Defiance (21 page)

Abandoning my efforts at controlled, silent breathing, I give in to my body’s demands, dragging in a huge gulp of air while I tense my muscles for action.

The beast sniffs again, its body coiling like a snake about to strike.

If I don’t move, I’m dead.

I have to time it just right. Leap as it attacks and hope the noise of the fireball it spews covers the sound of me landing in another tree. Glancing at Melkin’s position, I judge the distance between my tree and his. He catches my eye and jerks his chin toward the branch below him.

I brace myself and watch for my moment.

I don’t have to wait long. In seconds, the beast’s agitation reaches a boiling point and it rears up, takes aim, and roars a giant ball of fire straight at my tree.

I run along the branch and leap for Melkin’s tree as the trunk behind me explodes into flame. I land hard, slip, and nearly fall, but Melkin’s unnaturally long arm snakes down and catches me.

I dangle against the tree, my feet struggling to find purchase on the branch below me, while the Cursed One roars its fury and swings its head from side to side, obliterating everything in its path.

Panic blazes through me, sharp and absolute. I’m not going to die. Not like this. I have too many promises to keep.

My feet find the branch, and I steady myself by holding on to the trunk below Melkin. He keeps his hand on my pack, and we freeze as the Cursed One slithers around the trees, sniffing and listening.

I don’t know what called it here. Maybe it was close enough to hear me yelling. Maybe we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, though I’ve never been a big believer in coincidence. Whatever caught the Cursed One’s attention, we’re in its sights now.

Any gratitude I feel at being high enough to avoid letting it sniff out our location disappears when it bellows, a throaty roar of fury, and strafes the trees in front of it with fire. The trunk below us bursts into flame, and heat licks at my toes.

Smoke billows up, choking me, and the flames crawl steadily toward us. My lungs scream for air, my muscles shake with the need to run, and my skin feels dry and parched, but switching trees now would be my death sentence. I hold my breath to keep from coughing, and focus on remaining still.

It works. The Cursed One swings its head back and forth for another interminable minute, then curls back around, black scales glistening in the flickering light of the flames it created, and slithers its way into the gaping hole it made in the ground.

We remain still until the last trace of it disappears. Then we explode into motion. Scrambling up the trunk, we run along the length of the thickest branch we can find and tree-leap only to do the whole thing all over again.

Fire spreads quickly in the packed density of the Wasteland, but I know there’s a river less than one hundred fifty yards to the west. Melkin knows it too, and we head for it in unspoken agreement.

Behind us, a wall of fire chews through the forest, spitting sparks and embers toward the sky and gushing a cloud of black smoke in our wake. We leap, climb, run, leap, and at some point, Melkin’s hand reaches out and takes my heavy pack off my shoulders so I can keep up.

In the distance, I see the deep blue-black surface of the river glittering beneath the afternoon sun. My lungs burn, and my hands are raw from snatching at rough bark for balance, but I increase my pace as the wall of heat behind me whispers along my skin.

Melkin reaches the river first, but doesn’t jump. Instead, he waits, reaching a skinny hand back for me as I make my final leap and skid along the branch toward him. He catches me, grabs my hand, and together we dive out of the trees and into the crisp, cold water.

I
no longer know what time it is. I’ve been lying on the damp, gritty floor of this cell for hours. Maybe a day. Maybe more. Without a way to track the sun, I can’t be sure.

Pain is my constant companion—stabbing me with every breath and making a mockery of my attempts at sleep. At least one rib is broken, my arms and legs ache fiercely with bone-deep bruises, and my eyes are nearly swollen shut.

But worse than all of that is the burn on my neck. Every throb of agony from my seared flesh is a reminder of the Commander’s power over me. I want to use the pain to focus on a plan to remove that power from him permanently, but my thoughts are fuzzy and vague, and the pain seems so much more important.

A chill seeps into me from the stone floor I lay on, and even with my cloak, I’m shivering. I should force myself to stand up and walk. Loosen the muscles. Promote faster healing.

I inhale slowly, trying to keep from pressing my lungs against my rib cage with too much force, and place my palms flat on the floor in front of me.

