Chapter four

They walked the whole day, until the sun started to set, Maxine’s legs started to feel weak, her head was down, her shoulders sagging, the only thing holding her straight was the corset.

Before she opened her mouth to complain, or ask anything, she saw a village in the center of a valley. Beyond the stone wall that protected it she saw houses, markets, live stock, merchants, the city had a life of its own. Finally, civilisation.

“Almost there, we’ll find an Inn and rest for tonight” Jake mumbled, they were all tired.

Maxine was mesmerised as she walked past the gates of the city and found herself in the old world, like she had gone back in time. The streets smelled like ale, sewer, rotting food mixed with some sweet smells she couldn’t identify.

“Looks like nothing has changed…” Farak said to Jake as they bumped into people on the narrow streets, Jake nodded.

“Did we go back in time?” Maxine asked, taking in the city and its people, their clothing, their ways.

“Not really. There is a thing that happens when it comes to dimensions…where there is magic, there is no technology…” Jake answered her.

“Oh…”she nodded, somehow it made sense in her head as technology was kind of magic in some ways, she thought about her cellphone for the first time since they arrived, strangely she didn’t even miss it until now. She wanted pictures of this place, pictures made everything feel like things actually happened. Guess I can take mental pictures.

Everyone was drinking, laughing, eating, some were making out with some of the working girls, but they all stopped when the trio entered the tavern. All eyes on them. Farak slowly turned his head to look back at Maxine, mouthing the words “put your hood up”. So she did. The noise erupted back just as it had stopped, suddenly; then everyone was back at what they were doing.

She sat down a table with Jake while Farak went to arrange a room for them in the Inn that was above the tavern. Her body sank on the wooden bench, she was exhausted from their walk. The redhead came back with a key in hand, his jaw clenched.

“What’s wrong?” Maxine asked.

“They only have a room with one bed, but we’ll manage…” he sat the key on the table and joined them, “I ordered some meat, bread, cheese…” he looked at Maxine smiling, “and ale”. He looked so mean normally that seeing him smiling was still new to her.

A dark blonde, curvy, blue eyed, rosed cheeks and big breasts girl came towards them with a pint of ale and three metal cups, deviating from the swaying drunk people. The waitress locked her eyes on Farak from the moment she left the counter until she set the drink on their table. Maxine irrationally decided to take her hood off, putting her hand on Farak’s leg to break their gaze. Farak thanked the girl then turned to look at them.

“What was that Maxine?” Jake laughed while pouring a strong smelling ale into the cups.

“I don’t like sharing my only friends…” she joked, avoiding eye contact with them, “ that includes you too Jake”.

She had never been the jealous or possessive kind, she thought it was because she never actually really cared about anyone or anything that much and yet here she was, with this silly atitude that was all new to her.

Maxine lifted her cup into the air, “to this new life, may it be long enough for me to understand everything…cheers”. The ale didn’t taste like the beers she liked to drink back home, it was thick and warm, to her it was a different drink altogether, but she drank the whole thing in a few gulps anyway.

They ate and drank some more, well, a lot more. She was beginning to get accustomed to being flanked by her two roommates, the more they drank and talked the closer they got to her, shoulders brushing.

They told her how they had spend a year looking for her before they finally got the chance to rent out the rooms at the apartment, and how she was beginning to vibrate in the frequency of her birth dimension and that was causing problems wherever she went.

“That was actually the fourth accident you caused Maxine, when we saw what you did with that car and how that lady was almost killed we decided not to wait anymore, your home was calling you” Jake went on.

She was almost drunk when she squinted her eyes to notice a thin, greasy black haired man staring at her with his dark eyes from across the tavern. He was in a corner table, alone, no food or drink. She tightened up, the tips of her finger tickled with what felt like electricity, she shook her head.

“What’s happened?” Jake questioned, sensing her tension, his hand on her shoulder. Farak was looking around discreetly to see if something had happened, something he missed.

“There is a strange man staring at me…” she looked back at where the man was sitting, to show them, but he was gone. Farak cleaned his mouth with his sleeve and got up stretching his hand to help Maxine up.

