by K. G. Wilkie
Alyss gaped at the assortment. "This is what he stocks his prisons with? That seems so wasteful." Jackie assured her that she really was in a guest room and not a prison cell, though she struggled to convince the girl of that; and really it was hard to blame her for resenting being trapped here.
The rest of the group tried to decide on a game. Alyss went to the food cupboard Veronica had shown her on her so-called tour and passed mugs of hot chocolate to her visitors while they talked it over. Checkers. Chess. Cards. Even pass the balloon and hide and seek were rejected.
"I'm just so bored," Alyss pouted. "Can we please just decide on something and do it? It was bad being alone for so long but having nothing to do was still obnoxious. Isn't there anything fun to do around here?"
The other two glanced at each other, then looked at her. Their faces were completely blank. "I know," Priscilla called out, "we can start a puzzle!" Priscilla giggled.
Alyss grimaced. "I know I just complained about this and shouldn't be causing a fuss, but I'm really not into puzzles. There's always at least one piece missing, especially in a used puzzle like these probably are. It drives me nuts never actually being able to finish them," Alyss groaned.
Priscilla puffed her cheeks out. "Hmm. Well, it is an inevitable fact of life that every puzzle you ever play will have one piece missing." Sighing dramatically, she added, "And then you will spend days knowing that you can never finish your task."
Jackie just laughed. "Isn't that backwards? You'll spend days knowing that you stuck with it long enough to see the picture. You learn more by paying attention to the overall puzzle instead of focusing on each little piece."
"I never thought of that, but she's right," Priscilla mourned, shoulders trembling. "It will never be the same without the last piece. Think of how lonely the other pieces will be with their leader missing!" She scrubbed her eyes with both fists, bawling obnoxiously loud. Somehow, though, the supposed tears were completely invisible.
"It's just puzzle pieces, why on earth are you being so theatrical?" Alyss growled, her role as an elegant lady temporarily forgotten. The girl continued to whimper.
She looked over to the two sisters. Jackie was holding her sister in a tight side hug, stroking her hair and speaking in the quiet voice one associates with babies or puppies. "Shh, we`ll get the puzzle piece`s family back. Don't cry, `kay?" Priscilla continued to whimper.
All of a sudden, Pris straightened, and Jackie heaved a sigh of relief. "Oh, was I gone?" Pris asked. "He never really asks to switch," she mused nonchalantly. "He just takes over, and then afterward everyone around me will be all upset because he said or did something ridiculous. How was it this time?"
Her sister shook her head. "I can't really tell when it's you or him," Jackie said. "You always seem the same to me no matter who is in the driver's seat, and it's only after he does something absolutely rude I realize it wasn't you."
"How could you not tell?" Alyss muttered. "That was incredibly annoying, and normally she's not," Alyss added.
Priscilla smiled at her. "It's nice to know someone can tell the difference between the both of us. I'm quite fond of him, but he's such a troublemaker and I'm just clearly not," she said.
"I think you are wrong about the puzzle pieces, though," she said, staring intently into her teacup. "It's not a matter of focusing on a missing piece, or on the rest of the puzzle without the piece. What's important are the lines that run through the whole puzzle, letting us know they are all the same type of thing."
"What? Way too insightful for dumb puzzle pieces," Jackie laughed. "Besides, weren't we talking about this to have a little bit of fun in our spare time?" They huddled together, giggling.
Priscilla grinned at the both of them. "Well, I do have something cool to show you all though. Maybe that will deal with your boredom problem." She pulled her golden contraption out of her pocket, and it opened itself up to reveal the figurines smiling and dancing for her. They turned to see Alyss sitting there and frowned at her, then they scurried back into their places and closed the machine shut as their audience looked on.
Pris frowned at it. "That's very odd. I wouldn't have expected it to do that."
A sharp knock at the door interrupted their merriment. The girls looked at each other in surprise, then Alyss got up to open the door. There stood Aeron, standing with his legs hip-width apart and his hands clasped in front of him.
