The Marked Girl (4 page)

The king's face was set. “It is the only chance they have—”

A clamor of noise from the top of the hallway interrupted him.

The king pulled himself up against the bars, close to Cedric. “Go to the portal, Cedric. The wraths will not need all of us as prisoners, and they will likely kill those they do not need.”

“Father—”

“I am not only your father, but your king, and for once you will do as I say. And, Cedric . . . remember the scrolls!”

Cedric didn't have time to puzzle out his father's words before a group of wraths were upon them, led by Malquin himself.

“You know, a wise prince would have run away from his captors,” Malquin said, looking at Cedric with a thin-lipped smile. He took a small handkerchief from his pocket and used it to wipe a smudge of dirt from his crippled left hand. Aside from the hand, and the shriveled, twisted arm to which it was attached, Malquin looked much like any other man in the realm. It was hard to tell his age—though his face was smooth and unlined, his shoulder-length hair was a shocking white.

“But then again,” Malquin continued, “wise isn't exactly your reputation.”

Cedric clutched the sword in his hand. Malquin's quick eyes caught the movement. “Now, now,” he said. “This need not get messy.”

Malquin gave a slight nod, and three wraths broke off and made for Cedric. Each was armed.

“Go,” the king urged Cedric in a low, ragged whisper.

Cedric startled at the king's tone—his father wasn't commanding him this time. He was pleading. Cedric made up his mind in an instant and reached to grab Emme's hand.

“Run!” he yelled.

Instead of trying to charge through the wraths and up out of the tunnel, Cedric turned to head deeper into the dungeons, pulling Emme along. He looked behind once to ensure Kat and
Merek were following him. Few knew the location of the portal. Many even doubted its existence, as the king had kept it a close secret since it was discovered. He'd erected an entire hidden courtyard around it, accessible only through a series of tunnels that led through the dungeons. Even Cedric had not known how to access the tunnels before his seventeenth birthday a few months earlier. On that day, he'd finally convinced his father to show him the portal's location. After all, Cedric had reasoned, if he was going to rule Caelum someday, he should know of its secrets.

The dungeon tunnels twisted and turned, gradually leading the group upward once again. Cedric took intersections and offshoots quickly, struggling not to stumble over the loose rocks strewn across the floor as he ran. He heard the pounding footsteps of wraths chasing after them and only hoped they would get lost in the labyrinthine tunnels.

He arrived at one last intersection and turned left, coming up abruptly against a thick, wooden door. Cedric reached out to the wall on the left-hand side. He pushed on one stone after another, feeling nothing but cold rock under his fingers. Finally, one of the stones pushed inward, and the heavy door swung open.

Cedric stepped through it and into the hidden courtyard, lined with thick, high stone walls. It had no roof or ceiling, and when Cedric looked up, he could see stars glittering in the distance. At the end of the courtyard sat a large wooden box.

“Is that it?” Emme's voice broke through the still night. The others came through the door after her, panting.

“We cannot honestly be considering this,” Merek said.

Cedric darted across the courtyard, lifted the box off of the ground, and tossed it aside. Hovering there an inch above the grass was a thick, swirling black mass roughly the size and shape of a man.

“It . . . it is real,” Kat breathed.

A clatter of footsteps echoed from the tunnel.

“If we are going through, we must do it now,” Cedric said in a hushed voice.

But he didn't move. No one did. All four of the royal children stared wide-eyed at the portal. Its whirling mass was mesmerizing. It seemed as though it was actually sucking in the darkness of the night, leaving all traces of moonlight behind.

“I am absolutely not going in there,” Merek said.

“Stay behind and get skewered by wraths if you like,” Kat replied.

“No,” Cedric said. “We are all going.” He held Merek's gaze for a moment before the other boy finally looked away.

“I do not think I can,” Emme whispered to Cedric.

“It will be all right,” Cedric replied.

“Promise?”

Cedric opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by the noise of the wraths pushing into the courtyard. They were followed by Malquin.

