Inherent Fate

by Geanna Culbertson

  Blue stepped forward. Her arms were still crossed, but her scowl had faded. Her eyes shone with fire, but they were no longer looking at me with rage or resentment.

  “It is what friends do, Crisa,” she replied. “And you have to give us a chance to do the same. We’re not going to judge you for asking for help or relying on us or admitting that you’re not strong enough to do everything on your own. Because it’s like you said—we’re friends. Being there for one another is part of the package. It’s a two-way street that’s definitely not something to be ashamed of. And you seriously have got to start learning to accept that.”

  “Yeah, I know. And . . . and I do. I get it now. Even if I don’t always need someone to save or protect me, it’s still nice to know that there are people out there who care enough about me to keep trying. Having friends in your life who want to help you is something to be grateful for, not ashamed of. And I’m done letting my insecurities control me or convince me otherwise.”

  Blue, SJ, and Jason stared at me in surprise.

  “And what—dare I ask—inspired this revelation?” SJ asked.

  “It pains me to admit it,” I sighed, “but Daniel and I sort of had a talk.” I gestured to Daniel, who was leaning against the prison wall with his arms crossed, watching the scene unfold like it was private theatre.

  “You had a talk with Daniel that ended in self-growth, not murderous impulses?” Blue asked, dumbfounded.

  “I couldn’t believe it either.” Daniel shrugged. “By the way, Knight, your hand is doing that liquid metal thing again.”

  “What?” I looked down and saw he was right. I was so in the moment that I hadn’t noticed my hand envelop in the magic watering can’s liquid metal effect. When the phenomenon dissipated a second later the blurry brand remained. And yet, for a second it looked different. The mark on my palm fluxed like a word was trying to form. It shrank and pulsed and I really thought this might be it. But then it stopped. I squeezed my fist shut and rolled my eyes.

  “Still nothing?” SJ asked.

  “No,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll never know what my defining personal strength is and the mark will remain blurry forever. But I’m not going to let that, or anything else, keep me blurry too. My head and heart are clear now and I know what I want. And that’s this.” I gestured at the group of us. “Our friendship. It’s something special and I’ve taken it for granted for way too long. And I’m sorry, guys. I’m so, so sorry. While I don’t expect you to trust me again any time soon, I am going to work hard every day to earn your trust back. I just need to know if you’ll let me. Can you guys give this supposed protagonist a second, second chance—a chance to prove she’s not an antagonist like Nadia thinks?”

  My friends exchanged a look and my heart quickened as I let their judgment pass.

  I’d made a good pitch, and I truly was sorry for keeping things from them and committed to mending my ways. But I’d also taken screwing up to epic new levels, hurting all three of them in the process. So maybe a heartfelt apology wasn’t enough.

  What if the damage I’ve incited can’t be undone? I wondered as worry sunk in.

  What if they don’t forgive me? What if they can’t forgive me?

  But then SJ smiled and said the four greatest words I’d heard in a very long time.

  “Second, second chance granted.”

  My eyes lit up. “Really?”

  “Yes, really. But you must let us in from now on, Crisa,” SJ said. “Sincerely, we have to trust one another no matter the circumstance.”

  “I will. I promise,” I assured her.

  “And no more lies either,” Blue added. “Shenanigans, tomfoolery, malarkey—you know I’m fine with all three. But deception—no dice. Got it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Good.” Jason nodded. He put his hand on my shoulder. “Because we’ve got you.”

  “Yeah.” I smiled. “I know.”

  I turned and hugged him. Blue and SJ joined in.

  For the first time in weeks it felt like we were us again. The air was clear; the tension was gone; the deceit, duplicity, and pretext melted away. It was just my friends and me. And that was all I needed.

  “So then,” SJ said as we pulled away. “Blue, care to enlighten us on the specifics of this ingenious, pea-based plan of yours?”

  “Gladly,” she said, unleashing another grin. “So here’s the deal. While there are a lot of versions of The Princess & the Pea, the gist is that a prince was looking for a wife, but he was a mama’s boy and his mom had absurdly high standards for every princess he chose. The girl her precious son married had to be the most perfect lady—delicate and dainty as can be. So along comes this common female protagonist that he falls in love with. She’s not even a princess, so there’s zero shot his mom’s gonna go for it. But the prince asks a Fairy Godmother for help. She gives him an enchanted pea. The prince introduces the girl to his mother and claims that despite not being a princess she is the most delicate creature in all the land, and therefore worthy to be his wife. To prove it, he bets his mother that a pea buried beneath a bunch of mattresses can bruise the girl. He and the girl plant the enchanted pea under the mattresses and sure enough, in the morning she is bruised like a two-month-old cantaloupe. They repeat the test several times with the same result. And the rest is history.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Daniel said. “I read the story for a homework assignment at the beginning of the semester. What you haven’t told us is how the pea works.”

  “Right.” Blue nodded. “So basically there are two things you need to know. First off, the energy this thing creates is silent. Second, its force will be concentrated solely on the first thing it touches once activated—like the mattresses the protagonist slept on in the story. So all I have to do is fire the pea at the wall while I say the trigger words and it should create enough of a shock wave to destroy the front wall of the cell. Once we’re out, Crisa can use her wand to slice through the lock on the storage room at the beginning of the hall.”

