The Princess Who Tamed Demons (18 page)

The bubble around me had temporarily widened,
and I saw fear on the faces of the men for the first time. Linn
still picked frantically between the wisps of grass like a quail
pecking for insects.

"What are you doing? Are you going to let one
simple woman make a disgrace out of all of you?" Fasima's enraged
voice sounded almost inhuman.

"You see she has power," one of the men
half-complained, half-shouted. "Our blows don't faze
her."

"Remember why you follow me," Fasima hissed.
"The secrets of my mother's line are alive and well in me. Must I
squander their power to do what you fools apparently cannot?"
Fasima drew a small pouch from her waist belt, sprinkling a fine
gray ash in four neat piles along her stone bench. The
root-carvings in the bench's four feet began to pulse and gradually
come alive. Something seemed to struggle inside the stonework like
an insect trying to break out of its chrysalis, but I had no time
to focus on the eerie transformation as Fasima barked new
commands.

"Tackle her and bind her." She broke the spell
of their indecision, and they all rushed me at once, Linn
completely forgotten.

I frantically whirled with my staff to spin
out of their grasp, but there were far too many hands groping and
pummeling. Fists punched me in the face, and more blows rained down
from all sides. I lost my grip on the staff as they ripped it
violently away. I had probably knocked several of the men
unconscious during their suicidal charge, but there were still
fifteen or more left to wrestle me to the ground.

They all began to hit me, and vision blurred
as I felt blood stream down my chin.

That's when it happened. Linn must have found
the damned amulet and finally put it on.

All of a sudden the men scrambled away from
me, screaming in terror. Fasima's eyes bulged and she began backing
away, her shrieks rising from one octave to the next as she turned
and fled in another direction. I sat up, panting as if I'd just
climbed up a mountain, my body battered and aching with a split lip
but no serious damage.

Linn was kneeling, the sickle-shaped amulet
finally hanging around his neck.

"These twin Amulets of Fear are handy," he
said.

"Yes. Assuming you don't drop one in the grass
and fumble about for it for half a century," I said, glaring. When
two people wore the matching amulets they instilled complete terror
in anyone who saw them, and only the two wearers were
immune.

"Now what?" I slowly got to my feet, offering
the librarian a hand. His bulbous eyes thinned out as he grinned.
All of a sudden that grin morphed into horror.

"Get down!"

I turned just in time to see four monstrous,
stone humanoid shapes where Fasima's bench had once been, all
barreling toward me with frightening speed. I didn't know what
ducking would accomplish, but I trusted Linn on a quasi-instinctual
level. I dove to the dirt, preparing to feel the crush of stone
hands and feet pummeling me into a pulp. Out of the corner of my
eye I saw Linn's eyes turn dark as if each socket had sprung its
own miniature abyss. His dark mumblings were like half-formed
nightmares translated into imperfect speech, and my eyes widened
for one tortuous heartbeat as I saw his brilliant librarian's robe
shed its gold calligraphy like a snake's skin. The flowing script
tore off the clothing, swirling and hurtling to intercept the
incoming stone golems like a forked tongue of lightning. I could
only gape as the golden words melded to form a wingless, serpentine
dragon which somersaulted and roared. Its whiskers twitched beside
bared fangs and a snout rippling with fury.

"Linn!" I wasn't sure why I shouted his name.
Perhaps part of me wondered whether the terrible power he'd
summoned had somehow required the ransoming of his very soul. The
dark pits of his eyes looked more demonic than human now, and yet I
found my focus pulled inevitably to the golden apparition as it
collided directly with the nearest charging sentinel. I gasped as
the dragon's fangs punctured the golem's head like spikes through a
paper lantern. The golem's torso flew apart like skewered glass,
and in the blink of a sparrow's eye the dragon-serpent had already
zigzagged to intercept the next attacker.

