Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

ESCAPE HATCH

I ran out of there like a cockroach fleeing a freshly lit torch. One foot after another, weighed down by heaps of skirts, I ran towards the forest. The town road wound around it, but the quickest way home would be through. I needed to reach my level-headed father and sharp-tongued mother. They wouldn’t let a stranger take me from my home. And, surely, they had some say in it, since I was their daughter. Cursing myself for even thinking of leaving my family, I glanced back.

If Mav had run after me, he no longer held my trail. The group of black-cloaked men, however, seemed to follow at a leisurely pace, hoods drawn. My skin prickled with fear, but I drew comfort as I neared the forest. It was my childhood playground, a safe haven, and I could easily lose them. As I turned my head to face forward again, I saw a flash of blue eyes and blonde hair. But before I had time to register a hand held out in front of me, I flew with sudden force up into the air. I landed with equal violence on my back.

I wheezed, trying to reflate my lungs after the impact, my brain not processing the unnatural way in which I was flung off my feet. The blonde man hadn’t even touched me! I fluttered my eyes open, revealing my vulnerable, horizontal position. I clenched my fists, filled them with dirt, and pushed myself up to sit. As I lifted my gaze for the second time, I locked eyes with the bluest set I’d ever seen.

The man extended a hand to me, revealing a pale forearm brushed with light blonde hair. His open palm seemed delicate, no trace of roughness left by the household work I’d grown accustomed to. Nor of the hard labor of lumbering, I noted. Everything inside me screamed to resist his offer to pull me up, but I could not. My thoughts felt like eels I tried to catch with wet fingers, my focus seemed to pulse in and out, nauseating me. As if the motion was not my own, I extended my hand, my body betraying me. No! The touch of his fingers was both comforting and wrong, wrong, wrong.

On the short journey from sitting in the dirt to standing, I felt a breeze tickle everything from my stomach to my toes. My eyes shot down. My gown was gone. Save for the small silver dragon pendant hanging from my neck, I was utterly naked.

I looked up to see the man staring at me—a smile forming on his face. He still held my hand, which felt overly warm and uninvited. But I couldn’t break his stare, nor could I determine how I lost my dress.

As my slippery thoughts tried to re-form, a searing heat brushed my fingertips where they met his. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. The pain lessened, and the heat traveled up my arm, caressing me in a possessive, alarming way. After it passed my shoulder, it tightened around my neck just so slightly, as if to remind me it was there. Tears slipped down my cheeks as the heat advanced on my chest and circled my breasts, taunting me. I knew then I was being violated—in some strange, impossible way. His eyes had gone from hungry to ravenous. But even in my delirious and pained state, I had the vague impression his desire was more cruel than carnal.

I battled to get the words out. “What do you want from me?”

An almost imperceptible shadow crossed over his simmering grin. “Well, first of all, I believe you owe me a dance.”

The man led me into a twirl and laughed as if he was playing his favorite, most hysterical game.

My face grew hotter, wetter. I felt utterly exposed and trapped, unable to move.

“But more importantly,” he continued, pausing our dance, “I am here to complete my queen’s task, sweet Terra. And honestly, I didn’t think you would run. Lost good money on that, I might add. I have never had the pleasure of experiencing rejection from a young human maiden. It is a rare occasion to find myself surprised, and I have to say, it was to my supreme delight.”

Queen? Of where? “What could a queen possibly need from a miner’s daughter?” I asked, tears continuing to streak my face. “There must be a mistake. I am no one. I have nothing!” I breathed out the last part, a silent scream. My heart blared so loudly I could feel it ring in my ears, but I could not move.

“In time, you will see you have more to give her than you may wish. Now, I must take you home,” he said.

This is my home! I wanted to yell.

The heat continued to roam southward. Though my mind was saturated in a fog of pain, my feet called to me, begging me to run. I could not break his gaze, but my left hand throbbed, drawing my attention to it. The throb was more acute—more pounding—than the searing heat I’d felt in my right when Fayzien touched it.