  Jason pivoted to me. “That’s where they shoved our weapons before putting us in this cell,” he explained.

  “I’m impressed, Blue,” I commented. “That’s a solid plan.”

  “Hey, just because you’re usually our designated leader in these situations doesn’t mean a scrappy girl like myself can’t contribute.”

  “Definitely,” I agreed. “Especially now. Because after we’ve gotten our stuff we’ll need one heck of a plan to get out of here and it’s going to take all of us to get it done.” I turned to the boys. “Daniel said you both took a Magical Geography course at Lord Channing’s. How well did you do?”

  “Easiest A ever,” Jason responded.

  “Great. So Alderon is next to the Indexlands where the Author lives. That much I know. But how far is the border from where we are now?”

  “Not far actually,” Jason replied. “Valor is maybe three miles from the border. Why, are we gonna make a run for it?”

  “I don’t see how we have any other choice. We don’t have a lot of resources so we can’t afford an elaborate kind of play here. SJ, do you still have all the portable potions you brewed at Ashlyn’s?”

  “I have plenty of explosion, slime, and ice potions. They are in the storage room along with my slingshot and our weapons.”

  I thought about how useful SJ’s portable potions had been in our previous fights. The marble-sized creations may have looked cute and harmless, but they held huge amounts of power. The red portable potions emitted fiery explosions. The jade ones produced giant blobs of super sticky slime on impact. And the silver potions temporarily froze things solid.

  While this was great in terms of a fighting advantage, we’d never faced a threat like this before. There were hundreds of antagonists out there. If we had any shot of escaping the palace, we needed something extra.

  “What about that other potion you made?”

  SJ’s face paled.

  Prior to leaving Ash
lyn’s, SJ had used a combination of ingredients to brew a very experimental and extremely powerful portable potion. She was planning to destroy it because she’d decided it was too dangerous, but I had stopped her when I found out, believing that it might come in handy on our journey.

  “Crisa, you know I have not tested it,” SJ replied. “I created the potion from memory. If my calculations were even slightly off, the results could be—”

  “Cataclysmic. I know. But you also said that if it did work it would produce an intense temporary earthquake. And right now that’s our best option for when we get upstairs and the guards eventually outnumber us.”

  “I’m with Crisa,” Jason said. “If we get into trouble, SJ, you need to fire first and have regrets later.”

  “Agreed,” said Blue.

  “What she said,” Daniel added.

  SJ exhaled a sigh and reluctantly nodded. “All right, fine. I will do it.”

  Jason put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’ll back you up. And we have our new weapons too, remember?”

  “What new weapons?” I asked.

  Blue grinned deviously. “What, Miss Magical? You think you’re the only one who gets to level-up on this journey?”

  She, Jason, and Blue went on to explain that while they were on the magic train the three of them had saved the life of a Fairy Godmother. Since the recent attack on our magic train ride to Adelaide, Fairy Godmothers had been randomly checking in on the transports to make sure they were safe. Unfortunately, this Godmother—Lucille as she was called—happened to pop up on a magic train where there were several magic hunters.

  They got the jump on her when she was inspecting the cargo hold. Luckily, my friends intervened. They’d spotted the hunters standing on the platform at Adelaide station and after what happened the last time, they elected to keep tabs on the hunters throughout the ride. As a result, they’d been there when Lucille was attacked.

  My friends subdued the hunters before they could kill the Godmother and take her magic. As a reward, Lucille had granted each of them a special gift. Blue’s utility belt, which normally held her throwing knives, was now charmed to replenish the knives as they were thrown. She would never have to worry about running out mid-battle again. Jason’s axe was enchanted to produce a small force field whenever he gripped the handle and thought of the word “protect.” This energy barrier would project from the blade and create a temporary shield around him. And SJ’s gift . . . Well, SJ’s gift was a little more complicated.

  My friend carried around her portable potions in a sack that she attached to her belt. However, we’d been through so many attacks on this adventure that she’d run out midway. Thankfully she’d been able to re-brew more ammo at Ashlyn’s. But the risk of running out of potions was an ongoing obstacle. So she’d requested that the Fairy Godmother enchant her sack to remedy the situation.

  If she reached in right now she would still find all the portable potions she’d recently made. But inside the sack also existed a tiny, contained wormhole that SJ could activate by thinking of the word “compress.”

  Once activated, SJ could reach into the sack and pull out any object so long as: (a) it existed (b) it could fit through the mouth of the sack, and (c) she knew exactly where it was. She couldn’t just reach inside and yank out a miscellaneous taco or a random knife from the kitchen at Lady Agnue’s, but if she remembered the exact location of something, say, a quill on her desk, she could pull that out with no problem.

  At the moment it wasn’t a terribly useful enchantment, but it held endless possibilities for the future. For example, she could make hundreds of portable potions ahead of time, keep them hidden in a specific location, then call on them when necessary. She would never have to worry about running out of ammo again. Assuming that we survived our current predicament, that is.

