She then arched her back and bit her lower lip as another spasm wracked her body. The contractions were getting stronger, coming closer now. The baby would soon arrive. The pain of labor would be forgotten, life would resume, and they would both be forever changed.
Taking an iron pot of hot water from the tripod that held it over the fire, he placed it on the floor by where she lay, allowing his fur cloak to fall to the floor. He wore a thin leather overgarment, under which his woven linen shirt rested against perfect skin. The linen shirt closed over his broad chest with an interlaced tie. His skin was stretched taut over his musculature, still cold from exposure.
Even in this light, markings could be seen on his forearms and on the side of his neck, faintly visible, winding their way over and moving with his skin. They had the appearance of being war paint, or like the tattoo skin-piercing ink work of far-off islanders. But these were more like an elaborate birthmark. They glowed in the firelight and disappeared with the shadows.
The man took a water-soaked piece of cheesecloth that had been allowed to cool, placed it on his wife’s forehead, and smiled with concern that was only mostly hidden behind his piercing eyes. He hummed a soft melody and worked with graceful hands, tearing strips of warm linen with which to wrap the baby when she came.
She …
He had predicted to himself that the baby would be a girl. He couldn’t know for certain, being a slave to time like man. A thing deep within his heart told him, though, that the baby would indeed be a girl and that she would be special. He longed for a daughter.
His wife cried out again and looked directly into his eyes.
He knew—it was time.
He gently pulled the blanket aside, waiting. She pushed with a piercing scream. The wind answered her with a burst, shaking the hut. She was in her second day of labor and the effort and strain on her body was beginning to show; her strength was fading. He wondered how much longer she would have to endure, but he said nothing, praying that this time would finally be the last, for her sake.
She bore down, pushing as hard as she could, so hard that she could not breathe for a moment. And then… cries. Sweet, soft cries. Their baby’s innocent voice filled the small hut as mother and father looked into each other’s eyes, smiling. The baby was so small in his arms. He gently wrapped her in warm cloths, presenting her to his exhausted wife.
She was a girl. She was beautiful, with her mother’s black hair and the same piercing eyes as her father. She fed for the very first time, and then the little family gathered together under the warm blankets by the fire to sleep, glowing with the spark and joy of new life.
For that one night in their little world, everything was perfect.
CHAPTER X
HE STOOD OUT AGAINST a brilliant morning sunrise at graveside, under the now-dormant oak, desperate and ruined, overrun with grief. He had been digging most of the night, and his thoughts hovered over concern for how he could save his daughter’s life now. His anger was beginning to stir. The tears that fell from his eyes took hold of red-orange sunlight and sparkled like crystal. Dreams of a life under the sun were now gone—too soon. His beloved, for whom he had sacrificed all, was dead. He looked down at the bundle in his arms and pulled the smooth wool-skin blanket back, gazing into his daughter’s eyes. She was perfect. Her skin, smooth and pure, reminded him of his beloved bride.
His grief came in a fresh and powerful wave again. Now his wife had her place amongst the stars. The heavens he had abandoned for her, the position he had despised, which he had abdicated to make his habitation under the sun with love—all now wrecked. She had gone to the one place he could not reach. The place he once had called home. He was now bound to the burdens he had gladly accepted for love’s sake: time, consequence, the caprice of mankind. And these burdens, even a fallen angel could not shake.
He knew there was no one to help, nowhere he could turn for the faintest hope of empathy. Even in his own village, he was an outsider. He remembered with bitterness how he and his kind had begun their own peaceful civilization, had thrived under the sun with their loved ones. The Brotherhood had come, attacking under pretense in the night, scattering them, and then all had become enshrouded in surreptitious myth. Deepest darkness.
The Brotherhood. Those El had cast down under the sun as punishment for their insurrection. They traded on fear and loathing, insistent that lies were truth and dark was light. And the fact was that man had made his own abdications, surrendering his divine right to these petty usurpers.
