Spoiler! :
“Stop following me.”
Fury’s voice penetrated through my sleep, rousing me more effectively than a flock of honking geese could’ve done. I stretched, yawned hugely, and cracked my eyes open to the gray morning sky as my body began to register its own soreness from the previous night’s events and from sleeping on the rocky ground.
Last night, Fury had climbed a little ways up the mountains for safety from the undeads before striking a fire with the flint and tinder he’d brought in his rucksack that also contained his gold, precious totems, and maybe some food. I’d lurked in the shadows, shivering as the night wore on, until Fury’s snores became loud and even, giving me the chance to creep out and warm myself by the fire. I fell asleep on the hard ground as far from Fury as I could get while still within the warm reach of the fire.
Now, as I looked around and rubbed my aching back, something from the deep recesses of my memory came flooding slowly back…
Shame. Where was he? He told us he’d meet us at the Heavenhope Mountains as soon as he could…
I jumped up and raced to the edge of the outcropping. The village below was now empty of any sign of a flame or undead; it looked like the charred remains of a ghost town. I squinted and tried to see if there was any movement among the demolished buildings, any sign of life, no matter how small, but there was none. Either Shame was dead,—unthinkable—badly wounded so he couldn’t move,—hardly bearable—or somewhere on the mountains looking for us—preferable.
I glanced up and down the mountain range, eyes combing through the giant boulders and mounds of snow. Shame couldn’t be too far if he was on the Heavenhope; the town was close to only a small portion of the mountains, and he surely wouldn’t flee the region, not when he promised he would find us.
Footsteps crunching against the snow sounded behind me. I turned around and saw, to my alarm, that Fury had already packed up and was walking away. I stood rooted to the spot, torn between waiting for Shame and following Fury, when it hit me: the reedpipes! I stumbled after Fury while my mittened hands fumbled under my furs for the pipes. I ripped off my mittens and lifted the pipes to my mouth before I realized stupidly that I didn’t know how to play them.
I summoned the melody of the kingdom’s anthem in my mind and blew a few notes of the pipes. I sounded like a dying whale, a sound that made Fury shoot me a look of distaste over his shoulder. I tried again with the same result, but kept at it; the sooner we were reunited with Shame, the better.
We walked along the mountains for what felt like ages, heading east always. I experimented with the pipes until my lips were sore and my exposed fingers felt sure to fall off from the biting cold. Fury didn’t pay me any attention and didn’t stop to rest once; he marched purposefully on in irritated silence. He looked like he knew where he was going and like he wanted to get there quickly, so I was surprised when he stopped suddenly around midday, causing me to walk right into him.
“What?” I growled, still fuming at him for last night, but Fury clapped his hand over my mouth, a look of intense concentration on his face. I resisted the desire to bite his hand and remained silent and still, waiting impatiently.
After a brief second, I heard it; the crunch of boots against snow and the soft murmuring of voices. I had a wild thought: could the undead talk? I didn’t think so, but all the same, my heart accelerated madly in my chest.
Fury must’ve seen the look of comprehension on my face, because he lifted his hand away, reaching instead for the dagger in his belt. Eyes watching, body alert, he crouched down like a cat ready to pounce on its prey and waited as the voices drew nearer.
Two figures came into view from behind a boulder and I just registered a familiar crown of blonde hair in time to yell “No!” and fling myself on top of Fury, who had just leapt to attack. My fist collided with his calf, sending my brother off balance, resulting in him sprawled on the ground, cursing loudly.
Malice and Deceit stared at Fury, mouths slightly open. I jumped over a large rock and landed before them, smiling hugely. “Malice! Deceit!”
“Joy?” Malice gasped, like she couldn’t quite believe it was me. Her eyes grew wide as she stared at me, and then without warning, she flung her arms around me with such force I nearly toppled over. Her back heaved as she began sobbing into my shoulder.
“Joy!” she bawled, “I… I thought you were… dead… or worse!”
I patted Malice soothingly and shot Deceit a puzzled look, mouthing, “Worse?” Deceit grimaced in answer as he pried Malice’s death grip off me.
“Who’re you?” Fury growled, picking himself up, dagger still ready in his hand. He looked Malice and Deceit up and down, taking in their ash-covered furs, ragged hair, and burnt faces.
Deceit’s eyes flashed none too kindly as I hastily answered, “Malice and Deceit, remember? You remember them, don’t you?”
Fury scowled. “Friends of yours?”
