Princess Interrupted, page 17
part #1 of Prophecies Series
Even with all of this work, and the results that she had earned, Arabelle felt sad. She knew that despite all of her achievements, she was destined to die of the poison that coursed through her veins. She rubbed the rash on her ribs that was the only hint of the incident that seemed like a lifetime ago.
Some day, she was going to sleep too long, and then the poison would settle in her blood and crystallize in her muscles. Arabelle would then be unable to move to break the crystals in her muscles and soon afterwards, the muscles around her chest which helped her breathe would freeze, and she would die.
Unbidden tears appeared, and Arabelle sobbed uncontrollably. She would never even have an opportunity to know a love as fleeting as the love that Maggie had with Hassan. She’d die alone in her bed.
Arabelle thought briefly of the blue-eyed boy she’d seen, and dismissed the image as a strange fantasy that would never come to pass, and cried herself to sleep.
Her dreams had been plagued with visions of the First Protector rescuing their world from the demons five hundred years ago. It was the same vision many in Trimoria shared – yet lately, it seemed to be appearing with much more frequency for her.
Smoking remnants of burnt siege engines covered a large battlefield. Surrounding it with an aura of misery and terror, a group of soldiers desperately fought off a horde of demons in a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and sizes. All possessed vicious dagger-like claws and mouths full of sharp teeth and protruding fangs. The bony ridges along their joints were almost knifelike. Within the unit of soldiers, a collection of short, bearded warriors swung giant sledgehammers as they chanted their battle hymns.
The fighting converged on a central hill. As the soldiers fell back under the onslaught, a circle of lithe archers loosed a never-ending stream of arrows into the slavering demonic horde. At the top of the hill, within the circle of fighters, a robed man concentrated on a globe-shaped object in his hands. While those protecting the hill were bloodied and stooping from injury or fatigue, this man with his immaculate white robe and strange orb glowed from an inner power.
As the demon horde tore through his soldiers, the robed man lifted the sphere high into the air. The light over the battlefield dimmed as it blazed with power. Upon the man’s command, the power expanded from the orb, shooting out over the landscape in every direction. As it touched the creatures of the Abyss, they burst into flame and collapsed into ashes. The rate of the light’s expansion quickly accelerated until it filled all the visible terrain from horizon to horizon. What had been night had now turned to day…What had been defeat had turned into victory…
As the First Protector’s victory unfolded in her dream, her vision suddenly blanked into a field of white. Suddenly, she felt a familiar presence she couldn’t name. Within the field of white, a scene unfolded...
The night was dark; the only light came from a campfire in the distance. There were four people gathered around the campfire. Lying on the ground next to her were four men in the black uniforms of Azazel’s soldiers. One of the soldiers looked wide-eyed as blood spurted from a wound in his throat, yet he didn’t move. Arabelle looked down and saw her mother’s dagger dripping with blood in her hand.
The scene flashed white.
Arabelle walked between the tents in her caravan. She spied Tabor following her at a distance. The look on his face rarely belied any emotion, but today she noticed a mild look of amusement.
Next to her, a boy wearing a robe walked alongside her, speaking quite animatedly – though she couldn’t really make out any sounds in this vision. As he spoke, he turned and the face that greeted her was the face that had haunted Arabelle’s dreams. It was the blue-eyed boy.
The scene flashed white.
She saw the blue-eyed boy again, but this time he was confronted by four other boys who were clearly trying to interfere as he pushed a cart of supplies.
The largest of the boys blocked his progress while the others surrounded him and attacked.
The blue-eyed boy became a blur of motion as he ducked under a punch and kicked the knee of his first assailant, shattering it. Another attacker lunged and the boy twisted the attacker’s arm and gave a swift strike against the elbow. The arm bent into an unnatural position. The attacker pulled away and ran from the fight.
Watching the boy’s power, she knew that such fighting skill must have been a result of tremendous amounts of training. Her heart beat faster as she watched him size up his opponents. He was a soldier?
