Iris's Guardian (White Tigers of Brigantia Book 2)

by Lisa Daniels

  They saw humans as stupid, lazy, and disposable, and Anya couldn’t remember a time when the wyrms hadn’t been in power. It seemed to her like the wyrms had ruled the world forever, hurt the humans forever. Her grandpa spoke of his grandma talking about the cruel treatment of their masters. They spoke of how one step out of line might get you beaten to death – and skies forbid that you were an attractive woman.

  If a wyrm decided to take a woman, no one ever saw them again. Anya’s mother explained why. She said that the wyrms weren’t allowed to have children with women, so the moment one became pregnant, they got executed. Anything to stop their blood mixing with the humans. But not enough to stop them from committing their atrocities in the first place.

  Why can’t they just leave us alone? Hideous creatures. Anya swiped harder at the wheat in front of her, grunting as she did so. Others did the same thing on either side of her. Each were careful not to get ahead of one another, in case it prompted their overseer to decide upon defining a new speed. And if someone lagged behind too much… then they risked getting beaten, which would put them behind more. Which might then get them killed.

  Anya bared her teeth, simmering in resentment. Thoughts boiled in her head of the idea of vengeance, of taking up arms, of storming through the wyrm mansions and stabbing them to death as they slept. Of course, those rotten beasts transformed into giant lizards, making it significantly harder to stab anything through them – but if you caught one by surprise…

  She vented out her frustration instead on the wheat. Always careful to not get ahead. Careful, sometimes, to slow down a fraction of a pace if she suspected someone getting too tired. She or someone else would use a special downward stroke signal to tell the others within eyeshot to do the same. The wyrms hadn’t figured out the system yet. And the humans did what they could to survive. To keep each other alive for as long as possible.

  Anya also did everything in her power to look ugly, along with the other women in her plantation. The foolish and vain ones got taken first, tossed about in the lordling’s quarters like a doll.

  In a way this helped the humans, since it meant their future generations would be too ugly to be of any aesthetic use to the wyrms. Except some might just choose to fuck with you anyway, because they could. You could never quite prevent everything. Just reduce the chances as much as possible.

  Everything Anya did had been passed to her by her mother and her grandpa. They knew all the tricks, all the ways to make their miserable lives that little bit easier. Anya smeared mud on her face, kept her bucket washes to a minimum, let her hair grow untidy and unkempt, and always slouched and hooded her eyes. She also pulled peculiar expressions whenever a wyrm addressed her, though sometimes it got her whipped. Under the advice of her mother as well as most other women, she bound her breasts, which had started inconveniently erupting out of her chest at the age of thirteen.

  “You have to reduce all signs you’re a fertile, pretty woman,” Kendra would say, perhaps while stuffing wild, repugnant-smelling garlic inside her daughter’s mouth. “Can’t be taking any risks. Don’t want you being taken like my last one.”

  Last one. Humans tried to have as many children as possible because they knew most of them would die. Anya’s oldest sister got taken when she was eleven and never returned. One of her younger brothers died of the illness that ravaged the serf village just outside the plantation, which made the gracious Lord Osmer whip his serfs even harder to get the harvest produce he required. Now Anya’s family – five children, including her – worked extra hard to help provide for their single remaining grandfather. The youngest of course couldn’t work, but the eight-and ten-year-olds could. If the wyrms decided to focus any of their ire upon Grandpa Horace, because he no longer could physically do the work in the fields, he’d die.

  Horace managed to survive in other ways, though. He helped look after some of the youngest children while their parents went out to work. He helped cook in the village. So, although he didn’t work on the plantations, they saw him still being marginally useful.

  Anya didn’t want to think about the day when her grandpa could no longer hold a stirring ladle properly, or keep a child under control. It might be two months, it might be two years. But everyone broke down in the end.

