The Rose Princess (11 page)

As she got closer to the tent, odd cries began to beat against her eardrums. Scowling
alone wasn’t going to accomplish anything, and she didn’t want to plug her ears. She
had to listen to keep feeding the rage she felt toward the bastards responsible for
all those moans.

As one of the villagers standing at the entrance to the tent noticed Elena, his expression
grew stern. He adjusted his grip on the spear in his right hand. It was a farmer by
the name of Gary.

“I’m not a Noble, you know,” Elena said, showing him a smile anyway.

“Why is this happening to us?” Gary asked, his expression unchanged.

“I don’t know.”

“That young feller comes along and all this shit happens on the same day. Someone
saw the two of you taking the road up toward the castle.”

“Well, we turned around before we got there,” the girl replied. “Since we don’t get
many lookers like him in town, I thought I’d take him on a little date.”

“Bah, you lousy whore,” the man spat as he turned away in disgust. No one in the community
really appreciated the wild behavior of Elena’s group.

“Pardon me,” Elena said without letting the expression change on her face, but once
she’d slipped in through the flap, she unleashed a vicious kick with her right foot.

As always, her instincts were spot-on. Most likely, not even the rough-and-tumble
farmer had ever taken a kick to the genitals through a layer of canvas before. Groans
of pain could be heard coming from the ground outside.

“Learn how to talk to a lady, you damn limp dick,” said Elena. And though that kick
should’ve lifted her spirits, her voice was heavy.

The moaning in the tent had grown deafening. It took quite an effort on Elena’s part
just to keep from shutting her eyes.

Half-buried in the earth or caked with dirt, the villagers were writhing on the ground.
On their backs, necks, and foreheads, roses of four different colors opened unexpectedly.
Even if the villagers who hadn’t been afflicted pulled them out, more roses would
rise from the sundered flesh to flower in beautiful displays of red, blue, black,
and white. Apparently, this abnormal method of infection hadn’t made them true servants
of the Nobility, as they didn’t sleep through the day but rather writhed in agony
when the rays of the sun penetrated the thick canvas tarp sheltering them. That was
why they were being protected instead of having stakes driven through their hearts,
Elena told herself. If these people had received the kiss of the Nobility, they’d
have long since been dispatched. It was the law of the Frontier.

“E . . . le . . . na . . . ,” a voice sobbed down by her feet.

Saying nothing, Elena just kept looking straight ahead.

“Help . . . It’s me . . . Decoy . . .”

“And me . . . Seren . . .”

“It’s so hot . . . The pain . . . My body . . . is . . . burning . . .”

Something caught hold of her ankle. A cold hand. Elena didn’t move.

“Just wait a little longer. I’m sure we’ll get you back to normal.” But as the girl
spoke, her body trembled. From the ankle in her friend’s grip, an evil chill that
beggared description was needling into her. Her flesh was starting to crawl. And that
voice—

“E . . . le . . . na . . .”

“You damn freak!” she snarled, the words coming out in a tone even she couldn’t have
imagined. Her right hand slid down to her hip and took a length of weighted chain.
She hauled back with it, and then whipped it down hard, all intentionally. A sickening
sound was heard, and unpleasantly warm spray flew in her face. But she just kept bringing
the weighted end down. Time and again she swung it. And between the blows, the voice
continued to call her name faintly, almost as if intoning a curse.

Perhaps that was what the weight on the end of the chain was meant to bring to an
end.

Behind her, a different voice cried out, “Elena—What are you doing?!”

A thick arm roughly encircled her torso, dragging her backward.

“Let go of me, you freak! I’ll kill you!” she shouted, the last expression echoing
out in the sunlight.

“Simmer down, you idiot.”

A slap resounded against her cheek.

Now free of whatever had possessed her, Elena stood to one side of the square. Out
in front of the tent, Gary was still curled up on the ground, and it was one of the
bikers that came out from behind the girl to face her. A single strip of hair that
resembled an eclair stretched down the center of his otherwise bald head. It was Stahl,
the gang’s second-in-command.

Rubbing her cheek, Elena said softly, “That hurt, you know. Care to be a little gentler
next time?”

