Sword Sisters (6 page)

Also, learning magic would be like starting over entirely. And I hate magic. Give me a sword and something to cut any day.

“Maybe you and me, Gray, we should just run off together. Find ourselves some real work. You’re smart, and I’m tough; we’d make quite a team, right?”

The mouse dropped to all fours and sniffed along the edge of the wall for bits of discarded food. He had his priorities in order.

Maybe my real destiny was to mother the real Red Reaper. I mean, the prophecy was written down by a witch whose handwriting looked like someone had attached a quill pen to the foot of a panicky squirrel. So what if I was destined to mother the Red Reaper, and it turned out to be a red-haired, fire-souled son? I suppose a male Red Reaper would be better liked, more accepted by the humans who seem to favor men in all things even though it was a woman who brought them to life. You know, maybe I’m not so sure I’m fond of these humans. They seem silly, violent, and self-absorbed. And very, very weak.

Hell, maybe I should stop fighting so hard and just join a brothel. Yes, that would be serving on my back. But I’d be safe. I’d be displayed as the freak that I am. I wouldn’t have to hide it. I’ve heard some men have a taste for the bizarre. That’s me, all right, with my Demon skin, flaming red hair, and thick limbs. Mistress of the Bizarre.

Would they despise themselves afterwards for coming to me? What would it be like to lay with a man? I’d never done so, not with a human, which of course is strictly forbidden, or a Reaper, who are all way too old for me anyway. Truth be told, I wasn’t even sure how. I suppose that’s the sort of thing a mother discusses with her daughter. But my mother was too busy pretending to be dead and talking to the birds and the bees to make time to chat with me about the birds and the bees.

I had a chilling yet curiously welcome thought. What if I am to die a virgin?

I suppose it should’ve been terrifying, but it was romantic to me. Many warriors choose celibacy as a way of securing and focusing their chi exactly where they want it. They don’t waste precious life force on mundane matters of the flesh.

They’re also incredibly lonely people. And there’s a difference between loneliness and being alone. The second didn’t scare me.

The first, though? It terrified me.

And it terrified me because of that kiss. That kind, gentle, practically chaste kiss from a brown-eyed boy who saw me for what I was and didn’t run away.

“You know what?” I said to the mouse. “I’ve had it with this place. It’s time for a change of scenery. You can take over my room now, mouse; I won’t need it anymore.”

I stood, straight and proud. I looked up at the clouds visible through the skylight above me. “By the marriage gods of Hassazag, I swear I will find you, Aaron. I will return your kiss. And then you—if you wish—may return my heart.” Or you may keep it and give me yours in return. Because if the Reapers didn’t want me, if the world of men needed me merely as a brood mare, they could all damn well go to hell.

“Be nice to Vikki; she could’ve poisoned your cheese months ago and hasn’t,” I told Gray.

I leaped for the skylight.

I ran through the woods, past the safety zone, easily avoiding all the patrols and guards. It’s not like they were expecting anything anyway: Except for bandits and the occasional disgruntled rabble, there were no incursions or battles to be had. And they certainly weren’t expecting anyone to sneak away from the castle.

Finally, I reached the Forever Forest proper. It didn’t get that name because it was small or easily traversed. No, it was gigantic. In fact, on the maps, it ended only at the sea, and even there, no one was quite sure of the shore’s outline. Great swaths of territory were simply blank because no one knew for certain who or what lived there.

Since the end of the war, some humans had gone back into it, cleared spots, and erected settlements. But there was no established trade route among them, and unless they came to the castle for the public festivals on the solstices and equinoxes, we didn’t know they existed. So Aaron could literally be anywhere.

But I knew he was in here somewhere because he’d been hunting. You didn’t hunt on the open plains, where the deer could see you, or across the cultivated fields unless you sought only rabbits or other small game. The forest was where the big things roamed, and Aaron’s hunting blind told me he was no rabbit-chaser.

