Heat began to rise in him, too, encouraged through their Bond, inspired by her action. It prickled on his head, radiating into and out of his horn. With another bellow, he plunged into the mass of bodies attacking them, his horn glowing as if freshly forged. Sweeping his head left a mesmerizing streak of orange in his vision, and he cut through bodies with little resistance. Mixing with the blood and sweat came the acrid stench of cooked flesh, of fumes, the kind that left a raspy, painful dryness in someone’s throat.
Gradually, the heat intensified, until it became an incredible pain on Renne’s skull, driving him half-mad as he swept and stabbed with his horn. Magic growing out of control, burning and hurting.
Just as quickly as the heat came, it stopped. The red haze in front of his vision calmed, and he was finally able to focus again on the battle.
Dozens of corpses lay at their feet, many with cauterized holes in their bodies. Some cleaved completely apart. The fighting in the distance drew to an end as the last of the attackers were killed, and stragglers were chased out of camp or captured. The people around him were still, their eyes wide. Fearful. Tara and Janus stood together in their flaxen white forms, silent, ears flicked forward towards him. Maya, meanwhile, had dropped her bow from nerveless hands, and now unceremoniously retched onto the grass.
Her magic had infused the Bond between them. In that moment when she fired that blazing arrow, he had seen a warrior. A person consumed by the fight, or perhaps the magic. And so much destruction between the two of them! But there was something terrible among the dead. One of their guards, with a cauterized slash through his side. Renne’s work. In his blind, painful rage, he’d caught that man when thrashing through the enemy.
The regret now began to weigh upon his heart.
Maya
Whispers and stares followed Maya. She couldn’t stay near the scene of such carnage, but the left behind soldiers and merchants huddled together to talk.
“They fear you,” Renne said, stepping closer to her, away from where all the bodies lay burned and broken upon the soil. “They fear us, what we can achieve together. We’ve shown them what Bonded are capable of.”
“I don’t want this,” Maya snarled. “I don’t want to do this.” Her insides churned at the thought of what she’d just done. How easy it was to fire those arrows and watch the others burn. She’d done that. Let magic course through her, dredged up from the deepest levels of herself – and killed.
“What do you mean? It’s amazing what you did, Maya. We can change the course of the war. You have magic, we can slay our enemies –”
“Shut up.” Maya whirled on him, brushing off his hand which had been an inch from resting on her shoulder. “Renne, I killed a lot of people. I’m a civilian. Do you understand that? This isn’t something I’m supposed to do. Can you imagine me going back to my parents and explaining to them that their baby girl slaughtered people?”
“That’s if you even get back,” Renne mumbled, before scowling at himself – but too late.
“Why don’t you say that again?” Rage coursed through Maya now, close to boiling point.
“I just meant,” Renne said, holding up his hands, “you don’t need to be in such a hurry to disappear. You could be a symbol of hope to these people.”
“That’s just fucking it, Renne. I don’t want to be a symbol of anything. I just want to go home. Not have blood on my hands.”
“You killed the enemy. They were trying to kill you.”
“That’s not the point!” Maya screamed at him, grabbing Renne by his shirt near his neck, aware of people staring at them both. “You want me to be a pawn in this, yeah? You want me to kill, and kill, and kill.” She couldn’t express the rest of the words she wanted to say. Fear of losing humanity. Disgust at herself, but the disgust was wrong somehow, since it wasn’t the fact she’d killed that wound her up the most.
There was something else.
Renne seized a chunk of her hair, and their eyes practically drilled holes into one another. “That’s right,” he said. “You could be the best killer we have in this army.”
Heat licked through their connection, adding both rage and something else, which Maya didn’t want to explore at that particular moment in time. She wrenched herself away from him, leaving his throat intact, and stormed off.
“We’ll need to practice the magic, you know!” he called after her. She held up a middle finger to him in return, not caring if he understood the gesture or not.
