by Cora Avery
“You don’t have a choice. I don’t want it anymore.”
“You cannot turn your back on the family—”
“Why not? They turned their backs on me,” she said.
“You fought and lost—”
“And was exiled—”
“Would you have rather been killed?”
She threw her hands up in the air, backing away from him. “I’m sorry, Damion, but I can’t.” She turned, intending to march straight through to the adjoining breezeway, where more doors sat open to the back of the house.
Kirk appeared in the threshold before her, tiny hands wringing. She halted, directly under the iron pot rack, which sent a fresh wave of enervation through her.
“They are here, Master Python.”
“Thank you, Kirk,” Python said. Kirk vanished.
Magda started forward again, but halted once more when an all-too familiar figure stepped into the breezeway from outside.
The young woman was a stunning beauty with cascades of black hair bound back from her high forehead, secured under a woven-branch silver diadem. Her eyes flashed, aquamarine. Her curling lip, ruby red. Her statuesque body was clad in tight trousers and a cut-away, forest-green gown of silken cloth.
The lathed walls and gleaming beams of Python’s mansion seemed to collapse upon Magda. The whole world closed in, darkening, disappearing, until it was only her and Lavana.
Lavana threw her hands open up by her shoulders, so her silver-hued finger-knives framed the long, sweeping lines of her face. All ten curving blades were drawn—the most straightforward method for one Rae to make her intentions known to another. One of them would die today.
“Hello, cousin.” Her sweet lilting voice echoed through the cavernous space of the kitchen. “Look at us. All grown up now, aren’t we?”
Magda edged back a step. “I don’t want to fight you. I don’t want the Enneahedron.”
“Oh, good,” Lavana said, drawing back all but one of her blades, the forefinger of her right hand—the dragon. The sheaths that covered her fingers were wrought like the worst of the beasts—a kraken, a were-tiger, a manticore. “Then I will not have to force it from you and worry about ruining my gown.”
“Or my house,” Python commented casually from where he had retreated, back by the sink.
Footsteps sounded from the hall. Two of Lavana’s warriors appeared. Riker gazed at them as if impressed. Damion stuffed the Enneahedron into his waistband and faced the approaching warriors, blocking the threshold.
“You should be more concerned that I will report your whereabouts to the Elf King,” Lavana snarled to Python. “How frustrating it must be for you not to be able to see your own future.”
Python gazed at her coolly.
“You are working for the Elf King,” Damion spat at her over his shoulder.
“Working for?” Lavana sneered. “Not at all. But we have come to an agreement.”
“What will the Crown say when she learns that you have treated with her worst enemy?” Damion asked.
“You are the only ones who know and soon you will be dead, as will the Crown, and then I will be the Crown.”
“A pawn to the Elf King,” Damion retorted.
“Damion,” Magda said, “give me the Enneahedron.”
Damion glanced back at her, then removed the bundle and held it to Riker, who bridged the space between Magda and Damion. Riker took it uncertainly and brought it to Magda.
“What a pretty Prince you have, cousin,” Lavana said, taking a sashaying step closer, almost at the edge of the kitchen now. The distance between her and Magda was more than ten feet, but it felt like ten inches. “Perhaps I’ll claim him instead of the one I already have.”
“You have no Prince,” Damion growled, still swelling up to fill the opposite doorway.
No escape. Either they’d have to go through Lavana or her warriors. Magda’s pulse revved. She knew what she had to do, but it had been so many years . . .
“You have been on the run too long, Damion,” Lavana said. “I have a Prince now. Quite a spectacular one, but I like the look of yours, Magdalena. There’s something rather sweet in his face, isn’t there?” She winked at Riker, who gazed at her dumbly.
Magda unwrapped the Enneahedron. When she laid her hand on the stone, a jolt of energy pushed through her, igniting her veins, rekindling the cinders of magic buried within her. Though she’d had no intention of fighting Lavana, though she still didn’t wish to be Radiant or even to return to the Lands, the thought of handing over the Enneahedron suddenly became . . . impossible.
