Daughter of the Devil

Chapter 6

Two days. That's how long I had before they caught up. Two nights of almost freezing to death, shivering in whatever shelter I could find. Two days of riding the horse I had named Midnight, of drinking ice cold dirty water from wherever I could find it. Two days of surviving off of what little wild berries I could find. Two days of covering my tracks with my power without really even meaning to. Two days and two nights where I felt constant, painful doubt. But I didn't have very many options except to go south. It was my best bad idea.

On the first day, at dusk, I got a drink of water from a dirty pool in the middle of the woods. As I looked at myself in that pool of dirty water, I wondered who it was that I was seeing. The girl looking back at me had my blue eyes, my shoulder length platinum blonde hair, my long oval-shaped face, my ghostly pale skin, my small almond shaped eyes, my petite nose; but she was ugly. By Ridlandian standards I was beautiful, the perfect blend of my father's eyes and broad shoulders and my mother's hair and face. The girl looking back at me should have been beautiful too. But her eyes revealed bags of tiredness, her pale skin striped with dirt, her mouth pointing down at what was just barely a frown of hopelessness, her hair matted and tangled, her long face trembling, her little nose scraped by thorns. The two girls could not possibly be the same person. The girl looking back at me had been marred, ruined, deformed, damaged, disabled, impaired, bruised, disfigured, twisted, contorted, and warped. She was inexact, defected, decaying, and imperfect. The girl looking back at me had been hurt.

On the second day, at dusk, I hurt my foot. I shouldn't have been walking around in the dark, but I was trying to tie Midnight to a tree so she couldn't leave me. I needed to trap her with me to ensure my own survival.

And I tripped over a root. I fell comically on my face, and Midnight snorted as if she were laughing at me. My right foot got caught under a root that I was blind to, and I fell directly on my face.

I got lucky. My foot wasn't broken, just sprained. But it hurt to walk on, and I could only do a kind of one sided run that ensured I could be outrun by anything faster than a leaf falling to the ground in autumn.

Midnight hadn't been tied yet, but I was too scared to get up and try again. So I slept a fitful sleep, hoping, praying that Midnight wouldn't leave me. When I woke, she was standing right where I left her. So we rode on. But I was running out of stamina. And so was Midnight, though she did a good job hiding it.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was in between two different search parties. One coming from Bellinor, searching for me. They didn't have a trail to follow, but it was easy enough to figure out I was going South. South to Onia. And it didn't occur to me to zigzag my way there or take any path other than the straightest one. The other party was coming from Onia. I'm not sure how much they knew at the time, but they definitely knew I existed. But they didn't know that I had escaped.

On the morning of the third day, the three of us met. The Ridlandians caught up to me first, and the Onians would come no more than thirty seconds behind.

Midnight had been mistreated, anyone could see that. And I knew as the Ridlandians approached, that while I was doomed to be mistreated again, she didn't have to be. So I hopped off of her back, and I let her run away. We wouldn't have outrun them anyway. Better she live than us both die.

Had I met that party of Ridlandians today, I probably could have bested them, or at least come close. But I wasn't trained. I had next to no control over my power. I was completely helpless against them.

When the man grabbed me, the fear I had been holding in exploded and suddenly he was on fire. But no matter. Another one came. And when I shielded my face to protect from his dagger, a tree grew and he was impaled on a branch. But no matter. Another one came, and he had copper.