Maya didn’t touch a weapon over the next week. Even as they packed up their camp and moved within the walls of the recently conquered Bastion, she couldn’t shake the images out of her mind, or the remembrance of that heat inside her body. She’d… bound the bow to her magic somehow, conjured smoldering quarrels, superheated arrow tips, watched as her arrows punched through multiple bodies, as a burning, fearful hatred whipped through her skin. Worst of all was the frenzy Renne went into. She sensed his emotions and the edge of madness in his thoughts, as her control over the magic slipped, and the heat became more painful than bearable.
She hadn’t been able to drop the magic fast enough. Maya squeezed her eyes shut, stomach lurching as the wagon she traveled in rolled over a lump in the road. She sat alone, between supply crates and a bucket of water, having feigned that she was too exhausted to walk. They’d allowed her the privacy of the brown canvas, and the heady smell of wood surrounded her. Her arms rested upon the prickly crates – one bad scrape and her skin would sprout splinters.
They’d put all the bodies together in one huge funeral pyre. The smoke trailed deep into the sky, but they no longer needed to worry about hiding in this particular section of Albalon. Not now that the five armies had successfully conquered Bastion and made sure the place was habitable for all of them.
Behind her eyelids she saw the deadly red glow of her arrows again.
I never thought I’d be capable of killing anyone. And yet, I was able to shoot arrows, throw fire, and end lives so… easily.
She’d be arrested and condemned back in America. Imprisoned for life in a terrible prison. But here, the same loss of life wasn’t just accepted, it was encouraged. Renne saw nothing wrong in it. He didn’t understand her hesitation. They didn’t have a stable, global society like on earth. They were in the dark ages, the middle ages, still fighting to form the empires and people that would one day dominate their world. Many would fall, and many would rise.
It stung, to consider herself as a murderer. No, a soldier. Soldiers were allowed to kill. But soldiers went through training, and she’d never trained in that capacity. She was a civilian holding a bow. A civilian granted powers of destruction.
Yvonne hopped into her wagon, opening the flaps, which let in proper light, compared to the flickering, enclosed candle Maya had, with little holes to allow the smoke to escape. Maya blinked in surprise. Yvonne was supposed to still be in Bastion.
“I have returned,” she said, her bone belt clacking against the wood as she crawled towards Maya, clearly not caring if Maya actually wanted her there or not. “After a successful battle, imagine my surprise when I ask around for where you are, and Tara tells me that you’re in here, sulking.”
“I’m not sulking,” Maya snapped before she could control herself. The last thing she wanted was Yvonne there, sneering, clubbing her with that brash, unforgiving attitude.
“Then tell me why you’ve been avoiding everyone as much as possible, hours after helping save those left behind in the camps?” Of course, she went straight for the throat. Everyone else had been delicately dancing around the topic, but Yvonne didn’t. She probably had no clue how. “Imagine my surprise when you and Renne had a screaming match in the middle of a large group of civilians and soldiers mere moments after you’d helped them successfully repel an invasion, hating your own powers, it seems.”
Imagine her existing in my world, Maya thought, desperate for a distraction. She’d be locked up. She’d be a freak.
“Why do yo
u think?” Maya said, adopting instead a harsh tone, mentally protecting herself against Yvonne. “It’s the first time I’ve killed people.”
Yvonne said nothing in response, but continued examining Maya with her sharp, critical eyes. The dark makeup contorted her features, making her less of a comforting presence and more of a terrifying one.
“You can’t expect me to be okay with killing people,” Maya continued, a slight whine entering her tone, which she hated. “I’m not a fighter. I come from a place where so few of us kill.” Though she wasn’t entirely sure how true that was. She’d never encountered death in her life. Yet.
Why didn’t Yvonne say anything? The witch-woman placed her hand against the floor for better balance as the wagon lurched, and the lantern shifted a few inches. If only that woman didn’t stare like that, like she was trying to pick Maya apart and figure out the juicy parts inside her brain.
