Rosaliy

Just before Drake tumbled from the sky and well before being inadvertently blasted out of the sky by Shrilynda, Rosaliy made her way through the halls of the crumbling palace turned pirate stronghold.

“This all seems too easy,” Rosaliy mumbled as she and Jadelynn ladled healing potion into a little jar Jadelynn had stashed in a scarf tied around her waist. Sure, there had been plenty of menacing-looking pirates patrolling the halls, but they were no match for an invincible invisible bubble. All it had taken was to knock over a chair down the hallway from the conspicuously guarded treasure room to convince the guard to check a room around the corner. Then they closed the door on him and broke the lock. Jadelynn’s extensive expertise with older brothers and mean pranks had come in handy. Rosaliy made a mental note to thank her brother for not being a psychopath.

“You’ll make up for it getting to Flifary Island,” Jadelynn chattered, taking back the full jar. “How do you expect to wrangle the Granpulpo? Queen Kat talked to us about it one time when we were studying magical creatures. She said it was huge and easily angered.”

Rosaliy had no real answer. The second they stumbled across the information in their research, Cliff and Jadelynn were sure a giant octopus was the best way to travel. Supposedly, only a magical creature could travel to Flifary Island uninvited, but when that creature was a touchy, giant octopus, she wished she had time to dig for another plan, one involving a boat or magical stones. It was safe to assume Daniella would not have considered travel by giant octopus a legitimate option, so at least Rosaliy had the supposed power of unpredictability on her side.

They exited the door, and Rosaliy disentangled the chain of the intricate metal ball from her belt, cupping the twisted metal in her palm. Handling new objects required coming out of the protective bubble—an unfortunate drawback. When the benefit was being invisible and completely safe from everything outside the bubble, that one drawback was surmountable. The dome sprang up just in time for them to slide by one very angry pirate yelling to a few more to split up and search the castle.

“I doubt they’ll be searching where we’re going,” Jadelynn giggled quietly. The urge to whisper unnecessarily was too hard to overcome.

They sped through the palace. Outside the ballroom, the pirates had let most of the palace fall into disrepair. They had tracked sand everywhere and redecorated with whale bones and mounted cutlasses.

“Does it ever make you sad?” Rosaliy asked as they walked past a wall-sized nautical map affixed to the wall with knives.

“You should hear Matias whine,” Jadelynn giggled. “No, they can do what they want to the place.”

“If things had gone differently, you could have lived here. I think, in your place, I might be inclined to resent the pirates.”

“Hmm,” Jadelynn hummed with a sideways grin, pointing at a jewel-encrusted chandelier being used to support one end of a rope hammock. “Not really. I see how much pressure Lillya is under. I mean, poor girl can’t even go camping without somebody trying to kidnap her. My mom still doesn’t get to make choices for herself. I couldn’t do it. I’d snap and run away, probably. Instead, I get to train to be a Sorceress. I feel like it was what I was meant to do, you know?”

Rosaliy did know. “Magic is in your blood. It is what you were meant to do.” She told a new group of girls exactly that every year, and she meant it every time.

Another hallway’s decor consisted of bottles hanging from the ceiling with ropes.

“Abuelo would be spinning in his grave if he could see this, though,” Jadelynn whispered, like whispering would give away their position less than shouting at this moment.

Finally, they found the sealed wing. Sealed was not the right word, considering the only barriers were a few tables someone had hacked the word “NO” onto. The stairs were too great an obstacle for the flat bottom of the dome, unfortunately. The first time they tried to go up, the dome slid straight through. They had to backtrack, and Rosaliy had to abandon the enchantment, retying the metal ball securely around her belt. They were so close anyway.

“Good thing Sorceress Issabeth makes us run stairs every day,” Jadelynn sighed. “She always says if you’re not prepared to run up ten flights of stairs in an emergency, you’re not prepared for anything.”

That did sound like the High Sorceress.

“Hey,” barked a voice down a distant hallway. “I heard something in the cursed wing.”

Jadelynn moaned. “Can we not tell the Sorceress she was right?”

