by Jasmine Walt
“We need more raiders,” Heron said.
Lynx was about to reply when, in the blink of an eye, the guardsman closest to her sliced through a young raider with a sword. The girl’s battle cry stilled as her severed body crumpled into the dust.
Hare. Bile bubbled into Lynx’s mouth. All she wanted was to join her voice to the battle cries and to rip the Chenayans to pieces with her machete. But a rash move like that would cost Lynx her life.
She gestured to Clay and Heron. “Dismount and bring your crossbows.”
Lynx, Clay, and Heron slipped away from the fires. She led them to a grove of trees and tussock grass opposite the fighting. Hiding from the light of the two moons, she hunkered down into the grass and lifted her crossbow. Heron and Clay lay on either side.
It was the perfect spot for sniper attacks. As long as the raiders in the camp kept the guardsmen pinned at the gate, they could pick the Chenayans off with poison-tipped quarrels. She had no compunction about shooting people in the back. Stealth and poison were the only way the Norin held their own against the Chenayans. Even in moonlight, the Chenayans, with their dark hair, bronze-colored skin, and mail armor, were easily distinguishable from the fair-haired Norin.
“How many murghi-tipped quarrels do you have?” she whispered to Heron.
“Five.”
Between them, she and Clay also had five. Not enough. She gritted her teeth. “Fire at will and then get out of here. The bastards will rush us as soon as they figure out where the attack is coming from.”
They let fly a barrage of quarrels. Their bolts hit with precision, born of years of training and cold-blooded hatred. Eye lined up to her crossbow sights, Lynx fired into the back of the guardsman who had killed Hare. It ripped through his armor and struck him in the shoulder. The air oomphed out of him, and he staggered forward, only to collapse on his knees. Seconds later, he tumbled to the ground.
Lynx marred her face with a harsh, ugly smile. Thanks to the murghi, the Norin poison, within minutes, he would be delirious and unable to move. Within days, a slow, agonizing death would claim him, befitting a man who dared slaughter her friend.
By the time the Chenayans figured where the quarrels were coming from, ten of their number lay dead or dying. En masse, the raiders at the gate swarmed the remaining five. Still, the Chenayan axes flailed, until finally, sheer weight of numbers brought them to their knees.
Lynx stood and raced to the camp. “Attend to our injured!”
She unsheathed a machete and made for Hare’s killer.
Heron grabbed her wrist. “Wait. He’s still conscious.”
“Then he will feel my machete,” she replied, voice like ice.
Heron let her go, and he and Clay fell into step with her. She nudged her boot under the guardsman’s shoulder and tossed the man over. His lips were already turning blue from the murghi, and his eyes were glassy. But that was not what held her attention. A pea-sized chunk of jasper, lodged in his nose next to his right eye, gleamed in the moonlight.
Ignoring his inane ramblings—the effect of the poison—she knelt and poked the tip of her machete under the stone.
He cried out in pain.
She ignored that, too.
With a grimace, she drove the tip of the blade deeper and deeper under the gem until it finally broke free in a spurt of blood. The guardsman groaned, and his body jerked. Before long, even those halting movements would cease as the poison tightened its grip. Then, for three or four days, he would linger in agony between death and despair as each of his organs shut down. Death, when it came, would be a mercy.
Lynx picked up the jasper and held it up to the moonlight. She breathed out a disappointed sigh.
“Nothing,” Heron said.
Clay looked on, his face contorted with morbid interest.
“Just a piece of rock.” Heron narrowed his eyes.
“I had to check.” Lynx tossed the bloody stone onto the guardsman’s chest. “Something gives these bastards their supernatural powers.” She stood, calling to the servers, who had now emerged and battled fires with water buckets. “As soon as that’s done, stake the Chenayans out in the desert. They will either die of murghi, or the vultures will get them.”
“Yes, Princess Lynx,” someone called.
Lynx knelt next to Hare. Tears of sorrow and anger spilled down her cheeks as she brushed Hare’s braids away from her face.
A hand landed on her shoulder, and she looked up into familiar blue eyes. King Thorn. Her breath caught.
“Father.” She stood. “We killed them all . . . but at what cost?”
