Royal Outlaw: (Royal Outlaw, Book 1) (41 page)

Some did not flee though. Mariel noticed several ogres that did not move, neither in attack nor retreat. They simply stood their ground with their clubs raised above their heads. The shadows shifted in the night and it almost looked like one ogre ran through another one. The ranks of ogres had dissolved into chaos. Mariel felt some hope that they might escape, so long as the Assassin did not appear. The horses were in a state of panic. Tristan and Captain Clemens had ceased fighting and turned all their attention to trying to stay on their frightened steeds. The whites of the horses’ eyes showed and foamy sweat clung to their flanks. Caught between deadly serpentramels and ogres, the horses refused to be calmed.

Iyela stood firm, and although she was frightened, she was a rational creature who could push fear aside when necessary. Mariel and Cara clung to her back, Cara with her face buried, and Mariel with Aracklin weighing her arm down. There was no need for the weapon at the moment though, not when the ogres were in panicked disarray.

James and Zeke shifted back into their human forms in hope of calming the horses. The ogres took advantage of this.

Directly ahead of Mariel, standing in the path Iyela would fly down if enough ogres moved out of the way, stood a massive ogre standing eight feet tall. In a loud, guttural language, the leader shouted angry commands at his panicking troops. Some ogres stopped and traded glances, fear making them indecisive. Brave the serpentramels or risk facing the wrath of an angry commander?

Mariel knew that cowardice and desertion were punished severely among ogres. The paused ogres began to move again. A few ran toward safety, but as more paused to listen to the roaring words of their commander, others turned and began to attack Mariel and her guards again.

The commanding ogre was rallying his troops and that meant death for Mariel. Still holding Aracklin, she pulled a knife from its sheath and delicately gripped the blade. Careful not to hit Cara as she pulled her arm back, Mariel released the knife toward the leader.

An unexpected cloud concealed the moon momentarily, causing the shadows to increase which blocked Mariel from seeing her knife hit its target. When the cloud passed, she was shocked to see the ogre leader standing where he had been before, looking exactly like he had. The knife she had thrown had disappeared into the shadows around him.

Angry that she had missed such a large target in easy range, Mariel pried one of Cara’s hands from her waist and ordered her friend to hold Aracklin. She drew another knife, only to shove it into the eyes of an ogre who strayed too close to her as he rejoined the battle. After dispatching a few other overachieving ogres, she had only two knives remaining. She shifted them both into throwing position in an effort to stop more frightened ogres from listening to their commander and to regain her damaged pride.

The knives left her hands in as straight of a line as the first one had appeared to move. This time a cloud did not obscure Mariel’s view as both knives hit their target directly. The ogre did not scream, or blink, or show any sign of pain as the knives struck him in the throat. The knives did not stay in the throat though, they passed through it. Something changed in the ogre, but it was not his expression, it was his substantiality. His entire body became clear and Mariel watched as her knives joined the first one she had thrown in a tree directly behind the ogre.

Mariel blinked, uncertain what she had seen, until Cara’s cry of alarm shook her back to her senses. Cara, holding Aracklin, brought the weapon down on the bare shoulder of the ogre approaching them. The sword stuck fast, nearly ripping Cara from the back of the unicorn, but as Iyela shifted to regain her balance, Mariel jerked Cara back and wrenched Aracklin from the ogre at the same time.

She finished off the ogre as Cara returned to screaming into Mariel’s back. Glancing around at the remainder of the standing ogres, she could detect some faint blurriness to some of them, but the shadows were thick, and she now realized the Assassin was using those shadows to his advantage.

The Assassin. Mariel spun her head around wildly, looking for any sign of the zreshlan that was surely there. Breath escaped her and the world spun as she became unable to focus. Some of the ogres were illusion to make their numbers look larger than they were. But an illusion had to be created by a magician. The Assassin must be close.

Thought vanished from Mariel’s mind until all that remained was the fear. It sunk deep down, paralyzing her. Her body, tensed for fighting, began to slacken. Cara was alerted by this change and managed to grab Aracklin as Mariel released her sword.

“Mariel!” She screamed directly in the older girl’s ear.

The princess lurched back to the moment and remembered to breathe. James had heard Cara’s cry of alarm and he understood what it meant. He and Zeke shifted back to their snake-forms and slithered as fast as they could down the path where the illusion of the ogre-leader stood.

Ogres nearby fled from the path and Mariel realized the two serpentramels would leap just before they did.

“He’s an illusion!” She yelled.

The warning was late. James and Zeke heard it as they jumped toward the ogre. Again, the illusion became momentarily distorted. Zeke hit the ground still in his black mamba form, but James shifted as he fell.

He stood up and looked directly at Mariel. “Fly, Iyela! Fly!”

Iyela did fly. The powerful muscles of the unicorn coiled and then she launched into a canter. The canter quickly became something else altogether as the world flew by in a blur. Mariel flattened her body against the white body that moved beneath her and shouted back at Cara to do the same. The words were lost in the wind, but Cara did not need telling. Still clinging to Aracklin, she squished the air out of Mariel in her effort to stay on their mount.

When Iyela jerked suddenly to the side to avoid obstacles that only the unicorn could see at such a high speed, Mariel used all the experience she had to stay on. Cara, who had gone hoarse from screaming, nearly fell off every time, and only Mariel’s shift in balance and hold on Cara’s arm kept the younger girl from tumbling to her death.

Finally, Iyela slowed to a normal horse’s canter as she navigated the edge of a steep ravine. Mariel glanced down, but could see only darkness. They followed the ravine for a while at the slower pace, until it abruptly flattened. Mariel could see grass stalks shooting up from beneath the snow in a large plain to her left.

