Blood of Heirs

by Alicia Wanstall-Burke

  A rustle in the undergrowth drew her attention, but it was too small to be Abbi. Lidan listened harder, focussing on those sounds that were not natural to the bush, sounds not made by rangers or horses or labouring women. She closed her eyes and waited.

  Someone screamed and a crash echoed between the trees. Eyes open and trained on the direction of the sound, Lidan darted after it, led by the torch and the lightning and her churning gut. The crashing continued, followed by another scream, louder, closer this time. She charged on, vaulting a fallen tree and scrambling to a stop on the other side.

  A child screamed again, terrified and alone.

  ‘Abbi!’ Lidan cried in reply, hoping somehow her sister would hear her through the chaos and fear. There was no answer, no sign the little girl heard her at all. ‘Abbi! Where are you?’

  A growl shook the bush ahead, followed by the rumble and crack of thunder and a furious gust of wind. The rain stung Lidan’s face, forcing her eyes to narrow and her hand came up to shield against the onslaught. The wind clawed at her coat but she pushed on, the torch guttering before coaxing itself back to life.

  Just beyond the edge of her light, Lidan heard the hurried breaths of a child. She lifted the torch in a vain attempt to throw the light in a wider arc, moving forwards, following the sound.

  She saw Abbi’s back, her shirt soaked through and clinging to her tiny shoulders, her dark curls hanging straight in a curtain down to her waist. Even from this distance Lidan saw the girl’s body tremble.

  ‘Abbi?’ Lidan asked, careful not to spook the girl and send her screaming into the bush like a frightened piglet. She took a step forwards, one hand reaching for Abbi’s shoulder and the other hoisting the torch.

  The growl came again and Lidan stopped cold.

  Her stomach twisted to knots and her breath quickened. The ngaru was so close she could hear it sniffing and exhaling over the hiss of the rain. Her eyes followed the sound, rising from the crown of her sister’s head to the darkness just beyond the light. It breathed again, preparing to pounce, waiting on her next move to decide its own.

  ‘Abbi, it’s Lidan,’ she whispered, hardly daring to move her lips in case the creature snapped forward.

  ‘Liddy?’ came the shaking reply, Abbi’s voice no more than a squeak of terror.

  ‘When I tell you to run, you turn and run. Understand?’

  She didn’t answer.

  The ngaru snarled again from the shadows.

  ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Abbi whispered, her tiny head twitching in agreement.

  Lidan’s free hand lowered slowly to her knife and settled on the bone handle. Once the weapon of a ngaru, now it would be turned against them. ‘Abbi, run!’

  Her sister spun and a clawed hand darted from the darkness. It snagged the girl and yanked her away by the back of the neck. Her scream ended in a hollow snap, and the creature launched itself at Lidan.

  It hit her in the chest and knocked the torch away to sputter and die, driving her backwards in a tumble of flailing limbs, sticks, leaves, and cold steel. Somehow Lidan drew her knives and started slashing wildly, tangled with the creature and refusing to give an inch. She couldn’t see the ngaru to plan her attack, she just cut and stabbed and screamed and punched, kicking and twisting whenever the thing got a hand on her for longer than a moment.

  It faltered under the ferocity of her attack, fuelled by rage and pain and sadness. In the flashes of lightning, she saw the creature stagger as it tried to back away, and realised it was not nearly as large as the one that attacked Loge near the Caine. She launched at it, the knives bearing down on its back as it turned to crawl away.

  Pus and mucus sprayed into the night as she stabbed. The ngaru wailed and screamed, thrashed and clawed, marking Lidan in a hundred places, yet she felt none of them. Driven by desperation and grief, she forced the ngaru against a tree in the raging storm, one of its arms hanging from threads of muscle while the other pawed aimlessly at Lidan’s shoulder. Its strength faded, her cuts and slashes too much for its raw, rotting frame to handle.

  Lightning flashed again and she saw its face. She jammed a knife under its chin, driving it through its mouth into its brain. It twitched and danced and Lidan yanked the blade free, swinging up with the other to stab the sharp steel through its neck and into its spine.