“Kreios, you are a fool,” the godman said to himself. “You believed, and too easily, that life under the sun would not bring its consequences to bear upon your decisions. You believed you were immune.” The cold, dead wind tore at him, mocking his loss. He felt the outrageous cruelty of the cold; the helpless frustration that of course they would conceive a daughter at such a time as to require the child to be born in the depths of the worst winter he could ever remember.
He had dug a meager grave in rock-hard frozen earth under the very oak tree where they proclaimed their love for one another only five cycles of the sun ago. He could still feel her heart in his memory, fluttering with anticipation. He had knelt before her, poured out his soul, had finally won her, and vowed to love only her into eternity.
Now he poured out his soul once again, drowning it in her grave—and he felt the unjust spitefulness of a life lived in subjection to fallen reality. He had placed her cold body into the colder ground, had wept as he covered her empty body with shards of frozen earth. Now he was finished, and the snow blew in and covered over the scar he had made, making everything look clean and fresh, marking off a bitter contrast to what was the last thing he could do for her. He sobbed, an expression of confusion, frustration, anger, and hurt.
The baby cried and wriggled in his arms. Kreios turned and went back inside his hut, shutting the cold out with a thud. He wrapped his daughter tighter in the soft mink pelts that had warmed his wife only last night, nestling his baby girl in his own bed. He snuggled in with her.
When she had fallen asleep, he rose again, restless. She needed a mother’s milk if she were to survive, and he knew where he had to go to get it. A two-day journey from his small village was the town of Gratzipt. His brother lived there with his wife, and Kreios knew she was surely very large with child by now; the birth would be imminent, if it hadn’t happened already. His brother’s wife would be able to nurse his newborn daughter.
But could the child endure starvation for two days?
Crouching down, poking at the fire in the center of the small hut, he tried to think. No matter how he approached the problem, the solution was always taking her there. Milk was the only life source for a newborn child—nothing else would do. In his village, there wasn’t one mother who would give suckle to his little girl. Not in the winter, and certainly not for someone like Kreios.
His village had written him off long ago. There were rumors. His name, if it was spoken at all, was only ever uttered in fear or hatred. The villagers were scared of him and his odd pale skin, the strange things he was able to build, his fey antisocial ways. Even under scorching sun in summer, his skin always kept its paleness, never burning, never darkening. Local mythology made him into a wizard. Or worse.
My kinsman will take us in or I shall die trying to get to him. I will not let my sweet girl starve to death.
With the deliberate and steady hands of a warrior, he pulled on his heavy cloak. He gathered scraps of dried meat, putting them, along with a few valuables, in a large leather pack. Then he carefully slid a long object, wrapped in a shroud, inside the pack and lashed the flap down tight. He took a sling and placed his slumbering child into it, then slung it carefully around his neck, tucking her close to his chest under the thick fur of his cloak.
He tightened his belt about his waist in preparation for his journey, and walked out the door into the harsh winter air. The howling wind had subsided a little, and he reflected on the permanence of the
change now undeniable in both his life and that of his little girl.
But he felt an abiding peace beneath his circumstances—if even for a moment—and thought of smiling, but did not allow it. He looked at his child and felt the most severe fusion of intense pain and love. It is just you and me from now on.
He thought about the long walk that lay ahead. He thought of the likelihood that the Brotherhood could have stationed a guard to watch the crossroads, ready to make a report.
He finally allowed his mind to give form to a very bold idea that had been smoldering within him and then said, “I must,” into the thinning winds. In this statement, the future, with all its potential for good or evil, was encapsulated. It will draw out the Brotherhood. It will violate the treaty—I cannot.
Kreios shook his head and padded silently through deep, drifted snow toward the road, the village at his back. In about a hundred paces, he would be in the woods, under cover. They will know—they have eyes everywhere. He did not bother to argue with himself further. There was no use fighting it. He knew that the world would do what it would do; why not anticipate and prepare for the worst? For his beautiful child, he would risk his life as well as the treaty, if that was what was required.
