Kala had never seen Skye so angry. She poked her head out. “Morning, honey. Want me to kill him?”
The man blanched, but Skye replied, “Tempting, but no, thank you. Not unless he returns.” The man bolted down the narrow path, and Skye came back inside.
“My mother’s onetime ‘boyfriend,’” he explained, directing Kala to the table and beginning to prepare her morning kai.
“Thank you,” she said as he handed it to her and kissed her cheek.
He looked in on his mother, then returned to sit across from Kala. He ran a hand through his hair. “I can’t believe we did it. We’re home,” he said incredulously.
Kala put her cup down, reached out, and put a hand on his. “Your home. I need to go check on mine.”
He squeezed her hand. “Of course. I understand. You’ll come back?” he asked hopefully.
“We’ll work that out. I know we’ll be together in the end, but first, I have to do right by those I love, as you have by yours.”
Skye rose, circled the table, and enveloped her from behind. She held his arms tightly. “This is not goodbye,” she reminded him.
“I know,” he said, but his breath caught. “I’m going to check on my mother,” he decided while he sought to regain his composure.
Kala released her hold on him, and he went into the bedroom. She finished her kai and got dressed for travel. She was securing her pack when a knock on the door interrupted her. Skye was still with his mother, so she answered it for him. She opened the door to find Ashlyn on the step. Her white furs framed her cheeks, pink from the cold, and her green eyes sparkled as she looked uncertainly into Kala’s.
“May I come in?” she asked timidly.
Kala just stepped back out of her way.
Ashlyn assumed that meant she could, so she did.
Kala closed the door behind her.
“I wanted to thank you for bringing food to the village,” Ashlyn began. “Things were looking grim.”
“You’re welcome,” Kala replied, feeling uncomfortable for being thanked just for being a decent person.
Ashlyn looked her over. “So you’re my boyfriend’s girlfriend?” she asked.
“We’re many things to each other,” Kala replied cautiously.
“I’m happy for you,” Ashlyn assured her. “Skye’s a great guy.”
Kala began to feel a little guilty.
Ashlyn could tell she was making Kala uncomfortable, so she changed the topic. “So, you’re getting out of here?”
“That’s the plan. Why?”
“Take me with you when you go – please!” she begged.
“I’m sure there’ll be room for you, and you’re welcome to come with us.”
Ashlyn breathed a deep sigh of relief. “I thought you’d hate me, and punish me by leaving me in this hell-hole.”
“Skye has never said anything but the nicest things about you, so I couldn’t hate you even if I wanted to.”
“That’s a relief. I wouldn’t want to be on your bad side.”
Kala laughed. “No, I suppose not.”
Ashlyn stuck out her hand. “Friends?”
Kala hesitated, feeling it was too early to tell, but accepted her offer. “Friends.” She looked through the bedroom door. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to talk to Skye before I leave.”
“You’re leaving?”
Kala couldn’t decipher whether it was concern or hope in Ashlyn’s voice. “I have business to attend to, but you’ll see me again.” She walked Ashlyn to the door, wished her well, and stepped back inside.
Skye exited the bedroom, closing the door quietly behind him.
“That was Ashlyn,” Kala told him. “She’s nice... I hate that. Why can’t she be a bitch?”
Skye chuckled and hugged her.
She looked up at him. “Do you still love me, even though I’m a terrible person?”
“Warts and all, my little tree frog.”
“Tree frog? That is so not sexy,” she said and snuggled into his embrace. “Can I borrow your amulet, please? I’m going to take the airship to my village. If I can’t come back immediately, I’ll send it back to you with your amulet and use mine to hail myself another to meet up with you later.”
Skye agreed and handed it over.
“Thank you. Oh, and by the way, I agreed to bring your girlfriend with us when we leave here,” Kala told him.
Skye bristled. “Ex-girlfriend.”
“Just teasing, but I did agree to her coming.”