  She considered now her family. Anya never knew her father. Humans often didn’t form proper relationships, unless they were determined to risk loss for the sake of love. Her mother didn’t mind. It was their way, the way of many men and women here. The ones who did stick together were treated with grudging respect. The ones who lost, however, broke down the hardest. You saw enough people grinding their knuckles into the dust, their eyes bloated from tears, to know the costs. Not all prices were worth paying.

  Their masters, of course, encouraged large families, so they could have more serfs without needing to buy from auctions. It also gave the wyrms something to kill every now and then for entertainment, as the humans struggled to accommodate and feed themselves.

  Everything boiled down to those blasted wyrms in the end. If they weren’t around, if they didn’t do all of this shit, humans would be free. Humans could live in cities without fear of persecution, feed their families, live beautiful lives and relationships. All Anya did was dream and dream of escape, to find a way out of this terrible scenario, before it ground her into nothing.

  She considered fleeing to one of the cities. Although she’d still be a second-class citizen, at least she’d have more nooks and crannies to hide in, or could set up business as a respectable merchant in the slums. She’d only visited the city once, helping to carry things for her lord, and saw the streets and the stalls and the rickety houses. Better than her current life, working on the fields, shivering in little huts.

  City dwellers didn’t know how good they got it. They didn’t have the whip cracking at their backs, and the fear of death burnt into their souls.

  The wyrm watching them now decided that the humans were working too slowly. He cracked his whip menacingly. “Work faster, the crops won’t harvest themselves! You get food and homes, you should repay the kindness of your lord by producing more!” Again, he flicked that accursed whip. Anya knew what it felt like to have such a thing lash across her skin, leaving welts and sometimes blood across her muscles, and deep bruises that stayed for days afterwards. Unlike the serfs, dressed in rags and cobbled-together clothes, the overseer wore finely tailored garments, from a linen blouse to a red waistcoat, along with black breeches, white socks and shoes. His angular face lingered on Anya for a moment, who had momentarily slowed in her work. Then he sneered.

  “Filthy animal.” He slashed the whip over her back, and she cringed, before speeding up her work, dreaming of swinging the scythe at him and cleaving his entitled behind in two.

  If only she was stronger. If only she had some kind of magic that could help her take them down with ease. If fucking only. Barring that, Anya wanted to whisk her entire family away, run out of the plantations, and find some isolated place in the middle of nowhere. Maybe then nothing would interfere, and they could live there for the rest of their days.

  The desire fuelled her dreams at night, kept driving her through the day. Her heart was young – it desired a better life. It believed in a better world, unlike the adults who had been beaten down into submission. Her mother warned her of that spirit eventually leaking out of her, with more years pressed upon her skin, bones and soul. A depressing thought, really. What was the point in living at all, if nothing mattered? If they just lived to the whims of their masters, and died in squalor and misery?

  It’s not right. It’s not fucking right. The thought stirred up a furious passion in Anya.

  At sundown, they were allowed to stop, though two people had collapsed from dehydration. Anya didn’t think they’d be seeing those people again from the way the wyrms had converged upon them, whips swishing menacingly. She went back to the village, where the dwindling community gathered in their self-designated leader’s house – th
ere to help soothe moods and fight despair. They needed to fight the evil somehow.

  Inside the leader’s hut, the complaints began. Aching backs, burnt skins. Elder Tam helped where he could. People helped treat one another with the remedies they knew, though many of their community also preferred to stay in their homes, not wanting to risk any wrath if the wyrms took offense to these gatherings. For some people, these gatherings kept them above water. Just from having others to care once the scythes had been placed down, and the soils tilled.

  Anya watched as her mother took a salve to help treat her burns. Anya looked at the gaunt, beaten-down faces of people who had lost all willpower to fight. The despair left a tight knot inside, a heat that coursed through her veins, waiting to unleash itself in furious energy. Seeing their rejected expressions made her want to slap their faces out of it. Wake them up somehow. Any chance of making a rousing, heroic speech would be greeted with blank stares and fear. Anya knew the drill, because she’d tried a few times before. Still, for the sake of it, she raised her voice above the murmurs. Because their faces disgusted her, and the defeat that weighed upon their souls made a voice in the back of her head scream soundlessly at the misery.

