by Tracey Tobin
Tori shuddered at the thought, but also frowned at the explanation. “But…” she thought aloud, “he knows now, or at least suspects.” She glanced back at Jacob and Kaima. On their journey to Jacob’s meadow to send the message to her friends back home, she had told them about her horrible nightmares from before the Shadow attack, how a dark spectre with a terrible voice had repeatedly demanded to know who she was and where she’d come from. It wasn’t until the Shadows stormed the Maelekanai village that she understood that it had been Iryen, communicating with her mind somehow, and that he’d surely sent the Shadows to hunt her down. “So won’t he be preparing now?”
Eden nodded, but the motion radiated with determination and optimism. “Yes, but he has lost a great deal of time, and our hope is for your strength to progress faster than his.”
Tori wondered if her stomach was actually physically on the ground at this moment, or if it just felt like it.
“To those means,” Eden continued, “I am off to spread the word as far and wide as I can. You will require allies - many of them - when the time comes to face Iryen and his army of Shadows. Your focus, however, must be on strengthening yourself, so this task is left to me.”
Tori stared for a long time at the place where the woman’s eyes should have been. In fact, she’d almost forgotten that Jacob and Kaima were there until they suddenly appeared at her sides, their hands on either of her shoulders.
“We wish you good fortune on this task,” Jacob told Eden. He gave a short, respectful bow and added, “And we hope to meet again as soon as can be permitted.”
“Ishrigia nia kel marrialla,” Kaima added. It must have meant something positive, Tori thought, because it caused Eden’s lips to finally flicker back into that familiar smile.
Eden offered them all a respectful nod and began to turn when she seemed to think of something else and hesitated. With her body still poised to leave she cocked her head slightly back toward Tori. “My child, do you recall after your victory against the Shadow attackers, you became weak and fainted as your body returned to its normal form?”
Tori wrinkled her brow as she thought. It was a bit difficult to remember that first transformation, if she was honest. Her brain had been high on the combination of nearly dying and being infused with a sudden surge of blood magic. However, she could just barely recall the sensation, how she’d been so strong and energetic and confident one moment, so exhausted and unable to keep her eyes open the next. “Yes, I remember.”
Eden nodded, seemingly to herself. “Iryen notwithstanding, it has been a very long time since someone in this world has practiced blood magic. I cannot be entirely certain, but I expect this was not an isolated incident. You may continue to suffer from a kind of ’blood magic fatigue’ with extended use of your abilities. Of course, you will also have to continue to use them in order to become stronger, so I urge you to practice with caution. Do not press yourself too far too fast.”
Tori took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded. “Okay, I’ll try.”
“And one last thing... Blood is sacred. Blood given is a gift, but blood taken is a violation. To strengthen your power you require that blood, but to take it without permission could have dire consequences, so do all you can to ensure that it is always freely given.”
Tori opened her mouth to respond to this last warning, but before she could gather the proper thoughts Eden had hitched up her robes, moved away into the shadows of the forest, and vanished.
Chapter Three
Tori woke the following morning with a horrible knot in her neck and bags under her eyes that could have carried all of their supplies. She had spent what felt like the entire night in a dream world that kept jumping back and forth between a dozen or more different emotional damages. One moment she was being slammed against a wall by cruel hands, the next she was surrounded by Shadows as her body went traitorously weak and limp. She dreamed of rummaging through piles of empty pill bottles and watching, paralyzed, as Jacob’s writhing body went up in flames. And all the while she kept hearing a voice in the back of her mind hissing at her: “I guess you were wrong about a lot of things, weren’t you?”
She wondered vaguely if it were possible to actually be driven insane by nightmares.
“Rise and shine, princess!” Kaima’s voice called. The next second her furry face appeared in Tori’s with an infuriatingly overenthusiastic grin on it. “Time to get moving! If we have to go all the way to the Howling Mountains it’s going to quite a long hike!”
Tori groaned and dug her knuckles into her eyes as she rolled to a sitting position. “How long exactly are we talking?” she dared to ask.
Kaima placed a claw to her lips and seemed to think about it. “Well,” she said, “Given time to eat and sleep, and granting for the fact that you’re clearly not accustomed to extended periods of travel, I’m going to estimate about…ten days?”
Tori had been taking a sip of water from her skein and now nearly choked. “Ten days?” she cried. “Of nonstop walking?!”
Kaima bit her lip in an attempt to hide her amusement. “Yes, princess,” she confirmed. “It is over two hundred and fifty miles away, you know.”
Tori’s eyes felt like they were going to pop clean out of her head. She thought back to when Jacob had announced that it would take a little less than two days to travel from his cabin to the Maelekanai village. She had thought that trip might kill her. Now she was going to have to walk for a week and a half? There was no way her soft, city-life body would ever survive.
“Remind me again why we didn’t take Jacob’s horses?” she groaned, miserable. She already knew the answer. Jacob had already explained it. The only two that had been properly trained were the ones who had run off. The others hadn’t yet been broken, and would therefore be much more hindrance than help on their journey, particularly considering that neither Tori nor Kaima could ride passably well.
