Love Mark Fantasy Book 5: All My Love
Автор
Linda Kage
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Chapter 1
Dori
Earth Year: Late 2020
Outer Realms Year: 328
I’d never been the type to get carsick before.
My mom got seasick a lot, though. I remembered riding the ferry once when I was a kid from Canal Street to Algiers Point, where she spent the entire trip hanging her head over the railing, just puking her guts into the Mississippi. My dad had to rub her back while I fed her a continuous stream of saltines until we landed, and then we had to take the bus home.
Today, I totally sympathized with how pathetic she’d looked back then because the motion sickness currently kicking my ass was definitely no joke.
With a weak groan, I cracked my eyes open and immediately decided that was a bad idea.
A very bad idea.
The constant jostling back-and-forth rock of the wagon I rode in was unbearable enough. Its bumbling grind and jarring shuffle had flipped the switch in my stomach to gurgle mode the moment I’d climbed aboard and settled myself on the hard, wooden planks next to the other women.
Within minutes, I was resting my cheek on the sideboard and panting miserably over the side with one arm limply dangling down, too exhausted to move.
But opening my lashes to discover nothing except violent crashing waves under me was quite another matter altogether.
I’m not sure what had happened to the harmless gravel road we’d been traveling on, but it wasn’t there now. I found myself staring straight into an abyss of what had to be at least an eight-hundred-foot drop-off over the side of a cliff that plunged right into a brutal, surging sea.
And at the very moment I beheld this frightening sight, the wheels of my ride got caught on some uneven ground, causing the entire wagon bed to flounder unsteadily and tip toward the side of the cliff, threatening to spill its contents—which, yes, included me—directly into the waters and jagged rocks below.
“What the hell!?” Gasping, I lurched upright and clutched the sideboards for dear life.
This was not how my day was supposed to go.
Continuing to pant and will my heartbeat back to normal after the wagon settled down again, I clenched my teeth and shook my head because honestly, this was just my luck.
I mean, if I was going to be suddenly sucked from the only life I’d ever known and get thrown through some freaky, Bifrost-looking portal thing until I landed in a completely new world, I couldn’t have found myself in some technologically advanced utopia in the tropics, could I?
No…not me.
I just had to end up in this...this frigid, medieval nightmare.
Except I’m not sure medieval was exactly the right description for the Outer Realms, either. Sure, the place had castles and queens with knights in shining armor. I’d even heard rumors of dragons being around at one time, but they had no coffee or chocolate.
I’m totally serious; no chocolate at all.
In my book, that was about as medieval as it got.
The wagon I was riding in looked more like something from the eighteen-hundreds Oregon Trail, minus the pretty, white bonnet sheet that usually covered them. But the people here used toilet paper—today’s version of toilet paper...on rolls with two-ply and everything.
They didn’t talk all that medieval-ish either, at least not how medieval-ers from the movies I’d seen talked. Their dialect was kind of a hodgepodge of present-day and old-timey American English with a splash of a British accent thrown in.
I know, I know. So weird. Don’t ask.
It made no sense to me either, to be honest. The Outer Realms was downright impossible to compartmentalize into one single category.
I just knew I wasn’t home.
And I was really missing New Orleans right about now. Especially its transportation system. Gah, give me a streetcar or Uber any day over this.
“Where did the road go?” I asked, gulping unsteadily as I glanced ahead to see that every carriage, wagon, and horse in the royal caravan I’d decided to stow myself away on was also riding this close to the side of the cliff.
These people were freaking crazy, let me tell you. And the most bewildering part was how my question was met with a chorus of laughter.
Laughter!
Oh, the clueless earthling had a very logical inquiry. Let’s point and snicker like she’s a freak. Ha-ha, so funny.
Even the driver glanced back to snort at me, and I hadn’t heard him speak a single word since I’d climbed into his wagon for a free ride.
Finally, one of the women paused her amusement long enough to furrow confused brows and demand, “What? Are you serious?”
