were still moving through her hair, but now they were following a twisting, under-over pattern that he recognized from his sisters as she began to braid it. “I thought…I’m so sorry, Aidan, I thought they’d come back for us…. Oh.” Her hands paused as her perfect posture slackened ever so briefly; by the time Aidan had noticed the change, she had straightened again, her hands resuming their braiding as if the ritual comforted her. “Never, never, in my entire life, Aidan, I have never—those awful men—I have never been treated so badly, no one would ever have dared in Kiindine—they threatened me, they struck me, just look at me—”

And Aidan did look at her, one eyebrow raised, with such a quelling expression that her voice faltered and died mid-sentence; she looked away and resumed her braiding, her cheeks reddening. Aidan, however, was not willing to let her transgression slide so easily. Something hot and poisonous was rising inside him, burning his chest and his throat, until it was all he could do not to slap her himself; he had never been so furious in his life, not once in a lifetime filled with fights and threats of death and injustice on top of injustice. 

“I can’t believe you,” he snarled. “That’s the worst you’ve ever been treated? All he did was slap you and grab your hair and—and what, hurt your feelings? Rip your dress? Look at me!” He could not see himself, but even the simple action of spreading his hands made his back burn; the cuts and welts all over him still stung from the salt water and the sand embedded into every inch of his skin, and he imagined that if he somehow found a looking glass on this deserted island, he would see his own eyes staring out of a broken, bleeding, bruise-covered lump. “This is all your fault, all of it! If you’d just kept your big mouth shut—if you weren’t so pampered that you can’t handle a normal person’s life for a few days—what could there possibly be for you to complain about, huh, Princess? What, are you hungry? Well guess what—what you feel right now is how my little sisters feel every single day, and me, and everyone else that lives in our part of your city. Nobody cooks for us, we have to find food for ourselves, and we’re lucky if we can every day—my sisters are lucky not to have starved to death! If not for me they would have years ago! And now….”

But he could not bring himself to continue: Alaine had started to tremble all over, tears dripping silently down her cheeks, and the sight was too pitiful to endure. 

“I—I’m s-sorry,” she gulped, and to his horror, she began to sob. “I truly am, Aidan, I n-never m-meant for any of this to h-happen, I s-s-swear….”

“All right, all right,” he cut across her, but gently; she had, he felt, suffered enough for awhile. It wasn’t her fault that she had never experienced hunger or pain the way he had, nor was it her fault that his little sisters were all alone. She was a princess, and he was a peasant, and neither of them could be blamed for what they were. “You don’t have to cry, Alaine…. Please don’t tell me that no one’s ever yelled at you before.”

Alaine gave a gurgling little laugh, wiping at her eyes with her sleeve. “They haven’t,” she admitted. “No one ever dared. This whole trip has just been—it has been—God and Goddess, every day is like this for you?”

“Well…no.” Aidan had to smile at that, though he imagined it looked more like a grimace. “Being kidnapped by pirates isn’t normal for me either. But getting beaten, or someone wanting to kill you—that happens a lot.”

“It can’t possibly.” Alaine looked sick at the very idea. 

“Oh, yes,” Aidan confirmed. “Your own soldiers do that much every other day. It’s fun for them.”

“Aidan, that is not a funny joke!” she scolded him, clearly horrified. “Our soldiers are commanded to protect our people, they would never be allowed to treat the common folk that way!” 

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” said Aidan with a shrug. “They do it all the time.”

“That’s….” Alaine looked away, frowning, her hands moving unconsciously back to her unfinished braid. “Disturbing,” she muttered at last, so quietly that Aidan wondered if she were talking to herself. 

Aidan said nothing in reply; the truth was the truth, and if it disturbed her, well, there was nothing he could do about that. He leaned back against the dune and watched her finish braiding her hair, tying the end in a neat little knot to finish it off. His sister’s hair had never been quite long enough for that, but even with the braid, the knot of hair still swung past her waist. 

“Well….” She gave a deep sigh, chewing on her full bottom lip as she looked around. “What do we do now, Aidan?”

A laugh burst out of him unbidden, a sour laugh that sounded more like a cough to him. “Me? Why me? You give the orders around here, Princess.” 

“But you….” She hesitated before she spoke again; Aidan could see that whatever she was trying to say bothered her more than she wanted to admit. “You know how to do these things, Aidan. How to survive. I’m afraid I haven’t the faintest idea what to do.”

“No, see….” He could not believe he was having this conversation—or with whom he was having it. If someone had told him a week ago what he would be doing now…. “I know how to steal, or—or how to run away from a fight you can’t win. But this…. I’ve never been anywhere like this! I’ve never even left Kiindine! You must’ve been to all sorts of places!”