The remaining two assailants circled him, one wielding a dagger, the other a club. They attacked at the same time, and the boy spun around and smashed the larger of the two in the face with a kick. Blood sprayed from his attacker’s nose and he reeled backwards. Yet she saw the blue-eyed boy grab his arm as blood began to flow from a dagger wound....
The scene flashed white.
Arabelle was in her father’s tent, sitting next to him. The same blue-eyed boy sat next to a larger man who looked like an older version of the boy. He certainly had the same penetrating blue eyes. The boy’s father?
The man nodded, and so did Arabelle’s father. Father waved for the boy to approach. He stood and walked toward the Sheikh, looking uncertain. Father guided him to kneel next to Arabelle and the boy held his arm out. She too held her arm out while her father pulled out a white silk ribbon and looped it around both of their arms in a ceremony of betrothal.
Arabelle woke with a sudden start, her heart rattling in her chest and she was barely able to catch her breath. She kicked off the covers and realized she was a sweaty mess despite having slept with barely any clothing.
Could those visions be true? Only some of them? Oh please, let me have the opportunity to meet this boy. Could he really be the one I am destined to marry? What could all the other visions mean?
As she stretched her muscles and began her exercises, Arabelle used her inner sight and smiled. She’d tried to detect both of the blue-eyed people who had been in her vision and they both were inexplicably somewhere above her.
She recalled the words of the enigmatic old woman. “That bird which you seek in the sky is bound to land on the ground. Protect the bird, or all you know will suffer.” Arabelle allowed herself to place hope on a dream. She grinned like a fool with the thought that she would actually be meeting someone that she could share what remained of her life with.
Arabelle
Chapter Fifteen
Spying on Evil
“I find myself drawn more to animals than people. Animals are usually much more sensible.”
Grisham
Despite the hardships that she’d lived through since being poisoned, her most recent visions had invigorated her. It had been weeks since she saw the betrothal ceremony in that vision, and she still remembered every moment of it. Somehow, Arabelle knew that it was a scene from the future. She had to believe it.
Arabelle felt confident that she’d been destined to suffer, but she would somehow find someone to give her a feeling of normalcy – at least for a moment. That was all she could hope for. She knew that her life was one of privilege and the princess owed much to her father and her people. With that level of obligation, Arabelle knew that she needed to work hard developing all of her skills and perfecting the execution of everything Tabor and Castien had taught her. It was the only thing she knew that she could do.
With that in mind, she searched through the supply tent for an elusive item. Madam Mizmer by now had given up trying to figure out what she was doing amongst her supplies. The matronly cook knew that Arabelle’s father would compensate her, so she gave the princess free rein to do whatever she needed. As Arabelle searched through one of the boxes, she hoped to find the ingredient that had so far been eluding her. It was the last ingredient on her list.
For the last several weeks, she’d been practicing how she might use some of her powdered weapons effectively. Poor Maggie had been her victim more times than she could count. She had been a willing accomplice, but she wasn’t sure Maggie realized how often she was going to be practicing on her.
Arabelle smiled, recalling how Maggie coughed uncontrollably the first time Arabelle successfully blew the powder into her handmaiden’s face. She’d been practicing with finely ground crystals of sugar or salt which she knew were harmless. She’d found many opportunities to sneak up on Maggie with her beeswax- plugged straws. If Maggie tasted the salt or sugar, then Arabelle knew her strategy worked. She was now fairly confident that her technique for using her straws was effective.
Arabelle had been in Madam Mizmer’s supply tent dozens of times, and she’d mostly completed her arsenal of powdered weaponry. Madam Mizmer claimed that she had the last ingredient Arabelle was looking for, but the powdered ash of damantite slag was extremely rare and seemed to be eluding her. It wasn’t a food ingredient, but used by some herbalists for strange concoctions that Madam Mizmer claimed were good for treating exotic illnesses. It turned out that Arabelle was seeking to make just such a concoction.
