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

by Bryce O'Connor

  “More pressure on him,” the woman sighed, glancing back into the cart where Raz sat at the edge of his broad bedroll, long legs and tail trailing over the rear edge of the wagon, slim fingers toying with his panpipes. Jarden had made them for him when he’d turned twelve and, though it had taken a long time for him to learn, Raz played nearly as well as his uncle now. With one hand he moved the instrument across his lips, the music sadly lost to the wind and grinding wheels, his other stroking his little sister’s dark hair. Ahna was fast asleep, her back to the front of the cart, small head resting in her brother’s lap.

  “I don’t think he minds,” Agais said with a shrug, clucking the horses into a canter once they rolled onto the first truly flat ground they’d seen in months. “Raz will always pull his weight. Besides, I’m getting the feeling he prefers the cities to the sands.”

  Grea smiled, leaning her head against her husband’s shoulder.

  “Ahh, so there is a way the son differs from the father… Who would have guessed?”

  Agais chuckled, listening to the clatter of the wagon, the city growing a little more distinct with every knock of the axles.

  “Let him be a city merchant, if that’s what he wants. In more ways than one it’s a better life than this.”

  “True, but there’s no scorpions to bash around in town.”

  Agais and Grea both jumped. Raz had climbed to the front, his footsteps masked by the wheel sounds. He crouched behind his parents now, one muscular arm extended to balance himself against the wooden wall of the cart. He was grinning, or doing the best imitation his serpentine face would allow, which mostly involved his higher lip twisting a little at the corners, pulling it up to reveal the gleaming points of slim teeth that had long outgrown their infancy. Faded but still visible, the three parallel scars that ran down the right side of his snout stretched the slightest bit, making them more pronounced. The only true-tell sign that he was, in fact, smiling was the minute spread of his orange-tinged, sky-blue ears.

  Something only his family noticed.

  “How many times have I told you?” Grea laughed, reaching back to smack Raz’s knee. “Don’t do that!”

  Raz chuckled. “I heard you talking about me.” He eased himself down to sit cross-legged behind them. “Being a shopkeeper would be a bore. There’s nothing to do except eat and sleep and yell. I like the towns, but not the dullness of the life.”

  “There’s other things to do,” Agais said, twitching the reins. “I don’t think there’s a captain anywhere who would say no to you joining the city guard.”

  Raz made a face. “No. Never. I’d run off to the North before I joined the guard. They’re corrupt and cruel.”

  “Only the rare few,” his father told him. Although by now it might just be all of them, he thought privately.

  The truth was that Agais had purposefully held his family back a few days this year. Being able to camp close to the market districts had its advantages, that much was true, but at a cost. The place was one of the central hubs of the city, the heart of trade and economy. It was the sort of environment that attracted hundreds of honest merchants and traders every week, along with thousands of Karth’s residents, looking for anything from food to weapons to horses.

  Unfortunately, the opportunity to cash in on a healthy flow of coin always drew the attention of a different sort of businessman. The slave rings now controlled most of the desert’s intercity commerce, Karth being no exception. Circling in past the slums, closer to the wealthier estates in the east districts, meant a long daily walk carrying the goods to sell, but it also meant security. The Arros wouldn’t have to deal with slavers or corrupt law officials telling them that they had to pay a “residential tax” out of their daily revenue.

  At least we can hope not, Agais told himself.

  “You could apprentice somewhere, when you’re older. Jerr’s Hammer in Miropa might even take you. The smith there is the best in the northern fringe towns. Or with a stonemason, or architect! Or—”

  Grea and Raz had continued their discussion, unaware of Agais’ wandering mind.

  Raz was laughing. “I feel like you’re trying to get rid of me, Mama,” he told her, swaying, the cart thumping over a lump in the sand. “Angling to sell me off to the highest bidder, maybe?”