Kreios reached the tree line. The Whispering Wood had been named for the isolated village it guarded, the place he had called home for ten cycles of the sun now. The Storytellers had said that God, El, would whisper truth to travelers there if they had a pure heart. But the voice of El was not something for which many listened now. There were no pure hearts in this world.
He glanced around like a predator, turning from the crude road and trudging off. The snow was deeper in the dormant undergrowth, but as he made his way farther in, under the canopy of the forest, the going became easier.
He could feel his baby girl breathing softly as she slept next to his skin. He knew she would be warm. The cold would not reach her there. Do not do it, his inner voice screamed at him, warning him not to provoke the Brotherhood.
He stepped into a clearing.
Kreios shut his eyes, calmed his nerves, and chose to be at peace. He listened carefully for watchers, reading with his senses the bleakness of the wood for the pungent contrast of a lone inhabitant. After a moment of this, he satisfied himself and was certain that he was indeed alone.
He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands. He began to glow, his birthmarks casting shadows deep under his skin, bright against the snow all around. Turning his eyes upward, he bent into a crouch.
Kreios leaped into the sky, a bolt, turning west, speeding across the heavens like a shooting star. The air parted around him in waves of light, forming the appearance of wings. There was no way to unmake this choice.
CHAPTER XI
KREIOS FELT A THOUSAND accusative stares arrayed around him like weapons. His flight to Gratzipt was a torch in the night to the Brotherhood, and he knew he would be watched and followed. He did not know how they knew when his kind took flight. He did not know what mystic connection his kind had with the Brotherhood, but it was deep and unbreakable. He could feel blackness coming for him. The battle that would be fought was inevitable now. He needed to craft a strategy, and quickly.
He landed outside the town’s extents in a little deadened glade that provided some cover. The baby wriggled against his body and cooed, cutting him right to his heart. He loved her more than he could have imagined possible. She was only a day old, but the love he already felt for her seemed to him as old as the heavens. He hurried his steps. She needed to eat, and soon.
Kreios strode directly to a solitary hut at the fringe of the town’s boundary. Like him, his kinsman Zedkiel was an outcast from society, publicly regarded as a sorcerer, courted only by the desperate under cover of darkness. Some came to him for his unique and bewitching ability to craft vessels of glass, which would have been easily explainable to an unsuperstitious mind, but such thinkers were few and far between. He raised his hand to knock at the door, but it opened first.
“Welcome, my kinsman,” said a broad and smiling face. “Come inside. I have been waiting for you.”
It was Zedkiel. Kreios embraced him, being careful to turn slightly so as to not crush his daughter. It had been half a cycle of the sun since these close kinsmen had allowed themselves to see each other. The last bit of news they’d shared was that Zedkiel’s wife was with child, and that she would give birth in midwinter.
Like his own wife.
The bond they shared ran deep, knitting them together in thought and spirit though the distances between them were sometimes great. Zedkiel knew. He beckoned Kreios with moist eyes, and he stepped inside his kinsman’s house, closed the door behind him, and looked around. “I am sorry, my brother, for putting you in danger like this.” He looked at Maria, who was standing nearby with a warm smile on her face.
“Do not worry, Kreios,” Zedkiel said. “We are family. If that means we fight, then we are prepared to do that.” He stepped closer and grasped arms with him. “Kreios, I am very sorry for your loss.”
“You are a good brother, Zedkiel. I only hope we never have to face the Brotherhood in battle again. You are steward over a fine village, and I can feel that you love it here.”
Zedkiel nodded and pulled Kreios’ cloak away to reveal his new niece’s sweet face. She was awake and looked up at her uncle, smiling. “She is lovely. Looks like her mother, thank God.”
Kreios laughed weakly and allowed his brother to hold her. Zedkiel looked down at the newborn girl and kissed her on the forehead. Without another word, he turned and gave her to his wife. She smiled and excused herself to another room, and Kreios breathed a heavy sigh of relief. His daughter would live.
