by Jada Fisher
“But at the same time, I agreed with everything it was doing. I grabbed the man and told him that he was going to experience everything he had done to anyone he had ever hurt. He then started screaming and got off of me. The next thing I knew, he was running into the closest wall, again and again and again. The girls tried to stop him, because none of us wanted to deal with being by the dead body of the village chief’s brother, but we couldn’t. And after only a few good runups, he fell backwards and stopped moving.”
Ukrah could picture it clearly in her head. And, as awful as it was, she also felt a bit of relief. After so much time in Helena’s presence, it was hard not to feel like some sort of decrepit monster. While the round, happy woman filled places with love and light and comfort, Ukrah felt like she didn’t bring anything positive to the table. No, all she did was turn people to ash.
Probably not the healthiest thing to think, but it was what it was.
“I couldn’t let them find him there, it could ruin their family. So, I dragged him away. I was planning on dropping him somewhere in the woods, as far as I could get from the farm. I thought maybe I could drop him in the creek and people might think he got drunk and fell in.
“But I was intercepted by trappers. It was awful. I barely managed to get away, but by then, they’d gotten a good enough look at me so that I was definitely going to be found out in the morning. That was when my sister came up with the idea to hide me in plain sight. Our village was just bordering on the size of a city and spread out enough that no one would question another girl’s presence.
“It just turned out that she had this wig that she had made when she was an apprentice in the city. The client had never showed up after paying for the materials, so she had always kept it, saying she had a feeling it would come in handy someday. And it did.”
“She was an apprentice to a wigmaker?”
He nodded. “When we were younger, yeah, before fever took away our mother and father. She’s six years older than me, ya know. We used to have a middle brother and sister, but the fever took them too.”
Ukrah swallowed hard. She knew what it was like to lose someone she loved, but she couldn’t imagine watching as four of her family members succumbed to sweat and sickness. “I’m sorry. She sounds amazing. Where is she now?”
He was quiet again, and she could almost hear his heart cracking a little inside his chest. “She’s gone.”
“Oh.”
She wanted to ask more. She wanted to find out who had hurt him and why, what they had done so she could exact justice on them. She felt that familiar burn of righteousness in her belly, but she shoved it down.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, or she assumed it was some sort of shrug. It was hard to tell with his body pinned as it was. “I’ll have plenty of time to think about it later. I mean, I always kind of assumed I’d get a later. Now, I’m not sure there’s going to be one, but that’s a lot to think about.”
“There will be,” Ukrah said fiercely, much more than she had intended to. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“Oh, you got some special power then that involves miraculous rescues?”
“No, mostly I just kill people.”
He seemed startled by that. “Come again?”
“A lot of times I just poof—” She made a gesture with her hands. “—them right into ash. Sometimes it’s other things. I’ve tried to call on it purposefully with mixed success. When it does take over, it wants to destroy anyone it deems as deserving. Heavy stuff.”
“Huh, and here I thought I was the messed up one.”
That startled a sharp bark of laughter from her. “My sponsor is literally the god-woman. I spend most of my days surrounded by damaged and scarred people.”
“Well, good to know we fit right in together.”
They shared a bit of a chuckle, but it tapered off. They fell into a sort of quiet, with Ukrah decidedly trying not to think of stories she’d heard about people in the wilds being trapped in small caves or caverns and slowly suffocating to death. That only made her heart beat faster and her mouth suck in more air.
She might have even slipped into something like sleep, or at least the meditative state that Dille had taught her, it was hard to say. All that she knew was that things were calm and quiet in her mind for a bit, then suddenly she was being shaken thoroughly.
She jolted and came back to herself just in time to see more dirt and grit raining down around them.
Another collapse!
She threw her body over Marcellin’s as best she could, protecting him from the worst of it. But then, to her side, she saw more rocks tumble away, revealing a path barely visible through the soft glow.
“Marcellin, I have to ask you a question, and it’s serious,” she cried over the noise rising all around them.
“In this situation, are there any non-serious questions?”
Maybe she would have laughed, but what was about to come out of her mouth was making her absolutely sick to her stomach. “I want to drag you out of here—”
“Well, that sounds like a great idea to me.”
“But you’ll have to lose the arm and leg.”
He was quiet again a moment, and it was accompanied by the rumbling and a rock falling right beside them. “I guess you can say I’m a little attached to them. You got something to make them, uh…less attached?”
“Remember that ash thing? I’m pretty sure I might be able to, uh, get rid of them.”
“Pretty sure? Um, you have that kind of control? No offense, but I don’t exactly want to be the person you test it out on.” Another rock fell, landing right next to his head. “You know what, I trust you. Get me out of here.”
“Alright. I have no idea if this will hurt or not, but I’ll try to make it as quick as possible.”
“Thanks… I guess.”
She nodded and placed her hands on the flesh of his leg and arm just above where were pinned under the rock. The limbs were swollen and heated, feeling less like something real and more like an overstuffed pig-bladder.