“At what cost, indeed.”
She and her father stood side by side as raiders and servers scurried around them. The servers—Clay included—attended the Norin dead and injured while Heron led the raiders carrying the Chenayans out into the desert to die.
Lynx tucked her hand under her father’s arm. “Why? That’s what I want to know. They harry us, poach our ostriches, make life hell, but they’ve never done anything as suicidal as this.”
Her father raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Suicidal? Is that what you think?”
Lynx nodded. “Every Chenayan died tonight. What was the point? If they wanted to slaughter us, why only send fifteen men?”
A server ran up to her father and thumped his fist to his heart. “King Thorn, sir, we lost twenty-six people and have forty injured.”
Her father shook his head. “Thank you, Lizard.” He turned to Lynx. “As future Commander of the Norin raiders, what message do you think Mad Mott sent us tonight?”
From his tone, her father had some definite ideas. Sixty-six Norin dead or injured, with just fifteen Chenayan casualties. Despite the cool autumn evening, Lynx rubbed her arms against a sudden chill.
“I wish I knew,” she replied. “You tell me.”
“Tomorrow,” her father said, “after the funeral. We have much to talk about.” His blue eyes turned flinty. “Not least of all, Clay’s failed egg raid.”
Lynx’s stomach clenched at that disaster, sidelined by the battle. “You heard?”
“Kestrel told me.”
“Did she also say she destroyed Clay’s eggs?”
Her father ran a scarred hand across his face. “She did. I should have known the day could only get worse when she babbled that at me.” A sigh escaped his chest. “Find your brothers. We need to plan for tomorrow’s funeral.”
A sharp wind whipped around Lynx as she played a soft, melancholy tune on her fiddle in front of the unlit funeral pyre.
The Norin did not leave their corpses languishing. All night, servers had scoured the plains for scarce firewood to build a pyre tall enough to consume the bodies of twenty-six men, women, and children. By morning, the pyramid of bodies and wood had been ready. Lynx’s nose burned with the reek of precious kerosene, used to soak the wood to speed the burning.
As she played, Lynx spotted Heron pushing his way through the gathering crowds. Everyone who could be spared from guard duty had collected on the dusty plain outside the camp for this send-off. Heron’s sun-bronzed face broke into a sad smile as he joined her. She smiled back as he stopped next to her. He stood so close, her elbow knocked into his side as she played. She didn’t mind. He was her best friend, and it was comforting to have him here.
The royal family always took the lead at public events. Clay, dressed in a server’s apron, and her older brother, Wolf, braids and feathers rimming his face, stood to her left. Wolf was her father’s heir and would inherit the throne on his death. Wolf’s wife, Aloe, wearing a server’s apron, flanked his side. She held their young son. Lynx looked around for Kestrel. Instead of joining the younger generation, she stood behind their parents, seated on the other side of the pyre. As king and queen, they presided over this somber affair.
Typical of Kestrel to grab the center spot. She frowned, more at herself than at Kestrel, because such thoughts were churlish on this sorry day. She concentrated on her fiddle playing and studied the funera
l pyre.
It was the first time in living memory that so many Norin had lost their lives in a single Chenayan attack. If this was the new order of things, Lynx feared for her tribe’s very existence.
And yet, under the guise of the Unity, Emperor Mott still demanded a Norin bride for his son. It was inexplicable to her.
In the turmoil, she had yet to speak to her father about whom Mott had selected for Lukan. Trembling with pent-up emotion, Lynx swept her bow across her fiddle strings, sending an angry caterwaul over the gathering.
Her father stood, fixing her with a piercing stare. “On that note, I think we should begin.”
“Sorry.” Lynx dropped her fiddle to her side.
Heron took her other hand, holding it tight in his callused fingers.
King Thorn cleared his throat, and then his voice rang out in the silence. “May the Winds be with you all! For four hundred years, we have borne Chenayan brutality. That will not stop just because today we weep for our family and friends. Treacherous bastards that they are, their guardsmen will be back. It behooves us to remain vigilant, to remember who we are and what our friends died to preserve.”
