by Leith Briar
“We need to do something,” I say. “I can’t walk around holding my boobs all day.”
“I will send one of the lads on horseback to the native market. They are bound to have something fit for your condition.”
I sit down on the bed. This isn’t good. I knew this would happen eventually, I mean for the last three days I’ve been walking around with a bloated stomach. But my condition is about to become obvious. I’d always thought it took around three months to show any visible signs, but it’s happening after barely a week.
“I haven’t failed to notice the way Vrexor looks at me.”
Loche stops whatever he was doing and stands in front of me as I continue.
“We can’t hide it for much longer. And I can’t spend every day cooped up in this room, either. It will just flame his suspicion.”
He nods his head in agreement. “Aye. You are right. I had hoped we would be able to wait for Colm’s return — as he is not going to like what I am about to suggest.”
I raise my brows cynically. It’s not like Loche to go against what he thinks Colm would or wouldn’t want — aside from the jewellery, that is.
“My pregnancy is turning you into quite the rebel.”
He laughs at that and shakes his head. “We should leave for Navaria. Vrexor will not follow you there. The Plaigh are not welcome, and he would not take the risk alone and without numbers. Colm would not like the thought of you away from home, but the way I see it, your safety is more important. And the babes, of course.”
“Navaria?”
Loch sighs and immediately sets to work pulling the chest across the floor. “I thought Colm showed you the lay of the land? Navaria is where the natives live. You will be welcome there. And there will be folks — women — who know far more than I do about birthing a child.”
I shift uncomfortably at his words, not yet ready to accept the fact that soon I’m going to actually give birth to a child.
“What about the women I came here with?”
I have asked Loche about them before, at various points throughout the last week. But he just dodged the questions and changed the subject. He wouldn’t say anything other than they were safe and living comfortably. “There could be a doctor or a midwife amongst them — a nurse? There were at least twenty of us. There was a girl called Megan, and she was training to be a vet? I know it’s not the same but—”
“A vet?”
“Like a doctor, but for animals.”
Loche makes a face. “Interesting. But you are not birthing an animal.”
“It’s all similar though, isn’t it?”
Loche rolls his eyes. “I am afraid even if there was a chance it would help, I can not allow it.”
“I don’t understand…”
He shakes his head. “Do you think you would have accepted your fate as you did, if you had known then what you know now? These things take time. Delicate matters. Besides, it would be up to the Bhiast who chooses her to explain the way of… to explain everything. Not me, and certainly not you. The natives will have wise-women.”
“Wise in human childbirth? They looked nothing like us,” I say, but I get up and help him with the chest, anyway. There’s not much suitable clothing for me now, but I notice he’s packing some of Colm’s long swathes of plaid.
“Wise in all sorts, I am sure.”
We manage to get my few belongings packed into a small sack, and Loche leaves me to ready the horses. I’m told the Bhiast took the best horses with them, but since we’re both fairly light the younger, smaller ones would manage just fine.
So I’m left with my thoughts, and as I look around the room, I realise I’m feeling strangely emotional about it all.
I was just getting used to this place.
That would have seemed absolutely insane the very first night… and yet today it doesn’t. I guess when everything changes so abruptly, you adapt a lot better than you ever imagined you could.
And now I’ll need to adapt again.
A new place. A new culture. A new language barrier. The thought of it is overwhelming, but I know there is no real alternative.
If I stay here, Vrexor will know for sure. Even if he doesn’t notice the swelling of my stomach, he will notice the lack of tight, restrictive band around my waist and he will know.
Sneaking away will also mean he knows, but at least I won’t be around for his monitoring and checks. Loche told me he had already set up a laboratory of sorts down in the cellars, complete with the Plaighs answer to stirrups.
A shudder makes my shoulders tense, and I quickly leave the room. I’ve tied the loose folds of fabric across my breasts — almost like a boob-tube, and one of Colm’s large black furs covers my entire top half. No one would know I wasn’t properly clothed under it.
Loche warned me the middle of night is cold, but to ride for the full day in the sun in my condition would be too dangerous.
We leave as soon as the castle sleeps.
There is just the small matter of dinner to get through first.
I take my seat in the great hall, the rest of the chairs empty except for Loche on my right side, and Vrexor who’s sitting on the far right.
“You feel the cold tonight, girl?” Vrexor asks.
I’m fairly sure he knows my name at this point, but for whatever reason he won’t dignify me with using it.
“Yes, it gets much colder here than I’m accustomed to on my home planet.”
He nods once and doesn’t speak again throughout dinner. He barely speaks at all, but he watches me. I see him in the corner of my eye as I exchange small-talk with Loche.
Throughout the meal I feel uneasy. His presence always has me on edge, but tonight it has multiplied for obvious reasons.
As soon as the plates are cleared away, he excuses himself from the table and bids us goodnight.
I cast Loche a suspicious glance as he leaves the room.
Something feels off.
