Escape From The Green

by Gadziala, Jessica

  I knew about them.

  And I knew my sister had been there.

  I knew she had come out a shell of the woman she had been before, had taken refuge in the empowering arms of Baba Yaga and her fortress of women where no man dared step unless they sought a slow, torturous death.

  Other than that, I knew nothing. My mother was evil enough to have sneered at her fate. My father had gone pale, and taken off. To where? I had no idea. And were there any correspondence from Jasper to me, it had been intercepted before I could get my hands on it.

  I had no idea if she was functioning, if she had found her way out of the darkness, if Doyle had been there to prove to her that men - some men - could be trusted.

  I knew that Cece's arrival at the Light court had - somehow, the details weren't given to me - led to the Princess coming out of whatever insanity had claimed her for as long as any could remember.

  I longed to go there.

  To see Jasper, to ask about Jade.

  But those were selfish yearnings.

  "My mother has made a deal with the Dark Prince," I reminded Drake. "Seeking asylum in the Light might test the shaky alliance between both courts. It may prove safe, but at what cost? Another war? Generations of carnage? Over me? I would rather take my chances in the human realm. I understand how things work there. Perhaps better than I understand how they work here."

  "They will come for you. Prince Jet, your mother. Hate the realm as much as they might, they would come. To save their pride, to get what was promised."

  "I realize that," I agreed, nodding. "But there are areas of the human realm. Places where not a tree can be found, let alone the veil to The Green. Places where the humans crush so tightly together that there isn't a whisper of air between them in the streets, where someone could disappear if they needed to."

  "Around all that metal," Drake mused, brows drawing low. "It doesn't bother you?"

  "I've never lived in one of the human cities. My parents kept an estate for me on a large piece of land. It had human servants - changelings cast aside mostly - to tend to me. There wasn't much exposure to it. I had been in a town only once, cars and trains around," I went on, wondering if those words were lost on him as well, if he had ever seen the giant metal beasts hurtling through the world at unnatural speeds, carrying countless humans to the buildings where they worked. "It made me achy," I admitted, remembering the way I had gone to bed bone tired afterward, soreness like growing pangs in my limbs. "But I could learn to live with it. I'd have to. Jasper and Jade did alright," I added in an attempt to bolster my own certainty that I could do it.

  "The body can almost get used to a certain amount of pain," Drake commented, voice guarded.

  When I turned, I saw a veil over his eyes as well.

  He would know.

  Pain.

  He would know it better than most.

  His entire life since my father came upon him had been torment.

  Slave labor meant to break his resolve, his spirit.

  Then there had been the beatings.

  For fun.

  For entertainment.

  To try to bring about the Change.

  I'd never seen it.

  Him Changed.

  I doubted my father's guards had ever managed to make him break enough to bring it about. Or else I doubt he would have been living in a barn doing manual labor anymore.

  My father would have been selling tickets, creating fights to put his Draca up against someone else's poor, enslaved creature.

  They got it the worst, it appeared, the fae who Changed, who became other things.

  Treated like lower beasts, taken as slaves, killed for fun like hunters in the human realm with the large-eyed deer who did nothing to deserve death.

  A Draca would bring in the biggest betters, the worst of the worst, wanting to see a creature of myth in all its glory, fire billowing from its mouth, setting all the other animals ablaze.

  I'd seen him losing his control before, had seen the plates erupting from his skin, bloodied and fierce.

  But try as they might, they could never fully break his spirit, never make him become a plaything for the rich, the powerful.

  My stomach sank each time I would hear a guard call out to him.

  Draca.

  Like a slur, like an insult.

  The beatings always followed.

  Daily.

  More often even, I imagined.

  I tried, here and there, to interrupt it, to get the guards to go do something else, to save him what little bit of pain I could.

  But I wasn't naive.

  I knew he went to bed bloodied and bruised more nights than he didn't.

  I knew he knew more about pain than I ever would.

  My heart ached for his reality.

  "I'm sorry for what they did to you. For what my father did to you," I told him, voice getting a little thick.

  To that, his eyes - along with his body - softened, the guards fell. "You're not responsible for the crimes of your father."

  Crimes.

  I had never heard it called such.

  Even if that was what it was.

  A crime.

  To beat, to enslave, to torture.

  It wasn't generally seen as such in our realm.

  Maybe the word, the idea, came from his clan. Maybe they were not violent as one would think creatures made of scales with the breath of fire within them would be.

  Maybe they were kind and peaceful.

  "I wish I could have stopped them."

  "You certainly tried," he surprised me by saying. My brows had drawn low, and a slow smile tugged at his lips. "Come now, Amy. In what world did you have an emergent need for them to come and move your armoire around in your room?" he asked, reminding me of one of my less inventive attempts at distracting them. "I'll never forget that," he added, shaking his head. "You were all of a babe, half leaning out your bedroom window, voice cold as your mother's - which I knew not to be your own - informing them that they had forgotten their agreement to come up and move it, and that you were going to go tell your father if they did not do so immediately."

