Elf Saga: Bloodlines (Part 1: Curse of the Jaguar) (9 page)

The faeries glow a bit brighter and a faint
cloud of green dust fills the air, and from within that dust a
tangle of balewood vines and yellow blossoms grow out of thin air.
Then a few pale tendrils weave down and around the steel shackles,
wrapping over and over the chains.

“Now what?” I can’t feel anything
happening.

“Keep your panties on.” Rajani grins. “You
can rush life, but you can’t rush chemistry.”

“What does that mean?”

The cuffs snap open somewhere inside the
tangle of balewood roots, and a moment later the roots themselves
loosen up enough for me to slip my hands out. “Nice. What did you
do?”

“Balewood leeches all sorts of chemicals out
of the soil, which is how it kills other plants. I just used it to
leech the alchemic treatments from your chains, and poof, they
broke.”

“Awesome.” I rub my wrists and stand up.
“What about the Drogori curse on them?”

The chains begin to shriek. No, seriously,
the chains themselves begin to scream and wail like a woman trapped
between pain and rage, not unlike my friend Sakoya when she found
out mid-labor that she was having triplets and still had two to
go.

Rajani leaps to her feet as her faeries dash
back into her hair. “The curse seems to be working just fine.”

I kick the chains into a pool of oil, which
barely muffles the noise, and then we run across the chamber,
ignoring the shouts of the prisoners, and I crash through the door
with my shoulder. The entire door rips off its hinges and slams
into the corridor wall.

“Rajani, let’s go!”

“Wait, where’s my bag?” She’s standing in the
open doorway of the jailor’s office full of papers and keys and
small boxes. We grab her lightning knife and my hatchet, but she
keeps looking around.

“I’ll get you a new bag. Let’s go!” I wave at
her.

Rajani paws through the papers and pops the
lids off the boxes. “I have to find it!”

“I’ll buy you a new one!” I stomp back into
the office. “Hell, I’ll make you a new one from the skins of your
enemies, but we have to go!”

“We can’t go! The crystals are in my
bag!”

I freeze. “What crystals?”

“The crystal levers from the Valkyrie’s
console,” she says, still ransacking the office madly. “I put them
in my bag so no one could steal the ship.”

“So, without them…?”

“We can’t leave!”

I blink. Somewhere behind me a cursed chain
is screaming, and angry prisoners are yelling, and approaching
guards are shouting. I turn toward an old book shelf and smash my
fist through it, shattering three shelves and spilling a dozen
ledgers and tools on the floor. I hit it again, and again.

“Why! Is nothing! Ever! Easy!”

I suppose this is the point where I just stop
caring, because when the first guard runs into the doorway of the
office, I grab him by his uniform and throw him back down the hall,
knocking six or seven more men to the ground. And I start
walking.

“Gen! Gen, we have to find my bag!” Rajani
calls from the office.

“I’m getting the damn bag,” I snarl.

“But we don’t know where it is!”

“I know exactly where it is.” Two of the
guards crawl free of their compatriots and reach for their
flintlocks. I grab the guns by their barrels, crush them like
flowers, and then club both men with their own pistol stocks.

“How?” Rajani hurries after me.

“It’s something Mother taught me once.” I
step over the guards and keep walking. “When something bad happens,
you blame the bad guy. So let’s go get the bad guy.”

The dungeons are a bit of a maze, but we find
the stairs, mostly by following the sounds of the oncoming guards.
And as the sound of the screaming chain fades behind us, and as the
number of bruised and moaning guards that I step over grows, we
work our way back up to the hall where the captain’s office was,
and out to the main courtyard where we first arrived.

Two dozen men and women are there waiting for
us, with two dozen rifles all aiming green-glowing alchemic rounds
at my head. Captain Oda is there with them, pointing a pistol at
me. “Get down on your knees, now!”

They beat me up, throw me in jail, and now
they want to shoot me? Again?

I am done.

Done with this town.

Done with these people.

Done holding back.

I keep walking.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the
captain asks, cocking her pistol.

“WHERE’S AMARA?!” I roar back at her,
spreading my arms and legs a bit to make sure they can’t shoot
Rajani behind me.

