The Elemental Trial

by J. A. Armitage

I came to a standstill and turned. The three others stopped short behind me.

  “I think we need to come up with a plan,” I said, folding my arms across my chest.

  “You think?” wheezed Molly. I’d forgotten how short she was. Keeping up with my quick strides looked to have almost killed her. Her cheeks were bright red and clashed horribly with her hair.

  “Do we even know where we’re going? This is what, some kind of mine?” Orin asked. “Last time they gave us a clue. It seems strange that we have just been left to fend for ourselves.”

  “Maybe we should have been checking out the statues we passed instead of running past them at the speed of light,” Molly made out between deep breaths.

  Statues? I glanced around me. Molly was right. I’d been concentrating so much on getting away from the other team that I hadn’t taken in my surroundings. I hadn’t noticed how the natural tunnel had given way to something man-made. Or faerie-made, as it was.

  Statues lined the walls, each of them lit with some kind of artificial glow. They depicted creatures unlike any I’d seen before, with bulbous noses and ears, and spindly arms and legs.

  “What are those?” I examined the one nearest to me. Even compared to the rest, this creature had a particularly large nose. Unless he had something hidden up there, I seriously doubted he could tell us anything.

  “Goblins,” Orin said, his fine mouth curved in a frown. “I think this is a goblin mine. We shouldn’t linger here. Goblins aren’t…friendly.”

  “Great. Where the hell are we going, though?” I asked.

  “This might help,” Ario purred, holding up a long tubular object.

  Orin took it from him and examined it. “It’s a cryptex. Where did you find this?”

  If he said it was hidden in a statue, I was going to die on the spot of embarrassment.

  “I was handed it on the way in. I was told it was the first clue.”

  I was just about to ask him why he hadn’t shown us already, but I knew the answer. It was because I’d practically run off. But at least we were ahead of the other competitors.

  “Look at this,” Orin said meaningfully as he passed the cryptex to me. It had a row of symbols along the side. I’d read The DaVinci Code enough times to know what a cryptex was—a portable puzzle used to hide a hidden message. God knew how I’d survive this race without pop culture to guide me. I was about to pass it to Molly to take a look when something stopped me. One of the symbols was larger than the rest. And I’d seen it before. It was the symbol on Cass’s book. But it was upside down.

  “What does this mean?” I asked, pointing to it.

  “It’s an alchemical symbol. It means to come together,” Molly answered, huddling close to me to examine the cryptex. She smelled faintly of bubble gum. “I majored in runes at University, and they use some of the same root symbology.”

  “Does it change the meaning if it’s reversed?” I asked tracing the small symbol with my finger.

  Molly nodded, taking the cryptex from me. I hated to part with it, but I didn’t want to come off as bitchy with my own teammates right from the get-go. Molly was already mad with me for sprinting off.

  “Sometimes, it changes the meaning.” She scrunched up her face, considering. “I guess in this case, it could mean pulling apart or fragmenting.”

  I thought back to the book Orin, and I had taken from the library in Cardiff. It was about severing the fae and the human realms. If the symbol meant fragmenting, that would make perfect sense.

  Molly handed the cryptex back to me. “These others are also alchemical symbols. They represent various metals. But I’m not sure how that helps us.” She shrugged.

  “I thought you majored in this,” Orin pointed out stiffly. It took a lot of effort to hold back my smirk.

  “I said I majored in runes, not reality show alchemy. There’s not a 100% overlap,” she snapped.

  Orin pursed his lips. “So we know one of the symbols. That gets us nowhere.”

  But I was examining the device, running my fingers across the cool metal dials. I pushed at one, and it clicked forward, revealing something beneath. Another symbol. “There’s another row of symbols here, but I don’t recognize them. There’s also a hole in the end, but I can’t see what you’d put down it. It’s way too small for my finger to fit.”

  I looked up and saw Ario leaning against the wall like a fashion model, watching me closely. My ears reddened. He didn’t seem particularly concerned with solving the riddle of the cryptex or getting to the next checkpoint.

  Orin took the cryptex and placed it in the side pocket of his bag. “As none of us can figure this out now, I say we keep on. I think I can hear the others.”

