The Assassin Princess (The Legacy Novels Book 1) (24 page)

“Don’t you remember?”

“You’re trying to trick me, Father,” Adam said, but his face was contorted into a fearful grin. He was shaking, green flames rippling from him. His sword was still sheathed.

They hadn’t yet been noticed.

“I think you’re deluded,” his father said. “Then again, that’s not exactly news is it? Son, look around you and remember.”

The man came forward and turned Adam round by the shoulders to face the cluster of trees, but Adam’s eyes skipped over them and landed on Hero and his burning blade of purple flame.

“You!”

Florence stepped beside Hero as Adam ran at them, and the two touched their blades together. The blast of white and purple produced a rainbow of power that shot through Adam’s chest. He flipped backward and landed on his back.

Hero wasted no time and moved forward, but Adam was already on his feet, turning on the spot, a whip of green flames flying from his palms. The flames clawed at Hero and Florence and lifted them up, throwing them into trees. Hero landed face first on the forest floor, but when he arose, he saw that Florence was already in battle, white and green sparks shooting across the clearing. He stood and called on the borrowed power, pushing himself into the fray, charging at Adam with his blade.

He swung, and Adam dodged, he spun around and their blades met with a flash of colour.

“You can’t defeat me, silly man,” Adam screeched. “I am forever.” His black boot kicked out and lowered Hero to his knees as Florence took his place. Adam brought the mist up to blind and bind her, but her white fire still found him and threw him back against the tree, his back to the hollow. He pushed forward from the trunk and launched at Hero, his blade raised with a cry of hatred between sharpened teeth.

The green sword sliced through the air to Hero’s neck, but another power threw Adam aside as Graeme stepped forward from the sidelines, his hands raised with purple-lit palms. Adam fell, grabbing Hero as he did, bringing him down with him. With one hard push, Adam sent Hero off-balance and toward the hollow of the tree.

“No, Hero!” Florence called, but it was too late. Flames engulfed him as he entered, and was then gone.

*

Adam felt reality slip as Hero burned in the hollow. The flames licked and extinguished leaving nothing but silence and darkness. Only moments ago, it seemed, he’d run fast to escape the firestorm that his protégé had sent after him, and only too late had his eyes fallen upon his father. He was thrown into the trees as it hit, the purple blast sending them both into a land where the only light was a misted blue, and the black trees surrounded them like unearthly sentinels from another realm. They watched him and waited for him, and his immortal soul screamed. He’d run as the searching light found him, a long ago forgotten threat, a broken memory wrapped in a solitary darkness that came together at last in his mind. His father and the girl were on pause as he started to remember everything—the madness between the trunks, how he couldn’t get away, how he’d fallen into the dark path with his father the first time, all those years past, and the light had shorn away as if with a blade. The trees behind were impassable darkness, and in front, a lonely place where they fought an endless fight of hatred and jealousy. He’d screamed for his father to relinquish the sceptre. “Give it to me, old man, I am lord now, I am lord.” How long had it been? Time meant nothing and the two fought for hours or weeks or years, rolling and jumping, skidding and throwing, their power shields and weapons, purple and green sparks.

At some point he’d grabbed the horn and yanked it from the old man’s hand, yet his father had been surprisingly strong and resilient. He took chase, netting him with a mesh of purple flame, dragging him back between the trunks, his body slamming against each in turn. How long had he been pulled in like a fish from the sea? How long had it taken? There’d been no way to tell.