He was right, she didn’t know if she had a good enough level of control to attempt what she was about to do. She’d never really used her abilities for such a specific purpose, unless one called obliterating arrows in mid-air specific. But as the small space they were in rumbled all around them, she couldn’t see them surviving if they stayed still, and she certainly wasn’t going to leave him to die on his own.
So, she closed her eyes and concentrated, calling on the dark, bubbling force within her. It was so obsessed with protecting, right? Well, she needed it to protect the innocent in front of her. A boy who was probably around her age that had also seen too much in his relatively short life.
Besides, he was another vessel, yet another piece in the puzzle that would have them saving their world, healing it from the inside-out. If the spirit inside her wanted to ever be reborn as it should, it needed to do exactly what she was asking of it.
And to her vast surprise, it started to react to her, rolling up from within her and sliding down her arms and into her fingers. She felt it go down into his limbs, rushing into the parts she couldn’t see, where it pooled and pooled until she could see the faintest of outlines of his broken arm and leg in the edges of her vision.
Then, with the slightest of squeezes, she felt the magic heat and expand before fizzling out entirely.
“I… I think that worked,” Marcellin said breathlessly, a tear streaking down his cheek. “Pull me away now before we’re both crushed to death.”
“Did it hurt too badly?”
“Who cares? Just pull.”
She didn’t need to be told twice, she gripped the side of his dress and yanked him to the side, turning him so that she could switch to his shoulders and pull him backward through the small gap.
It wasn’t easy, and she was knocked off balance several times as she backward-crawled through the small space. She felt rocks digging into her knees and cutting at her arms, bu
t she didn’t care. She pushed herself as fast as she could in the awkward position, until she finally toppled out.
She was bewildered for just a moment, almost having expected the small, cramped space to last forever, but she recovered quickly and lurched forward to yank Marcellin the rest of the way out of space. He followed quickly, and, as if being pushed by fate, the rocks tumbled shut right where his bottom half had just been.
“By the spirits…” Ukrah wheezed, falling backward so that she was prostrate, breathing harder than she had in a while. “I cannot believe that worked.”
“Would it be rude of me to say me too? I don’t even know how I’m alive right now.”
“It’s probably the magic, if I had to guess. You did just lose two limbs.”
“Yeah, I’m trying not to think about that. And I’m not looking either. But for that matter, why am I even able to see? Pretty sure my little light spell didn’t extend out here.”
Ukrah craned her neck, looking for the source of illumination. “There are a couple of broken, overturned lanterns on the ground. I think I see an old firepit I can probably light up before they go out.”
“Well, get on it then. It’s not like you’ve been busy with anything else.”
She huffed out a laugh. She was tired, hurting, and covered in dirt. She was pretty sure she was bleeding from at least a couple places, and her chest ached something fierce. And yet, considering how bad it could have been, she wasn’t doing half-bad. “Alright, let me get right on that.”
It took a bit of effort to crawl out from under Marcellin’s upper half. For being so slender, he certainly had a fairly solid weight to him. But she managed to extricate herself and stumble toward the empty pit.
She must have hurt her hip somewhere along the way, because she was definitely limping as she stumbled along. Despite that, it didn’t take that long to get enough scrap to have a good base for the fire and then use the lanterns to set the tinder ablaze. A few moments later, she had a reasonable burn going—enough to see most of the area.
Finally, they weren’t trapped in a tiny space. They were in the corner of what had been the first floor, a small part of the ramp partially visible, and she was pretty sure they could probably wiggle under it to go deeper into the prison.
Except she definitely didn’t want to do that. Deeper meant less likely to ever get to the surface. Less likely to ever get rescued. Besides, she didn’t know if there were any other survivors down there, and considering that Elspeth had rescued all the witches, anyone she ran into would be a hunter who most likely wouldn’t be happy to see her.
“You know, I feel like I should be in a lot more pain than I am. If we survive this, something tells me it’s all gonna hit me at once later.”
“That’s usually how it works. When I was run through, it only hurt for a bit, then the spirit took over and I was fine until it went dormant again.”
“Spirit?”
“It’s, uh, complicated.”
“Complicated how? Like, we’re possessed by something evil?”
“Uh, no. But also yes. A little? Don’t worry about it now. Worry about it if we get aboveground.”
“Fair enough.”
“Hey, you know this place pretty well. Are there any supplies around here? Food, water?”
“Um… There might be a cask of water, maybe some dried rations in a chest. But I’m not really keen on moving right now, so good luck finding them.”
“That’s alright. You just rest. You’ve earned it.”
“You’re darn right I have. I’m just gonna…close my eyes for a minute, okay? I promise, I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”
Another dry chuckle and then she was up again, searching much more intently than she had before when she had been lightly going around looking for burnable debris. Although it was brighter with a fire going, it was difficult to spot things in the flickering light.
Despite her time of sleep and/or meditation before, she found her eyelids beginning to droop and her shoulders sagging. Ah, so perhaps she had been going into a sort of injury shock before and it was finally wearing off. That was unfortunate timing.