I nodded. Malice wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her coat and asked, “So what happened to you two after we were attacked? Have you seen anyone else yet?”
“No,” I said, “what about you?”
“No,” Malice replied, her face melting into an expression of fear. “You don’t think we’re the only ones…”
“Oh come on,” Deceit said. “You can’t possibly consider that the undead got that many people.” But he didn’t sound so sure of himself.
Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw Fury hurrying away, planting each step carefully so as not to let the snow crunch under his feet. “Oh no you don’t!” I cried angrily and raced toward him, grabbing his arm tightly so he couldn’t leave us like he did last night.
“Get off me!” Fury yelled, flailing about like a man in high water who didn’t know how to swim, his dagger waving about everywhere. With a great heave, I wrapped my arm around his torso and flung him to the ground, hands gripping the front of his furs and pulling his face close to mine.
“Don’t you dare leave us, you hear?” I spat, giving Fury a nice, hard shake. “We have to stick with each other now more than ever, don’t you see?”
Fury glared at me and hissed, “Get off me, you witch.” He shoved me away and, to my relief, stayed where he was, grumbling incoherently under his breath.
I turned back to Malice and Deceit, the latter staring at Fury with loathing. “So what happened to you two?”
Malice’s eyes darted uncertainly from Fury to me and back again before answering, “We woke from the fire that someone had lit on our house. Aunt Moral was already awake, and we went with her outside to find a bunch of undeads running around all over the place. We didn’t know where to go, we were just trying to get out of the village and stick together, but there was so much fire and so many people running around and screaming that we lost tight of Aunt Moral. Deceit and I tried looking for her, but it was no use with all the chaos and we hardly recognized any of the roads anymore, so we were almost guessing which paths to take to escape. We managed to find the right road and we were so close to getting away, but an undead girl was there in front of us, blocking our way, and Joy, the undead girl, she was… she was Prudence!”
I breathed in sharply. Prudence… I saw her get bitten, saw her change into an undead…
“But then,” Malice continued on tearfully, “the strangest thing happened. A knife came flying from somewhere close by, out of nowhere, almost, and hit Prudence right in the back.” Malice shuddered and gulped. “I don’t think she died—well, she’s undead now, I don’t think she can die—but she was very surprised and kind of stumbled a bit. Deceit and I ran past her and we managed to climb onto the mountains and stay safe. But Aunt Moral, and Prudence… and all those other people…”
I bowed my head. “Poor Prudence… I saw her get… get bitten.”
Deceit snapped his eyes toward me. “Bitten? What do you mean bitten?”
Fury snorted, rolling his eyes in a know-it-all fashion. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? She was bitten by an undead; how else did she become on in such a short amount of time?”
Scowling, Deceit said, “What, so now the undead can make the living like them too?”
Fury smirked. “Took you long enough.”
“But how are the undead here?” I sighed, sitting down on a rock. “This is too cold for them, isn’t it?”
“Well, there was a fire last night to warm them up,” Malice murmured thoughtfully through her sniffling.
“Yes, but the undead aren’t too keen with fire either,” Fury replied. “It won’t kill them to pass through fire—they can’t burn—but the dead and the flames have never gone hand in hand. Don’t you see? The conditions for a kind of attack like last night’s don’t fit with undeads. And why attack our village, of all places? Why no attack Bor, for example? No,” Fury said, shaking his head and smiling sardonically, “someone put them up to it. Someone’s controlling them.”
There was a long silence after that, with Fury still wearing traces of an appalling smile and Malice looking uneasily into every shadow. Deceit was staring at Fury with a mixture of disgust and disbelief.
“Well,” Deceit said, finally breaking the silence, “they’re obviously under control of their king.”
Fury threw back his head and laughed, his shoulders shaking up and down. “Really? Their king? What an amazing nugget of truth!” he said sarcastically. “Tell me then, what motivation does King Fortitude have for attacking such an unimportant town as ours?”
Deceit opened his mouth, looking ready to shoot something nasty at Fury, but he paused, closed it, and folded his arms, frowning deeply. Fury snickered and said, “That’s what I thought. You see, when King Fortitude was an old man in the Venom Kingdom hundreds of years ago, before anyone had even heard of undeads, he made a foolish plan to come back to life after his death, his aim being to live forever. He had worked on the theory for decades, and when he was finished, he thought he would be a great hero and cast a powerful spell on the entire continent, giving power to the deceased to rise from the grave. King Fortitude died a few months after the spell and was buried accordingly.
