by Tracey Tobin
Tori paused for a moment. She looked at Jacob and Kaima, both of whom seemed to be inwardly shrugging, and then to Heln, whose face revealed nothing of how she should respond. Finally, she decided to continue to proceed with honesty.
“Actually, no,” she said simply. She watched the Chief’s brow rise again and quickly added, “I am sure the Coiyana are brave and powerful, and would fight valiantly, but I’m not looking to storm the castle gates, at least not yet.” Her throat was starting to feel dry again. “You see, the fact of the matter is that only blood magic can defeat blood magic, so… I’m actually the only one who can defeat Iryen. What I need is a donation of Coiyana blood to make my power stronger.”
For the first time the council seemed to be at a loss for words. They stared at Tori as if she’d just told them that she planned to defeat the usurper by tossing trays of pretty pink cupcakes at him.
Then the Chief burst into hysterical laughter. He let out short, loud barks of mirth in between gasps of air to the point of near-asphyxiation. Tori felt her face growing hotter with each joyful cry.
“You!” the Chief howled, tears springing to his eyes. “You are going to defeat this supposed dark wraith who has control of the Shadow hoards that my people have been fighting relentlessly for the better part of two decades?” He stopped just long enough to give her a pointed look before exploding into a second burst of mirth. “You’re a tiny thing!” he cried. “And a human at that! You probably couldn’t defeat a rampant firefly!”
Tori’s skin became more and more flushed as he spoke. She bit her tongue hard and forced herself to take long, deep breaths while the council stared at her in clear disgust and the Chief laughed deep down from the bottom of his gut. By the time he let the firefly comment out she was ready to open her mouth and defend herself, but instead she took a step back in surprise as two sets of hands slammed down on the table on either side of her.
Kaima and Jacob were both shouting so loud and so fast that Tori could barely make out any of what either of them was saying.
“You ignorant mutt! Do you have any idea-”
“This is your rightful queen you’re talking to!”
“-saved my sister’s life and nearly died doing it!”
“-bravest thing I’ve ever seen-”
“-burned the entire attack squad of Shadows-”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about-”
“-need to pull your heads out of your backsides!”
Tori’s head swiveled back and forth between her two comrades, shocked at the pure fury on each of their faces as they screamed obscenity after obscenity at the Coiyana’s leader.
“You guys,” she begged, reaching out a tentative hand toward Jacob’s tensed shoulder. “Guys, calm down. This isn’t hel-”
She didn’t get a chance to complete her sentence because in the next moment a huge furry hand was over her mouth, an arm around her waist, and she’d been lifted clean off the floor with a sharp squeal. Before they could turn to her cry, Kaima and Jacob had been similarly snatched up, with two Coiyana attacking Jacob at once - one to hold his hands behind his back and the other to slam his head down onto the table. Tori wriggled uselessly in her captor’s arms and heard Heln’s voice speak from behind her head.
“What do you wish to do with them?”
She could just barely see over the top of Heln’s massive paw, but Tori locked eyes with the Chief and for the first time saw that he was flat-out frowning. His eye twitched as he considered his prisoners, and a low growl was barely held back behind clenched fangs.
The council shouted various suggestions that Tori ignored because it hardly mattered. She’d lost this round, and if Heln’s prior warnings were anything to go by, she had no idea what she could do now to turn the situation back in her favor.
As her mind fought for an answer - and her lungs struggled for air - a slow smile began to play across the Chief’s face. It was a much different smile than previously.
“They are too interesting to simply kill,” he growled, “especially our little princess. Take them to the cages.”
Tori’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. The cages?! That doesn’t sound-
There was a sharp pain at the base of her neck, and then, darkness.
Chapter Six
Tori woke to a lot of angry shouting, but it sounded as if it was coming from the end of a tunnel, echoing in a disorienting way. Her ears were ringing and the back of her head stung. She groaned, and couldn’t help but note that she’d been thrown into a state of unconsciousness numerous times since she’d first arrived in this world. Surely that was going to catch up with her eventually.
“Jacob!” a muffled voice was saying. “I think she’s waking up!”
The very emphatic shouting stopped short. Tori heard footsteps and a lot of scuffling. She thought she felt something clumsily touch her face, but a moment later it was gone. Slowly she opened her eyes expecting to see Jacob, but what she saw instead was a deep black nothingness.
“Oh god,” she groaned, doing her best to drum up the energy required to panic. “I think I’ve gone blind.”
Jacob shifted beside her and let out a great sigh. Tori couldn’t tell if it was relief or exasperation. “No, don’t worry. We’re just in total darkness,” he muttered.
Slowly, careful not to smash her head into anyone or anything, Tori pushed herself into a sitting position and noted that she seemed to be sitting directly on a cold stone floor. Her head was swimming, but she squinted and tried to force her eyes to adjust to the dark. She thought there must have been a tiny bit of light somewhere that her vision could hook on to, but she couldn’t make out a damn thing, not even from her two companions sitting less than a foot away from her.
“So…” she stated, “that went well.” Inexplicably, she began to giggle like a fool.