“It’s the right thing to do, so thank you.”
“Someone has to look out for all of your ex’s.”
Skye swatted her, then kissed her deeply. “I won’t be whole until you return to me.”
“Then I’d better get going,” she replied, then hesitated. “In a moment,” she added and kissed him back.
Kala felt the ship land outside her village. She hadn’t noticed that it had been descending, it had been so gradual. She readied herself. Would she be greeted as a murderer? Would Lily forgive her? Would her grandfather recoil from the person she’d become? She steeled herself for every possibility and opened the door.
She hadn’t prepared herself for what she saw – the ruins of her village. She stepped out in disbelief and stumbled toward the burned-out buildings. Nothing was left except charred foundations; nothing was left of her grandfather’s cottage at all.
Everyone she’d ever loved was gone – her grandfather, Lily, Cera, Forest, and Calix. She stared numbly at the emptiness as her heart convulsed with pain.
She returned to the ship, pulled Skye’s amulet out of her pocket, dialed the setting for his village, and pressed its center. The ship disengaged and began to rise. She threw the amulet in the door and slammed it closed.
They want a weapon – I’ll be a weapon.
11
Soren
Soren stood in the entrance of his tent, staring at the town across the river. He imagined its inhabitants cowering behind its stone walls. Walls would not hold him back, regardless of their height or thickness.
He closed the flap and returned to his place at the table. His war council sat waiting impatiently. His general Trax drummed his fingers, making plain his annoyance at been made to wait. He was a hulking man, a warrior chieftain from the north. He had been born into a life of violence and had learned how to wield it to his ends. He was brutally efficient as Soren’s hammer.
To Trax’s right sat Seline. Soren had come across her early in his conquest. He and Trax had razed a village that was more advanced than any other they’d seen – it even had running water. Soren had discovered that Seline was the talented engineer behind it, and had spared her from Trax’s warriors. Now that his war was bringing him up against walled cities and not just isolated villages, he needed her expertise in designing siege equipment. She had a knack for creatively solving any problem, even with limited resources, and she took advantage of the respite in their meeting to perform calculations. She sat scribbling and could not have cared less how long the recess lasted.
To Trax’s left sat Lennox. He was as slippery as they come, having run a criminal enterprise in a town that they’d recently overrun. When captured, he informed his captors that their leader wanted to see him. His boldness had piqued Soren’s curiosity and won him an audience. Lennox pointed out no less than twenty things that Soren was doing wrong that would make his advance unsustainable. Lennox promised to help him if Soren made him a captain. Soren was intelligent enough to recognize an asset when he saw one, and Lennox became one of his inner circle, despite his distastefulness.
Soren surveyed each member of his council. Trax had been with him the longest, having ruled the tribe into which he found himself transplanted as a youth. Despite his lounging in his chair, Trax stared back with an intense gaze and furrowed brow, as if barely restraining his anger. His unruly, dark hair fell to his shoulders, around which he wore furs, despite the warm climate. His enormous broadsword was forever strapped to his b
ack, and Soren wondered if the man slept with it. Trax flexed his giant hands as if adjusting his sword grip. The muscles of his arms and chest bulged, and scars crisscrossed his exposed skin. Soren disliked Trax, and he was pretty sure the feeling was mutual, but they needed each other – Soren articulated the vision that Trax could rally men behind to further his desire for conquest, but Trax’s cruelty bothered him. Soren wanted to see the world torn down so that it could be rebuilt, but Trax just relished tearing it down. He enjoyed the suffering he caused. Soren wondered, What would he do with him at the end of the conquest, or would Trax overthrow him before then and lord over the ashes of the world? Soren shuddered. But how to eliminate him? The man had a talent for survival.
He turned his attention to Seline. She wore an unadorned tunic and trousers, with her hair tied back in a loose braid, betraying a shock of prematurely grey hair, despite being middle-aged. Soren liked her – he admired how her mind worked. She could be pretty if she wanted to, he thought, but she was uninterested in anything but her thoughts. She was an ally, but neither companion nor friend, if Soren were honest with himself.