My body shakes as I slowly push myself to my hands and knees, inch by torturous inch. Gray dots swirl in front of my limited vision, and my empty stomach rebels against the waves of dizziness swamping me.

I may have gained my cloak, but I’m in no shape to gain my freedom.

It’s a devastating thought, but I can’t hang on to it for long. Heat is eating away at my brain, blurring the edges of reality until I can’t tell if the contents of my head are memories, dreams, or wisps of things not worth the effort it takes to force them into something that makes sense.

I can’t stand without help. Crawling toward the wall is a slow, agonizing process, and I stop frequently to rest, laying my face against the filthy stone floor and shivering both from external cold and the internal heat that blazes through my head but refuses to warm my body.

How does one cure a fever? I can’t remember. My body shakes as I force myself to keep crawling. Keep moving. Keep pushing my muscles to work through the bruises because
he’ll
come back. And I refuse to let him kill me.

I reach the wall sometime later and discover my nose is bleeding. I don’t know how long that’s been going on, and I decide I don’t care.

From a distance, I hear the main dungeon door open, and I know I should be afraid, but that takes too much effort. Instead, I dig my fingers into the rugged texture of the wall beside me, and pull myself to my feet.

The room spins in slow, sickening circles. I try to breathe through the nausea this creates, but dragging air into my lungs ignites the terrible pain in my side.

Someone is walking along the row between cells. I don’t know who it is. I can’t seem to turn my head to look. Instead, I lean my forehead against the cold stone of the wall and shake uncontrollably.

Rachel is out there. Somewhere. I know I should remember something important about her situation, but with fire eating at my brain, all I can think about is her hair in the sunlight. Like flames. Like the flames pounding at the inside of my skull.

I bang my head against the wall to put out the flames, but they just multiply.

Move.

I have to move.

If I don’t, he’ll kill me before I can escape.

I slide one foot in front of me, but it wobbles, and I have to hang on to the wall to keep from falling over.

Someone opens the door to my cell. The noise explodes inside my head, sending brutal hammers of pain into my temples. I let go of the wall to cover my ears, and pitch forward onto the unforgiving stone floor.

Footsteps hurry my way, and I reach for my sword. It isn’t there, and the motion triggers the pain in my side until I’m gasping air in quick, shallow breaths.

The owner of the footsteps reaches me and crouches down. I can’t see who it is, but the soft scent of lavender seeps through the stench of my cell and makes me want to close my eyes and pretend I’m in a field. Safe. Free. Lying on a bed of crushed lavender while the pain in my body subsides into nothing but memory, and those I love are still alive and well.

“Oh,” a girl’s voice exclaims in a whisper. A cool hand presses against my forehead.

I’m dreaming. I must be. There aren’t any girls walking freely through the dungeon. My brain has cooked up a fantasy, and if I don’t snap out of it, whoever is truly inside my cell with me will kill me before I can keep my promise to Rachel.

Rachel.

Rachel doesn’t smell like lavender. She smells like citrus and midnight jasmine, and I wish the lavender would disappear and become Rachel’s scent instead.

It doesn’t.

Instead, the same cool hands that were pressed to my forehead are busy pushing something into the pocket of my cloak.

“Food,” she whispers against my ear. “I’m putting medicine for your fever in the water. When the fever goes down, eat.”

A cup tips against my lips and a trickle of bitter-tasting water dribbles into my mouth. I swallow reflexively, though part of me is screaming that this is a trick. A trap. Another wicked ploy of the Commander’s to torture me. Maybe it’s poison. Maybe it’s something that will scrape me raw inside, doubling the pain until I want to kill myself just to make it end.

I turn my face and let another mouthful of water leak out onto the floor.

A girl lays her face next to mine, her outline blurry through the swollen slits of my eyelids. “Swallow,” she says softly. “We’re trying to help you.”

I want to ask her who she means. No one helps you once you’re in the dungeon. No one has ever helped me outside the dungeon either, except for Oliver, Jared, and Rachel.

The hard, brisk steps of a guard echo down the row, coming swiftly toward my cell.