The new pain grew so intense that it became a heartbeat in my chest, in my head, in my whole body.

The tension in my left hand came from the dirt I’d forgotten I was holding. Not from my strained fist, but the dirt itself.

Not just dirt. Earth.

The word “Earth” rang in my head like a call to prayer. The pulsing seemed to have an upward direction, as if it wanted me to raise my clenched fist. On instinct, I battled to comply, bringing my hand level with the man’s face. The faintest sign of confusion flickered in his eyes as I opened my palm.

The Earth leapt from my hand, hitting him with an unnatural force that knocked him several feet back and to the ground. His grip on me released. My jaw loosened at the absurdity of the act, but I gaped only for a split second before the dirt beneath my feet pushed me towards the forest.

I ran at a pace I had never reached before. The Earth seemed to lift my feet faster, propelling me forwards. I no longer followed any trail I recognized, though I had wandered every nook and cranny in our small forest countless times. A path opened up, shrub and brush parting like curtains as I flailed through the trees. I wanted to pause, to check if the ludicrous assistance I seemed to be receiving was the conjuring of my mind. But I did not. I had not a second to spare.

The unfamiliar path led me to a stone bridge across a creek. Cut with gallonberries on both sides, I recognized it as the place Gia and I picked earlier that week. Across the bridge was home.

The path seemed to be diverting me away from the bridge, but I did not acquiesce. Home was close. I jumped and scrambled over bushes and roots alike until I hit hard stone. I heard a humorless cackle and turned back to see the man. He stopped several paces away from me, arms extended out to opposing sides. He breathed heavily, his cloak was torn and riddled with brambles, and his golden hair was in more disarray than someone like him would ever allow. But his grin spread wide, gleeful. I felt movement beneath my feet and looked down to see water swirling beneath the bridge. I blinked. The river moved impossibly—not in a current pattern at all. It moved as if… it were alive. My eyes snapped back to him, his arms open. Was he…?

I tried to take another step, but the water built to the point of crashing over the bridge. Two steps later, and the river erupted . A wave swept over my head, nearly taking me down, but I steadied myself on the railing and pushed forward. The water was a rising tide, raging as if to wrap around my waist and whisk me away. The frigid moisture clung to my bare skin like a sodden woolen dress, and I knew my feet would lose grip in a matter of moments.

I looked up for any sort of help, desperate. I spotted a lone vine that hadn’t been there a moment ago, dangling from a tree that curved over the bridge like a crescent moon. Despite the cold, my legs launched me high enough to grab hold of the vine. As I did, it flung me out of the water and across the bank. Onto the other side of the river.

I shot a glance backward at the man. It looked like he was gliding towards me over the river, which inexplicably had become a tormenting sea. Despite my acute disbelief, pure adrenaline pushed me forward, and I continued to run until a massive rodent hole opened up before me. The rodents of Argention grew to the size of the pigs. When I was a girl, I used to play in those long tunnels, and was smacked senseless for coming home head to toe in dirt. But right now, I had no time to question my instinct. I took a deep, steadying breath and jumped feet first into the hole. As I slid down, I thought I heard the opening close behind me.

I barreled through the tunnel until I landed in what appeared to be an underground cavern of sorts. Despite the raw sting that coated my skin from the fall through the Earth, I could only think of the blue-eyed man. Fayzien . I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, the impossible image of a man walking on water plastering itself to the back of my eyelids.

“This can’t be real,” I whispered aloud, looking around. “Is any of this real?”

But as much as the last hour had felt like a nightmare, I was fairly certain I wasn’t dreaming. Forcing myself to focus on the escape, I took in my surroundings. It was a large enough space for me to stand nearly upright. The tunnel I’d fallen through opened into the space from the ceiling behind me, and three other tunnels forked out of the cavern in front. One seemed to slope down further, possibly to another network of caverns below. The two remaining tunnels stood opposing one another. From my vantage point, one went left and one went right.

