Page 52 of Enthralled

I stagger back, reaching for book and quill. But I don’t have them. I am fully in the Nightmare Realm now, trapped in this space of reality with Idreloth. There is no protection from this being, this great and terrible darkness. I stare into her eyes, all sixteen of them, and know that I am lost.

A burst of flame erupts before me, blinding my eyes. I scream, throw up my hands, and stagger back. Blinking with pain, I peer out through my fingers to see a silhouette carrying a flaming sword step between me and that oncoming wraith. At first I cannot make sense of it. Then she looks back. Vervain’s wide eyes stare into my own. In a flash of clarity, I see her standing before me, book open, writing a counter spell with a swift, sure hand. I blink. The image of the nightmare closes in again, and Vervain is there, wielding that sword.

“Run, Miss Darlington,” she says.

“No!” I cry, even as my feet carry me three paces backwards. “I won’t leave you!”

Her eyes flare with spell-fire. “You must think of the life inside you now,” she says and angles her sword in an arc of red flame. “Go. Save your child. Save all the children.”

Then she turns and raises her defense just as the Eight-Crowned Queen descends upon her. She swings her blade straight for the nearest of those eight necks. There’s a flash of light, a burst of heat.

I turn. And I run. Run in such a blind panic of terror, if the gods were not with me, I would easily leap right into the arms of another Noswraith. I simply cannot be cautious, cannot find the strength to care. Terror pulses in my veins, driving my footsteps across the paving stones. I leave the hall behind, escape into the next passage, and plunge into shadow. But it’s not the living, moving shadow of the Nightmare Realm. This is real shadow, real darkness, and that gives me hope. I speed on, faster than before, my heart thundering in my ears.

A scream echoes across the stones behind me—a human scream, cut short in agony.

Tears stream down my cheeks. Vervain! After all this, did I drag her from her cell only for her to die at the hands of such a monster? I should have stood my ground, should have found my quill and book. I should have tried to help. But I cannot stop my flight now.

A stairway yawns before me. I grasp the banister, only just keeping myself from falling all that long way down and breaking my neck. Half leaping, half flying, I take the treads four or five at a time. I recognize where I am; below me is the front entrance hall, and that door leads out into a courtyard riddled with nightmares. I don’t care about that. Not now, not with Idreloth at my heels. I can think of nothing but escape.

I leap the last several steps, land hard on the floor below, take three paces, and . . . my feet sink to the ankles in black swamp muck.

“Gods blight it!” I cry as my body pitches forward. My hands splat into mud, sinking elbow-deep. For a moment I can do nothing but remain where I am, down on all fours, frozen in place and staring into mire so deep and so dark. My heart pounds in my throat. This is just what my rational mind tried to warn me against—run too far, too fast, and you’re sure to run straight into another Noswraith. I should have slowed, I should have watched my step.

It doesn’t matter now. I know exactly where I am. This is Dulmier Fen, and I have no weapons, no defenses. No way out of this.

“Blight and damn!” I curse again. With a wrench I manage to pull my hands free and sit up onto my heels. But I’m still stuck fast in this mud. When I try to get to my feet, I flounder, flop, and topple forward again. My own dark reflection stares up at me from the wavering pool of water just inches from my nose. I stare back, as though seeing myself for the first time.

“Failure,” I whisper.

Castien sent me to rescue Vervain. We needed her, needed all the help we could get in this last, wild hope of saving the children. But I failed. Vervain is dead.

I close my eyes but cannot escape the memory of Anj’s voice in my head.“The savior of Vespre,”he’d called me. And they’d all looked at me as though I was some sort of heroine, returned in this final, desperate hour to turn the impossible tide. I was supposed to make a difference. Instead what has my arrival caused? I’ve only put more people in danger. Dig is wounded because of me, may have already perished. Dead like Vervain. Dead like the wyvern. Dead like we’ll all be soon enough. Dead, dead, dead.

And it’s my fault.

I feel their approach long before I see them, wavery figures, indistinct in the mist. Some close. Some far. Surrounding me. When at last I lift my heavy head, I cast my gaze across the broad, flat, empty expanse of the fen, endless on all sides and full of ghosts, each standing in his own dark pool. Young men and old, faded, thin, hollow-eyed. All alone. Desperately alone.

“Amelia.”

I suck in a short breath. Turning slowly, I look over my right shoulder to see one of the ghosts drawn nearer than the rest. He’s a young man with captain’s bars on the shoulder of his ragged uniform. I know him. I’ve read this story before—read it and bound the wraith within. I’ve walked in this man’s footsteps and encountered him face-to-face. He helped me once.

Some small, rational, librarian part of my mind protests this idea. Helped me? He’s a Noswraith. This whole world is a Noswraith—the fen and the ghosts which inhabit it. A spell of tremendous power, born from a mind in tremendous pain, and brought to vivid life by the imaginations of those who read the original tale, who felt the truth of it in their bones. Only horrors can be wrought of such magic. The Miphates proved that truth long ages ago.

Yet there’s something about this ghost, this young man who approaches me now. He doesn’t move in steps but in a fluid, floating grace, like a low cloud moving above the surface of the fen. The lower half of his legs vanish beneath stagnant water and tall grasses. One hand presses to his abdomen, catching the guts that spill from a gory wound. His face is drained of all color, corpse-cold, but his eyes are bright as he looks down at me.

“Amelia,” he says again. “Amelia, you came back.”

He remembers me. He doesn’t know my true name, of course. He can’t. He can only know what was written into his creation, which includes a memory of the sweetheart he left back home. He’s mistaken me for that sweetheart, but he remembers her and remembers that we met here once before.

It’s not what I would expect from a Noswraith.

I push to my feet. I cannot flee—the mud holds me fast. Soon the fen will pull me under, and I too will be a ghost alongside the rest of these wandering souls, while my physical body, somewhere back in Vespre, lies on the stone floor at the base of the stairs. Drowned without a drop of water in sight.

But I’m not dead yet.

“They must be stopped. Ended. Destroyed.”Umog Grush’s imperative voice rings hollowly in the back of my head. I shake that thought away, however, and instead call to mind a different, more recent memory, that brief vision I’d glimpsed through the roiling darkness surrounding Vervain and the Hungry Mother. That strange, terrifying, beautiful image.

“I see you, Vervain,”she’d said to her own creation.

---