Still they talked, those around her. She heard her name a few times, made out Theron's voice saying something about death being the only way for an Arm to break the magic. None of that mattered. Not anymore.
She fought them when they tried to pull her free. She might have even shouted, cursed. Eventually, they let her alone but they didn't leave. She felt them around her, forming a protective circle for her grief, keeping the Highlanders out, letting her mourn in some sort of private.
She didn't mark the time. It could've been a day or moment she stayed there; it was a small sound finally took her attention. She lifted her cheek from Yenic's face to answer the noise—the question, now she realized what it was.
"Why you cry?" It was a delicate bird of a thing who had made the sound. Blonde with curls. Frail looking, standing alone, forgotten.
Edulph rushed to the child and gathered her close, cooing over her hair, her arms where they were bare. Aedus shifted side to side, obviously not sure whether she should go to Alaysha or to her niece.
"Why you cry?" the girl demanded. She broke out of Edulph's embrace and stepped closer to Alaysha. Her eyes swirled with color: green, yellow, blue, brown. Alaysha recalled Aislin's words – that a witch knew another by the eyes, but these were like no eyes she'd ever seen.
"He's dead," she told the child.
"Dead?"
"He's not – he doesn't breathe anymore."
"Oh." The girl cocked her head thoughtfully and the colors melted into one another. "I can fix that."
Alaysha crept to her knees and reached out to touch the child's shoulders. Indeed she was a frail thing. Maybe a season and a half old, but her face: her eyes, were older. As Edulph had said, she was remarkable.
"How can you fix it?" Alaysha asked her and the girl looked confused, as though the answer was obvious.
"Because I Liliah."
The End
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Wait for the next instalment in October, 2013, but for now, enjoy chapter one of Sons of Alkaia, available from any ebook retailer.
Sons of Alkaia: sample
The wolves smelled the milk and womb blood on her, and they came. Alkaia imagined the scents leaked tendrils of sweetness out to them through the night air, speaking to them in a language the beasts understood to their cores. Oh, yes, the blood—her blood—called to them. Alkaia heard them snuffling at the perimeter of the darkness where the firelight from her paltry flame couldn't reach. It had taken her far too long to tinder the pitiful fire that separated her from the night, and meager as it was, she protected it like she'd protected nothing in her life before.
Except for the man, she reminded herself, and then quickly threw ash on the light of that memory so that it couldn't distract her. Truth was, she was here now, exiled from her sisters and her land. Alone in the night with a sick flame grasping wearily at the night air. She understood the fatigue, no matter how much she denied it. She was ill. And alone. At least she might as well be. Nothing and no one to hand but a newborn male. Nothing on her back to keep the chills away.
She stole a glance at the shadows, knowing the babe mewled from the spot where she'd left it, close enough to the fire that the predators wouldn't dare make for it, and far enough away that the sparks wouldn't land and catch his swaddling fur afire.
She supposed the wolves heard its pitiful cry as well. More reason to come stalking a warrior in the night when they thought her vulnerable. Alkaia considered leaving the squalling thing where it lay, taking a stick with a good burning end off into the darkness and making camp elsewhere. Leave the wretched child to the wolves. But the bare truth of it was there were too many beasts in the pine forest to be sated by a newborn male. They'd come for her afterwards, their appetites piqued by the flavor of tender meat and newborn milk.
So she left it mewling and kept her blade close at hand instead. She squatted near the flame, letting its little heat flush her face as best it could. One short sun cycle since she'd left the land of her sisters, choosing exile so that a breed man could live. Two days since birthing twins: the first set in dozens of seasons for her people, the first set of many to come in that one quarter solstice. Two days since she'd left the daughter she'd longed to bear all these years while she clung to a male who was nothing to her but a burden.
How she grieved that girl child. Her breasts ached just thinking of her. She would have nursed her, not given her to suckle on a stock woman as was the usual custom for an Enyalian warrior. Not her daughter, the one she'd waited for all her solstice days. Had she not saved the man—Theron—she might yet have stayed to do so. Let the boy she bore suckle from a lesser woman's teat, grow to youthhood, clean meat and cook meals and forage wood for another solstice fire in his own time. Her daughter was the one she wanted.
Except she wouldn't have had those twins were it not for Theron; none of her sisters would have had theirs either. She thought of him and knew she couldn't have left him to those fires, to crackle in the flames while his body fat melted from him. While his face blackened and his hair singed. While his hands—healing hands, wondrous hands, soft, gentle, kind hands—burned to ash with nothing left to show a man was in the village at all. She couldn't see him go the same way as the other breed men—spent and too worthless to be left to wander her homelands.
