She Went West
by Martha Cipolla
The fires blazed sudden and bright. In the center of the trainee spies’ encampment, a hundred torches shot rays of heat straight into the frigid air in the dark dead of night and a hundred miniature bonfires shuddered into terrible life.
In the barracks, the insides of Jocelyn’s eyelids glowed suddenly red, and she snapped them open and saw, instead of stone-smooth dark, a flickering on the walls: the alarm. The prisoner had escaped. Her sister. Jocelyn’s chest went hollow and heavy. She would have to decide whether to join the hunt. She hexed innocent people. Or race ahead to warn her? Maybe she didn’t mean to.
* * *
“No, miss,” the guard said again, her voice flat. The fires were throwing sparks into the blackness that hugged the village, but they didn’t reach the guard where she was shrouded in the shadows of the walls. The susurrations of the other trainees’ voices rose and fell in waves as they gathered in the center of the square, fifty meters away.
“But are you sure you didn’t see the prisoner?” Jocelyn asked again, a wobbling thread dancing unpredictably through her voice and threatening to expose her.
The guard’s gloved hand hovered almost imperceptibly toward her sword hilt. “I said, no, miss.”
“Okay,” Jocelyn said, turning away toward the square. Perhaps she shouldn’t press any further. But a shiver crept through her veins. If she couldn’t find Eliana... Well, that simply wasn’t an option. She turned back.
“It’s just that, if you did see her, and you were to say out loud, just to yourself like, which direction she went in, and someone were to hear, and that person were able to divert an imminent and terrible disaster, and you could—”
“Oh, my bleeding swords. Shut up.” The guard paused, then smirked. “She went west.”
“Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” Jocelyn breathed, and she pressed a hard roll dappled with oats, olives, and droplets of cheese into the guard’s hand before slipping from the gate and into the vast forest beyond it.
Because she didn’t spare a glance behind her, she didn’t see the guard twist into a puff of smoke, then into a smug-looking raven with a hard roll clutched in its stiletto-like talons.
“I fricking love bread,” the raven said.
* * *
The rush of chill wind whistled as it pressed its way around Eliana Georgiana Cintera the Great. It stabbed rudely at her face and it cut through her velvet robe and it sliced deep into the cracks in the skin of her knuckles, which had been whittled there by the knives of a winter air as dry as giants’ bones. Her footsteps drove up a horrible clattering that echoed wildly along the darkling tunnel of slate-gray stone that dipped beneath a long expanse of the forest. Each shallow breath coated her gullet in icy batting, and she thought sure her frantic heart would pound its way right out of her.
And then Eliana Georgina Cintera the Great tripped over a flurry of feathers and crashed onto the rough stone beneath her boots.
“How DARE you impede ME, the GREAT Elia—”
“Whoops-a-trumpets, grand mistress,” the raven wheezed, choking a bit on a bready olive.
Eliana stopped her decidedly unregal struggle with her robe and allowed herself to collapse against the frozen ground. Would this goddamned raven never leave her be? She was never putting out a bird feeder again. And her notoriety was not unearned. She struck fear into the hearts of all who heard her name! Why had she wanted to feed the goddamned birds in the first place? Sometimes she thought she would never fully expel her goddamned sister’s goddamned voice from her brain.
“If I threatened to strangle your furry neck—”
“Feathery.”
“What?”
“You meant ‘feathery.’”
The dangers of bone-chilling cold and the fear-soaked adrenaline of her flight paled in comparison to the way this goddamned bird grated on her every last atom.
“Or ‘fuzzy.’ You could say ‘fuzzy,’ I suppose,” the raven continued. It spat out a dribble of cheese.
“If I threatened to strangle your goddamned FUZZY neck—”
“Sorry to interrupt,” the raven interrupted, “but the mob is on its way with the pitchforks and all that. Jocelyn is coming to conduct a grand rescue.”
“And here I thought my sister was as useless as you are.” Eliana heaved herself upright, using the icy stone walls as leverage.
“I am hardly useless,” the raven huffed, and then it was gone.
Eliana tilted her head back and closed her eyes, ever so briefly, and then, lungs searing, she ran on.
* * *
All the land rumbled with the pounding of the horses’ hooves as the trainees rode hard through the forest and the cold dark, fanning out over the Great Gray Underpass. Not even a sorceress could outrun such horses, and certainly not one whose imprisonment had leached so much of her energy, and soon, Eliana Georgina Cintera the Great knew their nearness and their names, and her core flumed up in animal terror. Goosebumps exploded along her skin, and when she finally burst from the miles of tunnel and into the open forest, a cobweb brushed her forehead, and the hairs stood straight all along her neck and she shrieked.
“There she is!” went up a cry from somewhere behind her.
“We’ve got her!” from ahead to the left.
“No more hexing from this one!” howled a voice that seemed to be practically in her ear. The trainees on their horses flowed in and around Eliana, swooping down and scooping her up, taking away her velvet robe and replacing it with one of plain wool, binding her mouth and her wrists and her ankles, swinging her smoothly over someone’s pommel, good and captured, here in the forest far to the east of the village.
Jocelyn, of course, had gone west.
* * *
The goddamned raven was having a very amusing night.
Copyright © 2024 by Martha Cipolla