“I want you on your knees, now!” the captain
shouts again.

“AND I WANT AMARA! NOW!”

“Surrender!” The flintlock hammers all snap
back, ready to fire.

“YOU SURRENDER!” I admit, this was less than
witty.

I leap at them.

They fire at me.

And I slam into a wall.

Not into a hail of acid bullets, but a wall.
A wall of golden light.

I crash back down on my backside and I see
through the wall of light that the soldiers’ bullets have all
shattered on the opposite side of the wall and a thin drizzle of
acid is running down to the flagstones.

“Are we all done behaving like angry babies?”
a woman asks.

“Who the hell…?” I turn to look at the open
gates and see a woman riding slowly into the courtyard. Her mount
is a huge unicorn stallion, a beautiful black monster with golden
hooves, mane, and tail, and a golden spear shining above its
glaring eyes. The woman herself is much smaller, her thin frame
cloaked in a long golden dress, her dark face framed by a
magnificent black mane of hair, her hands and temples gleaming with
golden tattoos, and her forehead blazing with the golden light of a
small spiraling horn.

“Oh.” I blink and exhale. “It’s you. You’re
the queen, right?”

“Why yes, I am.” The woman smirks. “Now, can
I drop this magic barrier and expect everyone to play nicely, or
does my big angry friend here need to start throwing his weight
around?” She pets the mane of her unicorn, which is flaring its
nostrils and baring its teeth furiously.

My pulse slows and my skin cools as she
speaks, and I shrug. “I think we’re good now.”

“So glad to hear it, sweetie.” Her Majesty
Amina Zarinde nudges her stallion into the courtyard as the little
horn on her forehead stops glowing and the wall of light between me
and the guards fades away.

“Now, captain, perhaps you can explain all of
this.” The little sovereign waves at the shallow trench that the
guards’ acid rounds have eaten into the stone tiles.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Captain Oda bows her
head. “There seems to have been a series of misunderstandings this
morning. Earlier today, our guards mistook Miss Marev here for the
exile Lozen. And following a brief altercation, Her Highness
Princess Amara directed her personal guards to arrest Miss Marev
and her companion. I am not clear what charges she brought against
them.”

“Bullshit charges, that’s what,” I snipe at
the captain. Turning to the woman on the unicorn, I say, with an
awkward half-bow, “Listen, Your Queen-ness, no disrespect, but I’m
just trying to track down my mother, and your people, including
your daughter, have all been a big sack of dicks about the whole
thing.”

She laughs. “Oh sweetie, you’re just like
your mother, aren’t you?”

I frown. “No.”

“Yes, you are.” She looks past me and waves
giddily, yelling, “Hello Rajani, you’re looking lovely as always.
It’s so nice to see you again!” She looks back down at me and says,
“And for what it’s worth, I’m not a queen anymore.” She nudges her
mount and the glaring black monster marches past me toward the
stables. “I am an empress.”

“Empress? Of what?” I can see that the
captain wants to strangle me for not using any of her precious
decorum, and I wink at her as I walk along next to the unicorn. At
arm’s length. Length and a half. Crap, unicorns are scary. I think
there’s dried blood on this one’s hooves.

“Empress of all Viraka.” She halts and two
grooms step forward to take the unicorn from her as she slips from
her saddle and plunges to the ground beside me, where she barely
comes up to my shoulder. “As of last week, I rule over the entire
continent. Come along, please.”

I glance back toward the open gates and the
city beyond. I just want to get the hell out of here, but the
chance to talk to the queen, sorry, empress, is probably worth
risking yet another pointless fight with the guards later when we
have some sort of inevitably avoidable misunderstanding.

So I follow the great Amina Zarinde through a
large doorway into a hall, and then another hall, and past some
rooms full of sculptures and young people laughing and playing
music, and finally we arrive in a large office. There are servants
everywhere, some bearing food and drink, some with wash bowls and
towels, some with paper and pens, all standing at attention,
awaiting their empress’s commands.

There are also several over-dressed men and
women gathered at one end of the room. One has the golden horn and
tattoos of an Alcani rider, while another has the curling black
horns of a Drogori. The others are less exotic, but equally strange
in their jewels, daggers, crystals, and elaborate headdresses. They
all turn and bow to the empress, but remain where they are,
seemingly content to wait and watch.

