“We’d kill anyone, at this point. We might kill you right now, we’re so dangerous. Dying doesn’t mean a thing. The water king is dead. Dying doesn’t mean a thing.”
“I used to feel that way,” Marigold said, ripping the red dress from Darius’s hands. “But I don’t anymore. I don’t want to die. And if I make it out of here alive, there’s so much I’ll do.”
“Like what?” Darius asked.
Marigold got as close as she dared to him.
“Live for my own pleasure. Bed as many men as possible.”
Nell let go of her wrists, and Marigold reached up to touch Darius’s neck. She stroked his chin, he pulled her close, and then Marigold put her hands around his waist…and removed his knife, and stuck him with it. Moaning, he fell to the floor, and Marigold stabbed him once more in the leg, and then took him by the neck and held her knife to his skin.
Nell started laughing.
“You think I care if you kill him?” he asked.
In her mind’s eye she saw all of the people in her life that she most revered in her life–her parents, Melinda, Finn and his family, and even Topaz and Helena. She wondered if she really had died, and this was a kind of passing on rite. Her dress was torn and half off, her hair long and tangled. Marigold wanted these people she saw to, for once, see her in a position of strength. She shoved Darius to the floor, put her foot on his neck, and untied her feet, while Nell came towards her. Seconds later, he wrangled her to the floor with some ease.
He pinned her to the ground, with his forearm on her neck, and she grasped at it and hoped and prayed she could be strong enough to figure out what to do next. All of this fighting, fighting, fighting, both now and then, the scheming and plotting and trying to get better, trying to be safe, trying to be free, was exhausting.
And that’s when it happened, when she least expected it to. She lifted the men into the air and left them suspended. She put her hands toward the rock and moved it by magic. It was only when she saw her freedom through the open mouth of the cave–and it was in the form of a landscape, one of the gentler kinds she had been painting, envisioning, dreaming about for a month–only then that she realized she had harnessed secret forces beyond the ordinary. She could lift objects and people with incantations that came to her, seemingly from nowhere. In children of the fire kingdom, this often-clumsy manoeuvring was the first showings of a magical ability. With time, this morphed into the power to move the element fire.
But Marigold did not really inherit any genes from the fire kingdom, and she certainly had never shown signs of magical ability in her life before.
Looking back in the cave, she saw her captors still suspended in the air. It seemed cruel, but with a crooked smile, Marigold decided to leave them there. She couldn’t kill. But she wanted revenge. This was the best she could do, and she figured it was still pretty good.
She had no idea where she was going, but she stepped out into the landscape feeling solid and real and–quite nauseous. She rested her hands upon a boulder for a minute to get her bearings in this new world.
Now she decided to follow her instincts. She picked a direction and started walking. The sun was shining high in the sky now. It was a new day. Her compass would lead her where she needed to go.
Hours later, starving but still high from her escape from rape and death, Marigold’s compass led her to a gorgeous river and signs of civilization. It looked like a road lay about half a mile away from her.
First, she decided to bathe herself in the stream.
Inevitably, as she waded in, she thought of that night weeks before with Finn in the pond in the night-time. The feeling of that night was as instinctual as her body’s knowledge of the water that lay ahead after her escape from the cave. It was the same as the deep hunger she felt after working on the farm all day or after losing herself in a painting. Her attraction to Finn made sense on a level below her mind’s circling. She had hardly known him for more than a day when they were together that night, and yet, when they were quiet and their bodies were close, she knew everything. It was an intimacy she had never had with any man before–indeed, any person before. She could not explain it. There was no logic to it–Finn was handsome, of course, and strong, but then, Topaz also fit that description.
Finn had a way of being that fascinated her, though. A way of moving, speaking, thinking. She waded further into the water and felt its power, cold as ice, as it washed over and pulled away the kidnapping and the cave. The wave of nausea that had hit her before was calmed by the following water, and the super silence that occurred when she dunked her head. After walking back toward the land, she lay out in the sun and let her skin warm again.
The nausea returned eventually, but this time it was mixed with hunger. Perhaps she only needed to eat. It had been a full day, she supposed, since she’d had a meal.
It was time to walk back toward the road. She had a little money in her pocket to get a roll and a cup of tea at any inn she chanced to pass, and honestly, that might have been all she had the stomach for.
One sign pointed toward the fire kingdom, the other toward Finn and Rosemary and the rest. There was her old life and her new one. How to combine the two? Was it possible? Was there a third life that didn’t require her to leave her past completely behind?
The choice, however, was ultimately easy. After her near death experience, she needed to see her children. Finn was engaged, she reminded herself. Butting into his life again and complicating matters, didn’t seem attractive to her.
She walked toward the fire kingdom and her unfinished business there. It had been very difficult to leave in the first place, but happily, she found it was not so difficult to go back. She would be reminded of her former self, and that would be painful, but now she felt confident that she could walk toward that image of misery and sadness with her head held high, without feeling any danger of being recaptured by it.
So she turned toward the fire kingdom, walking on bare feet, her hair gliding in the wind.
Chapter Twelve
Finn
When they arrived at the cave, a rock had been rolled back and the sun began to shine. Finn steeled himself for a fight, but was perplexed when the situation seemed…so pleasant. He had expected dark and dreary surroundings infused with the terror of capture and perhaps death. A sort of shadow overhanging everything. But the feeling he got upon arriving there was one of…
Freedom.
It was irrepressible, but also deeply confusing. He had passed a sleepless, anxious night travelling in darkness in order to save Marigold. So were they arriving, all in their state, only to discover that Marigold…