Lennox squirmed in his chair and brushed his thin, greasy hair back over his head. Soren found him almost as distasteful as Trax, mostly because he was rumored to fancy children, whom he did not treat well. Soren sought out evidence of this and would have been happy to punish him severely at the first sign of such a transgression of Soren’s values, but Lennox was so devious that only rumors escaped his black hole.
Soren sighed. “Where were we?” he asked.
“The townsfolk fleeing,” Trax reminded him testily. “Do we hunt them down?”
Soren thought for a moment. “There’s no reason to. If we destroy their town, we destroy them. In the wild, they’re nothing, and certainly no threat to us. Let them flee.”
This did not sit well with Trax, who hated to miss an opportunity for bloodshed.
Soren could tell what he was thinking. “Our focus is the town,” he pointed out. “There’ll be plenty of people to kill inside its walls.” That seemed to appease him.
“If I may…” Lennox began, and upon confirmation from Soren to proceed, continued, “Could we not kill all the farmers? It’s in our best interests to have some remain alive to harvest the crops we need to sustain our army’s advance.”
Trax shrugged, “They all look alike – peasant, farmer, merchant. Hard to be particular when you’re killing people.”
“At least try,” Lennox said.
“Of course,” Trax replied, having no such intention.
“Oh…” Lennox added, “And how about not torching the fields or killing the livestock. That’s your own dinner you’re destroying.”
Trax shrugged, bored when the conversation veered away from murder.
Lennox turned to Soren. “I’ve been continuing my interviews,” he began.
Soren knew that by ‘interviews,’ the man actually meant ‘interrogations.’ Lennox thought it would be valuable to learn more about the world they were aiming to conquer, so he had begun rounding up anyone who had been displaced as a youth in an airship and tried piecing together a picture of the world. It bothered Soren that Lennox preyed on those displaced by the airships, as he felt a connection to them, but the information Lennox gathered was valuable enough for Soren to look the other way. The information was fragmented, but a picture of the world was beginning to emerge.
“We have large expanses of territory still before us, and cities larger than any we’ve yet seen. An army marches on its stomach, and if we keep destroying the sources of food, we cripple our ability to push forward.”
“That’s sensible,” Soren agreed, risking taking Lennox’s side over Trax’s. He turned to Trax. “Tell your men not to destroy crops or livestock. They’re ours. I want them.”
Trax grumbled but indicated his consent.
Soren turned to Seline. “How goes your siege equipment?”
She looked up. “Hmm? Oh, right – yes,” she said, shifting gears from thinker to speaker. She collected her thoughts. “Two towers are being built to my specifications right now. That’s not a lot, but we just need to breach the walls in one place to have the town fall. I’m having a battering ram built too. The towers are mostly to provide cover for the men wielding it.”
Trax found the length of time it was taking to complete her pet projects infuriating. “How much longer?” he asked, annoyed. “My men grow restless.”
“Just a few more days,” she replied. “Oh – and there’s something else I’ve been experimenting with. It’s a white powder I’ve acquired from merchants who say that they got it from somewhere in the far west. It burns hotter than any forge. Would you care to see a demonstration?”
“No, that’s all right. I believe you,” Soren replied.
“I have several ideas for its application, but I think it’ll be quite handy in torching the timber gates and weakening them for the battering ram.”
“Sounds good,” Soren concluded, trusting her judgment in the matter. “Keep at it.”
Soren got up again and moved to the door. He peeled back the flap and looked out over the town again. “We attack in three days,” he told his council, “And yes, Trax, you can kill everyone except the farmers.”