I didn’t see how the question could be taken as a joke, so I blinked at her before squeaking out my alarm and clutching the sideboards when we hit yet another bump. Then I groaned because, wow, this wasn’t helping my nausea at all.
“Honestly,” I muttered, cringing out my fear. “Do we have to travel quite this close to the edge of a cliff?”
I told myself not to look down—do not look down, Dori—just before I glanced down, looking straight into the angry sea.
Oh God, why had I looked down?
My stomach roiled. I spun back to the harem girls I’d been riding with for the past few hours and listened to them laugh some more at my expense as I concentrated on breathing through my nose and not vomiting.
“Are you sure you’re a High Clifter at all?” another one of them finally asked.
Eyes widening in worry, I reached up to gingerly touch the tattoo I had on my temple. It told everyone who looked at me that I hailed from the Kingdom of High Cliff because all High Clifters had them. If you didn’t have one, you weren’t a High Clifter.
Unity had thought it’d be a good idea for me to get one too so I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. I didn’t exactly want to be discovered as an outside invader in this unfamiliar world and run the risk of being burned at the stake, hanged, or maybe even stoned to death for it, so I’d acquired one of their marks to fit in with the locals.
And yay, go tattoo, it always got me a foot in the door until I opened my big mouth and ousted myself as a clueless newcomer with just about everything I said.
“Well, I...I…um...” I shrugged helplessly and flailed out a hand. “I’ve never left the capital before.”
“But how could you live in Elaina and never even heard of the Cliff Trail?”
The Cliff Trail?
Casting the inquirer a tight smile, I muttered, “I’ve been incredibly sheltered.”
“Apparently,” one of the ladies said in a dry voice, while all of them continued to stare as if I were some kind of alien.
Admittedly, they weren’t wrong, you know, since I hailed from a far-off world. But still…
Rude.
“What’d your employers do, tie you to the bed from birth?” one of them asked, causing the others to cackle with more laughter. “Did you even get to learn your letters and numbers, or did they only teach you how to pleasure a man?”
I blinked, unamused.
Truly, these people had the oddest sense of humor.
Ever since Unity’s husband, Olivander, had greeted me the moment I’d landed in the Outer Realms, he’d kept me pretty much out of the public eye.
For my own safety.
Apparently, I had a cursed mark on my arm, and if anyone caught sight of it, I’d basically be executed within minutes, since anyone who possessed one of them was a straight-up monster.
So there was that.
Plus, the fact that I’d only been an inhabitant on this planet for barely over a month now.
Put those together, and I looked pretty dim and naive to these people.
I mean, I knew I still had a lot to learn about the Outer Realms. Like the fact that there were actual cliffs in the Kingdom of High Cliff. For some oddball reason, that had never occurred to me before, but here they were!
Can’t say I would’ve wanted quite this close a view of them, though.
“Well, to catch you up to speed, Miss Sheltered,” one of the older women in the wagon told me. From listening to them all talk to each other, I’d learned her name was Naveen, and she was pretty much the boss mom of the group. “This here is called the Cliff Trail, and it’s the fastest way to get from High Cliff to Lowden. It shaves off two to three days’ worth of riding if you go this way.”
Spreading out her arm in the direction facing away from the edge of the cliff, she brought my attention to the scraggly weeds that ranged from two to eight feet high and were thick with huge, piercing thorns. “But if you’d rather take your chances out there in that, be my guest, love.”
“I heard only half the people who enter the Thorned Forest come out again,” one of the girls whispered ominously.
I winced at the ragged frontier we were passing and then swiveled back to peer across the ocean. As my motion sickness flared back to life, I wondered why I hadn’t seen this when I’d first arrived in the Outer Realms because I’m pretty sure Olivander would’ve had to bring me right through this area to get me from the village of Belle, where he’d found me, to the capital of Elaina. But then I remembered that we’d ridden in his carriage with the curtains drawn, and I’d mostly slept through the whole trip because getting blasted from one world to the next really zapped your strength for a few days.