"King Fortitude became undead weeks later, to find that it was nothing like what he expected. It was nothing at all like being alive; no happiness, no joy, just a vast emptiness, the only feeling being an insatiable hunger. The reason for this is that the undeads’ souls are fragmented and weak, and so they long for wholeness, something that, once it is lost, cannot be gained. King Fortitude found that he had not given the planet a gift, but a curse.
“Luckily, not everyone gets turned undead after they die. For someone to turn undead, their soul has to be broken or restless at the time of death. King Fortitude worked for years trying to reverse the spell, but his attempts were in vain. He was driven to near insanity from the hunger and tried again and again to kill himself, but he found that nothing seems to destroy undeads. So, in exasperation, he went to the Earth Kingdom, the kingdom of life, thinking that the sages or the Bloodline Mystics would help him, and begged them to fix his soul. They declined, however, and ever since then King Fortitude and all the other people who have been raised from the grave have been at war with the Earth Kingdom.
“So you see,” Fury concluded, “King Fortitude has no reason to attack such a village as ours. He has eyes for the Earth Kingdom only, and I must say that the Earth Kingdom is being extremely foolish not to try to help him now; the number of undeads will never decrease if they can’t die, and now that they can change the living, we’ll be lucky if anyone gets out of this alive. Besides, the undead don’t pop up from just the southern region near the Disease Kingdom; they can come from anywhere. Those in the northern reaches, however, such as here, will freeze up, since they can’t generate body heat well. But they’re not dead if they freeze; if you thaw them out, they’ll be as good as any other who’s back from the grave.”
“So,” Deceit said, beginning to pace, “let me get this straight. It doesn’t make any sense that the undead attacked here because all the undeads will be battering the Earth Kingdom to restore their souls and because it’s too cold here for the undeads to do anything even if they did want to attack us?” He threw his hand up into the air. “Well then who does want to attack us and why?”
Malice watched her brother anxiously and said, “I don’t know. This whole thing is creepy. We should go to the closest town and tell someone. I mean, we might be the only ones who can, and the capital has got to know about this.”
At that, my mind jumped to Shame again. “Wait!” I yelped. “Not yet! My godfather told us to meet him here; he’s probably searching for us right now!”
Fury yawned. “Joy, if he didn’t come early this morning to find us, he probably never will. Get over it.”
“Just because you act like you don’t have a heart doesn’t mean I have to!” I snapped. I looked at Malice pleadingly.
“We should wait,” Malice said immediately. “He is a sage, after all.”
“Oh come on,” Fury growled. “You can’t exclude the possibility that he’s dead; rejecting death is pointless. We’ll be wasting our time.”
I scowled at Fury. “Aren’t you a downer. Don’t you feel guilty thinking about leaving the mountains when a sage could be dying just a few miles away? That’s just as bad as committing murder.”
“Murder?” Fury snarled. “What does murder have anything to do with this? Look, I don’t want to risk my life and my time searching for someone who might not even be alive. This plan was stupid. Let’s just move on and get over it.”
“Mam would known what to do if she were still here!” I yelled, feeling my neck and cheeks grow hot. “Thanks to you, she’s gone and we’re stuck here like a bunch of clueless idiots!”
“So now everything’s my fault, huh?” Fury bellowed in my face. “What’s with you pointing fingers and making me the bad guy? And you’re depending on your dead mother to help you out of this? You’re such an ignorant kid, Joy. I don’t think you even understand the whole concept of death. Do you?”
Anger was muddling with my thoughts and for a moment I gaped like a fish, trying to pluck the words from my mind that I wanted to shout at Fury. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to see him suffer before me, to coil with pain and to beg me to help him. I wanted to see his heart break, wanted to watch him as he watched himself deteriorate like a tower made of sand. I wanted to see him cry and scream and say that he wish he was dead. I wanted him to feel pain, real pain, the worst he’s ever felt in his life.
I wanted him to hurt like I did when he left me and when I saw Mam die. I wanted it so badly. I couldn’t remember a time when I hated him more.
“She’s your mom too,” I said through my teeth. “No matter how many times I saw that, I don’t think you’ll ever get it. Maybe I don’t understand death, but you don’t understand real love. I’m ashamed to be related to someone like you.”