  "I never did ask them to do it in the first place," I informed him, shrugging. "But they couldn't be accused of being the brightest bunch. They all figured they'd forgotten. I ended up living with the armoire half-blocking my closet for that year."

  His smile pulled up higher at that. "You always tried, Amy. I saw that. But you were young. Your father was dead inside. There was nothing you could do to save me from it all. Well, until now that is," he added. "I barely remembered what it felt like not to have chains eating away at your flesh, burning the skin away day after day, night after night. I feel lighter," he added, shaking his head at himself as though he were being silly.

  "I couldn't even lift them. I don't know how you managed to carry that weight for... I don't even know how long you were there."

  Time was hard for me with my life in two different worlds. I knew Drake had been there for as long as I had been alive. Likely longer. But how long that was in Green years, I wasn't sure.

  Drake let out a sound that was a laugh, but humorless. "I don't know either," he admitted. "There has been no way to gauge the passing of time. I lost track of the seasons at the beginning, when my body wasn't used to the unyielding heat, cold, work, beatings. I don't know how many summers had passed me by without taking note of them. It's been a long time, though."

  In our time, a 'long time' could mean hundreds of years.

  Hundreds of years of torment, of misery.

  And not just the physical pain he eventually learned how to mentally overcome, to manage. Somehow. But the other things. Like if he wasn't the last of his kind, if he had left behind a clan, he had no idea where they were, if they were still alive, if others had lived to suffer the same fate he did.

  Did he leave behind a wife? Children? His parents? Little sisters or brothers?

  I burned to ask the questions, but found my tongue fat wi
th uncertainty. I had been scolded for being too curious, for asking too many questions, told no one wanted to share the innermost details of their lives, that it was none of my business to learn someone else's business. My mother had bared her teeth, staining the tips with the berry tint to her lips, claiming I had picked up too many human habits, that only lesser creatures felt the need to be so curious - because they were too stupid to simply understand how things were.

  I kept my lips pressed together, holding in my curiosity, reminding myself that I could be whoever I wanted to be as soon as I stepped foot in the human realm. If I wanted to ask questions, I could ask questions. Until my throat went raw and my brain got overheated.

  "Ugh," I grumbled when a gust of wind whipped the already raw skin of my face, racking me with a full-body shiver.

  Drake moved in front of me, blocking the worst of the wind with his wide back, looking down at me with an apology in his eyes. As though the weather was his doing. "This will be pure misery, but it is good for us," he told me as another gust made sheets of snow cascade down from the limbs of the tree at our side. My eyes must have held the question I had in my mind because he shrugged. "It will cover our footsteps. There will be no tracks for them to follow. They may still be able to track us, depending on who they have employed to do the task, but it will be harder without footsteps. And this wind will cast our scent all over the woods. They will be looking in circles. Hopefully for long enough that we can find the veil and slip out."

  "Well, at least it has a bright side," I told him, feeling my teeth start to chatter in the back, trying to grind them together to keep it from being audible.

  "If we head over to that small cliff right there," he went on, holding out an arm until my gaze followed. "We can build a little temporary shelter to keep the wind from getting in our bones."

  It was already in my bones, but I wasn't about to complain about it. I also was sure I would be all but useless trying to build a shelter, but I kept quiet about that as well, knowing that with a little guidance, I could at least hand him things or tie things.

  "Sounds like a plan," I agreed, falling into step with him as he turned, huddling close at his side, allowing his body to block a small amount of the wind.

  "I'm going to need to go find some pine branches. Shouldn't be hard. They should be falling off left and right in this. You stay here where you can get a little break from the wind. I won't be more than a few minutes."

  My stomach dropped at the idea of being alone, a ridiculous thing considering my original plan was to go on my own, my plan still was to live on my own.

  But that was in the human realm.

  This was The Green.

  And, sure, the humans had bad guys too, people evil through to their souls who enjoyed all sorts of terrible things, inflicting all sorts of pain.

  But those people paled in comparison to some of the fae, ones who would drain you just because they liked to cover themselves in blood, ones who would enslave you just to use you day in and day out until you broke... and even after that.

  There was evil lurking here, even in the relative peace in the Light.

  "Alright," I agreed, giving him a nod when I was sure my voice didn't come off confident enough. "I will stay here and try not to freeze.

  "I won't go far," he promised. "I should be close enough to hear you if you call for me."

  "Okay."

  "Okay," he agreed, hesitating a moment longer before finally turning his back on me, and walking away.

  The wind slapped at the side of my face, making me miss the mass of his body, the way it so effortlessly kept the wind from biting into my skin, slipping under layers of thick clothing.

  I turned my back on the open forest, facing the rock.

  It would turn out to be a huge mistake.

