Sophia, Princess Among Beasts Page 18

  She held up her hand. “No, no—that’s not right. The second words were a lie. The first were ‘I love you,’ and words more true were never spoken, in this world or in heaven. I breathed them right into your heart.”

  “Just let me stay here,” I pleaded.

  “You are needed at home, my darling,” my mother said. She squeezed my fingers and her expression changed. Her voice became low and urgent. “Listen to me, Sophia. Ares and his men march to destroy Bandon Castle.”

  I stood so quickly I knocked over the chair, dumping the perfect roses onto the floor. “But we defeated him. He fled in the middle of the night!”

  “He rides toward Bandon even now.” My mother stood, too, and now she took my face in her hands. “You are no longer just a princess. You are the queen now, Sophia. Your people depend on you. You must go now. Go home.”

  “Come with me,” I begged again. “If I can go back, why can’t you?”

  Slowly, sadly, she shook her head. “The journey is yours to make alone.”

  Though I didn’t want to believe her, I somehow knew that she spoke the truth. And so I dragged myself from her arms and climbed once again into the dark carriage. Grief tore at my heart. The whip cracked, and the horses began to run, and the light from her windows grew smaller and smaller. And then it was gone.

  CHAPTER 64

  Exhausted as I was, sleep was impossible. Relentless jolts from the racing carriage tossed me up and down like a sack of grain. I held on to the windowsill as best I could, trying to keep my head from smashing into the walls.

  Eventually the forest thinned. We careened through scrubby brush, then burst onto a stubbled meadow scattered with giant slabs of black stone. As dawn slowly broke, clouds billowed in the east, and a sprinkling of stars glittered overhead.

  Our path led us into barren gray foothills. As we climbed, the track grew narrower and steeper, but somehow the strength of the horses never flagged. Their hooves pounded, the carriage shook and rattled, and still we rose. The air grew thin and cold, and the gusting wind felt like fingers plucking at my hair, my dress.

  Terrible noises began to spill from the ogres’ hideous mouths. I covered my ears as I tried to lean out to see what troubled them. It took me a moment to realize that they were singing. But the song had no words I knew. Their language was dark, primordial—the sound of ancient boulders grinding together.

  The path suddenly leveled and widened, and now we galloped across a rocky plateau. The horses’ hooves sparked each time they struck down, and the ogres began howling even louder. Our speed increased. And up ahead, I saw it: the yawning blackness of empty air. The trolls shouted and loosed the reins, and the horses careened straight toward it.

  Then one of the wheels struck a rock and the door flew open, crashing against the side of the carriage. Below me, the ground rushed by in a dizzying blur. I held on as best I could as we raced toward the edge of the precipice.

  I had made a plunge like this before, but fear gripped me nevertheless. I closed my eyes as the edge grew nearer and nearer. I was frozen—

  And we drove off the cliff.

  I choked back a scream of terror. The trolls no longer sang. We hung suspended in the night, silence all around us. And then, like a silk blanket, a great calm settled over me.

  We began to rise, as if the clouds were stairs we could climb. We pressed through a veil of mist, through wisps of pulsing, flickering colors. The sky was a jewel box of black velvet. The air grew warm and soft as summer.

  I heard notes ringing high and clear, like an infinite number of tiny brass bells: the sound of the heavens singing. I knew that the answers to all my questions floated there in the sky, and all I had to do was reach out and touch them. Any minute, I would know if I’d ever see my mother again. In another breath I’d know what happened to Raphael.

  I leaned out the window. Above me, the stars; below me, the dark, spinning world. The beauty took my breath away.

  And then, all of a sudden, there was nothing.

  The darkness was deeper than the blindness of the cave. The carriage was gone, I was set adrift, and I could feel myself coming apart. Being… unmade. I had no sight, and no mouth to cry out. I could feel no limbs. I tried to assemble what I felt were the pieces of myself, but I was floating away like dust. Unfurling, evaporating, vanishing into eternal nothingness.

  Maybe this, finally, was death.