“Oh, yes, all over the world—but never alone, it was never allowed! I’ve never been anywhere without guards, or servants, or—wh-what I mean is, your adventures must have taught you how to find food, at least, or build a fire….”

Aidan snorted. “Adventures? Do you mean stealing food from the docks without getting caught, or pulling a knife on a bunch of thugs who’re trying to kill you?”

“Well, both, obviously.” She was starting to get irritated with him now—as if he were the one being foolish. 

“Would you look at that,” he said sarcastically. “Every day of my life’s been an adventure, and I didn’t even know it. Look, we’ve just gotta…. Can you read?”

“Can I read?” She looked at him as if he had just asked her if she had gills. “Of course I can read, I’m a crown princess of the Angardian Empire!” 

“Okay, okay….” He held up his hands in surrender. “I just didn’t know if girls weren’t allowed to read or something, I don’t know what you people do. Anyway, haven’t you read anything about this?”

“Well….” She gave it a moment’s thought, her hands moving unconsciously across her skirt to smooth it. “Perhaps some bits and pieces, but nothing quite like this…. How about you?”

“Oh, yeah.” He braced his hand against the palm and pushed himself to his feet, gritting his teeth against the violent protests from what felt like every inch of his body. “I’ve got a whole big stack of those books back in my library at home. Would’ve brought ‘em, but I must’ve given ‘em away to some needy kids, I couldn’t find ‘em anywhere.”

Alaine rose as well, dusting sand from her dress with a disapproving expression. “Aidan,” she scolded him, there’s no need to—”

“Hush!” Aidan held out a hand to silence her. 

“Excuse me? How d—?”

“Shut up!”

Alaine fell blessedly, though petulantly, quiet, and Aidan turned away from her, his ears straining against the oppressive silence. He had heard it again, the sound that was not a sound, the wind that was not wind, the strange, high buzzing or whistling or whining that keened just out of his range of hearing. But it was louder now, more insistent, and this time, it refused to fade.  

“Do you hear that?” Aidan spoke in a voice no louder than a whisper, his head swiveling as he tried to locate the source of the noise. 

Alaine paused for a moment, frowning—but then she lunged forward and grabbed his wrist. “Aidan, that’s it—that’s what I heard earlier! That odd humming sound! What is that?”

“I don’t know….” He turned toward the center of the island, peering through the palms and the scrub. “But it’s coming from over there, somewhere…. Stay here.”

“But—”

Aidan knew she would argue, and did not care; he turned his back on her and strode away without waiting for her reply. If she had any sense at all, she would realize the danger she was in and stay out of sight—and if she didn’t, well, that was no longer his problem nor his responsibility. A more pressing concern lay ahead: the incessant humming—for lack of a better word—coming from somewhere up ahead. He pointed his feet toward the shore and darted forward in a half-crouch, his hand tightening around the Stone like it once would have around the hilt of his knife, his eyes raking the sand and the sea for the source of the mysterious sound. 

16: Part One: Chapter Sixteen

Leah died without a sound, save for a whisper of escaping breath that Katrina heard clearly in the sudden hush. 

Kat saw the blood, heard it gushing into the crystal bowl with thick, sickening splashing sounds, but even then, she did not realize what had happened; it was only when the splashing slowed to dripping, when the suited man gave Leah a little shake before tossing her limp body aside, when Leah tumbled headfirst down the steps of the dais to land in a broken sprawl at their base, that Katrina saw the dripping red slash below her snow-white face and closed eyes and realized that she was dead. She opened her mouth to scream, but her voice failed her; the room was suddenly airless, spinning around and around while she fought to breathe like a landed fish. 

That odd humming sound, vibrating incessantly against her ears just out of her range of hearing, stopped abruptly, leaving a silence so oppressive that the very lights seemed to dim. Katrina looked up—and a flash of bright purplish light blinded her, forcing a shriek from her throat as she cringed and squeezed her eyes shut. There came a pulsing, crackling roar, like a wildfire racing by, and Katrina, squinting against the bright splotches decorating her vision, saw fire erupt from the middle of the archway, spreading outward until every inch inside the arch was ablaze. But it was no ordinary fire: it was heatless, sourceless, and a brilliant amethyst purple, so bright as to bring a hellish glow to every object in the room and cast dancing demon shadows across the floor from where the suited man stood.