  FOUR

  Drake

  I hated to leave her.

  But to be perfectly honest, she wasn't going to make it.

  Not without a shelter to block the relentless wind, not without something to lock in our body temperatures to thaw her out.

  Her lips were losing their color.

  Her cheeks were painfully red.

  The skin would dry and peel in a few days.

  I knew that sensation all-too-well from the early days of my captivity. Back when I didn't have enough muscle, enough fat to keep me warm. Back before I had time to slowly fill in some of the holes in the barn that was my home, caking them with mud where I could, filling others with masses of dried leaves, spare bits of fabric if they could be found.

  Those early winters were a bitter memory of being curled in a corner of a room, shivering from head to toe, teeth chattering, sure I wouldn't make it through.

  Maybe I had even been somewhat disappointed to find out I had at times.

  I didn't want that sad fate for her, the feeling of unending coldness, the certainty of your impending death.

  She had barely even gotten a taste of a life on her own terms.

  I'd be damned if I let her die before she even got an opportunity to live.

  Even if leaving her alone made a pit settle in my stomach.

  Sure, this was the Light.

  And, sure, it was the most brutal time of winter where most fae were holed up indoors to stay away from the severe weather.

  But that only meant that the fae with ill intentions would be all the more on the prowl, on the lookout for those who would not know to defend themselves until it was too late. If they could defend themselves at all.

  I had no idea if Amethyst had any skills, any way to protect herself. If she was named after her potential skill set much like her half-brother and half-sister were, then it would imply any skill she might have would be a passive one. One that brought peace and calm, one that maybe gave her some slight intuition.

  That, mixed with her ignorance of The Green as a whole meant she was about as defenseless as a babe.

  From the sound of things, she would be able to navigate much better on her own once we crossed the veil. She knew the human ways. She would find her way there.

  So it was my job to keep her safe until I could get her there.

  I owed her that and more.

  She gave me something I never could have gotten for myself.

  She had given me my freedom.

  It was something I had all but lost hope in.

  I didn't know what freedom would mean for me.

  But I was thankful for the winter, for the heavy jacket wrapping up my body.

  The last beating I had endured had broken some of the plates in my back, making it impossible to slip back inside my skin like it normally would after I forced the Change to stay mostly at bay.

  They would heal.

  They always did, given enough time, given the chance to repair without being broken again.

  As soon as they healed, they would slide harmlessly back into my skin once again, making it impossible for someone to know who - to know what - I am.

  And so long as no one knew I was Draca - that I was descendent from a line of fae so rare they thought us the stuff of fables, of myths to tell their children about at night to spark their delight, to deepen their wonder - then I was relatively safe. As safe as any fae in the woods in winter.

  They might wonder why I was bigger, stronger, why I was corded with muscle while most fae were slight and almost delicate.

  But there were excuses for that.

  The work camps, for example.

  You could claim to have done a spell in one of the Dark camps for a few years, the unyielding hard work and long days causing your body to bend into a new shape.

  It was a passable excuse.

  They'd believe me.

  Or, well, I'd kill them for their silence.

  Maybe that was harsh, but so had been my life.

  I would do anything to prevent myself from living that way again.

  If the price of my freedom was bloodstained hands, so be it.

  That may have sounded cruel, heartl
ess.

  But the Green was not a place for softness, for sweetness, for goodness.

  Which was why Amethyst needed to get out as quickly as possible.

  It would eat her alive.

  Possibly even literally.

  You never really knew.

  I had been out of the world for so long. It was hard to tell who the players even were anymore, which fae had risen in power, which had fallen.

  I wasn't even entirely sure which Court was holding more power.

  They were supposed to be equal, of course, but only fools believed that. Power always tilted ever so slightly in one direction more than the other. For generations, it was Light, back when the lineage was secure, the powers unparalleled.

  But then rumors swelled about the Princess taking ill.

  And just like that, everything tilted Dark.

  It was why the forests were so unsafe, even in the Light.

  But new rumors were surfacing.

  I'd heard the guards talking about it in whispers for ages, knowing Opal would flay them if she overheard.

  The Princess had made a full recovery.

  And the Light was guarding Cece. Celestine. The daughter of both Courts - something never before heard of in all of our history. A fae bound to be more powerful than any before her.

  If she chose the Light Court instead of the Dark, who knew what was to become of them.

  But those were problems for those whose lives were bound to be affected by those decisions.

  Amethyst was going to be out of reach in the human realm.

  And me, well, I was going to see what - if anything - was left of my tribe.

  It had been so long.

  I wasn't even entirely sure I could find my way back. But I would die trying. Die in my efforts to regain what was ripped from me so long ago.

  We live on the fringes. Lived. Maybe I was getting my hopes up too much by thinking in the present tense. But we had survived on the fringes for generations behind our own veil created by a grateful mage so long before that no one even remembered the details, they had been long lost in the haze of endless seasons.