“Very good,” Lavana said, eyeing the Enneahedron and stepping closer again, just beyond the threshold now.
Magda had another means of escape, but it would only carry one, and that would mean leaving Damion and Riker behind. She didn’t know if the two warriors squared off with Damion were the only ones or if there were more outside. And how had they arrived so quickly, still dressed in the garb of the Lands? Either they had a portal or there was one nearby. She guessed it was the latter. Moveable portals were much harder to come by than fixed ones.
Having the Enneahedron in her hand may have been giving her more physical strength, but it was also drawing her former self out—that reckless, bigheaded, insatiable self.
“Since you have no desire for the Enneahedron,” Lavana said, “you may hand it over to me now.”
“And then what?” Magda said.
“And then I will kill you quickly, instead of slowly and painfully.”
Well, if Lavana intended to kill her anyway, then why make it easy on her?
Riker backed away, around the island, inching into Magda’s peripheral, moving closer to Python. She couldn’t blame him. He’d never been equipped for a moment like this.
She, on the other hand . . .
She stuffed the Enneahedron into her bra, between her breasts, where its sparking energy fed straight into her heart.
For the first time since the day she’d been exiled, she reached into her shadow’s vault and felt the cool rings of her knives slide over her fingers, tightening around her digits—the magic-infused metal becoming like a second skin, tuning into her thoughts.
“Look who’s back,” Lavana drawled. “You know, I wish I had been of age when your mother died. I could’ve bested you and Alanna both. Only I would not have been so merciful as she.”
Lavana lunged forward, finger-knives shooting out of their sheaths as they raked towards Magda.
Magda swung her arm around, hooking the lamb carcass with her own blades and flinging it up into the air. Fifty pounds of dead flesh slammed into Lavana, knocking her off her feet and into the wall.
“Sorry about the gown,” Magda said as she spun to meet one of the warriors.
The first locked his blade to Damion’s—also drawn from his shadow’s vault—and shoved Damion up against the wall.
Her finger-knives pushed the second’s sword off target. She stepped in, seized his wrist, retracted the blades of her left hand, and smashed her sheathed fist against his face. Bone crunched. Blood spurted. She twisted his arm, broke his hold on his sword, hooked her foot behind his ankle, and knocked him off his feet. His head thudded against the edge of the butcher block and he crumpled.
Leaping onto the blood-drenched wood, ducking beneath the deadly iron rack, she avoided Lavana’s next swiping strike. Two more warriors pushed in past Damion and the first. As they fought, Damion tumbled back into the colonnaded hall, out-of-view.
Riker huddled in the corner. Python continued to lean by the sink, watching impassively.
She leapt, knives catching in the wooden beam, and slashed two of the chains holding the rack. It swung free, clipping Lavana’s face. She screamed, doubling over. The scent of seared flesh burned Magda’s nostrils. One of the warriors was also hit, thrown back into the hearth, which was, unfortunately, cold.
Magda drew back her knives, dropping to the floor before Python, who didn’t even flinch.
“Thanks a lot,” she snarled at him.
“You gouged my beam,” he said.
But she was already seizing Riker by the arm, pushing him ahead of her and out of the kitchen. The second warrior, who had been attending his mistress, launched over the one with the broken nose, wielding double blades. She raised her knives in time to deflect the first blade, but not the second, which sliced across her thigh.
She growled through her teeth, stumbling back a step, but then surging forward, driving her knives into him. He lurched as his lungs were punctured, his eyes widening. The drenching heat of his life’s blood poured over her hand. A dizzying hot tang swamped her breath, as though she were drinking his blood.
“You have been killed in service to your mistress by a Rae. You will travel the High Road,” she said as the light faded from his eyes.
She slid the knives free and let him fall.
Lavana had pushed up to her feet, chest heaving, a charred black mark crossing her temple and cheek, her eyes bright as twin suns.
Magda turned and ran.
SHE DIDN’T GET FAR before she came upon Damion, clutching a seeping wound on his side and standing over the gaping, bloody corpse of Lavana’s warrior sprawled on the pool table.
She whipped Riker into the billiards room.