  It fell, flopping to the wet ground and gasping like a dying fish. Its eyes found her for long enough to give one last, defiant snarl.

  Lidan forgot her knives. She lifted her foot; then with all her anger, all her hate for the ngaru and Yorrell, all her fear of her mother and her desperation to please her father, she slammed her boot into the ngaru’s face and crushed it like the insect it was.

  *

  Abbi wasn’t far.

  Her small frame lay at the foot of a huge ghost-bark tree, motionless and soaked by the drenching rain. Lidan found her in the flashes of lightning, following the sound of shallow breathing and the wheeze of exhalation. It became a desperate grunt as Lidan staggered to her side and pushed wet hair from her face. The darkness hid most of the horror, but in another flash of lightning, she saw blood coursing down from a grisly tear at the girl’s temple.

  One of Abbi’s eyes swivelled to look up at her sister in the light of the storm, but the other remained fixed at an odd angle. Blood bubbled from her mouth as she tried to talk and a sob shuddered through Lidan.

  Tears fell with the force of the rain, mingling with the water from the sky. Her small, favourite sister, gasped again for a breath and Lidan felt it rattle through her chest. Her ribs were shattered, and likely her spine fared little better. Lidan had seen enough rangers in the healing rooms to know what grunting breath and bubbling blood meant. Abbi was drowning and there was nothing she could do.

  Shouts came from the trees. Torchlight glowed, and Lidan knew her sister’s screams had raised the alarm.

  ‘Too late, eh, little mouse?’

  The one eye Abbi controlled levelled on her sister’s face and her lips quivered. The pain must have been incredible. Lidan saw it in the shiver of her body and the twitch of her hands. She knew what her father did for his rangers when they lay broken beyond repair, too far gone for skilled hands to bring them back, yet not so damaged that death spared them suffering. He helped them with a small mercy, the last gift he could afford them after years of loyal service.

  Abbi needed that mercy.

  Lidan bit down on another sob as Abbi choked on her blood, her eye pleading for the pain to end. Lidan cradled her sister’s head to her chest and wept. She kissed the little girl and held her close.

  ‘I’m sorry, Abbi…’

  It didn’t take much.

  Hardly any pressure at all and it was done.

  Lidan looked down through her sobs at unseeing eyes, glazed and staring at the sky, unflinching in the rain. She gathered the broken little body into her arms and cried.

  *

  She found her family again as the storm passed to the north, the rain hammering down as the thunder retreated into the distance. The first person to see her was Kelill. The woman’s hands went to her mouth and she screamed, turning to run, shouting for Erlon and the others to come. The sound was distant, across a great chasm of pain none of them could cross.

  Rangers appeared with Lidan’s father and stopped dead at the sight of her. Erlon hit the ground like a stone, staring at his eldest cradling the body of one of his babies. Siman waved and a pair of rangers pulled their daari to his feet and led him away, murmuring words Lidan could not decipher.

  Siman appeared, his long, scarred arms reaching for Abbi and slipping the weight from Lidan’s grasp with gentle ease. His eyes scanned Lidan’s face in the driving rain but she didn’t know what he was looking at, or searching for. He left her alone, surrounded by rangers who had no idea what to say or do except stare.

  Sellan shoved them aside and ran to Lidan, for once a genuine expression of horror and sorrow on her face. She collected her daughter
against her chest and sank with her to the ground, ignorant of the mud and dripping blood.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ Sellan whispered in her daughter’s ear. Lidan heard the breathless fear and knew it was the truth. She almost had lost her. If not for a pair of knives and the training of a young ranger with nothing better to do, Lidan would certainly be dead.

  She listened to the beat of her mother’s heart and let everything else fade; the rain, the thunder, the screams of Raeh realising one of her babies was gone. She let her father’s roars and the distant howls of the ngaru vanish into the abyss of her sadness and heard nothing but the beat of the dana’s heart.

  There was one sound missing from the commotion of the camp, unheard among the groans of wounded rangers and crying children. There were no cries or grunts of birthing, no heaving efforts to push from the wagons.

  ‘Mother?’ Lidan asked in a hoarse croak.

  Sellan rocked her daughter back and forth. ‘Yes, petal?’