Sometime later they’d found themselves within a clearing, a cluster of six hollowed trees before them—and that’s when they’d come, and father and son had run from the fiery spheres together, run forever from light that stretched to eternity and back, seeking them, herding them; run forever, dodging trunks and jumping roots, falling into gullies and losing direction, losing sense. A girl had appeared and he threw her aside; but then his father was no longer with him and Adam was lost. The beings had gone, though they were still there—in his head if nowhere else—chanting:
One must go
. Oh, the chant!
One must go
. That horrific chant! It’d rung in his head like an infinite bell. The trees were black gates he couldn’t pass, the branches dead insipid hatred made flesh from wood. At what point had he known his mind was gone? The wood groaned around him a deep voice, howling a restless whimper of silent noise. Shadows began to move to follow him, walk with him and talk to him of death and morbid things; men with no skin offered him rides on horses that weren’t there. A fire of black burned him to a dance, and for how many hours did he do that dance, singing loudly into the trees? He’d screamed and yelled, cried and cheered, laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed—

When he’d found the sceptre of crystal in his hands still, he’d screamed at it, for he’d been carrying it the whole time. He hadn’t noticed. He looked at it for decades, or had it been only minutes? Time had been funny, and with it he’d scratched a tear into a tree, laughing and screaming as the marks became light—so long since he’d seen light—and he grasped the edges and tore them, tore them with his teeth, with his nails, chewing his way through the bark and into the light and then—

He’d found himself upon the cliffs of Noxumbra, overlooking the sea, and his memory had faded; all that remained was the tattered mind held together with green and jealous hatred for those he wanted to destroy.

He remembered now, and screamed, turning in time to see his father’s move to strike.

“You remember now, do you?” his father taunted. “You remember what you really are?” His hands were glowing balls of power.

Adam threw his arms out and his body burst into green flame that lit a pyre around him. The flames shot from him, his scream already eternal; his father was no match. He was thrown far across the clearing to the very edge, bound tight in a black shroud, twisted by the entirety of Adam’s power, sealed tight and forever entombed.

“Die!” Adam screamed. “Die! Die!”

The girl moved toward him, her sword slicing through the flames to pierce his side. He turned on her and threw her back, reaching for his sword—

The sword was gone.

A singing of metal sounded from behind him and from the trees stepped an old woman, creased and wrinkled. His mother. In her hand was his sword of power.

“Hello, Son,” she said, her eyes reflecting his green flame. “I think you dropped something.”

Adam laughed. He turned on the spot and laughed at everything he saw. A Guard at the edge of the clearing dragged his father between black trunks; the powerful girl stood at his side, her sword flamed, his mother at her flank, his own sword pointed in threat.

“You all think you’re so smart, huh? I am here in the
mad
place, expelled from my lands, expelled from sanity.” There was movement in the dark, a shadow fast approaching. “You think me weak? Oh, how wrong you are.” He held his arms up, the green flames flickering to black. “When I left here I left without a mind to speak of—but you can never really leave.”

From the shadows stepped a man of black fire and white skin, a man whose fire joined with Adam’s. He smiled his sharp teeth, and the black flames leapt forward.

*

Daniel watched the woman as she watched him, and the rain fell heavy upon the empty street between them. He didn’t know why he stood in only a tee-shirt and jeans, soaked to the bone and shivering with cold, or why she stood within a well-lit doorway beneath a canopy, dressed and dry in a simple white gown. He knew only his name, and that she was beckoning him toward her.

His shoes squelched with each step as he walked across the deserted road and up the short path. He looked up at her, her profile a golden map of delicate beauty lit by the outside light, a glimmer of a smile.

A castle, a sword, a girl.

She held out her hand and Daniel took it.

“Hello, Hero,” she said, and pulled him forward, up onto the step and into the house. “Come in, out of the rain.”

The door swung shut behind him.

“Hero?” he asked, though even the sound of it brought a feeling of
home
back to him, a safe harbour to run to when all else was out at sea. Then the feeling was gone and it was only a word.

“It’s your name,” she said, leading him down a hallway and into a warm room with a sofa and chairs, an empty TV screen, coffee table and bookcases. He was left there for a moment as the woman vanished, reappearing with a towel. He took it and wiped his face and hair. She offered him a chair, and he sat. She sat opposite.

“My name is Daniel.”

“It is here, yes,” she said, her eyes so familiar, sparkling under the low light of the lamp. “My name is Charlotte Rose here. In Legacy, I have been, and in some ways, always will be, Grace Rose.”