Damion took a staggering step and then slumped against the table.
“Heal him,” she said to Riker, pushing the Prince towards Damion.
“Do what?” Riker said.
She retracted her knives and grabbed Riker’s hands. He stared at her blood-soaked fingers clutching his.
“Where did you get those?” he asked of the knives.
“You’re a Prince. You have the power to heal. Do it!”
His mouth hung agape. “I do?”
“No, Mistress. Run,” Damion said, grimacing.
“Yes, cousin,” Lavana said from the doorway. “Run.”
Magda skirted the table and raced out another door, through the short, dim hallway and into a sparse living area with a leather couch, a few chairs, and a large fireplace. One wall was almost entirely open doors. She rushed out onto the patio and halted. Out of the black water of the gazing pool, which was normally a silvery-blue hue, a large lumpy head arose.
“Oh, good,” Lavana said as she strolled onto the patio behind Magda. “The ogre is here.”
Though her thigh was sheeted in blood and burned with each pulse of her galloping heartbeat, Magda unleashed her knives, spun, and attacked.
Even after seven years, the rhythm of battle returned to her as if she had spent every day in exile training. She could not discount the heat of the Enneahedron pressed against her chest, fueling her.
Fighting hand-to-hand with finger-knives was as much of a dance as combat. By the time the ogre took his first earth-quaking step out of the pool, blood ran from numerous small grazes and nicks over her body. But at least she’d avoided any deathly strikes.
The shaking of the ground caused them both to lose their balance and stumble back from each other.
The iron burn on Lavana’s face looked even worse in the sun, swelling and raw black, oozing yellowish pus.
“That looks painful. I hope your Prince is a skilled healer,” Magda said, panting and attempting to keep her balance as the ogre took another step into this world.
An ogre. The only compensation an ogre took for use of its considerable brute strength was children, preferably babies. And this was when Magda knew that her younger cousin, daughter of her mother’s wheedling brother, truly was the terror that Damion made her out to be. In truth, she’d thought him simply angry because Lavana had killed Alanna. But now it was clear, whatever honor Lavana had was long gone.
“Perhaps I will not need my Prince to heal me,” Lavana said. “Perhaps yours will do so once I claim him instead.” Her knives slid back into their sheaths. Small cuts bled through her sleeves and pants.
“What’s wrong with your Prince?” Magda panted. “Doesn’t he want to be claimed by you?”
The ogre’s shadow fell over them then. Magda’s gaze rolled up and up and up.
A mouth full of sharp brown teeth smiled down at her. Cresting above the second story colonnade, his fat lump of a head, haloed by a wild tangle of orange hair, looked like a clod of wet clay. His soaked, rough spun clothes clung to the bulging misshapen bulk of his body. The gristly curls of nose-hairs protruding from his nostrils looked about as long as her legs.
Lavana folded her arms, smiling. “Let’s see what you make of an ogre.”
As if his size weren’t bad enough, the brute was fast too. One of his over-long arms flew out and slammed into her like a battering ram. She sailed across the patio and crashed into one of the columns of the east wing, her shoulder cracking. Yelping, she crumbled, pain sparking over her vision in white-and-black bursts, her left arm failing to respond when she told it to move.
“Far too easy.” Lavana’s voice echoed off the palazzo’s walls and through its arcades. “Kill her. But don’t eat her.”
The ogre grumbled in its thick, slurred language. The ground trembled again as it plodded towards her.
Vision doubled by pain and tears, she snapped off her necklace and smashed the ceramic ball against the stone. Amid the shards, little bigger than a pea, the tiny green seed was difficult to pick up as her entire body was shaking, both from the pain of her broken arm and from the ogre’s approach. Yet, somehow, she managed to get hold of it. If she ate the seed, she would escape, but then Damion and Riker would be left behind and surely killed.
And then she heard a soft sound, someone clearing his throat.
She looked up and found Kirk obscured in the shadows under the colonnade. He waved for her to come to him.
Clutching the seed in her hand, she fought through the nauseating crash and churn of agony and crawled on her knees into the shadows. The ogre’s fist rose.