Still… I glanced around me, amazed that I’d missed so much that last time I’d been through here.
“Isn’t this incredibly dangerous, though?” I asked. “What happens if we meet someone going the other way?”
“Then they get out of our path.”
I winced at the thorns someone would have to step into in order to get out of our way. “But—”
Before I could voice another question, however, the wheels jostled too perilously close to the edge yet again. I yelped out a curse and scooted in toward the center of the wagon, seeking safety, only to bump into one of the other girls. “Sorry.”
Her name was Erinn, I think. She must’ve been one of the kinder souls here because she offered me a forgiving smile and patted my knee before saying, “Ain’t no danger here at all, milady. We got the fence protecting us.”
“The…fence?” I asked slowly. Did I even want to know what that was?
“Just there,” Naveen explained, motioning toward the cliff. “It’s an invisible barrier that runs along the side of the cliff. It keeps anything of a substantial size from going over unless you ask it to let you through.”
Yeah, did she just say you had to ask a fence to let you through?
“It’s like this,” another girl joined in. Ora, if I remember her name right, ripped a heavy boot off her foot and heaved it over the side of the wagon, toward the cliff. But instead of tumbling into the waters below, it stopped short, and the air made a strange buzzing sound against it, crackling with light as if the boot had struck a wall of pure electricity. Then the footwear came bouncing back to the wagon and hit one of the other women in the side of the shoulder.
“Ouch!” she cried, clutching the injury and scowling at Ora. “Try watching your aim next time, will you, hussy?”
As Ora smarted off some non-apology, I kept blinking at the place where the boot had ricocheted off pure air. “It’s a freaking force field,” I said in awe.
I mean, how cool was that? Especially in a wannabe medieval-type world.
“A what?” Ora asked, turning to frown at me in confusion.
“Nothing,” I murmured, finding a small pebble lying in the bottom of the wagon bed. After picking it up, I flicked it at the force-field fence and frowned when it went sailing right over the edge and into the sea with no resistance at all.
“Pebbles are too small to be recognized by the fence,” Erinn explained to me.
“Oh.” I nodded, still staring at the spectacular stretch of air beside us. “Huh. That’s so cool, though. I wonder how it works.”
“With magic, of course,” Naveen said simply, her haughty tone letting me know how ignorant she thought I was.
Ora sniffed and sent me a degrading glance. “You’ve heard of magic, I reckon?”
I met her gaze and unconsciously tugged at the long sleeve of the dress I wore to make sure my wrists remained covered. The cloth successfully hid the cursed mark I had embedded on the inner part of my forearm, proclaiming that I was a member of the most magically evil family on this planet.
“Yeah,” I muttered in a low voice. “Magic, I’ve heard of.”
And it was still hard for me to wrap my head around that. But magic was real in the Outer Realms—like openly and (mostly) accepted by everyone as just another part of life.
A month ago, everything had been right and normal with me. I’d been living with my roommate in our cozy, walk-up apartment within strolling distance from the French Quarter and trying to keep my terrace tomato plants alive while I saved up enough money from my waitressing gig to buy myself a car. I’d even been staying healthy enough through the pandemic, when I got mixed up in one little protest that went south, caught a brick to the head, and boom—instead of outright dying, I was spat out onto the ground in some foreign land that resembled a Renaissance fair gone wrong.
Olivander, the guy that found me and helped me deal with my new surroundings, was not only a prince of a guy, but he was a literal prince who had since become the King of High Cliff. He and his wife, Unity, had been so awesome about helping me try to find a way back home and keeping me safe while I was here. But in doing that, the three of us had discovered that my mom might have also been born here before she was shipped off to Earth when she was an infant, hence the reason a tattooed mark had appeared on my arm when I landed that said I came from House Graykey—aka, the cursed family.
