Royal Outlaw: (Royal Outlaw, Book 1) (43 page)

Mariel cowered like she had as a child, and shook her head. Then she realized that this was what she needed to do to put the memory behind her, to keep it from hurting her. Slowly, and with a voice that broke, she began to tell what happened after her mother put her to bed for the last time.

“He made my nurse dress me in my finest clothes, he said he wanted to watch me die like the corrupted royal that I was.”

She stopped there, unwilling to proceed. The memory ended there . . . almost.

“Then what happened?” Cara prompted quietly, as though speaking to a child. Maybe she was speaking to a child. Mariel felt like she was six again, like she was reliving the experience.

She was quiet for a long time and, to her surprise, Narel did not break the silence. Finally, Mariel said, “He ordered one of his men to take my nurse to one of the cages and he took me to the cellar.”

“We shall go to the cellar,” Narel stated, matter-of-factly.

Mariel shook her head vehemently, but then she nodded slowly and uncertainly. The strange release and calmness she felt after talking about the last memory made her willing to face the almost overwhelming fear of the next one.

Once again, the immortal led the way, but Mariel allowed herself to look around and remember the fateful march along these same halls and down the stairs that the striped monster had taken her down nearly twelve years before. Hordes of brown-recluse spiders had scuttled with them that night, but today she saw only three spiders, none of which meant her any harm.

Words poured from her mouth the entire walk, words that gave her freedom from each step of the memory.

They walked through the decrepit kitchen and down the stairs to the open cellar door. It was here that Mariel collapsed in a fit of horror and memory. The memories here were plural and long, but when she recovered, she started to speak, started to tell them what had happened.

The Brown-Spider-Man had thrown her in here. Her mother was already there, dressed in her best like her daughter and looking as frightened. Time became immeasurable here, her youth had made her unable to count and keep track of the days. Narel knew though. With her tail, she brushed away a section of the cellar wall, revealing etch marks. They represented days.

Cara gasped when she saw them, but Mariel stared at them numbly and then counted them again. Twenty days. Nearly three weeks. Mariel and her mother had lived in this cellar for three weeks, but they did not stay there the entire time. This next part was one of the hard parts.

“He would order his men to haul Mother and me out of the cellar. I don’t know if it was every day, but it was a lot. They kept our servants in cages in the courtyard. He forced us to watch him or his men brutally kill our servants and guards one by one. Whipping, beating, torture, stabbing . . .” Mariel took a sobbing breath. “Biting. They all died. I watched them all die! And I couldn’t stop it! I couldn’t even turn away!”

Sitting on the floor with her arms wound around her curled legs, she rocked back and forth. They had died. She could not even name all of them because she had been too arrogant of a child. As she had watched them die she regretted not knowing them all and not allowing herself to realize that she was just like them because they were human and so was she. She was not special just because royal blood ran in her veins.

With each successive killing, Mariel had begun to lose hope of rescue. She knew that her papa would come, he would visit and she hoped he would stop the Brown-Spider-Man. When her nursemaid was killed, she stopped that particular prayer. If Papa came, he would be killed like all the others. Who was to rescue them? No one. Mariel thought bitterly now. No one came to rescue them because no one knew what was happening.

The king and queen would not come to her rescue. It was a sobering fact that struck her just as painfully at the age of eighteen as it had when she was six. As a child living at Remel, she had always lived in the delusion that her grandparents loved her and would come for her.

Princess Carolina and Darren had long tried to convince their daughter that her grandparents would never come for her, and that she should not want them to come. As she had watched one of the last servants die, and no rescue came, something snapped inside of her. Anger had flared into existence in her small breast that was unlike anything she had ever known. She had realized the truth, understood the word “exile” that she had heard muttered so often by the servants. Her grandparents would not come, they would never come . . . until eleven years later when they needed her.

The anger had made her wish that her grandparents would come to Remel more than she ever had in her short life. She did not want them to come so that they would rescue her and her mother. She had no longer wanted their rescue. She wanted them to come so that the Brown-Spider-Man would kill them too.

Mariel gasped for breath between sobs as Cara held her close and rocked her. Was the hatred of her grandparents entirely justified? She had been a part of the Resistance for years, one of its most valuable assets, but had she fought to overthrow the king and queen because of their mistreatment and cruelty toward their people, or was Lizzie right, had Mariel been fighting against them for her own personal revenge?

The princess felt weak. She stopped rocking, stopped sobbing, and became still. The answer to the question she asked was unknown to her, and she could not face that question, not today. It was too new and too terrifying. Someday, she would have to answer that question, but right now she needed to finish facing her memories.

“They left the bodies in the cages in the courtyard and let the birds pick at the flesh. The courtyard began to smell just like the Brown-Spider-Man. I don’t know how the men who worked for him could bear the smell, but they did, and eventually I stopped throwing up every time I smelled it.”

“How did you escape?” Cara blurted out unexpectedly.

“Mother saved me.” Even though the memory was not complete, she knew in every fiber of her being that her mother had saved her.

“All of the servants and guards had been killed, but we were still alive. We both knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long. One night, it must have been the night of the twentieth day.” She indicated the marks on the wall. “Mother hugged me tight and I felt her tears. She asked me if I could be brave. I told her that I would do anything. And by that time, I would. She asked if I remembered Papa teaching me how to pick locks and I said yes. We were here, in the cellar. She found me what I needed and apologized that she couldn’t do it herself.

“I was scared. I was so terrified my hands shook. It wasn’t like the games I played with Papa. Picking this lock didn’t mean a sweet for me as a treat if I succeeded; it would mean Mother’s life and mine. After a long time, I got it to work. She stole knives from the kitchen. She gave me a great big kitchen knife.”