Malquin's eyes gleamed in the moonlight. He turned to Cedric. “I would not recommend going that way, young prince.”

Cedric held up his sword. “That seems enough reason to go.”

With an air of complete calm, Malquin reached into the pocket of his trousers with his good hand. He brought out a
small, metal object that glinted in the moonlight as it moved. Cedric had never seen anything like it before. Part of the object was shaped like a small tube, cut open at one end and attached at an angle to a handle that vaguely resembled a sword hilt.

“Step away from the portal.” Malquin aimed the device at Emme while the wraths formed a circle around their group, closing them in.

Cedric gripped the edge of his stolen sword's hilt, but didn't move.

Malquin shrugged. “Or have it your way.” His finger moved slightly against the device in his right hand. Moving on instinct, Cedric dove and knocked Emme to the ground just before the night air was filled with a loud bang that reverberated off the stone walls.

A wrath standing just behind Emme crumpled to the grass, a black stain growing on his chest.

“What . . . ?” Cedric stared at the creature on the ground, then to Malquin's device. “What is this magic?” He got to his feet, directly between Malquin and Emme. The circle of wraths tightened around them, though some looked down at their fallen comrade, expressions of confusion flashing briefly across their gnarled faces.

Malquin merely smiled and raised the device again. Cedric shot a panicked look to Kat, who nodded once. Kat grabbed Merek by the arm and jumped into the swirling dark hole, pulling him behind her. One moment, they were standing on the solid, moonlit grass. The next, they were gone.

Emme gave a little scream as the pair disappeared into the
portal. Malquin's eyes fixed on the empty, dark mass, his mouth a small O of surprise. Even the wraths looked stunned. For a moment, no one moved.

Cedric heard another gasp and whipped around to see that a wrath had captured Emme from behind. It grasped her wriggling form and moved toward the dungeon doorway.

“Emme!” Cedric shouted.

Emme wrenched her head in his direction. “Go! Cedric, go!”

Cedric sprinted instead toward Emme. Two wraths jumped in front of him to block his way, but Cedric swung out wildly with his sword. His blow hit one wrath in the shoulder, cutting through mottled leather and hitting skin. Before Cedric could brace himself, the other wrath swung out with a stonelike fist and hit him in the chest.

Cedric stumbled backward. He looked up just in time to see Malquin aim the small, dark device directly at his face. He took one more step backward and prepared himself for another loud bang that would shatter the night, and likely his skull. But he never heard it. Instead, his momentum kept him reeling backward until he no longer felt grass beneath his feet. He was only falling, falling, falling . . .

At first, Cedric felt nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing. Once he realized he wasn't dead, he turned to look for the others, but he saw only black. He tried calling out to them, but no noise would escape his throat.

Then the space around him exploded into brightness. He landed, hard, on his hands and knees. Underneath him was a
type of strange gray stone. He hurried to stand on unsteady feet.

Cedric spun around to the portal, which was no longer hanging in the air, but was now a dark circle against a stone wall. It grew smaller and smaller as Cedric stared.

“Emme!”

The portal shrank down to the size of a pebble and then blinked out, leaving only the stone behind. Cedric ran to the wall, to the place where the black hole had been, and threw his fists against it.

“Emme! Emme!” His scream seemed to tear from his throat of its own accord. He beat the wall with his fists until a pair of hands pulled firmly on his shoulders. Cedric turned to see Kat, whose eyes were fixed on the space where the portal had been.

“It's gone,” she said, her voice flat.

“No. No. She is . . . We have to go back!”

Kat just shook her head, her expression grim. Behind her, Merek looked like he might be sick.

It was still night outside, but the air felt different, smelled different. When Cedric looked up, he couldn't see stars, only a frightening orange glow in the sky, and beyond that, a darker, empty blue. He could hear water running nearby, and when he looked for it he saw a small stream flowing over odd-looking stone. He was standing at the edge of a riverbed, only there were no trees, no shrubs, no dirt. Just flat gray and white all around—under his feet, over his head, on the wall behind him. It was cracked in some places, smooth in others, and altogether foreign.