Suck it up, princess, said the voice in the back of her head, It’s bound to get a lot worse than this from here on out.
With that pleasant thought lingering in her mind she closed her eyes, took several deep breaths, and used every ounce of personal strength she had to open them back up again. “Where’s Jacob?” she asked. She had noticed that he was mysteriously missing and his blanket was still strewn across the forest floor.
Kaima shrugged as she moved to begin gathering her own things. “I thought I heard him heading off through the trees as I was waking. He probably just needed to, uh…” Kaima frowned and looked at Tori out of the corner of her eye. “I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to refer to these kinds of things around royalty.”
Tori rolled her eyes and pushed herself to her feet. “It’s okay, I’ve solved the mystery,” she assured her friend. Having to deal with personal matters in the middle of the woods was high up on her list of things she really, really didn’t enjoy about this world. Back home she’d never even gone camping anywhere that didn’t have a proper restroom within spitting distance.
By the time she had returned from her own personal matters Jacob had returned and was packing up his supplies with a rather strained look on his face. Tori managed to study the look for a full twenty seconds without him even noticing her looking, until Kaima cleared her throat and he nearly jumped out of his skin.
“You okay there?” Tori asked, eyebrow raised. She glanced down at the ground where he had just dropped everything he’d been carrying.
Just like that there was a perfectly pleasant, if not a bit forced, smile on his face. “Perfectly fine, princess,” he assured her, gathering the dropped items back up into his arms. “Never better.”
Tori narrowed her eyes, but she couldn’t put her finger on whatever was clearly going on with him, so instead she reached for her blanket and growled out, “The next one of you two to call me ‘princess’ is getting a rock upside the head.”
The first day wasn’t terrible. Tori was tired and sore from the traveling they’d already done between Jacob’s ca
bin and the Maelekanai village, but she still had a fair bit of strength left in her.
The second day was significantly more tiring. She’d had another night filled with terrors, and even though it was a jumbled mess of disjointed images that hadn’t congealed into anything particularly solid, she’d woken feeling as though she hadn’t really slept at all.
By the third day she could tell that she was really slowing down their progress, and hoped that Kaima had incorporated this kind of delay into her calculations.
On the fourth day she didn’t wake until nearly noon. When she confronted her companions about letting her sleep so long, she felt ashamed to be told that she had been crying out in her sleep. By the time she had calmed down near sunrise they had decided between themselves to let her rest for the rest of the day.
The morning of the fifth day, having gotten the extra sleep the day before, was the first time she’d woken early since the night following her “call” home. The sun was just starting to peek through the lowest openings in the trees when she was stirred by a strange sound, like a sharp intake of air.
If she hadn’t woken at that precise moment and allowed her eyes to flutter open slowly so that he didn’t notice, she wouldn’t have seen Jacob creep from his forest bed and tiptoe off into the trees with his left arm held tight to his chest. In the moment she thought about calling out to him, but something made her hesitate, and in that moment he had already gone.
“He’s been doing that every morning.”
The voice, while quiet, nearly made Tori jump out of her skin until she realized that Kaima was whispering to her from across their campsite. With a hand over her jumpy heart, Tori pushed herself up and set her Maelekanai friend with a stare. “Doing what?”
Kaima leaned up on one hand and gestured with the other toward where Jacob had vanished. “Sneaking off,” she said. “He’s always the first to wake, and he’s always very quiet, but my hearing is exceptional. He’s been sneaking off just past dawn every morning. At first I thought he was just, well, you know. But he always goes clutching his arm where-” She trailed off, but also gave Tori a meaningful look.
Tori didn’t need clarification anyway. She’d already put two and two together and the answer was as clear as day. She had assumed that everything would be fine once the initial pain had been quelled, and Jacob hadn’t said anything to the contrary. But it was clear now that her Guardian was still experiencing side effects from Eden’s guidance spell and was trying his best to hide it. All at once Tori’s chest began to ache. How bad was it? Did it only happen in the mornings when he was sneaking off, or was he dealing with it all the time? Why was he trying so hard to hide it? Was there anything they could do to fix it?
How could I have let him do that for me?
The question that she spoke aloud was, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Kaima offered a small shrug and a click of the tongue against her fangs. “Honestly? I knew you had enough to be getting along with,” she admitted. “But since you’ve caught him yourself now, I figured there was no point keeping it to myself anymore.”
Tori found her fingers clutching the pill bottle in her pocket as she stared off after Jacob, allowing the demons to start clawing their way into her brain again. Her self-destructive thoughts were interrupted when Kaima appeared beside her and snatched up her chin in one steady paw. The Maelekanai forced the human to face her, giving her a firm, authoritative glare. “He’s your Guardian. He’s taken on that role of his own free will. He’s accompanying you on this journey to protect you, regardless of personal cost, and you’re just going to have to get used to that fact because it’s not going to change any time soon.”
Tori opened her mouth to argue, but Kaima pressed a claw to her lips to stop her. They stared each other down until Tori’s glare faltered under Kaima’s. Finally the human gave up a small nod and the Maelekanai’s claw was removed.
