Zoe Reed: Breaking Legacies

“Why do you have the princess’s horse?” I demanded, setting my hand on my dagger in an attempt to be intimidating.

“She asked for a trade,” the witch answered calmly, as though she’d been cooperating the whole time and couldn’t account for my displeasure.

I watched her pour the steaming mixture into a vial, fearful of losing a single drop. “What did you give her in return?”

She blew over the opening of the glass, and then pressed a cork into it to close it up. “A potion,” she answered, extending it to me. “To help her hide.”

“What’s this?” I asked, almost afraid to reach out and take it for fear this was another trick.

“A potion,” she repeated, holding it before her until I took it. “To help you seek.” She pulled the hood of her cloak back up over her head. “Best to return home, hunter.”

“I can’t,” I said. I examined the crimson fluid within the vial. “I have nothing to give you for this.” Truthfully, I had the coins Silas had given me, but I wasn’t going to use those unless I absolutely had to, especially not on something I hadn’t asked for in the first place. The witch smiled at me, a crooked smirk that revealed the top row of her surprisingly straight teeth. She moved toward the door, as though she was preparing to leave, and opened it. “What do I do?” I asked before she stepped out. “Do I drink it?”

She didn’t appear to have heard me, but when she disappeared in the darkness outside, there was a voice in my ear that said, “Cursed long before this night.”

The voice caused me to shiver, because even though there was no one beside me, I could feel the breath against my skin. I looked down at Albus, and he let out a whine when his big brown eyes met my own. Not wanting to spend another minute in the eerie cabin, I paced outside and around back to where I’d left Brande, and I stored the vial in a saddlebag. The princess had obviously continued on foot from here, so I pulled out the strip of cloth I’d cut from her dress and knelt in the snow beside Albus, holding it to his nose.

“Get a good whiff of that,” I told him, and after a few moments, I put it back into the pouch at my hip. “Track.”

While he searched the immediate area for the beginning of the trail, I mounted Brande, and, at the signal of a declaring bark, we were racing through the woods again. We weren’t riding for nearly as long as we did the first time. In fact, it seemed as though we’d hardly gone half a mile before Albus stopped at his next find. I jumped down to examine what looked like a dark patch in the snow. Upon closer examination, however, I discovered it was an expensive silk gown, some riding leathers, and jewelry. All were the princess’s, I knew, but I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Nobody in their right mind would shed their clothing, especially in weather like this. And what about the jewelry? It was like she’d vanished into thin air.

I was about to ask my canine companion what he thought—a habit I’d gotten into since he was one of my only two friends while I was out hunting—but he wasn’t at my side. He’d crept a few paces away, and now stood on his hind legs, stretched up the length of a tree and growling at something perched in it. When I got to him, I squinted up into the branches, and I wouldn’t have been able to see anything if it weren’t for the gleam of one tiny eye. It was too small for a human or a wild cat, but too large for any kind of rodent.

Suspicious, I retraced my steps a few feet away from the tree, and then I stuck my arm straight out. “Maddox!” I called.

Sure enough, there was the soft flapping of wings from the tree, and moments later a large falcon landed right on my arm. There was a metal ring around one of its ankles. After angling it toward the moon, I could see it was imprinted with the royal mark, and there was a long, thin leather lead tied to the same leg.

“You’re Maddox,” I mused, venturing to stroke the bird’s back. Ellie had to have been right about the princess’s love for the bird, because it allowed me to pet it as though it were no stranger to being fondled.

I opened my mouth to ask the falcon if it knew what became of the princess, but before I got a word out, there was a shout in the distance. “It went this way!” Albus began to growl, but I shushed him just in time to hear the next yell of, “Get the pasty ghost!”

At the first shout, I’d thought maybe they were after Maddox, but by the second, I knew they weren’t, and I’d grown curious. “You stay here with Brande,” I told the bird, setting it atop the saddle and securing its leather leash around the horn.

I pulled my hood over my head, as I was accustomed to do when I was being sneaky, and with Albus on my heels, I sprinted through the deep snow toward the noise. The male voices led me up a hill, and when I reached the top of it, I hid behind a tree to see down the other side. There were three torches, but I could see additional movement against the white of the snow, indicating there were five men in total. That was, until there was a light behind me, one I hadn’t noticed until it was too late.

“Oy!” shouted the man, in front of me now that I’d turned, and I glanced over my shoulder just long enough to see some torches starting up the hill to come to us. “You after our Will-o’-the-wisp?”

“No,” I answered, trying to ignore the knife he was holding toward me, and Albus’s menacing snarls. “I heard shouting. I was curious, is all.”

“I won’t have you lying!” he growled, advancing so far forward that I stepped too far back, and I lost my footing at the steep edge of the hill.

I went rolling backward, head over heels, and the snow did nothing to cushion my fall. At least I managed to avoid hitting any of the trees on the way down, or any of the men, who just watched me roll by. The hill was so steep that I didn’t come to a stop until I reached the bottom of it, and only then because it was flat for hardly six feet before it turned into a large wall of ice. It was the glacier that stopped me, and I smacked into it with a painful ‘oomph.’ Albus had run down after me, and he nudged me with his snout when I came to a halt.

“Get her!” one of the men hollered.

I sat up, frantically searching for an escape route through the whirling in my head. An inconsistency in the ice caught my attention, and before I could think about it, I darted into the cave. It wasn’t as dark as I imagined it to be on the inside. The moonlight reflected from the outside off of every glassy surface, creating a mysterious glimmer in the cavern. But I didn’t stop to enjoy it. The men were on my heels, and the paleness of the walls only made it more difficult to avoid detection. So I kept running, taking one turn after another until I spotted a small crevice at the bottom of a wall. I slid for it feet first, disappearing with Albus behind me just as the men turned down the branch we were in. There was only enough room for Albus and me to lie down flat, but I sank deeper into the cleft, watching the blur of torches through the ice and hoping the men wouldn’t be able to see me through it as they sprinted by.

“Where’d she go?” one of them asked, his voice echoing off the damp walls.

“Forget her,” complained another. “Let’s find the Will-o’-the-wisp.”

The footsteps sounded closer and closer, until they passed me once again. Instead of heading for the exit of the cave, however, they ventured down a different branch, probably to search for the wisp.

Frustrated at getting myself in this situation, I buried my head in my folded up arms. “Stupid.”

In response to my scold, there was a soft pant, but it hadn’t come from Albus. It was too melodic. So musical, in fact, that it sounded more like a hum. It was a cute sort of noise, like I’d imagine a beautiful girl to sound when she let out a lovelorn sigh. I lifted my head, and had to stifle a cry of surprise even though I scrambled back into Albus. It was a little glowing ball that made the sound. A pale blue energy, small enough to hold in my hands if I put them together. At my fright, the little ball made another series of tones, this time like the ringing of tiny bells, and I knew it to be the equivalent of laughter.