Golden Apple, The

by Diener, Michelle

  “Wait.” It came out as a whisper, and he swallowed, worked some moisture back into his throat. All the while, Rane was getting closer, closer, to the grindylow. Eric needed to be conscious, needed to keep his spell going, for a little while longer.

  She raised the stick up and back, getting ready to swing as she strode towards Eric, her face set.

  “Wait.” It was loud enough for her to hear this time, and she stopped short, her gaze flying to his.

  Rane stood over the grindylow, fumbled with his knife, missing the dragon once, twice. Then he had it.

  He dropped straight down. Let gravity do the work for him as he plunged the blade into the grindylow’s neck.

  The blood gushed and sprayed, covering him, but he couldn’t move. Now he was down on the floor, the thought of rising, of moving at all, was impossible. He sank lower, rested his head on the stone paving.

  He wanted to reach behind him and rip the skin from his back, flay himself to be rid of the agony.

  The creature beside Sooty had long since fallen to the ground, half-unconscious with pain. Its eyes opened, and for a moment they stared at each other, at floor-level, and he felt a bond forged between them.

  And then the pain was gone.

  Kayla had broken the spell. Eric’s hands were raised to protect his head, his staff on the floor, as Kayla brought back her stick for another blow. Blood poured from the side of his head.

  He rolled out of Kayla’s reach, grabbing his staff and holding it close to his body, like a ward against evil.

  “I will have my marks on you.” His mouth twisted and his eyes were narrow. “You will be mine.”

  He threw out his arm, circled his staff over his head. He must have planned to vanish, but the light was still leaking from the crack Kayla had made earlier and he only flickered in and out of sight.

  Kayla took another swing at him, but before she could connect, at last his staff worked, and he disappeared.

  Rane tried to pull himself up.

  He was weighed down. The receding pain from Eric’s spell, the bone-deep fatigue, the soul-deep sorrow over Soren. They held him in a grip stronger than two stone giants.

  Then he turned to Kayla, and found her looking at him, the cool gray of her eyes calming, giving him strength. He reached out a hand to her and she helped him to his feet.

  “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  They staggered out of the castle, and Rane was glad all over again he had killed the second gindylow. Walking back into the mists around the castle would have been impossible if it had still been loose.

  Sooty ranged around them, protective, sniffing the air, and by the look on her face, not liking what she smelled.

  The purple creature from the dungeon was slung between Kayla and himself, its legs dragging from shin to toes on the ground behind them as they lurched down into the valley.

  Kayla kept looking across at him, her teeth worrying her lower lip. “How far is the forest?”

  “It’s not that far. You’ll see it when we get through those wells.” His words were gasped, and he wasn’t breathing properly.

  She gave a nod and didn’t speak again, putting her head down and taking the strain when she wasn’t glancing across at him, to check on him.

  She had saved him. Saved his brother, although typical Soren, he had refused to stay saved.

  She was all he ever wanted.

  When she looked across at him again he held her gaze, and her eyes softened.

  After that, they both concentrated on getting away as fast as possible.

  Even though the creature they were carrying was tall, it didn’t weigh that much, not to him. It was starved and light-boned, and they got through the wells quicker than he thought they would.

  The pain, the reaction from Eric’s spell, started to lift, and it must have been doing the same for the creature they carried between them, because it lifted its head a little and gave a small sound of astonishment as they stepped through the wells and into the mist fields where the gindylows had hunted him.

  Rane remembered the angle he had come in at, and nudged them in that direction, until suddenly, they were out of the mists and standing near the river where he’d washed earlier.

  Dusk was only just setting, the late summer evening sky still orange and pink in the west.

  The creature struggled a little, and Rane realized it was trying to stand on its own.

  He and Kayla stopped and it slowly got its feet under it, and stood, hands on their shoulders to keep itself steady.

  “What is your name?” Kayla asked it.

  “Huri.” It looked at the water, and then turned away, and something about the way it moved told Rane she was female.

  “Are you from here, or did Eric bring you from somewhere else?” Kayla fitted herself more securely under Huri’s arm.

  Huri shook her head, her eyes averted from the river bank.

  “I saw someone like you,” Rane told her. “Earlier today.”

  As he spoke, a shadow rose up from the river bank, standing from a crouch.

  It was the creature Rane had cut earlier, the white of the bandage stark against his purple skin.

  Huri gave a quiet moan. It sounded to Rane like the final death throe of a tree, just after the last axe stroke.

  She half-turned her back, her eyes down, her whole body shaking, and Rane moved away from her, letting Kayla take more of her weight, as he left himself free to protect them all.

  Beside him, appearing so suddenly his heart skipped in a moment of sheer terror, Sooty butted his hip, her lips drawn back in a snarl.

  The creature he’d met earlier, clearly known to Huri, and of the same people, raised his hands in alarm, and looked over their shoulders, to where Eric’s castle would be, if it wasn’t hidden from sight.

  “Bad gone?”

  “For now,” Rane said. “But he’ll be back.”

  There was no way Eric would abandon his castle. He may have beaten a retreat, but he had too many magical things in the castle.

  But not as many as he’d had.