Katrina, shivering uncontrollably, stared at the man as he stared at the archway; she could only see his back, dark and indistinct against the flames, but she could tell that he was gaping at the fire with the same shock and disbelief that she felt; clearly, he had not expected this to happen. Slowly, timidly, one wrinkled hand reached out toward the flame, coming within an inch of touching it—but then he withdrew and stepped back, speaking in his native tongue. He was speaking, shouting over the roaring flames, and though she could not understand the words, the tone made his meaning clear: whatever he was doing, it was working. 

Katrina’s kidnapper pulled her to her feet and shoved her forward; she stumbled, her feet refusing to move properly, but he merely picked her up by the back of her shirt and forced her to move forward. The man grew closer, larger, and his eyes seemed to burn with excitement and lust as they fixed upon Katrina. And that knife remained in his hand, still dripping with Leah’s blood. She could feel it on her own throat as if it were really touching her skin, could feel it slicing razor-sharp through her flesh, could feel her blood spilling onto the stones like poor Leah’s….

Help, she thought wildly. Somebody…anybody…do something, please….

Slowly, inexorably, her captor pushed her toward the man, but it was not until her booted feet tripped over the first step that she found the strength to resist. She tried to twist free, a hoarse scream tearing from her throat and burning as if she’s swallowed broken glass. Her captor ignored her utterly, even when she landed a kick on his shin—but the man, shouting with growing urgency, reached out with the speed of a striking viper and snatched a handful of her hair. Katrina screamed louder still as he dragged her onto the dais and twisted her head toward the ground, forcing her to crash face-first in front of the archway. Pain exploded at her temple, and she felt blood seeping from her broken skin as the world swirled around her in a blindingly-bright blur of every shade of purple—but no, that was the fire, swirling inward now, speeding up, tainted with darker and lighter streaks throughout. And behind it, through it, she could see glimpses of places she had never seen before, both peopled and deserted, cities and wastelands, mountains and forests and deserts and vast expanses of sand and coral beneath the sea, each one winking into existence for only a moment before being devoured again by the flames—but the voices did not disappear. She could hear them whispering in her ears, so loudly that they drowned out the roaring of the fire, voices rough and lyric, young and old, male and female, speaking languages she had never heard….

Then a hand tangled in her hair again, and with a jerk and a scream that even she did not hear, she felt herself pulled up to her knees and forced to kneel, staring down at the rippling crimson contents of the silver bowl. 

The man was shouting again, his grip painfully tight on Katrina’s hair; she squirmed and tried to pull away, but the pain in her scalp made her eyes water. Her head was forced back, and, staring into the void of purple flame, she screamed with all the force and breath that she had, screaming louder still as the hand gripping the knife rose before her—

A sudden flash seared her eyes—sunlight, bright and hot, such as she had not seen since she had left home. A hole appeared in the center of the archway, a window, expanding to consume the flames, and through it, she saw sand and sea, palms swaying against blue sky, and a human silhouette running toward her, arm outstretched….

A hand reached through the window and grabbed her wrist, pulling her forward; the man pulled back, and there was a struggle, Katrina kicking and shrieking, the man fighting to keep his grip, the disembodied hand fighting harder still. Then the fingers in her hair were ripped away, and she was pitched headfirst into blinding whiteness, falling, falling….

17: Part One: Chapter Seventeen

The island was deserted, silent, lifeless, possessing little more than the soft whisper of the ocean to cover up the sound—or whatever it might be. Aidan’s ears felt more tender and sensitive than they ever had at even the loudest of sounds back home as they tried to follow the odd humming, which had begun to take on a strange quality: it was swelling and ebbing, rising and falling, strengthening and weakening, like a music-string touched at different spots as it wobbled back and forth. 

Over dunes and jagged rocks he went, following the topography of the island as it changed according to the whims of the sea: on the southern side, where the waves crashed higher and harder, the rocks were stark and naked, and tidepools flourishing with life thrived in the spaces between them; on the northern side, where the water was gentler upon the shore, there was only sand, vast expanses of it, dotted with shells and seaweed and the occasional scuttling crab. Following the sound in a straight line westward, the ground that meandered up to his feet was ever-changing, though he never found himself very far from either edge of the narrow island. 