  “Every day I come back home and I see bruised bodies and ruined souls.” Her speech drifted over the susurrations. People always spoke quietly, afraid of the wyrms’ sensitive hearing. Most didn’t bother listening. “Every day I see children starving and elders hiding. Every day could be our last day, and yet we let these masters do as they wish to us, we let them break our bones and our minds and our souls. When does it stop? When does all this stop?” Anya waved her hand across the tightly packed room. A few of the younger adults nodded with her, but the elders ignored her, and several couples gave her a rude gesture.

  “Oh, shut up, will you?” a man said, scowling at Anya. “You’ll get us in trouble, wench.”

  “I’m sick of this treatment!” Anya fired back, standing her ground. “And I’m sick of people like you treating your fellow humans like they’re nothing. We get enough of that from the overseers. Do you have no pride? Are you a craven husk of a creature, scrabbling for scraps in the dark?”

  More murmurs. “You should be quiet,” Kendra whispered, tugging on Anya’s shoulder. She had some bandages trailing from her hands, and blood spots upon her wrists. “You can’t draw attention to yourself.”

  “Quiet,” an older woman said, backing the man. She was wizened, with muddy blue eyes, rubbing at a tender spot on her wrist. “You won’t get anything out of this lot, child. It’s admirable that you’re not broken yet. Really. But you can’t stir the broken. You see these wretches here for yourself. Some have families, some are just worried about getting food and not being hit. They don’t have time to dream.”

  Horrible words, but they made a kind of twisted sense. Anya just wanted people to be happy for once. To greet their days with smiles, because smiles lifted up the soul. To fight against their masters, because surely, death and resilience were better than being a beaten mule. “I’m not broken,” the man insisted, his dark eyes flashing. “I’m just not stupid. This is our lot. We accept it or we die.”

  Agreement from the others. Anya let out a sigh. She let her hands slump through her dirty hair. So much mud over her body. Her nostrils were long since immune to the odors.

  A man with dark eyes approached Anya from the side. He stooped as he walked, and wobbled, as if in need of a walking stick, and hissed, “Listen, I’ll help you out, here. You can’t keep doing this. We may have informers, willing to rat out to the overseers for some extra bread. You’re doing this too often. I know it must hurt, but you can’t keep it up. We’ve been like this for generations. People like you have gone missing for speaking up.” The man squeezed her shoulder, his brown eyes sad. He had scars all along his bare legs. “I seen it happen to my brother. A rat sold him out for extra meals for a month.” Come to mention it, some of the people here had intense, sly eyes, the kind that sought opportunities wherever they appeared.

  Anya grit her teeth, not satisfied with any of the answers. The oppressive atmosphere of the room stifled her, dragging her down into its pit. No one here wanted to do anything. No one cared. They just wanted to be left alone, to sleep, to eat, to do their jobs without interference. Afraid of the whip, afraid of an overseer’s wrath. Always fucking afraid.

  It made her sick to her stomach. She loathed the fear, simply because she made a choice at a young age. A logical choice. If she didn’t like something, then she needed to change it. There was no point staying with what you hated.

  Kendra encouraged that thinking, hoping to preserve that fresh youth of Anya’s for as long as possible. Distracting her from the grim reality of a world that crushed humans down into the mud.

  Yet the years dribbled by, and Anya’s measly attempts at stirring the populace amounted to naught. Whenever she grabbed a few people’s minds, something atrocious happened to grind them back into the dirt again. Her dreams of escape always got thwarted, too. The traders who passed through didn’t want anything to do with anyone in the villages, other than bartering goods out of them. She’d tried offering them anything she could, and a few clearly wanted to use her for other things, or planned to sell her on to the next twisted master.

