Twinchantment

by Elise Allen

  “I’m not magic!” Sara screamed.

  And then she started to cry.

  Flissa’s rage vanished and Nose Ring’s dagger dropped to the floor.

  Everything around Flissa was swimmy after that. She had some sense of Raya darting back down the corridor and chiding Nose Ring for overreacting. Then the lion rubbed up against Sara, thrilled that she was bringing not just twins but at least one mage to Kravein. She commanded a switch in guards, so Black Boot took Sara, Ponytail took Flissa, and Nose Ring was relegated to Nitpick and Primka.

  But all Flissa saw was Nose Ring’s own body turning against her.

  It was the blackest of magic. It was what Galric had accused the Keepers of the Light of doing with their bloody spikes in the dungeon. It was what the girl with the sickle mark on her hand had done to her friend in the hills. Not just harming someone, but taking over their body, robbing them of their free will. It was the stuff of Flissa’s worst nightmares and the reason she feared all magic.

  And it was what Flissa had just done herself.

  She couldn’t explain it any more than she could explain how the word “scimisword” came to her when she needed it to save Sara’s life, but she had done it.

  Was she magic?

  Flissa tried to focus on her own body, tried to focus all her fear and anger on the spell that bound her so it would break.

  Nothing.

  Then she was not a mage.

  Except she was when she wanted vengeance. Like against the plant, and the Brambled Gates, and Nose Ring.

  Was she a dark mage?

  Flissa went hollow inside. She didn’t even notice when she emerged out the end of the corridor and into the purple sunlight, or when her body climbed into a metal box on wheels that attached to Raya’s horse-drawn carriage. She didn’t balk when her captors locked the door. She was actually grateful. At least now she and Sara could talk.

  Raya reared back on her hind legs and rested her paws on the box so she could look in the only window—a small barred opening at the back. “Next stop, the marketplace—and Kravein. And because I’m a kind and benevolent captor…”

  Flissa saw blue sparks, then felt a sweet release as the spell dissipated and her body was her own again.

  Almost her own. Her rear end was stuck firmly and magically to the bench on which she sat, but the rest of her was blissfully free. No matter how mixed up she was in her head, she couldn’t help but luxuriate in the feeling. She rolled her neck all around, then stretched her arms high above her head.

  “Mmmph! Mmmph!” Primka struggled to speak.

  “Sorry.” Raya smiled. “No reprieve for you. I don’t like birds.”

  Flissa heard a whip snap and the carriage started to move. Raya dropped back down to all fours and ran. Apparently the carriage was just for her human cohorts and their prisoners. Raya was faster on her own.

  They all stayed silent, listening to the hoofbeats and the squeaks and strains of the metal box on wheels, until they felt they could talk without the guards hearing from the carriage.

  Galric grinned. “Did you hear what she said? We’re going to the marketplace! That’s exactly where we need to be, right? It’s where we’re supposed to find Dorinda.”

  Neither Flissa nor Sara responded. They only had eyes for one another. Sara leaned forward, arms on her thighs, as close to Flissa as she could get.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  Flissa was so relieved she didn’t have to explain. Sara just knew. She mirrored Sara’s position, so their faces were just inches away.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Flissa said. “She was hurting you. I wanted it to stop. You have to believe I wasn’t trying to do something so horrible, and I never would have—”

  She was going to say she never would have let Nose Ring kill herself with the dagger…but could she say it honestly? If it was the only way to save Sara’s life, could she truly guarantee she wouldn’t be that vicious?

  Sara’s eyes widened and she grabbed Flissa’s hands. “Flissa, do you think I’m upset? I’m not! She was hurting me. She had a knife at my throat, and you stopped her.”

  “Wait, what?” Galric said. “What did I miss? What did you do? I couldn’t see anything. I was behind you—I just heard a lot of screaming and shouting.”

  “But I used—” Flissa looked at Primka and Nitpick, who were both staring at her. Galric was also hanging on her every word. She couldn’t say it. She leaned even closer to Sara. “And it wasn’t the first time. In the Brambled Gates too. I have no idea what a scimisword is; I have never heard of such a weapon in my life. But I called for it because—”

  Sara looked at her intently. “I did it too.”