  Rane could feel the weight of the gem in his pouch. Along with a few other items that had called to him more strongly than the others in the dungeon, before they’d climbed the stairs and let themselves out.

  Eric had lost this round.

  But there was a war coming, and Rane knew the outcome was far from certain.

  The creature before him suddenly called to Huri, in a language that sounded solely constructed of tongue clicks.

  She turned away even more, twisting and hunching so she wouldn’t have to look at him.

  He spoke again, more urgently, and she shook her head.

  “What does he want, Huri?” Kayla looked between them, and Rane could see she was upset by the situation.

  “He want understand why I hurt him. Tried to kill him. Didn’t want Eric to have him, like me.”

  “Eric wanted you to bring him in, and you tried to kill him instead, so he wouldn’t become another of Eric’s slaves?”

  She nodded. “Tried to tell him to run. He wouldn’t. Grindylow coming. Stone giant coming.” She made a gesture, a cut along her leg, and Rane’s gaze went back to the creature’s scar he’d seen earlier that day.

  “What’s your name?” he asked him.

  “Ker.” He looked between Sooty and Rane, and Rane wondered if he was considering his chances of fighting them.

  “Do you understand what Huri is saying? That in order to stop you being made into Eric’s puppet like she had been, she tried to kill you instead?” Kayla stepped even closer to Huri, put her arms around her, and Rane realized Huri was close to collapse.

  “Let’s talk about it on the way to the forest. I don’t think Huri can last much longer.” He stepped closer to Huri as well, and got her arm over his shoulder.

  “Thought there no choice. But was wrong. Ker is alive. Fine.” Huri’s voice was soft, shamed.

  They started moving again, with Soot
y closer to them, now, and Ker trailing in their wake, keeping a cautious distance.

  The forest was right ahead, and Rane could see a strange glow coming from it. Like it was lit with purple lanterns.

  Kayla seemed to move faster, the closer they got, and when they were on the same level as the trees, and could at last see between the trunks, Rane jerked them all to a halt.

  There was a sentinel line of wild magic spheres waiting for them, the line stretching as far as his eye could see in both directions.

  “What is this about?” he asked Kayla, looking at her over Huri’s bowed head.

  She took a moment to answer. In the end, she shrugged. “A homecoming welcome.”

  * * *

  They made their camp in the thin trees at the forest’s edge. Wild magic circled them, a fence that no-one would be foolish enough to try to breach.

  Just being near them made Kayla feel better. Stronger.

  Ker had hesitated at the sight, and then stepped in with them, had allowed himself to be included in the protected area.

  He sat a little away from the fire Rane had started, though, as if he had no welcome with them, although Kayla and Rane had both asked him to join them.

  Huri was either unconscious or asleep where they had lain her down.

  Rane sat staring into the fire light, and Kayla reached out a hand and touched his shoulder. “I’m sorry about Soren. So, so sorry.”

  He turned to look at her slowly. “How did you get him out?”

  “I broke into Jasper’s stronghold, healed him with the apple, and then managed to trick Jasper into bringing us up above ground. I used wild magic to get us away.”

  She thought how ridiculous it was that so much fear and exertion could be summed up into so few words.

  Rane reached over and took her arm. Gently turned it over to look at her wrist.

  He circled it with his fingers, tilted it so the firelight illuminated it. The fine pattern was denser, far more intricate, than it had been before.

  She hadn’t looked at it since Nuen had grabbed her arm in Jasper’s stronghold, and she gasped. “It’s…beautiful.”

  It was a delicate spiral; airy, light and detailed. It reached a handspan from her wrist up her inner arm.

  She sensed Rane’s frown.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No, it’s not that.” He rubbed a thumb over the markings. “I feel…nervous when I look at it. That it is taking you from me, marking you as its own.”

  “It feels like the other way around.” She touched it lightly with her fingers. “Like I am marking it. Shaping it.”

  “Why does it need you? Why does it let you use it?” He looked up at the wild magic around them. “Are they hemming us in, or protecting us?”

  “Protecting. No doubt about it.” She withdrew her arm. “But sometimes protection can be misguided. Like leaving someone without talking about it, to keep them safe.” She had considered letting this conversation go. It was done. There was no changing that he’d left her and chosen for them both. She even understood why he had done it, but she would not let it happen again.

  He lifted his head, and held her gaze. “If you’d come with me, the golden apple and the gem would be in Eric’s hands and we would both be under his control.”

  She gave a nod. “I don’t dispute it. But we should have discussed it. Made a plan of action. You chose to make the decision on your own.”

  “I wanted you safe.” He ran a hand through his hair, and looked across at Ker, hunched miserably over himself a little way away.

  “I know. I don’t care.” She looped her arms over her knees and hugged them tight. “If it affects us both, if either one of us could be in danger, we have to talk about it.”

  He waited a long time before he answered. She preferred it that way. It meant he’d really thought about it.

  “All right. In future, we talk about it.” It was an admission of so much more than how he would treat her from now on. It was an admission of the fact that they were a team.

  They were together.

  “Good.” She smoothed a hand over his shoulder, her hand trembling at the enormity of the shift in how things were.