King Thorn’s face blazed anger and hatred. He took a deep breath. “Despite being a signatory to the Treaty of Hope with the other surviving nations of the Burning, the Chenayans rebuilt their armies in violation of that accord. Norin was the first country they attacked.”
Although familiar, hearing this history still had the power to raise goose bumps on Lynx’s arms. Twenty years before the Chenayan leader Thurban invaded Norin, the nations of the world had reached a pinnacle, creating vile weapons of mass destruction. Old conflicts between nations turned to war, and in a few short months, the planet had been left desolate by the Burning. Even now, there were lands where no living thing grew.
The survivors of the Burning swore to never let war on that scale ravage their world again. To that end, all weapons and the technology that made them possible were destroyed per the terms of the Treaty of Hope.
Thurban Avanov of Chenaya had stepped into that chaos when he attacked Norin. They had begun to rebuild their schools and universities, but Avanov claimed they were in violation of the peace. He argued that book learning had been banned by the accord, that no one was ever to read again.
Within weeks, Thurban and his guardsmen had kidnapped the Norin professors, destroyed their fledgling schools, and shattered their society for a second time. With Norin on its knees, Thurban placed a vassal king on the Norin throne and forced him to sign the Unity. As part of the agreement, the Norin monarch promised that a Norin princess would marry the Chenayan crown prince. Then Thurban set the survivors adrift to roam their land as ostrich herders.
Four hundred years on, little had changed for the Norin people. Every emperor, Mad Mott included, used their guardsmen to keep them moving, never letting them settle long enough to build a stone hut, let alone a proper school. In retaliation, true Norin kings decreed that, at the very least, parents were to teach their children to read, write, and do basic arithmetic.
Lynx leaned forward as her father continued.
“Why did Avanov and his Chenayan army attack us all those centuries ago? For the same reason Mott’s guardsmen attacked us last night. They seek to control us because we are powerful. They fear us like no other nation on this windswept planet.” King Thorn raised his fist, shaking it to the sky. “Our masters call us low-born savages and cut us down like vermin, but they know we are the only educated people in the empire. And it is that which makes them fear us.”
Lynx felt her father’s eyes alight on her before moving on to drill the faces of other mourners.
“Would you relinquish that freedom for false promises of respite from Chenayan attack?” He pointed to the funeral pyre. “Would they?”
A murmur of noes ran through the crowd.
“I thought not. Our education and our egg raids make Norin great—the greatest thorn in our enemy’s hoof.”
Lynx nodded in agreement. Thurban’s destruction of the old Norin had marked the beginning of the egg raid tradition; if Norin could no longer build places of learning, they would be warriors, fighting to be free from Chenayan bondage. That, coupled with their education, made them a source of constant aggravation for their overlords.
“Today,” King Thorn continued, “we not only mourn their deaths, but we also celebrate the triumph of their lives, lives built on honor, learning, and pride.” He hefted a burning torch from a wrought iron stand next to him and held it high. “They did not die in vain. May the Winds receive their souls and carry them to their reward.” Slowly, he walked around the pyre, brushing the kerosene-soaked wood with fire. Within minutes, the pyramid was ablaze, a giant beacon of flame and heat shimmering in the midday sun.
Face like stone, Lynx watched it burn. “This cannot go unchallenged,” she whispered to the wind that moaned around her.
She knew the Winds had heard her. What the answer would be, Lynx could only guess.
4
Nothing but ash and smoke remained of the funeral pyre as the sun set, red and angry, over the camp. Her back and legs aching from her day-long vigil, Lynx was more than ready to collapse into her bedroll. She forced her muscles to move as the crowd drifted away from the place of mourning.
Her father tapped her shoulder. “Come to the council tent. We have things to discuss.”
Lynx suppressed a sigh, knowing sleep was now a dream. “Of course.”
Clay hissed in a breath. Only raiders were permitted to enter the council tent. When his step fell softly behind her, Lynx gripped his hand and found his face desperate with longing.
She whispered, “Trust me. Remember, I made you an oath that I would plead with Father for you. You will raid again.”
Clay’s shoulders and face relaxed.