She was beginning to worry that she wouldn’t find what she needed. Arabelle opened the last dust-covered box, flipping through more packets of powdered ingredients with unrecognizable names, and suddenly she let out a squeal of excitement. Arabelle held in her hands an old yellowed packet labeled, “Damantite”. She carefully opened the packet and saw a very finely ground, black powder. She resealed the packet and put it in her bag.
Arabelle restored Madam Mizmer’s storeroom to a semblance of order and quickly returned to her tent.
After telling her guards she wasn’t to be disturbed, Arabelle retrieved the recipe that the enigmatic herb woman had given her for a potion she called “tincture of the new moon.” She gathered all of the dry ingredients on her table and arrayed them neatly to the right of the mortar. She retrieved from her desk the bottle that Madam Mizmer had given her of quizoa leaf extract and placed that to the left of the mortar. She double-checked the instructions, looked at her table and nodded.
My most complicated recipe yet.
One by one, Arabelle laid a small collection of ingredients at the bottom of her stone mortar, grinding them with one hand as she slowly dripped the pure oil extracted from quizoa leaves with her other. She continued grinding as she watched the concoction transform into a fine, emulsified liquid.
Per the instructions, she stopped adding oil and took a pinch of the powdered damantite in her fingertips. She was surprised at the smoothness of the powder which Arabelle sprinkled into the mixture. When the powder contacted the oil-infused tincture, she was amazed to see tiny flashes of red-colored sparks. She stirred everything thoroughly for another minute and, despite her skepticism, the recipe operated as promised. The recipe clearly stated:
If properly mixed, with utensils of non-porous stone, the final tincture of the new moon will signify its completion by permanently discoloring the implements used in its creation.
Arabelle couldn’t help but experience a moment of silent glee. The gray stone mortar and pestle she used to grind the potion suddenly turned a black so deep that it almost seemed to suck the light out of her tent. She stopped stirring, unstoppered a glass vial, and carefully poured what she had created into it. Arabelle stoppered it and compared its consistency to the vial she had received from the old woman. They looked identical.
She turned toward her bed, where she had laid out the darkest outfit Maggie had made her, and smiled.
Time to test this out.
Arabelle tied off the end of her headwrap and tucked her mother’s daggers into sheaths that she’d had Maggie make for her outfit. Showing her weapons out in the open could cause her to be noticed, and that was the last thing Arabelle wanted. she had color-coded the straws with the different powders she’d ground. Into her belt she tucked a few of the prepared straws that carried the powdered leaf Castien said would cause someone to experience short-term memory loss. She also gathered a few straws filled with the ingredients for pain relievers and stimulants.
The last item on her table was the tincture she had created. She sat in front of her table, grabbed an empty straw and dipped it into her unstoppered bottle. Arabelle put her finger on the end of the straw and lifted a wobbling drop of the potion. She took a deep breath and looked up as she raised the straw above her right eye, removing her finger from the end of the straw. The drop splashed into her eye with a cool sensation and Arabelle repeated the process with her other eye.
She kept her eyes closed for a minute and felt nothing out of the ordinary until she opened them. Arabelle opened her eyes and a wave of dizziness hit her as she looked around her tent. Her depth perception was completely thrown askew. Everything seemed to be closer than it really was. Arabelle squinted as the brightness of her lamp overwhelmed her.
She retrieved the mirror from her desk drawer and looked at herself. Arabelle nearly dropped it when she saw what she looked like. It was one thing for her to see herself fully veiled with a headwrap. It was quite another thing to see her eyes. Instead of the brown eyes surrounded by white that she’d always seen, her eyes had turned completely black. Even the whites of her eyes were now the darkest shade of matte black imaginable.
I guess I needn’t worry about the light reflecting from my eyes. I hope it wears off eventually, otherwise I’ll have lots of explaining to do.