“We should make haste,” Loche urges me, mostly with his eyes. His voice is so soft he’s practically mouthing the words.
I shake my head slightly, terrified that Vrexor will walk back through the door and catch us conspiring. Who knows how good or bad their hearing is? “Let’s wait awhile. Just in case he comes back. Please.”
Loche nods and shouts one of his Balachs over to fill our cups. Uisge-Beatha for him and that milky substance for me.
“Tell me again of Earth,” he says. “The scouts tell us the important things, but they never stay here long enough to go into much detail.”
I smile and take a drink of my milk. We’ve had these conversations more than a few times over the past week, but his thirst for knowledge never stays satiated for long. I guess that never really leaves you? Already I find myself wondering, and I can only imagine that intensifies as the centuries go by. But it’s more than a thirst for knowledge with Loche, I think.
I’m beginning to suspect he’s a gossip.
“What do you want to know?”
“How can you know what you want to know when you do not know it yet?”
I chuckle at his tongue twister. “Alright. Point taken.” I wrack my brains, trying to think of what has changed over the last seven hundred years.
“We have things that’ll heat your food for you in a matter of minutes.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “Sounds a lot like a fire.”
“I guess it’s not so different, but we call them microwaves.”
Looking not really as impressed as he should be, I try to think of something better. I can’t really tell him about aeroplanes, since they already have space travel. “I don’t know. People have it easier, I guess? We’re more free.”
“How so?” He sits up, looking slightly more interested.
“Well, where I come from, we don’t have to work fields all day. Women can have jobs and be paid the same as men. Men can marry men, and women can marry women. We don’t die of common infections. We don’t die in childbirth nearly as of
ten.”
I’m about to keep going, but he holds a hand up to stop me. “Wait. You are going too fast. One at a time.”
I shake my head, sensing that we’d be here all night if I started trying to explain it all to him. “You can quiz me more on the journey. We always talk about Earth. I want to know about here.”
“Here is just here. The Bhiasts go to war, they come home. The cycle repeats itself… until the day you arrived.”
I mimic his unimpressed look and he shrugs. “Fine. Tell me about your version of Earth. Did you know Colm?”
Perhaps he has some piece of succulent gossip on him.
He smiles. “I know you will be surprised at this, but I am actually older than Colm.”
For a second I hesitate between wanting to laugh at his sarcasm and then thinking that would be incredibly rude if he’s not joking. So I settle for a smile.
“I am pulling your chain,” he says. “I grew up with his old man. Known Colm since the night he was conceived.”
I smile again, hoping he will tell me more.
“His father was our clan leader, as was his father before him. Colm was never supposed to lead, though. He was his father’s second child — and you know what they say about second children.”
My brows furrow as I shake my head. “I’m afraid I don’t know much of anything about children.”
“Well, you are about to learn. If there is a wild one in the family, you can bet it is usually the second child. His older brother and his younger sister were killed by… an enemy. Colm was not born to lead, but he would have made a good Laird.”
Theres a lump in my throat, both at the look on Loche’s face as he retells the story, and at the thought of Colm losing his siblings. Well, losing is bad enough, but to have them killed by your enemies must be harder still. It occurs to me even though that is technically my home planet, it seems just as foreign to me as this one. “He never got the chance? To be Laird?”
Loche shakes his head. “We were betrayed. McCaig bastards bargained with the Plaigh to take us instead of them. Very same bastards who took his brother and raped his sister.”
“McCaig?”
That’s my name.
Instantly his eyes go wide, and then he averts them and stares down at some spot on the table. “A co-incidence, I am sure.”
Perhaps…
Perhaps I’d have bought that if it wasn’t for his reaction.
“It’s not that common a name,” I state, my tone more accusatory than questioning.
He doesn’t say anything. And that just makes it worse.
“What aren’t you telling me? Were they my ancestors?”
Loche does look up at all, and he’s still trying to find the words to reply. Meanwhile my thoughts are going into overdrive.
The fact he’s not answering means he knows they are. Which means none of this was a co-incidence.
“It was you. Colm. All of you — you came to my room. When I was younger. You meant to take me. But why? What was I, some twisted seven-hundred-year-old revenge?”
“My Lady… It was—”
But he stops when I scrape my chair back from the table. “I need to use the ladies.”
“Sophia!” He gets up to follow but I hold my hand up.
“Alone.”
I just need a minute. Just a minute by myself to process what he’s told me.
Or more specifically, what he didn’t tell me.
What they all failed to mention.
I cross the hall and head for the stairs, intending to take a moment in the quiet of my chamber. The place where I gave myself, barely over a week ago, to a man I thought I had something with.
But it was built on a lie.
He hated me since the day he laid eyes on me.
It all begins to make sense. They came and probably found I was too young for their twisted purposes. But they knew they’d come back, and I lived my entire life since that night riddled with the fear of it. The fear that one day, whoever was in my room would come back.
I spent so many sleepless nights wondering why.
And now I know.
