by Gow, Kailin
Gem nodded.
“I am. I hope I am, anyway.”
“Oh, you are. Now run along. I’ve got a pub to run.”
Gem left Svetlana to her tea. She wandered over to Jack, who was still staring at his piece of paper.
“Hi Jack.” She knew she needed to make more of an effort with Jack if he was ever going to be less nervous around her.
“H-hi.”
“Got anything interesting?” Gem asked him.
“What? No!” Jack all but shot up from the stool he was on. “Just some… just some history stuff. Pointless, boring history stuff. Um… I’ve got to…I’ll be…”
Jack more or less ran off. Gem thought about going after him, but Sparks and Rio seemed to be working their way up to another argument. She weighed it up, and decided that stopping the two of them from fighting was probably more important. After all, Jack was just being his usual nervous self, and at least he probably wasn’t going to end up brawling with anyone.
With a sigh, Gem headed for the other two boys. She didn’t see Svetlana shaking her head sadly behind her.
Kat squirmed in the ropes they had used to tie her hands, but they wouldn’t budge. The only thing worse than being tied up was where they had tied her up. Apparently, they had decided that a stone walled cowshed would work as a prison. Kat scowled. What sort of ruler not only didn’t have a castle, but also didn’t even have a proper dungeon?
Jack made his way through the Woods as quickly as he could. He had hardly believed Kat’s note when he’d got it, but it had been in her lipstick. Lying to Gem about it had been hard though, but thoughts of Kat and her shortcut kept him busy enough that he didn’t have to think about it. So busy, in fact, that he didn’t even notice the burly figures creeping up on him as he walked…
Sparks tried not to sulk as Gem told him and Rio to stop being such idiots. Deep down, he knew she was right. It was just that he also knew that he didn’t like the way Rio looked at her. It was so obvious what he wanted, but Gem couldn’t seem to see it. Still, at least when Rio walked out, that left the two of them sitting next to one another…
Gem found herself torn between wanting to go after Rio and staying there with Sparks. She decided on the latter, both because it would let Rio cool off, and because she had to admit she was happy just sitting next to the handsome jock. When his hand reached out for hers, she didn’t stop it…
Rio leant against the wall of the inn, feeling his anger bubble. Of course Gem had sided with the farm boy. It was too much to think that she felt anything for him, even after all she’d said. When the guard came up to him holding a note written in black lipstick, he barely even glanced at it before setting off…
Chapter 7
Gem was getting worried. She had gone outside, looking for Jack. Looking for Rio too, come to that, because she hadn’t seen either boy for at least the last hour or two. With Rio, she might have believed that he was still sulking, though even his hardheaded obstinacy should have abated after a while. With Jack though, it didn’t make sense.
Gem had to admit that she felt bad about not noticing that he was gone sooner. It was just that she and Sparks had started talking, and somewhere in the conversation she’d lost track of time. Now, Gem was regretting it. None of Goolrick’s soldiers remembered seeing Jack after he had left. As for Rio, the only one who remembered anything said that he had seen the boy around the side of the inn, but that had been almost straight after he’d walked out.
Gem went there anyway, but there didn’t seem to be any sign of Rio. All that was there was a crumpled piece of paper. Gem picked it up and read it, then read it again with increasing fear. Had Rio really run off after something like this? Had he really been that stupid? Had Jack? Gem felt her stomach knot. She could only guess at how much danger they might be in.
In the cowshed, in the Spurious village, Kat worked at the ropes holding her for the two hundred and fifteenth time. Well, she didn’t know that for certain. It wasn’t like she was od actually been counting. It certainly felt like it might have been a two hundred and fifteenth attempt though. Like the possible two hundred and fourteen other tries, the ropes refused to budge.
Kat was starting to think that it might not have been very prudent to argue with Sebold, but wise probably wasn’t the word she would have picked to describe herself at the best of times. The trouble was, she knew, she was just a naturally querulous sort of person. She would argue with anybody. It had only been a matter of time, really.
Thinking of time, hadn’t they kept her in her rather a long time? What sort of game did that? Kat was beginning to think that Henry Word had been in a very odd mood when he designed Anachronia. As if in answer to her boredom, the door to the shed opened. It revealed two burly figures, with a third, rather smaller one held between them, gagged with his hands tied.
“Jack?” Kat exclaimed. The two guards threw the boy into the pen, tossing his glasses in after him. Kat half-shuffled her way over to the boy, who groaned in pain as he tried to sit up. He had a black eye, and just the way he moved told Kat that he was bruised everywhere else too. One glance at his hand told her that they had taken Jack’s ring from him, the same way they had taken hers. Kat tugged the gag out of his mouth.
“Hi, Kat.’
Guilt hit her at the brightness with which Jack said it. He should have been angry, but he wasn’t. Somehow, that hurt, almost as much as those bruises had to.
“Oh Jack, I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t come here then… hang on. This doesn’t make sense. This is just a game. You can’t be hurt. Not really.”
Jack groaned again, and this time managed to get upright.
“That’s good to know,” he said, smiling wanly. “Though if so, I wish someone would tell the bruises.”
