Brina screamed when the house crumbled. She stepped out of the treeline and looked down the hill at the ruins of her home, then sank to the earth. She clutched Shandae as sobs racked her body. Ash and smoke carried up to her, and she choked with the smell of blackened earth and burning flesh, but still she did not leave. She watched as C’Tan’s guard pulled her from the burning rubble and raced her back to the castle. She watched as even the stone burned and melted in the heat. At the top of the hill, she fell to her knees and wept as her entire life went up in smoke.
The horses snorted and stamped. Shandae awoke once or twice, but went back to sleep quickly with her mother’s constant rocking. Brina was unsure if she rocked to comfort herself or the sleeping child.
Jarin was gone. The link that had always grounded her—the bond between them—had snapped the instant Jarin had been taken by death. She’d felt a flash of crushing weight, the sear of flame, an ache of relief and regret as he’d slipped from this life into the next.
As the black of night turned to the misty gray of morning, Brina picked her way down the slope to inspect the ashes of her home, unable to leave until she saw proof that Jarin was truly dead. She knew she was going against Jarin’s dying wish, but she couldn’t help herself. She had to know.
She got as close as she could, but the heat of the charred remains and the baking stones would not let her get close enough to know for sure.
There was no way Jarin could have survived the blaze, but she couldn’t give up hope, despite the severance of their bond. She couldn’t live without him. Jarin had saved her from her murderous father, had taken her from Kalandra’s scorn and Tomas’s disbelieving taunts. They’d never believed the horror she’d witnessed. Only Jarin had given her a way out of her past, a place to forget.
Brina screamed at the sky.
“Why?”
She fell to her knees, pleading with the heavens for an answer.
“Why?” she whispered as the tears fell unchecked.
As she knelt before the ruins of her home, staring into the embers of the fire that had destroyed her life, she remembered Jarin’s final words, one line in particular standing out: “Go to Ezeker in Karsholm . . .”
Brina couldn’t go to her sister, as Jarin had suggested. She couldn’t afford to take the chance that her father would find her there. And she knew nothing of the Bendanatu and had no desire to start now.
No, the safest place was with few people, a place where no one knew her so she could forget her old life and start anew. She and Shandae had to hide, from her family as well as C’Tan. She had to be dead to all of them. C’Tan knew how to find her otherwise.
And so she took a new name, one she’d avoided for most of her life, for it was full of ache and loss. It belonged to her battered and dead mother and her long-gone sister who had died at her father’s hand; a name that reflected their pain and the agony of betrayal and was now etched in her very soul.
What other name could there be, now that deadness pierced her heart and soul?
“Marda,” she whispered.
But what of the child? What name would reflect her loss, yet keep her anonymous to C’Tan?
Brina, now Marda, stared into the glowing coals for an answer. They blinked and wavered back at her, and she suddenly knew. A bitter smile crept across her face as she stared at her baby, so much like her father, and brushed away a lock of dark hair as he’d done not so long ago.
“Ember,” she called the sleeping child. “Ember Shandae. For the glowing coals our lives have become.”
Marda nodded once and dashed away the tears that had plagued her the night long. She could afford them no more. She turned her back on the stone and coals. Straightening her shoulders, she left her home and heart behind.
The Sapphire Flute: Book 1 of The Wolfchild Saga Page 4