She pitched herself away. The stone pavers cracked under the ogre’s blow.
Kirk tsked, though he was smiling. “Master Python will not be pleased.” He gave Magda a disapproving once over and then sighed. The ogre grumbled. Lavana was screeching from somewhere behind him, though her words were lost on Magda.
Kirk’s pointy little fingers pinched Magda’s ear. In a blur, she was suddenly in another room. A bedroom.
Python was just starting to peel off his shirt. He looked as surprised as she felt sprawled on the marshmallowy softness of his mattress.
“Kirk?” he said, scowling at the brownie, now standing by the double doors.
“I have disobeyed you, Master Python,” Kirk reported. “I await my punishment.”
“I see,” Python said, pulling off his shirt and allowing it to fall to the floor.
Though it was very tempting to remain on Python’s heavenly bed and fall into unconsciousness, Magda forced herself upright. She swayed.
“You have a portal here,” she said, sucking sharp breaths to stay focused through the rolling swells of agony. In spite of these efforts, she became lost to it for a moment, aware only of the spreading weakness within her, the throb of her arm and shoulder, the tacky sweat that seemed to be suffocating her pores.
“Why did you help her?” Python asked Kirk as if Magda hadn’t spoken.
Outside, a roar. The house shook. A deafening crack and pop of breaking stone echoed through the open doors.
Kirk muttered something unintelligible.
“Speak up, Kirk,” Python said, pulling on a fresh button-up shirt, this one gold.
“Did I need a reason, sir?” Kirk snapped.
“I should think you would,” Python said, buttoning his shirt. “Considering the trouble you knew it would bring you.”
The house rocked again and the mirror over his dresser tilted and then fell, crashing and causing Magda to flinch, inciting a fresh bout of crippling pain.
“The other one stinks of Elf,” Kirk said after another moment of grumbling. “I have no love of ogres either.”
Pyt
hon finished buttoning his shirt and frowned towards the doors outside. More stone cracked. “It’s destroying my house.” He shook out his sleeves and looked back at Kirk. “Well, Kirk. You helped the Pixie Rae. Now she’s about to ask you to do so again. And apparently I am going to free you.”
“I am?” Magda asked.
“You are?” Kirk asked at the same moment.
“Evidently,” Python said as if surprised as well.
“No, please, Master Python.” Kirk came forward, his hands open, pleading. “Punish me as you will. Burn my feet with irons, starve me for a week, two even, but don’t free me!”
“I’m sorry, Kirk,” Python said, taking up his cane and then his keys from the catchall on his dresser. “You have served me well, but the time has come to part ways. My visions grow increasingly dark.”
“No, please!” Kirk covered his face with his hands, shaking his head.
“You can’t see the future? Why?” Magda asked.
“It means a time of great change is imminent.”
She glowered at him. “How imminent?”
Python smiled that snake smile of his and opened his bedroom door.
“I’m going for a long drive,” he said, limping out. “Give the Elf Prince my regards.” He shut the door with a soft click.
The house quaked again. One of the paintings fell from the wall as well, almost landing right on top of Kirk. The ogre’s hand curled around one of the balcony columns, his murky green eyes peering in. The foul garbage funk of the ogre’s breath blasted through the doors as he howled at them.
Magda used the last of her energy to push off the bed and down on her knees before Kirk.
“That’s the end of me,” Kirk was saying.
Like all brownies cut off from their natal homes, without someone to bind himself to, he would die.
“No, you can serve me, now,” Magda said.
Kirk took his hands away from his face, glaring. “I never should’ve helped you!”
“Please,” she said.
“You’re about to be dead,” he said. “There’s no point in serving you.”
“But this will take you back to the Lands,” she said, placing the green seed at the Kirk’s feet. Then she reached under her tank top and pulled out the Enneahedron. The loss of it against her chest left her doubled over, almost face down on the carpet. Creeping fingers of darkness clawed at her consciousness. “Take the Enneahedron back to the Lands,” she said, “to the Crown. Tell her that Lavana is serving the Elf King and that she cannot be allowed to become Radiant. Please.”