  He looked at her in the firelight, and opened his mouth to speak just as Huri sat up with a scream.

  They both scrambled to their feet, and she saw Ker rising as well, his attention riveted on Huri.

  Huri dragged herself to her feet, looking through the trees, towards the field that held Eric’s castle.

  “I didn’t think he’d come back so quickly,” Rane said, pulling out his knife. His other hand went up to touch his back, and his face was white and drawn, like it had been during the gindylow attack in the dungeon.

  “Perhaps he’s not welcome anywhere else.” Kayla was quite sure he wasn’t.

  Then Huri started walking toward the tree line, her face so haunted, so fill of agony, Kayla drew a wild magic sphere to her without even thinking about it.

  “Huri, can I try to stop this? Stop the pain?”

  Huri tripped on something, a root or a stick, and fell heavily. She lay for a moment, and then started to pull herself along the floor with her elbows. “Stop?”

  “I will try. Will you let me?”

  She nodded, but kept dragging herself toward Eric.

  Kayla lifted her hands and hesitated. She would love to have Ylana here with her, helping her, telling her what to do.

  But she didn’t, and every second she wasted, Huri was getting closer to Eric.

  She imagined Huri’s back, smooth and unharmed, imagined her without pain.

  Purple flared from her hands, but it was met with a flare of blue wherever it touched Huri, a vicious spark that threw her into even more pain. Her cries made Kayla physically sick.

  She drew back, and smoke was coming off of Huri, the stench of it like manure burning.

  Ker shoved her, clicking and shouting in her face, and she raised her hands.

  “There must be a protective spell on top of the other magic.”

  She pushed him aside and crouched next to Huri, but she was unconscious now, the cry that had cut Kayla all the way through her heart was the last sound she’d made.

  “Take her.” Rane stepped beside Kayla, standing over her with his gaze on Ker. “Take Huri. Put her over your shoulder and run as far from here as you can. I don’t think he can hurt her, or compel her if you’re far enough away.”

  Ker looked at them, at the wild magic, and then beyond, through the trees towards where Eric’s castle lay. He bent and Rane helped him lift Huri up, draping her over his shoulder.

  “As far as you can go,” Rane told him, and Kayla thought he wanted to do the same.

  Ker grunted and then turned, and Kayla waved a hand, so the wild magic parted and moved to form a purple-lit path away from the forest edge.

  His first few steps were unsteady, and then he found his rhythm and he was gone, Huri limp as a puppet down his back.

  “Do you want me to try on you?” Kayla lifted a hand to her throat, because she didn’t know if she had the stomach to try again. “I watched him mark you, and I don’t think he’d finished before I interrupted. There might not be any protection over his marks on you.”

  Rane lifted a hand to his back again. “I saw you pull back when Huri screamed like that. I think that’s when you should have gone harder, punched all the way through. Even if I beg you to stop, that’s what I want you to do to me.”

  “What if you pass out, like Huri?” Kayla waited as he looked away.

  She didn’t want to do this at all. But she would.

  Her hands trembled, but she bunched them into fists.

  Rane ran a finger along his back. “I would rather die than let Eric have any power over me.”

  She drew in a breath, wanting to tell him she would never let that happen, but after a moment gave a nod. Not in agreement, but in acknowledgment of his wishes.

  The wild magic sphere she had called to her to help Huri
was still hovering just over her shoulder and she held out her hands and closed her eyes.

  She touched him with wild magic, felt the flare as Eric’s spell tried to counter it.

  Rane cried out as blue and purple clashed, and with horror, she saw him fall down to his knees.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Rane was free again.

  It came at a price. He felt a strange tingle across his shoulders, like the skin was numbed, but whether it was temporary or permanent, he didn’t care.

  Eric’s power was gone.

  Kayla was kneeling right next to him, cupping his face in his hands, and he drew her to him in the first real embrace he had given her since she’d come to rescue him from the castle.

  “You’re all right?”

  “I’m all right.” He smiled against her cheek. “It looks like there wasn’t a protective spell.”

  She sagged against him, and they stayed that way, in each others’ arms, until at last they grew stiff and uncomfortable.

  “Let’s move deeper into the forest,” he said, “I don’t like how close we are to the edge.”

  She gave a nod, and he almost laughed at what he’d just said. Getting deeper into the forest had always been the last thing he’d wanted to do. Now he saw it as the safest option.

  He kicked sand on the fire, and picked up the saddlebags Kayla and Soren had brought through the wild magic doorway. One looked familiar.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “The clearing near Jasper’s stronghold. Soren says they belonged to the men out hunting you.” Kayla took up one as well.

  “It belonged to an old friend of mine. Someone I trained with as a knight for Jasper. He captured me on my way to Eric. And then he touched the gem.”

  She shivered. “Even before I knew you’d been there, and they had been caught in the gem’s magic, I felt a darkness there. What do you think happens to them? Where do you think they go?”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it since Soren disappeared. No place good. If anywhere. Maybe they simply die.”

  She looked at him a moment, and then turned away, started walking into the forest. She clicked her tongue, and Sooty was suddenly beside her, and he watched them both, elegant, sleek, as they moved in unison.