She wanted to shrink back into the bed, draw the blankets over her head and hide from it all. From the woman in front of her who claimed to be her father’s sister, from the strange truths she’d told her about herself that deny as she might, she knew to be true.
“I realize this is a lot for you, discovering everything you’ve ever believed about yourself, about your life was a lie, but the council grows restless with a stranger in our midst. The unexpected return of my power is all that’s held them at bay, but in the five days you have slept here in the healing veil, they have speculated and stewed, a great swell of fear rising in their hearts.”
“Fear? Of me?”
“They have no idea who you are, but there has not been an outsider in these lands since they took your mother to her king and the borders were shut down. Outsiders are dangerous, they bring change, but we need change more than ever. The few young among us grow as restless as their fathers were, longing to reach beyond this bare strip of land for something so much more. They have felt you in their blood, dreamed of the freedom you will bring, of running beneath the moons as we were always meant to run, but the council stifles their dreams with threats of exile and isolation.”
Lorelei knew it wasn’t the same at all, but the council she spoke of reminded her so much of her father. Every dream she ever had, he’d crushed within his iron fist, dictating to her the life she would live whether she wanted to or not. He’d practically gift-wrapped her in a skimpy red dress before handing her over to the son of his enemy in hopes their union would bring peace.
“You are the whisper on the wind, the change that has to come and the council has sensed this. I’ve held them back as long as I could, but now that you have woken they will summon you to stand judgment beside the warrior who brought you here. I cannot withhold the truth from them, and I wouldn’t want to. Once they discover you are Rognar’s daughter they will cast both of you out, but your journey only begins here in the Edgelands, daughter of Rognar.”
Immediately, Lorelei wanted to know more, to know what journey she was meant to take, but that answer was simple. She would journey back home, back to Leithe and demand her father tell her the truth, but something stopped her. The frightened child inside her that longed for the safety of her nurse, Pahjah’s arms, could never go home. Not if the things Rhiorna told her were true, not if Trystay arrived in Rivenn before her.
Trystay was no doubt already there, and only the gods knew what lies he’d told about her. Did they think she was dead? Had he told them she’d run away just like her mother? Would Aelfric march his armies into the Edgelands in search of her, battling what was left of the U’lfer the same way he’d done when her mother ran away? If so, what would he do to her when he found her? Would he kill her, the same way he’d killed her real father?
An army of chills marched along every inch of Lorelei’s skin. She didn’t have to lift her hand to see that she was trembling. She could feel it deep inside her, the fear of exile and abandonment. She had no home, no family, no future.
Rhiorna walked toward the open door, barely looking back over her shoulder when she spoke as if she’d read Lorelei’s mind. “No future?” she asked. “Child, if you could see the things I’ve seen…” Shaking her head, the rippling length of her unbound, wild red hair tickled across her back before she finally glanced over at her again. “Your future is brighter than you could ever dream.”
Rhiorna left her alone in the room and she stared at the open door with wide, terrified eyes. All her life she’d longed for adventure, for the freedom to make her own way in the world, but none of her fantasies had ever looked quite like the strange quagmire of events that had just been dropped into her lap. Her life was a lie, everything she’d ever learned, everything she ever believed, all of it was lies.
Lifting a hand through the loose, tangled locks of her hair, she winced when her palm brushed across the scab on her brow and her eyes burned with unshed tears.
CHAPTER SIX
Finn stood in the hallway outside the healer’s room doing the same thing he’d called his brother out on earlier that afternoon: eavesdropping. Not because he was nosy like Viln, but because he hadn’t left her side since the moment he’d knelt down to look upon her for the very first time and it felt strange not sitting with her. As if he would suffocate if he couldn’t breathe the same air with her. His heart would stop beating if it couldn’t join with the rhythm of her life.
It was the most disconcerting thing he’d ever felt. It put his teeth on edge and made every one of his muscles clench but he didn’t want it to stop. He just wanted to be with her. Always. And that made next to no sense at all because he didn’t know anything about her except her name and that she was Rognar’s daughter.
When Finn was a boy Rognar was one of his heroes, much to the dismay of everyone in the village except his mother. The Conqueror brought sorrow upon them all, destroyed their freedom to roam and take whatever their greedy hearts desired from whosoever they chose. He was also an advocate of peace among all U’lfer—even the half-breeds, which if Finn’s mother’s stories were to be believed, he had fathered many. Rognar brought one not of the blood into their fold and her presence among them caused nothing but pain according to the council. Sure, there were plenty of U’lfer who fell in love outside their own race, and there were once an endless number of half-bred wolves on account of it, but they very rarely brought their non-U’lfer spouses into established villages.
As far as Finn was concerned, Rognar led an exciting and charmed life, aside from that whole execution thing. People once respected the Conqueror, enjoyed the freedoms and luxuries his boldness brought to them as a people, but now his name was like a curse.