  CHAPTER 65

  I awoke with a heaving gasp. My eyes snapped open to light—bright, yellow sunlight—but everything was blurry and jumbled. Shapes wavered, and colors smeared and bled into one another.

  “She’s awake,” a woman whispered.

  Was she talking about me? I blinked rapidly and the fog began to clear from my vision. I saw a stained glass window, a tapestry of blue gentians, and the gleaming curve of an old, all-too-familiar harp.

  A figure moved toward me. Was that… Odo? Jeanette? Was I really home?

  I struggled to sit up as Jeanette hurried toward me, tears streaming down her face. “You’ve come back to us,” she whispered.

  “We thought we had lost you,” Odo said, sinking to his knees. “Sacheverell said there was nothing more he could do, but Jeanette never once left your side.”

  “My mother was right,” I said, my voice full of wonder. “She said I could come back!”

  Jeanette frowned and turned to Odo. Their expressions, so briefly full of joy, were now haunted by worry. “Perhaps the fever is not gone,” she said to him.

  “I feel fine,” I insisted, but even as I said it, I began to grow confused. If Jeanette had never left my side, did that mean I had never left this bed?

  That was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  Jeanette turned back to me. “Your Highness, you should rest—don’t speak. Here, let me fix your pillows.” She tried to reach behind me but I grabbed her wrist.

  “It’s all true,” I said. “It happened, I’m sure of it. I felt myself die. I was taken to a black castle. There were beasts, just like the ones I read about in my book. And I saw my own mother, Jeanette. She was so beautiful, just like you said.” I shook my head and felt tears sting the corner of my eyes. “But she told me that I had to come back. She said that Ares was coming to attack us.”

  Jeanette went pale and opened her mouth to speak, but just then Adelie came running in, kicking up the rushes. They had been strewn with dried lavender, and the smell of summer bloomed in the air. Adelie dropped low in a curtsy. “Your Highness,” she said, “I’m so glad to see that you are better.” Worriedly, she glanced over at Odo to see if he was watching her. “They won’t kill us all, will they, Your Highness?” She bit her lip and waited for me to comfort her, the way I once had.

  “They won’t,” I said, trying to sound certain, but already Jeanette was pulling her quickly from the room.

  I turned to Odo. “You must tell me where we stand,” I said. I looked down at my arms, unmarred by blisters. “And what of the Seep? Did Sacheverell find a cure? Does little Fina live?”

  His eyes were troubled. “He did, Your Highness, and she does, and that is our lone good news. But if you will know what we face, you must come with me. Can you walk?”

  I’d barely even managed to sit up all the way, but I said, “I think so. Why?”

  He cleared his throat, and his glance flickered away from me.

  “I know this habit of yours,” I said. “It means that you don’t want to tell me something, but you know that you must. Odo, tell me. I’m not a child. I am your queen.”

  “You are needed on the battlements,” he answered curtly. “Ares’s army masses on the plains east of Bandon. And we must meet them there in battle.”

  I nodded as I struggled out of bed. I didn’t try to tell him that I had already fought Ares once. I didn’t think he would believe me, and perhaps with good reason. I didn’t understand it myself. But it hardly mattered now: my duty was to rule my kingdom. My army.

  At least in this world, Ares’s soldiers would be me
re men, I told myself.

  My legs were weak, unused to their own weight, and I leaned on my hated old harp to keep from falling over. Odo gently cupped my shoulder—steadying me without reassuring me.

  There could be no reassurance with such an enemy outside the gates.

  It is not over.

  I gathered myself for a moment, and then I looked up at my father’s knight with resolve. “I will need my sword,” I said. Then I turned to Jeanette. “And I should not fight in my nightdress.”

  Odo bowed, handing the blade to me, and then went to wait in the hall. Without any armor of my own—my father would have been furious had I asked for it—I dressed in a soldier’s garb of a rough tunic and leggings, with the sword girded at my waist. I straightened my shoulders and felt blood returning to my limbs in slow, prickling waves. I clenched my fists until they throbbed. Soon I would need all the courage I’d ever possessed and more. I had been a princess, a beast, and a captive. And now I must be a warrior queen.

