What would she do with the knowledge?
And when she stepped to the water’s edge, and her blood spilled into the sea, what would he do when he was set free?
Chapter Three
Havence managed the steep slope of the dune before her mother’s cart pulled up to the front of their small house.
The old timbers of the building once were supple and smooth, cut from some tree whose dried up roots left pockets in the ground where they used to run with water. Now, the wood splintered and flaked in the harsh sun; the walls threatened to tumble apart with the next sand storm that rushed over the land.
How long ago had it been, barely a week or less, that Ven had had to climb into the well, a rope tied around her waist, and drop to the bottom, hoping to be able to dig deep enough to find another splash of water to wet her tongue?
Her mother ambled slowly from the cart.
Ven offered her hand when she was close enough to assist.
Frail fingers, too frail for her age, the weather and the water making a husk of the woman who had given birth to her some twenty-two years ago, reached out to accept the aid.
Havence had never seen her mother as vibrant.
The desert had long ago stripped any joy from the woman’s bent back.
That, or the beatings she’d endured during her tenure as witch in the citadel.
Havence didn’t truly know.
She’d only guessed at the scars on her mother bore; the scars that Ven would return with once she was allowed to leave the heart of her people’s homeland.
Her father would have never allowed it.
But then, her father was the reason her mother was so hated.
An outsider, a seafarer. Dead.
Havence would not be welcomed in the capital, much as her mother was not welcome there, though they accepted their presence as necessity.
She linked her arm through her Shara’s, made her steps slow and steady so as to allow the woman the time to straighten her spine and relearn the use of her feet after so long in the cart.
The city was a three-day journey from their home on the shore.
If Shara had been lucky, someone would have offered her lodging on her trip there and back, but once they saw the mark on her forehead, most turned their backs on the witches of the east.
It would have been a long and hard trip.
Havence should have gone as well, but her turn was coming, far too soon.
“How was the west?”
Shara smiled sadly, patted Ven’s hand. “Hot.” They entered the house together, and her mother sank into the single chair they had before the seldom used fire, the heat never needing much to add to its warmth. “It is good to be back by the water. It is not so arid here as in the deep desert.”
Arid enough.
Havence didn’t ask more of the trip, of what the temple elders had said or demanded.
Shara would share the news soon enough.
She moved through their tiny home and fetched a glass from a cupboard, pored a measured draught of water into the cup and brought it back to her mother whose peeling skin and cracked lips told the story of how much she’d been given on her travels.
“That’s too much, Ven.”
“It’s fine. And you need it.”
Shara offered a small nod. Even with her denial, they both knew she would drain the glass dry for want of the water it held.
They could likely drain their small well of all its water within a day if they were not careful, the thirst a thing that would tempt any man to damnation to quench.
But they were always careful, always circumspect in their rationings.
“The water holds strong?”
Havence wished she could lie to the woman who had raised her, but no matter the hardships truth offered, they didn’t hedge to one another. “I will have to go down to dig it out again. It’s mostly mud now. Each dig is lasting less and less.”
She didn’t add that they needed rain, a storm. They both knew that and knew too there was no hope for the same.
Whatever spring her ancestors had found long ago was drying fast beneath their feet.
“The dig won’t matter. We need only enough water to fill our casks.”
“We will need the water, Mama. Better to just dig it out now than have to go down again and again in the future.”
“There will be no future here, Ven.” Shara straightened her shoulders in her chair, squared her chin as she met Havence’s gaze. “We are to return to the Citadel. The khan has decided it is time you were introduced to the court.”
A long time coming, finally here.
Her mother had gone when she was a child to the city to learn the lessons there.
Havence knew she was past due for the same.
Had she not begged the sea to save her but hours before from this very fate?
“Mother, I—”
“It is done, Havence. The choice is removed from my hands. The khan has commanded it be so, and I will not risk rebelling again, not for any reason.”
“When have you ever rebelled? You who are at the beck and call of Alaluat and the city’s people? You who have never been treated with kindness within their walls, catering to their needs? You would have me as docile and beaten as a slave rather than a free woman! If Father—”
“Your father is the very reason for our plight, Havence!”
The bitterness in Shara’s voice caused Ven to take a step back, the snarl that curled the older woman’s lips harsh and unforgiving, bitter where Ven had never seen the same before cross her mother’s mouth.
“You loved my father.”
“Yes. And for that love we were outcast.”
Ven shook her head, hands upraised before her like she could ward off the hateful words. “You said we were always outcast.”
Shara pushed herself from the chair, her stooped height no match to Havence’s unbowed back. She reached for the light robes covering her, dust stained from her travels, the color of the sand.
Ven knew what rested under those clothes. She knew the scars that wrapped across her mother’s back, the lash marks that the khan was too willing to order against anyone who displeased him, male or female, elder or child.
