by Lucas, Naomi
Something shook her, rattling the world behind her eyes, making her slap her hand at whoever dared to take her dreams away. A sad moan fell from her lips when the shaking only grew worse, violent, eradicating the walls her slumber had erected.
A wave of loss hit her, and she cried out and fought not to leave her dreams behind, but whoever demanded her attention was relentless in their intentions.
“Wake, woman,” a deep, commanding voice slithered through her shell again.
“Astegur?” she mumbled.
A hot plume of air blasted her face, forcing her eyes open. Horns and heated breaths. He leaned over her, his face right above her own, and she smiled lightly, remembering that he’d returned to her.
“The centaurs have surrounded Prayer,” he said.
The throes of slumber crashed and burned, and met their deadly end.
Fear replaced it to envelop her back in reality. Her brow furrowed, and her eyes widened. Astegur filled her vision, and between them was his smoke and the mist.
“What?” she asked. Confused, she looked down at herself, to the hearth, and the bowl on the ledge. “I fell asleep.” She shook her head, raising her hands to scrub her face. I shouldn’t be sleeping. More memories came back to her as she stared at the bowl, recalling its strange taste. “You put me to sleep? You drugged me.” Anger chilled her voice, but it didn’t last long as a shuffling, muffled form screeched beside her.
She twisted to find her mother bound in the corner, a linen hanging from her mouth, her throat working and constricting over and over as if she was trying to swallow it down while her jaws snapped as if to shred it at the same time. A constant gag.
Calavia’s mouth slackened in horror at the sight. “Mother?” She climbed to her hands and knees, heart pounding.
Astegur grabbed her and yanked her around to face him.
Calavia gasped and narrowed her eyes as furious ones met her own again. “You!” she shrieked. “What have you done?”
“I tried to save your mistfucking life!”
She slammed her palms against his chest and dug her nails into his skin. “What did you do?” She looked back at her mother, but Astegur caught her chin and refused to let her.
“I tried to leave this rotting heap of tepid swamp water, nest of bugs, and dead sediment behind to meet its end alone. She will not let us leave!” he roared in her face, making her hair flutter back.
Let us leave? Calavia jerked her head out of Astegur’s grip. Her eyes shot around the room once more, stopping on her mother’s form struggling in the corner before looking back at him. She noticed the bags hanging from his hips, the weapons strapped to his form, and the strain in his muscles.
She drew back. “You tried to steal me away?” Her mother made a gurgling sound. “And her?” The remaining fog in her head evaporated. He tried to steal me. She startled and drew farther back from him, crawling toward her mother. She made it several feet before he grabbed her ankle and dragged her back. “I thought I could trust you!” she cried out as she slid across the rough floor, reaching for her mother.
“I saw what we are up against. They are burning out the swamps. By tomorrow morning the centaurs will have us surrounded with giant bonfires and light. Their light will pierce through your barriers and light up the settlement for all to see. We’ll be trapped here to die! You will die--”
“Then you should have left when you had the chance! Go now, bull, because I will not leave.”
He surged over her form and clamped one large hand over her neck when she fought to rise. She reached up and grabbed it, matching his snarl with one of her own. She knew he would not harm her, but in that moment, she didn’t care if he did. Fury brightened her eyes.
“Is that what you really want me to do, Calavia?”
Her eyes watered as they stared at each other. She didn’t want to back down nor fight him. She didn’t want him to leave, but she knew she could not stop him, nor keep him here against his will again, not when death could be a very real option.
She gripped his hand harder as she kicked out her legs once, her feet sliding across the thick fur of his legs, his boney hooves. They shared several angry breaths as she continued to struggle out from beneath him. She searched his dark eyes as he searched hers throughout, and when he began to draw his harsh face closer to hers, she released her grasp on his hand and slid her hand into her dress, drawing out a small clump of wax.
Fierce eyes became hooded, the space around them burned with their body heat. Her mother's struggles filled her ears. His lips came upon hers, ravaging, and she slammed her waxen hand right over his eyes.
A roar filled her ears, echoing off the stone walls, trembling the ground. Astegur shot into the air, clawing his face as she scrambled out from under him and rushed to her mother’s side.
“Calavia!” he bellowed.
She winced as she tore the linen from her mother’s mouth.
Her mother snapped her teeth at her and howled, straining against the reeds that held her limbs.
Horns sounded off in the distance, drumming the fear of battle right into her. Calavia worked at the reeds on her mother’s legs, trying to rip the fibers coated with her own wax apart with her hands.
“What have you done to me!” Astegur demanded.
Astegur’s rage made her clumsy.
She had torn the first binding off when she was grabbed from behind and pulled away. She rose up quickly and backed away as Astegur moved toward her, cracking the stone under his hooves, his face and eyes red.
She reached back into her dress just as he closed the distance between them again. “Please.”
He grabbed her arms. “Oh no, Calavia.” Astegur glared down at her. “I’m growing immune to your magic, hag.”
“Only because I did not mean for it to last long.” She flinched when he tugged her arms forward.
“What did you think you would do? Blind me and release your mother? Then what? Live here the last of your days waiting for death together?”
“She is my family.”
“She won’t let us cross the barrier! She’s killing us. Let her die and be done with it!” Astegur released her arms and spun around, approaching her howling mother flailing on the floor.
Her heart fell to her stomach as she grasped him. “No.”
He unsheathed his axe and raised it over his head. “She wants to die.”
