She raced out into the parking lot as Ricky revved his engine and inched toward Kelly and Marcus. His tinted windows were all down. Hip-hop thumped on his system.
“No!” Joanna shouted, but her words were drowned out by the rattling bass.
“Yo, Kelly,” Joanna heard Ricky shout out his car window. “Who’s this guy supposed to be? You think I’m stupid?”
Soon as Joanna saw the look in Ricky’s eyes, she understood.
Her entire life had been moving toward this very moment. She didn’t faint like she always thought she might. In fact, she grew stronger. And things slowed way down, like she was seeing everything before it happened.
She knew Laura would rush over to tell Kelly, and she knew Tessa would duck behind a black SUV. She knew Marcus would let go of Kelly’s hand and shout back at Ricky. She knew Willy would come flying out of the restaurant holding his cell phone, screaming for everyone to leave before he called the cops. But most of all, Joanna knew she’d sprint over to Kelly, grab her by the arm and start pulling her toward Helen’s car.
She hurriedly unlocked the passenger door, shoved Kelly into the bucket seat, then raced around to the driver’s side and dove in and started the engine.
All she knew was she had to get Kelly away from danger.
Fast as she could.
Before Ricky could pull his gun and fire on her out of jealousy.
Kelly was sobbing and shouting at Joanna to slow down, but now was not the time for conversation. Joanna flipped the car into reverse and jerked it out of the tight parking space, then gunned it for the lot’s only exit. Just as she was pulling into the road, though, she had to slam on the brakes. But the car didn’t stop fast enough and she plowed right into a pedestrian.
The last thing Joanna saw before cracking her forehead against the steering wheel column was Ronny’s terrified face.
• • •
When Joanna came to, she was on a stretcher, surrounded by cops and paramedics. Her friends were all holding each other and they looked like they’d been crying. Kelly was there. She was okay. Over Kelly’s head, Joanna saw the slow spinning lights of multiple cop cars. Then she saw Ronny.
There was a huge gash on the side of his face and his head was taped down to the stretcher so he couldn’t move. His right pant leg was covered in blood. Joanna’s heart broke. She’d run over the one person who made her feel safe. How could she have ever thought he had bad intentions? Two paramedics were wheeling him toward the open doors of an ambulance.
“Wait,” Ronny said as they passed Joanna.
The paramedics slowed to a stop.
Joanna’s head was still in a fog from the booze, and from the accident, but she clearly saw Ronny trying to reach for the bulge in his right pocket. He couldn’t get his hand down far enough, though, because of the way he was secured in the stretcher, so one of the paramedics had to help. The man reached into Ronny’s pocket and pulled out a wrapped package. He asked what he should do with it, and Ronny motioned toward Joanna.
The man placed the package on Joanna’s stretcher, then they loaded Ronny onto the ambulance and drove off.
People were leaning over Joanna, asking questions. Cops with their notebooks and paramedics. Her friends. Auntie Helen. But Joanna couldn’t focus. Her forehead was throbbing where it had slammed against the steering wheel. And the world was still spinning. She managed to pick up the package and pull apart the poor wrapping job. And when she saw what it was, she immediately started sobbing.
They wheeled her toward a second ambulance. Two paramedics lifted her stretcher and slid her toward the back, and one of them hopped in with her. The last thing Joanna saw before they closed the doors was the paramedic handing the iPhone box Ronny had given her to Tessa, who looked at it and then looked at Joanna, tears running down her cheeks.
Joanna was still crying, too, as the doors shut out all the outside sound. She felt the engine start, and she stared at the blurry ambulance ceiling, imagining the fortune that would be imprinted in her mind forever: “The hour has finally arrived.”
It had taken running Ronny over in a car to understand what those words actually meant. Not that she would be hurt, but that it was time for her to stop pretending. She’d wanted to be Ronny’s girl all along. And tonight she was supposed to tell him. On her birthday.
She shouted his name. “Ronny!”
Again and again she called for him.
But nobody could hear her.
And nobody could take back what she had done.