Marks from a marriage against clan law.
Marks her mother had spoken of only after Ven’s father didn’t return from a voyage on the sea.
She reached out, stopped Shara’s hands reaching to undo the ties.
“You never remember what they will do to us, Havence, without hesitation. Some I received when I was a child. When I worked against the khan and was caught. He could not kill me, not a witch, but he took pleasure in having me beaten. He would not have hesitated to kill me when I came to him belly heavy with child, a child not of the blood. He will not hesitate to kill you if you step out of line. All he needs is a child of your womb. He won’t wait long after it is born if you give him reason not to keep you around.”
“You survived.”
“No,” Shara trembled, sitting heavily back in her chair, “I did not.”
Ven knelt, clutched her mother’s hands in her own, pulled them to her lips for a gentle kiss, this woman who wouldn’t look her in the eyes. “We can flee, Mother. Father came from across the seas. Surely there are others out there who would take us in, who could save us. We can find them, go to them. We don’t have to go to Alaluat.”
“Your father was a sea pirate, Havence. His people would not take us in. They would kill us for asking.” She sighed, “And even still, they have not been seen on our shores for years. The seas do not allow them to come near.” Shara clenched Ven’s hands. “We will go to the Citadel. We will kneel before the khan. We will survive, as we always have. That is final.”
Nothing left to argue over, no argument her mother would hear.
And, truthfully, Ven wasn’t sure there was any argument that would, could, win.
Cruelty and strength. If you were neither, you did not last long, a truth Havence had learned wel
l from her mother over the years, shielded from it even as it was a constant threat hung over her head.
She was not cruel, she couldn’t be, though she did what was needed to survive.
She counted herself as strong.
She counted her mother as stronger.
“Of course, Mama. I will dig the well in the morning and have everything packed for our journey by the end of the week.”
Shara shook her head. “There is no need. They will take everything from us when we enter the temple. They will dress us to our caste. We will be allowed nothing of this life to take with us.”
“But Papa—”
“Bury it here, Havence. Bury it deep, where no other will ever find it. But you cannot take it with you.”
Bury it all.
No coming back.
She nodded, and Shara leaned into her chair.
There would be nothing more to say on the matter. As her mother said, their fates were decided.
Ven forced herself not to look towards the small window at the back of the cottage, the roiling waves that could just be seen striking the shore with the sinking of the sun.
If she couldn’t even take a picture of her father, then there was no way she could take the ocean with her.
“They fear us, as they always have. But they fear more the lure of the sea, Havence. We will go to the city or be taken, and if we are taken, it will be as slaves for our magic and nothing more. We will never be trusted, not with our own lives, and certainly not with the lives of the Khanastani who we are meant to serve. My choice to bring fresh blood to our line was not seen as natural. You the most unnatural of all. Your skin that is the color of white gold, not the honey-brown of a native. Your eyes are blue in a world ruled in blacks and caramels. You are other, the product of my disgrace, and yes, we are damned for it. Had I born a daughter who looked like our people, my sin might have been forgiven, but not for you.”
Ven slipped silently from the bed she shared with her mother, the wind whistling where it blew against the house, likely screaming with the sand storm it had brought up outside.
She moved to stand by the single window in their small hut.
This was home, and she would likely never see it again.
Her fingers itched to touch the dried stores she’d carted out to the barn that afternoon, stored away in the cart bed to take with them to the city lest they not have the supplies she needed once they reached Alaluat. Two herbalists, magicians, witches whose magic was as simple as the earth they walked upon, and as feared as the unknown beneath their feet.
She pressed the pads of her fingers to the sea glass rubbed smooth by the ocean and fallen to the shore.
Her father had carved out the window from the wooden wall of the cabin. Ven remembered her mother’s horror at arriving home from a visit to the city to find Ven hanging from the wooden structure laughing while Nemsi held her feet. She rubbed her thumb along the tarred joining of two pieces of glass, one green, one blue, that her fathered had fit together and laid in the wall, a constant view of the sea that was his home, that he always told her stories of, that she would never touch or be near again.
The view was gone in the dark of night, in the blur of sand and soot of the storm.
Ven turned away, returned to the bed.
Shara wrapped her arm across Havence’s waist. “We will survive, Hava. We always survive.”
Ven closed her eyes in response.
The days before their departure went quickly, with little time for anything other than digging in the well to bring up enough water for the trip and digging graves to bury all that they wished kept safe when they left in the hopes of one day seeing it again.
Her mother shook her head when Ven went about the digging.
False hope, to think she would find what she buried some day in the future.
She couldn’t just leave it behind.
Shara stood on the front porch, leaning against the rail, palms rough enough not to fear the splinters in the wood that she held. “We leave at first light.”
