Shadows (18 page)

“No!” The word exploded from Mara, as in one horrifying instant she remembered the other terrible thing that had happened, the other terrible thing that she had done. “It's not safe anymore. Stanik . . . knows—knew—where it is.”

“What?” Keltan whirled toward Chell. “Did you betray us?”

“I did not,” Chell said coldly.

“
I
betrayed you!” Mara cried. “
I
did!” Tears welled up in her eyes, flooded down her cheeks. “I was trying to save my father,” she choked out.

Keltan gaped at her. “
You
told him where the Secret City is?”

“No!” she said. “No. But I . . . I told him about the unMasked Army. And I . . . I gave him Catilla's name. And Stanik . . . that was enough for him. He knew about the old caves. He knew Catilla's father had known about them.”

“But Stanik is dead,” Keltan said. “You killed him. Maybe he didn't tell anyone—”

“I would not risk
my
people's safety on such a slim ‘maybe,'” Chell said grimly.

Keltan swallowed. He stared at Mara, and his face held so much shock and betrayal that she could not suppress a strangled sob. “Keltan, I'm—” she began.

“Save it,” he snapped, and now his white face turned red as anger overpowered every other emotion he might have been feeling. “Tell it to Catilla.” He turned to Chell. “All the more reason for us to find Edrik. We have to warn—”

“
You
have to warn him, you mean,” Chell said, his own voice still cold. “My duty lies elsewhere.” He glanced at Mara. “I have to get to my ships,” he said. “Come with me.”

“What?” Keltan spun toward Mara again. “Mara, don't be a fool, you can't trust him—”

But Mara hardly heard him. She was imagining returning to the Secret City, to the place that had become her second home, telling Catilla, telling them all, that she had betrayed them, that she had told the Watchers where to find them, that their sanctuary from the Autarch's tyranny had been snatched away from them through her actions, and on top of every other horror unleashed that day, she knew she couldn't do it. She didn't have the strength.

“I'm going with Chell,” she said. “I can't go to back to the Secret City. I
can't
.”

Chell nodded once. “Then it is decided.” He glanced back up at the valley's rim. “The Watchers will be delayed by confusion and uncertainty . . . but not forever. There were witnesses. They will come after us. We must ride.”

Keltan stared at Mara for another long moment, as if he had never seen her before; then he wheeled his horse almost savagely and dug his heels into its flanks. He galloped away to the north, vanishing up and over the top of the valley's far slope.

Mara gasped; she'd been holding her breath without realizing it. Tears blurred her vision again and she swiped her sleeve across her face. “Are you recovered enough to ride?” Chell asked her.

Recovered?
Mara felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rising in her throat, and choked it down; if once she started laughing, she feared she would never stop. But . . . recovered? The idea was ludicrous. She'd seen her father stripped and hanged. She had absorbed his dying magic, torn magic from the Watchers, killed Stanik and absorbed
his
magic, used all of it to smash the city wall. Her mother had fled to a distant southern village and soon enough would hear of her husband's death, and could face the same punishment herself, and there was nothing Mara could do to help her. She had betrayed the unMasked Army, which had rescued her from the horrors of the mining camp, and all the friends she had made in the Secret City; and she had once more used the power that could eventually drive her into madness and evil. When next she slept, the ghosts of her father and Stanik and who knew how many others awaited her. Though the morning sun shone bright all around them, Mara felt like she was back in the mine, trapped in a chamber deep underground, all exits blocked by fallen stone, air running out, no life, no light, no hope.

Recovered? She would never recover, not if she lived to be a hundred.

All that swirled through her mind like the muddy water of an unleashed torrent, but all she said out loud was, “Yes.”

“Then let's ride.” Chell turned his horse so that the rising sun cast its shadow long and black directly in front of him. “West . . . to the sea.” He clapped heels to the horse's flanks and rode away up the valley, and Mara, setting her jaw and gripping her reins, galloped after him.

Flight to the Sea

T
HEY BURST UP OUT OF THE VALLEY onto open ground, pounding across wheat fields covered with yellow stubble. There seemed little need for stealth, since the Watchers would soon find their trail. Their only hope lay in speed, in staying ahead of pursuit all the way to the distant coast.

Mara had never been west of Tamita, and had only the vaguest notion of the terrain between the city and the sea, knew only that it was supposed to be two days' ride. As a guide she was next to useless, and she knew it; she feared she'd soon be worse than useless, as the impact of everything that had happened in the city made itself felt. She knew that nightmares lurked at the edges of her consciousness, knew they would claim her for certain the moment she slept. And so she resolved not to sleep for as long as she could, but that held its own risks: on the ride from the mining camp to the Secret City, the nightmares had found their way from her unconscious to her conscious mind, manifesting in hallucinations.

At least the first part of their ride was in bright sunshine . . . not that it kept the horrors of the morning from gibbering in the shadows of her brain.