The second golem swatted at the liquid grace
of the apparition with its bulky hands, but it was far too slow.
The golden dragon's teeth gnawed through its face before pouncing
on a third victim, and then there was only the last golem to fear
as it launched itself at me. I rolled clear as the golem landed
with the sickening finality of collapsing ceiling. It leaned over
to snuff me out as Linn's dragon-serpent lunged through its neck,
talons screeching through stone like a sword slicing a mirror. I
cringed as I heard the golem's death knell, its fragments
spattering me from head to foot in dust and debris. I choked,
coughed, and crawled away from the earthen carnage, feeling as
soiled as if a flesh-and-blood attacker had bled out all over
me.

I turned onto my back, breathless while
staring at the ruins of what had once been an innocuous piece of
outdoor furniture. The golden apparition had vanished, and only one
flimsy piece of evidence assured me that I hadn't hallucinated
during the entire thing. I stared at Linn, his librarian's robe now
looking almost as drab and unremarkable as the rest of his
wardrobe, the beautiful calligraphy purged from the scarlet cloth.
I didn't know what to say.

Linn walked over and crouched beside me, a
fleeting glint of satisfaction in his chestnut eyes—eyes which had
thankfully returned to their normal color and
appearance.

"Najika, are you hurt?" His hands brushed a
layer of grit and dust off my face, critically scanning for any
signs of deeper wounds.

I managed to keep from stammering, but the awe
in my voice was still obvious.

"Physically? I think so. Mentally, not so
sure. What
are
you, a sorcerer?"

Linn shook his head with a rueful smile. "Far
weaker and less important, I'm afraid. I said the words which
awakened the spirit of the she-dragon, and the forbidding look was
all illusion. The spirit of the she-dragon can only be called once
and even then but briefly. Tethered only loosely to our world, she
cannot hurt a person, only creatures unnatural." I was more than
thankful that 'rampaging golems' fit that description. The prick of
curiosity had me about to open my mouth, to ask who or what this
spirit dragon might be, and how had somehow embroidered that
librarian's robe as a gateway for an otherworldly being.

Linn must have seen the question in my eyes,
and he did his best to head it off. There was a heavy sadness in
his face all of a sudden, in the slump of his shoulders, as if
haunting memories had become an ichor creeping into the marrow of
his bones. "The robe was a special gift from my wife. Her last gift
to me." He would say no more, but I knew that his wife must have
been an extraordinary person if she could sew magic into cloth as
effectively as a master blacksmith forging metal.

I would never meet her, and abruptly I felt
Linn's twinge of sadness leap the distance between us. I decided to
abandon the urge for more answers in the face of the librarian's
pain. There was no way he was going to give me all the answers
anyway, and truth be told, I was probably too tired and battered to
handle them at the moment. Instead I said just two words, and that
seemed effort enough. "What now?"

"Now we wait for your knights, see what hole
Fasima is cowering in, then take her back with us to face the Great
Amir's justice."

I put a hand to the gash in my lip, grunting
agreement at Linn's suggestion. Sticking to the original plan was
more than peachy in my book. This had been a long, trying case. But
I had at last discovered who had
really
tried to have me
killed at the palace. The person truly responsible for the wound
that would never go away. The knowledge that I would never bear a
child intruded painfully into my thoughts, and I shook it off
angrily like a horse bucking its rider. I marched away from
Fasima's house, from everything.

"Najika, where are you going?" Linn hurried
after me.

"I would like to be alone for a
while."

We had found Fasima and exposed her for what
she was, but that hadn't erased the past. It never
would.

~***~

Finally Sir Brel and his men arrived. We let
them do the dirty work, rounding up the terrified Fasima and anyone
loyal to her. The amulets' effects took a long time to wear off. I
didn't have the energy to help them, stewing in the juices which
were my mixed emotions. Wandering aimlessly sounded better than
sitting and moping, so I rubbed my hands over my face, took a deep
breath, and surged back to my feet. I began hiking, not really
mindful of where I was going. Linn still wore his amulet, but I had
taken mine off. In theory if I ran into trouble I could simply put
it back on…or so we assumed. We hadn't exactly tested whether the
amulets needed to be within a certain distance to work properly.
Right now I was too weary to give it much thought.

