by Tracey Tobin
Tori pulled back and bit her lip. “What the hell was that?” she demanded. She examined her arm, but the twinkling had stopped.
“The magic that lies dormant in your blood,” Eden replied. “The only reason that Iryen was able to invoke such powerful dark magic in the first place is because your ancestors had a touch of magic in their blood, gifted to them by ancient creatures that have existed as long as this world has. That touch of magic is the reason that the first Kynnon king was chosen to rule; people revered the ancient magic and believed that it would bring the kingdom luck, health, and prosperity.”
“And it survived in the royal line all this time?” Jacob asked.
Eden smiled and wagged a finger at him. “Magic - especially old magic - is effectively impossible to destroy,” she explained. “It endures, against all odds.”
“But what does it mean?” Tori asked. She was clutching her wrist now, imagining that she could feel the little sparkles of light moving around inside her veins like spiders.
Eden set loose that maddeningly optimistic smile again. “It means that you are capable of preforming amazing feats, my child,” she explained. “Through this magic you will be able to gain strength and abilities that no human has been able to call upon since ancient times; strength and abilities that will allow you to face Iryen and ultimately destroy him.”
Tori felt dizzy. Again it seemed as though she was hearing a muffled distortion of the conversation, as though her ears were full of cotton. Everything Eden said seemed like it was in another language. She felt like she had been dropped into the middle of a fairy tale, and her desperation to get out was growing exponentially by the second.
“I thought that blood magic was evil?” Jacob was inquiring.
Eden spread her hands out in an ‘it depends on the way you look at it’ gesture. “You’ve likely only heard negative tales, dear child, but magic is neither inherently good nor bad,” she told him. “The result comes as a circumstance of the intent. If Victoria’s intent is pure she will be able to gain great power from her subjects.”
Jacob frowned. “From her subjects? What is that supposed to mean?”
“She will be able to draw strength from them through their blood by joining it with her own.” Eden said this as though it was a completely natural and reasonable thing to be suggesting. “The magic in her blood will draw to it the power that is inherent in any creature’s blood. It is a very old power that the very first of her ancestors possessed, but it has not been witnessed for eons. Even I am not entirely certain what will happen when we make the first attempt, but the Maelekanai elder has graciously offered to be the test subject to share his blood with Victoria. We will attempt our experiment this evening.”
Tori’s grip on her wrist had been getting tighter and tighter as Eden and Jacob spoke, until she was practically cutting off her own circulation. “And who made this decision?” she exploded all at once.
Jacob jumped with genuine surprise at her volume, and even beneath her robes Eden managed to look somewhat abashed. “Whatever do you mean, my dear?” she asked in a steady voice.
Tori was anything but steady. In fact, her body was practically vibrating with anger. “Who made this decision?!” she cried. “When did anyone run this plan past me? When did I consent to be a guinea pig? When did I ever say that I accept any of this insanity you’ve been spouting at me?!”
Eden’s lips parted as though to respond but, shockingly, nothing came out. Instead it was Jacob who began to sputter something to the tune of, “We just thought-”
“No!” Tori shot back, cutting him off with a harsh wave of her hand. “You didn’t think! No one thought! All you’ve been doing is telling! But I never agreed to any of this! I was taken to this place against my will, during a time in my life when the absolute last thing I need is more stress. Then you-” She jabbed a finger at Eden. “-start prattling on about how I’m some mysterious princess-slash-savior, which I don’t even know for sure is true because fuck, for all I know that whole light-show could have been a goddamn hallucination!” She jabbed her other hand at a wide-eyed Jacob and shouted, “Christ, for all I know you could have drugged me sometime on the way here and I’ve been tripping my ass off this whole time.”
“Princess-” Jacob tried, but Tori put her hands over her ears and growled like an enraged bear.
“Stop calling me that!” she screamed. “I am not a princess! I’m Victoria MacKinnon, nothing more!” Her throat began to burn and she realized that she was crying again. That only made her angrier. “I don’t want this! I don’t want any of this! I don’t want to be a princess, and I don’t want to be a queen, and I damn-well don’t want to risk my life fighting for a place that I didn’t even know existed until three days ago!”
She stopped to breathe for half a moment. In that moment of silent rage Eden spoke, very quietly. “But if you won’t fight, then we are all damned to suffer Iryen’s rule for all time.”
“That’s your fucking problem!” Tori shrieked back. “I never consented to be made into this savior you’re looking for, and I definitely don’t consent to having alien blood forced into me like I’m some kind of magical lab rat!”
“But-” Jacob seemed desperate for something to say, some argument that would fix this situation, but he was at a complete loss for the right words.
“Victoria,” Eden begged. “Please… We need you.”
For a split-second Tori felt something like guilt, but the rage and the pain of the past several weeks overpowered it. “Well, then, maybe you should have asked for my help instead of acting like it’s my duty to just mindlessly accept whatever you tell me!” With a throaty howl she turned to leave the council room, but at the last second she turned and shouted one final retort: “I am not some shiny new toy that you can play with as you please! I’m a human being and I’ve been through plenty enough suffering of my own without being saddled with the responsibility for everyone else’s!”