“That’s not why you’re bothered, is it?” Yvonne said. “It’s not about the fact you killed when you’ve never done it before, is it?” Her knowing smile sent a chill down Maya’s spine, and panic began to wedge in her lungs.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
“I don’t,” Maya snapped, so vehement that Yvonne’s eyebrows raised upwards. “Don’t talk to me about this. I don’t want to talk.”
She sat there in frazzled, angry silence, hating Yvonne’s knowing smirk, hating that maybe the woman did perhaps understand more than she should. But no. Maya couldn’t... mustn’t…
“I’ll see you later. Renne wanted me to check up on you, discuss a little about your magic, but I suppose if you’re going to sit here and lie to yourself, then we have nothing further to discuss.” Yvonne’s expression was full of contempt. She crawled her way out of the wagon. She slid off, and whatever impulse Maya had to ask Yvonne to stay was lost.
A few moments after Yvonne vanished, Maya made plans instead to escape, to leave this realm and everything behind. She booted up her red-apple colored Nokia phone again out of habit. The battery now straddled the fifty percent mark. She stared at the blank signal before nearly dropping her phone as it vibrated.
A message.
There still wasn’t sign of a signal – yet she’d received a message. From mom. Eager, excited, Maya opened the impossible message, scanning the words.
Which made her heart drop into her boots.
Maya, it said. My beautiful, wonderful daughter. I miss you so much. I can only pray that somehow you’re out there, fighting, and nothing bad has happened. I promise we’ll find you. We’re looking every day.
But if you can read this, then please, please contact us. Let us know you’re okay. Love, Mom.
Her mother never spoke like that. Or liked to admit she loved Maya or say anything soppy and heart-revealing.
Meaning that she was likely now out of her mind with worry, wondering if Maya had run away, if she’d been kidnapped, or killed. Frantically, Maya typed a message back. No specifics. Just she was okay, and she was trying to escape. Which probably made it sound like she was locked up in someone’s basement, but she couldn’t quite say that she was trapped in another realm.
As usual, the message didn’t send, and it joined her increasing pile of unsent, red messages, like blood littered upon a field…
Forty-nine percent battery. She turned her phone off, and muffled a scream of anger and frustration behind her hand.
People waited for her back home. They needed her. Just to send a message, to do something to reassure them she was okay. Despite whatever power coursed through her veins, causing tongues of fire to form in what she touched – she’d never felt so powerless as she did now.
Bastion at least looked like an actual city and not a collection of old, crooked houses, though there were some that didn’t seem well cobbled together. Most buildings were made of a solid, dull gray stone, some reaching two stories high with the most extravagant buildings reserved for Bastion’s center which Maya saw sticking out above the roofs of the other structures. Some people attempted to cultivate gardens, but in most cases, the streets had a decidedly uniform, military feel to them, with very little color leaping out at her.
“What do you think?” Renne said, now stepping into place beside her, since she’d crawled out of her wagon to get a better view of where the five armies would be setting up base, acting like they hadn’t had an argument and then not talked to each other for a week. “It’s a good, defensive city. Not quite as grand as River’s End, where I came from, but still far more advanced than tents and rundown buildings, eh?”
Speaking of advanced… she saw aqueducts working to control the waters that flowed through the streets in especially constructed channels. Mills. Public bathhouses. Some nervous locals peeking out of their homes to get a good look at those now pouring in. They stared at Callum, Tara and Janus, who were in their unicirim forms as they marched down the street, giving the onlookers a good eyeful of their royals. Maya was aware Renne had been requested to remain human, because his pure dark form resembled nothing like how a proper unicirim appeared. He probably got left out a lot.
“It’s alright,” she said, deciding now wasn’t the time to start describing the wonders of the world she came from. Or keep reinforcing her isolation. “But what’s going to happen to the people who live here? What’s the plan?”
“Liberation,” Renne replied simply. “We’ve replaced their werewolf masters and abusers with true people and will root out any of the enemy soldiers still hiding in the city. We have the witches going door to door.”