“I, for one, don’t think this situation is particularly humorous,” came Kaima’s voice from the left.
Tori shook her head and cleared her throat. “No, actually, it’s not,” she admitted. “I think I might just have a bit of a concussion. Or maybe I’m losing it again.” She cleared her throat a second time and fixed her face into a frown. She knew the others couldn’t see it, but it felt like she should definitely be frowning. “What exactly happened up there?” she asked, her voice stiff.
“They knocked us out too,” Kaima replied. “We only woke up first. It’s been about fifteen minutes since I woke. Jacob’s been screaming himself hoarse since then, but we haven’t had a single response or seen a sign of anyone. And I don’t know about you two, but I feel like I’m going to throw up. The stench in here is disgusting, can’t you smell it?”
For a moment there was silence while Tori tried to think of a gentle way to say what she was thinking.
“Kaima…” Jacob’s voice was the one to break the awkwardness. “I think she meant to ask what the hell happened with us up there.”
More silence.
“Oh.”
Tori sighed. “I’ve never been a terribly diplomatic person,” she spoke to the darkness. “I’ve always just kinda said whatever the hell I wanted, and figured that if people didn’t like it, then that was their problem. But that, up there-” She pointed, even though she knew the others couldn’t see the gesture. “-that was me doing my very, very best to be diplomatic, because I need to make them understand. I need one of them to offer their blood so I can get stronger, and that’s why I was trying really hard not to lose my cool.”
Further silence.
“You know… The way you two did.”
It was very faint, but in the dark and the silence Tori thought she heard Kaima make a tiny mewling noise like a kitten who had been struck.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Jacob said in a very quiet voice. “We know that we screwed up. It’s just…” He let out a long sigh. Tori could almost picture him with his head hung, fingers pushing through his messy auburn hair. “It’s just that after seeing what you’re cap
able of with our own eyes, to have that…that joker laughing in your face like that…” He trailed off.
Tori closed her eyes and let her head fall forward. She noted that her neck and shoulders were extremely stiff.
“I get it,” she eventually responded. “I really do. But, in the future, I definitely think that we should keep in mind that we’re peddling a pretty insane-sounding story, and losing our collective shit will certainly not help us convince people to believe it.”
She might have been imagining it, but Tori could have sworn she heard Jacob make the same mewling sound that Kaima had made.
They sat in silence for a long time. Tori listened as hard as she could, but the only sound she could make out was the steady thrum of some kind of mountain stream off in the distance. Once the throbbing in her head had calmed down a bit she carefully worked herself into a standing position and reached her arms out, waving them around in every direction. Behind her, her fingers met metal and wrapped cautiously around a thick bar. Some quick, blind detective work found that the bar ran from the floor to well over her head, and was surrounded on either side by neighboring bars, one every four or so inches. She began to walk slowly, tracing the perimeter of the cage.
“There’s no door that I could find,” Jacob offered, guessing at her movements.
“I tried climbing the bars,” Kaima chimed in, “but there are more across the top, about eight feet up.”
Tori kept walking none-the-less. She estimated that the cage was about ten feet by ten feet. Too big, she thought, to be designed with a single prisoner in mind. Did the Coiyana regularly take groups of prisoners then?
On a hunch that she couldn’t have explained if she’d had all the time in the world to explain, she pressed her body up against the bars and reached her arm through as far as it would go. Her fingertips touched something flat and solid. “That’s weird,” she muttered.
There was a shuffling as Jacob stood and made his way carefully toward the sound of her voice. “What is it?” he asked.
Tori stretched her arm as far as it could go, but the bars held her back and just out of reach of the mysterious surface. She retracted her arm and turned to where she thought Jacob was standing. “I think there’s a second cage, or a wall,” she explained. “My arm isn’t quite long enough to reach.”
She listened as Jacob manoeuvred his own arm through the bars. There was a solid sound like he’d rapped his knuckles on something. “I feel it,” he said. There was a frown in his voice. He shuffled around Tori to try another area, and then another, and another. “I think it’s the whole way around,” he said.
“Why would they need a wall around a cage?” asked Kaima. “Just to keep us in the dark?”
That was precisely what Tori was wondering. “He called us ‘too interesting to kill’,” she murmured.
“What?” rang out both Jacob and Kaima’s voices. Clearly they’d been preoccupied by the sudden attack in the council room.
“Too interesting to kill,” Tori repeated. “That’s what the Chief said right before he told his cronies to bring us here. I wonder what he meant by that…”
There was a loud shrieking noise, like rusty door hinges, and for a moment the cage was flooded with light that blinded its occupants before darkness fell again. Someone had entered the outer wall through a door.
“Who’s there?” Jacob bellowed. He stumbled around in the darkness, likely blinking against the same sunspots that Tori had sparking in front of her eyes. “We demand to be released immediately! You cannot lock up your rightful queen like this!”
Tori was about to shush him when a voice that she recognized snaked out of the darkness.
“I apologize,” said Heln, sounding surprisingly like he genuinely meant it. “But we have not answered to the royal family since I was a pup, and the council are mere figureheads, incapable of overturning the Chief’s order, even if they wanted to.”