Rosaliy would have agreed wholeheartedly, but she was busy running up what must have been a thousand stairs. Jadelynn kept pace, and eventually they were at the top, panting. If Issabeth could have seen them, they would both have been assigned strict new training regimes as punishment. Rosaliy managed to close her fingers around the metal ball before three pirates crested the stairs, weapons drawn. Up close, the pirates—two men and a woman—were menacing. Where the Crocs had given the impression of trying to look tougher than they were, these pirates were exactly as tough as they looked. Their spiked boots and copious weaponry were less decorative and more a lifestyle. The woman was her own brand of fierce. She looked like one of those swamp flowers that tempted travelers with its colored leaves and wafting smell, just to devour them when they got too close.

“Room by room,” ordered the woman. She rolled her r’s like they were the ocean itself. “Flush ‘em toward the sea.”

“We toss ‘em over when we find ‘em?” asked one of the men. “Or you in the mood to chat?”

“They’re interrupting my busy evening of devouring canapes by the trayful,” she groused in reply. “I’m in the mood to gut them and hang them from the South Turret.”

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The questioner pushed open the first room with the blade of a withdrawn knife. “Hello?” he called. “Anybody in here? Just looking for a partner for a rousing game of bladelings. No?”

“I don’t like bein’ up here, Es,” whined the other pirate. “These hallways are cursed by the spirits of—”

“You can stop right there, Harl,” she cut him off. “There are no roaming spirits down these hallways unless you count rats and gulls. Plenty of those.”

“Then why don’t no one ever come in here?” he shot back.

“Cause you blasted a hole in the side of the castle eight years back, locoburro,” she scoffed. “Don’t make me waste energy on threatening you.”

“I wish mom would let me put streaks in my hair like Esmona’s,” Jadelynn sighed, eying the woman’s dramatic teal hair.

Esmona? Oh.

“We need to get past them before they beat us to the secret room,” was what Rosaliy said out loud, although her thoughts were quite different.

They waited until the pirates had cleared the hallway and made for the end, hopping over wide cracks in a crumbling floor. The dome may have carried them safely across, but the drop to the swelling ocean below was alarming enough to convince Rosaliy not to take the chance. Rosaliy had to relinquish the ball so they could try the door. She bit back a cry of dismay. The wall to this room had been ripped away, plus the entire adjoining room. There was no way to go further from here. To add insult, Jadelynn pointed. Directly across this pirate-created chasm, Rosaliy could see the space between the floor they were on and the floor above. The secret room was so close, but there was no way to reach it from here.

Rosaliy heard the pirates banging doors down the hallway, moving closer.

Safely under the dome once more, they ran the wrong way in order to pick up another hallway that took them back to the other side of the castle chasm. At least they had outpaced the pirates and had a little time to search. However, unless they could exit this room by the time the pirates made it this far, they would be trapped, unless they wanted to chance a long drop to the ocean. Rosaliy did not want to chance a long drop to the storm-wracked ocean.

The wind came in fierce, noisy gusts, making it hard for Rosaliy to hear the noisy pirates, but thankfully doing the same for them. She tied the metal ball back to her belt and scanned the room dubiously. It had been wrecked by wind and sea air. What if their entry point was at the bottom of the ocean?

“The chandelier,” hissed Jadelynn during a wind lull. “See the ring around its base?”

That was the point of entry to the secret space above all right, but where was the keyhole to open it?

“Maybe if I stood on your shoulders, I could reach the ceiling?” Jadelynn offered. “I don’t see anywhere to put a key, though.”

“Search the room first,” Rosaliy whispered. “There must be something.” Unless it was on the wall that had slid into the ocean years ago. Rosaliy shushed herself; pessimism was not helping right now.

Jadelynn pawed through weather-torn shelves, sliding objects and opening drawers. Rosaliy took a second to evaluate what was left in the room. The space was wrecked after all these years of being open to the elements. There was a rusty suit of headless armor slumped in the corner. One arm had been ripped off, but the other seemed in better shape—less rusty and still fastened in place. Rosaliy waved Jadelynn over.