  ‘Farah?’ The name spilled from her lips to fall with the tears and rain. For a moment there was no reply, then her mother’s hands squeezed a little tighter.

  ‘It’s a boy.’

  Epilogue

  The Hidden Keep, Southern Orthia

  ‘You have to let me see her…’ Ran protested in a barely audible whisper. His voice was broken and weak from lack of use, his head throbbed and he could hardly move his eyes without pain lancing across the front of his skull.

  ‘I told you before, she is well, but you are in no state to see one another,’ Collan replied from a table near the door where he stood busily grinding herbs. He moved to the hearth and swung the kettle off the fire.

  ‘Is she awake?’

  Collan shook his head but did not turn. ‘Not yet. She stirs, but does not wake.’

  ‘I need to see her,’ Ran insisted. He tried to sit up, but the burns along his arms screamed with heat and he groaned, collapsing back against the bed. He surrendered and let the pain go, willing it to ease and soothe itself.

  ‘Much better, Master Ran,’ Collan nodded and approached with a pot of herbal tea and a clean towel. ‘I felt the change that time. The more you turn your power inward, the sooner the wounds will heal.’

  He held a cup of water to Ran’s lips and let him drink—their usual ritual, before he was offered a pain-relieving tea and further rest. Collan wiped drops of water from Ran’s chin and leaned back to check dressings and fuss over the cast on Ran’s broken ankle—injuries all sustained in the explosion of his magic and taking what seemed an age to heal.

  His power had only just begun to pool again, depleted and wounded in the effort to destroy the creatures that had chased them, and unable to heal his body as quickly as it had before. It left him languishing in a sickbed in one of the keep’s towers, and at the mercy of Collan, the Keep Master, who appeared to moonlight as a nurse and teacher.

  ‘You promised to tell me about Lackmah today,’ Ran reminded him. He asked about it daily, and each day Collan found an excuse not to reveal any more than a few cryptic riddles.

  ‘Did I?’ He feigned surprise and moved to sit in a chair by the fire. ‘I don’t remember that.’

  Collan cracked a walnut in his hand, the slight limp in his left leg belying the strength visible underneath the layers of his robes. Ran rolled his eyes. If this kept up, he’d be healed and a hundred years older by the time he got any answers.

  ‘Yes, you did promise. You said you’d answer all my questions and then some—’

  ‘When?’

  ‘You said it the morning I woke up, after the attack!’

  ‘No,’ Collan corrected, tossing the broken nutshell in the fire. ‘I said I would tell you, but did I happen to mention when?’

  Ran searched his memory of the morning after his explosive arrival at the keep, Collan’s face hovering over him as he demanded to see Sasha. He’d apparently screamed a few other things at his rescuers—an insistence on an explanation of the creatures and one repeated word.

  Lackmah.

  ‘You said you would tell me “all in good time”.’

  ‘You think now is a good time?’ Collan eyed him, light brown eyes steadily watching for a reaction.

  Ran looked at the ceiling instead and sighed. ‘No. But—’

  ‘The question runs through your head constantly, doesn’t it?’ Collan hadn’t asked that before.

  Ran swallowed and nodded. It did, haunting him through his dreams, his ghost asking day and night, more persistently than she’d ever asked about the scroll. He’d ignored her once, at his peril, and he wasn’t about to do so again.

  ‘And you think I know enough to end the confusion in your mind? Enough to put your questions to bed?’

  ‘You have to! You’re the Keep Master!’

  ‘This is true,’ Collan conceded with a nod, then looked at the fire. He steepled his fingers and sank into thought, leaving Ran to wonder if he would, just this once, give in to his pleas. ‘Lackmah? You want to know about Lackmah?’

  ‘Yes, I do!’ If Ran could have opened his hands in supplication, he would have, but his burns and bandages held them still. All he could do was look at Collan and beg with his eyes. ‘That name has followed me for more than half a year. Since the night I was cursed with this magic, it’s all I’ve wanted to know.’

  ‘And if I tell you, will you stop this infernal chatter? Will you leave it alone and submit to training here with the rest of the magic-weavers?’

