Chapter Six

I walk over to guard our flags, now completely healed. People scramble around to follow their teams. Our captain lets me be one of the guards, but when I find out the other guard is Mark, I start to doubt my decision.

I move as far away from Mark as I possibly can, and while Mark is preoccupied disarming a hunter, I decide to sneak away. I run swiftly across the field until I hear Mark swearing loudly. "Kayla, you brat! Go disarm Zoë!" I'm confused until I notice a blur sprint past Mark. I observe closely to see a girl with dark-colored hair and copper-colored skin running towards our flags. She looked like a Persian princess, with a silver circlet and matching chiton.

I charge towards Zoë until she flings a knife towards me. This catches me off guard and I slow down. Zoë notices, and continues throwing knives at me. They purposely miss me, but sometimes she accidently aims a little better, so my arms are soon covered with small cuts. When Zoë runs out of knives, she starts shooting arrows at me. She's slightly better with her bow and arrows, and I have to slow down to pluck out the arrows that stick out like thorns on a rosebush. Despite Zoë's distractions, I manage to get closer to her, and it startles her. Zoë shoots an arrow at my shoulder, but at the last moment, the arrow is spun around and flies away from my shoulder. Zoë is flabbergasted but recovers quickly. She starts loading and reloading arrows towards nonfatal places that would still cause much pain, but the arrows avoid their targets. Zoë shock turns quickly into frustration and then anger. She stops to yell at the sky, "Mistress Artemis, your "games" are not funny. I am not amused." Zoë speaks with a thick accent and reminds me of Shakespeare. Unfortunatly, when I reach for her weapons to disarm her, she reflexively slaps my hand away. Zoë glares at me and shakes her finger as if saying "no".

"Did thee really think it would be easy?" she laughs. I'm stunned, and she uses it to her advantage and starts running towards the flag. While she runs with the flag across the field, I decide to take my sword and use it as a spear. I take aim and throw, unsure if my "spear" would make it. As the blade slices through the air and soars across the field, it falters enough to hurt Zoë without impaling through her arm. She yelps in pain, and lets my team disarm her. Despite my victory, another hunter makes it across with another flag, resulting in Chiron declaring the hunters' 55th victory in a row. My team groans, but Caston comes over to congratulate me on helping disarm Zoë. However, not everyone on the team was happy with me.

"Kayla, what were you doing?" I look up and see Mark marching towards me. He's sweating, covered with small splotches of blood, and growling. He takes his spear and punctures it into my arm. I cry out it pain and my vision fogs as Chiron and Caston pull Mark away. He resists though, and he charges right back to me. This time, his spear is forgotten and he takes my head and pounds it to the ground. Each throw is more forceful. "Kayla! You should have watched for other hunters other than Zoë! Now Phoebe got it!" His voice is pained as if he wished that his team would win again. When Caston charmspeaks Mark from beating me again, I feel helpless. With tears in my eyes, I stagger away from the crowd and into the forest.