Kat tried to think about it more. The bruises were an aberration. They were out of the ordinary. They didn’t fit.
“I suppose,” Jack said, “I suppose this is a game, right? There’s… there’s no chance this could be real?”
Kat started to say that of course there wasn’t, but stopped herself. Normally, she liked to think she was a pretty intuitive person, knowing things by instinct, trusting what she felt. She got the feeling that was the wrong approach here. Instead, she tried to treat it the way a scientist would, taking the unproven theory- the hypothesis, they would probably call it- and testing it with the facts she could find. There were the injuries to Jack, and the fact that everything felt so solid. Then there was the way things didn’t work the way you’d expect them to in a game. Sebold didn’t live in a castle. Exciting things didn’t happen in the village on a convenient schedule. Even being imprisoned like this didn’t fit, because in a game, Kat would have escaped by now, or learned something convenient, or something. That left only one conclusion…
“Jack” she said, “we need to get out of here. If this isn’t a game, then what’s to stop Sebold from just killing us?”
A wave of fear hit her as she said it. She had charged into those ogres without a thought of the danger, because as far as Kat had been concerned, there hadn’t been any. But there had been. They could get hurt here. They could die here. Just the thought of it made her feel sick.
“What about the others?” Kat asked, not waiting for Jack to answer. “Are they ok?”
“They were fine when I left,” Jack assured her. “You know, I’d be better at escaping with my glasses on.”
“Oh, right.” Kat picked them off the floor two handed, cleaned them as best she could on his tunic, and then settle the glasses on Jack’s nose. “Better?”
Jack nodded.
“Right, I can’t get these ropes myself. Can you unpick the knots?”
It turned out that Jack wasn’t very good at undoing knots with his hands tied, but he was tenacious. He kept going persistently until finally the ropes fell away from Kat’s wrists. It didn’t take her half as long to get him free. The next step didn’t look so easy.
“We still need to get out of this place,” K
at said, “and the door is locked. I know, I tried earlier. Unless you can pick a lock from the inside…”
Jack shook his head.
“Maybe we could use one of the ruler words though.”
“You think we still could?” Kat asked. “I didn’t think to try without my ring on.”
“Isn’t that just a way home?” Jack asked. “There’s an easy way to find out. Surreptitious.”
Kat had to look hard to spot him, even knowing that he was there. She was torn between jubilation at the fact that it worked and anger at herself. She could have escaped hours ago!
“Right,” Kat said. She doubted that Jack had planned that many escapes before, and even if hers were mostly from her room after she’d been grounded, the experience was better than nothing. “I suppose we’d be better off waiting for dark, but we don’t know if Sebold will decide to do something worse before then. We’ll have to use the “deleterious” word to blow the door off, then make a run for it. It’s not great, but it’s probably the best we’ve got.”
Jack pursed his lips.
“What are you thinking?” Kat asked.
“There might be another way. A different word. I mean, if it can make an inn disappear…” he stepped over to the door, putting a hand on it. “Ephemeral.”
One minute the door was there, the next it wasn’t. Kat stood there open mouthed, mostly because it had hit her that, since this wasn’t a game, there was actually a real place where they could do things like making doors temporary enough to disappear. It was probably also handy if you lost your keys. Realizing that she was wasting time, Kat quickly whispered the word “surreptitious” and led Jack outside. She was cautious. She knew the word wasn’t as good as really being invisible, and now that she knew that injuries would really hurt, she suddenly didn’t feel like being spotted by any guards.
“We should get our stuff,” Kat said. She tiptoed her way over to the longhouse, trying to keep to the shadows. She needn’t have bothered. There were a few people further off, but no one was nearby. She peered around the edge of the longhouse door, then jerked her head back. Sebold was at the far end of the room, casting yet more runes. For a moment, Kat thought about pointing at him and saying deleterious, just to see if it would work, but she remembered what he had said about wearing protective charms. In any case, Kat wasn’t sure about whether she could do that to someone who wasn’t a character in a game, who was actually real.
Instead, Kat settled for sneaking inside just long enough to steal back her sword and shield, along with Jack’s bow, from where they’d been set in one of the spots beside the table. There was no sign of their rings. Kat guessed Sebold had those on him, and since even tiptoeing out balancing all the weapons made her heart hammer in her chest, Kat wasn’t going to risk trying for them. She passed Jack back his bow.
“Right, let’s get out of here before they notice we’re gone.”
No sooner had she said it than Kat heard a commotion over by the shed. Not waiting to hear more, and especially not waiting to hear the words “there they are, get them” she grabbed Jack’s arm and ran for the edge of the village. Maybe it was the words keeping them hard to notice, or maybe they were just lucky, but either way, no one tried to stop them.
Even so, Kat didn’t stop running until they were well into the trees. When she did, Jack more or less collapsed.
“We did it,” he gasped. “We actually got away.” He punched the air feebly. Apparently it was all he had the energy for.
Kat nodded, and was about to start celebrating herself, though possibly in a slightly less exhausted way, when she remembered something.