Mara had become a competent rider if not a great one over her weeks with the unMasked Army, or she would never have been able to keep up with Chell, who seemed born to the saddle . . . probably to be expected for a prince, she thought. They could not gallop the whole way, of course; once they had crossed into a shallow valley that hid the walls of the city behind them, they slowed to a walk to give the horses a chance to recover, then proceeded at a steady trot, occasionally alternating with a canter in more open terrain. They passed farmyards and villages, but kept a wide berth, and the day wore on without a sign of pursuit behind or ambush ahead. “Maybe they don't realize we escaped,” Mara said to Chell about noon, as they stopped for a few minutes to give the horses a chance to drink and graze, and their own sore muscles a chance to relax.

“They'll figure it out soon enough,” Chell said. He looked back along their trail, and frowned. “They may be closer than we think. Look!” He pointed toward a band of trees on the far side of the shallow valley they had just crossed. They had passed through those woods a half hour before. Squinting at them, Mara saw what he had seen: flocks of birds wheeling above the trees. “Something disturbed them,” Chell said grimly. “Might be wild animals, or farmers, or hunters. Or . . .”

“Watchers,” Mara said. She turned tiredly back toward her horse. “Let's keep moving.”

They mounted the horses, who were none too happy about it, and pressed on.

The afternoon ground by. They passed through more low valleys, separated by ridges, each a little lower than the one before, until finally they topped one and, as the sun sank before them, saw at the limit of their vision a bright line of reflected fire.

“The sea,” Chell said. He glanced at Mara. “Can you keep riding? If we carry on through the night, we might be there by morning.”

“I can keep riding,” she said stoutly, though she wasn't nearly as sure about that as she tried to sound. “But what about the horses?”

Chell glanced back. They'd seen nothing else to indicate pursuit since the disturbed birds above the trees, but they'd never since had that clear a view of their back trail. “We'll give them an hour, next time we cross water,” he said. There was a growling noise that for a moment made Mara think there must be an animal in the trees, but Chell grimaced and put a hand to his stomach. “I wish
we
could graze,” he said. “And I wish I'd eaten breakfast.” He clucked to his horse and they trotted on.

They stopped on the shore of a shallow, swift-flowing creek not twenty minutes later. The horses stopped to drink. Mara stretched out in a patch of grass, staring up at the star-studded sky and listening to the rush of water over stones. She only wanted to rest, certainly didn't intend to sleep . . . but her body had other ideas.

In the darkness behind her eyelids, the nightmares waited.

There were old “friends” there: Grute, the boy who had tried to rape her, the first person she had killed with magic. There were Watchers she had slain at the mining camp and at the new magic lode in the mountains that she had found with the geologists sent out by the Autarch. There was the Watcher who had died in the woods as she, Chell, Edrik, and Keltan made their way to Tamita. But they were pale shades compared to the new nightmares.

Her father . . . and Stanik.

Her father appeared before her naked, head at a grotesque angle, eyes bulging, tongue protruding. “You killed me,” he groaned, his voice a choked travesty of the voice she had loved all her life. “You killed me. Your own father . . .”

Stanik came before her carrying his mangled head, face half ripped away, blood dripping from the severed neck. Impossibly, a voice came from the shattered skull and broken, jagged teeth. “You little
bitch
,” he snarled. “How
dare
you. How dare you stand against the Autarch. Against the Circle. Against me!”

Closer and closer they came. She tried to back away, but couldn't; her feet were rooted to the spot, her back against a tall black cliff. They reached out their arms to touch her and she screamed and screamed and . . .

...woke, jerking upright, but the nightmare continued: for bursting out of the woods bordering the stream came a dozen Watchers, swords drawn, horses thundering down toward her and Chell, stretched out on the ground not far away and as fast asleep as she had been.

There was no time to wake him, no time to do anything but the one thing she knew she should not do, and yet the one thing she longed to do with all of her being: she reached out to all those onrushing men and, screaming in mingled pain and ecstasy, ripped the magic out of them, and flung it, burning as it poured through her body, into the ground in front of them.

The earth turned soft and yielding, writhing and twisting like rotting meat seething with maggots. The horses, their screams echoing hers, sank into the ground, forelimbs cracking like dry twigs. The horses' riders, already unconscious in the saddles, already sliding away, were flung down as well. Necks and arms and legs snapped on impact . . .

...and then the ground solidified again, and there was no sign there had been any Watchers or horses there at all, except for one steed's still-protruding head. Eyes wide and white with terror bulged. There was a sighing rush of wind as all the air was forced from the beast's lungs; the head twitched once, madly, swollen tongue protruding from the gaping mouth . . .

...and then the wide, white eyes turned red and popped from the skull in twin squirts of blood, and the head was still.

Mara turned her head and threw up into the grass. And then she screamed, as to her it appeared the ground where she had vomited suddenly boiled again, and a man's face exploded out of it, eyes bulging and red, mouth screaming, blood pouring from ears and mouth. She scrambled back on her hands and knees and the entire field before her appeared to erupt with the men and horses she had just killed. Limbs broken, ribs shattered, blood pouring from terrible wounds, they came toward her, crawling, moaning, snorting, snarling, on and on and on. No matter how much she screamed, and screamed, and screamed again, still they came on, and with them were Grute, Stanik . . . and worst of all, her father.