  “That sounds awesome, man,” Daniel said when Jason finished detailing the new abilities of his axe.

  “More importantly, it’s handy,” Blue added. “With what’s upstairs waiting for us we can use all the advantages we can get. Now as to our plan . . .” Blue pivoted toward me.

  “Right,” I said. “So we’re going to make a run at the main entrance. One, it’s the only route out of this place we know. Two, no one will be expecting an escape via the castle’s front door. And three, in front of the castle is where the guards parked the carriages. We just need to make it to them and then get to the border.”

  “You do realize that there are hordes of guards roaming the halls, a small army in the foyer, and a large number of miscellaneous antagonists outside the castle who would not mind eliminating us themselves,” SJ said.

  I shrugged. “Hey, given that the alternative is public execution, I’m willing to give it a go if you are. So what do you say, oh great and logical one?”

  “This plan is about as sane as any of the other plans you have come up with recently,” she replied.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “As usual, I think it is a bit of both. Ergo, I am in. I cannot speak for the rest of you, though.” SJ gestured to the others.

  “So you want me to take on impossible odds while armed with nothing but a few weapons, gumption, and a half-baked, unorthodox plan?” Blue asked. “Of course I’m in. This is an endeavor worthy of Bruce Willis himself. And if it’s good enough for Bruce, it’s good enough for me.”

  “Not the words I would’ve chosen,” Jason commented. “But yeah, definitely in. Daniel?”

  “Knight already knows I’m on her side. Let’s get this done.”

  Despite the bleakness of the situation, I felt a warmth in my heart at my friends’ words.

  “All right then, now that’s settled,” Blue continued, “I’ve about had my fill of this place. So, if you’re ready . . .”

  “Do it.” I nodded.

  Blue grinned. “Aye, aye, captain.”

  The five of us stepped back so that we were as far away from the front wall as possible. Blue removed the rubber band she’d been wearing on her wrist since our escape from the lair of the Therewolves (thank Book she hadn’t taken it off). She used the band to fire the magic pea as she called out its trigger words:

  “Good night!”

  BANG!

  CRASH!!!

  KS!@D**H%3#$FH@!!!!!!!

  The pea shot forward and unleashed a string of enormously powerful shock waves at the front wall of our cell. When the dust cleared and we saw the gaping hole it’d created, Blue called out the pea’s stop command:

  “Good morning!”

  Instantly the enchanted pulses ceased and Blue went to retrieve the little green thing from the wreckage.

  “That’s why no one caught on to the pea’s enchantment,” Blue explained as we helped her search the rubble for it. “Its magic only activated when the prince’s mother left her alone each evening after saying, you know, the first thing. And then the enchantment was shut off when she re-entered the room the next day and said the second thing.”

  “All right, that’s it. I’m definitely doing the reading assignments from now on,” I commented as we continued poking through the debris.

  “Blue, I think I found it,” Jason said. “But . . .”

  We dashed over. Jason had picked up the pea from the chunks of iron and stone, but it wasn’t in good shape. The once bright green color was flickering and it was no longer perfectly round and smooth. It was flat and smushed like a tiny pancake. After flickering a few more times it abruptly turned to dust.

  “What happened?” Blue exclaimed.

  “It’s your pea. You don’t know?” Daniel asked.

  “Once you say the stop command it’s supposed to return to its normal form and begin recharging,” she explained. “There’s no reason that wall should’ve destroyed it.”

  I bent down and touched a portion of the crumbled wall. Instantly that weird dizziness and brain static I’d felt before returned. “There’s something about this stone,” I
said, removing my hand. “My wand should be able to hack through anything. Whatever this stuff is made of, it’s powerful. It must’ve been too much for the pea to take.”

  “I’m sorry, Blue,” Jason commented thoughtfully, knowing that she would be upset about losing the pea. She had a deep love and respect for fairytale history and its related relics.

  “Same, but we need to move on,” Daniel replied. “Anyway it’s hardly the first magical relic we’ve destroyed.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “The pea went down in the name of saving us, just like the magic mirror and Aladdin’s genie lamp.”

  Blue and SJ turned on me in unison, their faces shocked and dismayed. “You destroyed the genie lamp?”

  “Not the time,” Daniel said, herding us forward. “Designed to be silent or not, someone upstairs definitely felt that pea’s explosion. We’ll have company in a minute and we need to get out.”

  We followed his lead and began our dash down the corridor. As we ran, SJ glanced at me. “When this is over we need to have a serious talk about your affinity for destruction.”

  “Noted,” I said.

  e hurried to the storage room where our weapons had been stowed. The door was made of regular steel and locked with regular bolts. I transformed my wand back to an axe and easily hacked my way through.

  Once the door was removed we dashed inside. SJ found her slingshot and sack of portable potions. Blue located her trusty hunting knife and her newly enchanted utility belt with throwing knives. The boys grabbed their sheaths and weapons—Daniel’s sword and Jason’s upgraded axe. As an added bonus we found Blue’s cloak, which my friend happily put back on.