Child of the Daystar (The Wings of War Book 1)

by Bryce O'Connor

  “TOLMAN! GRAB MYCHAL!” Jarden yelled, swinging the branch around once more so that it whooshed through the air. Before Tolman could move to snatch the boy up, though, the cat roared and struck at Jarden, lifting onto its back legs to swipe with both front paws at the man. The first caught the base of the flaming limb, knocking it from his hands. The second caught his shoulder, dragging large black claws down Jarden’s left arm as the cat fell back on all fours between Mychal and his would-be rescuers. Jarden screamed in pain, stumbling backwards and falling into the sand, clutching at his mangled arm with his good hand. The cat left him, turning its black eyes instead on Tolman, who stood frozen, all strength sapped from his body. He clutched at the staff in his hands, wondering what good the thin piece of wood could possibly be against a monster such as this.

  He could see the cat preparing to leap, see the legs tuck and muscles strain, claws extended. It was practically in midair, in fact, when a dark blur not even half-the animal’s size collided with its front shoulder. The sandcat yowled, knocked away from Tolman, twisting and spraying sand everywhere as it leapt to its feet again.

  Waiting to meet it, teeth bared and clawed hands splayed in the air in front of him, was Raz.

  The lizard-babe hissed, extending his wings to their full capacity so that their bluish skin glowed in the moonlight. His ears were spread, as was the neck-crest, a single pale blade rising behind his head in the night. He hissed again, taking a step forward and rippling his wings.

  The effect was beyond frightening.

  Through the confused haze of events, Tolman realized with a jolt that the babe had grown. Despite his poor health, in the three weeks since they’d found him Raz had sprouted an easy inch, maybe two. He stood taller now, perhaps four feet in all, with a bearing that promised a fight.

  Even the sandcat seemed to hesitate, despite its greater size. It tried to circle the atherian, eyes darting between him and the crying form of Mychal, lying just behind Raz’s spread wings. The lizard-babe was having none of it. He feigned forward with a squawk, collapsing and extending his crest. Not once did his sunset eyes leave the cat’s black ones, even when Tolman scrambled to Jarden’s side. The man was still conscious, by the Sun’s blessing, watching the two beasts face off with a mixture of pain, anger, and intense relief streaked across his face.

  After nearly a minute of testing and pushing, the sandcat seemed to realize the only way past the atherian was through him. With another roar it struck suddenly, launching itself directly at Raz’s small form. The boy was just as fast, though, darting forward to collide with the beast.

  The fight that ensued was bloody and bone shattering. Like the wild animals they were the two forms writhed and spun in the sand, striking and biting and slashing at each other whenever they got the chance. They thrashed, kicking and clawing, sometimes leaping away only to crash head-on again. Tolman and Jarden could do nothing but watch, useless and faintly aware of others running to meet them. Much of the family came—Achtel supporting a sobbing Iriso, Kosen and his daughters, Prida and Surah. There were other forms, though, people they didn’t recognize. A dozen members from the other clans camped nearby, alerted by the screams.

  Everyone stopped when they got near, fixed with horrified fascination.

  The fight raged as loud as a wartime battle, the two combatants screeching and roaring. At one point the cat managed to sink its teeth into Raz’s thigh. Tolman felt a sinking fear until the lizard-babe’s other foot caught the animal’s exposed neck, forcing it to release his leg as blood coursed through torn fur. In the faint light of the Moon the sand around the two creatures grew steadily darker and wetter, sticking to them and their wounds. Exhaustion seemed impossible for the pair, the fight simply growing wilder and more vicious as a minute passed into two, then three, then four.

  And then it ended.

  With a twist of his body, Raz slipped beneath the beast, clinging to its neck with both arms. A powerful kick of his good leg crushed one of the cat’s shoulders, and as the animal screamed in pain the atherian’s teeth found its throat, cutting the sound short. For a few silent heartbeats more the cat flailed and the lizard-babe’s torso strained, small muscles popping out of his back and neck. Then, with a sound like ripping parchment, the two fell apart. Ten long seconds the sandcat twisted noiselessly in the sand, blood spilling from the fleshy hole beneath its jaw. For a time after that it twitched, convulsing helplessly.