He chose me because he knew whoever he picked might die. And he wanted it to be me.
Like some fucking sick consolation prize.
Oh well, I murdered my wife but hey, at least I avenged my siblings in the process.
I’m working myself up to a frenzy by the time I reach the door to my chamber.
The worst part of it is that I can’t help feeling that this is my fault. I have no right feeling betrayed because I shouldn’t have let my guard down.
I barely even knew him. I let myself think with my body instead of my head. I fell for a handsome face instead of seeing the brute that was hiding beneath it.
They say the devil never comes with claws and horns, he comes in the shape of the thing you desire most. Well mine did come with claws, and fucking horns, and I still fell for it.
Idiot.
I let him in, and now it hurts like hell.
“Going somewhere, girl?”
The room is dark — the fire long extinguished and the only light coming from the faint flickers of the sconces in the hall. I don’t need a light to recognise that voice, though.
I knew something was wrong.
“Remove that cloak and show me your stomach, or Balach Loche ceases to exist.”
Chapter 23
Colm
We have been fighting for six nights straight, but when you have done this for as long as I have, you tend to get a sense for being over the worst of it.
And tonight feels like we are over the worst of it.
The Scouts tell us stories about wars on Earth. Great wars fought with armoured machines and lasting for years. The Plaigh, as a race, do also have those types of wars. But they have machines for that. They have species more suited than us for great wars with machines that last many hundreds of years.
The battles we fight out here are not so different from the ones we had on Earth. Skirmishes are common, pitched battles with cavalry more so. Sometimes, like now, we find ourselves dug into trenches, a ball-hair outside arrow-range and indulging in a siege.
The invaders — a race of sentient beings that resemble insects more than they do men — call themselves Ghrimsk. They are black as soot and tall, like crickets on two legs. We have taken back most of the land they stole, and now they have retreated to a fortified stronghold carved into the side of a mountain.
They use spear-like weapons in close combat, and tiny arrows laced with their own venomous saliva.
Filthy bastards.
And so we sit in our trench, as we have been for the previous nights, waiting to see how many they will send out for us. They would likely fare better if they just stayed inside, but I am not complaining.
“Maybe they have learned their lesson,” Gregor says. “With any luck they will not come out tonight. I do not know about you lot, but I could sleep for a week.”
I chuckle at him. “You have got it backwards, boy. With any luck they will all come out, then we can be done with this and I can sleep in a place that is not swamp-shit.”
“Send Coinneach over,” he says. “They will be so concerned with fuckin’ him, they might all come out for a shot.”
The group laughs under their breath. The brothers never miss an opportunity to rip into each other. ’Tis true, Coinneach means handsome, and he is that. He is the youngest of us all and barely grows hair on his face, but none can deny it. He would be a man for the lassies — if there were any lassies on our home planet. On Earth, there was always some angry Da’ wanting to slap his coupon for ruttin’ with some innocent maid in the hayfields.
Coinneach screws his face up. “You know it has been that long, I would maybe consider it. As long as I was giving.”
“Ha!” Brody says. “I wonder what their women look like.”
“Bald,” I shoot back. “For sure.”
Coinneach chuckles. “Tits?”
“A good
handful.”
He shakes his head. “Always been more of an arse man.”
I laugh at him and shake my head. I have no idea what their women look like, but it is passing the time to think about it. “Judging purely on the male species, I would say their arse is two legs attached to a back.”
Coinneach pulls a face and shakes his head. “Ack well, that is Gregor’s plan fucked then, eh? I am not interested.”
We are mid-chuckle when all of us hear the same sound in the distance.
“Shhh,” I tell them, more out of habit than actual necessity, and we all duck down. “Brody, archers.”
He gives me a nod and I watch him crouch as he runs along the trench.
I pick up two big clumps of wet soil and rub my face with my hands. From what I’ve witnessed, the Ghrimsk do not see in the dark half as well as we do. Between the leather armour and the black fur, the dirt aids us in becoming practically invisible to them.
Which is why I maintain it is a good thing they keep sending troops out.
Well, a good thing for us.
My face and head covered, I stick my head up and peer between the gaps in the palisade.
“Five-hundred,” I say to Gregor. “Maybe more.”
This is the most they have ever sent. There are one hundred and eighty six of us. The first night, they matched us. The second night, I estimated three-hundred.
“They are getting desperate,” Gregor whispers.
“Aye. I suspect their numbers are waning.”
Already I can tell he has caught on to my way of thinking. I am always with Gregor in these skirmish type battles. When we pitch he leads the cavalry, but they are of fuck-all use in a trench. So he stays with me, his younger brother glued to his side.
“Split us,” he says. “Take most of them with Brody and give us fifty men to storm the fort.”
I was thinking along similar lines, although I would have suggested more than fifty with Gregor and Coinneach.
It is a risk on both sides. Directly in front of us, we will be outnumbered four to one. But the bigger risk lies with Gregor, as we do not know how many await behind the walls.