As they flew closer, Ambrosia could see that they were tiny mechanical bees made of gold. She screamed as she felt their tiny stingers sear into her flesh, and she realized that the stingers were tiny sharp blades, which was far worse than getting stung by any natural bee. Ambrosia shrieked in pain as she felt her blood gushing out all over her body. She shielded her eyes in an attempt to block the bees from stinging them.
“Ambrosia, look!” Desdemona shouted.
Ambrosia struggled to open her eyes, and saw a fountain in the next room. She ran as fast as she could into the next room and dove into the fountain. The bees could not follow her in because they were programmed to behave like natural bees, who are afraid of water. Ambrosia held her breath and watched the water turn red with blood as the bees hovered above the water’s surface. Eventually, they could no longer sense their target, and the swarms began to dissipate.
Ambrosia’s whole body began to ache from lack of air, and she rose to the surface. She took a huge gulp of air. She saw Desdemona and Victor rise out of the water on either side of her. “I hope that never happens to me ever again for as long as I live!” Ambrosia breathed.
“Well, don’t let your dress get caught in strange beams again!” Desdemona spat.
Ambrosia turned to Victor and asked, “Do you have any healing potions?”
Victor splashed his arms in the water. “You are immortal! Your skin will heal on its own if it hasn’t already!” he spat.
“What . . . just happened to us?” Desdemona asked.
“It’s obvious that was some kind of booby trap. We must be more careful when walking around here!” Victor growled.
Ambrosia was a total mess. Bloodstains covered her clothes, and her hair was soaked and matted after having been killed once that day and nearly killed a second time. They all climbed out of the fountain and walked toward a set of double doors. Victor opened the doors, and the three of them walked inside the room. There were cobwebs everywhere, and a thick layer of dust covered everything.
Either Tristan did not get very many visitors, or he was a terrible housekeeper. Desdemona heard the sound of footsteps.
“Who’s there?” a man’s voice asked. Desdemona saw a pale handsome young man step out of an adjoining hallway. It was evident that he did not go out in the sun very often. His face turned even paler at the sight of Victor. “Tareth!” he gasped.
“Yes, it’s me! Tristan, old buddy, how are you?” Victor responded with fake excitement.
“H-how did you . . .” the young man stammered.
“A professor broke the magical barrier spell, freeing me! Aren’t you excited to see me?”
“What are you doing here?” Tristan gasped.
“I have come to collect my prize!” Tareth growled.
Tristan didn’t want to find out what this prize was. He stumbled backward and tried to run away. “Andrew!” he screamed, calling to his friends for help.
Tareth put his hand on his belt and shouted, “Agomoth! Valgoterh! Imajak! Veol!” It was a spell he had brought with him from his realm. All of a sudden, a bright light shone forth from Tristan, and his eyes rolled back into his skull. A cloud of smoke surrounded him and floated through the air. The smoke floated into Tareth’s belt.
“You said that you were going to share the magical powers!” Desdemona protested.
Tareth snarled, “As in, you two will get the rings, and I will take his powers! I didn’t say I was going away empty-handed!”
As Tristan’s body fell to the floor, his soul detached itself. He let out a horrific shriek and darted around the room. In his fury, he threw Desdemona and Ambrosia’s bodies up against the cave walls. Tareth put his hand on his belt. The Faeblood Wraith stopped and looked at him. “You’re mine now! You’re under my control!” Tareth spat. “Now, you will tell me where to find the rings of Salovar and Alyssianna!”
“He seems very hard for you to control,” Ambrosia said.
“They’re all hard to control at first. I will have him totally under my control after he sucks the magic out of his first victim,” Tareth replied. Then, he realized that he did not need Tristan to access the rings; he already knew. Tristan was a Wisdom Fairy, and his magic had shared with Tareth knowledge of where the rings were.