  There was a moment of silence, and the change happened very suddenly. Raz’s face, cheery and smiling one moment, froze, registering what he’d just said. His neck-crest twitched, rising slightly. His mouth opened less than a finger-width. His eyes dimmed, growing vacant, the edge of conscious intelligence ebbing away.

  “Raz…” Grea began, concerned and about to reach back to touch his face, but Agais stopped her, his eyes on his son.

  Raz jokingly called it “slipping out of humanity,” and Agais supposed the phrase fit well enough. There were times, occurring less and less often with every passing year, where something would trip Raz up, ripping his thoughts away from what was going on around him and fixating on what was going on in his head. It was, Agais assumed, the part of him that was atherian. Sometimes the triggers were small things, like some motion in the corner of his eye or the wind battering the wagon sides particularly harshly.

  Right now, though, it was something else. Agais watched Raz’s hands move together, first rubbing the scars on one wrist, hidden by the silver bangles, then the other, covered by the wooden bracelet.

  Atherian had a long memory. “Sell me off” had probably not been the wisest choice of words…

  Raz’s tongue flicked out from between his teeth, tasting the air. His tail slithered forward along the wagon floor. His split pupils didn’t flinch, staring out across the desert, seeing something much farther away than the sands and sky.

  “Raz?” a quiet voice asked.

  The change was just as sudden this time. Raz relaxed, blinking away the primal look that had taken over his golden eyes. His mouth closed, and his crest flattened down the back of his neck. He looked around, the chain on his face swinging.

  Ahna had gotten up and made her way to the front of the wagon. One small hand pressed the wall, helping her balance against the sway of the cart. The other clutched a little cloth doll to her chest. Her dark wavy hair bounced with every bump, and her pretty gray eyes, tinted with just the strangest hint of emerald green, were wide as she looked at her brother.

  “You’re making scary faces again…”

  There was a tense moment, Agais and Grea looking on, letting the horses stray from the path as they wished. Raz, for one, seemed at a loss for words. Then he smiled, grinning ridiculously at Ahna. Abruptly he threw his arms up, falling back onto his folded wings, legs still crossed.

  “Don’t-cha’ know my face always looks like this?” he asked her, grinning and crossing his eyes. On a human it would have looked silly.

  On Raz it looked ridiculous.

  Ahna giggled, smiling and jumping to sit in her brother’s lap once he sat up again. At not quite nine summers old, the top of her head barely reached his neck.

  Relaxing, Agais and Grea turned their eyes back to the desert. Karth had bloomed through the heat, towers rising from the richer eastern parts of the city, their thick forms shimmering against the cloudless sky. Somewhere behind them they heard a man, probably Jarden or Tolman, yell “Hyah!,” trying to maintain a good pace in this closing stretch.

  “Maybe the city isn’t such a good place for me, Mama…”

  Grea looked over her shoulder. Raz was gazing off at the western distances, his eyes on the space just above the horizon. He had one arm wrapped loosely around Ahna just to make sure she didn’t step too close to the wagon edge, but apart from that he had the look of a mind carried elsewhere.

  This time Grea did reach back. She ran her fingers gently across his cheek, marveling, as she always did, at how smooth the scales were. Once, years and years ago near the Garin, she’d grabbed a viper
thinking it was dry wood. She’d been lucky enough not to be bitten, but the feeling lingered in her memory, that cool, lethal softness.

  Raz’s cheek felt the same.

  Cupping the bottom of her son’s snout in her hand, Grea pulled his face around to look at her.

  “You are a better man than you think,” she told him with a smile.

  Raz averted his eyes. “The trims don’t like me.”

  “They don’t know you,” Grea insisted, letting go and patting him under the chin. “I recall Iriso felt the same at first.”

  Raz’s ears perked up. “Aunty?” he asked, perplexed. “She didn’t like me?”

  Agais snorted, earning a smack on the arm from his wife.

  “You could put it that way,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s just say you have a talent for getting on people’s good sides.”