Eventually, however, the island widened, and he, following the southern shore, soon lost sight of the sand completely. The sound was coming from somewhere northwest of him, but the rocks around him climbed to a winding cliff face from where he thought he might be able to catch a glimpse of his surroundings from above. So he followed the shoreline as it fell away below him, climbing the rocks to the rough, uneven surface of the cliff, the edge dropping off with such a slick slope that he was afraid to go too close. The cliff was not high—it rose just above the palms that swayed amidst the sea of sand stretching northward—but from its summit, panting slightly from the effort of climbing, he could see almost the entire island. He could even see the ocean on the other side of the sand, which curved away in a crescent-moon shape before disappearing beneath the waves. To the south and west, he saw only water, endless and unbroken, except for—

Aidan quickly dropped to his hands and knees and crawled over to the cliff’s edge; the exercise made his cracked hands ache and the scabs on his wrists break open and bleed, but he had caught a glimpse of something bobbing in the water before it disappeared from sight, and he refused to let his own clumsy city feet get him killed before he had a chance to see what it was. He crept to the edge of the cliff, looked down, and saw…a boat. He looked away, rubbed salt spray from his eye, blinked hard, and looked again. There it still was, a weather-beaten dinghy half-full of water, its oars shoved clumsily beneath the seat. 

His first thought: Thank God and Goddess—we aren’t trapped here after all.

His second thought: We’re not alone. 

The back of Aidan’s neck prickled at the thought of this quiet little island, seeming so harmless and serene, harboring another fugitive—or worse, one of the pirates trying to hunt them down. He looked around and saw no one and nothing that lived, not even a crab or a bird, on the entirety of the island. But he could not see everything, and if Alaine could hide from his line of sight, so could anyone else. To the flames with the strange noises; it was no longer safe to stay here. The best thing to do would be to find a way down to the boat, take it to Alaine’s hiding place, and row with her back to the mainland before—

A piercing scream rent the air, startling him so badly that he nearly tumbled off the cliff into the ocean. A woman’s scream. 

Alaine!

Down from the cliff again he scrambled, giving no thought or care when the rocks scraped his skin or tore his clothes, jumping down where he could even when the fall sent sharp pains through his bare feet and battered legs. The screaming continued, panicked and shrill, as he tumbled down a pebble-littered slope and ran full-out across the hard ground as it turned slowly to golden sand. It came not from the east, where he had left Alaine, but from the north—burn her, I told her to stay put!—and he turned his aching feet toward the source of the screaming, which, knowing that dragon-skinned sneak, he should have expected…. 

He scrambled up the side of the dune, elbow-deep in sand, and came face-to-face with the source of the humming. 

The thing was nearly a dozen paces away already, yet still Aidan stumbled backward, tripping and falling onto one knee in the deep sand. It was a hole in the air, ringed with purple fire, hovering above the sand as if held in place by invisible wraiths—and where the other side of the island should have been visible through it, the sand and the sea, there was only blackness. Aidan had never seen its like before, but he knew exactly what it was: A dragon’s eye!

But before he could flee, before he could move at all, the screaming began again—and through the eye, he saw blurred figures moving around in torchlight, struggling, fighting, and he smelled blood and smoke, and beneath the screaming he heard a man’s voice shouting in excitement. 

“It’s working—it’s working—Gremalt, help me hold her, quick, before we lose the connection! Hurry!”

The blurred figures were sharpening, slowly, as if the window were unfogging, as if the eye were focusing, and Aidan saw two burly men, armed and armored, rush forward to help another man, tall and slender and oddly dressed, drag a girl forward and force her to her knees, a girl he did not know. Behind her, he saw another girl, yellow-haired, sprawled broken and still amidst the pool of blood collecting beneath her slashed throat. And as the strangely-dressed man raised his blade again, as the girl screamed for all she was worth, Aidan ran forward, pushing through air that seemed suddenly to be congealing around him, and dove through the window. 

The air through the window struck him like a wall of stone, beating at every inch of his body so hard that for a moment, he thought he had run straight into an illusion and fallen facefirst into the sea to be pummeled by the waves. An icy chill submerged him, and though his lungs heaved, he could get no air from the darkness that surrounded him. But half of him was still warm and free, and he lunged for the girl with the frantic desperation of a drowning man, dragging her away from her captors; they resisted, and the shrieking girl was trapped, but Aidan grabbed her with both hands, planted his heels, and heaved—

Then, without one final pull, the girl was torn free, and the two of them tumbled backward onto the sand of his own world. 

18: Part One: Chapter Eighteen

The suited man did not release the girl willingly, but when she was finally torn from his grasp, he took a step back from the portal and held up a hand so his henchmen would do the same. For a moment, he simply through the oval of purple fire, expecting the tropical island before him to disappear—but the fire burned feverishly on, and through it, he saw the boy and the girl scramble across the sand and disappear into the world where he was born.

“It worked.” This he said not to his henchmen, but to himself—and to his surprise, he heard English instead of his native tongue. Truly, he had been in this world too long. “Gremalt! Koldig! Lead the way!” 

“Ayaë, Vaardvist.” Gremalt, the larger of the two, moved forward at once with a respectful gesture. But Koldig hesitated. 

