by Jasmine Walt
Studying their tattoos, Avery noticed other names mixed in among the pictures of dragons, hellspawn and sea nymphs. In those names he saw a reflection of a shadowy network of friends, allies and accomplices, some dead, some possibly still living, some likely in prison, stretching across years and geography, their friendships forged in blood and danger and lawlessness. For a moment, despite himself, Avery felt jealous. He could only sit and watch as they grieved, as they bonded. Layanna, still unconscious, lay in her blankets.
Avery wrestled with himself. At last he cleared his throat. When the others looked to him, he rolled up his left sleeve.
“They died because of me,” he said. “I would be honored to bear their names.”
The others glanced at each other, apparently uncomfortable. Maybe by being marked with their friends’ names he would become one of them, and they did not want to open their group up—not to him, not tonight, even if he was the person they had sworn to follow. Come on, he thought. He needed this. It frightened him how much he needed this. Mari and Ani were long gone. Sheridan was a traitor. He had no one, not one person in this world. He didn’t even have a home, or a bed to curl up in.
Finally Janx nodded his huge head and came to sit beside him. Lifting his needle, he said, “You ever had a tat before?”
“No,” Avery admitted.
“This’ll hurt.”
“I’m ready.”
Hildra and Muirblaag came forward. Hildebrand chattered loudly.
“It’ll hurt less with this,” Hildra said, and shoved a bottle into Avery’s hands. He drank. Muirblaag clapped him on the back, and he coughed.
“You ready?” Janx said.
Avery sucked in a breath and nodded.
Janx hadn’t lied. It hurt like hell.
His arm itching, Avery traipsed through the forest the next day, right behind Muirblaag. Between them they carried Layanna on a makeshift stretcher. Avery’s arm burned, but he held on tight. Sometimes Layanna slept, sometimes not. Avery would catch her staring up at him, or the sky overhead, and he felt oddly self-conscious. He felt closer to the others than he had before, and it may have been his imagination, but he thought they acted more openly around him, too.
Toward afternoon, Layanna climbed out of the stretcher and walked a ways by herself, limping along with the help of a wooden stick Muirblaag carved for her. She could only walk for a short period before she needed the stretcher again, but in another hour she was once more afoot. The periods of walking grew longer and the periods of resting shorter. Avery was amazed again at her recuperative abilities. He reflected that nothing about her should shock him after seeing her turn into an amoeba monster. He still remembered the screams of the soldiers dying in her stinging tentacles or engulfed in her otherworldly acids.
That night the band came across the ruins of a small village that crept up a mountainside. Stone houses jutted like crumbling teeth through undergrowth, and large spiders wove webs between half-collapsed walls. After burning out the spiders, the band made camp for the evening. The mountain winds blew very chill that night, and Avery only protested a little as Janx and Hildra made a fire in the shelter of a wall. Layanna was placed near it and fed with the meager foodstuffs they possessed. She tore into the jerky and gulped water like a fish.
Avery smiled. “You have a healthy appetite.”
Smacking her lips, Layanna glanced up at them. “What I need now is something from the sea.” She’d spoken in Octunggen and Avery had to translate for the others.
Hildra smirked. “The only thing fishy we have is Mu.” She slapped him on the shoulder. “Eat him with my blessing.”
Layanna’s gaze moved to Muirblaag as if sizing him up, and the fish-man shifted uncomfortably.
“Hildra was joking,” he said.
“Good for you,” Layanna said in her thickly-accented Ghenisan.
The others chuckled nervously.
“Why don’t we get some shut-eye?” Janx suggested. “We’ve gotta go down into the valley tomorrow, or find a way across to the next mountain. We need our sleep.”
“Fuck that,” said Byron. He was staring at Layanna. “It’s been long enough. She’s awake now and I want answers. For starters, what the hell is a Collossum, honey?”
“I don’t think that now is the time,” Avery said.
“Not human,” said Layanna, surprising him.
The others leaned forward. “Where are you from, sunshine?” Hildra asked.
“Not here.”
“Did the Octunggen make you in some lab?”
“No,” Layanna said. “I say further nothing about that.”
She doesn’t trust us with the truth, Avery realized. The thought that she couldn’t even tell them what she was, after all they’d been through already, disturbed him more than he wanted to admit.
She yawned, and Avery said, “I think that’s it for tonight. Let her rest.”
“No,” Byron pressed. “One more thing. She hasn’t even told us where we’re going. Some presence, she said. Well, what presence?”
The others murmured agreement, and Layanna returned their gazes quietly. She seemed about to say something, then hesitated. At last she yawned again and said, “I am tired much.”
She closed her eyes and stretched out, and the others stared at each other. Avery shivered in a sudden mountain wind.
“She won’t even tell us where we’re going,” Byron said. “Not what she is, not where we’re going. Gods damn, but I don’t like this.”
They began seeing rays.
At first it was simply one, far off, a black wedge against the sky drifting over the mountains. A few days later, they spotted a second. They were far apart, miles and miles to either side of the band. After a week, three rays cut the sky. They circled closer, then closer.