The wraith shot angrily at Tareth, but Tareth kept his hand on his belt and, with his mind, commanded the wraith to stop attacking him. “Just wait until he gets hungry.” The wraith suddenly screamed and shot out of the room.
“Where did he go?” Desdemona asked.
“Who knows. He will be able to drain sorcerers of their magic with or without us,” Tareth said.
The belt shared with him knowledge of where the rings were located. It also shared with him information about what kinds of traps guarded them and how to disarm them. Suddenly, his face turned white, and Rosaria thought she saw an expression of pure terror come across his face.
“Follow me. The vault the rings are hidden in is this way. But first I must disarm the other booby traps! There is one room inside that vault that even an immortal shouldn’t go into without disarming the trap inside,” Tareth said.
The three of them walked through the vault until they came to a library. There was a chess set sitting on a marble table in the middle of it. Tareth walked up to it, put his hand on one of the black knight pieces, and pulled it toward him. There was a grinding sound that echoed throughout the palace.
“What’s that sound?” Ambrosia asked.
“That is the sound of me disarming the trap!” Tareth replied. The grinding sound stopped, and a smile stretched across Tareth’s face. “Disarmed!” He sighed. Ambrosia thought she heard the sound of fear in his voice. Tareth led the three of them through the vault. They came to the door that led to the room where the rings were.
Tareth took a deep breath and pressed down on the door handle. The door came open, and the three of them walked into the room.
“Are you afraid of something?” Desdemona asked. Ambrosia now knew that she was not the only one who sensed that Tareth was worried about something.
“I’m afraid of . . . spiders! That next trap is full of spiders! I had to disarm it!” Tareth whispered.
“Spiders? But you’re immortal!” Ambrosia laughed.
Tareth’s eyes shot daggers at her. He spat, “Some people live with strange, intense fears they don’t understand, and they don’t know why they are afraid of something!”
Desdemona and Ambrosia looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. Tareth and the two women crept through the room. Desdemona saw yet another door and asked, “Another room?”
Tareth turned to her and said, “Yes, and this is the final trap. It is impossible to disarm, so I suggest that you don’t look into the beam of light that you will see shining on the ground. Looking into the beam of light will set off the trap. This trap is, by far, the most painful trap of them all. It’s poison darts. Face the wall and feel your way to the other wide if you don’t want to set it off,” Tareth said.
They opened the door. Desdemona and Ambrosia entered the room, faced the wall, and began feeling their way along the wall. Then, Desdemona’s eye twitched, and she accidentally looked into the beam of light. There was a loud whoosh, and Desdemona felt herself getting stabbed with a needle. A burning liquid ran through her veins, and she felt as if she was burning from the inside out. She collapsed on the floor and was aware of Tareth screaming at her.
Ambrosia was also yelling, but Desdemona couldn’t understand what she was saying. Desdemona drifted in and out of consciousness. Then, she slowly awoke. A few moments later, she felt as if she had regained enough of her strength to stand up. She hobbled to her feet and saw Ambrosia doing the same thing. Apparently, she, too, had been poisoned by the darts.
“Watch out next time! All three of us got hit with darts. That poison would have killed us if we were mortal!” Tareth spat. “Put your hands over your eyes like this so they won’t wander over to that beam again!” He cupped his hands ov
er his eyes. The two women did as he said, and they crept to the door at the end of the room. Desdemona recounted the number of times she would have died that day if she had still been mortal.
As Tareth opened the door to the third room, Desdemona saw two columns sitting in the middle of the room. “This is it, ladies!” Tareth said. One pillow with gold tassels sat on top of each of the columns. A ring sat on top of each pillow. Desdemona’s heart pounded as she approached the column. She had been waiting for this moment for many years, ever since she began studying dark magic in secret, even before she met Tareth. Desdemona and Ambrosia picked the rings up off the pillow and slipped them on their fingers.