The Chosen One
SAUNDRA MITCHELL
I suppose there’s nothing to distinguish Vernal, except that it’s my home, and it has a prophecy. It starts like this:
There will come a day when Evil will pierce the Heart of the Green City. Questing through wilds and dark and peril, the Light-Forged Champion alone shall claim the Fabled Cup and restore the kingdom’s Heart, and with it, all our joy. Praise Vara.
There are also bits about three flaming witches, the Breathless Reaches, and an Earthenwork Defiler. It doesn’t sound like much, does it? Though admittedly, it only rhymes in the original tongue.
Nevertheless.
Like Vernal, there’s little to distinguish me, except that I am myself and no one else can claim that.
My father is the king, my half-sister, the crown princess: respectively, the head of the kingdom and its burgeoning heart. I am nothing. I rolled out of the wrong side of His Majesty’s sheets. Consequently, I can’t be acknowledged, but neither can I be entirely ignored.
I’m close to the court, but not in it; cared for but never coddled. The king is a wise man and knows enough to walk a balance with me. I have nothing to resent, and I never feel entitled to anything more than the pleasant position I have: my sister’s bed mistress. I dress her hair and hear her secrets, and I love her completely.
Everything about her is exquisite, from her coiled black hair to her curved ankles. Likewise her voice of spices and honey, which she uses to beckon me.
“Corvina—”
I glance over my shoulder, still busy polishing her bronze mirror. It takes a fine touch—too much sand and the face will go hazy. Too much acid and it will go dark. “Yes, Lucia?”
With a smile, and a net made of her dark lashes, she casts for me. “Come sit awhile. Come talk.”
“Oh no, I can’t. I’m slaving for you,” I say, with my own smile.
“I’ll rub your feet.”
I put the mirror aside and turn, scrubbing my hands clean on a cloth. Though I pretend reluctance, I have my sandals half-off before I reach her side.
“If you insist,” I say, and sprawl in her linens.
And she does, the crown princess of Vernal, rub my feet. She’s quite good at it, and cheerful, too. Hints of lavender and orrisroot waft around me, perfume from the herbs folded into the mattress. I taste bliss, and sigh with it.
“Yes, sweet?” she prompts.
I curl a hand over my head and beam at her. “Perfect.”
Lighting with that, Lucia doubles her effort and resists the temptation to tickle. Over my toes, she peeks at me and whispers, “I’ve figured out my Betrothal Quest.”
“Then tell me.”
“It will be a Decade of Conversations,” she says. She digs her thumbs into the arch of my foot, on purpose, I think, just to make me collapse. She’s pleased with herself, all but humming now.
Melting in dozy pleasure, I smile at the canopy and tell her, “Somehow, I don’t think Father’s going to let ten years pass before you pick a consort.”
“I knew I should have used another word,” she mutters. “What I mean is, I’ll choose my suitors, and they’ll each have to have ten conversations with me.”
Teasing, I say, “Last one standing takes your hand?”
“Hush.” She flicks me, just hard enough that her fingers snap against my heel. “They’re supposed to take clues away from our talks. After all ten, they’ll go questing for the thing that will win my hand.”<
br />
I lift my head again. “And what thing is that?”
“Whatever I like. A perfect quince from Queen Vatia’s garden. A Lycean bone spoon. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” She shrugs. “Because I’ll tell nine of them, ‘Good luck unraveling my clues. Go forth and seek my prize!’ ”
Warming all over, I push onto my elbows. I see precisely where she’s gone with this, and it couldn’t amuse me more. “Then your favorite you’ll tell to fetch a Lycean bone spoon, and be quick about it.”
“Exactly. It seems like it rewards cleverness, and you know how Father admires that.”
I tug the ribbons on her sleeves. “So you know, I admire you.”
“Flattery gets you nothing,” she says, but then her hands still. The weight between us shifts, heavier as something troubles her. With a halfhearted squeeze, she asks, “Will you come with me?”
The weight lifts, at least from me. If she weren’t so entirely serious, I’d joke with her—bother her with demands and impish conditions. But this matters; it’s written in the depths of her eyes and the set of her lips.
