THE MARK Read online

“Anybody else hear that?” she asked. It was the first time anyone had spoken in a while.

  “Music,” Megland said. “And horses.”

  They stopped walking, and Chris heard wheels and horses’ hooves on cobblestone. There was a town nearby. It was risky, but they needed shelter for the night, and theoretically they would be safer in a village than outdoors. So they followed the sounds they heard, letting them guide them out of the forest, until all at once the trees dropped away and they were behind a shop in a bustling town. A man dressed in vibrant blue clothes busily went about his work—pounding a blazing sword on an anvil with a hammer. Orange fires glowed in the open workshop behind him, bright against the dying light outside.

  “I know where we are,” Digs said. He didn’t sound like he was happy about it. “We should not be here. Not today.”

  Megland looked around. Understanding dawned on her face. “This village, it’s Laetus, isn’t it?”

  Digs nodded gravely.

  Chris looked around. All she could see from her vantage point was the blacksmith still working on the sword, and through the alleyway people walked in their bright, colorful clothes. The accordion still played. The townspeople talked over each other and laughed. What was so ominous about this place?

  “We don’t have a choice,” Megland said to Digs. “We need to rest. It will be long before we cross another village.”

  Digs pursed his lips. He wasn’t thrilled. “Fine.” He turned to Chris and Micah. “We need to find an inn. Whatever you see in this place tonight you must remember to not draw attention to yourselves. Remember, we are wanted by both mercenaries and Karniv. There are people looking for us. Try to blend in.”

  They walked past the blacksmith who didn’t even acknowledge their presence. Chris assumed he was used to people walking by his shop all the time, unlike at Polaris where it seemed like everyone knew where everyone else was at all times. As they took the alley to the main thoroughfare, she hoped they could go unnoticed here.

  Globes of orange lights hung from strings above the cobblestone streets. Carnival music, bright and creepy, seemed to snake its way through the dense crowd. Everyone was donning a mask. Some had hooked beaks, some fangs. Still others had feathers and bills. The menagerie of colorful villagers milled about the center of town. Chris felt conspicuous in her dark blue dress and bare face.

  A man with a face exploding with whiskers walked by carrying a tray of masks. Chris took one and thanked him. He held out his hand. Fortunately, Megland stepped in and pulled some shiny blue coins out of the small brown pouch she kept with her and bought masks for them all.

  Just as Chris was about to put on her tiger mask—complete with what she hoped wasn’t real fur—she felt the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She remembered what Liza had said in her cabin, that she should listen to her body, that it would tell her if something was wrong. Chris listened to the pressure in the back of her skull, the awareness that someone was watching her. She fought the urge to turn around and walked further into the teeming crowd, taking her time, trying to look casual.

  Music swelled and retreated all around her. People bumped into her, trying to see the spectacle. A fire-eater swallowed a torch’s flare only to spit it skyward in a fireball a moment later. Across the street from him, a juggler tossed knives into the air then caught them in a smooth cycle. Above them, a woman riding a unicycle traversed a high wire.

  Chris looked all around her, taking it in, and just so happened to see a bare-faced man carrying a long, curved sword. He held the hilt at his waist, the blade pointed skyward, resting against his shoulder. He was dressed in old fashioned military regalia, looking for all the world like a genuine redcoat. She turned to tell Micah, but he wasn’t there. None of her friends were. They’d gotten separated in the crowd. Her stomach clenched. Something wasn’t right. They needed to get out of there.

  She tapped the shoulder of a woman next to her. Her owl eyes were disconcerting. “Yes?” she said.

  “Excuse me,” Chris said, nearly shouting to be heard, “What’s the fastest way out of the village? In the southern direction?”

  The woman was short, rising on her tiptoes to crane her neck as she searched the area. Chris looked where she did and saw a troubling sight. A guard blocked every alley. Chris had a feeling she knew what the woman was going to say.

