Young Writers Society

Emily and Zita had gone to bed that night absolutely exhausted. They had spent the entire day before with the younger kids, playing with them, making and feeding them their meals, playing some more, putting them to bed, and making sure they stayed in bed. They were asleep before their heads hit their pillows. But they didn’t awake the next morning naturally. They awoke to screaming and the smell of smoke.

In an instant, they were both on their feet. Emily yanked on a pair of black gardeners gloves and shoved a sunhat on her head before stuffing a random assortment of stuff into a single case and tossing it out the open window, all in a matter of a few seconds. Then they both rushed downstairs, toward the screaming. The moment they opened their door their room flooded with smoke. Zita coughed and dropped to the ground to crawl under it while Emily just ran right into it and down the hall, smashing open doors as she went. Zita squinted through the smoky red haze and spotted flashed of green, red, and blue magic where the screaming was coming from.

She crawled that way, following a stupid, yet unstoppable instinct she didn’t realize she had. She carefully lowered herself down the steps and onto the main floor. She coughed and pulled the hem of the purple dress she had fallen asleep in over her nose and mouth. It didn’t seem to help at all. Her lungs burned with every breath, but she had to go here. She groped forward in the low visibility, unable to find the flames the heat and smoke told her was there. In what felt like an eternity, she managed to find her way to the dining area. She wished she hadn’t.

The first thing she found after a table, was a dead body. A very small dead body. She clamped her hand over her mouth, still hearing grunts and screams from somewhere else in the room, and muffled her own scream. The little girl was laying facedown on the floor with her head turned to the side, her eyes open wide and a clot of blood in her once neatly-braided hair. A tear dropped from Zita’s eye and she squeezed them shut.

No. The sensible side of her said cooly, block it out, block it all out. Help who you can now, cry for those you can’t later. The other side of her was bawling in the corner, so she grit her teeth and blocked out her emotions. Good thing I have a lot of practice, She thought with a twisted smile and crawled toward where the fight was.

The smoke cleared up a bit when she got there, enough so that she was sort of able to see what was going on. Kivvien was there, that much was clear. His hands blazed with intense green light as they worked the carefully practiced patterns of spells. She could just barely make out the look in his murky green eyes, kill. His intent was clear. Her eyes went to the enemy, but she couldn’t make them out, only the many, many hands glowing shades of red, green, blue, and yellow, and the spells that bound them in blue and green. Kivvien and Imani, Zita realized the older woman was there, somewhere, hiding in the smoke.

A red flash tried to wrap around Kivviens neck, but a flick of his fingers dissipated it. The spell that had been working on one of the attackers, revealed to Zita through only the green and red glow around their chest and hands respectively, flickered out for just a second and the red glow vanished with it. Kivvien cursed and worked another spell, fending off another flash of red, then blue and yellow, every time having to start over on his casting. His jaw tightened and he dropped his hands, rendered immediately invisible. There was a dull flash of steel as he pulled a rapier from inside his coat and crouched, slinking into the smoke.

Zita went the other way, to where the little kids screams sounded near the kitchen. She found the sources surrounded by walls of flame on all sides and closing in fast. None of them were hurt so far as she could tell, but she was too busy getting to her feet and unting the sweater that she had previously forgotten was around her waist and trying to put out some of the flames. Instead of going out, the flames roared higher and the kids shrieked louder. Her sweater caught fire and she tossed it away. Okay. There was another way around this.

Her mind worked a thousand miles and hour. She remembered the fireplace at the Striker household, how it never went out because...of-freaking-course it had to be a spell. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her mind was growing foggier by the second as the smoke invaded her lungs, piercing her throat with every breath. She pushed the pain aside, as she had done a thousand times before. This was no different than any day at the Striker’s. She would be fine.

She had always made a point to memorize every spell she saw, so how had they put out the fire? She spread both hands before her and channeled a bit of magic into them. The kids were still screaming, crying out for her to hurry to help to make it go away. So she did.

Orange unlike any shade fire could produce enveloped the flame. Zita’s hands were moving, but she was too focused on what she wanted, her intention, to really notice. The flame, in an instant, vanished. The kids swarmed her and she got to her hands and knees. They did the same and together, as a group, they crawled to the front door.

When they got there, the air cleared. Zita found she could breathe freely again, but then, her lungs stopped altogether. Standing guard, just outside the door, were three very tall, very strong, very well armed mercenaries in multicolored armor, built to blend with the colored vegetation. Zita got to her feet when they saw her and guided the kids behind her. She gave what she hoped was an intimidating look.

They wordlessly brandished their weapons and charged. She didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing. Her mind was reeling. Her hands were up. A blur of green and orange, a flash of steel. Kivvien stood over the body of the third guard before the other two had even hit the ground.

