Dead and Buryd: A Dystopian Action Adventure Novel (Out of Orbit Book 1) (8 page)

“My girl,” he murmured, smiling down at her for a moment before the hand from one cheek was gone and quickly came back with a light smack upside the head.

“Ow!” Georgianna complained, stepping back and reaching up to rub her head. “What was that…”

“You come home far too little!” he claimed, pointing at her. “Anyone would think I have no daughter, just sons!”

“Son, Da’, you only have one!”

“Sons run off and sleep in odd places, not daughters!” he claimed, narrowing his eyes at her.

Georgianna had received this talk many times before, and even though she was twenty-six years old, more than capable of looking after herself, she still frowned and chewed her lip at her father’s disapproval.

“You sorry?” he asked.

“Yes, Da’,” Georgianna mumbled.

Her father nodded slowly.

“Good!” he answered. “Now, help with the stew, will you?”

Georgianna rolled her eyes as soon as her father wasn’t looking, a motion that made Braedon giggle and cover his mouth. Georgianna smirked and winked at him, ruffling his hair as she dumped her bag on the ground and climbed past her father, who was taking his seat in the doorway again.

The house was cooler than it was outside. All the windows and doors were flung open to let what little breeze could be found circulate through the small rooms. In the back of the house, two large doors stood open, leading out onto a small patch of dried grass. Just past the doors, vapour swirling up into the air, a large pot stood above a small fire holding the stew her father had been talking about. Georgianna watched the boiling bubbles for a moment and moved over to the trunk in the corner of the kitchen. She lifted the lid and took one of the spoons from its place in the trunk. The lid dropped with a snap, and Georgianna dipped the spoon into the stew and sucked the juice from the back of the metal. It was decent enough, but the quality of the Lennox family cooking had definitely dropped off since her mother’s death.

Lifting the lid and removing the tray that lay across the top of the trunk, she placed it on the rough-hewn wooden table that took up most of the simple kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t used much anymore, the different pots and utensils that her mother had made such good use of during her life, abandoned. Her father preferred to make simple meals in large quantity so that they would last for a number of days.

She dug through the contents of the trunk, finally finding what she was looking for. Down near the bottom, clearly not used all that often by her father and brother, a small cloth satchel held a number of paper packets filled with spices. Her mother had been obsessed with collecting spices. Whenever the Kahle camped near another tribe, she would insist on going over with some trade in the hopes of finding something the Kahle couldn’t find on their trail.

Georgianna took each packet out in turn, carefully opening each one and sniffing it tentatively. She had never had the flare for cooking her mother had, no matter how much her mother had tried teaching her. Georgianna wasn’t good at automatically knowing which kind of spice a dish needed to really bring out the flavour, nor did she know how to counteract things when they went wrong. While Georgianna was a good medic, she was not good at reviving injured food.

She tested a number of spices and herbs, sprinkling them over the stew in turn. She closed each packet just as carefully as she’d opened it and placed them back in the satchel, going to the stew and stirring it carefully. Lifting the spoon, she sucked on the back thoughtfully, wondering what it was her mother would have done. There was something wrong with it: it was full and tasted of the meat, but there was something missing, some flavour that, as a child, would have had Georgianna initially wrinkling her nose.

Blinking for a moment, she wondered if it could really be that easy? She reached into the trunk and pulled out a dark green cantina. Opening it, she sniffed and immediately wrinkled her nose. Dark berry wine. That was it. She liked the taste of the wine, and she had certainly become more accustomed to it as she got older, but there was still that slightly acidic smell that she had never fully gotten used to.

She stood over the stew for a moment, wondering how much she was supposed to put in: too much and it would overpower everything; too little and what was the point? Grimacing as she tipped the cantina, she waited for three healthy glugs to spill from the mouth before she brought it away, replacing the cap and returning it to the trunk.

Her third tasting yielded better results. While it still didn’t taste like her mother’s—she was pretty sure nothing ever would—at least it tasted of more than meat and root vegetables. She stirred the concoction once more before placing the spoon to the side and returning to the front porch, leaning over her father’s shoulders and kissing his cheek.