Daniel blinked. Images flashed in his mind of things that made little sense, yet fit loosely together like a jigsaw incomplete. He saw black trees, blue mist. He saw a girl with brown hair, brown eyes.

“Grace? Grace—and I am the hero?”

“Yes,” she said, “it will take a few minutes, but it will all come back, and soon, so listen to me now. You were in the Mortrus Lands, and you went through a portal. That led you here, to this layer.”

Daniel watched lightning flicker at the edge of the curtain. It changed the room, for but a second, into an old movie theatre where the projector hid behind the window, bringing his life into a crude focus of warm and shaded lamplight, growing shadows dark and deep across the plush carpet. All was quiet except for the ticking of a clock, the rain against the windows, a far thunder, perhaps the rolls of film churning and churning.

“Ami,” Daniel sighed. “We needed to save her.” But that was all he could bring. He looked to the walls as if for inspiration and saw landscapes of hills, painted scenes of familiarity. Another frame held a watercolour of a forest, a horse of white strolling from between the trees. “Not a horse—a unicorn,” he whispered, tracing the spiral with his eyes as it faded into the washed green of the meadow.

“Yes,” the woman said, “that’s it, take your time.” She took his hand and it felt familiar and welcome. “You need to save Ami, and I need to tell you how things happen so that you may play your part when you return.”

“Return?” Daniel was struggling. The projection was fading and he held to the towel, stroking it across the back of his neck. His joints ached. How long had he been standing in the rain? Where had he come from? He rubbed his face expecting the familiar stubble, and finding instead someone else’s clean shaven face.

“All that I told you about myself was true, but I was an old, old woman, older than I should ever have been. By returning to the Mortrus Lands I completed a circle and surrendered myself to a fate that had begun long ago when the Sentries built the tunnels, the portals through the layers.”

The Sentries. His memory sparked with white flares of light, spheres and ghostly apparitions that filled him with fear.

“I shall enter those portals, Hero, as I have already done so. I found myself lost, as you have found yourself, only I stood at the edge of a train station platform. There a young man approached me, and I was soon to realise that the man was Graeme, my lord and husband from Legacy. From his perspective, he had just left Legacy and entered the Mortrus Lands with Adam. He was led by the shadow of my younger self to the ruins, and Adam was expelled to the woods, forever to roam with no mind or way out. Graeme was transformed, sent back through the layers as other lords have been, back to the layer from whence he came; only this time, the prophecy of
one must go
was not fulfilled, and no heir was sent back. It was not her time.”

Daniel followed, though the memories were fragmented still. It was all making a strange kind of sense, as if the scenes were being projected out of sequence—but it didn’t matter, because he’d seen this one before… “So, you and Graeme met after you had both gone through the portals, even though you left later, and he earlier?”

“Yes, as the portals can shift between the layers in space, and time.” She smiled, her lips pouting slightly as she did. “I know this is a lot to take in, but when your memory is back, you will remember all that I say here too, even if you don’t understand it right away.” She squeezed his hand and continued. “Years later we had children, though we
knew
that Ami, the third child, was to be the heir to Legacy. I remember everything I have ever seen and witnessed in my extraordinarily long life, and so I was able to instruct Graeme on what was to happen, so that he would be ready for when the time came. I have already lived through everything that has yet to take place for you, and for me it was a long, long time ago. You need to understand that we raised Ami to be her own person, one who will choose her own fate, will defy Legacy and any of the trappings she may face. She is the first female heir and she doesn’t have to rule the land the way lords have before her. Adam has tried to take her away and make her his own, but she is much more than a mere puppet that can be manipulated—no, we raised Ami to use the gifts she possesses to fulfil her potential. She is creative and resourceful, full of life and love. She can be corrupted on the outside, but her heart will always remain true—and she must know this, recognise it—for the only thing that tethers her to another’s will
is her own self-worth
.”