Quickly, I say, “Yes, of course.”
“In my court,” she promises, “you’ll be allowed to do what you please.”
What she means it that she’d let me get married. All the stars in Lucia’s eyes are for romance, though I suppose she’d let me become a sea captain or an oratrix or actress, if I really wished it.
Still, for her, it comes back to love, always love. It doesn’t matter that the accident left me with no eyelashes to bat, no eyebrows to darken with kohl. She couldn’t care less that I’m bald and mostly earless and mottled. I look like a brown egg, oblong and unnatural. Yet, in her mind, I am her lovely little sister; any suitor would be lucky to have me. Her stars leave her blind.
No one else shares that sentiment; no one knows that better than I. I’m seventeen, the king’s bastard daughter. My mouth is unscarred, and my lips full—but no one’s ever tried to kiss me, not even for machination’s sake. The rest is too disturbing to try.
Most days, I wind scarlet silk around my head, to give the impression that I might have hair. That way I merely startle people coming and not going. I can’t help that. I’m melted and molten; I don’t like it, but that’s my face.
Nothing will change it.
But because Lucia believes the only thing keeping me from romance is our father’s strategies, I loop my arms around her and press my forehead to her temple. She’s been eating candied quince again. I smell it when she sighs and shifts her weight into me.
“It’s a kind thought,” I say. “But hush now.”
“I mean that,” she insists. “You can do anything you like.”
Petting her, I swear, “I already do.”
My sister has been poisoned.
Or cursed, or taken ill—none of the royal physicians agree. I stand at her bed, bathing her fevered brow with ginger water, and try not to resent each expert for being stupider than the last.
“It’s all wolves,” Lucia says. She turns her face toward my hand. A thick, raised rash spreads over her body—she looks like a coal crusted with fire and ash.
“There are no wolves,” I answer.
Lips parting, Lucia begs soundlessly. A dark halo of sweat outlines her body, her trembling hands clawing at the covers. Mindlessly, she pushes them off, then keens for them once they’re gone. I feed her water from my fingertips, and shudder at the sensation of her leather tongue rasping for more.
My beloved sister has fallen, and the physicians argue amongst themselves. None comfort her but me, so I start over again with the cloth: bathing her face, her chest, her searing arms and hands.
Our father arrives, and Cilo barely bows before saying, “It’s quite possibly hysterics, my lord. To fall ill on the eve of naming her quest, surely it’s nerves.”
Praise Vara, our father dismisses that with a waved hand. “Ridiculous. Laenus? Gemella?”
The eldest of the three, Laenus relies on that seniority to add gravity to his diagnosis. He tugs his white beard and pronounces, “Poison. Yesterday, she was fit and well; today, struck down and out of her head. It’s too sudden to be anything but malfeasance.”
“All due honor to my mentor,” Gemella says, cutting a look at Laenus that says she’d prefer not to honor him at all, “she’s burning with fever and beset with the scale. We’ve had word that villages in the outer provinces have seen the same of late. Either there’s a spree of poisonings—”
Wrapping himself in a decided chill, Laenus shakes his head. “Augusta Lucia hardly spends her days scrabbling with wild animals and dung fields. You cannot compare unlike cases.”
“She is mortal, you dolt.”
I say that.
No one expects it. Until then, I am invisible. A servant, actually busy at my task and minded by no one. Now Laenus minds me quite a bit, though Father seems unperturbed by my outburst.
Seeing her chance to win the diagnosis, Gemella tightens a wrap around her shoulders. “Certainly, Laenus should offer a bezoar against poison. But Her Majesty is mortal. What harm can come of treating this as illness, as well?”
Father nods. “I agree. Make all due haste.”
The doctors file out, muttering among themselves. And to my surprise, Father reaches for the bowl in my hands. Once his gaze falls to Lucia’s face, it doesn’t raise again. He dips the cloth and squeezes it, wiping new sweat from her brow.
“She’s never been ill,” he says. He settles, bound by shadows, at her side. “You were always the uncertain one. You caught every little pox, it seemed, and then the fire …”
Suddenly, my feet ache from standing; my head hurts from too much upset. Folding my hands, I say, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Corvina. Children get sick. Accidents happen.”