  “Nobody can leave now,” the woman said. “It’s about to start.”

  Just as she said that the music began to fade. The fire-eater and juggler, even the unicyclist, wrapped up their performances and gathered to the side. Chris felt someone tap her on the shoulder and a scream welled up in her throat.

  “It’s me,” came Digs’ voice from behind her.

  Chris started shaking. She had been sure it was all over.

  He squeezed in beside her. The crowd was pushing forward by increments.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I’m not scared,” she lied. “You just surprised me. Where are Micah and Megland?”

  “Somewhere near the back.”

  “We can’t leave.”

  “I know,” he said.

  What were they all waiting for? The music had stopped and now the village square was filled with the voices of the crowd. They were getting louder, growing impatient.

  “You have any idea what’s going on here?” she asked. “This some kind of fair or something?”

  He leaned in so he could lower his voice. “This village—Laetus—is part of the northern kingdom. We’ve arrived just in time to see them celebrate what pays for them to live so extravagantly.”

  It took her a moment, but she finally said, “The capture of The Marked.” It always seemed to come back to the trade. She looked around, amazed that people could make a carnival out of something that hurt so many.

  “Right,” he said. “Tonight they will feast, dance, and drink. But first, they will punish those who have helped conceal or otherwise aid Marked.”

  “But the punishment for helping them is death.”

  He nodded.

  They were going to witness an execution.

  Torches flared, flanking either side of the platform beyond the front row of spectators. A portly man climbed the stairs that led up to the makeshift stage. He wore a green and white checkered suit. His mask was feathery, the long curve of a swan neck extending upright from the top, the bird’s beak open as if about to eat a chunk of bread. He picked up a cone off the planks, one of those old-timey megaphones, and spoke into it.

  “Welcome, citizens, to this most auspicious of nights!”

  The people cheered.

  “As we do every year, we exercise our right to a region free of magical threat and tyranny! The way we do this, the way we keep our traditions safe and raise our children with the certainty of a stable and prosperous future, is to flush out those who would try to undermine our way of life!”

  The crowd cheered louder. Chris fought the nausea that was making its way up her throat.

  The speaker waited until the crowd quieted. “This is the tradition of the annual Wormding Festival. This is the night we remind our fellow citizens what it means to be loyal to each other, to be responsible for each other. Because if we turn our backs on each other we are inviting disaster. A plague that will spread, infecting the lives of each and every person here, destroying what our ancestors worked so hard for! Do you want that?”

  “No!” the people shouted.

  “Do you want to keep the standard of living you have enjoyed all of your lives?”

  “Yes!” the people shouted.

  “Then bring forth the guilty!”

  The crowd roared as men in purple, pink, and blue suits, all wearing alligator masks—green, toothy jaws jutting from their foreheads—led bedraggled prisoners up onto the stage. The captives’ wrists were bound together behind their backs with twine and they wore knee-length ratty brown shifts that revealed their dirty, open-sored skin. They’d been captive for a while
.

  Two men. One young, one old. One teenage girl. Their heads were bowed as they crossed the stage. Once they reached its center, the alligator men stopped them. Then each of the captors took a small box from their own pockets. To Chris, it looked like they were about to show their captives a ring. Like it was the most macabre multiple proposal ever.

  “They’re the wormdings,” Digs said quietly.

  The crowd was hushed, seemingly holding their collective breath.

  “You don’t want to watch this,” Digs said.

  “I have to,” she told him. And she did. Those people up on the stage, those people with their hands bound with rope, were like Hannah. They had helped people knowing well what the consequences were. Chris had an obligation to watch what happened next.

  She couldn’t see what the alligator men took out of the boxes. She was too far away. Whatever it was, it was small enough to place in the prisoners’ ears.

