Page 125 of Princess Avenged

The voices have grown quiet upstairs but furniture legs scrape over our pine planked floors, glass smashes and footsteps thud—but I can’t tell how many feet are making those noises.

The sounds from above go quiet and the footsteps vanish. And still I haven’t found one wall of the cellar room.

“Mom!” I shout. “Mom!” I stumble around the space again, trying to find a marker, any indication to orient myself in the utter darkness.

Finally, I sit, the ground cold under my butt as I hug my bent legs into my chest and shiver.

It’s not cold down here, at least I don’t think that it is, and yet my arms and legs are covered in goose bumps and the hair at the back of my neck prickles up to salute my terror.

I rock, counting to keep track of time, and then when the numbers get so high that the plan seems futile, I start to sing to myself. Kid songs, pop songs, ads from the TV—whatever comes into my mind.

Fatigue is threatening, so I pinch my arms and then slap my face. I’ve never done well in the dark, never even stepped outside our house after sunset, and it’s so quiet down here that I’m not certain my ears even work.

I can hear my own voice but that doesn’t prove much, so I clap a few times to verify that I can hear.

“Mom!” I yell again, crying now.

My nightmares visit me, even though I’m awake—recurring dreams of being trapped in a much smaller space filled with terror, smoke and screams.

But nightmares aren’t real. Unlike what’s going on now.

Mom’s dead. Even if I escape from this tomb, I am alone, an orphan. Suddenly fourteen feels like a baby, not the near adult I believed it to be. But I can’t give up. I need to be strong. And if there’s any chance that Mom’s still alive, I need to get up there to save her.

Standing, my legs are stiff from the cold and inaction; pins and needles scamper through them as I move. Hands ahead, I search for the walls, for the ladder, for anything that might help me orient myself and let me escape.

But what feels like hours later, I’m still pacing the room, turning each time I’m certain I’ve gone too far, and I’ve yet to find the edges of a room that I know has four sides, and I know is only about twenty feet in both width and length. I’m going insane.

It doesn’t make sense, and I know it’s not meant to.

This illusion of distance must be part of Mom’s magic. A glimmer of hope flickers through me. If her magic is holding, does that mean she’s alive? I have no idea.

I wish she’d answered my questions about how magic works, about why we stay isolated, but she refused so many times I stopped asking.

Closing my eyes, I draw deep breaths, longing to calm myself, to decrease my heart rate, to convince myself that all is well.

Light glows through my closed eyelids. I open them and gasp.

“Mom!” My mother is standing in front of me. I reach to hug her, but my arms go straight through.

She smiles and nods. “Ember, the immediate danger has passed.”

“What danger? Who was that up there?”

Not reacting to my questions, she keeps talking. It’s some kind of recording.

“But, my daughter, the danger you face will never pass. Not fully. I have done what I can to protect you, but at some point you will have to face the darkness.”

How could anything be worse than the total darkness I’ve suffered through these past hours?

My mother’s arm rises, and a light glows, illuminating the corner of the room that’s not more than five feet away from me. Her magic, or someone’s, kept me from finding that corner before.

“In this corner you will find a box,” says the apparition of my mother. “In this box you will find documents, access to money, the deed to the farm that will be yours at eighteen. Until then, stay hidden. Tell no one you are alone, and—I cannot emphasize this enough—never go outside after dark. Not ever.”

Her image disappears.

“Mom!” I step forward and turn but the image of her has gone.

The room fills with light, starting as a blue shimmer that brightens to white, revealing all four walls of the room, the box in the corner, and the ladder leading up to the trap door.

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