  Ran paused with his mouth open, unsure if the trade was worth the price. ‘Yes…’

  Collan narrowed his eyes and leaned towards Ran. ‘If I tell you, here and now you must swear the oath and pledge yourself to the Keep. You will not leave, under your own power or that of another. You will commit to a life here, with your fellow magic-weavers, and you will train. You will learn to harness and control your power, and in time, you will become a teacher. Are you sure this is what you want?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. In that case…’ The man sighed and settled back in his chair. ‘Lackmah and the creatures who hunted you are so closely linked, one story cannot be told without the other.’

  ‘What?’ Ran demanded. His heart began to pound and his mouth ran cotton-dry. He hadn’t expected that.

  Collan continued to speak to the fire, as if he drew the story from the flickering flames. ‘Lackmah was a village near the Disputed Territory, mostly populated by farmers trading with passing army columns, supplying the front with fresh food and weapons. It became quite the hub of business over the summer, but in winter when the fighting ceased, the village returned to its quiet ways. One winter, about fifteen years ago, the village’s population vanished. It wasn’t until the thaw that the duke’s vanguard found it empty, the livestock dead or missing, the crops abandoned. It took months to discover what had happened.’

  Ran knew.

  His stomach twisted at the memory of all those bones, the bodies piled in the cottage on the lonely road. He saw them in his mind—their white teeth and hollow eye sockets gaping from the depths of the cottage, some hidden in shadow and the rest illuminated by moonlight. His ghost’s body lay prone across the doorway and he shuddered.

  Collan continued in the silence, shaking his head. ‘They found a place so foul and against the laws of humanity, the duke outlawed the mention of its name. The people of Lackmah were taken by witches, derramentis mages drunk on power, and murdered for the sake of experimentation. The witches killed them one by one, with each death fashioning a servant from the corpse.

  ‘At first, they failed and the dead remained dead, hence the dusty bones piled high within the walls of the cottage. With practice and a steady supply of villagers, they perfected their magic. They tied the souls of the dead to theirs and held them trapped here, among the living, unable to pass through to the realm of the Black Rider. Lackmah is not the reason magic is despised in Orthia, but it is a powerful demonstration of the damage magic can inflict when allowed to run unchecked
.’

  He lifted a finger to Ran and their eyes met.

  ‘One winter was all it took. One winter, to massacre an entire village. Men, women and children; house by house, farm by farm, until not one family remained to till the earth when the spring sun thawed the ice.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Ran breathed.

  ‘Indeed.’ Collan stood and slipped his hands up his sleeves, moving to the window and staring out at a view Ran could not see. ‘The witches fled and evaded capture, but the legacy of their massacre remains.’

  Ran’s stomach flipped. ‘The creatures on the road?’

  Collan nodded slowly. ‘The beasts are all that remain of the people of Lackmah. Their souls and lives, corrupted in death by an evil we have yet to comprehend.’

  The image of his ghost girl, broken and alone in the cottage full of bones, rose again in Ran’s mind. Then a flash of blackened teeth and spraying blood filled his vision and he flinched away.

  It couldn’t be true…

  ‘When the witches fled, the creatures were left to wander. For the most part they keep to the caves and dark places of the world, but they do emerge to hunt. We often hear them, always moving south, but they’ve never tried to attack our walls.’ He glanced at Ran. ‘Until the night you arrived.’

  Ran tried to swallow a hard lump from his throat but it wouldn’t move. Collan’s voice became distant, lost in the noise in Ran’s head.

  The creatures are the remains of the people of Lackmah…

  ‘Ranoth, your power was triggered because you stumbled upon the site of the greatest magical massacre Orthia has ever witnessed. Had you never approached that house, you might have lived your life free of the curse that all in this keep claim as their own. You are as much a victim of that place as those who died within its walls.’ The Keep Master sighed and made his way to the door. ‘I’ll get your supper, Ran, and we can talk about it some more.’

  He slipped out and left Ran alone, though he was never truly alone. His ghost stood at the end of the bed, pale and beautiful, unchanged from the first time he’d seen her in the house of bones. She watched him with sadness in her eyes but she did not flinch as he stared at her, almost gaping, rocked by the truth in Master Collan’s words.