I flipped a coin in my mind and chose left. I couldn’t allow myself to overthink things. After twenty minutes of crawling on hands and knees, I ended up in a smaller cavern with even fewer viable exit options. I squeezed my eyelids together, willing the hot moisture of frustration to stay behind them. Turning around to try the other tunnel, I moderated my breathing—in and out—as I crawled. Moments after entering the other path, I realized conventional crawling wouldn’t work. I resorted to pulling myself forward one forearm at a time while my lower body dragged behind me. A painful activity, particularly when naked. Which I still was.

I gritted my teeth, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out at the searing cuts of gravel against my unprotected skin. By the time I reached the third cavern, my body was a masterpiece of dirt, grime, and blood. It felt like battle armor.

The third cavern had one large tunnel, wide enough that I could walk through hunched over. I marveled at the size; yes, moles were large in Argention, but these were beyond practicality. The tunnel opened up as I made my way, eventually feeding into the mouth of a cave shielded by a canopy of vines. The clear night sent the moonlight streaming through. I pushed the curtain of vines to the side and breathed in the evening air—the scent of the Argen forest pines, spruces and firs with creeping moss coats and sprawling twisted roots. My forest. The foliage had breathed into my blood my whole life. The place I loved but had felt compelled to leave behind. It was still my home.

I steadied myself. The position of the moon told me the end of that day had just passed. It was likely about an hour past midnight. It took another hour of running in circles, wandering around surprisingly unfamiliar canopies and rock fields, to get my bearings. At first, I was hesitant. Hiding behind trees, throwing paranoid glances over my shoulder. But my mud-skinned body and dirt-matted hair gave me a comforting camouflage. Eventually, when I became convinced no one was following me, I concentrated on finding my way home.

It was easy enough, once I found a landmark I recognized. Each brush of that wood had its own feel, its own heartbeat. Each breath the forest took helped point me in the right direction. After another hour, I reached the edge of the trees, just a few hundred yards away from my cottage. Candles were burning, a soft glow in the windows.

They must be worried sick about me. A familiar pang of guilt emerged, sharp in my stomach.

Determined not to walk through my front door stark naked, which would surely embarrass my father and brothers as much as it would me, I crept silently towards the house. We had an old cellar a few dozen yards away from the cottage, used mainly for old storage and dry goods in the winter. A tunnel connected it to a crawl space beneath the main room, a function my father added for retrieving supplies during cold winter nights. I knew my father had left some military wear from when he trained to be a soldier in his youth. I had played in the clothes as a child, imagining myself a war hero. They were nothing more than simple camouflage trousers and a jacket, but they would do better than mud.

I tugged on the cellar door and descended into the space, shutting it behind me. I pulled on my father’s pants and buttoned his coat, both of which hung awkwardly snug on my curved body. When I turned to leave, I heard a faint, alarming sound from the tunnel opening. I stilled to listen. The thick round stone that served as the door in the direction of the cottage muffled the noise, but I heard it again. The unmistakable sound of a woman’s cry.

I moved faster than I could think, shoving the first stone to the side and sprinting through the tunnel. The cries mixed with screams and continued to amplify, turning my insides cold. By the time I reached the end of the tunnel, I shook almost uncontrollably, a sinking feeling about who those screams belonged to lodged in my gut. But I attempted to calm myself—in and out went my breathing. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast , my father always said. I ran my fingertips along the circumference of the second stone and loosened its seal. Working my fingers through the crack between the tunnel and the stone, I found purchase on the door. I nudged it, tipped it forward, and lowered it carefully onto the ground.

As silently as I could, I slid on my stomach into the dirt crawl space until I was underneath the main room of our cottage. The wailing remained relentless, and figures came into focus as I rolled onto my back to face upwards. I looked into my house through the small gaps between sweet-smelling pinon floorboards laid carefully by my father years ago. I was looking straight up at the outsider.