  I went into the hall and smiled grimly at Odo. Together we turned to go.

  CHAPTER 66

  But my thoughts were of Raphael, not Ares, as Odo and I climbed to the ramparts. If the Seep hadn’t actually killed me, it meant that he might still be alive, too. Perhaps he was cured, and he needed rescue from Gattis’s foul underground kingdom. I felt my pulse quicken with hope. If Raphael had saved me in that other world, then maybe I could save him now.

  Odo put his hand on my shoulder, bringing my attention back to the present. He’d stopped at a stone embrasure along the battlement, and now he gestured for me to look out. What I saw took my breath away.

  Ares’s army, thousands strong, amassed on the plains beyond Bandon Castle. It was as if a city had sprung up where there had been only hillocks and meadow grass: a city of tents, shouting soldiers, and fluttering flags the color of dried blood. Bonfires burned throughout the camp, sending black smoke curling into the sky.

  Every part of me flared with mortal fear.

  What sort of world was this, where a thousand mercenaries marched on a lone castle? We had so little compared to Ares. Ours was a fiefdom of fields and hills, a twisting river, a village of a few hundred souls. What did he hope to gain?

  Beside me Odo stood grim and still.

  “Can our marksmen reach them?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “They are out of arrow range.”

  Toward the camp’s edge, I saw a knot of men cooking meat over a fire while two giant carrion birds wheeled and shrieked above them. As I listened, the birds’ piercing cries seemed to turn into words. “Blood!” I heard them shrieking. “Flesh!”

  I gripped the wall so tightly I cut my fingers on the stones.

  The harpies.

  Trembling, I watched as the green-haired monsters of that other world dove, rose, and then dove again, daring each other to snatch a piece of roasting meat from a fire.

  I squinted, peering more closely at the soldiers. Would I now see what—or who—I dreaded most?

  Yes. There was Mordred, prancing around the perimeter of the camp on a black-maned charger, while the long shape of the Ekhidna cut through the crowd of soldiers like a knife.

  “All the monsters,” I whispered. My lives—my worlds—had joined into one. To fight the coming battle would take more strength than our men possessed.

  I leaned over the battlement so far that Odo grabbed the back of my tunic to keep me from falling. There were knights I’d never seen before, but recognized from my book: Bael, a toad-like creature with eight jointed arms; Aexe, the burned man, whose limbs looked like the blackened trunks of trees; and Vermis, a huge, segmented monster with fangs sharper than arrowheads.

  I felt Odo trying to pull me back in. “Your Highness,” he said, “please, you’ll fall.” I scanned the throngs for other faces I knew. Near another bonfire, I saw the sharp, savage face of the jackal god, Seth, and elsewhere I spotted more men I recognized from Ares’s halls. But I didn’t see Zozo or Balor. I couldn’t find Hasshaku Sama or El Cuchillo.

  I turned to Odo, and he saw the shock on my face, but he didn’t understand its source. It wasn’t just the strength of our foe, or my fear of the coming battle. It was this awful realization: an army of demigods and monsters had followed me into the real world, but the ones who’d died during my time with Ares were not among its ranks. So had the wild events I’d witnessed actually happened? Had it not been a dream after all?

  And what did that mean for a certain human boy?

  The thought hit me like a fist in the stomach. There was no point in going to the dungeon now. I felt the blood drain from my limbs.

  “Your Highness,” Odo said again, “they are waiting for us.”

  I could barely speak for sorrow. Raphael was gone. “What do you mean?” I managed.

  “Ares waits for us to accept his invitation to battle,” Odo said.

  “They invite us to battle, as if it were a royal ball?”

  “He is giving us a choice,” Odo said. “We can come out and fight, or we can barricade ourselves in the castle, and he will lay siege.”

  “That is just like him,” I said bitterly, “to offer a choice between options that we can only find abhorrent.”

  Odo turned to me in surprise. “What do you know of Ares?” he asked.

  “More than I wish to,” I said fiercely.

  “Your Highness, I do not understand.”

  I didn’t know how to explain it, and so I just shook my head, gripping my sword until my knuckles whitened.