I steal a grape off a tray as the empress
sits behind her massive ebony desk and washes her hands and
face.

“Well, I have had an exhausting morning,”
Amina says with a smile.

I grunt. “You and me both.”

“Oh, don’t be a grumpus. You’re young. Walk
it off.”

“Thanks for the great advice, I’ll get right
on that,” I say as I look around at the portraits on the walls.
Lots of people I don’t know wearing lots of jewelry. “In the mean
time, I really need to get back to chasing my psycho mother around
the world. So if you could just ask your girl Amara to return the
crystals that control our ship, we’ll be on our merry way.”

Amina sighs. “Oh Amara. One of these days,
that girl is going to give me a gray hair that I can’t dye. What
did she do this time?”

“She asked us to kidnap her so she can visit
scenic Yas Yagaroth with us.” I tuck a braid of my hair back behind
my ear. “I said no. She arrested us. I’m starting to think she
needs a good kick in the ass.”

“Gen!” Rajani looks shocked. “She’s dying!
Where’s your compassion?”

“Compassion, compassion.” I pat my pockets.
“Hm. I think I left it back in my cage down in the dungeon.”

“No, Rajani, it’s all right.” Empress Amina
leans back in her massive golden throne and sighs. Her slender ears
barely manage to poke out from within the great curling mass of her
hair. For some reason, that makes me smile. She’s so tiny!

She says, “Amara is deeply troubled, and it’s
my fault really. I just… I didn’t know what to do with her. How to
handle it all. I can’t tell you how strange and terrible it was
when the doctors told me that my baby girl was sick, and dying. I
mean, look at me, I’m a freaking empress, and an Alcani, and best
friends with a Feyeri, and there’s still nothing I can do for her.
I’ve tried everything… I tried…” Her lip trembles and she looks
away and covers her mouth.

Great. Now I’m the dick. I shuffle my feet
and look down. “Sorry.”

She shakes her head. “It’s my fault. I wanted
to protect her, obviously. But there’s no manual for this sort of
thing, no guide. And I knew all along that I was trampling on her
freedom, every day of her short life, because I wanted to keep her
safe, keep her alive as long as I could. For her. And for me. Of
course it was a bad choice, but there was no other choice. I was
just… trapped. And now here we are. She’s angry, and she has a
right to be. But she’s still my baby, and she’s still dying… and
there’s nothing I can...” She stares out the window, her lips
pressed tightly together.

Rajani says, “Your daughter said something
about a young man, and a baby on the way.”

“Oh yes, the boyfriend. The actor.” The
empress sighs. “He performs at the White Jacana, I think. Not that
that matters, but I did meet him once, and I wasn’t…
impressed.”

“Mothers never are,” I mutter.

“But a child is a child,” Amina continues,
“And that’s all the more reason to keep Amara here, to keep her
safe, to try to keep her with us as long as we can. We’ve beaten
the odds so many times already, so maybe…”

I glance at the servants and see that some
look sad and some look as blank as statues. Even in this palace
full of people, the great Amina Zarinde looks as small and alone as
anyone else, like any other person crying and trying not to cry.
And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I say to her, “Look, Your
Empress-ness, overlooking the fact that she’s been a first-class
dick today, and I personally never want to see her again unless
she’s in a cage and possibly on fire... would it really be all that
bad if Amara comes with us? Maybe she’s right. Maybe there’s a cure
out there somewhere. I mean… she is dying. It can’t hurt to try,
can it?”

There. I did my part. I was all generous and
crap. Now say no. Please say no.

Amina shakes her head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I
can’t allow it. Especially now that she’s pregnant. Remember, I
know what it’s like to travel the world and fight monsters and
explore the dark corners of ancient places. People get hurt. People
die. Sure, it’s fun at first, but the novelty wears off eventually
and you realize that it’s actually uncomfortable, and boring, and
tiring, and painful… and violent.”

“Life is violent.” I can’t help but laugh a
little. “Just walking up to your front door this morning was
violent.”

She nods at me. “Your poor eye. I can see
you’re no stranger to violence.”