  Raz didn’t say anything, but he looked a shade happier. If his favorite aunt could learn to fawn over him as much as she did, then maybe others could change as well.

  It still bothered him, though.

  Raz looked down at his sister, blissfully oblivious to the conversation, jumping her doll from one of his knees to the other. It was troubling, how people could be so prejudiced. The Garin was one thing. Everybody there knew him. Raz felt at home, felt safe. He could go from camp to camp with his family to exchange stories and trade, and only the littlest ones of most clans would stare at him in open awe or fright.

  Even then their mothers usually scolded them.

  But the cities…

  Raz liked the cities. That much was true. He had an easier time remembering his infant years than his cousins or sister, and could still recall the first time the Arros had dared take him into town, a few years after his adoption. Miropa had been their first stop that season, the sprawling “Gem of the South.” Built around an oasis only slightly smaller than the Garin, Raz remembered his fascination with the city, his curiosity at the towering, oddly shaped hills and mountains he’d eventually understood to be timber and stone buildings. Unlike the other fringe towns, Miropans paid the price to have better materials than clay and mud shipped to them. Heavy pine and granite came from the North, brick from the factories in the port cities to the west, and glass—the reason Miropa was called the Gem—bought from the Imperium and West Isles across the Emperor’s Ocean. Most of the roads—with the exception of the dingy shantytown alleys that were an unavoidable offshoot of any city—were paved with stone from all over the occupied lands, making inner-city travel easier. Topping all this off, though, was the fact that Miropa’s governing body was one of the few left relatively untouched by the slavers, meaning it still maintained at least some control over its own civil systems and private workings.

  Karth was a hellhole in comparison, but Raz didn’t care. Whether it was Miropa or Cyro or Karavyl or any of the smaller fringe towns, they all came with their own individual curiosities and dangers. Cities he loved.

  What Raz didn’t like were the people.

  “Trims,” nomads called the city-folk, for the decorative and impractically flashy clothes and robes they wore. Trims were a different breed of men, and Raz hated the way they made him feel. They all knew who he was. Part of the Arros’ success was a direct result of people thronging to see the “tamed lizard.” He knew his father hadn’t liked it but, with the family’s wellbeing overriding his own personal sense of right and wrong, Agais had let it happen.

  To Raz, at least, it turned out to be the better choice. The initial flame of intrigue that had raced through cities upon the Arros’ arrival burned out each time after only a few days, diminishing until finally he was a known anomaly rather than a fascinating curiosity. Raz had been too young to realize the exact nature of the events going on around him, but he acutely remembered the relief he’d felt whenever the throngs died away.

  As with everything, sadly, there was a price.

  Trims were not an open people. They did not welcome Raz i’Syul Arro in the same way the trading caravans had eventually done. When their thirst for a glimpse was quenched, they fell into the only mindsets that possibly made sense to them.

  Dislike. Disgust. Contempt.

  Sneers were the most common greeting he received from the locals he dealt with. More often than once the Arros had lost a customer because someone “refused to make deals with a scaly” or “didn’t want to touch something the ‘lizard’ had had his dirty hands all over.”

  Agais himself had personally threatened several such characters’ manhoods if they were ever seen near the Arro’s stalls again.

  Still, maybe Mama was right, Raz thought, holding on to Ahna a little tighter as the cart jolted over another hump of sand. Maybe trims could be made to see that he wasn’t the animal most of them thought him to be.

  He ignored the tiny voice of experience whispering in the back of his mind, telling him it wasn’t likely.

  III

  “She will return him to the man he was. She will be his guiding light when he is blind. She will be his anchor to true reason.”

  —Uhsula, Seer of the Under-Caves

  “Don’t stare.”

  Syrah tore her eyes away from the ragged group of men she’d been watching, turning her attention back on the road. It was hard to see much through the thin veil of white silk that covered her face, but without it she was almost blind in the sun.

  Damn her eyes…

  “It’s not like they can see me,” she said with false innocence.