Jacob and Kaima both began to argue, but Tori cleared her throat and their cries of protest cut off sharply.
“And what, exactly, is the Chief’s order?” she asked.
It took a few moments for Heln to respond. “You have to understand,” he began, “that the Coiyana have sacrificed ourselves for the kingdom for centuries, but never so much as in the past eighteen years. We have spent the entire time you have lived sending hunting parties out into the countryside to eliminate as many Shadows as we can find. Despite that, their numbers never seem to wane, while our numbers have waned, dramatically. We continue to do so because it has been our purpose for as long as our memory stretches, to be the kingdom’s strength…its warriors.”
He paused. Tori could tell that something was coming, and she knew she wasn’t going to like it.
“In the time since the Shadows invaded our lands, the Coiyana are the only tribe who have taken a stand and continued to fight with all our strength, and so we have come to value strength and the way of the warrior above all else, you see?”
Kaima made a rude noise and she was sure Jacob was opening his mouth to speak, but Tori spoke over them both.
“What are you trying to tell us, Heln?” she asked.
There was a swishing sound, followed by a clatter and a clang near Tori’s feet. She reached down and felt the hilts of her dagger and Jacob’s sword.
“You’ll need those,” Heln said cryptically. “Good luck, little human princess. The first trial begins at daybreak.”
Another rusty squeal and a blinding glare of light, and he was gone.
Tori hardly slept.
In the pitch black cage, they had no way of even knowing what time it was, but when no one returned for them for well over an hour after Heln’s departure, the trio decided that no one else was coming, and it might be best to try and get some rest.
However, Tori had a hard time getting her brain to settle down. She’d been trying as hard as she could to keep her cool and stay in the situation, but the truth was that she was terrified. They had no idea what was going to happen, why Heln had returned their weapons, or whether they were going to be able to talk their way out of this mountain. And on top of it all, Tori had to convince a Coiyana - beasts she couldn’t stop thinking of as permanently-transformed werewolves - to offer blood so her magic could grow stronger, or the whole situation would have been pointless. It made her head spin until she felt she might be sick.
And so she found herself lying on the stone floor, her hoodie under her head as a pillow, repeating a nervous mantra to herself over and over: I need to convince the Coiyana to help me. I need to convince the Coiyana to help me.
She eventually began to drift, but was frightened awake by a sharp intake of breath somewhere to her left. She didn’t say anything, and neither did either of her companions, but she was certain she knew who the sound had come from and why, and so now another worry wiggled into her brain: she still had to figure out what to do about Jacob’s pain.
At what felt like about four in the morning - but could have actually been any time of day - she subconsciously squeezed the pill bottle in her pocket so hard that the plastic cracked. The sharp sound was so loud in this silent, black cell that it had Jacob and Kaima awake and in a panic immediately.
“Nothing!” Tori told them, sorry to have disturbed what little sleep they might have been getting. “I’m sorry, it was… It was nothing.”
But it wasn’t nothing, not really. The splinted plastic bottle in her hand felt like a sign, somehow, and she couldn’t help the silent tears of fear that streaked down her face as she tried desperately to will herself to sleep.
She must have passed out at some point because she was awakened, alarmingly, by a bright light and a lot of fevered shouting. For half a second she thought she was back home and had drifted off during a hockey game, because the din sounded exactly like a huge crowd of spectators cheering and jeering in equal measure.
The light was only coming from several dozen well-dispersed torches, but because they’d been blind for so long it too
k several blazing moments before Tori could blink her vision back and get an idea of what the hell was happening. When she did, her heart plummeted right into her stomach and she felt the blood drain from her face.
It was a crowd of spectators screaming down at them, from row after row of stone bleachers set at the top of a twenty foot wall that surrounded the area in which their cage was housed. The floor was smooth stone, about the size of a football field, and their cage sat at one end, while a huge cylinder that appeared to be made of some kind of polished, opaque glass, sat at the other end. Glancing up, Tori realized that a similar cylinder had been the secondary wall of their cage, but that it had been lifted by a series of gears and pulleys to reveal them to the crowd.
The stands were full of Coiyana. No, Tori’s mind corrected itself. The stands were far from full. But the three-hundred or so werewolf-like beings who were there had crowded as close to the arena wall as they could, making it seem very full from Tori’s perspective, down low and looking up at them.
Her eyes wide, it hit Tori just where they were: the Colosseum. She turned to her companions and found them both looking just as shocked. Jacob was gripping the hilt of his sword with white knuckles.
The roar of the group of Coiyana stopped very suddenly. Tori scanned the stands and found the Chief, sitting in a large stone throne mid-way down the length of the arena. He was holding up one large hand and grinning like a maniac.
“My brothers and sisters!” he called out across the Colosseum. “These strangers come to us with a preposterous tale! They claim that this puny human female is the rightful heir to the Kynnon throne. The true-born princess whom we all know died in birth!”
The reaction from the crowd was a mixture of angry jeers and straight-up cruel laughter.