“But Vaardvist—the girl—”

“Leave her.” In his exhilaration, the man could think of nothing else but stepping onto that sand and breathing in the air of his own world. “We no longer need her. Gentlemen, today I return home—and the two of you will join me, to stand by my side in eternal glory. Come!” 

The men ran forward with no further hesitation; they knew better than to question him twice. They gathered in front of the portal, bumping shoulders in their rush to be the first to obey, and after a moment’s struggle, first Gremalt, then Koldig stepped over the threshold and onto the island beyond. 

The suited man watched them go, but made no effort to follow in haste. He reached up with his bloodied hands and loosened his tie, letting the silk garment fall in a fluid flutter to the ground. His jacket followed, then his belt and watch—all the accoutrements of this world that he no longer needed, had never wanted. He took a deep, slow breath as he approached the portal, steeling himself, reassured by the sights of his unwilling test subjects, Gremalt and Koldig, standing tall and unharmed on the other side. Then he stepped through the portal, leaving every thought and trace of that world behind him. 

End of Part One. 

 

A/N: Don't get your hopes up - the "parts" are utterly meaningless and there will probably be over a hundred of them before they're eventually booted out. 

Thanks for reading! I'm stopping after Part 2 Chapter One and leaving it up as a sample - if you want more, be sure to leave feedback! Otherwise I just assume no one's reading and the story dies! 

~CRH 

19: Part Two: Chapter One

Aidan wasted no time on introductions; the moment he sucked in a lungful of sweet, life-giving air, he jumped back to his feet from amidst the dunes and ran, coughing up the sand that had come as the price for the beautiful air that he would never take for granted again. He pulled the girl with him, leading her around the dune and back toward the shelter of the palms, refusing to slow until he reached them—at which point he found a large rock, dragged the girl behind it, and slapped his hand across her mouth. She cried out in protest, but he ignored her, looking behind him—not at her, with her wild eyes and her continuing squeaks of protest, but at the dragon’s eye. If he craned his neck, he could catch a glimpse of amethyst fire far away, but he heard nothing more, and no one seemed to be following them. Still, he waited a long, breathless minute before he finally released the girl. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning and looking at her at last. “Are you all…?” 

But his words died in his throat, for the girl was clearly not all right; in fact, what he saw before him sickened him so badly that he did not know whether to hug her or run away from her as quickly as he could. She was tall for a woman—or perhaps a girl; all he could say for sure was that she was around the same age as Alaine—with light brown skin and dark eyes, just like him, though her hair was a much lighter brown. And, like him, she bore bleeding welts from chains on her ankles and her wrists—which were still tangled in the rope that had bound her, though something, likely the fire around the dragon’s eye, had singed the rope straight down the middle until a piece fell away with every move she made. Her clothes, too, were bloodstained and torn, or what was left of them—she had been wearing, he guessed, a corset of some sort beneath her dress and overskirt, but all that was left now was most of the corset and just enough of the overskirt to cover her halfway down to her thighs. She had clearly been through much, almost as much as he had, but…she was a girl. Somebody’s daughter, somebody’s lover, maybe somebody’s sister. He could only imagine what monsters like that would want with her. 

The girl did not answer him; instead she looked him over, her confusion and terror clear, staring at him as if he were a monster. He reached for her, gently, but she flinched away, the fingers of her right hand digging into her left upper arm. A furtive glance was enough for him to confirm that she was injured: a bone beneath the skin of her shoulder was jutting out. 

“I—here, let me—”

But the girl recoiled from his touch once more, her boots digging into the gravel as she pushed herself back against the rock with a whimper. 

Aidan hesitated; the girl clearly wanted to be left alone, and after what he’d seen, he could not blame her, and wished that he really could leave her at peace. But he couldn’t just leave her here—not with those men hunting for them both. He rose on his knees and craned his neck again, scanning the trees around them, but there was no one there—at least, no one that he could see. 

“Look—we have to go.” He crouched in front of the girl and looked directly into her eyes as he spoke to be sure that she was listening. “You need to come with me, I can get you out of here, away from those—oh, no.” He bent his head and ran his fingers through his hair, suppressing an exhausted groan. “You can’t understand me, can you?”

He looked up at the girl, who continued to stare at him with a blank look on her face. He sighed and shook his head. There was no time for this. If he could get through that window, then so could that man, or anyone else for that matter, and they could be after him any second—no, after her. She they would want back for whatever dark ritual he had interrupted; him they would just cut down, as easily as stomping on a trapped lizard. 

“Okay—hey, we—we have to go.” He rose to his feet, though hunching to keep his cover, and offered her his hand. “C’mon,” he said. “It’ll all be okay. I promise.” 