“Come on, time to go upstairs” he breathed, still looking around, his voice deeper than usual. She reached for his hand, pushing herself up with the other, she was actually quite altered with all the ale she had drunk. Jake grabbed their belongings, and they made their way upstairs.

The chamber was as small as the wooden cottage they first slept in, and it had one ridiculously small bed by the window, even Maxine would not fit if she wanted to stretch her legs. There was a small fireplace with embers still keeping the place warm, and nothing else, not even a rug on the floor.

“Fur then?” She asked them, pronouncing every vowel drunkenly, “Jay brought the blankets, right?”

Jake put the bag on the bed and threw the furs on them, Maxine almost lost her balance at the weight. He carried this all day, poor thing.

“Tomorrow I’ll try to get us a better room” Farak murmured, opening his fur on the floor. Maxine took the dagger out of the sheath and put it next to her head, under her fur. She folded her velvet cloak into a pillow, finally resting her head and body. With her head spinning, she wondered how much weight she would lose in Morthir, if she were to be walking all day.

“Who am I?” she asked them, with her eyes closed. Silence fell.

Jake laid down on her left, so close to her she felt his warmth. She opened her eyes and turned to him, he was shirtless, sporting his unscarred glowing skin, his ocean blue eyes looking at her.

“All we know is that you are a bastard like us” he paused to think, “well, bastard princess with magic blood. Believe it or not, we don’t know much more than you, we were just kids when we delivered you” Jake chuckled, “Farak was almost a teenager actually…”. Farak laughed, and they all laughed together for a minute. Then silence, apart from the muffled sound of people laughing, music, clinging cups, and love making.

“Let me take off your boots, give them here” her ginger haired, tall and beautiful friend commanded. He was acting so different here, he was still very serious but happier. Maxine lifted her legs, he took her boots off in snappy movements, then grabbed her warm feet with his cold hands, setting them back on the fur slowly.

“Is your hair getting darker by the days, or am I really drunk?” Maxine questioned, eyes struggling to focus on him.

Farak took off his shirt, folding it neatly onto the bed. She remembered the day that she woke up in her room, and everything was folded nicely, it had been him. She saw the scars on his torso and this time she had to ask.

“How come you have scars? Jake here didn’t want to heal you?” She threw in a joke, so he wouldn’t get offended. He laid beside her, taking her hand and placing it on his chest, above a thin scar. She felt the hard muscle under her hand, she was clueless that he looked like this under his dark clothes back home.

“Jake has healed many of my wounds, thankfully, but these are the ones I keep, I don’t know, they feel right” he was whispering now, “You know…I was eleven when Tysen told me we had to take you away, ‘we’ve been discovered’ he said, he told me I was to take care of you until you were ready, and once he saw Jake’s power he sent him along, he was only ten.”

He propped on his elbows to see across from her, to see why was Jake so quiet, she looked too, they found he was already sleeping. Farak started unbuttoning her doublet. Maxine skipped a breath, her heart started pounding with his sudden move, but she didn’t stop him.

He lifted her shirt and undershirt slightly, just enough to see the skin between her pants and her corset, then he ran a finger on her birthmark, just above her bellybutton. It looked like a red letter Y.

“You know I had to see you naked when we moved in, it wasn’t an accident” he was speaking so low, she could barely hear him, “I had to see this, to make sure it was really you…”

She had to bring herself together, get her breathing steady, her buzz went away when the adrenaline of him undressing her kicked in. Farak was still looking at the mark.

“It’s not a birthmark. Tysen branded you, I helped him by holding you down…” he leaned in close, his breath warm in her ear, “I’m sorry for that…”. She could feel the regret and pain in his voice, but butterflies flapped in her stomach.

“That was the day you almost killed him, you were a toddler so you had no idea what we were doing, burning you like that…you threw him against the wall, he passed out” he took off his hand from her, covering each layer of clothing back.

“Are you sure you can sleep with a corset on?” A rhetorical question. He curled up facing the other way, facing the door, his bare back to her.

She finally steadied her breath, her eyelids were heavier by the minute. She was now realising what Farak had just told her.

They had branded her like cattle, when she was just a child. What the actual fuck.