“You smell like your mother,” her father commented with a fond smile.

“Of dark berry wine?” Georgianna asked.

For a moment, her father pondered the idea, before he slowly nodded.

“I think that may have been part of it.”

Georgianna climbed past her father and slumped down onto the dry earth near his feet. Braedon, who had been playing with a couple of carved wooden horses from Halden’s childhood, picked up his toys and rushed over, wriggling himself into Georgianna’s lap so that she could wrap her arms around his waist and rest her chin on top of his head.

“How’ve you been Da’?” she asked.

Her father shrugged. He looked older than he used to, far older than he should have looked. Georgianna could remember her father scooping both her and Halden up under his arms, carrying them through camp when they misbehaved. He wasn’t a giant, but he had seemed that way, the way he held command. His dark hair, the same as her brother’s, was now heavily sprinkled with grey, his beard going the same way. Yet his bright green eyes still sparkled with the energy of a much younger man. Despite his strength and skill with a weapon, Lyle Lennox had become a carver, taking wood and whittling it away to create useful objects. For his joining present to Georgianna’s mother, he’d made an entire cooking set, large enough for a family of six.

Taking one of the small wooden horses from Braedon, Georgianna galloped it across the boy’s knees and up his arm until she nuzzled it into his neck, neighing playfully. Braedon giggled and tried to wriggle away until Georgianna handed him back the toy.

Georgianna turned back to her father and frowned.

“Beck says hi,” she told him with a careful smile.

It was odd to think that her father had been friends with Beck, knowing the man now as the marshall of the Belsa. But apparently, when they were young, Beck Casey and Lyle Lennox had been thick as thieves. Beck had trained as a hunter and scout, Lyle as a carver and carpenter, but the two remained close whenever they were in camps. Now, however, the two barely saw each other.

“Of course he does, lazy bastard can’t get over here himself,” her father chuckled. “How’s that girl of his doing?”

“Lacie is great,” Georgianna nodded enthusiastically. “She’s a really fast learner.”

“Good. It’s about time you had an apprentice,” he claimed, pointing the knife he was using to clean the hide at her. “No good letting those talents go to waste.”

Nodding, Georgianna reached out and pulled her bag towards her. While her father hadn’t originally been happy to know she was visiting the Belsa to help out, knowing how badly the Adveni wanted them eradicated, he had slowly come around to the idea as long as Beck was looking after her. When Georgianna had brought back news that Beck had a young girl living with him, a girl the marshall was treating like his own daughter, Lyle Lennox had been over the moon. He wouldn’t tell Georgianna why, of course. He said it was none of her business unless Beck decided to tell her on his own, and that she was not to ask him about it.

“I still need to meet that girl,” her father announced thoughtfully, scratching the edge of his knife against his jaw. “Beck’s a good man, a loyal Kahle, but those tunnels are no place for a young girl.”

He looked pointedly at Georgianna and nodded very suddenly:

“You’ll bring her here! Lots of people to help out this way, you could call it work!”

“She’s wanted, Da’,” Georgianna lamented. “A drysta runaway.”

Her father tilted his head to the side and dug the knife a little further into the hide as he tried to think up a reasonable solution. After a minute, he finally huffed, which Georgianna knew to take that he’d not been able to think of one. No doubt it was annoying him. He wanted to meet his friend’s daughter.

“You know, you could always come down to the tunnels with me,” she suggested. Glancing beneath her eyelashes at her father, Georgianna quickly occupied herself with opening her bag, like her suggestion had been perfectly innocent.

“And risk being hauled off as a Belsa?” he asked. “Who will look after your nephew when I’m buryd, huh?”

Georgianna opened her mouth to argue but quickly closed it again, knowing it wouldn’t do any good. It wasn’t the first time she’d tried to convince her father to visit the tunnels and Beck. Scooping Braedon off her lap and onto the dried grass, she carefully got to her feet.

“I’m going to check on the stew.”