  Beside her, Talo smiled. “Just because no one can tell you’re staring doesn’t make it any less rude.”

  He stopped to drop a copper into the wooden bowl of a shrunken beggar. The old man was a pitiful thing, all skin and bone and thin pale hair, with a dirty bandage wrapped around one shin. Syrah watched Talo kneel and pass a hand over the injury. There was a white glimmer, barely distinguishable in the bright sunlight, and the Priest stood up again.

  Laorin magic could only do so much to help the natural process of healing, but at least the beggar wouldn’t die of infection now.

  In the thirteen years that had passed since the Laorin took her in, Syrah’s Priest-Mentor hadn’t changed much. Talo’s trimmed beard still framed his strong chin, though there was now a peppering of silver amongst the coarseness. It streaked through his long ponytail too, striping the waist-length brown with pale gray. His ice-blue eyes, so capable of sharpness and discipline when need be, were warm as he pressed a second copper into the palm of a little boy with two missing fingers and barely any clothes to speak of. Still a head taller than most men, Talo leaned heavily on the steel staff in his left hand, something he’d once only rarely carried, trying to keep off the knee that had recently started bothering him on these longer trips.

  Syrah reached into her purse for one of her own coppers. The coins were square, different from the circular gold crowns, silver dukes, and copper barons that were the common coinage this far south. That didn’t stop the old woman she held it out to from snatching it up eagerly, though, just as it wouldn’t stop her from haggling for bread with it. One of the northernmost desert towns, Karth dealt with the few northern tradesmen almost as much as Miropa to the east. It made the North-come coins a generally accepted form of currency, especially in the slums.

  Then again, there wasn’t much that wasn’t a generally accepted form of currency here…

  “Seek Laor,” Syrah told the grateful woman gently, “for the Lifegiver welcomes all to his faith.”

  It was a simple enough message, one meant not to push the Laorin way onto nonbelievers too abruptly. Rather, it would hopefully spark the curiosity of a handful of the beggars they helped today, and in time maybe some of them would find their own way into Laor’s embrace.

  Syrah heard Talo murmur the same words while they worked, moving down the street. Across the way, Priest Jofrey al’Sen and his acolyte, Reyn Hartlet, were
progressing in the same direction. They wore white sleeveless tunics and loose tan pants to help keep them cool in the broiling heat. Turbans of light cloth were wrapped around their heads and the bottom half of their faces, protecting them from the sandy wind that frequently graced the dusty streets. Talo wore similar attire, though the wrapping had been pulled down, freeing his mouth so that his words wouldn’t be muffled.

  Syrah grimaced. Though all three of the men looked flushed from the heat they weren’t accustomed to, she was more than a little jealous of them. Her full-length robes covered her from head to toe, not leaving even a sliver of skin available for the sun to claw at. Her hands were gloved in soft, thin leather, and the veil that covered her face was part of a shawl that wrapped over and around her head and neck. Apart from her gloves and boots, every bit of her clothing was specially tailored from thin silk to trap as little heat as possible, but there was only so much the quality of the fabric could do. Even silk was practically useless when the temperatures were so high the contents of a full water barrel could evaporate in an hour if left to the full effects of the sun.

  Syrah grit her teeth, feeling beads of perspiration trickle down the curve of her back. The insides of the gloves were soaked from moist palms, and her eyes stung as salty sweat found its way down her forehead. She had to pause often to drink from the flask on her belt, lifting the veil to gulp down mouthfuls of the unpleasantly warm water.

  Each time, even in those few seconds of exposure, she felt the sun stab at the skin along her jaw and cheek.

  Still, it was a price she didn’t mind paying. There was poverty in the North, of course. Hundreds who couldn’t find food or shelter perished in the winter months every year, starving or dying of exposure when the temperatures plummeted. It was an unavoidable tragedy, one the Laorin fought endlessly to fend off.

  But it was nothing—nothing—compared to what Syrah saw around her now as she straightened up.