Someone grabbed her and she struck out blindly, felt her hand meet flesh, her foot sink into softness. She heard a grunt, and a curse, and then something hit her head with terrible force, and she collapsed into blessed, untroubled darkness.

•  •  •

Consciousness returned piecemeal: a sound in the silence, a rocking motion, a cool breeze across closed eyelids. Warm flesh covered in smooth hair flexed beneath her cheek. Her head hurt, throbbing in time with her heart, sharper pains sometimes stabbing as the rocking motion moved her body. For a long time Mara was half-awake but kept her eyes closed, afraid that if she opened them she would once again see the people she had killed crawling out of the earth-turned-mass-grave she had somehow created through magic. But then she started to slip into that nightmare with her eyes closed, and that drove her fully awake, gasping.

She found herself slung across the saddle of a horse, her head dangling against its left shoulder, her legs hanging down the other side. Only the moon provided illumination, but its silvery light was enough to show her a brown leather boot and a black-trousered leg, beyond that the rear end of the horse, and beyond that a second horse at the end of a long lead. They seemed, from what she could see in the uncertain light, to be riding through a second-growth forest: stumps from massive, long-since-logged old trees interspersed with the much more slender trunks of living ones.

“What's going on?” she tried to say, but her throat was so dry it came out as a nearly unintelligible croak.

“Mara?” said Chell's questioning voice from somewhere above her. “Are you awake?”

“I think so,” she grated, her voice a little stronger now. “Unless this is still a nightmare.”

“It's real.” Chell reined the horse to a halt. “Let me get you down.” His boot disappeared as he slid from the saddle. A moment later she felt his hands on her waist, and she was sliding down as well, though if he had not immediately wrapped his arms around her she would have fallen. Her legs felt as limp as overcooked noodles and the pain continued to pound away at her head.

Chell helped her to sit on the pine needle-covered ground, her back to a tree. He knelt beside her and gingerly touched the side of her head. “Ow!” she yelped as his fingers found a sensitive spot. “What hit me?” She raised her own hand, and discovered a sizable lump.

Chell sat back. “I'm afraid I did,” he said.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“You were . . . not yourself,” Chell said. There was something odd about his tone. He sounded almost . . .

Afraid?
Mara thought.
Afraid of
me?

And then she remembered what had come just before his blow to her head had knocked her unconscious, and knew she couldn't blame him. “I . . . all those people . . .” She shuddered, and looked fearfully around her. “They were . . . coming back. Out of the ground. Or did . . . did I imagine what I did to them, too?” she said, with a sudden surge of hope. “Was that a hallucination?”

“No,” said Chell flatly. “No. We both dozed off. The Watchers must have been closer behind us than we thought. They came on us out of the woods. And you . . .” He shook his head. “I've never seen anything like it. Never even
imagined
anything like it. The ground . . . ate them. Swallowed them up, as though they had never been.”

Mara swallowed hard to keep from throwing up again. “I didn't . . . I didn't know I could do that. I didn't know
magic
could do that.”

“Neither did I.” The prince stared at her. “Mara,
what are you?
”

She shook her head miserably. “A freak,” she muttered. “A monster.”

He regarded her a long moment. “No,” he said at last. “I don't believe that.”

“You saw what I did.”

“I saw what you did,” he agreed. “I saw you save both our lives. And back in Tamita, I saw you aid our escape and punish the man who killed your father . . . but I also saw you
not
kill all the Watchers or the people gathered as witnesses, and even heal one you had injured. You had the power then, and the rage, to murder indiscriminately . . . and you didn't.” He reached out to her again, and she flinched, but he didn't touch the bump on her head. Instead, he tenderly smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Mara, you're not a monster. But you're powerful. So powerful, you could rule this land if you wished.”

“I don't want to rule this land,” she said plaintively. “I'm only fifteen years old.” Tears started in her eyes. “I just want to go home. That's all I ever wanted. And now I never, ever can. Home isn't there. My father . . . my father is dead.” She could feel the grief clawing up from inside her, like a caged animal trying to escape. “And the Secret City . . . I've betrayed it, too . . .”

“Then perhaps you need a new home,” Prince Chell said softly. “Mara, Aygrima is not all the world. It's not even most of it. There are other lands, other kingdoms, oceans and islands, strange shores that have never been explored, lost cities from before the Great Plague . . . so many other places to be than here in Aygrima. Including my own country of Korellia. My father would welcome you there.
I
would welcome you there.”

Mara stared at him, wide-eyed. “It sounds . . . wonderful.”

“It
is
wonderful,” Chell said. He clasped her hands in his. “And I can take you.”

For a moment all she could see were his eyes, dark glimmering pools in his moonlit face . . . but then she remembered what he had told her in Tamita, remembered
why
he wanted her to come with him to Korellia, and she snatched her hand away. “You don't want me,” she said bitterly. “You just want my power. You want to use me as a weapon. You want me to kill for you.”