  “That’s not how you hold a blade, my Queen,” Odo said gently. “Your clasp must not be so rigid.”

  I loosed my fingers a little. “I know. I was remembering someone.”

  Reiper. My greatest enemy was down there somewhere, in that sea of men, and soon I would come face-to-face with him again.

  “There is some honor in Ares if he does not attack without warning,” Odo said.

  “Honor? Hardly. He is only trying to make us tremble, so that we go to fight certain of disaster already. Our deaths are not enough for him. He must have our fear, too.”

  Odo said nothing.

  “It’s inevitable, isn’t it?” I asked as I watched the harpies wheeling over the camp. A soldier tossed bread to them as if they were pets. “The villagers—all of us—we will be slaughtered like cattle.”

  “We will not.”

  “How can you say that, Odo? Remember that my father is no longer here to scold you for your honesty. Admit it. We are overmatched. We will be massacred.”

  “Many of us will die, yes. But we will not die like beasts, Your Highness. We will die like warriors. With honor.”

  My eyes swept over the city of soldiers. I remembered seeing my father’s knights ride home after a conquest, and though I knew little then, I think I still understood: even a battle won is hard. I shook my head. “Was it my fault, Odo? I asked my father not to fight. And when he stood down…” I gestured to the plains.

  “When Leonidus was no longer a warrior king, others were more than ready to take his place,” Odo said. “Blame rests on many shoulders, including yours, but war and conquest are as much a part of our lives as birth and love.”

  “And death,” I said bitterly.

  “And death.” Odo stood silent for a moment, his hand on his sword. Then he bowed, ever so minutely. “Battle is at hand, Your Highness. Our lives are yours to command.”

  Fate had put the crown on my head too soon, and now I must be worthy of it. I know what is best, my father used to say to me.

  Now I hoped that I did.

  CHAPTER 67

  That night I asked Jeanette to braid my hair in intricate, twisting coils. She asked—her kind voice feigning lightness—what might be the occasion for such a splendid style. “There is none,” I lied. I didn’t want to speak of my decision to anyone. It was too terrible to voice.

  I sent her from my chamber when she had finished, and then, alone, I dressed in the raiment of a queen. The gown had b
een my mother’s, kept in a sealed wardrobe after her death, its folds still fragrant with cedar and dried roses. It was ivory silk, encrusted with opals and mother-of-pearl, its design as exquisite and refined as she had been. The blue gentians of our family crest were worked into the bodice in sapphires and golden thread.

  When I looked at myself in the mirror, it was almost as if I saw her—how I’d imagined her all my life, and how I’d seen her in all my father’s portraits. A fainter, paler version of the beauty I’d met in that impossible dark forest.

  Then I pressed my hands together over my heart and said a prayer of protection, for all those in Bandon Castle and in the village not far away, all who would go to sleep dreading the bloodshed the dawn would bring.

  But what if I could stop it? To demand that nearly everyone I ever knew and loved—Odo, Jeanette, Adelie, and even irritable, disapproving Abra—march to their own slaughter, and give up their lives in my name, was not the order of a queen. It was the command of a tyrant.

  I knew that it was my duty to protect them if I could. I took a dark, hooded cloak from the wardrobe and covered my gleaming dress, and then I slipped from my room, easily avoiding the guards stationed at the end of the hall. Of course, I had no idea if my plan would work. But even the faintest glimmer of hope was better than the pitch-black of despair.

  The halls were unlit, but I knew them so well that I did not need a torch. At the gatehouse, the guards stopped me with brandished swords. Showing them my grim, determined face, I bade them return to their posts, and then I slipped across the bridge.

  Fires flickered in the field, but the camp was quiet. A chill wind from the north rustled the dry branches of the trees along the river. My feet crunched on dead grass. I walked to my fate as a thief goes to the gallows: frightened, unwilling, and yet knowing that he must.

  I heard a snuffling breath behind me, and I whirled around in panic. But it was only Dogo, my father’s half-wild hound. This brute had torn the throats from deer on many a hunt, but now he looked up at me and whined. I held out my hand, and he licked it.