With that last accusation she stormed off, leaving a shocked Jacob and Eden standing wordlessly behind her.
Chapter Seven
Tori didn’t know where she was going, but she walked with authority. She must have looked as angry as she felt because the Maelekanai she passed actually looked apprehensive and went out of their way to move as far away from her as they could. She used this to her advantage and stormed through town aimlessly until she found a good place to be alone with her thoughts. The platform had a number of trees growing around it so that it was almost like an enclosed, natural gazebo. She chose a spot beside a particularly thick tree trunk where she could not be seen from the single rope bridge and flopped down beside it. She felt like screaming until she lost her voice, but instead she put her head in her hands and squeezed as hard as she could, focusing only on the feeling of her fingers drilling into her skull.
“Do you have a headache?” a little voice asked. Silent as a cat, Jiki swung down from one of the trees and landed with grace beside Tori. “Squeezing on it like that probably won’t help, you know.”
Tori sighed and let her hands fall to her lap, though her head still throbbed. “I’ve got a lot of headaches, kid,” she confessed. “And I only deserve one or two of them.”
Jiki made a funny face at that, like she was trying to decipher the mysterious code that Tori was speaking in. After a moment she gave up, flicked a finger at Tori’s blue robes and bare feet, and announced, “Nope. You’re cleaner, but you still don’t look like a princess to me.”
Tori snorted. “Good,” she growled. “Maybe if I don’t look like one they’ll stop expecting me to be one.”
At that Jiki cocked her head to one side. “Don’t you want to be a princess?” she asked. An innocent question asked by an innocent child. She curled her little paws around her knees and rocked back and forth in time with the flicking of her tail. “I think it would be pretty neat to be a princess.”
Tori barely managed to suppress the rage that was threatening to bubble over again. Sh
e squeezed her eyes shut and swallowed several times before responding, “Some princesses have it easy, kid, but to be a princess in this world I’d have to fight.”
Jiki’s eyelids fluttered. “Fight who?” she asked.
Tori thought about that. “Monsters,” she replied, hoping that the kitten would understand and leave it at that.
Jiki frowned and considered this new information. “No,” she agreed. “That doesn’t sound fun at all.” She gave Tori a curious look. “So does that mean that you’re not going to be a princess after all?” She looked genuinely disappointed.
Tori rubbed her forehead and another sigh escaped her lips. “I don’t think so kid. All I really want is to go back home, but I have no idea how to get there.”
“Don’t you know how you got here?”
Tori almost shot back an annoyed, snarky response, but then she stopped in her tracks. She thought about what she’d learned about her past. She’d originally traveled through worlds as a baby, and that first time it had only been a matter of smearing the crystal pendant with a little bit of her blood. When she’d returned it had been via the same location (Some kind of special spot that links between the two worlds?), and-
Her heart skipped a beat as she remembered the moment she’d handled the pendant for the first time. She’d cut her thumb on the ribbon just before she’d fixed the clasp around her neck, and it was right after that she’d begun having the visions. “Blood magic,” she whispered, staring down at her trembling hands.
“Huh?” Jiki asked.
Tori’s hand went to her chest, but found it bare. The necklace… She’d left the necklace back in the bathhouse with her clothes. She would need to retrieve it immediately, and then-
“Victoria?” shouted Jacob’s voice from somewhere nearby. “Victoria, where are you? Please, we need to talk! Victoria!”
Jiki had just opened her mouth to call out a reply when Tori snatched the kitten up in a bundle and wrapped a hand around her face. “Shhh!” she hissed, and kept her hand firmly planted over the little muzzle until Jacob’s voice faded off in another direction.
When he was gone Jiki shook her head to dislodge Tori’s grip and frowned back at her. “Why don’t you want him to find you?” she asked. “I thought you were friends.”
“We are,” Tori assured her, a voice in the back of her head wondering if that was still the truth. “But Jacob is one of the people who thinks that I should fight the monsters, so I don’t really want to talk to him right now. Do you get it?”
Jiki nodded with a grave look on her face that was almost comical. “Sometimes I fight with my friends too,” she shared.
Tori looked at the innocent kitten and set her jaw. She felt resolved, purposeful for the first time in a long time. “Do you want to help me get home?” she asked.
Jiki grinned the kind of grin that could light up a room. “Of course!”
With a fluttering heart, Tori mirrored her grin. “I need you to go to the bathhouse and bring me my clothes. There’s a necklace with them that is super important, so be sure you’ve got that. And I’ll also need a long rope. Do you think you can you do that?”
“Of course!” Jiki said happily, showing her little fangs. “You wait right here. I’ll be back!” She took off on all fours, thoroughly excited by her little mission.
While she was gone Tori examined her surroundings. The trees didn’t have branches that were close enough together to climb down, but there was plenty of space between two trees for her to drop a rope down. She hadn’t climbed a rope since junior high gym class, but surely going down had to be easier than going up.
Jiki returned so quickly that Tori thought she must have teleported. (For all I know, people might really do that here…) “I got it all!” she announced, bouncing on the balls of her feet. She held out a bundle of clothes with the crystal pendant laying on top of it and gestured to a coiled rope hanging from her shoulders.