Mariel paused in her story and shuddered. It was with this knife that her mother had given her that she had first killed. The man had tried to haul her off the horse in the courtyard, but she had been scared and confused and she had stabbed him. She could still feel his warm blood on her hands.

The memories of everything that had occurred after her first kill flooded back. They came back at a manageable pace, and most of them were the same. The horse had thrown her not long after leaving Remel. After that, she traveled on foot and was always on the move, putting what Darren had taught her to the test. Before the Assassin came, it had been a part of games, but as she had run south, the knowledge saved her life. She remembered begging for help, and no one helping, except a group of guards who had cruelly tricked her.

All the running had been in vain, the Brown-Spider-Man had caught up to her frequently, but she had always escaped. In a high desert he caught her again, and that time he had had no intention of letting the chase continue. She had run, stumbled, and fallen into a river. That river took her into the heart of Ambras Añue and into the hearts of the zreshlans.

Her memories did not stop there. They skipped forward to the temple at the convent in August. She remembered the Brown-Spider-Man’s caresses and his forms of torture. She remembered admitting fear and begging for James to save her. Narel, in the form of the vixen, had rescued her then.

Cara had saved her on the frozen lake the other night. She now remembered everything that had happened and the fear and memories that had paralyzed her. Cara had had the strength to do what Mariel did not. She had caught the Assassin unaware and drove Aracklin through him.

Mariel subconsciously touched the hilt of the sword at her waist.

All of her forgotten memories had returned to her. All except one. It was a gap of no more than fifteen minutes, but it was the most important memory. This memory alone was what had forced her to forget it all. She needed to remember it now.

She stood with care, lightheaded after so much crying. Her tears were not done yet though.

“We need to go to the courtyard.”

Without saying a word, the goddess and the copper-haired girl followed Mariel out of the cellar and through the kitchen to the courtyard. The moment Mariel saw the many broken and missing grey stones of the courtyard she fainted.

* * *

A warm feeling woke Mariel, but the moment she opened her eyes she started screaming. The memory flooded her. She struggled to stop up the dam, but it was too late, it could not be stopped. She was left without air and the scream cut off abruptly. She moaned loudly as though under physical torture. Physical torture would have been preferable to the emotional torture caused by the shockingly vivid memory.

Pain shot up her arm as a broken stone cut open her elbow. The pain was real, but not real enough. The memory dragged her down again, down into grief, into madness. Unlike the other madness she had experienced in the dream-filled early nights with the zreshlans and the fear of facing her memories, this madness was a silent one. It was a madness too personal to share with anyone else.

She wanted to die to escape the fear and grief. Death was an exit. Aracklin rested securely in its scabbard that was twisted underneath her. How easy it would be to draw the sword from its sheath and drive it through her heart. She wanted that. To end the pain that was too great to bear. So easy. Warm blood from her injured elbow began to dampen the sleeve of her dress. She felt it. Blood was life. This triggered something inside Mariel. The desire to live was fierce inside of her and it rose up. It fought the madness.  

Freedom was within her grasp. A freedom that not only meant release from pain, but also release from the imprisonment of being a forced princess by the grandparents she hated. Suicide was the wild card, the power she still held to ruin everyone’s plans.

Surely her suicide would not please the Assassin, not after Cara had nearly killed him and Mariel had escaped him too many times. He would insist on killing her himself. He would be angry if she took that privilege away from him. Her grandparents would be furious that she found a way to escape them, and they would be left without an heir. And her papa . . .

Mariel’s mind snapped out of the madness and back into the world of logic. She gripped the hilt of Aracklin as though it was the only thing that would ground her. Cara clung to her, while Iyela, who had been in the courtyard the entire time, rested her long face against her friend.

If Mariel killed herself, Dreyfuss would not hesitate to kill her papa. She had known that since the moment Dreyfuss had blackmailed her into becoming princess. There was no way out, no wild card. Being princess was her fate and she had accepted that, but here in this courtyard where she had watched her mother die, she had forgotten that.

“There were men in the stable when we entered,” Mariel spoke abruptly, her voice raspy from screaming and crying. “They attacked us. Mother fought back. One grabbed me and Mother struck at him and missed. Her knife wounded me in the right shoulder. She was horrified by what she had done and screamed. That scream was the reason she died. She killed the man, threw a bridle on one of the horses, and led the horse and me out into the courtyard. The Assassin’s men had been alerted to our escape attempt by her scream.

“Mother had to drop her weapons to lift me onto the horse. Someone attacked her, they stabbed her and one of the men’s knives struck me just barely on the forehead, ripping out some of my hair. Mother didn’t drop me even though she was wounded. She pushed me up onto the horse.

“She never had the chance to try to mount behind me. They pulled her away from me. One of the men tried to pull me off the horse. He’s the one I killed, but I didn’t know what I was doing. As he fell, he spooked the horse and the horse bolted.

“Mother yelled, ‘Run, Mariel! Run!’ before a scream of agony disrupted her last words. As the horse ran toward the gate, I looked back. I shouldn’t have looked back! The men were stabbing her, beating her, and then they parted as the Brown-Spider-Man approached. He bent down and bit into her neck. Her screams stopped suddenly and she was dead, and I was alive.”

Mariel started crying again, but these were not the sobs that had wracked her body earlier, it was the soft, gentle crying of release, not pain or fear. She was grieving for the loss of her mother, truly grieving, which she had never been able to do. Suppression of her memories had caused the suppression of her grief.

And she did not face her grief alone. Cara and Iyela provided comfort in their touch and in their silence.