“We can’t stop. Sebold won’t just have sent one note. He wanted all the rings. We have to warn the others.”
“So we head back to the inn?”
Kat shook her head, even though she wanted, really wanted, to say yes.
“First, we’ll have to stop by where they caught you, in case one of the others is already on their way. Do you remember where it was?”
Jack nodded.
“I think so.”
Kat had half been hoping that he would say no. Instead, she had to hope as she jogged through the woods that there would be no one there. The sword and shield she wore weren’t the comforting presence they’d been when she got them. The thought of having to fight again sent shivers down her spine.
Those shivers turned to full blown terror when she heard the sounds of a fight ahead, but Kat didn’t stop running until she reached the edge of a track where Rio was fighting a pair of Sebold’s men, his broadsword slamming into their shields. For a moment, Kat thought that he might be winning, but then she saw the third man, back in the trees, the one that the other two were driving Rio towards.
For several seconds, Kat stood there frozen. The sight of the sword in the third man’s hands made her think of just what might happen to her if that sword struck her. She didn’t want to die. Kat looked to Rio again. His attackers forced him back another step, then another, laughing as they did it. Something snapped in Kat then. She threw herself forward, drawing her sword as the third man turned and aimed a startled swing at her. She ducked it more through luck than anything else, then stabbed out with her own blade. The soldier fell dead, and Kat turned back to the rest of the fight.
She didn’t need to do anything. Of the two men who had been attacking Rio, one was running away, while the other was on the ground with an arrow sticking from his chest. Kat tried to be nonchalant about it, but casual wasn’t an option the way she was currently feeling. She grabbed Rio, kissing him before he had a chance to protest.
“I’m so glad you’re all right,” she said when she pulled back. “And I’m so, so sorry.”
Rio led the way back towards the inn in silence. He couldn’t help his eyes darting to Kat from time to time, because he didn’t know what to say. He could still taste her lipstick from where she had kissed him, but couldn’t help thinking of the note to him written in the same shade. He also couldn’t help thinking about what Gem would taste like if she kissed him, and whether it would be as sweet…
Kat trudged along behind him, mostly keeping her eyes on the path. She’d blown it. She knew that. But Rio… he was hardly glancing back at her. Kat wasn’t going to let herself cry, but it wasn’t exactly easy…
Sparks was sharpening his sword, watching Gem try to convince Goolrick that they should go after the others. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea. Actually, what he really didn’t like was the thought of Gem wanting to run after Rio, but Sparks knew he shouldn’t say that. And there was Jack to consider…
Jack’s eye still ached, but he kept up easily enough. It was Kat who seemed to be having problems. She had hardly looked at him since escaping. Silently, without making a fuss about it, he slid his hand into hers…
It took Gem nearly an hour to persuade Goolrick to send out scouts to search for the others. He only backed down when she threatened to go and search by herself, and then only when she promised to stay where she was. Gem just hoped that they would find the others before anything happened.
Chapter 8
Gem heard the shouts from Goolrick’s men before she saw the others return. She and Sparks were sitting outside the Ephemeral Inn, waiting for news as Gem had promised Goolrick she would. He had made his help conditional on her staying there, so she didn’t dare get up to check what was going on in case it gave the wizard an excuse to withdraw it.
Sparks had sat with her, on a bench in front of the inn, and Gem found that she was glad of it. He hadn’t said much, but just having him there had helped. The weight had been fraught with worry, filled with it, and knowing that she couldn’t help was worse. Still, judging by the sound coming out of the woods, the men of Perfidious had found something. Gem just hoped it was the others.
It was. They arrived in a cluster of Goolrick’s men, and Gem’s heart leapt to see them. It fell again when she saw that all three of them were being held tightly by the arms, like prisoners, and were bei
ng almost dragged along. When Goolrick stepped from the inn, Gem put herself in front of him.
“Tell your men to let them go, Goolrick. They don’t deserve to be treated like that.”
“Don’t they?” the young wizard gave her a cold look. “You might want to vindicate them, to free them from all blame, without thinking, but I cannot afford to be so foolish.”
Gem looked from him to Sparks, hoping that the boy would back her up. Instead, he was staring at the others with what appeared to be anger.
“Not you as well?”
“What do you expect, Gem?” he replied. “I saw the note. They ran off on the promise of a short cut, and Kat, she’s the worst of them. She betrayed us.”
Goolrick nodded his agreement.
“The boy is right. They ran off to join Spurious without a thought. Now the only question is what to do with them.”
That sounded ominous to Gem. She followed as Goolrick and Sparks walked over to where the others were being held. Gem had half expected Rio and Kat to be arguing and shouting, but the subdued way they just stood there was somehow worse.
“Please tell me that you’re at least going to hear what they have to say,” Gem demanded of Goolrick. Sparks cut in.
“What can they say, Gem?”
“We won’t know until they say it, will we? That’s the point. Rio, Jack, Kat, are you all right?”
They nodded. Rio gave the soldiers holding him an ugly glance.
“I’ll be fine just as soon as these two let go of me.”
“Goolrick…” Gem put a warning note into it.