Havence looked up from where she knelt in the sand, the last cask buried and her hands shoveling the fine golden grains on top of the mound hoping a dust storm would take care of hiding what she had buried.
“Say your goodbyes to the sea, girl. Say farewell to the demons of the deep.”
Ven had thought she’d hidden her love of the ocean well enough from her mother, but a seer saw all, even that which was meant to be secret. It was the one gift of her mother’s that Ven wished most to possess. Her affinity with herbs meant little when her mother could stare at a man or a woman and see the ill humors in their body, the very maladies of the soul that plagued their lives.
She nodded and rose stiffly from the sands.
Shara ambled back into their home, and the path to the seashore seemed a long distance away, and far too close as Ven made her slow trek to the ocean she would miss beyond words.
The waves crashed, but no spray came far enough to touch her cheek. The sands beneath her feet felt far too similar to the desert sands she was heading towards to offer comfort or relief.
She stared out over the waves, at the turquoise waters, the white caps that foamed along the crests, the deeper blues and blacks that led to the dark depths far away at the edges of her sight.
No need to ask if the dragon was out there.
Why bother? She wouldn’t be here to answer if he was.
The breeze shifted, a cool drift that scratched her cheek with the start of the sand storm roiling from the west.
She shaded her eyes; why she bothered looking into the gloam she couldn’t say, but she did it, like whatever was coming out of the dust would somehow change her future.
A spark of teal, brighter than any color she’d seen on land before, glinted at her through the dust. The silver of a fish’s scales picked clean by the scavengers on the shore?
Even still, she couldn’t stop her feet from moving, her knees from bending when she drew close enough and the winds stilled around her.
There were enough fish skeletons that littered the sea line for her not to be shocked by the one before her.
But she’d never seen a scale as large as that which rested beneath the corpse’s belly.
It was easy enough to dig the shard out, the aqua scale as large as her palm, not from any fish she’d seen washed up on shore.
A perfect memento that would be stolen from her when she reached her new home.
Her fingers clenched around the sharp edges of the oval, scratched by the strength of whatever fish’s hide the plate came from.
She didn’t let it go.
Couldn’t.
With hands that shook, she untied the band that held her dark hair back from her face, the midnight strands falling down her back, caught up and twisted around the turquoise treasure, hiding its color in the depths of the night.
She tied the band around the coil she wound at the base of her neck.
Maybe, if she were lucky, the priests wouldn’t find it when they stole all of her past from her upon entering their temple.
Chapter Four
She had it.
The moment her fingers closed around his scale, he’d felt it, felt the pulse of her magic surge through him, same as her ancestors had the day the witch bound him beneath the sea.
Winter Squall, how he wanted to roar, wanted to maim. Trapped for a millennium beneath the waves and now so close to freedom he could practically taste it.
One drop of her blood, just one drop, spilled into the waters.
He’d felt it, when her finger scratched along the edge of his scale, the small tear of skin that drew red from her flesh, not enough.
Not enough to free him.
The breath he held made bubbles funnel to the surface when he breathed out.
She was walking away. The piece of him she carried with her growing distant, moving deeper onto land rather than closer to his prison. No chance she would slip and slice her arm now that she
crested the bluff and moved towards her home.
How he hated that cabin on the edge of the dunes.
How he hated the women who had owned it over the centuries.
I’m not afraid of you, she’d said.
She should be.
But she didn’t feel like her ancestors who had come before her. The magic in her veins held a different taste than theirs, spoke to the winds and the waves in a way her peoples never had.
It wouldn’t matter.
He would find a way to draw her back to the water’s edge. He would find a way to get her to free him.
And then he would find a way to end her line so that he could never be caged again.
Chapter Five
The citadel was as monstrous and horrifying as Havence always expected it to be.
What magic she’d learned and performed throughout the years had never been done anywhere near the great walls of the city or the temple at its center. She’d never been required to entertain the khan Roaca or the prince who would succeed him some day. From all accounts she’d heard, the king’s son was as ruthless and barbaric as the man himself.
And here they all lived, a stone’s throw from the room she’d been ushered to, a novitiate’s quarters, though the temple master had flinched at calling her that.
There were no rooms set aside for the witches of the east.
Which made her wonder where it was her mother stayed when she’d been summoned for her magic to the city all those times.
The priest had sneered at her dress, the roughly hewn cloak she’d pulled over her head to cover herself when Shara and she entered the citadel. He had recoiled from her mother when he caught a glimpse of the woman’s forehead.
Ven bore no marking yet, but he made the connection and crossed himself in Selish’s name, the Serpent’s coil he made over his heart meant to spare him the wrath of the desert djinn, but he was the only demon she saw.
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