But the boy. She should have left him. She still wasn't sure why she'd demanded to take him with her. A moment of impossible weakness, she supposed, brought on by the fleeting look downward at a squalling face that lit a memory of that man who gave him to her. Gone, safely, she hoped, to the arms of his witch, to her arms, while Alkaia fled with half his fruit into the woods. A blade on her back, a bit of fur on her loins. A tinder bundle wet with the boy's urine by the time she made camp.
The pine woods that surrounded her left little in the way of scrub brush that she could use for cover. Pine had a way of poisoning the ground. But there was, thankfully, some. A few sturdy hemlocks towered above even the tallest of the pines. Just below their canopy, twisting into all sorts of embraces, were several feathery bushes stealing the nourishment from a long fallen tree.
She supposed it was behind all that life that the pack waited.
She supposed she could consider herself fortunate her flesh was whole: her sisters' payment for a lifetime of leadership and a hale daughter to put to training. No simmering boar fat to peel the skin from her back as she fled. No. She was spared that humiliation.
She grinned at the fire humourlessly.
She'd begged for the grease.
"I'm not afraid," she'd told the bone witch who agreed to her exile. And that woman who had spent as many seasons forging steel from the ash of the fallen to temper the warriors' blades as Alkaia had spent fighting and killing had merely shaken her head.
"By your leadership we have nearly two dozen warrior children and another half that good for stock." The witch chalked her hair, almost to ritual, and though Alkaia never understood why, she never questioned the woman who led the tribe with her. The woman was older than Alkaia, older than any Enyalian, and that too was a mystery when every Enyalian Alkaia had ever known found her death one way or another before the seasons had ran ten handfuls of courses.
A record quarter solstice by Alkaia's design, so the bone witch told her. All for the continued glory of the Enyalia: a race feared by those who had the displeasure to hear the word, a tribe stretching back to the birth of the trees, so the bone witches told in lore. A race now so corrupted of bloodline they had to seek fresh skin from men as far away as the grassy domains past the burnt lands. On the other side, too, deep into the heart of ice. A race who killed any man who fell upon their village unaware, who took the women for breeding stock or the girl children for slaves, to be breed stock in their time. A race who bred warriors from hale men and only through the true line.
A race of perfection.
Alkaia felt t
he flame against her outstretched palms and thought it strange that her face burned from within. She knew the Enyalian line was growing pale, weak. Too diluted. So did the bone witch, and when she saw the renewed glory the man Theron might offer with his herbs and his magic, she let Alkaia keep him, and in freeing him, she let Alkaia live.
"You brought the man who gave us all these would-be warriors. We'll not ruin your back with burns. Not cause the wolves to seek you out for the smell of your cooking flesh."
It was meant to be a gift of gratitude and respect, but Alkaia could find no pleasure in it, only shame. Keeping her back unburned was meant to offer the komandiri a chance at survival, but the pack sought her anyway. Alkaia strained for the sounds of growling in the darkness. They'd come because they'd scented the milk and the stink of her moon that would last another full rise before it stalled. If it stalled at all. It showed no sign of letting up; rather, it drained from her mercilessly until she felt the fatigue in her bones. It was the worst enemy she had ever faced.
So she was spared the agony of burning, but it seemed the agony of death by wolf's teeth would come anyway, that or bleeding to death.
She poked at the sullen flame with the sooty end of a tree limb she'd foraged while the sun was still flirting with the treeline. The flame would keep the beasts at bay only if she kept near enough to it that they feared leaping into it upon attack—and only if it was a good enough burn to threaten pain.
A shriek of hunger came from the bundle of furs on the forest floor and her traitorous breasts leaked in primal answer. They hurt, and she knew the pressure would abate if she fed the thing. She also knew her body would need all that energy and nourishment if she couldn't find food. She needed all her energy just to boil down pine needles, to strip the young fallen cones into a disgustingly mashable paste that would taste of wood and resin even to the best of cooks. Just gathering boughs to cushion her head or keep her warm would sap her. It seemed unwise to waste it all on a manchild.