Pressing on, the group crossed the shoulder of one mountain to another. They ascended through a pass, then picked their way down into a tangled, dark valley, littered with recent bones and ruins. The smell of rot was thick on the air. The trek up the next mountain was arduous, and as they climbed toward its summit cold winds howled around them, sometimes pocked with snow. Winter began to set in with a vengeance, worse with the elevation. Snow-covered fortresses hunkered from cliff sides, austere and beautiful. Avery huddled in his coat.
He showed the others how to camp and find trails. They were city-bred, unused to nature, but his father had taken him camping often growing up. Avery remembered the long nights of listening to the creatures of the forest outside his tent as his father told him a story. Avery’s memories stirred as they went deeper into the mountains.
He tended to Layanna often. Her wound had become infected, and he cleaned and dressed it with care. She would have been at risk for severe fever, even death, but after feeding her extra-planar facets in Hissig her uncanny recuperative abilities were able to help her, along with Avery’s attentions. His small medical supply dwindled, and he tried to use it sparingly. As they pushed even deeper into the mountains, and Layanna grew better, she guided them; she said she could sense where to go. On previous hikes, Avery had stuck to the foothills, to the relatively safe frontier, the areas where ngvandi typically did not go, but now he might as well have been on a different planet. He could no longer see Hissig save the lights of the city reflected off clouds to the east, and that only at night.
They pressed deeper, and deeper. Mountains piled up around them.
The rays followed.
THE END of Volume One
The Atomic Sea series continues with Part Two, now available from:
http://jackconnerbooks.com/books/the-atomic-sea-part-two/
To claim your FREE Jack Conner Starter Library, which includes four whole free novels, sign up for my newsletter here:
http://jackconnerbooks.com/newsletter/
About the Author
Amazon bestselling author Jack Conner lives in Austin, Texas, a city of sunshine, live music and great Mexican food. He’s been reading and writing all his life, al
ways gravitating toward the fantastic. Inspired by the great fantasy writers, from Howard to Tolkien to Martin, he writes stories of constant tension, unrestrained longing, looming darkness and danger.
For more information on Jack Conner:
@JackConnerBooks
jack.conner.98
www.jackconnerbooks.com
[email protected]
Read more from Jack Conner
http://www.amazon.com/Jack-Conner/e/B00BNZ17F8/
Rebel’s Honor
Book One In The Crown Of Blood Series
Gwynn White
Published by 4xOverland LTD
England
www.4xoverland.com
Publishing enquiries: [email protected]
First published in 2015
This book is the intellectual property of the copyright owners. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, including duplication, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2015 Gwynn White
All rights reserved.
Created with Vellum
About the Book
Rebel’s Honor
A marriage she didn’t want. A prophecy that could change the world.
Lynx of Norin is a proud warrior who always does what’s right for her people. When an ancient treaty and a thousand superhuman guards force her to leave her land for an arranged marriage, she knows it’s her duty. Lynx begrudgingly travels to wed her sworn enemy, the supernaturally powerful Lukan Avanov.
Lukan grows to love his bride-to-be, but he wasn’t prepared for a second mysterious visitor to ruin his plans. A curse that has been prophesied for ages may come true on Lukan’s watch, and it could bring down his entire family.
As Lynx seeks to destroy the Avanovs from the inside, Lukan fights to keep his empire from falling apart. Lives and civilization are on the line. Who will come out on top and who will fall to the deadly curse?
Rebel’s Honor is an epic steampunk fantasy set in a world where anything is possible. If you like page-turning action, captivating stories, and vivid steampunk imagery, then you’ll love this story.
Join the fight for freedom today!
1
A dozen white eggs gleamed in the weak autumn sunshine, unguarded, as Lynx crouched in the tawny grass. It wouldn’t be long before an angry parent returned to defend the precious hoard. She pulled out a machete—one of two stored in sheaths strapped across her back—and held it ready in case the bird attacked.
Only the bravest of the brave stole from a breeding ostrich.
Her younger brother, Clay, squatted next to her. His blue eyes, so like her own, glistened with excitement for this egg raid, his once-in-a-lifetime rite-of-passage into the Norin tribe.
Spotted!
Lynx brushed Clay’s arm, clad in a worn leather tunic similar to hers, and nodded toward a male ostrich striding toward them. More dangerous than females, ostrich cocks increased the risk of death or injury, making the prize so much more valuable.
Black wings flapping, the ostrich bayed a warning, a thrilling roar that always reminded Lynx of the distant call of hunting lions. It was appropriate. An angry ostrich was every bit as vicious as any lion. She had seen friends disemboweled by ostrich kicks.
Sweat beaded Clay’s face and his fist clenched around his machete whitened.
Lynx tried but failed to ignore the shimmy of doubt rippling through her. She liked to believe her bravery was tempered by intelligence—most of the time, at least—but people in the rest of the empire would call her and Clay insane for what they were planning.
They’d be right.
The next few minutes would decide the course of her little brother’s life. And destroy hers, too, if anything went wrong.