Her father stopped at the tent entrance. “Clay, come. You too, Kestrel. This is family business. Nothing concerning the other Norin yet.”
Lynx stared at her father in astonishment. Before she could say anything about his strange invitation, Kestrel, who had also never entered this hallowed space, darted past her into the tent. Irritated, Lynx stepped under the tent flap. Kestrel was usually scathing about Norin traditions like the exclusivity of the council tent.
Lynx’s breath caught, all thoughts of Kestrel’s animosity toward her Norin heritage forgotten.
The spicy tang of ostrich and chickpeas filled the dimly lit space. In one corner, Dove, her mother stooped over a makeshift kitchen, stirring a stew pot. Cooking was Mother’s passion, but seeing a kitchen in this tent was as unheard of as her father inviting Clay and Kestrel to join them. Every Norin tradition screamed that this was wrong. Before Lynx could question it, her stomach rumbled.
“Come. Sit.” Mother gestured to the plump leather cushions circling the fire pit in the center of the tent. Strands of blond hair spilled out of her bun, and her server’s apron was stained with cooking juices. “Lynx, your stomach speaks for all of us. Everyone in this family needs a hot meal after the trauma of these last two days.”
Lynx gave her mother a quick hug. “Food smells great. So this is why you left the funeral early?”
Mother nodded. “There is so much to discuss tonight, and I know my family. Hard discussions always go better with good food.”
Hard discussions. This had to be about Mott’s demand for a wife for Lukan.
Please let it not be me. Lynx’s stomach knotted as she sat on her usual cushion around the fire pit. A prime spot, it afforded her a view of the entire tent, made from hundreds of ostrich skins cobbled together.
Clay slumped on the cushion next to her.
Mother clicked her tongue and then said to Kestrel, “Dish up food for your brother. And don’t be stingy.” She tousled Clay’s hair. “For Lynx, too, while you’re at it.”
“But Clay’s a server now,” Kestrel protested. “Why should I wait on him?”
“Just do it,” Mother snapped.
Their
mother didn’t allow other servers to attend to them during their private family time. That meant Kestrel was always called on to help.
Scowling, Kestrel pulled her hands out of her apron pockets and bent over the cooking pots. She shoved earthenware bowls at both Clay and Lynx.
Too hungry to care about her rudeness, Lynx was about to spoon stew into her mouth when Wolf burst into the tent. Aloe and their young son, Raven, trailed behind him. Neither of them had ever been in the council tent before. Her expression nonchalant, Aloe ran her fingers through her mass of blond hair, unfettered by braids or feathers. Raven wasn’t so coy. The little boy stared around in wide-eyed wonder.
Lynx smiled at him, patting the other cushion beside her. “Come, Raven. You’ve wanted to peek inside this tent for ages now.”
With a shriek of delight, Raven leaped onto the ostrich skin cushions and snuggled up against Lynx’s side.
“Hey, Lynxie,” Wolf said. “I shouldn’t trust you with my son. Look what you did to Clay. Poor kid’s wrapped in bandages.” This was typical Wolf, doing his best to lighten the mood. He smacked them both lightly on the back, jolting Lynx’s spoon and spilling her stew.
“Wolf,” Lynx moaned. She scooped meat and gravy off her leather trousers, then sucked her fingers, relishing the spicy taste.
Wolf whisked his son up, handed him to Aloe, and threw himself down next to Lynx. He leaned against her arm. “You’ll need to brush up on your table manners when you get to Cian. I hear tell Lukan likes his girls compliant and sweet.”
The confirmation that she was Lukan’s bride of choice made her freeze.
“Wolf.” Mother shoved his shoulder. “By the four Winds, did you have to blurt it out? You’re an insensitive—”
“Mother, there’s no sensitive way of saying Mott chose my sister for Lukan.” Wolf squeezed Lynx’s hand. “I’m sorry, Lynxie.” He turned to Clay. “I’m sorry for both of you. Really, I am.”
Her father clapped Wolf on the shoulder. “That bastard Mott may have signed the letter, but he didn’t do the choosing.” A scowl darkened his face. “I’m convinced that was Lukan. He sees your sister as nothing more than a plaything.”