“Hurry!” she whispers and presses the cup to my lips.

The water feels good, even if it tastes vile, and I swallow. It might be a trick. It might make things worse, but the heat beating at my brain won’t allow me the luxury of thinking through my options, and I’m desperately thirsty.

“What are you doing, girl?” the guard demands.

“Watering the prisoner as you asked,” she says, her tone low and respectful.

“He’s had enough. Get out of there.”

She stands immediately and exits the cell, her steps hurried. The guard laughs as he looks at me lying on the floor, shivering while blood slowly seeps out of my nose.

I close my eyes and wish for a world where Rachel and Jared are safe and Oliver is alive.

T
he water snatches me with icy arms as I plunge beneath its surface. The sound of the fire becomes muted, a distant roaring that can’t compete with the swift rush of the river’s current. I lose my grip on Melkin’s hand as I’m flung downstream. I can’t stop spinning. Can’t break free of the current. Can’t get to the surface.

My lungs burn, and my brain screams at me to take a breath, but I’ve spun so many times in the dark embrace of the river, I no longer know which way is up. I kick out, lash with my arms, and fight against the water.

It’s useless.

My ears roar, and a strange hum grows louder within my brain as my chest convulses and I cough, sucking in a mouthful of water in exchange.

The water burns my lungs, and I cough again.

More water. More coughing. More pain.

And then it’s gone. The pain recedes. My chest relaxes. My lungs stop demanding air. I’m at peace.

I let the current spin me as the world darkens into nothing, but something wraps around me, hauls me through the water, and I break the surface.

I cough feebly, but my lungs are used to water now. They don’t know what to do with air. And I don’t care. I want to close my eyes and let the water take me. Let the tiny sliver of peace I felt swallow me whole.

But I can’t. Because whatever is holding me won’t let me slide under the surface again. By the time we reach the shore, my lungs are burning for air, and the peace I felt is gone.

I’m tossed onto the shore, flipped over on my back, and Melkin looms over me like a giant wet twig. He puts his hands together, one over the other, and slams them into my chest.

Water gushes up my throat, burning and suffocating, and fills my mouth and nose. He reaches forward and turns my head to the side as I spew the water onto the sand. Twice more, he hits my chest and I have to spit out mouthfuls of water. When he raises his hands a fourth time, my lungs contract, and I start coughing on my own. He lowers his hands, turns me to my side so any water I cough up can dribble onto the ground, and collapses next to me, his breathing harsh.

I don’t know how much time passes before he turns over on his side to face me.

“You gonna live?” he asks, and I see my pack is still strapped to his back.

My throat burns as I answer. “I’m fine.”

I should thank him. Between this and catching me before I fell from the branch below him during the Cursed One’s attack, he’s saved my life twice today. I should, but I don’t. Because even though he’s saved me, even though he claims to have lost almost everything, he works for the Commander. I don’t need anything else to justify the slow burn of anger I feel every time I look at him.

It should be Logan who caught me. Logan who saved me from drowning. Logan who asks if I’m okay.

“I’m sorry for what I said back there,” Melkin says.

I frown. I don’t know what he means.

“I know your daddy’s been missing for months. I saw what happened during the Claiming ceremony. If anyone has a right to bitterness, I guess it’s you.” His dark eyes wander away from mine, and he heaves himself into a sitting position, my pack dripping water, creating tiny streams on the riverbank.

I wish he wouldn’t apologize. Wouldn’t sit there like he understands and ask for nothing in return. It makes it hard to aim my anger at him.

I sit up as well, digging my fingers into the wet sand beneath me as my head spins slowly, and look around us. Nothing is familiar. We’ve traveled so far down the river, I’ve lost any place markers to show me where we are. The distant horizon is free of smoke, a clear indication we traveled for miles in the swift embrace of the water.

“Where are we?” I ask, and wish for the hot, syrupy drink Oliver always gave me to cure a sore throat.

The memory of Oliver stabs into me, and I force myself to breathe through it.

“About past the king’s city,” Melkin says, raising one bony arm to point to the bank above us to the left.