And because my blood belonged here, that’s why I’d been taken from Earth and tossed back to the Outer Realms instead of dying on that fateful day I arrived.
We think.
Or maybe I really was dead, and this was my afterlife. Except I didn’t feel dead. And I absolutely refused to buy that scenario. So…
In any case, no one could be positive why I was here, but strangely enough, I ranked among the minority that did indeed bear their own magical abilities. I could suddenly talk to animals when I most certainly hadn’t been able to Dr. Doolittle anything on Earth.
Sometimes, I wondered if I was simply laid up in a hospital somewhere in New Orleans, stuck in a coma, and all I had to do was wake up to get home again.
Trust me, I’d tried the Dorothy approach and clicked my heels three times; it hadn’t worked.
Ergo, dream coma or not, this was my new reality for the time being, and I decided to roll with it until I somehow made my way through. I mean, it appeared pretty freaking real, especially with the motion sickness going on. And that’s why I played the game and continued to keep my earthly status as well as my evil Graykey family ties a secret from a majority of the population for my own safety.
Which meant this was probably a good moment to pause and confess that I actually had found a way back to Earth. It might not have been a permanent way—apparently, I needed some kind of super special amulet with me to stay home for good when I returned—but saying a couple of voodoo-sounding phrases would’ve taken me back for at least a while—a year, tops—before I would’ve gotten sucked back to the Outer Realms again.
And yet…
Yeah, I hadn’t returned to Earth. I had even left the words I needed to chant to get me there back at the library in Elaina, which was now hours behind me.
Strange, I know. Why was I still here, one may ask.
Well, funny story, that.
You see, I’d been in the middle of the ritual to take myself home—I swear, my foot had been lifted to step back into the star tunnel I’d just created—when a tingling had started in my temple, right where my High Cliff love mark tattoo was located.
It didn’t seem to matter that I’d only gotten the stupid tattoo so I could merely look like a High Clifter and fit in. The magic in it had taken hold, regardless, and just when I was about to leave this world in the rearview mirror—bam—my mark alerted me to the presence of my true love in the general vicinity because that’s what the High Cliff tattoos did—they let you know when your true love was near.
And sue me, but I was curious, okay? I’d never had much luck in the man department before, and it’d been a full year since Alcée and I had split up. I just wanted to know what this guy who was supposed to be “just for me” was like. And maybe make sure he wasn’t all that and a bag of potato chips.
That was all.
I was a romantic at heart.
Not to mention the mark wouldn’t stop bothering me until I did go check things out. It was an annoying little bugger, let me tell you.
We’d had a couple of one-on-one conversations about its irritatingly persistent tingling. I kept telling the mark to chill a bit on the go this way, go that way, keep following him, don’t let him get away insistence that it kept pushing into my head, and it basically ignored me completely, screaming, move your ass, woman; don’t let him get away!
And so… I’d followed the unceasing prickling from my supernatural tattoo until we came across a cavalcade of people riding wagons, carriages, and horses out of town.
After a quick inquiry, I learned the caravan belonged to the King of Lowden. He was Olivander’s cousin and had been visiting High Cliff to settle some kind of land ownership deal or whatever, but now he was on his way back home.
Well, to think that someone who was supposed to be my soul mate was riding in the Lowden King’s entourage and could be so close, yet was getting away, was more than I could take. And I’d chased after the whole party before finding myself a ride on this wagon with these fine women, hoping I could track my true love down as soon as the caravan paused for a break, so I could—I don’t know—meet the man, at least.
I could always go home again after that, once I saw what he was like and I’d convinced myself that love marks were silly notions and they couldn’t really make you aware of the presence of your fated life partner nearby. It was just a ruse. That was all.
But, you know, I had to be sure first. Right?
Yes, I did.
Ergo…
Glancing around at the group sitting with me in the wagon, I heaved out a sigh.
Here I was, still following the sensation that was tickling my temple, even through the motion sickness.