  At long last, though, the beast stilled altogether.

  There was a moment’s peace, a breath of calm stillness in which all watching registered what had happened. Then it broke, and the gathered Arros erupted into cheer. Over the jubilation, however, several outsiders’ yells could be heard.

  “IT’S OVER! KILL IT! QUICKLY! KILL IT NOW!”

  It was then that Tolman saw the blades bristling from the spectators who were not of the Arro clan. Their neighbors had come armed—with the best intentions, no doubt—and now they advanced as a group on Raz. The boy, battered and bloody as he was, leapt backwards. He landed on all fours in front of a feebly stirring Mychal, baring his fangs protectively, misunderstanding the strangers’ approach. His wide wings spread once more, their membranes torn and ripped like the tattered sails of some storm-tossed ship.

  “NO!”

  Four voices screamed it at once. Tolman’s was one, as was Surah’s, kneeling beside Jarden’s still form, her husband having finally passed out from the pain and loss of blood. Another was Achtel’s, waving his hands and yelling, running straight at the armed nomads.

  The last was Iriso’s.

  The woman slipped and tumbled in her scramble to get at her son. She ran toward Raz and Mychal, throwing caution to the wind. At first Raz spun to face her, crest flaring in defiance. When she got closer, however, the babe seemed to recognize her, and he calmed. On his hands and feet he shifted aside, letting the crying mother rush to her son, picking his slender form up and holding him fiercely to her. Then she lifted her tearful eyes to look at Raz.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

  And, before anyone could think to stop her, she reached out and pulled the atherian into her chest, holding the two children tightly as she started to sob once more.

  Where Achtel had been able to do little to dissuade the angry group still trying to get at Raz, his wife’s action did everything. Almost to a one the men and women stopped dead, utterly confused, watching the three people huddled together just outside the darkness of the groves. Some of them looked disgusted, others curious, but regardless they all paused. For the first time they began to listen to the words of the man who had ridiculously tried to prevent them from defending their kin. Breathless, Achtel explained as best he could, hoping silently that he wasn’t dooming Raz even more by telling the boy’s story.

  Behind him, though, while he spoke, the rest of the Arros watched in amazement as the unthinkable happened. Raz—whose small, scaly, beaten body had gone instinctively rigid at Iriso’s contact—relaxed. Then, incredibly, his infantile arms reached up awkwardly to return the crying woman’s hug as best they could, his wings wrapping around all three of them like a blanket. For a long moment they held each other, a faint cocoon of patchy blue, still in the night.

  Then the wings fell limp, and Raz collapsed, unconscious, to the desert floor.

  It was in that moment, at last, that everyone seemed to regain the ability to move. The other Arros rushed to help the injured, most running to Iriso and the children, Kosen and Trina to Tolman. Together, along with Surah, they managed to lift Jarden out of the sand, blood weeping from the gashes in his arm.

  They were about to move him when the desert, quiet for the first time since that morning, was rent apart by a scream, agonizing and colored black with grief. With a creeping sense of horror, Tolman realized that Grea had been silent for some time, her pained cries at an end, and that the shriek, which rang clear from the
deepest part of the human soul, was not a woman’s.

  It was a man’s scream.

  X

  The hours the Arros suffered following that night’s events were amongst their darkest. Mychal was safe, thank the Sun, but his left leg was beyond repair, torn and twisted at the knee where the sandcat had gotten its teeth around it. After a rushed deliberation—to which Iriso could only contribute blubbering tears and further denial—the Grandmother accepted the help of four healers come from several of the other clans. A concoction of ganet leaf milk and aramora was drafted, putting Mychal into a sleep from which he wouldn’t awaken for days.

  Then the women removed the mangled limb, cutting it off just above the knee.