They had actually made it—the other side of the portal.

The unfamiliar landscape grew fuzzy as Cedric tried to fight down a rising wave of panic. He gripped the hilt of the sword he'd stolen from the wrath guard, trying to think of a single thing to say, to find someplace solid for his mind to land—

“Hello?”

Cedric turned toward the sound of the tentative voice and saw a girl standing nearby. She wore a bright blue shirt covered in strange markings and trousers that fit tightly around her hips. She carried a sword but held it strangely, dangling by her side as if it weighed nothing. Her light brown hair was loose, and strands of it flew across her face in the breeze.

The girl spoke again, but Cedric could not make out her words. Behind him, he heard Merek shift. One of them would have to step forward, and Cedric knew who it should be.

“Are you the leader here?”

The girl's eyebrows rose, and she was close enough that Cedric could make out her greenish-brown eyes. “Um . . . I'm the director.”

The girl began to babble then, using a mix of words Cedric recognized with ones he definitely did not. She gestured to a group of people who stood a distance behind her, and Cedric assumed she must be acting on their behalf. He looked again at her shirt, trying to make out what appeared to be a drawing on its front. It was a star inside of a blue circle, with larger red circles outside of that. He was still trying to interpret its meaning when he realized the girl had stopped talking and was looking at him, expectantly. Had she asked him a question?

“Where are we?” he asked, trying to sound more in charge than he felt.

“The Ellay River,” she responded, then added a few more of her nonsense words.
Could this be hell?
Cedric wondered. Would hell have rivers? Maybe his father had been right, and the rumors of the portal land were false. Cedric tried to ask more questions of the girl, and received only frustrating answers in response.

Then the very ground he was standing on began to . . . shift. His first thought was that the portal was opening again, but no. The sky didn't open in a black, swirling mass. The sky stayed exactly where it was. It was everything else that moved.

How could the ground move?

“What is happening?” Cedric called out to the girl, who also looked startled. He struggled to maintain his balance. It felt as though someone were roughly pulling the ground back and forth, right underneath him.

Then he fell. It happened quickly. One moment he was using every muscle in his body to stay upright, and the next he was flying forward, as if he had been pushed. He landed hard onto something soft and realized he'd fallen onto the girl. He had just enough time to register that she felt like a normal human—skin and hair and bones—before he pushed himself away from her, hard.

Cedric looked around to see Merek and Kat on the ground as well, and that's when he realized his sword was no longer in his hand. He searched the area beneath him as it continued to shudder. The girl screamed something then, and he looked up. Her eyes were focused on the large piece of stone that ran over
their heads—a bridge? It was moving as well. Could it fall on them? Could this whole realm be falling apart?

What sort of world was this?

Cedric reached for Kat's arm and pulled her out from under the stone structure. Merek followed as well. The whole world seemed to be shattering around them. And then, without warning, it stopped.

Cedric was breathless, and his heart was racing. It felt as though he'd just run for miles. He looked around him and saw the ground was intact, and the girl was staring at him with concern. Cedric looked to Kat and Merek, and they seemed unhurt.

Then the earth jerked again.

Before Cedric could speak, Merek whirled to face him. His hands were shaking and his eyes were wild with fear and panic.

Merek directed that panic right at Cedric, who tried not to flinch under his words. “I told you! I told you we should not have come to this hell. We are all going to die!”

Cedric wanted to say something back to calm Merek down, to contradict him. But wasn't he right? The king had told Cedric to go through the portal, but in the end, it had been his own decision that pushed them through. And now they had wound up in a place far worse, a place that seemed to want to shake them apart from their own skins.

They
were
in hell. Merek was right.

And then, Merek was gone. His body jerked, and then he was moving, running across the shaking ground.

Everything in Cedric wanted to stay right where he was and
wait for the world to still itself again, but he knew he couldn't. Merek was his responsibility. He looked at Kat, who seemed to understand. Together, they stood up and ran. Cedric spotted his sword lying nearby and stopped to pick it up by the hilt.