  We grew still. It was faint, but I could definitely hear someone talking.

  This time, I let Molly set the pace. We walked for what felt like hours. Always, the same straight path with the creepy statues that seemed to be watching us as we walked.

  Eventually, we came to a fork in the path. It was the first one we’d seen since going through the portal. I turned to the others and cocked an eyebrow, asking which path we should take. Both options looked identical, so in my opinion, it didn’t really matter which we chose, but I had to ask. My unease was growing the longer we stayed here without incident. It felt like the calm before the storm. The producers wouldn’t allow a day to pass without something exciting popping out at us. And Orin said the owners of these tunnels likely weren’t friendly.

  “I think we should rest up before making any big decisions,” Ario said.

  I could have gone on, but I could see the fatigue on Molly’s face.

  I nodded and looked at Orin. He shrugged but dropped his bag to the floor all the same. He was probably thinking the same as me. Don’t rock the boat this early on in the game. We had to at least pretend to work together. I’d learned my lesson in the last trial, though. I wasn’t going to trust Molly and Ario.

  Orin pulled a sleeping bag from his backpack and laid it out. Inside my pack, I found a sleeping bag just like Orin’s with the initials FFR embroidered in blue thread. Just seeing those three letters turned my stomach now, though I supposed it was nice of them to actually give us sleeping bags this trial. It wasn’t exactly cold in the tunnels, but the floor was hard, and I’d be glad of something between me and the unforgiving ground. I wondered if the race staff had decided that forcing us to spend so much time seeing to our basic survival needs was monotonous to the audience. Did that mean there was food in here?

  As I climbed into my sleeping bag, I checked the rest of the backpack. I’d been so busy trying to put distance between us and the other team that I’d forgotten to see what rations we’d been given. It wasn’t much, but again, better than the nothing-burger we’d gotten the first trial. I had two protein bars, a bottle of water, and a bag of salted peanuts. I also had a flashlight, a penknife, and a tiny first aid-kit that was barely worth bothering with. A bandaid and squirt of Neosporin weren’t going to help me down here.

  “Here,” Ario said, conjuring up a blanket. It floated down softly through the air on a bed of magic, before covering me perfectly. “I don’t want to see you getting cold. You humans aren’t as tough as the fae.”

  I smiled awkwardly, not knowing quite how to respond. As far as I was aware, faeries felt the cold just as much as humans did, and I noticed he didn’t offer a magical blanket to his own teammate.

  Ario laid his sleeping bag next to mine, settling down gracefully atop it. He moved with a predatory grace that reminded me of the panther that had almost ended me in the first trial. Deadly, beautiful. “Of course, the best form of warmth is body heat.”

  My cheeks heated. Was he flirting with me? Or was this some ploy? He’d seen how ridiculously easily I’d fallen for Tristam’s charms in the last round. He probably thought I was easy game.

  Ario winked at me before lying down and closing his eyes. I couldn’t help it, my body buzzed with warmth at his nearness, all the way from my core to the tips
of my ears. It didn’t matter that I didn’t trust him and thought he was probably going to murder me in the most gruesome fashion in my sleep, my body had a mind of its own, and right now it wanted me on full alert about the devastatingly-handsome male lain out next to me.

  “I wouldn’t worry about getting cold,” Orin growled at me. His dark eyes gleamed in the low light, fixed on Ario. The exchange between us had not passed beneath his notice. “The heat from your cheeks should keep us all warm.”

  Sighing, I lay down. To one side of me was Orin. To the other, Ario. Sheer embarrassment left me indecisive about which way to turn. So I spent an uncomfortable night on my back facing upwards. I made a mental note to sleep next to Molly next time.

  9

  I woke stiff and hungry, as per FFR usual. It was impossible to know what time it was—whether I’d gotten a full night of sleep. My pounding head and scratchy eyes told me I hadn’t, but the others were already stirring, so I sat up with a groan.