“Sorry about that,” Stahl replied, baring his pearly teeth in a smile. His eyes told
her,
That’s more like it.

“How many of us are left?” Elena asked him.

“Seven came down with this thing. All that leaves is me, Tan, and Nichou.”

“Counting me, that makes four. That’ll be enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To go into the Shamballa Forest and find some blue moss,” Elena said as she stared
off in the exact opposite direction from the Noble’s manor.

Her words made Stahl’s eyes bulge.

“You mean now? It’ll be night by the time we finish!”

“That’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Going out there near dark is just plain suicide,” said Stahl. “We’d be throwing our
lives away.”

“I wish to hell I knew why that’s all anyone ever has to say. If your life’s that
dear to you when push comes to shove, maybe you’re not cut out for playing the tough
guy even in a little hick village like this. Run on home and hide under your blankets.”

“I’m just saying . . .”

“My ears are gonna bleed if I hear any more excuses,” the girl told him. “Fine. I’ll
go by myself.”

“And if you get the moss, what happens then?”

“Then everyone goes back to normal—probably. That all depends on Mama Kipsch.”

Stahl was at a loss for words.

Turning her back on her still silent compatriot, Elena walked off toward the houses.
The only thing on her mind was where she’d be able to find the weapons she’d need.
That, and one thing more—the figure of a young man in black whose garments whirled
out in the moonlight danced across Elena’s eyelids, but she pushed the image to the
back of her brain with willpower . . . and perhaps a little sadness.

—

Racing along at just under a hundred miles per hour for exactly two hours, she could
finally see a fog-like blob of black beyond the red clay plains. Just as she was going
for the accelerator to increase her speed, she heard the tinny whine of an engine
coming up behind her. She rode on regardless, but a few seconds later three more bikes
pulled up alongside her so their vehicles advanced in a perfect line.

“Welcome back, wimp,” she said, still facing forward.

To her right, Stahl rubbed his own head and said, “Aw, don’t say that. I’m here, ain’t
I?”

“Maybe I should give you a medal or something.”

“Cut ’im some slack already, Elena,” moon-faced Nichou said from the bike to her left,
giving her a wink. Like his face, the man’s body was plump and round. “Why didn’t
you come get us sooner? Me and Tan chewed his ass pretty good, you know.”

“Stahl was just worried about all of us,” said Tan from the other side of Nichou as
a smile rose to his lips. He and Nichou were thick as thieves, but physically they
were complete opposites—he was a mass of lean muscle.

“Well, I suppose you didn’t want or need me worrying about any of you. Anyway, I don’t
think even we’re low enough that we’d let our leader go off all alone to fetch that
stuff,” Stahl said, bashfully pawing at his one remaining strip of hair.

Without so much as cracking a grin, Elena said to him, “Just as long as we’re clear
on that. This might be the only chance we ever get to do something for somebody else.
Your lives are in my keeping now.”

The only reply she got from her compatriots was the roar of their bikes.

Ten minutes later, the four of them reached the entrance to a forest where massive
black boles reached out with branches and leaves the hue of darkness. Finding the
thin thread of a footpath that led into the thickly packed forest was simple enough.

“We’ve got no choice but to leave the bikes here,” Elena said as she got out of the
saddle.

“Do you even know where this blue moss stuff grows?” Stahl asked as he put a gun that
looked more like a cannon and an ammo belt across his back.

Tan unloaded a thick, three-foot-high cylinder with a nozzle from his vehicle, and
Nichou walked along lightly while busily rotating both wrists. Around them spun long,
thin gleams of light.

“Let’s roll!”

At Elena’s command, the gleams resolved into three throwing knives in each of Nichou’s
hands.

There were cracks in the forest canopy that hung over the group like a black cloud,
and through them trickled long, thin shafts of light. Although the patterns of sunlight
were the product of nature, they possessed such a strangely geometrical order that
it was said many traveling artists came to admire them.

As Elena recalled, the blue moss grew on a rock pile in the western part of the forest.
Cautiously venturing in further, the group found their entire field of view filled
by the great variety of plants that called the forest home.