The armor had rusted over long ago, so they almost missed the keyhole in metal man’s armpit. Rosaliy banged upward to release the rust, wincing at the clanging sound. After a few tries, she managed to jam the key inside and turn it. There was a muffled click, click, click, and the chandelier lowered gently, its hanging metal loops becoming something like rungs of a rope ladder.

The thieves were smart enough to rejoice silently, and soon Jadelynn and Rosaliy had both scaled the makeshift metal ladder. The secret room above was an even more disgusting mess than the one below. Spider webs and animal droppings filled every corner. The conditions were made worse by being forced to crawl on hands and knees in the cramped space. Jadelynn stifled a scream as she jostled a nest and awoke a pack of squealing chicks.

A blast of wind shot in, bringing with it the ominous sound of distant shouting. Rosaliy redoubled her searching efforts. In amongst the filth, the room was also crammed with trunks and shelves with glass fronts.

“I wish we could take more,” Jadelynn sighed quietly. “Just think of the amazing things that might be in here. Maybe we could ask Queen Kat to make a deal with the pirates for some of it?”

No doubt there were valuable treasures squirreled away in here, but Rosaliy was only focused on one. Through the broken front of a dirty glass cabinet, something caught her eye. She wrapped a scarf around her hand and pried open the jagged glass. There was a carved wooden box with an octopus on the front. She tried to force the box open, but it held fast.

“Maybe there’s a special way to press the tentacles to unlock—” Jadelynn started to suggest. The wind chose that moment to die down, and she was cut short by a voice down below.

“You sure you heard something in here, Harl?” called Esmona. “Because if you are hearing fake spirits again, I swear…”

“They weren’t no spirits,” Harl protested.

“That’s why you waited for me outside, right?” chuckled Esmona, her voice definitely in the room now.

“Better safe than sorry.”

“Yeah, because that’s the pirating motto,” she muttered. Her footsteps moved back to the door. “Head around,” she yelled down the hallway to the last pirate. “Pin them in!”

Oh, no. Could she and Jadelynn drop down the access hole and activate the dome before they were skewered by pirates? It depended how close the pirates were to the hole, she imagined. Otherwise she’d be trapping a pirate inside the dome with them. Jadelynn was carefully peering down the hole now. The girl shot Rosaliy a grimace and shook her head. Not a good plan, then.

Maybe they could swing over the open edge, jump to the next room? Rosaliy tried to call up a picture in her head. The secret room she was in was dangling over the ocean. The stone shelf seemed prohibitively far from any floor below.

Then Rosaliy heard another voice call out. Drake’s voice. Good timing. Maybe. Esmona did not sound overly pleased to see him, but that very well might have been pirate flirting. Rosaliy crept toward the edge of the shelf to look out. There was Drake in the room across from her. He saw her. She could not have stopped her relieved smile if she tried. She wondered how he had managed to find her, but mostly the sliver of the shore below caught her eye, or, more accurately, its occupant.

There was a frighteningly pale woman down below. Katyrinna was a rosy pale, but this woman looked like she had not been outside for years. Her white skin was especially jarring in contrast to her curtain of black hair and the tattered black clothing wrapped around her slight form. She was Malum, Rosaliy realized, and she was raising her arms in attack. Rosaliy could not see the target, but the woman’s eyes were fixed on a point just below Rosaliy. Her brain fumbled. What could she do to help? Her fingers clutched only the wooden box. If she could have opened it in the next heartbeat, she might have called the animal Jadelynn called the Granpulpo. As it was, lightning flashed from the woman’s hands, a brilliant blinding blast.

Rosaliy hardly understood what happened next. She felt an earthquake at her feet, and the stone beneath her shattered. Jadelynn dove forward, arms outstretched, but Rosaliy was already falling fast. She had not even the time for her life to flash before her eyes before she landed with a slap on the water. Her only thought while she felt the briefest instant of whole-body pain was that water was supposed to splash. Who knew a liquid could feel so much like hitting a solid wall? Then she thought and felt nothing at all.