The girl shied away, looking from him to his hand as if wary of some sort of trick. But at last, something about his stance—on his feet, tense, strained, looking constantly over his shoulder toward the dragon’s eye—conveyed the urgency of the situation and convinced her that it was time to move. She climbed to her feet on her own, her head whipping from him to the dragon’s eye and back, her hand still gripping her shoulder. Aidan, giving up, slipped back under the cover of the palms, his eyes on the rim of purple fire in the distance—and to his relief, she followed, stumbling along in his wake on unsteady legs. 

Aidan was dreading the run back to Alaine’s hiding place, knowing that they would have to traverse the open sands more than once on their way back to the island—but before he could open his mouth to curse Alaine and wish yet again that he was not stuck with such a burden, Alaine climbed out from behind the rocks up ahead and ran toward them, startling him and the girl both. 

“Aidan!” She skidded to a halt in the sand, panting and looking from Aidan to the girl in clear bewilderment. “What happened? Who’s this? I heard—”

“Long story.” He cut across her with an impatient wave of his hand. “We have to go, now. I found a boat.”

“A boat? Did she ship come back?”

“No, it’s a dinghy—one of the little rowboats.”

“Really? But how—?”

“No time! Follow me—she’s coming too, keep an eye on her, will you? She doesn’t speak Visk.”

“Oh, really?” Alaine took the girl by the hand as they followed Aidan and began chatting away as if they were childhood friends, ignoring the way the girl flinched at her touch. “Mäs urdenviid Eyardüne? Na vaasik—?”

“Alaine!” Aidan hissed. “Stop it, we’re in a hurry!” 

Alaine, affronted, grumbled something about manners, but to his relief, she let go of the girl and fell silent. Aidan led them along the rocky shore, taking the path that skirted the base of the cliffs, ushering the girls along as quickly as possible. The path soon dead-ended directly into the water—but Aidan marched straight into the waves, eager to put as much distance between himself and the dragon’s eye as possible. Alaine, however, hesitated on the shore, the girl skulking behind her with her neck craned and her eyes wide to stare at the trees they’d left behind. 

“Aidan, where’s the—?”

“Behind the cliff—c’mon, Alaine, we have to move, now!” 

“Where? I don’t see—”

“I just saw it, it was just there, and it’s our only chance off this damn island before we get killed, now go, go!” 

Alaine lingered a moment more, her mouth open to make some comment about getting her dress or her shoes wet, he was sure—but then she seemed to think better of it. She slipped out of her shoes, held them primly in one hand, and strode into the water as if she were walking behind her father in a royal procession. The girl followed, albeit in a more clumsy fashion, and the three of them waded single-file, backs against the rocks, and followed the cliffside westward. 

The dinghy appeared just as the water grew waist-deep, the waves pushing against them with alarming force, the rocks beneath them dropping sharply off into the depths of the ocean just a finger’s length away from their feet. With no rope or anchor to secure it, the dinghy was drifting slowly back out to sea, and Aidan groaned in despair at the sight of it slipping out of their reach—but Alaine dove gracefully into the ocean before he could say a word, her sleek blonde head emerging from the water just behind the dingy as she grabbed the scrap of rope dangling from one side and pulled. She swam back toward them, and Aidan, so full of relief and gratitude that he actually considered thanking her aloud, leaned out and snatched the dinghy from her as soon as he could reach it. He helped her back onto their rapidly receding ledge with new admiration for her decisiveness and grace, evident even when she was standing motionless, soaked to the skin, half-submerged in the ocean, and bearing a great resemblance to a drowned rat. 

Aidan clambered into the boat first, keeping his hand firmly on the rocks to steady it and draw it in closer. He reached for Alaine once seated, but she placed a gentle hand on the back of the girl’s waist and led her forward, helping Aidan guide her into the boat. Alaine climbed in last without help, a little unsteady but showing no sign of nerves or distress. As soon as she was seated and settling her skirts, Aidan pushed against the rocks with all his strength, grabbed the oars, and heaved. The dinghy rocked and trembled drunkenly as it tossed back and forth under the power of the waves, clumsy and unwieldy under Aidan’s guidance, but slowly, painfully, it began to move in the general direction of the sea. And Aidan watched the island with the girls as it grew smaller and smaller on the horizon. 

Alaine was quiet for an unusually long time, watching the island recede, before she finally spoke up. “Aidan, I think I can see the mainland, up ahead. Can you take us in that direction?”