She was so absorbed in getting any sort of supply, whether it be sustenance or medical, that she didn’t hear the rock scraping and footsteps rushing for were until something slammed right into the side of her head.
9
Tooth and Nail
She stumbled back, the entire world swirling around her. She crashed hard, only barely remembering to kick her leg out blindly.
She connected with something, however, and there was a wild snarl. She tried to scramble to her feet, but she felt like she could hardly see, her head throbbing like it hadn’t in a long time.
Was she bleeding? It felt like she might be. But she couldn’t put her thoughts together enough to raise her hand and check. She was so scrambled, something she hadn’t been in ages. When was the last time that someone had gotten such a physical drop on her? She couldn’t remember ever being hit in the head so hard. In fact, she couldn’t remember much of anything.
She did, however, feel something rushing toward her. Not enough to roll away from it, but she was able to bring her arm down in time to take the greater force of the kick on her bicep. It hurt, oh it most certainly hurt, but it was better than if she had directly taken it to her ribs.
And for some reason, the pain worked as a sort of jolt, and her head cleared enough for her vision to stop spinning and her fight-or-flight to kick in. Another kick lashed toward her, but this time she did manage to roll, reaching out to grab his ankle and yank him off his feet.
He landed hard and she finally got a good look at him. It was a witch hunter, but one she barely recognized. Not that it mattered, because he would kill her just as well as anybody else.
She tried to roll again, to get to her feet and fight him. She tried to call up her magic, to do anything, but before she could, a heavy weight was slamming into her back and pressing her down into the ground.
“In the name of the Three, I bind you!”
Ukrah opened her mouth to snarl something, to let him know exactly what he could do with his words, but then something pressed into her neck. It was blunt, too dull to be a knife, but then a sharp, burning pain rocked through her whole body, making all of her limbs spasm.
“St-stop!” she managed to gasp out. But once more, she found her tenuous grip on her magic fizzle out completely, skipping straight over slippery and hard to grip right down to completely frozen within her.
Whatever he had done was still burning through her, racing over all her skin. It itched just as much as it scalded her, and she bucked up with all of her might, managing to get just enough of a gap under her to get to her knees and scuttle to the side.
The man lunged after her, his face covered in blood and one of his lips swollen to a nearly comical level, but she had enough of her wits about her to pull her fist back and catch him right in his swollen mouth.
He fell backwards and she took her chance, diving on top of him. Grabbing a rock, she raised it above her head and tried to bring it down on his skull. Except she was either too slow or he was hopped up on the same survival instinct she was, because he dodged his head to the side and brought his fist up into her ribs several times in a row.
It put her off balance, her breath leaving her in a rush, and then they were rolling again with him on top. He was bigger than her, and stronger, and it didn’t take him long to grab both of her hands in one of his.
She could tell his other was going toward her throat. She didn’t know if he had that burning stylus in his grip again or a knife or if it was just his bare hand, but none of that mattered. He could choke her just as easily as he could stab her. Her blood rushing in her veins, she managed to sweep one of her legs up and almost to her head, catching his arm in the crook behind her knee.
She put everything she had into resisting him, in trying to break his grip and somehow free herself. She had fought without magic p
lenty of times. Even if she was cut off completely, she wasn’t going to be helpless.
But it was hard not to feel that way as her muscles began to ache and her whole body shook. He was beginning to use his weight against her, tiring her out until she had to give in, and they both knew it.
But one thing he didn’t seem to take into account was just how sweaty their fighting got her. His attention fully on forcing his way toward her throat, he took enough of his concentration off her wrists for her to yank one out and slam the base of her palm into his nose.
He let out a choked sound and she pressed her luck, jabbing him again in the throat and reaching for the rock she had dropped with her other hand. Her fingers latched onto it, but before she could raise it, he was back onto her and pressing that burning stylus into her hand.
She screamed, her whole body locking up again as she burned. She didn’t think she had ever felt a pain so invasive, sinking through every part of her and smoldering like a fire was set in her skin.
When her muscles finally released, it was too late. His hands were around her throat and he was squeezing hard, too hard. It was only after several over-loud beats of her heart that she even realized he was saying something, words tumbling from his mouth in a frantic stream.
They sounded…holy, in a way. Was he preaching the ordinance of the Three to her? What a horribly cruel thing to do while killing her, a bit like rubbing salt into the wound. It really was a shame, to have come so far, only to get destroyed by someone who was so thoroughly entrenched in their propaganda that they would murder their fellow man.
Well, she wasn’t going to go complacently into the night. With all she had left, she drew up the energy to slash her fingers down his face, leaving deep tracks in their wake. But he didn’t let go. If anything, his grip got even tighter.
Well, that wouldn’t do.
So, she tried again, this time going right for his eye. He tried leaning away, but he wasn’t willing to give up his grip on her neck, so he did nothing to stop her. If the mere threat of her scratching his eye wasn’t enough, she saw no reason not to escalate.