I ran without conscious destination, letting fate and the terrain take me where it would, just as Keefe had suggested. It was exhilarating, and before long, I’d lost all track of direction or distance. I flowed with the terrain, avoiding every obstacle like a breeze or water running downhill.

At last, I stopped and leaned against a tree. I’d pushed myself, so I was out of breath, and blood pounded in my head. I’d gone farther than I’d ever gone before, but I wasn’t worried about being lost. Hell’s donkeys, it might even be better for everyone if I was lost. I’d become a myth, the Red Reaper who ran into the woods one day and vanished into the mists of time. Later generations could get their kids to behave by telling them I’d come out of the woods and eat them if they didn’t.

But I could track my own scent back to the castle whenever I wanted. My hair made certain of that. That was irony for you.

Then my surroundings got my attention. The clearing was about thirty feet across with a covering of leaves and a pair of rocks that—

By the flame-pissing gods of Mount Gehale. I’d found it.

Those two rocks were unmistakable. This was it—the clearing where I’d fallen, where Aaron had found me. My heart thudded so hard, I thought that even my supernaturally armored ribs would fail to keep it inside me. This was it.

Okay, Aella, don’t freak out. It was a long time ago. You can’t be sure.

But I was sure. Trees might change, plants alter with time, but unless someone came along with a crew of a hundred men, those two rocks would be the same. And they were. One taller, one shorter, both the size of dinner tables. Just as I remembered. Which meant—

He might be nearby.

“Oh, boy,” I said aloud and felt myself grow light-headed. Now, my difficulty in breathing had nothing to do with my exertion. He’d be…oh, around twenty now. Taller but no doubt recognizable. Those eyes wouldn’t change.

Then I had the jolting realization that he might also be married with children—human children that were soft all over without the dangerous spikes Reaper babies sported along their spines. He wouldn’t need special gloves to hold his human children the way he would with ours. And human children wouldn’t accidentally shatter the furniture with their rambunctiousness or bite chunks out of each other in spite.

I wanted to slap myself. What was I thinking? I had bigger worries, much bigger worries, than the romantic fate of some peasant who’d once been nice to me.

Then why did it feel like the biggest thing in the world?

But before I could start having that argument in my head, a woman’s scream rang through the trees.

I dropped into a crouch, reflexes taking over. Discern direction, my training said. To the west. Determine distance. About a hundred yards although the thick trees and undergrowth made that a loose estimate. Investigate and evaluate danger.

The scream was human—it would be, out here, where neither Reapers nor Demons traveled. And really, Reapers didn’t scream. We roared, we bellowed, we grunted and snorted, but we didn’t scream. I had screamed during my time with my Demon father, under his tender care, but as everyone was quick to point out, I was different. Perhaps that was what made me clench up inside not with fear but with righteous anger. That scream was not of pain but of terror. I knew that sound all too well.

I slid through the undergrowth, barely disturbing the plants through which I passed. I thought again about my hair, the scent trail it left behind me, but this time, I wasn’t the one being followed and tracked. No, I was the one on the hunt.

The air still vibrated from the cry, and as I got closer to the source, I picked up odors on the wind. I was nowhere near as good as Andre, but I was no slouch. The smells were mostly human: sweat, well-worn clothes, even the faint trace of flowers. But there was another tang on the wind, something I’d never before encountered. No animal left a scent like that or any human or any Demon or Reaper. What the hell was that?

I emerged from the forest at the top of a wide, shallow gully. I came down the side of the hill, slithering along like a snake, and crouched behind some bushes. My small size made it unlikely anyone would spot me unless they happened to look right at me, and I got an unobstructed view of the gully before me.

Directly across, in the opposite hillside, was the opening to a cave. It wasn’t much wider than a palace door, but the edges were shored up with mortar and rocks, and a language I didn’t know proclaimed something along the top. Clearly, it was man-made but not recently if the weathering on these stones was any indication. Older than the Thousand Year War at least, so probably not a Demon shelter.