“You got them out?” His voice was raspy. Zita nodded. He returned the gesture, giving her an impressed look, “Let’s go.” He gestured with his free hand to the attackers’ wagons. Zita gave another nod and led the scared kids to the wagons. Kivvien went in first, only Zita saw him drop tarp-wrapped things out the far window. When he came back he and Zita worked together to get the kids inside. When they were all loaded in, Kivvien told them to wait there and got out to talk to Zita.

“Okay, look. I need you to stay here and watch the kids, if someone other than me, Imani, Emily, or other kids come,” He forced his sword into her hands, “The sharp end goes into the other guy.” His lips twitched up in a smirk, and for a second, Zita was hit with just how younghe was. He couldn’t be much older than her, maybe sixteen or seventeen if you pushed it. It was easy to forget when his eyes gleamed with rage unrivaled by hurricanes.

“I don’t-”

“Look,” He repeated, “I’ve got to get the others out of there, you’ve got to make sure the ones who are safe stay that way. We’re wasting time.”

Her eyes hardened and her grip tightened around the sword. She gave him the nod he was looking for. With that, he was gone, back into the burning building.

Zita took a shaky breath and climbed into the wagon with the kids. They were huddled in the back, most of them clutching burned arms or legs and crying silently, their voices gone. She knelt next to them and put the sword aside to check their wounds. She took the arm of the little troll boy Kivvien had been holding the day before and checked the burn. It wasn’t that bad, she decided, she had had many similar ones and the ways to sooth the pain were ingrained deep in her memory.

She gave him an encouraging smile, “It’ll get better,” She assured him, “but we have to make it stop hurting right now, okay?” He gave her a shy nod, blinking up at her with puffy blue eyes and wiping his runny nose with his uninjured arm.

She asked him to wait just a moment while she found what she needed in the duffle bags that lined the walls. She ignored the guns, which she dared not touch, that sat at the very bottom of each bag and just took the water bottles off the top. She gathered all the water she could find in her arms and grabbed just one to finish treating her young patient. She cupped one hand and poured some water into it. Before it could seep between her fingers she charged it with magic, heal. Then she poured it over his wound. The angry blue color subsided and the blistering died down a little. The boy stopped crying and gave a little smile. She gave him the rest of the water to drink and moved on to the next kid.

Soon, everyone had had their wounds tended to and had a bottle of water to drink with a few extras set aside for anyone else who might come along. That thought jarred Zita out of the short rest she had allowed herself. She scooped up the sword and scooted over to the back flap of the tarp-covered wagon and peeked out a small opening.

Flames lapped out of the windows, and caught the surrounding trees. Red and yellow autumn leaves blazed all around. Some twisted side of Zita found the sight almost beautiful. The other side was shaking in fear. She should be doing something. She was a sitting duck here, crouching in the back of a wagon, clutching a sword she didn’t know how to use, watching helplessly as the place that she might have grown to call home go up in flames.

There are bodies inside. The thought clawed at the back of her skull, the image of the dead little girl forcing itself behind her eyelids. She squeezed her eyes shut until she saw spots. No. She would not lets that hunt her. She had a job. That thought gave her the most miniscule of comforts. She tossed the sword from hand to hand. Left, right, left, right. Either would do to fight with, neither would improve her skill. With every switch the weapon felt a little less foreign, a little more comfortable. Her sensible side hated it. Her twisted side smiled.

She wondered, biting her tongue after some more time had passed, if maybe that little girl wasn’t the only one dead. Maybe the bodies of Emily and Kivvien had joined her. Maybe the bodies of many more children were currently blistering in the flames. She swallowed the lump in her throat. She had practiced this. Don’t get attached. If you like it it will leave or be taken. That was rule one.

As the seconds ticked by she remembered her friend. She had only ever had one when she lived with the Striker’s, and even he might not have counted. He was a little bird with wings like hers, a parrot. She had found him at the base of her tree, a big old oak with a hiding place between the roots, with a cut at the base of one of his wings. She had used what little she had, a couple scraps of fabric, stream water, boiled in a little iron bowl she had smuggled out of the house to purify it, and little bits of cotton stuffing from one of her little siblings’ dolls, to patch him up.

Even when he was well he kept coming back, so often, in fact, that Zita had given him a name, Nonto, after the god of peace. She would confide in him, tell him things and make jokes he would laugh at, or, at least, make a sound that seemed his equivalent of laughter. He would perch on a root that stuck up just so, before diving back into the dirt and they would sit and chat for hours. It was the closest Zita would ever come to talking to one of her own kind, and she enjoyed it. But then Titin found out about Nonto, and it was all over. She could still see the sick smile on his face as he broke the birds neck. She could still feel the tears she couldn’t stop from running down her cheeks in torrents. The shattered feeling in her chest as she refused to leave the woods for days. The aching hunger that drove her back to the house. Back to her hell.

Zita was jerked back to the present when the doors burst open, letting out a wave of smoke followed by a group of figures. Leading them was Emily, her arms spread wide and her magic glowing in a dome around a sickeningly small group of kids. Following then were Imani and, finally, Kivvien, both watching the backs and sides of the group.