There were ten of us in this wagon, including me and the driver—Uvall, as they had called him. The other eight women were concubines who’d been living in the castle at Elaina and servicing Olivander’s father while he’d been king. But once he had died and Vander had gotten the crown, he had disbanded his father’s old harem, effectively putting all these ladies straight out of work.
When they’d heard that the new King of Lowden was returning home, they had banded together, rented a wagon, and followed behind at the end of his entourage in the hopes of joining his harem in Lowden.
Once I’d caught up to their caboose, I’d gotten a ride with them.
“I wish I had some nice glamouring magic powder on me right now,” the oldest concubine—Ursuline, I think her name was—announced with a heavy sigh. “That way, I could change the look of this weathered old face and become whatever the king most desired.”
“I hope he’s handsome,” Erinn demurred, her voice dreamy and wistful. “I’ve never been with a handsome man before.”
One of the others snorted. “He’s from House Kole. Of course, he’ll be pleasing to look upon. I swear, all of them Koles are too gorgeous for their own good. His sisters were the reigning beauties of all Lowden before they died.”
Wait. Had she just said this Lowden king guy was from House Kole? Seriously?
The dude was named King Kole? Why had I never heard Vander mention that before?
With a snort, I said under my breath, “He’ll definitely be a merry old soul.”
And a merry old soul was he, my brain went on to chant, remembering the old nursery rhyme my mother used to tell me when I was little.
“What was that, Rowena?”
It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me because, crap, I’d forgotten I’d told them my name was Rowena.
It had seemed safer to go incognito under an alias, so when Naveen—who was a petite redhead who looked too much like Crowley’s mom off the show Supernatural—had asked, Rowena had been the first name to pop into my head.
Straightening, I cleared my throat and answered, “Nothing, sorry.”
Naveen didn’t pursue the topic; she merely shrugged off my strangeness and went back to discussing the most effective ways to win them all a place in old King Kole’s merry harem once they reached Lowden.
They’d just decided to have their youngest and prettiest girl, Althea, be the first to seduce him so they could put their best foot forward and really sell themselves when Uvall gave a sharp whistle and jerked on the reins, causing the wagon to shudder to a halt.
“Whoa! What’s going on?” I asked, gripping the sideboards and looking around. I immediately went on high alert.
Tucking my arm protectively closer to my side, even though I was hiding my cursed mark under a glamour spell and long sleeves, I watched the other conveyances in our cavalcade in front of us also slowing to a stop.
At first, I wondered if Vander and Unity had realized what I’d done and had chased me down to fetch me back to Elaina. But when I looked for soldiers bearing High Cliff colors, there were none around. Just Lowden colors and banners, Lowden guards, and Lowden people.
Whew. What a Lowden relief!
My shoulders relaxed fractionally. There was no way Vander or Unity would know I was still in the Outer Realms, anyway. No one had seen me sneak onto the king’s wagon train.
Besides, the letter I’d left behind said I’d been going back to Earth. They’d never suspect that I’d stuck around to participate in this extremely risky detour first.
Which was nice in the fact that they wouldn’t try to stop me or even warn me how dangerous and unwise my mission could be—you know, because I still had a curse on me that could send me into a mad fit of bloodlust that caused me to kill everyone on this trail—but also meant they couldn’t come to my rescue if things went awry. I was one hundred percent on my own for this one.
It was as scary as it was thrilling.
“Taking a break,” Uvall announced, his voice gruff from lack of talking as he followed everyone ahead of him to pull off into a wide clearing where the king’s entire entourage could rest for a spell before starting off again. The scraggly, thorny bushes even gave way to a small forest that surrounded the rocky overlook, where I could already see some people darting into the trees for some much-needed respite.
Sucking in a breath, I realized this meant one thing to me.
My love mark gave a twinge of excitement, letting me know the man connected to the other end of it was still within its parameters.
It was time to find out who my mark was leading me to.