“Hot damn! Would you look at all that yogari weed, slim green, and stretching bamboo!
If we could pick that alone and sell it in the Capital, we’d be living high on the
hog for a good six months. A goddamn shame is what it is. You sure we can’t stop and
pick some?” Tan muttered.

“Every second counts,” Elena told him. “Pretty soon, this well-behaved forest is gonna
show its ugly side.”

But even as she reprimanded her compatriot, Elena couldn’t help but share his feelings
of what a waste it was to leave such treasures behind.

The vibrantly colored plants Tan had named—and many more—grew in profusion between
the trees or among their roots, and all of them were eagerly sought by merchants from
the Capital for their medical applications. Even though the nearby village didn’t
have an appreciable amount of land under cultivation, it was quite wealthy thanks
to the bounty of the forest. What’s more, due to the special properties of the ozone
given off by the trees in the forest and the unique composition of its soil, there
were always enough plants regardless of how many were harvested. The path the group
was following had actually been worn by people out collecting the various specimens.

“Notice anything, Stahl?” Elena asked nonchalantly after they’d been walking for about
three minutes.

“Yep,” he replied without as much as a nod of his nearly bald head. “We’ve had a tail
on us for a while. My gut’s telling me it could be real trouble.”

“No argument there. You suppose it’s ‘the forest dweller?’”

“Damned if I know. But it’s not closing or losing any ground—gotta be pretty smart
by the look of things.”

Although Tan and Nichou must’ve been able to hear every word the other two said, they
didn’t seem at all concerned. After all, these young men had not only grown up on
the Frontier, but they’d led a rough-and-tumble life in their gang. It took a lot
to unnerve them.

“Should we say hello?”

“Sure,” Elena replied, and as she spoke, she snapped her fingers twice. There was
no reaction.

The path twisted up ahead and disappeared into the trees. As they took their first
step around the curve, Elena and her gang demonstrated their teamwork.

Turning his torso just a bit to the right, Nichou let a streak of black fly from his
right hand. The throwing knife he’d hurled with a speed that could only be termed
ungodly was swallowed by the trees. It was only seconds later that the barrel of Stahl’s
gun and the end of Tan’s nozzle were brought to bear on the same spot.

And after a few seconds more, Stahl muttered, “It’s stopped.”

He wasn’t talking about the throwing knife. Rather, he meant whatever they could sense
following them.

Eyes glittering, Elena said, “Your knife disappeared. Was this a bust?”

“No, we would’ve heard it if it’d been blocked. And there would’ve been the sound
of it sticking into a tree if it was dodged. But I don’t think anything could’ve caught
my blade.”

“Then what happened?” Elena asked, not doubting her friend’s ability in the least.

“Well, it was probably—,” Nichou was saying when a black figure dropped from the sky
without a sound. “Head-taker!” he shouted as a
hirsute arm wrapped around his neck and he was lifted high into the air.

Before flame could spit from Stahl’s firearm, Elena had sent the weighted end of her
chain whirring after the creature. There was the crack of bone and an almost beastly
howl of pain, and with that Nichou crashed back to earth. The snap of branches continued
and something rained down on the group like a mist, then stillness returned.

The sun still hung in the sky. Yet there wasn’t the chirping of a single insect or
the song a single bird to be heard in the forest.

“Shit! This is freaking blood!” Stahl cursed as his fingers revealed the liquid that’d
fallen on his bald pate. “At two hundred, that damn head-taker must’ve finally gone
senile if Elena was able to catch a piece of him with her chain,” he chided.

“Hey! Just what’s
that
supposed to mean?!” Elena said, glaring firmly at Stahl. She then continued, “Well,
since I didn’t kill it, it’ll probably be back. There’s no sign of whatever was following
us anymore, either. So let’s pull ourselves together already and get going.”

Their leader brimmed with determination as she started onward, and the three men couldn’t
help but grin.

No sooner had they started walking than Nichou said to Tan, “Notice anything about
that head-taker just now? About the funny way it was dressed?”

“Nah, I was right underneath you, so I didn’t get a good look at it. You mean to tell
me it was wearing something?”