  Orin was shoving his sleeping bag back into his backpack with more than a little aggressiveness. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but I didn’t want Ario and Molly to see any fissures in our team that they could exploit. Even though Molly’s extra knowledge had come in helpful last night, I didn’t like having them with us. It changed the dynamic in a way I wasn’t comfortable with, setting me on edge. Of course, that’s exactly what the FFR producers had been going for. The teams were clearly getting too comfortable with each other, and so they had to dial up the drama by throwing us all together.

  Next to me, Ario sat up and stretched, his hand coming within inches of me. “Morning,” he said, his voice a deep growl. His dark hair was mussed from sleep, his eyes hooded. He looked like an actor in a movie waking up from a night of raunchy sex. Mortified by my thought, I bolted to my feet, my heart pounding. Where the hell had that come from?

  “Everything all right?” he looked up at me, offering a languid grin. It was like he knew what I was thinking. Faeries couldn’t read minds, right? Not even incubi?

  “Fine,” I said, my voice shrill.

  “You’re wound a little tight, aren’t you,” Molly complained, bending over and stretching.

  “Just eager to get moving,” I said, pulling my water bottle from my pack and taking a swig to cover my nerves. I did feel wound tight. It was this place. This cave. I needed the sky, the fresh air. No goblins about to pop out at any moment.

  We each ate one of our protein bars, took turns finding a spot to relieve ourselves down the tunnel we’d come through and turned to the task at hand. Figuring out which way we were supposed to go.

  “They look identical,” Orin said, surveying both options.

  Molly was walking slowly around the fork in the road, examining it for clues. “Here!” she said, crouching down in front of the right tunnel. “A symbol.”

  We crowded around her. Etched into the ground was the largest symbol on the cryptex. The one that meant to join together. “It’s gotta be this way,” I said.

  “Nice job, Mols,” Ario said, pulling her into a side hug. She grinned, and I felt a stab of jealousy followed by confusion. I just longed for Orin and I to have such an easy exchange, right? I wasn’t jealous over Ario…

  My feet were slow to move as the others set off down the tunnel. Ario hung back, falling in step beside me. I tried to ignore how his presence felt like the crackle of magic. Was he doing some sort of spell?

  “I was impressed by your performance in the Sorcery Trial,” Ario said politely.

  I snorted. “You mean you’re surprised I didn’t get myself killed?”

  He let out a little laugh. “You proved surprisingly resourceful. Especially, when you went in knowing so little about magic or the fae.”

  “I know about that stuff,” I protested, though his assessment was accurate. Some of the other competitors had studied these subjects for years. I’d had a one-month crash course that I basically flunked.

  “Oh, really? What do you know about the incubi?” he asked.

  “Um…” I licked my lips, which suddenly felt parched as a desert. “You…” I didn’t know how to articulate what I’d heard. “Incubi…have sex with women in their sleep.” Suddenly, I felt very alarmed that he’d placed his sleeping bag next to mine.

  He let out a husky laugh. “That is a foul rumor. Trust me; every woman who has sex with an incubus is very awake and very willing. Incubi obtain and strengthen our quora from the exchange of sexual energy. We are great lovers—to attract partners to us. Time with us is prized.”

  Sweat beaded my brow. Where was a cool breeze when a girl needed one? “Ah, good to know,” I said. “I guess I misunderstood.”

  “Our species have been greatly maligned over the years,” Ario said. “By other faeries who are jealous of our particular skills.”

  “You mean jealous that their girlfriends want to sleep with you?”

  “Sometimes.” Another chuckle. “What about you, Jacq?”

  “What about me?” I asked, my voice pitching up an octave. “Human. Human as they come.”

  “Are you and Orin…involved?” he asked.

  I chewed on my lip. Orin and Molly walked before us about twenty feet, Orin moving with that graceful stride that was burned into my memories. But he held himself stiffly, and were his fists curled at his sides? I knew faerie hearing was excellent. There was pretty much no safe answer here. Not in the least because I didn’t know what the real answer was. If I was being honest with myself, I did feel something for Orin. But I had felt something for Tristam, too. And now, my body seemed to be insisting that Ario was pretty great. Maybe I was just a human falling prey to faerie pheromones. Maybe I was hopelessly susceptible to their deadly charms, drawn like a fly into a spider’s web. Maybe whatever passed between Orin and me was really gratitude at how many times we’d saved each other’s hides.