My eyes shifted to Malice and Deceit, who both looked like they’d rather be anywhere else in the world, like they were intruding in on a personal moment. I nodded at them, a small apology. Then I turned my gaze back to Fury, who would look nowhere but the ground. “I care about people. If you won’t do something for Shame, I will. I’ll be back before nightfall. Make a fire so I can find this spot again easily,” I told Malice and Deceit.
“Joy?” Malice asked timidly as I turned my back on their lot and walked to the edge of the outcropping. Anticipation bubbled in my chest as I balanced carefully at the extreme edge of the cliff, toes just barely dangling. The wind softly rustled against my face, whispering promises of relief from the burdensome stress. Another flight, that’s what I needed. I’d take it and be grateful. My whole being craved that feeling of weightlessness, of being worry-free and to just soar.
“Joy?” Malice repeated. “Where are you going?” I heard her footsteps from behind me as she rushed toward me.
I pitched myself forward at that moment, letting myself tumble into a fast freefall. I did not want to see Malice’s worried face or Deceit’s handsome one or Fury’s hideous one. All I wanted was some alone time to just fly. The wind rushed into my face, blowing my hair back and rubbing my cheeks a raw red. I closed my eyes, immersed in the feeling of danger and adrenaline that pounded through my veins like a racing horse. My heart pounded wildly and my head was dizzy with my whole body screaming that danger was near, that if I didn’t do something soon, I’d get smashed into smithereens. It was the kind of feeling that blots everything else out, that eliminates everything until all you can remember is here and now and the feeling itself.
I embraced it. It was the feeling of being alive, of knowing that my life could be quashed in an instant.
My eyes snapped open and in a single heartbeat my arms were coated with feathers and my feet were talons. With one powerful beat of my wings, I was shooting upward, whooshing toward the mountain peaks and the magnificent sky above. Freedom at last! All the worries and stress were washed away, drowned out by the feeling of wild happiness. In a wave of emotion, I spiraled into a wide arc, marveling at my own grace and beauty. Nothing could have possibly put me into such bliss.
I brought myself down to reasonable searching height and felt grim despite how content my heart was with the feeling of flying. Even from high up, the mountains looked like giants, vast and oppressing. Shame could be anywhere down there… where? Where was he?
I kept my eyes peeled and my senses sharp for any possible sign of Shame while my mind wandered into the realm of memories. Shame and I celebrating my sixth birthday, giant globs of pastries before us. Shame patching up my skinned, bloody knee when I was nine. Me, thirteen years old, giving Shame a Death Doll to break on his seventy sixth birthday in hope that death would never capture him. Shame, sitting by the fire, telling Mam and I his knowledgeable tales of the wider world…
For some reason, that last memory stuck out to me. Maybe it was because it had been the most recent one, but I felt as though there was something deeper to it that I couldn’t explain. And there was something else about that memory too, something that he said. “He’s the first person to ever have avoided a Forsakenment after he’s been sentenced to one.” That’s it! But why? Why did that phrase in particular stick out in my mind?
I knew the answer after just a moment’s thought; it wasn’t true. Shame was wrong. There had been someone who had also managed to escape Forsakenment. No one talked about her though; no one liked so much as think about her. She’s said to be one of the greatest alchemists and mystics in history, as well as the most heartless. Legend has it that this woman—Spite, as they call her—planned on restoring the souls of the undead, but was stopped just in time by six powerful sages, who locked her up in a dungeon and secured the area with hundreds of killed mystics. A few months later, however, the mystics were found dead and Spite had vanished. No one has seen anything of her since.
Of course, Spite might not even be real. Most people regard her as the stuff from children’s stories. Besides, I’m pretty sure she lived thousands of years ago, so even if she was real, there’s no way she’s still alive today.
I wheeled in the sky, continuing on my search that I felt was more and more pointless with each passing second that proved fruitless. Despite this, I forced myself to keep going as the sun dipped lower in the sky and the temperature slowly declined. It seemed too soon that time had come to the brink of night, and with a heavy heart I began heading back, bitter failure seeping into me like damp.
The sun was balanced carefully on the horizon when I finally spotted the fire Malice and Deceit had made. I landed on a rock and transformed, feeling my body take on its normal shape. For a moment, I merely stood, savoring the last traces of the happy feeling that came with being a hawk, and when I could detect it no more, I headed toward camp.
My feet stumbled a little as a dizzy spell hit me out of the blue. “Whoa,” I muttered, holding my head in my hands. I was feeling a little… sick. I felt colder than normal. Water. I needed water, and then I’d be okay.