The magic in the rings would allow them to rule over the lands of Nimudor and Frohadon without opposition, and they also allowed them to rule anywhere the Azodar Forest touched in Frohadon, Kalnoreth, Nimudor, and Oloredian. After they disposed of the rulers of Oloredian and Kalnoreth, they would rule over those principalities as well.
“Shhh!” Tareth hissed. The three of them grew quiet, but Desdemona and Ambrosia did not hear anything. There was a long pause. Tareth’s eyes grew wider and wider.
“What is it?” Ambrosia asked.
“We are not alone,” Tareth hissed.
All three of them pulled their swords out of their belts. “Let’s go!” Tareth yelled. The three of them took off running and were shocked to see three young men running toward them, each with his sword drawn. “There they are!” one man yelled. Ambrosia only took comfort in knowing they could get out of there no matter what because they were immortal.
They charged out into the room, swords drawn. One man swung his sword at Ambrosia. Ambrosia clashed her sword against his. Then, she recited a spell to throw him up against the wall of the vault. The man only stood where he was. She remembered what Tareth told her about witch magic not working on sorcerers. Then, he kicked her down on the cave floor and stabbed her in the chest.
Blood poured out of her wound, and the man pulled his sword out. Ambrosia felt her chest heal, and the man stumbled backward, dumbfounded by her quick recovery. Desdemona took advantage of the man’s surprise and hit him over the head with her sword, knocking him to the ground. Ambrosia leaped off the ground and sliced open the abdomen of her attacker, spilling his intestines out onto the cave floor. Tareth slit one young man’s throat, killing him. Desdemona stabbed the third man in the chest. Tareth looked down at the corpses of the three young men and saw their quill pendant necklaces soaking in their blood.
“Who were they?” Ambrosia asked.
“Knowledge Sorcerers. See the quill pendants on their necklaces?” Tareth asked, pointing at the necklaces. “What are they doing here? And how did they find us?”
“Didn’t you hear him yell for a man named Andrew? These men were here with him!” Tareth said.
The three of them walked outside and, to their horror, heard the dragon roar from a nearby cave. Tareth whispered, “I am going to distract the dragon. They are allies of the sorcerers. When I say move, you move!” He placed his hand on the belt and commanded the dragon to go away until they had left the mountain.
Sometime later, they were able to make it back to the entrance of the mountain cave. Tareth noticed that the dragon trap had closed.
Desdemona and Ambrosia breathed a sigh of relief when they closed the door to the cave behind them. They all joined hands and recited the transporter spell together. In an instant, they were all standing in the throne room in Ethermoor Castle.
The belt, if it worked as Tareth thought it would, would allow him to exercise absolute power over the entire country of Ethermoor. Everyone who wasn’t of fairy ancestry would submit to his rule without question, which was why destroying the sorcerers and sorceresses was so important to him. The morning prior, he had sent all of his troops to find Willow and bring her back to him. He wanted to steal her powers for himself just as he had Tristan’s.
That night, Tareth went to his study to write in his journal as he always did every evening. He remembered what shelf he had placed his journals in when he unpacked. He looked at the shelves and noticed that his current journal was missing. He wrote in his journal every day and been ever since he was exiled to Valroth all those centuries ago.
Writing in diaries was the only thing that had kept him from losing his mind during all those years in isolation. If that had happened, he might have forgotten that he even had magic. Queen Zadelia sent him into exile without any of his magical materials. He created the paper from the barks of the trees on the island and bound the diaries with leather from the hides of animals he hunted.
He spent the evening looking around the room, cleaning up papers, stacking books, and dusting everything in the room in hopes of finding the journal. He couldn’t find it anywhere. He looked in his bag, thinking that he might have put it there to take to the mountain. He did not remember taking it out of the room, which he never did because he was so incredibly secretive about his life. His journals contained information about him that he would never breathe to anyone, including his students.