12
Kala
Kala moved among the charred buildings of her village in a daze. This isn’t real, she thought. She couldn’t reconcile the images of her village that were etched in her memory with the devastation around her. She could navigate these streets with her eyes closed, and so she did, retreating to the world she remembered. People she’d known all her life came into view in her mind, carrying out their mundane tasks. Calix popped his head out of the smithy, smiled, and waved. She caught a glimpse of Cera and followed her across the village square and through the door of Lily’s house. Kala heard Lily singing contently in the kitchen, despite having burned whatever she was baking. Forest sat cross-legged on the living room floor, gazing forward. Kala sat down in front of her. Forest registered Kala’s presence and stared deeply into her eyes.
“It won’t bring us back,” Forest said.
“What won’t?” Kala asked.
“Vengeance.”
“It’s all I have.”
“It’s not enough,” Forest replied and began to fade.
“Don’t go,” Kala begged, hot tears flowing down her cheeks. “Don’t leave me,” she pleaded – but Forest’s apparition dissolved. Kala reached forward but found only empty air. She opened her eyes, screaming at the skies. There was no house; Forest had never been. Kala wrapped her arms around her knees and curled into a ball. She lay alone on the ashen ground, sobbing piteously.
She cried until her tears ran dry, and she lay still and hollow. Her heart had turned to ash. The wind blew across her prone form, and an ember of anger glowed briefly in her heart, then expired. Desperate to feel anything, Kala fanned at it until it relit. She cradled it in her hands and blew on it until it sparked into flame. Kala warmed her hands by the flame as the fire rose and rose until it consumed her. The fire coursed through her veins, cleansing her of every emotion she’d ever felt until nothing was left but vengeance. The fire cried out for blood, urging Kala to her feet. If Death wanted her so badly, she would give Her what she demanded – she’d bring Her death. She rose like a predator, the fire thrumming in her veins.
She walked to the treeline and scouted along it for signs of her prey. She found traces of a small party heading south and a larger party heading east. Her need to punish decided for her – she’d head east. Forest’s ghost appeared before her, blocking her path. Kala walked through her. Forest’s spirit turned and followed. They stalked together into the gloom of the trees.
Kala advanced with no concern other than the need to find someone to punish. She felt no fear – what use had Death for fear? Death could not be killed. Kala walked until she was tired, or it was dark, and then she would simply lie down where she was and sleep, haunted by dark fires. Fores
t’s ghost would greet her when she woke, staring at her with baleful, disapproving eyes. Kala disregarded her and continued her hunt. The trail was cold, but Kala’s predatorial instincts drove her, and she was rewarded by the occasional confirmation that a force of men had indeed passed this way.
In a dream, Kala strode into a misty clearing in which a pack of dire wolves reposed. A beast with midnight-black fur rose to face her. A grey pair appeared at its sides and advanced past it toward her. Kala halted and waited impatiently. The grey on her left came to her and sniffed around her chest, its breath hot on her neck. Kala knew what it was drawn to. She brought out the wolf’s tooth on the necklace from inside her tunic. The wolf sniffed at it, while the second wolf breathed in the scent of her hair. Satisfied, they lay down deferentially before her. She took a step forward and patted their heads. The black wolf lay down facing her, and one by one, the others did the same. Kala strode between the grey wolves toward the black one and held out her hand for it to sniff. It nuzzled her hand, and she scratched behind its ears. She gave it a final pat and walked past. The wolves turned their heads to watch her go but did not rise as she walked out of the misty clearing. They paid no attention at all to Forest’s ghost trailing after her.
In the days that followed, Kala would sometimes glimpse a wolf through the trees, but only fleetingly. They were kindred spirits, and she felt their companionship despite the distance they kept. It rained all day, and Kala collapsed cold and shivering that night on a bed of moss. Kala felt more than heard its presence as the dark wolf strode out of the inky night and curled up against her back. The rest of the pack joined in, and they huddled together in a mass of wet fur. The heat from their bodies warmed Kala through the night. In the morning, when she woke, they got up and returned silently to the forest.
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