She cursed the weakness of nature that made her body speak to a babe borne of her body even though it was a male newborn and useless. It weakened her, and all for nothing. A girl child she'd welcome. A girl child she could feed and strengthen even at the cost of her own life if need be. But that thing in the furs? What was the point of losing your own energy for a male child when a male could do nothing in return but eat and sleep and piss and threaten the young ones with desires they couldn't control as they aged. No better than the beasts of the fields were men.
Ah, but she'd made the choice, and she knew it.
"I'm no stranger to discomfort," she said out loud. She didn't care if the child understood the words, or if the wolves heard her tone. "Stay in the dark or come for me, but make it quick."
The sound of crackling fallen tinder came from her left and the low rumble of an animal sounded with it. She fleeted a look at the furs, trying to decide whether the animals would make for the vulnerable bundle first or if they'd strike at both humans at the same time. She wasn't sure how many were in the pack, but she could swear the baritone of several throats had gathered at her back and sides. Plenty of them, then.
She wasted no time pulling her blade to the ready, planting her feet, letting the hairs all over her body strain for the air, all the better to feel a shift in the currents.
A shadow passed beyond the fire. She knew it was time.
"Come, then," She ordered into the shades. An answer came from her left with a short yip and then a streak of black running toward the fire, tugging almost stealthily at the edge of the furs. A yank and the streak was gone back into the darkness, leaving an upended and naked manchild on the moss. Alkaia could see his white skin in the firelight. So engrossed in listening to the woods around her, she had separated the sounds of its cry from everything else and let it recede. Now, the wailing entered her consciousness again and it sounded furious.
She cocked her ear toward it. "They are coming, boy," she said and chuckled. "They know I'll let them have you."
The boy shrieked louder, his cries an enraged protest of hunger and cold.
"They want me to reach for you," she told him. "Thinking to have us both with little fight." Again, she chuckled.
A grumble came from the darkest place of shadows, and she spoke to it without taking her gaze from the child.
"I'm smarter than you, bitch," she said, knowing now that the ploy had been set in motion by the alpha female. "You should have let your male make the move. My kind care nothing for our male pups."
The moment came as she knew it would. From the shadows the wolf leapt, too fast for Alkaia to see her clearly. Only a blur of eyes and a flash of teeth. She twisted without moving her feet, the years of combat making her spine supple. At the apex of her turn, Alkaia fell to a squat, letting her soles shuffle into place, her thighs quivering with the potential to spring. The she-wolf disappeared past the light line, and whimpering, began to move through the night.
The child squalled in earnest, enraged now. Alkaia's gaze locked on the way his arms hammered at the air, his tiny fists clenched. Through a narrowed gaze, she could just make out the front of a muzzle inching toward the infant.
Alkaia was there before she realized her own intent. Her sword moved in tandem with her instincts; she had barely the time to think what she wanted to do with it and it was done. The satisfying chunk of metal against a heavy coat, a grunt, a yelp, and the killing was complete. She barely registered the rush of warm fluid on her skin before she swivelled on her hip, swung again, this time to meet what she thought was a tail.
The whimpering in the shadows stopped. Silence met her ear. Even the child paused for breath. It was in the quickening of the moment that Alkaia knew they would rush her.
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Check out more by this author at her blog where you can find information on all the formats available.
Available Series:
Blood Witch
Bone Witch
Blood Witch
Prequel Series of stories
Seeds of the Soul
Theron's Tale
Sons of Alkaia
Stand Alone novels
One Insular Tahiti
Anomaly
Throwing Clay Shadows
Secret Language of Crows
Did you love Bone Witch? Then you should read The Sons of Alkaia by Thea Atkinson!
The wolves smelled the milk and blood on her and they came.
Alkaia, a warrior of Enyalia, has been exiled from her homeland, divested of all the tools she needs to survive because she dared free the man Theron from certain death. Now, she must find a way to use that vulnerability for survival.
Read more at Thea Atkinson’s site.
Also by Thea Atkinson
Elemental Magic
Water Witch (a supernatural fantasy novel)
Blood Witch
Bone Witch
Tales from Etlantium
Seeds of the Soul (a supernatural fantasy short story: prequel to Water Witch)
Theron's Tale (Tales of Etlantium: prequel series to Water Witch)
The Sons of Alkaia
Standalone
One Insular Tahiti
Anomaly
Formed of Clay: novella
Throwing Clay Shadows
The Atlantic is a Woman to Ride
Deadly Catches
God in the Machine: a short story
The secret Language of Crows
Watch for more at Thea Atkinson’s site.
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Bone Witch (Elemental Magic, #3) Page 23