I walked up over a rise at the end of a field
and found myself looking into a little gully. There was a stream
gurgling over a string of rocks. Colorful butterflies ranging from
mauve to bright pink to red-speckled black fluttered through the
meadow on either side. A girl maybe six or seven years of age was
trying to cross the flowing stream, and the boy could not have been
much more than a year older. Both children were adorable, their
features angular like most people in the village, and their skin
was a darker shade than most of the Tajmari.

The boy was coaxing the girl
across.

"You can do it, Mhirra. Come. I won't let you
fall." He had crossed first, yet now he was retracing his steps,
reaching out so that Mhirra, her legs wobbling, could reach out to
snag his hand.

He towed her across the stream, tiptoeing from
one rock to the next until they both stood safely on the other
side.

The little girl raised her arms in triumph.
"We did it, Ankhar. We crossed the River of Doom!"

I wasn't sure what game they were playing.
Like children often do, their imaginations were turning the mundane
places around them into a fascinating otherworld. Before I knew
what I was doing, I was taking big strides down the slope to the
stream to meet them. I stopped near the gurgling ribbon of water
when they looked at me with—was that uncertainty? No, it was
outright fear.

"Were we gone too long? No, oh please,
please
tell Mother I'm sorry. Please, tell her it was my
fault. If you don't, she'll beat Mhirra too." I peered closer,
seeing the telltale mark of a bruise on one of Mhirra's smooth
cheeks. My heart constricted and my right hand clenched.

"My name is Najika. No one's going to beat
you. I've come to…to talk to you about your mother." This was what
they called 'winging it.' Fasima's children might as well know the
truth, and I would break it to them as gently as I could. A sudden
thought whispered in my head. It seemed a little crazy, but no
crazier than taking on more than thirty men in armed combat. That
had turned out not
too
badly, so this might be worth a
try.

I leapt across the stones of the stream, then
knelt in front of the two children. They looked at me warily, as if
I could equally be friend or foe.

"Your mom is very sick, and I'm afraid she has
done some bad things to some innocent people."

"What's 'innocent' mean?" Mhirra wanted to
know.

"Innocent means people like you and your
brother, Mhirra." I paused, unsure how to explain this. "You'll
need someone to look after you while your mom is away. She might be
away for a very long time."
Yeah—like, forever
.

Mhirra slipped her hand into her big
brother's, and I noticed that Ankhar didn't seem terribly grieved
about his mother not coming back. "So who do we belong to now?" he
said.

I traced one hand along Mhirra's cheek, the
other along Ankhar's. When they stood there looking at me and
didn't flinch or pull away, I took that as a really good
sign.

"Why don't you stay with me for a while? I
would really like to show you the castle where I live. Do you like
castles?"

Both children's faces came alive, and Mhirra
squealed. "Yes, yes. A castle. A real, big, real-life castle! Like
the one in Tajma? Is that the one you live in?"

"Umm, for now. I can show you that one too. I
actually meant Castle Crag near my home in the Black
Kingdom."

"Two castles?!" Now it was the boy's turn to
sound like I'd just given him the fanciest toy in the whole world.
"Are you serious?"

I raised my right hand in the position of a
solemn oath. "Never have I been more serious in my whole life.
Think of me as a big sister. I'll look after you and I won't let
anyone hurt you."

The two children exchanged hopeful glances,
and when they transferred that hopefulness back to me it nearly
broke my heart. A tear threatened in one eye, and I swiped it
away.

"Come on, guys. Take my hands. How does the
idea of food sound to you? I think I have oranges and teacakes in
my pack, maybe even a few spiced apples."