The more the people of the Edgelands despaired, the harder Finn clung to the bloody bedtime stories his mother used to tell him when she tucked him in each night. Stories about his father, Deken that Axe, who spent all the years of his life at the honorable position to Rognar’s left, raiding, conquering and killing the way their people had always done. Deken met his death there when the council betrayed them all, and though Vilnjar constantly assured him the council had no choice, it made Finn hate them all.
One of the last of Rognar’s berserkers to be captured when the War of Silence ended, Deken hanged in Leithe while Finn was still inside his mother’s belly. Finn never even met his father, but like Rognar, he was a hero in the young boy’s mind. And his mother Eornlaith never cursed her mate for leaving her with three small children, never spoke a single ill word about him, the cause he died for or the loneliness his absence left inside her like a curse. She honored her mate in ways so many other women who survived that dark, terrible time refused to do.
Eornlaith the Steadfast only had one regret, she told her youngest son while gasping for final breath on her deathbed: that she hadn’t died beside her husband fighting for her people. People who’d spent their whole lives fighting because it suited them, but had no fight left when it actually mattered.
“I still had purpose here, Pup,” she whispered, her cold hand lingering against Finn’s cheek. “You were my purpose, Finn, the most important thing Deken and I ever did together, but I grow weary now and I am so alone without him. One day you will have a mate and you will understand. It’s hard to breathe without him near me.”
Vilnjar’s hand on his shoulder felt like the weight of the world as he tried to draw him from their mother’s sickbed, but Finn shrugged him off and stared down at her frail figure through tear-blurred eyes. He wanted to grab her, shake her, beg her not to leave him, but he was brave and none of those tears fell. Not in front of her, anyway.
The last words she said to him were, “I will dive into the hunt and run the never ending woods of Lohaloth—the Eternal Hunt—until I find him again, and we will hunt together until the gods grow tired of us all. Remember everything I taught you, my precious boy, everything I ever said and you will make us both so very proud.”
He was only ten.
And
he hadn’t forgotten, not a single word his mother spoke to him throughout the short course of their time together. Sometimes Vilnjar said that was what drove him mad, the whispering of a dead woman who wouldn’t let him forget who or what he was. Vilnjar believed the only way to survive in their world was to forget, to let go of the past and the old ways, but the mere thought of trying to stomp down what lived inside him made Finn’s heart race with fear. Vilnjar never understood that, but their mother promised one day he would.
“You must be patient with Viln, Finn. He’s always been too old for his years, and he’s seen so much. He is so afraid, but one day he will understand and he will be afraid no more.”
Their mother had been right about everything else, and he wanted to believe her about Vilnjar too. He loved his brother, but his faith in the man was waning.
The sound of coming footsteps snapped him from his reverie and he looked up from the shadow he’d tucked himself inside to see Rhiorna leaving the sickroom. It was strange seeing her that way—young, coherent, in charge of not just her senses, but everything going on around her. All his life the silent seer had been shriveled and old, blind and mute, her unseeing eyes a white haze of madness. She’d been something of a joke among the others, but no one was laughing at her now.
“Take a walk with me, Finn.” She sidled up to him and looped her arm through his, turning him away from the sickroom and leading him toward the doors beyond the temple that opened into the gardens.
He felt his chest tighten, his head turning back over his shoulder in the direction of that room where he caught a flashing glimpse of bright red hair and pale, freckled skin. He’d been away from her too long already and all he wanted was to get back to her because for some reason he felt certain being near her again would make the panic disappear. He was twice Rhiorna’s size, could easily break from her guiding grip and dart back toward the room, but when he glanced down at her he felt foolish. She smiled, a knowing glimmer in her brilliant eyes and then she patted the palm of her hand atop his tight bicep.
“It feels like your heart’s going to explode when you’re not near her, doesn’t it?” She pushed through the doors and into the fading sunlight and drew him outside.
The fresh air filled his lungs, cleared his head enough that he could almost think clearly again, but under the surface he still felt strangely compelled to flee back into the healing room behind them. Withdrawing his gaze before the doors closed behind them, he turned it downward and squinted at the seer.
“How did you know that?”
“I know all, Finn, see all.”
“Yeah, I’m still a little confused by that. Last week you were no more coherent then a radish, and now you’re…” There wasn’t a word in his vocabulary to describe what she’d become. “I don’t know, now you’re not.”
Rhiorna tittered and tightened her arm around his. “Last week I was no less coherent than I am now. Llorveth simply wasn’t ready for me to share my vision or my voice with this world, but now he has cleared my eyes and freed my tongue and I’m almost out of time.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Everything,” she said. “Or perhaps nothing at all. I suppose in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t matter.”
Following a stream of sunlight that carved a golden path across the stone walkway, she led him toward the fountain in the center of the garden, but did not unloop her arm from his. For a long, painful time, during which Finn swore inexplicable panic and irrational fear would overpower him and drive him to his knees, they stared into the rippling pool of the fountain.
Streams of water gushed from the brow of the statue of Llorveth, lord of the wild hunt, like a pair of flowing antlers that trickled musically into the pool of the basin he was perched inside. As a boy Finn always thought it was weird that their god was a stag and not a wolf, but his mother explained that the beast must understand the heart and wisdom of his prey in order to become a great hunter, and so their god fashioned his children after his love, and sacrificed himself time and again so they could thrive. As a man he still thought it was a little odd, but Rhiorna hadn’t brought him into the garden to discuss philosophy and religion. At least he didn’t think she did.