“Maria is due by the next new moon,” Zedkiel said. “Not long from now; perhaps a handful of days. We will care for your daughter as if she is our own. You have blessed us with a gift, Kreios.”
Kreios shed his cloak and both men embraced again before sitting down by the fire that blazed within a ring of stones on the floor in the center of the room. The fire crackled as Zedkiel tossed another log in, making sparks jump up and pop in the air. It was another cold day; the wind beat the clouds across the face of the sun and shoved violently through the small, unprotected village. There was no forest to break it, no wall to defend against it. The town of Gratzipt was dotted and spread throughout a broad, high mountain valley, where the livestock grazed freely on wild pastures in summer.
Kreios and Zedkiel talked, catching up on details of the time that had passed in separation. Kreios knew it was a miracle that they even had offspring to carry on their bloodline. Like he and his own wife, Zedkiel and Maria had tried for years to produce children. After many painful losses, it looked as if they too would finally be blessed with a child. “I am trying to be strong, but the pain of losing …” Kreios looked into the flames. A long scar ran down his right arm, intermingling with the jagged tattoo birthmark across his left bicep. The marks were similar to eagle feathers, and as his powerful arms moved in the firelight, his skin appeared translucent over them.
“I am very sorry, Kreios. I know how much you loved her.” Zedkiel sat hunched on the floor with his legs crossed. He was not as big as Kreios. His hair was long and dark, pulled back and tied with a leather thong. His legs were pure muscle, hardened by both his Maker and years of labor.
“I remember the first time I saw her,” Kreios said. His smile, dilute and distant, was but a passing figment on his striking face as he called up the memory of how she had captured him, even from across the reaches of the universe. “She was so beautiful …” He remembered falling for her. “And filled with joy. And so much fire. I knew abandoning paradise was wrong, but it happened before I even knew it had … and for her.” His powerful voice wavered. “She is still worthy of the consequence I continue to bear. Even in death.”
Zedkiel nodded. “Have I not been by your side for many an age already, whether under the sun or not? And I too have no regret of the decision mad
e by our kind.”
Kreios stirred the coals with a poker. He watched the flames lick hungrily at their fuel as they consumed it. “My kinsman, what are we to do about the Brotherhood?”
Zedkiel spat in the dirt. “We must face them, destroy them. We cannot hide forever. I felt you coming here. I understand why you had to hurry, brother—I felt both of you as you took to the air. I fear, however, what I might feel next.”
The angels who had chosen to fall for the love of women—for the pinnacle of El’s created life—bore their own burdens, to be sure. Perhaps the greatest of those for Kreios was that the Book of his life was forfeit to him. The Book contained his individual history, whether from time past or time yet to come. When he chose to fall, his Book was cast out of paradise, but not with him—no. The penalty for his betrayal was to roam the earth under the sun forever seeking it out, never knowing if it might have been found by another, one who might peer into its pages seeking power, seeking to control him, or one of the Brotherhood at worst … who might seek to destroy him.
But Kreios’ kind were also gods among men, and that meant certain things came easily to them, such as glassmaking, one of Zedkiel’s natural gifts. They retained certain spiritual abilities as well, at El’s good pleasure, and Zedkiel’s lingering ability was that he could sense imminent danger while it was still far off. Kreios possessed the ability, among other things, to listen as well as speak with nothing but a bare thought.
Kreios knew Zedkiel was thinking about the Brotherhood. He considered their options. He shook his head, knowing that what he had done in taking to the sky had been like the sounding of the Battle Trump from the top of the highest mountain. It had been nearly a call to war, his desperate attempt to save the life of his little girl. Certainly it voided the treaty that required their kind to remain shackled to the earth, but only time could tell what the Brotherhood would do to retaliate. Kreios and Zedkiel were now slaves to that relentless march.
The Airel Saga Box Set: Young Adult Paranormal Romance Page 6