The two sisters looked at each other, then stood in unison. Alyss tried to hold onto their hands, keep them around as shields for the certain confrontation, but both were clearly determined to avoid such a strained conversation. Jackie glanced at Aeron's tapping foot and rushed through her goodbyes to her friend before she left. Pris looked at her, and then waved to show she was going to stay for a little bit. She placed the contraption into her hand and tucked her fingers up around it. "Go ahead, take it," she smiled. "I think you'll need this when it feels up to playing again."
Alyss tried to give it back and pulled on their hands to keep them where they were. Soon they gave her a final hug and left. "Don't come sneaking in here unannounced," she said as soon as the door swept past the threshold and closed with a soft click. "It's bad enough when friends don't observe the rules of polite society, but it can be forgiven," she said. "But you are not a friend so you certainly don't qualify for that level of leniency," she sneered. He sat down on the edge of the bed regardless. She got up abruptly, clearing away the girls` abandoned mugs and putting them on the tray in the food cabinet on the storage wall. New dishes appeared there every hour, and old dishes disappeared instantly. Nevertheless, she ignored the additional table setting that had been set for Aeron, and closed the door with a decided thump. She pointedly ignored him and walked to a chair that was furthest away from him in the room. "I don't have the time to discuss how obnoxious you are right now, so it would be best if you left," she said, pointedly staring out the currently opaque window.
"I just wanted to warn you," he said quietly. "Bad things, scary things, are going down, and you are bound to be caught up in all of it." He smiled. "Also, feel free to thank me for bringing you company from one world to another; not everyone would go that far, but I'm willing to just for your benefit," he said.
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, no. It's your fault I'm here, the least you can do is to let me go. Since you can't manage that, making sure I don't die of boredom should also be a concern." She laughed. "You know, I managed to get out of this place once. Sure I had help, but I could do it again. I could get out of here whenever I wanted, and one of these times I'd be able to escape so far away you'd never find me again," she said. She relished this, having power over him, challenging him, when she'd felt so very powerless and weak after spending so much time cooped up in this dratted place.
Aeron smiled. "I can leave you with something very interesting indeed if you'd like," he said. Holding up his hand he added, "Look at this." She looked, and an orange lotus bloomed on his palm before her eyes. The tips of each petal caught on fire, slowly moving to cover the whole mass. He fisted it, winding his arm up in a pitcher`s move, and hurled the flower at a silk screen standing in the corner of the room. The flames hungrily gobbled the delicate fabric and lit ablaze the painted flame of a dragon printed on the screen. He crooked his finger to it, and it happily danced over to him to leave the blackened remains behind. It hovered in the middle of the room, awaiting its master's call. He then waved it over to Alyss. She shrieked as the flames engulfed her in their substance but held back all of its heat. Her shrieks slowly quieted as she realized this last part, her eyes dilating to their normal iris size. He flicked his fingers, and all of the flames galloped to him like puppies summoned by their master.
Alyss shivered some more, still recovering from the shock of the experience. Somehow it seemed she didn't find fireballs a particularly entertaining pastime. "Hmm," Aeron mused. She used to like playing with the flames, chasing and catching them like fireflies. Perhaps it's the shock of seeing the screen get burned
first? Perhaps she has had a run in with fire on Earth and is now scared of it? Still, it's no excuse! he thought indignantly. He thought about it a moment longer, then unconcernedly brushed the whole matter aside.
"No matter." She looked up, eyes shadowy with uncertainty and fear. "I`ll need to get my squire to fix this as well," he muttered. Jackie hadn't been the best squire anyone had ever had, but she was the first one he'd ever been in charge of, and he could still trust her with his most secret projects, unlike all the backstabbers that had grown up in court. He flicked his fingers again, but this time it was to banish the flames completely.
She looked at him angrily. "I don't think much of your little announcement, either. All of you people are always so obsessed with the secrets and vague words," she snapped. "Why can't you speak plainly for once?" she demanded. "Tell me what you mean. Tell me the secret all of you have been keeping quiet about. Tell me who you think I am," she commanded. He looked at her quietly, measuring her with his eyes. She growled and flung a pillow at him.