  After cleaning the stump and bandaging it carefully, the five moved on to the less injured. Jarden and Raz were laid out on the ground inside the Grandmother’s tent, both unconscious, and both torn to shreds. Between them, a haggard Surah, Trina, and Prida had managed to stop most of Jarden’s bleeding. They could do nothing, however, for the four long slices that ran from his shoulder to elbow, two of which continued down his forearm. Eventually three of the more experienced menders kneeled around him, and within an hour they’d sewn shut most of the wounds with thin sinew string. Meanwhile the Grandmother and the last healer, a younger woman named Evano Ashani of the Ashani clan, tended to Raz as best they could.

  “Her Stars,” Evano had whispered when she’d first laid eyes on the atherian, “so this is the cat-killer?”

  “Raz,” the Grandmother reprimanded gently. “And born under the Sun, just as you were. Do not let your assumptions blind you, child. Keep that steady hand still.”

  The woman nodded, and they’d gone to work, both silently wondering whether the babe would make it through the night even with their care.

  If Raz had been a mess when the Arros first found him half-dead in the desert, then there was no word to fairly describe his current state. He was slashed and battered, hardly a part of him left unscathed. Parallel gashes crisscrossed his body. Small ribs shone in the lantern light from several of the cuts, many of which seeped blood through a thick cake of sand. His thigh bled continuously where the cat had sunk its teeth in, and one wrist looked to be badly broken. The claws must have caught him across the face, too, because three lines sliced diagonally down his snout, splitting his right lip completely in several places. His wings were even worse. Shredded in more than one place, there were whole slivers of membrane missing in several spots at the edges. It gave them a tattered look, like the worm-worried clothes of an old corpse. While Evano worked on cleaning and closing the wounds along his body, the Grandmother took on the delicate work of slipping the torn skin of his wings back into place. The flesh was almost all there, and slowly she flipped and flattened everything back together with bloody hands. This done, she smeared ointment over every laceration, hoping against hope that infection wouldn’t set in and eat away at the delicate membranes.

  Only those involved in helping the wounded hovered around the Grandmother’s tent. Trina, Kosen, and Achtel had taken the children to bed, though understandably not a one slept a wink the whole night through. Eara and Zadi accompanied Hannas and her twins to Tolman’s hut, donated as a place of mourning to house the souls the Moon had claimed that night until proper burials could be held. There the woman and her children wept over the still form of her husband, clinging to the cold hand that hung from under the white silk sheet covering Ovan’s body.

  On the other side of the room, set on a small copper table borrowed from a dusty corner of the Grandmother’s wagon, was a basket, also covered in white. In it rested the small form of a baby girl, too still and too blue, swaddled in the comforts of an old woven blanket.

  Tolman alone had braved entering Agais’ tent after the night’s events, and then only for a brief minute to whisper his heartfelt sorrow and to inform the clanmaster of the state of his brother and the other injured. Agais, sitting at his wife’s side, had only nodded, his eyes red and wet. One hand ran through her pale hair slick with the sweat of a difficult labor, the other resting across his knees where he’d been laying his head. Slipping out again, Tolman didn’t feel the tear drip down his dark cheek, clinging to the stubble of his chin.

  XI

  In the week that followed, little changed in the Arros’ small camp. Jarden came to the next morning, though Surah forbade him from leaving his bedroll. It was another three days before Mychal and Raz stirred from their induced slumbers. In that time many people came from other tribes, wanting to see for themselves if the rumors were true. Had the Arros indeed taken in a lizard-boy? Was it truly winged? Could it really have taken on a fully grown sandcat?

  Not wanting to stir up trouble, Agais—having finally mastered his own grief—allowed them free entry, only forbidding them from getting too close.

  Most who came were little more than politely interested, giving their condolences to the families of the dead and wounded when they heard of that night’s tragedies. Some even had their clans tender aid, though Agais gently refused everything except bandages and medicines, thanking every benefactor.