That didn’t sound completely like liberation to Maya, but it wasn’t her place to comment. She noted how some of the merchants from the camp were already setting up stalls, selling trinkets and goods, how some people looked emaciated and starved, which she highly suspected was as a result of cutting off the food supplies of Bastion.
“Are you going to feed them?”
“Of course. We still have a lot of their supply wagons, but we’re going to need to stock up on food and resources before we make the push to River’s End. Bastion’s a perfect place to do so.”
“Can’t be that perfect,” Maya said, almost tripping on a loose stone upon the ground. “If you were able to siege and whittle down the defenders.”
“They were stupid. We are not.” He glanced over at his siblings and something like jealousy flickered in his eyes. An older man and woman were by the royals, the man gray haired, the woman with some streaks of gray forming. General Witslaw and someone called Beatrice, she thought. The people responsible for taking the royals to safety.
And, apparently, leaving Renne out of the spotlight.
“Did you manage to talk to Yvonne yet, about your magic?” Renne now turned to face her, stopping as the procession halted briefly in front. “Because you saved so many people’s lives people already think of you as a hero.”
Hero? That was the opposite of how Maya felt. She saw nothing heroic in her actions at all. Nothing that warranted such praise. But because Renne seemed so excited to address her as this, she gave him a wan smile back, and kept her thoughts to herself. Except, could she, really? Because whenever they got close like this, some of their emotions trickled through the Bond. “You’ve already heard my opinion on the matter.”
“Yes. I just hope you’ve had enough time to think it through. You’ve not done anything wrong. As for your power – the sooner you can control it, the better.”
Maya sighed. “I will,” she said. “I just... need a little more time to come to terms with it.”
He gave her a brief, relieved smile. “I’d like us to practice some more together. See just what we’re capable of. If you wouldn’t mind.”
I don’t. I want to go home. “Yeah, that’ll be great.” She continued drinking in the sight of Bastion, wondering to herself what a waystone looked like. Yvonne had mentioned a waystone would get her home. She’d need to pry into that some more, so she didn’t end up picki
ng random rocks and hoping they had magical powers in them or something.
They finished their procession, ending up in the wealthy center of Bastion where the werewolves had previously occupied in force. The huge castle in the middle housed all the royals, and the generals and high ranking soldiers were already arranging residential areas. Renne picked one of the biggest possible suites in the castle there as he was firstborn royal, and partly, Maya suspected, out of spite. Size mattered in the eyes of the public, and he couldn’t be seen downsizing in comparison to his siblings here.
She certainly sensed that envy and tangle of emotion burning strong in him but didn’t comment straight away. They had walked under a stone archway, a stone-coated front garden with dead and ill-kept plants in the dry soil lined up in trays. Renne’s personal servants swarmed to clear out the place assisted by some soldiers, and they sat in the shade of the fifteen story castle, sipping water and eating fruit and vegetables from a bowl set upon a garden table with low wooden benches.
“I know you didn’t want to be here,” Renne said, startling her out of her thoughts. No doubt he’d been attempting to read her emotions, and resentment stabbed through here. “So I just wanted to thank you for what you’ve done so far. Even if we might have been… pushing you – you’ve done really well. For an offworlder.”
Aggressively chewing on some green grapes, Maya glared at the royal in his solemn dark suit and the frilled white collar that framed his neck. She knew somewhere that her friend Danielle would be scolding her for not making more of an effort to talk to someone who clearly showed interest in her – but Maya knew that interest to be solely reserved for the magic. Not for Maya herself.
“Thanks,” Maya said, after stuffing more grapes into her mouth. “Nice of you to say so.”
“Maybe, if you’re bored, perhaps we could try and practice a little now?” He leaned forward, arms spread on the table, seeming as if they were reaching towards her. “It’d be nice. Imagine the kind of things we’d end up doing!”
The Last Unicirim’s Bride Page 7