Iyela chose to stick to the edge of the forest where the shadows could protect them. A cloaked figure appeared out of a thick portion of the forest directly in front of the unicorn. Iyela shifted directions in a single stride. She ran onto the plain, but the sound of cracking ice quickly followed.

Mariel shoved Cara off the unicorn and leapt from Iyela’s back as the hidden ice opened up to swallow its prey. As the princess fell to the ice she noticed that the illusion of the grass had vanished.

Iyela screamed as her body hit the frigid water of the frozen lake. The ice cracks widened. Mariel pushed her aching body off the breaking part of the ice, but the moment she was on her feet she slipped and banged her head against the smooth surface of the lake. She could feel the warmth of blood at the back of her head, but she could also feel the cracks widening beneath her.

She lay flat against the surface of the ice to distribute her weight and pushed toward Cara. The copper-haired girl was unconscious, unable to move on her own. Mariel knelt and pushed as hard as she could. The unconscious Cara skidded across the smooth surface of the ice.

The ice continued to break beneath Mariel. She carefully pushed herself away from the gaping hole Iyela had made and on to thicker ice. The unicorn stood dripping and shivering on the bank of the lake near the beginning of the ravine. The ravine’s shadows had concealed the frozen river that lay trapped between its high walls.

Iyela did not look at Mariel as the girl lay flat on her belly and carefully maneuvered toward Cara, whom she had pushed toward the bank. The unicorn had eyes only for something else, the cloaked figure who had altered their path and forced them to run onto the smooth, frozen lake disguised as a snow covered plain.

Brown recluse spiders scuttled across the ice toward Mariel. She stopped moving, stopped breathing altogether. Her eyes locked on the figure that had yet to lower its hood. But she did not need to see his face to know who he was, not when the memories slammed into her so hard she felt as if she had hit the ice again.

The images flashed through her mind too fast for her to fully process them. They came in a disjointed order and cut off in odd places, only to have that place picked up again after several other confusing memories had flashed passed. The frozen lake, unconscious Cara, Iyela standing on the bank unable to help, and the night’s events that had led up to this moment vanished. In fact, the memory of everything that had occurred in almost twelve years vanished. She was six again.

A single sound broke the silence. It was a voice Mariel knew well. Princess Carolina’s song filled her daughter’s head, slowing the onslaught of memories until they centered on a single one:

The beautiful twenty-two-year-old exiled princess looked to the ceiling in exhalation as she finished Mariel’s favorite song about a princess being rescued by a daring prince.

“One more, Mother.”

The woman swooped down and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “Tomorrow.”

“Pleeeeeeease?” Mariel did her best to look pathetic.

Princess Carolina laughed.
“
My little actress! You are cunning like your father.”

“Another song?”

“Tomorrow,” the princess repeated as she stood and smiled down at her little girl. She swept out of the room without a backward glance, leaving a single candle flickering. The light from the candle had always kept the monsters at bay from Mariel’s dreams. But that night it did not.

“We meet again,” the Assassin said in a voice shot through with amusement, but tinged with annoyance. “You have escaped too many times before, but not tonight.”

Mariel lay in the prone position on the ice, paralyzed with fear.

“That is not a becoming way to die,” the Assassin observed. “My Angela did not die that way.”

Some part of Mariel wondered who Angela was. She wanted to ask, suddenly had a bursting desire to ask, but the curiosity was quickly squelched by fear.

“My Angela was beautiful. She was strong and she was brave.”

Mariel did not care who Angela was.

“
Your
ancestor murdered her.”

The Assassin grabbed the collar of Mariel’s dress and dragged her upright. He leaned down until his pale, striped face was even with hers and his bloodshot eyes stared straight into the depths of her dark green eyes.

“My Angela had blue eyes. Eyes like the sky on a cloudless day. Eyes like a crystal clear mountain lake. Eyes more beautiful than anything on this earth.”

Mariel’s natural curiosity and trained observation noticed his use of the possessive. Zreshlans rarely called something theirs, and if they did, it was never for something living.

“
Your ancestor
leeched those glorious eyes of color when he murdered my Angela.”

He held Mariel against his body. She was too numb to register the stench of carrion that clung to him.

“Your death will bring me almost to the end of my task.”

He stroked her cheek almost lovingly.

“Your death will be the sweetest, although it is not quite the last.”

Mariel hung limply in his arms, unable to move.

“I will kill the king next.”

It did not even cross Mariel’s mind to pull out the small knife hidden still hidden in her bodice or look for her sword, which had skittered across the ice. 

“And maybe the queen too because she helped him breed.”

The princess did not even try to fight. She did not even consciously register what he said.

“I could never have had children with my Angela.”

He sounded sorrowful. There was enough loss and longing in that voice that Mariel almost felt sorry for him, until the memories slammed into her again.

“Some of your ancestors have escaped me.”

He pressed his head against her hair and inhaled deeply.

“Not you though. I
will
kill you.”

He touched his fingertips to the back of her head and brought them away bloody. Raising his fingers to his face, he breathed in the scent of her fresh blood as though it were an iris in full bloom. He lifted a finger to his mouth and licked off the blood with his eyes closed. Slowly, to savor the taste, he did the same to each finger.

Mariel wanted to retch, and would have if the fear had not immobilized nearly every part of her, including her stomach. It was almost like she was in a dream in which her mind moved sluggishly and her body did not move at all. The now-remembered memories weighed her down. If the Brown-Spider-Man was not holding her up, she would be flat on her face on the ice.

Despite her fear, she could not tear her eyes away from this monster.

“It would have been so easy to kill you that first time I entered your room.”

He touched her chest.