"I am not so sure how to say this," he said quietly. "I am not so sure it is all so true, so real, but you are so clueless about the whole thing. I'm still not always sure you are the person we think you are." He stayed quiet. They both did, really. The air between them was charged with tension, and both were loath to risk breaking it, and the possible consequences that would come with that.
She kept her arms crossed. Her eyes were hard. He sighed and summoned the wall chair out of its niche so he could sit and talk to her.
"You know, you aren't meant to be a prisoner here. Didn't I send Murray in to spend time with you and lead you around the place?"
She rolled her eyes. "He wouldn't have to lead me around if you would allow me to just go out of this room by myself. Besides, you kidnapped me. Whatever you want to call this awful little arrangement you've set me up in here, I did not come here willingly and I'm not allowed to go home even if I want to. That's basically the definition of being imprisoned."
He sighed. "It's not ideal, that's true. But it's for your own good," he insisted.
She stalked to the other side of the room and faced out the window. "Everyone always says that. They always think they know what's best for me. At first they knew it was best for me to just stay by myself in my home and never have any friends or go anywhere. Then the neighbors told me it was best for me to not get too close to Darien and let him into my life even though he was the only person who actually cared about me. Then my parents told me it would be best and easiest if we just stayed in Florida and things just stayed the way they had always been, even when the doctor told them otherwise. 'It's for your own good' they always say. But it never is. You think I'm going to start to believe that's true when my kidnapper tells it to me when it was never true when people who were at least slightly concerned about my life and my welfare said it? I'm not that stupid. I'm not that gullible," she said.
He protested that it really was for her benefit. He tried to explain there were things she didn't know about that threatened her safety. He was never willing to talk about the wizards and explain them to her, though. She obviously wasn't buying his half-hearted attempts to explain things out.
Eventually, he threw his hands up in the air. "I don't know what else to say to you now! You just aren't listening to me."
"Obviously, you aren't listening to me, either. I'm not going to follow what you say now or in the future, because the thing about kidnappers is that they just aren't trustworthy," she said.
He turned his back to her and moved to pause by the door. "Maybe you're right and you should never listen to me. I don't care. I'm not going to send you out to get killed by them. Whether you'd prefer to be gallivanting about or you agree to being held here makes no difference."
Alyss sneered at him, then jumped for the open doorway. Sparks flew from his eyes. "Don't leave," Aeron said. "The workers in the palace know that you can't leave your room without me now due to your adventuring. You may no longer access the other rooms in my chamber nor the hall, and neither of them will open for you anymore. Do not try to sneak out again," he added coldly. "You will regret what follows."
Aeron cleared the doorway. "I'll send you more entertainment so you don't go nuts here, but I refuse to allow you to be in danger. Even if that means I'm guaranteeing I'll be hated by you, I'll do it anyway because I care," he said. Her chin still jutted out mulishly, and it was obvious she had no intention of following his dictates.
He looked at her for a second, head tilted in thought. She shuffled nervously. "I suppose I should enforce my rules," he mused. She backed a step away.
At that moment little puffs of flame, nothing more than burning snowflakes, fell softly on her. She became still and frozen in place. Her eyes looked frantically around the room, but each time she tried to run, to escape, she found her muscles would not move. A snap of his fingers, and the sickly green smoke surrounded her, just as it had days earlier. Even her eyes had to stop the fight for freedom as they drifted closed, hazy dreams surrounding her.
The spell wore off after an hour without any of the dreams that plagued her natural sleep. When she got up it was to find with relief that some of her demands had been met, and a bookshelf stocked with tomes similar to the few she had managed to take out of the palace library on her last trip there populated it. She took one with relief and started to read, hoping to drown her worries for at least a few hours by escaping to the world of a story.
Not long after one brother had left the room, another entered. Richard slammed the door open. "Hello, hello," he said.