He dips the cloth again, and the light catches on the silver streaks in his black curls. For a moment, I’m confused by them. My father has always been the king; kings are strong and young.
But I newly realize that his youth is just an impression. In truth, he is growing older, and his voice is vulnerable when he says, “But they must not die before their father does. Promise me you won’t.”
I’m much too surprised to say anything more than, “I won’t.”
“We’ll make sure Lucia promises when she’s well again.”
The ground beneath me shifts ever so slightly. The tenderness in his hands I find remarkable. They have done this work before; he doesn’t shift uneasily. He’s not guessing how to tend Lucia, he knows. And he’s just said that she’s never been the sickly sort—not like her mother, Vara bless our death-kept queen.
I don’t know that my father has ever said he loved me, but it seems he’s been doing just that all along.
This weighs on me, but I cannot consider it too deeply. There are dragon’s galls to be forced down Lucia’s throat, and willow bark tea to be poured after them. I make a hundred compresses if I make ten. Well after dark each night, I harvest ice from the straw pit in the atrium and pack it into her bed.
She cries, and I cry, and none of it makes any difference. The physicians still argue: it’s magic, it’s disease, it’s a sanguine fever—no, a consumptive one—no matter, the cures are all the same now. Bloodletting and cinnamon tonics. Cinnamon poultices and more bloodletting. Her chambers stink of both and I’ll never eat a sweet bun again.
The seizures come; the rumors start. The physicians retreat, for the crown princess is dying, and no one wants to bear the responsibility for that. No one dares approach my father, who has made camp at Lucia’s side. He’s consumed with grief in anticipation.
This is why it wounds me to wound him, when I slip from the castle and steal Gavrus, one of his finest horses. Love aside, I’m still the nothing daughter—the stable master knows I’m not entitled to a steed. The cook knows I have no right to a bag of provisions.
And I’m certainly no Light-Forged Champion—but Lucia is my heart, the kingdom’s heart
, and if it takes a Fabled Cup to restore her, I’ll find it.
“I just need a place to water my horse and sleep for the night,” I beg.
I rub my fingers on my tunic, as if I can wipe off the bone-deep sting of having them caught in a closing door. It doesn’t work, but if I can do nothing, I prefer to move while I do it.
“We’ve got nothing for you!” This farmer’s wife is perfectly suited to her job. She is broad-shouldered and strong, and doesn’t hesitate to protect her home from threats perceived and real.
I shouldn’t have knocked after dark; I should have found a place in the wood to camp for the night. Truthfully, I found a place. The clearing was cool, sweetened by a spring and wild-growing sage.
But the darkness overcame me—I was unprepared for true night, one without torches and strong walls to shape it. Beasts of every sort, perhaps bigger for my ignorance, crept all round me. I clung to my satchel and my horse as long as I could bear it.
When something screamed (and Vara willing, it was a bird, please let it have been a bird), I fled. The sound echoed, chilling my spine, filling my ears—it bound me with a fear that went on and on.
My life in the palace was more comfortable than I realized, but realize it now I do. Laying my cheek on the rough wood door, I knock again helplessly. “Some straw in your barn? Anything, please.”
“I’ll have no abomination on my land,” the farmer’s wife cries.
Something on her side of the door makes a terrible sound. A wooden latch closes, a plucked wire whines. With a sharp breath, I straighten and that saves me.
An arrow shears through the slats. I taste its hiss; the shaft burns my cheek. The latching sound comes again, and my blood and bones, far wiser than my thoughts, move instantly. The narrow keen of another bolt zings past me, and I leap onto Gavrus’ back
The direction doesn’t matter. I’m animal instinct, my only thought is Run, run, run!
We streak through hills, as dark trees claw at the stars. Great, flying leaps carry us over acacia thorns and thin streams more mud than water. Edging the woods again, I start to laugh. All of my innards remain inside; I’m gloriously unpunctured. My head swims, sparkling with the giddy intoxication of escape.