“Yeah,” Aidan grunted in reply. He held one oar still in the water as he moved the other, turning the boat in a slow semicircle like a three-legged tortoise. When it was pointing vaguely toward what he thought was north, he began to row again, keeping an eye on the island as they moved so they did not drift too close to it again. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the blurry gray line of the mainland up ahead, growing closer in tiny increments as he rowed. Alaine, watching the island, seemed deep in thought, but not worried—and why should she be? She, at least, could swim; if the boat were knocked over by a wave, she could make it back to the island just fine, and could probably bribe those men to take her home. But for himself, he would not rest easy until they were safely on shore, with that island long out of sight. 

The sea, unfortunately, did not seem as eager as he to make this happen. The sea seemed still and calm from a distance, but even the small waves that barely disturbed the water’s surface pushed against the boat with more force than he had the strength to fight. No matter how hard he tried to keep the boat on a straight path, hey drifted west with every stroke of the oars through the water. 

After a time, as the island faded and Aidan began to see the outlines of trees forming on the mainland, Alaine gave a delicate, weary sigh and turned away from the island to survey the rest of the sea with her chin lifted high. 

“No other boats,” she noted. “The pirates have long gone, it seems. Aidan, what happened back there?”

Aidan opened his mouth, then closed it again, suppressing a shudder. “Later,” he muttered. He could not speak of it now, not while the girl sat right in front of him, looking around in terror. “We’re almost there. Almost to shore.”

“And…and then what?”

Aidan looked up, and Alaine was peeking over the girl’s shoulder, her blue eyes large and full of concern. Aidan knew that she was asking about more than the night’s itinerary. Then what? So short, so simple, yet it was the hardest question he’d ever been asked. 

But he had to put on a brave face—if not for her, then for the girl, who was very clearly going to be of no help to them at all. “Don’t worry,” he said firmly. “We’ll have a nice long rest and get going in the morning, and everything will work itself out.” God and Goddess, if only he’d had a copper for every time he’d had to say that; if he had, he would never have needed to say it in the first place. 

Normally, that was enough to persuade his sisters, but Alaine looked anything but convinced. Still, she said nothing; she merely pursed her lips, eyeing him with a severe expression, then turned to the girl, who jumped at the sound of her voice. 

“There, do you see? Everything’s going to be just f— Oh, right. I forgot. Now, what language do you speak? Na vaasik Sorrenedai? No? Her coloring’s a bit like yours, Aidan, where are you from?”

“Kiindine. Alaine, will you—?”

“No, I mean your ancestry. Surely your mother and father aren’t from Angard? Or at least not Old Angard?”

“You’ll have to take it up with them,” Aidan snapped. “Will you stop talking to her like a two-year-old? For all we know she’s older than you.”

“All right,” sniffed Alaine, and turned back to the girl with an air of weary patience. “I’m only trying to help. So she’s not from Sorrene, or Eyardünid….”

Aidan, concentrating on rowing, stopped listening to her as she tried string after string of incomprehensible gibberish, to all of which the girl responded with blank silence. The mainland was drawing slowly closer behind them, and if they could just reach the shelter of the trees…. God and Goddess, he felt he could sleep for days. They could not be far from Kiindine, and with a little luck, he would soon see his sisters again, and be free of the Stone, and forget any of this ever happened…. 

He paused to catch his breath, lifting the oars safely out of the water, and touched the Stone, still hanging from its thong around his neck. He had to get rid of it. It was the cause of all this trouble, all this mayhem; he would not have been surprised if it had drawn him to the dragon’s eye, or helped it to appear. He needed trouble in his life like he needed an arrow to the knee, and arcana never brought anything but trouble. Still, the thought of giving it away, or even letting it out of his sight….

The boat rammed into something solid, pitching all of them forward with startled shouts; Aidan, sitting up and looking wildly around, saw sand and pebbles and scrubby bushes and realized that they’d reached the shore. He released the Stone at once, feeling uneasy—he could not shake the feeling that he had done that, somehow—but lost no time climbing out of the boat and wading onto solid ground. The girls followed without waiting for his help, and the two girls waited, watching nervously, as he kicked the dinghy away, hard, several times, until the bottom finally scraped free of the gritty sand. The dinghy drifted away, and they stood on the shore for a minute longer, watching it bob back and forth as the waves took it out to sea, drifting westward as it did. Aidan was not sorry to see it go; on the contrary, its absence meant that anyone on that island would have a hard time tracking them here, and even if that were not the case, he never wanted to see it or another boat ever again. 

Once it was gone, he turned back to the girls, and the three of them stumbled in silence across the gritty sand and into the shelter of the trees. Aidan, spotting a small clear space amongst the trees, beelined for it and collapsed onto the rough, scratchy, half-dead grass, which felt, at that moment, like the softest mattress upon which he had ever laid his head. 