“You overheard my conversation with Lorelei,” she stated.
Finn lowered his head sheepishly, the shoulder-length tendrils of his loose black hair falling in to hide his shame. “Most of it.”
“Good,” she nodded. “I won’t have to repeat myself. We are obviously pressed for time, and there is much you must understand before the end.”
The end? That sounded dismal, but when Finn made no comment, she went on. “The council is astonished by the return of my wits, but then they never really had much faith. I’ve been avoiding them, but the barriers I’ve placed around the healing room are fading and once they fall I won’t be able to hold them back anymore. I’ve let it leak who she is, and it is only a matter of time before they come for her. They will want answers, of course, but none of them will want to hear what needs to be said. It is too late for most of them, I’m afraid, but I will do all I can before the end.”
It was the second time she’d said those words: the end. The end of what, he couldn’t guess, but no two words had ever made him feel more uncomfortable in his life.
Clearing his throat, the sound was barely audible above the gurgling fountain in front of them. “Are they really going to exile us?”
Withdrawing her arm from his, Rhiorna stepped up to the water and lowered her hands to rest along the carved stone lip of the basin. She leaned forward, her long, wild hair falling in around her face until the curling ends dipped into the fluttering pool of water beneath.
“She is Rognar’s daughter, a byproduct of these terrible times that have consumed our people since the War of Silence ended. They will see her as an ill omen, a precursor to darker tidings and they will fear the changes her coming here will bring. And you… They have been looking for a reason to cast you out since your first transformation because you have never been one to simply follow the leader. And now you’ve brought her here, and they have their reason.”
“What was I supposed to do? Leave her out there to die?”
“You mistake my words for a scolding, Finn, but I am not the Council of the Nine. I have not served their will for a long time, not ever, really. My place among their ranks was honorary in some eyes, but a mockery in others. I stood against their plots, refused to bow to their will when they turned on my brother… No,” she shook her head, droplets of water flicking through the air, “I applaud what you’ve done. You have no idea how important that girl is, how much our people need this to unfold just as it has done thus far.”
“You mean I was supposed to bring her here?”
“Just as you are supposed to be exiled with her, yes. This is all part of his plan for our people.”
“Who’s plan? What plan?”
“Llorveth, Finn. Everything that’s happened, it’s all leading up to something far greater than we could ever have imagined.”
“And you have seen this plan?”
“I have,” she nodded, withdrawing from the fountain and turning to face him again. “I have seen it all. Every moment of our future.”
“Then tell me what I need to do.”
“Listen to your heart. It will tell you all you need to know.”
“My heart, huh? I gotta tell you, I don’t exactly trust it right now. It is saying a lot of weird stuff.”
He had never been afraid of madness before, in fact he actually liked to embrace it from time to time because it felt so natural, but the persistence of the voice inside him was terrifying.
His.
She was his and always had been. Even before he knew her, before he’d ever even smelled her on the wind, she’d belonged to him and now that she was there for the claiming he had no idea what he was supposed to do.
“Then it is speaking the truth.”
“I don’t know, if you could hear the
things it’s saying…” He lifted a hand to his neck, slowly rubbing the flesh there, digging his fingers in deep before releasing them and dropping his arm to his side again. “From the minute I caught her scent on the wind, I knew her. I felt her inside me and now that she is here she’s all I think about it. I dream about her when I sleep. I wake afraid she won’t still be there.”
“Because she is yours, Finn.”
That confirmation did less to assuage his fears than he hoped.
“A wolf always knows his soul’s mate, even before she becomes his. And as her mate it is up to you to protect her, Finn.”
His mate? He wanted to throw his hands up and stop her before she could say anything else that didn’t make sense. The U’lfer no longer sought out mates in the traditional sense, not the way they had done in his parents’ time, in the time before the War of Silence. So few of them were left when all was said and done that if they waited to find their soul’s mate there would be no children at all. They mated with whoever was there for the preservation of their people, but even that seemed to yield very few new children. The very notion of the soul’s mate was outdated and overly romanticized according to the council, and for a flashing moment the idea of throwing the discovery of his mate in their faces made him happier than it should have.
But how could she be his mate? He knew nothing about the girl… except that she was part of him, that from the very first moment he’d felt her near him, he’d known that whatever she was, she belonged to him. And she was only a half-blood; surely that had to somehow interfere with the strength of the bond he felt between them.
“Stay with her, keep her safe, fight with her and teach her the ways of our people. Not this,” she held up her hands to encompass not the garden, but the village itself, the whole of all that remained of the U’lfer. “The old ways, Finn. You must teach her the old ways that Eornlaith taught you so she can make them new again, and no matter what happens, no matter where you find yourselves or what you have to face together, you must stand beside her until the end.”
Edgelanders (Serpent of Time) Page 8