  The words smacked Flissa. “What?”

  “The coin. In the first cave. I knew in my bones that if we stayed, we’d never get out in time to save Mom. I couldn’t explain it, I just knew. Then you flipped the coin and I saw it—it came up king. And I wished like crazy I could change it…then by the time you looked at it, it was queen.”

  “You flipped it?”

  “I didn’t touch it.”

  That wasn’t the same as saying she didn’t flip it. Flissa couldn’t believe it. It went against everything the coin stood for. It went against their trust. It went against them.

  “So the coin wanted us to stay in the cave,” Flissa said accusingly. “And if we had—”

  “If we had, we’d be dead. I wasn’t sure before, but after what you told me, I’m positive. Whatever happened, it worked for you when you needed to save my life, and it worked for me when I needed to save yours.”

  “How can you know that?” Flissa asked. “The cave was safe. Leaving it—”

  “Was the only choice,” Sara finished. “We had to get out. And now we’re on our way to the marketplace, just like Galric said. Exactly where we want to go.”

  “As prisoners, on our way to an evil mage,” Flissa objected. She sank her head in her hands. “Maybe we deserve to be in the Twists.”

  Primka mmmmphed loudly, but Flissa ignored her.

  “No,” Sara said. “No one belongs in the Twists. I don’t know if Raya’s story is true, but I do know there’s good magic out there. Like Katya’s, and Primka’s…and ours. We shouldn’t be punished for it. We shouldn’t have to stay in hiding. We shouldn’t have to live our lives so terrified of the Keepers that we pretend we’re one person just to keep them happy.”

  It was like Sara had reached inside Flissa and twisted her stomach.

  “I like sharing a life with you,” she said. “I thought you did too.”

  Sara sighed. She looked tired. She squeezed Flissa’s hands. “I like you. I love you. But I don’t want to be you, and I don’t want you to have to be me. It’s not fair. To either of us.”

  Tears sprang to Flissa’s eyes and she hated it. What Sara wanted was so clear and basic and normal. It shouldn’t rip her heart out. But it did. And she wished she could stop talking about it because it only made her feel weak and hopeless, but she couldn’t help it. She lowered her head.

  “I don’t know who I am if I’m not part of you.”

  “Me neither,” Sara said, and Flissa was so surprised to hear her sister’s voice break that she lifted her head. Sara’s eyes glistened with tears. She let out a wet laugh. “Just on this trip I’d be dead a million times over if it wasn’t for you. But we’ll do it. We’re the princesses of Kaloon. We have power. We’ll save Mom, we’ll go back, we’ll tell Mom and Dad everything we know…and somehow we’ll get Kaloon back from the Keepers. Then we can just be ourselves. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be good.”

  Flissa still didn’t know what to believe about the Keepers, but she did know things in Kaloon had to change. There had to be room for good magic. And a sign of potential magic, like twinhood or left-handedness, should never be enough to get someone exiled to this terrible place.

  Things would be different, and that meant she and Sara would have to be different too.
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br />   She looked hopefully up at Sara. “Can I still flip your coin to make decisions?”

  Sara laughed through a sob. “Sure. Until maybe you won’t need to. Can I still hold your hand if I’m running and I don’t want to fall?”

  Flissa nodded; then her voice broke as she added softly, “Until maybe you won’t need to.”

  The sisters looked at each other, holding hands, and even though they were in a tiny box on their way to an evil mage, Flissa was sure they’d succeed.

  They had far too much to live for.

  “It’s sundown,” Galric said, cutting into Flissa’s thoughts.

  “Sundown?” she and Sara echoed, then twisted their positions so they could peek out the window too.

  Galric was right. The purple sun hung low in the sky.

  “That’s not possible,” Sara said. “How long were we in the cave?”

  “Not sure. We got there, then there was the tunnel, and the ice, and then we slept….”

  Her voice trailed off and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She had a sudden flash of seeing something green and wavy….

