“Where did you get those?” he asked of the knives.
“You’re a Prince. You have the power to heal. Do it!”
His mouth hung agape. “I do?”
“No, Mistress. Run,” Damion said, grimacing.
“Yes, cousin,” Lavana said from the doorway. “Run.”
Magda skirted the table and raced out another door, through the short, dim hallway and into a sparse living area with a leather couch, a few chairs, and a large fireplace. One wall was almost entirely open doors. She rushed out onto the patio and halted. Out of the black water of the gazing pool, which was normally a silvery-blue hue, a large lumpy head arose.
“Oh, good,” Lavana said as she strolled onto the patio behind Magda. “The ogre is here.”
Though her thigh was sheeted in blood and burned with each pulse of her galloping heartbeat, Magda unleashed her knives, spun, and attacked.
Even after seven years, the rhythm of battle returned to her as if she had spent every day in exile training. She could not discount the heat of the Enneahedron pressed against her chest, fueling her.
Fighting hand-to-hand with finger-knives was as much of a dance as combat. By the time the ogre took his first earth-quaking step out of the pool, blood ran from numerous small grazes and nicks over her body. But at least she’d avoided any deathly strikes.
The shaking of the ground caused them both to lose their balance and stumble back from each other.
The iron burn on Lavana’s face looked even worse in the sun, swelling and raw black, oozing yellowish pus.
“That looks painful. I hope your Prince is a skilled healer,” Magda said, panting and attempting to keep her balance as the ogre took another step into this world.
An ogre. The only compensation an ogre took for use of its considerable brute strength was children, preferably babies. And this was when Magda knew that her younger cousin, daughter of her mother’s wheedling brother, truly was the terror that Damion made her out to be. In truth, she’d thought him simply angry because Lavana had killed Alanna. But now it was clear, whatever honor Lavana had was long gone.
“Perhaps I will not need my Prince to heal me,” Lavana said. “Perhaps yours will do so once I claim him instead.” Her knives slid back into their sheaths. Small cuts bled through her sleeves and pants.
“What’s wrong with your Prince?” Magda panted. “Doesn’t he want to be claimed by you?”
The ogre’s shadow fell over them then. Magda’s gaze rolled up and up and up.
A mouth full of sharp brown teeth smiled down at her. Cresting above the second story colonnade, his fat lump of a head, haloed by a wild tangle of orange hair, looked like a clod of wet clay. His soaked, rough spun clothes clung to the bulging misshapen bulk of his body. The gristly curls of nose-hairs protruding from his nostrils looked about as long as her legs.
Lavana folded her arms, smiling. “Let’s see what you make of an ogre.”
As if his size weren’t bad enough, the brute was fast too. One of his over-long arms flew out and slammed into her like a battering ram. She sailed across the patio and crashed into one of the columns of the east wing, her shoulder cracking. Yelping, she crumbled, pain sparking over her vision in white-and-black bursts, her left arm failing to respond when she told it to move.
“Far too easy.” Lavana’s voice echoed off the palazzo’s walls and through its arcades. “Kill her. But don’t eat her.”
The ogre grumbled in its thick, slurred language. The ground trembled again as it plodded towards her.
Vision doubled by pain and tears, she snapped off her necklace and smashed the ceramic ball against the stone. Amid the shards, little bigger than a pea, the tiny green seed was difficult to pick up as her entire body was shaking, both from the pain of her broken arm and from the ogre’s approach. Yet, somehow, she managed to get hold of it. If she ate the seed, she would escape, but then Damion and Riker would be left behind and surely killed.
And then she heard a soft sound, someone clearing his throat.
She looked up and found Kirk obscured in the shadows under the colonnade. He waved for her to come to him.
Clutching the seed in her hand, she fought through the nauseating crash and churn of agony and crawled on her knees into the shadows. The ogre’s fist rose.
She pitched herself away. The stone pavers cracked under the ogre’s blow.
Kirk tsked, though he was smiling. “Master Python will not be pleased.” He gave Magda a disapproving once over and then sighed. The ogre grumbled. Lavana was screeching from somewhere behind him, though her words were lost on Magda.
Kirk’s pointy little fingers pinched Magda’s ear. In a blur, she was suddenly in another room. A bedroom.
Python was just starting to peel off his shirt. He looked as surprised as she felt sprawled on the marshmallowy softness of his mattress.