 
7
Love and Loss

 
Braedon was sprawled on Georgianna’s lap asleep by the time his father returned home from work. Splattered with paint, Halden flopped straight onto the floor next to his sister and son. He rolled to the side, kissed Georgianna’s cheek in greeting, and immediately slumped onto his back again. Georgianna didn’t blame him.While she had spent a relatively relaxed afternoon with Braedon and her father, Halden had been working for the Adveni, probably ordered to work faster and harder every step of the way.

Georgianna carefully prised herself out from underneath Braedon, adjusting the boy to sleep on his father before she slipped out to the kitchen and ladled Halden a generous portion of stew. It was a little cold, her father having put out the fire beneath it an hour or so before, but Halden was grateful when Georgianna handed it to him and he took his first mouthful. As Georgianna curled up at her father’s side, Halden told them that he’d been working on one of the new buildings.

The older Lennox continued to whittle, refusing to tell them what he was making.

“Wood is a living thing, my little Gianna,” he used to tell her. “And like all living things, you can’t tell them what they should be. You can only help them find what suits them best.”

She had never really known what he had meant when she was a child, but it sounded very profound, so she’d never questioned him. Now, she thought she understood a little better. Just as she had decided for herself that she wanted to be a medic, and her parents had used their skills to help her along, Halden had decided that he wanted to work with horses. It had also been their parents’ acceptance of not forcing other living beings into what they might want that had stopped them from questioning the news that their eldest son would not join with a woman. Instead, at the age of nineteen, Halden Lennox had claimed that he was in love. Nobody had even known he had dated before.

His name was Nequiel. He was a nomad who had come to the Kahle to sell a foal. As Halden was working with the tribe’s horses, it had been Halden who had to look over the foal to see whether it was bred well enough to bring into the Kahle stock.

It had been Georgianna who first knew of Halden’s infatuation with the nomad, who had stuck around longer than had probably been considered necessary after the foal had been given the clearance to be bought. Halden told his younger sister while travelling south towards Nyvalau. Georgianna, admittedly, didn’t understand. She knew there were men who joined with other men, but at the age of thirteen, she wasn’t entirely sure why. Watching her brother with Nequiel, however, she quickly learned that it wasn’t about finding someone suitable to join with, someone you could live with. It was about joining with the person you couldn’t live without.

Watching Halden with Braedon now, Georgianna knew that this was why she hadn’t joined, why she couldn’t see herself joining any time soon, because she had not found that person she could not bear to be parted from. There was a sadness every time Halden looked at his son because, by blood, Braedon wasn’t actually his, and looked far more like his biological father. The boy’s mop of brown hair was blacker than Halden’s, the olive hue of his skin darker than her brother’s, and his eyes were the bright reddish brown that had been so distinctive in his father. The boy, almost five years old, was actually Nequiel’s son by blood. Nequiel had been asked to father a child when he officially joined the Kahle. The Adveni had wiped out a lot of the Kahle, and the elders wanted to ensure that their blood continued.

A woman named Heather, widowed by the war, begged the elders to let her be the one chosen. Her husband had always wanted children, and they’d simply never had the good fortune to conceive a child. It had been decided that, should the coupling be successful, the child would remain predominantly with their mother, but both Nequiel, and Halden, who by this time was joined with Nequiel for all under the sun and moon, would also be parents to the child.

The baby boy was brought into the world in the middle of the freeze. While Georgianna did everything she could, Heather succumbed to cold and, having lost so much blood, did not survive the birth.

Braedon, named for the wild flowers that grew within the heather, came into the Lennox home, and was immediately accepted as family despite not being any blood relation. As a gesture to his place with them, he was given the name Lennox instead of Yinah, Nequiel’s family name.

It had been almost three years since Nequiel was captured by the Adveni, a trade with an Adveni that went wrong. When Nequiel could not deliver the items promised, the Adveni claimed he was a criminal and a traitor, and he was executed in the square for all to see. Halden had stood among the crowd, held back by three Kahle men who kept tight hold on him the entire time.

As the last of the sun disappeared behind the horizon, the lengthening shadows melted into the night’s darkness, held at bay only by the oil lamp’s flickering glow. Halden finally peeled himself from the thick woollen blanket on the floor and lifted Braedon into his arms.