She looked up and saw his velvet clothes and dismissed him as being in league with Aeron. So she ignored him and continued to read in her book. "At this point I've had too many people coming in to observe me. I welcome Murray and any other footmen, or maids, or my friends, to visit me but not other obnoxious people who tell me prison is for my benefit.
He smirked. "Did you say prison? I was under the impression you had chosen to take up residence in my brother's guest quarters," he said.
She snorted and turned the page. "I can't see why anyone would. Guest rooms that you aren't allowed to leave without a guard watching to make sure you eventually get back here to be locked up again is not my idea of hospitality. This is just a prison, pure and simple. The fanciness of it doesn't change that there's no freedom here."
Richard waved his hand and made her book vanish. "Hey, I was reading that," she protested.
He smirked. "I think I have something that will be of more interest to you than your silly tome," Richard said. He waved his hand again and opened a portal into her bedroom. "If you think of this as prison, would you like to be freed?" he asked.
She looked at the portal and jumped out of the bed. "I would, I would. That's really my room, not just some image of it?"
He nodded. She ran towards it, but he held her back by her shoulder. "You promise you want to leave? It could cause my dear brother to become unhappy with you. That could be... an unfortunate thing," Richard added.
She pushed his hand aside and stepped forward. "I wouldn't be fully satisfied if it didn't," she said and crossed to her world.
He smiled at the now empty room. "Perfect. Upsetting my brother is so easy when those he cares about practically volunteer to drive him nuts. Now I just need to ensure the plan falls into place just the way I want it to."
He picked up a hair left behind on her pillow. It glowed in his hand. Soon it started multiplying itself into more and more hairs. Pieces of skin started to grow at their roots. The skin grew more to meet itself and make a head. Still it grew until the rest of the body formed. Slowly it filled with muscle and bones until a perfect replica of Alyss was laid down before him, down to the clothes she'd been wearing. He tucked the simulacrum under the covers so it looked like Alyss was still in the room and peacefully sleeping. He grinned and transported away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Town Bazaar
Richard's portal dumped her off in he
r bedroom at home. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes, taking in the feeling of freedom; but she couldn't waste much time on that when she knew pursuit was likely not far behind. Alyss had thoughts and plans race through her head and it was so tempting to just take her time and think through a plan, but she knew she'd have to act. Now. She dumped all her binders and pencil case on the floor to clear space in her backpack. She rushed around the house, stopping by the pantry and garage where she packed some food and supplies and stuffed them in the bag. Then a quick scrabble in a box labeled "manure fertilizer" revealed the stash of emergency cash her parents thankfully kept for times of need. Escape, in her mind, definitely qualified.
Alyss paid a taxi a hefty sum to get her to the commuter train station. Once she was there, the ticket counter warned her she had less than a quarter of an hour to get across the entire field to the actual tracks where she'd need to board. She sprinted to make it. Alyss huffed, the air moving far too slowly in and out of her struggling lungs, but she knew she couldn't stop running until she was gone.
One train ride and four buses later the view outside the window had grown brown, even as more towering high rises started to crop up. She boarded yet another vehicle, but eventually her last bus was stopped by a smoking engine and dumped all of its passengers in a rest stop town along the road before finishing its route to get from Vegas to LA. The other passengers were still close enough to home that they could call for rides from family and friends from their starting point, but no one could offer her a ride even when she asked them. One passenger told her that the next town over had a bus that would take her the rest of the way to the West Coast, so she trudged along the shoulder of the highway until she eventually came to Sunny Oaks. Sunny Oaks was neither sunny nor filled with trees of any variety. In fact, it seemed to be devoid of almost anything. She'd been walking, tired and thirsty, for miles until she made it there and realized the only intact buildings were a deserted gas station and an old chapel. There were blocks of other structures, but all of them had lost the fight to time and gravity and lay crumpled on the ground. Some houses still stood a little behind the gas station, but they looked empty. The lawns were bare of any greenery and the driveways were cracked. Some of them had holes in the roof. All of them were faded. She still knocked on the doors, just to check, but the sound of her fist echoed in each one and nobody came to answer it.