Dimly, he was aware of Alaine and the other girl settling on the grass near him, the girl keeping a safe distance between herself and them. He opened one eye and saw Alaine sitting primly on her crossed ankles and rearranging her skirts around her. The girl hovered in his peripheral vision, hugging her knees and looking around herself as if she feared she were trapped in a dream. Then, without warning, she began to cry.

“Oh, no—no, don’t,” Alaine wailed, and crawled over to the girl’s side at once. Aidan sat bolt upright, but remained where he was, tense and anxious; he could not stand to see her crying, he hated to see any girl cry, but he did not know what to do. Alaine tried to embrace the girl, speaking soothingly in her ear, but the girl hunched her shoulders and shied away, crying all the harder. Her whimpers turned to deep, forceful sobs of the worst type, the kind forced from the throats of the truly, agonizingly miserable, rendered utterly powerless by their own misfortune. 

“It’s all right…it’s all right….” Alaine did not try to touch the girl again, but she did not seem able to tear herself away. Her hands kept reaching out to hug the girl, or pet her hair, only to snatch them away again. She drew away suddenly, her sympathetic eyes turning shrewd. “Aidan, her shoulder isn’t broken.”

“What? Really?” 

“No, it’s just dislocated, by the look of it.”

“You know how to fix it?” 

“In theory, yes. I read it in a book once. If we hold the arm at the right angle and push, it should pop back in, correct? Will you help? I’m not sure I’m strong enough.”

“Sure….” Reluctant as he was to touch the poor girl, he could not stand to see her face twisted in pain. He crawled forward and hovered nearby as Alaine reached out and took the girl’s arm gently in her hands. The girl, to Aidan’s surprise, allowed this—though why anyone would ever fear Alaine was beyond his understanding. Judging by her clenched jaw and the way she braced herself against the ground, she seemed to know what was coming. 

“All right.” Alaine raised the girl’s arm and positioned it just so before beckoning Aidan forward with a jerk of her chin. He scooted closer and took the girl’s arm in a careful grip, placing his hands just above Alaine’s.  “On the count of three. One—two—three!” 

Aidan gave the girl’s arm a forceful shove, and at once he felt the bones of her arm tremble as the arm snapped back into the socket, heard the joint click, heard the girl’s startled shriek of pain. He let go at once, and the girl recoiled from them, her hand flying to her shoulder—but he could tell from her expression that the pain had disappeared. 

“There we are.” Alaine, her hand still resting on the girl’s arm, gave her a comforting smile even as the girl jerked away from her again. “Everything’s going to be all right, I promise.”

“Alaine, she can’t speak Visk,”

“I know that, but she can understand the tone at least. Oh, poor thing, she’s shaking…. Here, lie down on the grass, we’ll all go to sleep, it’ll be better in the morning, you’ll see….”

The girl was still crying, and the moment Alaine released her, she curled back up and hugged her knees again as if protecting herself from them. But her crying had lessened somewhat, and Aidan could see that she was trying to calm herself. 

“Can’t you do anything?” he asked Alaine in frustration. 

Alaine shook her head. “Can you blame her, after all she’s been through?” she said quietly. She backed away, making a gesture to Aidan to do the same, until the two of them were a good two paces away from her, as far as the little clearing would allow. Alaine looked back at the girl, her expression grieved, and Aidan wondered if she, too, were imagining her sisters curled up and crying like that. “Poor girl…if we go to sleep, she won’t run away, will she, Aidan?”

Secretly, Aidan hoped so—they would have a hard enough time finding food for themselves, let alone a third person who, he knew, would be no help to them whatsoever, only a burden. But Alaine would not see the sense in this, even if he did want to risk burdening her with the grim details of their situation. 

“She might,” he said instead, choosing his words carefully. “But if she does, that’s her choice, Alaine. She’s a grown woman, she can go wherever she wants, and maybe now that she’s on the mainland she can make her way home. We can’t make her stay other than tying her up, and we’d be worse than those men if we did that.”

“Men? What men?”

Aidan shook his head, refusing to answer. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow. Let’s just get some rest….” 

Alaine gave him that calculating look again, but to his intense relief, she said nothing; she merely lifted her skirts, crawled over to a softer patch of grass, and lay down with her head in her arms. Aidan did the same, stretching out on his back and shifting until the uncomfortable ground felt slightly less so, and stared up at the late afternoon sunlight drifting through the trees, thinking that he would never get to sleep, that there was too much to fill his mind, too much to absorb….