At the fire, I found Deceit lounging on the cold ground, feet propped up on a rock and hood pulled over his head. I sat opposite him and looked around in the silence.
“Where did Malice and Fury go?” I asked. My words practically gave Deceit a heart attack. He jumped a foot in the air, wind-milled his arms and thrashed until he was upright and standing, black hair ruffled from his little seizure.
“Oh hey,” he said, as calm and cool as ever. “Didn’t hear you come.”
I had to snicker at that. “No kidding. You looked like a scared jackrabbit!”
Deceit laughed and pretended to scowl. “I’ll get you back when you least expect it, trust me.” Turning serious again, he said, “Fury went hunting for dinner. He claimed he wasn’t going to share any of his game, so Malice had to go too since her totem is more ideal for this kind of thing than mine.”
I grimaced. “Sorry about him. He just doesn’t understand anything about kindness.”
“I’m not blaming you for it,” Deceit replied. He watched me carefully. “So I take it you didn’t find Shame?”
I shook my head. “No luck.”
“Sorry to hear that. But come on; he’ll show up, right? He’s a sage; he’s strong! Don’t worry, Joy. I’m sure he’s somewhere out there, completely fine.”
I sighed. “I hope you’re right. He’s old, not as strong as he used to be.”
Deceit frowned. “Well now I feel real bad about myself, bringing this up and making you sad and all.”
I waved my hand dismissively. “It’s fine, don’t worry about me. Worry about yourself and Malice, and what’s going to happen to you two after all this.”
“No.” Deceit walked around the fire and, in the blink of an eye, was crouching down next to me, close enough that I could feel his warm breath in my face. “I do worry about you, Joy,” he breathed. “I’ve been worrying about you ever since your brother left to go who knows where. You kind of retreated into yourself after that, and now I barely ever get to see the Joy I’ve watched growing up. You’ve lost two people dear to you last night; one is dead and the other might be. So yes, I worry about you. I want the real Joy to come out again despite all this badness happening around her.”
My heart had forgotten the rhythm of its own beat, which didn’t help with my slight dizziness. I was speechless, aware only of Deceit’s piercing black eyes and his arm around my shoulders.
“I, uh…” I said real intelligently. I swallowed and tried again. “Deceit, I’m really… I really want to—“
“OW!”
Deceit immediately withdrew his arm and spun around. “Malice?” he called.
A figure came lumbering through the boulders and snow-covered trees, but was much too burly to be Malice. A blue panther with a white star on his forehead prowled toward us, dragging a mountain goat behind him, teeth clamped against a hoofed leg. The panther deposited the goat by the fire, shook a few clumps of snow off his fur, and changed back into Fury, who promptly drew out his knife and began skinning.
“Malice?” Deceit demanded. “Where did my sister go?”
No sooner had the words left his lips when Malice came barreling toward us, arms laden with small birds and rodents. She let the dead critters clatter to the ground before grabbing Fury’s bag. She yanked out his water flask, gasped, “I saw a stream a little ways back, I’ll only be a moment,” and scurried away, obviously anxious to escape from us as soon as possible.
“Malice!” I yelled. “Malice, what’s wrong?” She didn’t turn around, and before I even realized I was moving, I ran after her.
It seemed that Malice wasn’t aware that someone was pursing her, she was so intent on getting away. She moved surprisingly quick, weaving in and out between mounds of snow, and I struggled to keep up with her pace. I kept my eyes on her brown furs, the only thing that stuck out in the bland, white landscape.
At last, she came to a halt at a fast moving stream. Something, I’m not sure what exactly, made me hesitate before barging in on her. Maybe it was the fact that she dropped Fury’s flask carelessly on the ground. Maybe it was because she was shrugging off her coat even though the sun was sinking, casting a cold shadow upon the mountains. Either way, there was something about the way she was acting that made me crouch behind a boulder and watch silently.
Malice peeled off her coat and sweater and hung both on a tree’s nearby branch. The sun’s last rays fell upon the fur, and I saw that one of the sleeves was soaked a deep red color…
I breathed in sharply as my eyes flew to Malice’s arm. She rolled the sleeve of her tunic up, exposing a deep gash on her forearm that bled a river of blood. It looked like it came from a mountain lion, and if Malice didn’t stem the flow of blood soon, she’d lose too much.
Malice, however, looked completely unconcerned as she inspected the wound. It didn’t even look like she was in any pain. She simply reached into her pocket, drew out a cloth, and dipped it into the stream. Gingerly, she began mopping the blood away with the wet cloth. She moved to dunk it into the water again and I caught another look at the wound.