He had never told any of his students that he kept journals. He walked into the visitor’s bedroom that Desdemona was sleeping in and started searching through her things.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m looking for . . . something,” Tareth said. He sensed the Wisdom Fairy power telling him that he could get information out of her without specifically asking her about the journal. “Did you take anything out of the spell room before we went to the cave today?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t take anything,” Desdemona replied. In the light that drifted into her room from the hallway, she could see a worried expression on his face. “Are you all right?”
“I just . . . lost some notes, that’s it.” He searched the servants’ quarters, but he didn’t see the journal. He remembered that Willow was the only other person who knew anything about his collection of magical books and things. His face turned white when he realized there was another book that he did not see when he was looking for his journal.
He ran upstairs to his study and frantically searched for the journal and the book, but he did not find them. He wondered if he should kill all the servants, thinking maybe one of them stole his things behind his back. Then again, he did not know if the servants were sorcerers or sorceresses and immune to his magic. He remembered where he had put the book once he got to Ethermoor Castle. It was the book that the ingredients for the immortality potion were in. There was information in both that book and his journal that he wanted absolutely no one to discover. That information was on how a person could kill an immortal.
Chapter Eight
The next morning, Riordan, Willow, and Angelina sat and ate a breakfast of berries they had picked out of the forest, and some bread that Riordan had bought before leaving Hallowdorn. As they were walking down the Centrarius Way toward Ethermoor City, they heard the low thunder of horses’ hooves walking down the road behind them. Willow pulled her cloak hood down over her face. The three of them ran and hid behind a large tree trunk
A line of ten carriages passed by. Riordan said, “I forgot that this week Princess Christabel of Kalnoreth, the daughter of Princess Hannah and Prince Maurice of Kalnoreth, is traveling to Oloredian to marry Prince Gregory of Oloredian.”
“Let’s attack them!” Willow hissed. Her terrible experience with Halvor had not dampened her hatred of the nobility.
“You will do no such thing!” Riordan growled. Willow saw a man wearing a suit of armor poke his head from behind a tree trunk. “Now!” a man’s voice screamed. All of a sudden, at least twenty men wearing suits of armor ran from behind the trees and attacked the soldiers guarding the most ornate carriage in the entourage.
Angelina growled, “We can’t just stand back and not do anything!”
“Fine. You go get yourself caught doing magic,” Willow spat.
Riordan pulled out his sword. “This family is very respected among the people of
Kalnoreth.” He charged at the band of thieves.
One of the bandits pulled the door of the carriage open and yanked the princess out onto the ground. She shrieked as a pile of light-pink and white fabric that was the skirt of her dress engulfed her, and even Willow could no longer stand to watch the scene. She yanked her hood off so that she could see what she was doing, pulled her sword out of her belt, and cut the horses loose from their carriage. They took off running through the forest. A bandit held his sword high into the air, preparing to stab her. One of the horses from the carriage galloped over and reared up on its hind legs, knocking him to the ground.
Angelina pointed at a vine that hung high in the treetops. It untwisted itself from the branch, shot out of the tree, wrapped itself around the attacker, and yanked him off the ground. It dropped him on his head, killing him instantly.
Rosaria, or Princess Ambrosia, couldn’t do anything like that! Willow thought, amazed at Angelina’s ability. Princess Christabel stood up, picked up a log, and swung it at the bandits, who were now running off into the forest in fear of Angelina’s abilities.
Christabel turned and looked at Angelina, smiled, and asked, “How will I ever thank you?”
“By not turning us into the police!” Willow spat.
Christabel’s eyes widened, and she said, “Oh, I will never do that! You saved my life.” She turned around and looked at the bodies of her soldiers strewn everywhere, lying in pools of their own blood. No one but Christabel survived the attack. “Oh, this is awful!” she sobbed.
Riordan walked up to her and whispered, “I’m sorry.” He kneeled next to one of the bandits, and a look of grave concern came across his face. “These are Prince Gregory’s soldiers.”
The Night Sorceresses Page 16