At just fifteen, if Clay returned home today with an egg, he would pass into adulthood. With that, he’d earn the right to braid ostrich feathers and beads made from the eggshell in his hair. Best of all, he’d join Lynx in the raiders. Revered above all in Norin, raiders rode on the outskirts of the caravan, defending their people and their flock of ostriches from attack by their superhuman Chenayan masters.
But if Clay failed—and survived the encounter—he would be nothing more than a server, performing the menial tasks needed to keep the Norin caravan moving across their vassal country.
Her brother had accepted the risk. Lynx had one last chance to ensure he was truly committed. She leaned closer and stared at him.
“You don’t have to do this. You’re not yet sixteen. I won’t judge you if you say you’re not ready.”
Clay scowled at her. “I’ve been ready for months. Only he stopped me.”
He: their father, King Thorn, leader of the Norin.
Lynx understood her brother’s resentment; she had been only thirteen when she sneaked off to raid her egg. At the time, if anyone had known she planned to raid, she would have been chained to a post to stop her risking her life. But, as silent as an owl’s wing, she had slipped away from camp to face her ostrich. Now, at twenty, her father was training her to take over leadership of the raiders when he died and her oldest brother became king.
Who was she to deprive Clay of his chance to raid?
She squeezed his leg, encased in black leather trousers. “Then let’s focus on that ostrich. It’s not going to hand you its egg, you know.”
A smile quirked Clay’s lips, filling Lynx with pleasure.
The ostrich gave them the full treatment, trying to lure them away from the nest with a display of piteous limping. His one wing drooped at his side, skimming the dusty ground as he lumbered away from them. The invitation was clear: I’m wounded, easy prey. Come and get me rather than my eggs.
But Lynx understood ostriches too well to be conned. The bird would stagger away, leading them on if they fell for the trick. Then, a safe distance from the clutch, he would rear up, slashing out his lethal talons. Surviving the attack would tax Clay’s fighting skills.
Clay leaned forward, ready to sprint to the nest.
Lynx gripped his thigh, whispering, “Not yet. Remember, an ostrich can outrun you. Let it move farther away, or it will be on you in seconds.”
Clay swallowed hard and then brushed away the sweat dripping in his eyes. “Don’t forget your promise, Lynx.”
“I won’t. Today is all about you. Live, die—I won’t interfere.”
The ostrich hobbled as far away as she’d anticipated. Soon, it would guess its mock dance had failed, and it would bound toward them to attack.
“Go! May the Winds be with you.” Lynx pushed Clay as he darted to his feet. When he sprinted forward, Lynx stood, too. Although bound by both her promise and Norin law not to interfere, she pulled her second machete from its sheath.
Speed was everything. Lynx had drummed into Clay that he must forget the ostrich, grab an egg, and secure it in his satchel before the bird reached him. Then his hands—and his mind—would be free for the fight of his life.
As she expected, the ostrich stopped. Its limping play forgotten, it spun to peer at Clay through sharp, beady eyes. Then it pulled itself up to its full height—nine majestic feet of muscle, bone, and feathers—and let out a booming cry. Wings like giant shields, it sprinted toward Clay, kicking up great clouds of dust behind it.
Lynx’s heart sank as Clay looked back at it. Clay, no! Run!
Clay’s eyes widened, and his pace slowed. His foot caught in an uneven patch of ground, and he stumbled. By the time he found his feet, the bird was bearing down on him, beating at him with its powerful wings.
Winds, please help him, Lynx pleaded. She tightened her grip on her weapons, her body rigid with tension. She didn’t need the Winds to whisper that Clay’s only hope was to forget the eggs and tackle the ostrich.
Contrary to Norin wisdom, Clay stood in front of the bird. She guessed in his panic, he forgot his training. Sh
e longed to scream to him to get beside the ostrich, out of reach of its legs, and to go for its head.
Instead, she bit her lip until it bled. The other Norin might not know they were raiding today, but she, Clay, and the Winds did. Neither of them would cheat.
She expected to see fear in Clay’s eyes, but determination blazed on his face, and his machete remained rock steady in his hands. Then, as graceful as a dancer, he veered to the side, avoiding a kicking leg, and darted behind the giant bird.
Lynx heart clenched; she understood his strange tactics.
He had ignored her sensible training, learning instead from the stories she had told him about her egg raid. This was how she had defeated her ostrich, attacking it from behind as a lion would. It was the most dangerous thing Clay could do. Her brother was making a point today that he was man enough to win against the toughest odds.
With a screech, Clay leaped up onto the ostrich’s back. The ostrich whipped its beak around, jabbing and tearing at Clay hanging off its tail feather. Clay slipped, and again, Lynx longed to scream advice, but it wasn’t necessary. Blood streaming from his face and arms, Clay stabbed his blade into the ostrich’s shoulder. The machete lodged deep into the muscle.
Eyes wild with rage, the ostrich rolled on the ground, taking Clay down with it. For a moment, all Lynx saw was her brother’s boot sticking out from under a mass of quivering feathers. Baying, the bird clambered back to its feet. Still hanging onto the machete, Clay used the blade as an anchor and heaved himself up until he mounted the ostrich like a horse.
A joyous smile spread across Lynx’s face as Clay wrenched the machete free and swung it hard at the bird’s neck.