  The girl was the first to move. Her right leg bent suddenly, looking like it would give out from under her. She quickly straightened it again. The announcer with the swan mask raised his hand, cueing the band that sat behind the stage. The same upbeat carnival music started soft then gained volume and speed. When all three prisoners began to jerk and spasm, engaging in a tortuous dance, the crowd let out the breath it had been holding, erupting into a noise so loud it seemed like it would bring the surrounding buildings crashing to the ground.

  The dancers’ faces were contorted, a flurry of twitching eyebrows, warped mouths, and bulging eyes. They writhed on the stage as strangled screams burst from them, audible even over the crowd’s cheering.

  “The worms light everything inside,” Digs shouted into Chris’s ear.

  She understood. The wormdings stimulated the central nervous system. They were all having violent seizures. Chris nodded and wiped tears from her face.

  “They’ll dance until they die,” he said.

  Chris watched the prisoners spit foam and blood and listened to the crowd around her yell and jeer. But her eyes were only for the girl, the teenager who gnashed her teeth and convulsed in front of a joyous audience. Her brunette hair could have been blond. She could have spent an afternoon with Chris on a castle’s wall tossing breadcrumbs onto passersby. She could have been caught for trying to help a man in a barred wagon. Chris watched her feet kick as she lay on her side until she twitched for the final time and grew still, her eyes staring out at the crowd and seeing nothing. The people around Chris, satisfied that their justice had been done, focused on other things. The jugglers and performers picked up their acts. Still the girl stared ahead.

  “It’s over,” Digs said, looking around. “We have to get inside. We’re too exposed.”

  It’s over, she thought. Not for one second did she really believe it.

  * * *

  Later, when true night folded itself over the village, when the streetlamps were all extinguished, the crowd gone, and the prisoners dead and carted away, Chris lay on her bed next to Megland in the small inn. Micah lay on the floor next to her, Digs on the floor on his sister’s side of the bed. He’d insisted on the arrangement, that the guys sleep on the floor, and Chris had fought it, but in the end Micah had agreed with him and now it was how it was. Megland and Digs were both asleep, but Chris might as well have stayed outside for all the sleep she was getting. She kept seeing that girl, the one who had died on a stage in front of everybody, staring back at her. Her vacant eyes seemed to ask, “Why didn’t you save me?”

  “Hey,” Micah whispered.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just seeing if you were still awake.”

  Megland sighed and turned over.

  “I don’t want to wake them up,” Chris said. “Common room?”

  “Sure.”

  She and Micah quietly walked to the inn’s common room, a large but plain space with some wooden chairs and tables and a fireplace where the flames were dying to a low burn. The two of them seemed to be the only ones still awake, the other revelers already turned in for the night. Chris took a seat next to the fire and Micah sat next to her, and even though they’d come there to talk for a while they just sat and stared at the flames.

  “I still can’t believe that happened,” Micah finally said.

  He could have been talking about anything from the moment they had first seen Leroy, but Chris still nodded. The fire was still burning hot enough that her face was warm but the darkness chilled her back. She scooted her chair a couple inches closer to the flames.

  “I keep thinking about Hannah,” she said, a lump forming in her throat.

  “I know,” he said.

  “We were right there. We could have at least tried to save her.”

  Micah didn’t say anything, but she felt him next to her and it helped take some chill out of the air. Someone was singing outside on the street, a man who had too much to drink. The tune was slurred and off-key but jolly.

  “You know,” she said, “Digs says that once we’re out of the northern kingdom people are going to be more cautious. We won’t be able to travel at night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, he said that there’s some ‘unrest’ and the villages have gates and watchmen that’ll assume we’re trouble and no one wants more of that right now.”

  “Was he talking about the same trouble Megland was talking about at Polaris?”

  “I don’t know. What did she say?”

  His chair creaked when he shifted. “That Karniv was worried about some trouble in the south.”

  “Probably. There have been some problems between Toppers and Moles.”

  “So, on top of everything else we’re going to have to worry about being seen with Digs,” he said.