They packed up their camp in silence, while Tori counted her breaths in and out to keep her mind resolutely off whatever was happening with Jacob out in the forest. By the time she reached five hundred and sixty-two Jacob reappeared and she’d managed to plaster what she hoped was a convincing smile on her face. “Ready to go?” she asked.
If Jacob noticed anything was off, he didn’t let on. With a freshly caught and skinned rabbit in his right hand and his left arm hanging rigid at his side, he returned her smile. He wrapped the carcass (which Tori eyed warily) in a piece of canvas and reached for his own pack. “Ready to go.”
They’d hardly begun the morning’s travels on the seventh day when Kaima stopped dead in her tracks, a sharp hiss in the back of her throat, all the fur on her tail standing on end. Jacob had his sword out before Tori could even react.
“What is it?” Tori squeaked. Her gaze darted in every direction, images of Shadows in her head, but she couldn’t see anything and the forest was alive with the sounds of birds and small mammals.
Kaima’s nose had wrinkled back as though a putrid stench had offended her, and her eyes were wild. “I smell Coiyana,” she growled.
“Oh for goodness-” Jacob’s stance relaxed immediately, but the glare he shot Kaima was that of a pet owner whose furry friend had just left a gift on the living room carpet. “Please don’t panic us for no reason, Kaima.”
Coiyana?
The word was new to Tori, and her companions’ very different reactions to it made her that much more curious. “What, pray tell, is a Coiyana?” she asked.
“Dirty, vicious, slobbering dogs is what they are,” Kaima spat back without hesitation. Her tail flicked back and forth as she spoke, nearly whipping Tori’s leg in its agitation.
Jacob snorted as he sheathed his sword. “That’s a bit rich coming from you,” he pointed out, “after all the grief you gave the princess for calling you a cat.”
Tori narrowed her eyes at Jacob. “Please don’t call me pr-” she began, but her request was cut off by Kaima hissing her retort.
“It’s not nearly the same!” she was crying. Her tail had chosen a position, sticking straight back like it had been frozen solid. “To call a Maelekanai a ‘cat’ is insulting and ignorant!”
“Could you guys just-”
“And exactly how is calling the Coiyana dogs any different?”
“You guys, I-”
“Because they act like dogs! Dirty, violent, warmongering mutts who do nothing but train and fight and-”
“GUYS!” Tori’s shout was so loud and sudden that several birds burst from their trees and squawked their disapproval down at her as they flocked away. Jacob and Kaima jumped, their bickering ceased immediately, and they looked contrite. Tori shook her head at them like a frustrated mother with naughty children. She turned to Jacob with pursed lips. “Please,” she asked, “tell me about the Coiyana.”
Jacob straightened up and spoke with a frank tone. “They are a warrior race of large and powerful canine heritage, adept at hunting and killing. For this reason they were prided for being welcome members of the Royal Guard for centuries, as well as the official protectors of individual towns and settlements.”
Tori raised a hand and an eyebrow to stop him. “Okay, so they’re fighters, basically.” She turned away from the part of her brain that was screaming ‘Oh god, there’s going to be talking dogs now too?!’ and raised a finger to Kaima’s open mouth. The Maelekanai crossed her arms and stuck out her bottom lip. To Jacob Tori said, “Please continue, and try not to sound like you’re reading directly from a text book.”
She wasn’t sure if Jacob even knew what a text book was, but he at least seemed to understand her meaning, because he said the rest with a much more relaxed tone. “I don’t know that much, but my father told me that during the Shadow attack on the Royal City a huge number of them fought and died. Afterward those who were left turned their backs on the Royal family and the towns and went off on their own. Father said it was rare to meet them anymore because they guard their locations with their lives and only leave to hunt.
I only know what I do because every so often a lone wolf would show up asking for my father or looking for a horse.”
Tori nodded. “Okay, okay,” she muttered. Finally she turned back to Kaima. “And now,” she addressed the pouting teen, “would you care to explain - calmly - why you’re so prejudiced against them?”
Kaima’s mouth burst open, but then her ears twitched a little and she snapped her teeth shut in a kind of grimace.
Tori already had a theory, which was why she’d wanted to give Kaima a few moments to calm down. Kaima’s mother had been killed when the teen was young. A frightened human had given away their plan to escape from a Shadow-guarded slave camp, resulting in a fatal fight. As a result Kaima had hated humans, and it was only after Tori’s sacrifice for Jiki that she’d realized she was casting broad strokes against an entire race.
“It’s not quite the same,” Kaima spoke slowly, anxious to defend herself without looking like a fool. “There were a group of them at the camp with us. I was very young, but I can clearly remember all the fighting and shouting. They’d provoke the Shadows and start brawls, and inevitably someone would get hurt or die. Then they’d snap and growl and blame the rest of us for not fighting well enough, and-” Her voice trailed off. She glanced back and forth between Jacob and Tori, who were both giving her meaningful looks, and finally growled, “Oh okay, fine! They’re not dogs, and maybe not all of them are horrible.” She crossed her arms again and huffed in a way that told Tori this was the best they were going to get out of her.
