Bone Witch (24 page)

S
he didn't remember pulling from Gael's hold or how she
managed to get past the throngs of people without her legs failing her. Alaysha
only knew she knelt on the ground where Bodicca laid Yenic.

He was still. Pale and white, so white.
White everywhere except for the bloody place where his fire mark was. In its
place grinned a nasty red line.

Bodicca passed her a black blade like the
one Edulph had given Theron to cut into his daughter's skull in the wilderness.
Alaysha held it, not even feeling its weight.

"Who did this?" she asked, aware
that she had spoken, but not quite certain the voice was even hers. It sounded
off, as though she was speaking from somewhere outside of herself. She reached
to touch Yenic's face and the flesh felt strange. It was hard and cold beneath
the first give of skin.

"He's dead," she heard herself
say. "Isn't he? She looked up at Theron. "Is he, Theron? Is he
dead?"

She wanted the shaman to shake his head.
She didn't want to see him nod, and step closer to her, to hear Bodicca say it
looked like he'd pierced his own lung with the blade. She didn't want any of
that and surely it would all change if she explained it away for them. Surely
his chest would move if she touched it.

"He said he had to break the
connection." She lay her cheek on Yenic's face, imagining that if he could
feel her grief, he'd somehow breathe again. He'd find a reason to live like she
had so many seasons ago when he'd first accepted her tears.

"Yenic," she murmured and swatted
the hand away that tried to pull her free of him. "Leave me," she
said. "Just leave me."

She barely made out the voices around her.
They could talk, each of them, if they wanted. They could laugh or walk away or
settle down next to her. She didn't care what they did. She stretched alongside
Yenic, wrapping her arms around him, trying to warm his skin. She thought of
the first night they'd lain together, feeding each other heat. If her tears
didn't work, surely her body warmth would.

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

Want to know when
the next title in the series is out
?
Subscribe to Thea Reads
.
No spam. No abuse. Just goodies and news and
freebies.

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 the 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.