My jaw dropped open. The gash was closing—healing—on its own.
I gawped for a moment, unable to believe my eyes. Something was coursing through me, burning my veins like fire, and I realized that it was anger, red hot anger that took hold of my mind.
I walked out from behind the boulder and growled, “Nice trick.”
Malice jumped and twisted around to face me, the damp cloth falling from her fingers. Her eyes darted nervously from me to her rapidly healing wound and back, as if debating in her mind what she should say.
“How come you never told me?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them, tumbling over each other like I couldn’t get them out fast enough. I felt surprised, because up until then I had no idea why I was so mad.
Malice looked just as surprised as I felt. “Joy,” she whispered, “I thought you would understand.”
“What,” I snapped, “am I supposed to understand why, as my best friend, you’ve been keeping something from me? We’re supposed to tell each other everything!”
Something in Malice’s eye sparked, something I’ve never seen inside of her, and that would’ve frightened me out of my wits if I wasn’t seething. “Everything?” Malice snorted. “What about your crush on Deceit? You never told me about that!”
I took an involuntary step back. I’ve never heard Malice talk like this to anyone before, and the face that she was talking like that to me… I quickly regained confidence, however, and shot back, “You know about that, so I’m not keeping anything from you! I’m not the one who has secrets here!”
“You’re not keeping any secrets from me?” Malice repeated, a disgusted look on her face. “Joy, it’s still a secret if you don’t tell me about it! I didn’t think that you would stoop to an excuse that low!”
“But you,” I hissed, “you, keeping something this big from me. You can heal yourself! This isn’t just some kind of tiny little thing! How could you keep this from me? We’re supposed to be friends!”
Malice looked ready to yell something tremendously hurtful at me, but suddenly, without warning, she broke down into sobs and curled up on the snowy ground. “I’m sorry!” she cried. “Yes, you have the right to know, but I was afraid, so afraid…”
Immediately, I felt guilty. She obviously had her reasons for not telling me, and it’s not like she was trying to hurt me. But I couldn’t help thinking that if she kept something like this hidden, what else isn’t she telling?
Malice whipped her eyes and sniffled. “I haven’t even told Deceit,” she gasped, and I felt instantly better. “I was just afraid,” Malice continued, gulping, “that everyone—you, Deceit, Aunt Moral, everyone—would think I’m a freak and would stay away from me, fear me…”
I stared at her like she was out of her mind. “Are you crazy?” I said. “You can heal! How would that make anyone scared of you? I mean, they should be happy about it; you can help heal them with cuts and stuff.”
Malice shook her head. “I don’t think it works like that,” she said. “I think my body does it naturally to itself when it senses damage. I can’t control it; I’ve already tried. I doubt I could channel it to heal someone else. It’s strange,” she continued, looking down at her almost completely sealed gash. “I think my body starts healing itself once the pain registers, but after a few moments, I can’t feel the pain anymore. I’m sure Deceit and Aunt Moral have no special ability like this; I wonder if I got it from one of my parents.”
I stared at her, noticing for the first time that the burns that had covered her face when we bumped into each other earlier were gone. How could I have missed this? How could I have never noticed?
Malice seemed to shrink a little under my gaze. “Joy, I’m sorry, I really am. I… I should’ve trusted you.”
I looked away, arms folded, unsure if what I was feeling now was still that silly, stupid anger at Malice. “Whatever,” I muttered. “Don’t forget to fill Fury’s water flask.”
I made to move away, to head back to camp, but Malice caught the small space of my wrist that was covered neither with my mitten nor the sleeve of my furs before I left, her face still wet with tears. I jumped a little at her touch; her hand was icy cold although she seemed not to notice. Probably her healing power again, I though bitterly.
“Joy,” Malice whispered pleadingly, “you won’t tell anyone, will you?”
I paused for a split second and some monster within me nearly took hold. Some evil impulse made me want to smirk, pull my arm away, and leave. I could imagine myself laughing at Malice’s look of alarm and fear. I could imagine myself telling Deceit that his sister had gruesome powers, that she tried to kill me. I imagined getting everyone we came across to hate Malice, to fear her, and these thoughts made the monster inside me growl with delight.
But I couldn’t. Malice is my friend!
So I just shrug one shoulder and say, “Sure, okay,” before patting Malice on the back and walking away.
Gender:
Points: 929
Reviews: 17