The next few minutes were a blur. Soon enough, Kivvien’s rapier was back inside his coat, and all the kids were taken care of and huddled in the backs of two of the wagons. Emily had retrieved the suitcase she had thrown out the window and was sitting between Imani and Zita on the drivers bench of one of the wagons while Kivvien sat on the other. With a flick of the reigns, Emily and Kivvien started the group off down the road.

Imani climbed into the back to look after and calm the children, so Zita and Emily were left alone looking all-too conspicuous with their whole bodies covered in ash and soot, their cheeks flushed from the heat and both of them appearing to be no older than their early teens. Kivvien, however, looked like he did this every day as he drove his team of horses with a confidence Zita couldn’t imagine being able to muster.

Zita broke the silence between them.

“What just happened?”

Emily looked like she was fighting back tears, but Zita didn’t regret asking, “Those were raiders,” She sniffed, “They find Kid Stops and take whatever we have. I guess they think we’re easy targets or something, which we kinda are.” She flicked the reigns unnecessarily and the horses put on a short burst of speed, “They don’t care who gets killed in the process, or how young they are, as long as they get what they want. We don’t even know what they do with it.” She grit her teeth, her fangs peeking out from between her colorless lips.

Zita pondered this for a second. Two seconds. “Where are we going?”

“There’s an annual meeting we hold between all the Stop Leaders, Imani wasn’t supposed to show up until three days from now, but this is kinda an emergency.” She laughed without humor. The sound sent shivers down Zita’s spine. She scooted away a centimeter.

“Where is it?” Zita decided simple questions were all she was willing to risk with Emily.

“Rykvor, the country, not the city. There a small town there a little ways outside of the capital, Noso. it might have a name a long time ago, but it was probably forgotten long before I got to Nerdifae.” Another flick of the reigns pressed Zita against the back of her seat.

They rode in silence after that. Zita could hear Imani comforting the children inside the wagon, telling them stories to calm their nerves and playing little games. The sniffling and crying of the kids died down until Zita couldn’t hear it any more, just the muffled sound of Imani’s voice as she told the old myth of Rinpolon, the vigilante monster, blessed by the gods and bringer of peace to his land. A nice story, full of plenty of plot twists and action to keep the kids distracted until the sun set and they dozed off.

When the sky was painted rainbow hues from the setting of the sun, and the sister moons rose one after the other to join the stars, Zita looked over at Kivvien. He tried to hide it, but even Zita could tell he was exhausted. His shoulders hunched, his under eyes were bruised purple, and his confidence was slowly dissolving. Zita stood up and waited for the wagons to drift coler together, then leapt beside him on his bench.

“Hey,” She greeted, not nearly as tired as he was.

“Hi,” He tried to sound wide awake, but his exhaustion was too great to hide.

“You’re going to get some sleep,” She ordered, taking hold of the reigns with one hand.

He looked at her in surprise, “You don’t have to-”

“Don’t try to tell me you’re not dead tired. I saw what you did in there, and you’ve been up a lot longer than I have. Go. Sleep. I’ll switch with you in the morning.”

He gave her a grateful smile and handed over the reigns, “Thanks.”

“No problem, now go!” She shooed him off and he ducked into the back, leaving Zita alone in the front. She fell behind a little to follow Emily, who seemed to know where she was going and relaxed as much as she could.

It was a long trip. They rode all through the night without stopping. At one point Emily switched with Imani, but Zita stayed were she was even as the sun began to rise. She couldn’t find it in herself to even try to sleep. Every time she closed her eyes she saw that little girl. That nameless little girl, killed for the convenience of others. With a gun, no less. Zita’s nose crinkled at the thought of the vile, magic-draining, things. The fact that anyone would use one, let alone so many, in Nerdifae was such a repulsive thought, Zita felt bile stir in her stomach. She cleared her mind of those thoughts and forced it to be blank. She stayed at the reigns until well after daybreak, trying the whole time to clear her head of the images that scrolled endlessly before her mind's eye.

She jumped at a tap on her shoulder. She glanced back to see a bleary-eyed Kivvien hopping onto the bench next to her. “Good morning,” He said with a yawn.

“Hey.”

“You lied.”

“Did I?”

He rolled his eyes, “You said you’d switch with me in the morning. It’s almost noon.”

“It is.” Zita knew she was being evasive, but she wasn’t really willing to have this conversation with the kid she was still kinda scared of.

“You didn’t wake me.”

“I didn’t.”

He sighed, “You don’t want to sleep, do you?” Zita didn’t say anything. “Here.” He reached over and took the reigns from her too-tight grip with a single smooth motion, “At least rest your eyes.”

Whether Zita liked it or not, that statement brought the absolute exhaustion she had been blocking out crashing down on her all at once. She surrendered her seat and leaned back, the back of the bench wedged between her bound wings and her back. She closed her eyes.