Stuck in the ground before it was an X-shaped wooden stand, the two cross pieces at least ten feet tall. This wood was also old though not as old as the door, and corroded metal bolts held the two pieces together where they joined. More ominously, shackles hung from the tops of the X.

My fists clenched. My Demon father had used shackles on me to hold me down for “training.” No one would ever shackle me again.

As I watched, two men dragged a teenage girl out of the woods. She was formally dressed in a long gown and wore both a necklace and wreath of flowers. She was not happy to be dragged, and the fear I’d heard in her earlier scream had now changed to fury.

“You pinheaded, dung-licking, crotch-rotted bastards!” she cried at the men, fighting like a gorecat. “Let me go!”

“By heaven, Amelia, shut up!” one of the men said. He was older, with gray hair and a beard, and reminded me of my own adopted father. He slapped her hard. I disliked him immediately. “Insulting us won’t help anything!”

While she was still dazed by the blow, they pushed her up against the crossed wood. The other man, who was younger and also dressed in something formal-looking, lifted one of her arms and snapped a shackle around it.

“No!” the girl screamed when she heard the metal click into place. She began to struggle anew. “No! Get this off me!”

It took both of them to get her other arm up and shackled, and they endured plenty of kicks for their efforts. They stepped out of range, both out of breath. She continued lashing out at them.

The younger man said, “Look, Amelia, I’m really sorry about this, but you’ve always known this might happen.”

She stopped and glared at him. Her face was bright red from the effort to escape. “You’re supposed to be my friend, Cal. We grew up together. I was the first girl you kissed.”

“I’m not happy about this, Amelia, believe me. But we have to appease Lurida Lumo.” He shrugged as if they were arguing about the color of the sky.

“There is no Lurida Lumo, you idiot!” Amelia said. “There might be a bear, or a mountain lion, or even a left-over Demon, but there’s no god who lives in that cave and eats sacrifices!”

“Amelia, you’re embarrassing yourself,” the older man said. “I’ve been on a dozen of these sacrificial treks, and I’ve never seen a single girl act like this. Being frightened is normal, but you’re behaving as if this were the end of your life.”

“It will be, you moron! Something will eat me, but it won’t be a damned god! Come on, Litwin, you have to know better than this. You can read and write! You’ve studied!”

“You will be transubstantiated into spirit, to be one with Lurida Lumo,” the old man Litwin said with the same annoying solemnity as Eldrid teaching one of her homilies. “It is a great honor and a most solemn calling.”

The younger man, Cal, took out a bag of something, poured it into a hole in the ground just inside the cave entrance, then lit it on fire with a flint. Purple smoke billowed out, and the wind sucked it almost at once into the cave itself. To him, it was probably an offering to their god. It was also a signal to whatever lived there that dinner was now served.

Cal closed his eyes and clasped his hands. When he spoke, it was clear he’d memorized the words because he gave them no inflection or meaning. “Lurida Lumo, I humbly bring to you this year’s sacrifice, the virgin Amelia. She is beautiful, as you require, and pure, as is proper for your offering. May she prove pleasing to your eye and spirit and cause you to grant us another year of prosperity.”

“Some stupid animal can’t grant you anything!” Amelia screamed. “Please, don’t do this to me, Cal. I’ll marry you if that’s what it takes!”

That got Cal’s attention, but before he could respond, Litwin said, “Lurida Lumo might appear as a mere animal. Because he is a denizen of the spirit world, and only visits our realm when it pleases him, he may choose the form he prefers.”

“Do you ever use that brain in your head for thinking, or is it just there to keep your skull from deflating?” Amelia snapped. That made me smile. She was tough and smart.

“Blasphemy is not the best way to spend your last moments,” Litwin said. “But because I appreciate your sacrifice, I will tell your parents you met your end with dignity.”

“I’ve got news for you, you jackass. I’m not meeting anything with dignity. I’m going down kicking and screaming!”