  But there were always those who could not understand why the Arros would endanger the lives of their family by harboring a “savage reptile.” More than once Tolman, Achtel, and Ishmal had had to get between Raz and an angry visitor claiming it was his or her right to finish the job the sandcat had started. One woman of a smaller clan, the Syrros, had gone into hysterics, threatening to come back with her husband and brother if they didn’t let her “kill the lizard.”

  It was Iriso that shut her up.

  Stepping between the crazed visitor and the three men guarding Raz, Mychal’s mother cracked her across the face with a sound like splitting wood. Iriso then did her own screaming, making it clear that the men of her clan could do much more than go after just one of her people. Then she’d grabbed the struggling woman by the hair and thrown her bodily from the tent, stepping out and raising a finger to indicate the sands beyond the caravan.

  “Get out,” Iriso spat, and watched the beaten woman leave, muttering dark threats under her breath.

  The Syrros never came.

  Thankfully, by the end of the third day the visitors seemed to have had their fill, and life found some balance once again. Hannas and her twins still grieved, but took solace in the activities needed to survive along the Garin. They soon joined the others in fishing and cooking, all three hardly speaking a word between them.

  No one pressed them to talk.

  Agais, too, returned to them, thanking Kosen for taking on the clanmaster’s responsibilities. He still spent much of his time by Grea’s side while the woman recovered, but his eyes were dry. Privately, at dusk as the next Moon rose, he’d taken the basket bearing his daughter’s still body into the sunset-lit grove, returning several hours later empty-handed.

  Ovan had been buried at the edge of the palms, resting at the shore of the still lake beneath the shade of the trees.

  The Grandmother tended to Mychal and Raz, pleased with how both were doing. Mychal’s stump healed well, his sutures already sealing, and his father had busied himself fashioning a crutch from some spare wood. Raz was doing even better. His wounds had started to close by morning of the first day. New scars in the form of paler, imperfect scales formed, but even the marks along his snout were barely visible. His silver bangles had been pushed back up his left arm to give space for the wooden splint that secured his broken wrist. Even his wings were doing well, though the old woman doubted whether the frayed edges where the sandcat had managed to rip whole pieces free would ever completely heal.

  Midmorning of the fourth day, at long last, the two boys stirred. Mychal awoke first, screaming and crying when he saw his lost leg until his parents came running, their faces tear stricken with mixed grief and relief. The child’s cries woke Raz slowly, his eyes flickering for a long time before he came to. He called out as wel
l, stiff and sore and barely able to move. The Grandmother rushed to his side, lifting him into a sitting position.

  “You foolish boy,” she whispered, offering him a cup of water while the babe cried out weakly in her arms. “You foolish, brave child. What would we have done if you’d gotten yourself killed? What then?”

  Raz didn’t respond, too intent on his parched throat. He gulped down the water in an instant, spilling less now than he had almost a month ago, and then held the cup out for more.

  That night the blaze of the cooking fire was larger than ever, and the clan celebrated the return of the two boys to the world of the living. Even Agais emerged from his tent, returning only briefly to bring his wife a plate of steaming silverfish and seasoned tubers. Then he sat down, taking a place beside Raz, who was staring around in wonder. It was the first time he’d been allowed to eat with the clan, and the fire and crowd mesmerized him.

  “They’re one stronger because of you, boy,” Agais told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand. Raz looked up at the man curiously, and Agais pointed at Mychal, huddled between his parents close to the fire. He was wrapped in a rough-spun pale blanket, looking significantly happier than he had that morning. Then Agais placed a hand on Raz’s chest, trying to convey what he meant.

  “Because of you,” he said quietly with a small smile, the first real one he’d managed in days.

  The babe still looked confused, glancing down at the clanmaster’s hand resting on the scarred, scaly muscles of his breast. Chuckling, Agais gave up, handing the boy a plate of food instead as it came around. Raz dug in at once, not bothering with his hands and instead picking the silverfish meat up with his teeth before tilting his head back and swallowing it whole. Next he nibbled on a tuber curiously, and made a face. Beside him, Jarden—allowed out of his tent for the first time as well—laughed, giving the boy a piece of his fish.