  “Orin and I…it’s complicated,” I finally offered. Who the hell knew? I needed to focus on getting to the end of this race and finding Cass, anyway, not getting involved with some guy. Any guy.

  Ario’s response was swallowed by a screech of excitement from Molly. “Look!” she said. We hurried to catch up, entering into a wide room that yawned above us in a soaring ceiling. The room was shaped in a circle, and the hewn rock walls around us were inlaid with doors. I counted them. There were ten.

  “Which one do we go through?” I asked in dismay.

  Orin pulled the cryptex from his backpack, and when I went to look at it, he turned, showing it to Molly instead. I pursed my lips. Any doubts I had about whether Orin had overheard my and Ario’s conversation vanished. Great. Now he was pissed at me.

  Molly looked from the cryptex to the room. “Ten doors, eleven symbols.”

  “Well, the symbol for join together is set off. It’s larger. So maybe these ten correspond to the ten doors,” Orin suggested. “But none of the symbols appear to match.”

  “If you move the dials, another symbol appears underneath them,” I offered.

  Orin cast a dark glance over his shoulder at me, before he and Molly looked closer at the cryptex, moving the symbols.

  Ario was leaning against the wall again, examining his fingernails. Was this how it always went with the two of them? Molly doing all the work, Ario just riding her coattails? Typical guy, I thought in my head. He’d probably mansplain it to her after she figured it out and take the credit.

  “Oh,” Molly said with surprise. “The ones underneath are astrological symbols for the planets.”

  “Those match the symbols on the doors,” Orin pointed excitedly.

  I moved in, coming around on Molly’s side so Orin wouldn’t shy away. “Okay, so which one do we go through?”

  Molly shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s nothing to indicate which we should select.”

  Ario shoved off the wall and strolled over, holding out a hand. “May I?”

  Orin scowled but handed over the cryptex.

  Ario inspected it, flipping the d
ials back and forth, hiding and revealing the astrological symbols below. “It’s that one,” he pointed to a door to the left with a round circle with a dot in the middle.

  “How do you know?” Orin asked, suspicious.

  He let out a long-suffering sigh and turned the cryptex to the three of us. “The alchemical symbols on top represent precious metals. Ancient alchemists believed that each metal also corresponded to a planet. Silver corresponded to the moon, lead to Saturn, etc. The symbols beneath are astrological signs representing the planets as well. But they’re all jumbled; none of the top symbols correctly corresponds to the bottom symbol. Except this one.” He pointed at the round symbol on the cryptex that corresponded to the door he indicated. “This represents the sun, and this,” he moved the dial to reveal the other symbol, “represents the metal gold, which corresponds to the sun. I’m assuming the big symbol for ‘joining together’ is the clue that we need to find the one that correctly corresponds. Plus, alchemists loved gold. It’s a safe bet.”

  The other three of us fell into silence, digesting his explanation. Damn. I guess Ario wasn’t just a pretty face.

  Molly shrugged. “Good enough for me. Onward?”

  I nodded woodenly, ignoring the little wink Ario shot me, together with Orin’s black look after he spotted it. Orin turned and stalked after Molly, while Ario gave a little bow, ushering me forward.

  I swallowed thickly. I don’t know what was behind that door, but I was half hoping it was a goblin horde. Anything to distract me from the awkward faerie sandwich I’d somehow found myself in.

  10

  My heart thudded as Molly approached the door. Literally, anything could be behind there. What if Ario was wrong? He hadn’t mentioned knowing anything about alchemical symbols when Molly was talking about it yesterday. It seemed unlikely that he’d just decided to swoop in and save the day at the last minute... but maybe his own self-interest in advancing was enough.

  I didn’t trust the show producers either. Even if Ario was right, and he did know what he was talking about, I wouldn’t put it past them to stash some monster behind the door for us to contend with. As Molly pushed the thick oak door open, I grabbed my knife from my bag and clutched it in my hand. The door creaked, sending an ominous echo through the cavern.