“Thank you so much,” Tori gushed. She grabbed the pendant first and made sure it was securely fastened around her neck before she hastily changed back into her old clothes.
“What’s the rope for?” Jiki inquired.
Tori was uncoiling the rope and examining one of the thicker branches as she answered. “To climb down,” she explained. “I don’t want to risk going all through town to get to the ladder because Jacob’s been wandering around yelling my name, so someone’s bound to stop me.”
Jiki nodded in understanding and then asked in a small voice, “I wasn’t thinking, but you’re leaving right now, aren’t you?” She didn’t seem surprised, but the disappointment on her face was quite clear.
Tori found she felt a little pang in her heart for this child who had been so cute and innocent and kind to her. “I’m afraid so,” she told the kitten. “But hey, maybe someday I’ll come back and visit.” She didn’t know what possessed her to offer up the lie, but the smile she received as a result was totally worth it.
Jiki helped her to tie a sturdy knot around one of the branches, and together they tossed the bulk of the rope off the side of the platform. It uncoiled like a snake and stopped a mere foot or two from the ground. “Perfect,” Tori whispered. She turned back to the little Maelekanai girl and gave her a tight hug. “Thanks for your help,” she said. “Now I need you to do one last thing for me, okay? Just distract Jacob for a little while so he doesn’t notice I’ve gone. I just need a little head start.”
“Will do!” Jiki said with a grin and a mock salute. “You be careful, okay krishni-ka?”
Tori had been pulling on the rope to make sure it was secure, but now she glanced back at Jiki with a question on her face. “What does that last bit mean?” she asked.
Jiki showed her fangs again. “It means ‘big sister’!” she replied. Then she ran off on all fours to take on her second mission.
Tori almost went after her. The little kitten was so sweet and kind that she could hardly stand it. She wondered what kind of world she was leaving Jiki in, really. But then she thought about how beautiful the village was, and how the laughing kittens had been playing happily in the trees, and she thought that it couldn’t possibly be all that bad. So she turned back to the rope and locked her conscience away in a deep, dark cell in the very back of her mind.
“Okay,” she said to herself. “Let’s see about this escape.” She sat down on the edge of the platform, wrapped a bit of the rope around her forearm, and eased herself out over the edge with her feet pressed against the tree. The second her weight shifted from the platform to the rope she began to doubt herself a great deal. The rope was pulling at her arm a lot more painfully than she’d expected it to, which made it difficult to begin her descent. She breathed slowly and forced an image of home in her mind. “You can do this,” she whispered to herself. “It’s not that far. You can do this.” She managed to ease herself down the first five or six feet, and then her muscles twitched and all of a sudden she was sliding down the rope, her bare hands burning, her feet flailing for purchase against the tree trunk. Unable to keep her grip, she let go at about ten feet from the ground. Her feet struck the earth heel-first, sending her crashing down onto her rear end in a heap. Somehow she managed to keep the profanity to a low hiss, but to make up for the lack of volume she growled every rude word she had ever heard in her life.
“Step one…partial success,” she growled. Once her rear had finished throbbing she moved into the trees to be out of sight and began carefully circling the village in search of the horses that she hoped were still hanging out where Jacob had left them. Once or twice she thought she heard Jacob calling out her name and was careful to stay hidden behind the trees. She felt a bit horrible for leaving him like this when he’d been so kind to her and helped her out, but now that he seemed obsessed with this idea of her as some superhero savior princess… No, she couldn’t say good-bye. He wouldn’t understand, and he would definitely try to stop her. They all would.
Something nudged her shoulder as she was peering up
at the village, sending a thrill of terror up through her throat. On second glance she found that Ashes had sneaked up behind her and was saying hello.
“There’s the pretty girl I’m looking for,” Tori cooed. She gave the horse’s nose a good rub and was grateful that the creature was so easy-going and friendly. “Good thing for me Jacob trained you so well. And I’ll bet that you even know the way home all by yourself, don’t you?” The horse gave a snort that Tori took to be agreement.
Ashes wasn’t wearing a saddle - presumably Jacob had removed them sometime the night before - but Tori figured that after all she’d dealt with she could manage a couple of days of bareback in order to get home. More of a concern was how she was going to get up on the horse’s back without help, but by leaning against a tree and doing a bit of a clumsy acrobatic maneuver, she eventually managed it without breaking her neck. “Step two: as successful as I could have hoped for.” She used Ashes’ mane as a way to steady herself and said, “Okay then. Let’s get out of her, girl.”
“Leaving already?” a voice mocked.
To Tori’s horror, Kaima fell down from the trees and landed with a hateful scowl directly in front of the horse.
“Looks like I was right about you after all,” the Maelekanai girl sneered. “Tasked with saving your entire world from evil and your decision is to turn tail and run.”
Tori could feel her blood boiling at the accusation. “This is not my world,” she spat. “Just because I happened to be born here doesn’t automatically make me responsible to risk my life for it.”
Kaima let out a short, rude laugh. “You keep telling yourself that, princess,” she tormented. “But we both know what the real truth is: you’re just a pathetic, spineless coward.”