  “And Megland. She’s one, too.” Chris turned in her chair to face him. He was staring into the fire, his jaw clenched. She decided to ask him something she’d been meaning to ever since the savannah, back when he’d gotten angry seemingly out of nowhere.

  “Do you have a problem with Digs?”

  Micah sat up straighter in his chair and finally looked away from the fire. “Not in particular.”

  “Because you don’t seem to like him. Did he say or do something?”

  He looked at her, searching her face as if trying to make up his mind about something. He took a deep breath and said, “You did.”

  “What? I said something wrong? What was it?”

  The fire popped loudly and Chris jumped.

  “Digs said something about me being your boyfriend and you laughed. You kept saying ‘no, no, no’ that I wasn’t.”

  “You’re not.”

  He looked back at the fire for a long moment. Chris could feel the whooshing thud of her heartbeat in her ears. Micah looked her in the eye.

  “I know I’m not. But why aren’t I?” he asked.

  Chris felt her face flush. The fire was suddenly too hot, the air in the room around her, too cold. What could she say? That, yes, she’d had a crush on him since he moved to Justice and started at her high school? That had he not shown up when he did, if he had shown up just a couple years earlier, they would have been a couple? But Micah had moved to town shortly after her father and sister’s deaths, and romance had been the furthest thing from her mind then. They had become friends because even though he’d been told about what had happened, he didn’t bug her about it. He never brought up her dad or Claire unless she was the one who wanted to talk about it, which was rare. Then, as time went on, she had just assumed that Micah didn’t see her in that way. They had remained friends—best friends—and now he was asking why they weren’t more and it was so complicated that she was at a loss as to what to say.

  “So why aren’t we together?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s kind of the last thing on my mind right now.”

  Why did he have to bring this up now? With everything they’ve been through for the last couple of days, why in the world did they have to discuss this now?

 
; He nodded then looked at the floor.

  “I just want to go home,” she said. “This place sucks and I just want to go back to Earth where we don’t have to worry about Swampers or mercenaries or being chased down by a killer bear. The sooner we get to the Swamplands the sooner we go home. And once we’re not worried about the possibility of imminent death maybe we can talk about it?”

  Micah just nodded again and turned his face away from her, scratching the bridge of his nose. “Yeah. Sounds good.” He stood and looked toward the stairs leading up to their room.

  “I’m going to get some sleep. Night.”

  “Good night.” She watched as he climbed the stairs. He was probably wishing he’d never brought the whole thing up, but really, what did he think she was going to say right then? Why in the world would he be worrying about something like this when all around them people were dropping like flies? Whatever his reasons were for bringing it up, Chris hoped it wouldn’t be a problem in the morning. They all needed to be alert and ready to move.

  If Micah could put this whole thing behind him, she could too.

  CHAPTER 14

  Leroy’s pointed fingernail scraped the window’s glass. He was just outside their room. He raised his hands above the pane and Chris could see threads dangling from his fingertips. She knew what was at the end of those strings: a doll, maybe even her doll, waiting for her soul.

  Leroy’s hands rose, nails tapping the glass as they did. Chris levitated and floated toward the window. It was as if the strings were tugging her. The room at the inn was much larger than she remembered it, the window further than it had been before. She drifted closer to where Leroy was waiting and wondered why she wasn’t fighting to stay away.

  There was nothing to grab onto. All the furniture in the room had disappeared. It was just her floating through empty space, reminding her of her trip to Kellet, of when she’d first been taken. For a moment, she was back out among the stars, but the sound of Leroy’s tapping brought her back to the room. She was almost to the window when she heard a crack and groan. She looked down from where she floated and saw her friends lying on the floor. Micah was turning over and his weight made the floorboard beneath him pop. It looked like he was having a bad dream. She wanted to yell at him, say “Hey! I’m up here! Help!” but couldn’t speak. She reached for her friends and the slow pull toward the window ceased. Leroy hissed and she dropped to the floor.