  She shook it off. It must have been part of a dream. “However long it was, it’s dusk now,” Flissa said, “so we have approximately sixteen hours to accomplish what we need to do, then get back to Kaloon.”

  She said it matter-of-factly, but Flissa knew sixteen hours wasn’t much, and she could tell it hit Sara that way too. They silently took it in; then Flissa realized they weren’t the only ones who were silent. Their jail cell had stopped creaking, and the horses had stopped clomping. Instead, Sara was buffeted by the sound of a million different voices, shouting and talking and all running into one another.

  “Hoods up,” Flissa said quickly. So far they’d been lucky; Raya and her gang hadn’t recognized them. They might not be so lucky in the marketplace.

  She and Sara pulled on their hoods just as Ponytail opened the back of the box. Raya stood next to her, not the least bit out of breath from her run. “Out,” the lion said.

  Blue sparks flew and Flissa’s body went rigid again—arms flat to her sides, head and chest up—but her rear end came free of the seat and she marched herself out of the box, right behind Galric. She couldn’t turn, but she heard a thump when Sara fell to the ground behind her, then a squeal when someone pulled her back up.

  Flissa heard the roar of a million voices, though all she could see was a rough-hewn street, with parked carriages shoved together at every angle. Hitching posts lined the street, and horses jostled against one another for spots at drinking troughs. Clumps of people—men, women, families pulling along children—thronged across the street to the roar behind her, which had to be the marketplace itself.

  Apparently the Rule of Three didn’t hold in this part of the Twists.

  Flissa heard Raya’s voice. “Take them to Kravein. I’ll meet you there.”

  After that she heard scuffling sounds; then Flissa felt her body turn.

  Sara, Galric, Nitpick, Primka, and their guards were all gone. What she saw was pure bedlam. It was some kind of town square, she supposed, but there was no way to tell its size. Mostly she just saw a mad crush of people and animals. Voices roared, and the smell was overpowering—a mix of exotic foods, spices, incense, and perfumes, plus a rank undertone of sewage, barnyard animals, and filth.

  “Keep resisting,” Ponytail said, her voice hard and too close for Flissa’s comfort. “I dare you.”

  Flissa didn’t even realize she’d been resisting until that moment, but now she resisted even more. She did not want to enter the marketplace. There were too many people, too many bodies, too many ways for things to go horribly wrong.

  She’d been so foolish. She and Sara had spent the whole ride to the marketplace talking about the future, when they could have been planning for the moment they arrived and how they’d escape. What would they do now? She didn’t even know where Sara was.

  That made Flissa stop resisting. Sara was going to the same place Raya had sent Flissa, so if she wanted to see her sister again, she had to release her body to Raya’s magic.

  She started walking.

  It wasn’t easy. The magic kept her head high, and though her hood helped shield her face a little, it was still dizzying to see all the bodies thronging and shoving so close. Several times people slammed into her, and she tripped back into Ponytail so often that she felt like Sara.

  Flissa took deep breaths and tried to get her bearings. From what she could see, the marketplace stood on a patch of flat ground maybe three times the size of the palace courtyard. The purple sun had all but completely set—darkness loomed over buildings at the ends of the square—but here the sky was full of thousands of tiny flying, flickering lights. So many that the marketplace was bathed in the equivalent of the midday sun.

  “Oof!”

  Someone had slammed into her, ramming into her stomach. She tilted her eyes down and saw two grimy boys, completely identical, and no more than five years old. Flissa had just enough time to wonder what such small children were doing alone in a place like this, when one of the boys snatched the magic velvet bag off her waist; then they both ran off and disappeared into the crowd.

  “Hey!” Flissa yelled. “Come back here!”

  She tried to lunge after them, but a blinding headache jerked her back and to her knees. She wailed out loud as stars and fireworks exploded behind her eyes.

  And she smelled lavender. The overpowering stench of lavender.

  The pain went away, but Flissa’s head still throbbed. She opened her eyes, and there was Ponytail, crouched over her, a cold, satisfied smile on her face.

  “Remember me…Princess?”

  Deliberately, she peeled off the fingerless leather glove on her right hand…to reveal a large, sickle-shaped purple blotch.