Blinking, she stood and it took a moment to steady herself. The old woman had warned her that her vision would be enhanced.
She peeked through the slit at the entrance to her tent. She’d found it a challenge, but learned that at night, she was able to catch her guards unaware for a few moments and sneak out without them seeing her. To her amazement, Arabelle could clearly see the beads of sweat on the forehead of one of the guards even though he was approximately fifty feet away. Excitement coursed through the princess as she realized how useful this gift of enhanced vision could be.
She watched them and waited. After a few minutes, another guard approached and talked to the guards watching her tent. Seeing the momentary distraction, Arabelle grabbed the opportunity and snuck away into the shadows of the caravan.
The darker her surroundings, the more her vision improved. She noticed that she could spy on someone from nearly one hundred yards away and still see their face well enough to read what they were saying. As she practiced her stealthy night wanderings, she heard someone say, “Any information from the captives?”
“None. The boy remains stubbornly silent, but we’ll get something from him – I know he’s hiding something.”
Captives? Boy? What could they mean?
Arabelle snuck around the tent to find the speaker and saw nobody. She turned, looking for signs of movement, when she saw a black-armored soldier leave a nearby tent that couldn’t have been more than ten feet from her. He turned toward the marketplace and marched away.
Her heart beat faster as she noticed several things at once. The soldier that had just departed was one of Azazel’s enforcers. When the tent flap had briefly opened, she noticed another soldier within the tent writing on a large chart hanging on the wall. The soldier who left the tent had looked in her direction and hadn’t even noticed her.
She wondered what they could have been talking about. Tabor had always taught her to avoid Azazel’s soldiers, and everyone she knew was afraid of them. However, if there were captives involved, what could that possibly mean? Against her better judgment, Arabelle approached the tent and listened carefully through the wall.
All she could hear was the scratching of a writing instrument. She looked around and saw nobody in the vicinity. Arabelle quietly approached the entrance to the tent, pulling out one of her straws. She carefully used it to separate the edges of the tent flap and put her face up against the tiniest sliver of an opening.
She peeked inside and saw the back of a black-armored soldier writing on a large easel. To the right of the soldier, she saw a large piece of parchment placed on the adjacent wall of the tent. It had writing that she was just able to read.
Seeking Strangers To Trimoria.
Send a Quad to patrol the border of the cursed swamp.
Maintain three Duos scouting the path of the caravan.
Await Kirag’s orders regarding the forest.
Extract from captives...
As she tried to make out the last line of text, the flap of the tent ripped aside and Arabelle fell backward in shock. The soldier stood over her, his face a thunderstorm of anger as he reached to his belt.
Arabelle yelped with surprise as she backpedaled to no avail. The brute roughly grabbed her tunic and lifted her in the air as he brought his dagger to bear. Without thinking, Arabelle brought the straw to her lips and blew the powder into the soldier’s face.
The soldier cursed and dropped her. She pulled out the wad of red colored straws she’d tucked into her belt, blew them all at once into the man’s face and ran.
Her heart beat so rapidly, it felt like it was going to leap out of her throat. She turned to see if she was being chased, but the soldier had fallen to his knees and was rubbing his eyes. Arabelle panicked as her legs silently carried her as quickly as possible away from the incident. She sped toward the relative safety of her tent and prayed nobody recognized her.
Grisham
Chapter Sixteen
Slavers
“I find Arabelle to be particularly gifted with the use of her daggers. Just like her mother.”
Tabor
Grisham never would have predicted it, but he’d grown to appreciate riding a mountain pony. He was proud that this was the same pony which refused to take a saddle from Oda, but with some attention, allowed Grisham to ride him. He grabbed a brush for the small horse and it nuzzled his hand, looking for another treat. Oda walked up and grimaced. “I don’t understand it, Grisham. How did you get that petulant beast to take a saddle?”