  Nothing felt worthwhile. Nothing worked if you were a vulnerable serf without any powerful lords backing you up.

  Anya felt the influence of despair pressing onto her, teasing her into its clutches. She worried if she kept this up, she’d become the very people she pitied and despised.

  She went to bed hungry, dirty, worn out, knowing she’d need to get up at first light tomorrow to do exactly the same thing. Her mother, grandpa, and four younger siblings slumbered in the tiny hut, with barely any room to move. Two infant boys, snuffling. Two older girls with lank, short hair, and faces as filthy as Anya’s.

  None of them had names, but Anya gave them some, anyway. Sniffle for the oldest girl, Tantrum for the next, and the babies were Chub and Podge. Their unique characteristics contributed to the names.

  “When youse make it past ten years of age, then youse deserve names,” Kendra told them. “Names go to the living. And you prove you are worthy to live by the gods themselves when you make it. Took the gods ten years to make our world, after all.”

  Anya didn’t believe a word of it. She didn’t think such a concept like gods existed, simply because they allowed everyone here to suffer. What kind of bastard did you need to be to accept such things happening?

  Sleep never came easy to Anya. The sounds and movements of her siblings made it hard to drift off, though she’d had a lot of practice.

  And a lot of discomfort.

  She finally managed a bite of sleep. At least, until the cries came out in the middle of the night, sending Anya bolt upright. Her mother and siblings had awoken, and peered outside the hut. Then, her mother rushed to Anya, face drained of all color. “Overseers. They’re rifling through the huts right now. Looking for dissenters. You gotta get out. You gotta escape.”

  “What?” It didn’t make sense. What dissenters? “I did nothing wrong. Why do you think it’s me they’re looking for?”

  “It was your speech. I reckon someone reported you,” her mother sobbed, blue eyes clouded with tears, wrinkled face grieving as if she’d already lost her daughter. Her mother acted terrified, and the terror seeped into Anya as well. “Oh, you were my prettiest, my brightest, and we hid you so well, but you couldn’t hide yourself.” Kendra let out a whimper. “Go, go now. Through here – you gotta go through the pit.”

  Trembling, confused, Anya was shoved to the back of the hut where a rug lay, and her mother lifted it up to reveal a small hole. Tantrum and Sniffle hissed her on, and she squeezed through the hole in panic, landing in excrement and pee. She heard her mother place the rug back over the gap, and tried not to retch as she clawed her way through the cesspit towards the small hole used for airing out the stench. No. Don’t think about it. Don’t think about i
t–

  She heard the door slam open in her former home, and raised voices bark, “Where’s that little bitch? Is this her family?”

  A murmur. Was her mother crying? Gods, were those monsters hurting her? Anya’s blood screamed out then, crying that it belonged to her mother, that she should go back and help her somehow. But what could she do? What the fuck could she do against an all-powerful wyrm? Tears bit at her eyes.

  “It is? It better be, snitch. Where are you hiding her, you filthy rats?” A pause. “Say, or I’ll kill the old man. Say!”

  A snitch. Perhaps one of those sly men in the elder’s house had decided killing Anya would be worth a few extra meals in his stomach. Fuckers. Anya choked back her despair as she fled, scrambling through the night, avoiding the areas lit by torches. Her bare feet, slick with human waste, skidded across the dirt patches of their stomped-upon paths. Small mud and thatch huts could be used as cover. It helped that Anya barely reached over five feet tall and stood as thin as a rake – ducking into slits of shadow made it easier to hide. She steered clear of a wyrm in his traditional form, towering above the huts. He had a long, serpentine neck, a bulky body with four legs, sharp claws, and a twitching, jagged tail. Spikes protruded from his back. He thumped along the huts, evil yellow eyes glowing as he sniffed. His scale color appeared dark in the moonlight, and his huge nostrils flared.

  “Smells like a fucking bog in here,” he growled, lips curling in disgust. He displayed his fangs. “Disgusting little creatures.”