  Flissa stopped breathing. Her heart thudded until it shook her whole body.

  It was her. The girl. Here.

  Ponytail’s grin widened.

  Flissa had to fight. She had to. She tried to rear back on her hands, ready to kick out and sweep Ponytail’s legs out from under her, but Ponytail merely quirked a brow when Raya’s spell made Flissa flop uselessly to the ground.

  Ponytail knelt down and pinned the lower half of Flissa’s body with her knee. Her cold blue eyes boring into Flissa’s, she casually drew her knife and placed its serrated edge against Flissa’s cheek. Without breaking the skin, Ponytail traced a line from Flissa’s cheek up to her eye.

  “Still want to fight?” Ponytail asked.

  “No,” Flissa said breathlessly. “I won’t. I promise.”

  “Good.”

  Ponytail withdrew her knife and got up, leaving Raya’s magic to take over and pull Flissa to her feet, chest up, arms pinned down. A marionette all over again.

  “So here’s the question,” Ponytail said as she walked through the crowd, Flissa moving helplessly by her side. “How do I get the most out of your secret? Do I tell Raya? Or Kravein? Or do I go right to one of the Keepers and tell her that not only is the princess of Kaloon right here in the Twists, but she’s actually a twin?”

  Flissa desperately wanted to turn her head to see if anyone had heard, but her neck refused to move. No one in the throng ahead of them seemed to hear, though. Everyone was too busy gathering around the marketplace’s stalls, jockeying for position and haggling over prices.

  “Please don’t tell anyone,” Flissa begged. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

  “Really?” Ponytail laughed scornfully. “You’ll give me back my life? My freedom? My family? Everything else you stole from me?”

  Flissa’s heart sank. Promises wouldn’t help.

  “I wasn’t trying to take anything from you at all,” she tried instead. “I was eight. I was scared. I saw you hurting your friend, and—”

  “Hurting her?!” Ponytail exploded. “I was a little kid too, remember? I was mad. I got out of control. Spinning her around like that was an accident, and she was fine! When I te
ll your secret to the Keepers and they drag you through Kaloon in chains, you look for Anna and she’ll tell you herself. She was fine. We might have fought, but she was my best friend and she wouldn’t have wanted this for me.”

  Flissa stopped in her tracks, so stunned she didn’t even realize she was fighting Raya’s magic until her knees threatened to buckle. She took the tiniest possible steps forward. Ponytail continued on several paces before she realized Flissa was dragging her feet.

  “You’re gonna make this hard again, huh?” Ponytail said. “Great. More fun for me.”

  “You don’t know,” Flissa said somberly, and something in her face made Ponytail pause.

  “Know what?” she asked.

  When Flissa didn’t answer, she moved closer, getting right in her face. “Know what?”

  “I can’t ask Anna,” Flissa said softly. “Her family was run out of Kaloon. They were tormented because everyone thought they’d kept your secret. Their home was ransacked, old friends threatened them…they had to leave everything, and run from the kingdom in shame.”

  Ponytail looked pale and stunned. Then she shook it off. “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” Flissa said. “It was awful. My father got the report—I made him tell me everything. They tried to sneak away in the middle of the night with the few belongings that mattered to them, but their neighbors saw. They became a mob—they grabbed the family’s things, said they didn’t deserve to leave with anything but the clothes on their backs. And even then it wasn’t enough. People were spitting at them—throwing things. Anna and her sister were—”

  “Enough!” Ponytail snapped. “That’s not my fault. What happened to Anna and her family, that’s on Kaloon. It’s on the Keepers, and the stupid royal family, who tells everyone that all magic is evil. You know who it’s on? It’s on you.”

  Ponytail shoved Flissa, hard, knocking her back to the ground. Then Ponytail reared back to kick her and Flissa flinched, but the blow never came. Instead, Ponytail kicked at a stump, whacking it again and again with all her might, each thump and thwack ringing out…until she fell to her knees, all her energy gone. She collapsed on top of the stump, buried her face in her hands, and let out a ragged sob.