“Astegur, stop!” More smoke than she had ever seen released from his nostrils, sparking the air. His battleaxe came down, and she dove between her mother and his blade, wrenching her eyes shut.
The strike never hit. She fell upon her mother, who had stopped moving, stopped shrieking, shielding her from him.
“Move,” he ordered.
“If you kill her, I will never forgive you,” she despaired, her voice quivering. “I will never look upon you again without seeing a monster.”
“Move. Now.”
She clutched her mother. “Never.”
She waited for him to yank her away again, to force her hand. She chanted softly under her breath, willing protection and comfort, knowing it would not last long. Her mother settled, stilled, and relaxed under her body as tears slipped down Calavia’s cheeks.
A terrible, thundering, heart-shattering vibration filled the air.
“Calavia…”
She shook.
“Can’t you see she wants to die? You said so yourself, when I came upon you with her the first time, that she was trying to kill herself.”
“Please, don’t do this.”
“Look at her arms!” He swept his hand out beside her, where her mother’s arm hung. “Her wrists, Calavia. The wounds she inflicted on herself look deeper, worse. She hasn’t stopped trying. She does not want to leave this place because some small part of her, some instinct we can’t understand knows that if she does, if we bring her to the mountains, the likelihood of her death happening is low. Here, all she has to do is wait.”
Calavia shook harder, squeezin
g her eyes tighter, feeling the cold, damp flesh of her mother’s body pressed against her own. “I can’t.”
“She will disperse the barriers around this place eventually. We need to fight our way out of here before she does. We cannot trust them, or her. We must leave without her if you will not kill her.”
“No.”
Astegur growled at her back. “I tried.”
Tears fell in waves down her face and she tightened her arms around her mother even more. How could she leave her when everything she had was because of her? If she had more time, she could find a cure for her mother’s thralldom, could give her mother’s empty humanity a reason to continue. She just needed more time. She needed Prayer.
Astegur placed his hand on the center of her back, heating her skin. More tears fell from her eyes.
“Calavia, look at her.”
She drew back slowly, wiping her face on the sleeve of her dress. When her eyes cleared, she looked at her mother who was looking up past her at Astegur. His hand left her back, and Calavia turned to look at him too.
“You’re asking me to kill my mother,” she whispered, haunted. “I can’t.”
His eyes softened. “Your mother has been gone for a long time. What you see now, it’s not her, it has never been her, not since the mist stole the last of her humanity. She’s your weakness. Let her go. If you do so now, we still may be able to escape while it’s dark.”
“No.”
The softness in his gaze hardened. “I will do it for you.”
“No. You will not change my mind.”
“Then you leave us no choice but to fight.”
Calavia let go of her mother, and the moment her touch left hers, her mother began to claw, wail, and fight her binds again. Calavia tried to ignore them, tried not to recall the wounds still on her mother’s wrists where she had tried to bleed herself out.
Astegur released a plume of steam from his nostrils. “To hurt. To die. To join an already dead place that prayers fled long ago.”
Calavia rose to her feet. “I called you here for a reason, bull.” She wiped the rest of her tears away as she stepped up to face him, back straightening. “To do exactly that.” The noises, the terror-striking sounds of a hundred horsemen just beyond, closed in around them. “I will not kill her, not even for you. You’re asking me to kill the only being I have ever loved. You’re asking me to commit matricide.”
She stared him down.
His nostrils flared, the muscles in his biceps strained. She fisted her hands at her sides.
“She wants this,” he said, his voice low and dark.
Her mother’s ghoulish noises emphasized his words. Calavia refused to hear them, couldn’t allow herself to hear them. Her throat constricted. She had to think of a plan, of something to convince him to let her mother live.
“We will win,” she said.
He reached for her, and she dodged away from his hand. “She is killing you, Calavia. She’s the weak thing holding you back. Stop hiding your nature for a dead thing.”
No. She shook her head and looked past him, out the shadowy exit, where the centaurs screamed. There was no more time, their enemies were here, and the swamps had not stopped their journey.
There was one thing she could do, one last terrible ritual she could perform.
“Let her go.”
She barely heard him as the wheels turned in her head. A darker shadow skitted through the temple passageway, and she took a step toward it. Astegur followed on her heels but didn’t stop her as the sounds from outside threatened to engulf them. Her mother’s wails grew louder the farther Calavia moved away.
She entered the dark hallways of her temple and saw her thralls standing around, aimlessly, as if waiting, with weapons in their hands. She pushed through them to the open entryway of her temple. The smell of blisterwood smoke filled her nose. Astegur’s hand clamped down on her shoulder as she stepped into the threshold, looking out.
Prayer was lit up in an eerie gold and orange sheen. The light cast from giant bonfires pierced through the mist on the outskirts of the settlement, obscuring and destroying her green lights in their flames. In and among them, between the riotous fires, were centaurs pounding their hooves to the moist ground. There was a shadowy wall of them on every side she looked.
As she stared at them, they raised their bows in horrifying unison from their backs and nocked their arrows, aiming them at her temple.
“Even the mist has left us to our fate,” Astegur said harshly, pulling her back into the shadows of the only building that could protect them now.
She swallowed her fear as the first of the arrows struck.
Chapter Eighteen
Calavia knelt at her mother’s side and brushed back the tangled hair from her face.
Darkness had begun to fall since she retreated deep within the confines of her temple. There was nothing else they could do without the mist shielding them.
She closed her eyes and tugged on her hair, wishing she would have listened to Astegur many days ago, when he told her they could not take on a battalion of centaurs on their own. Her eyes watered as she looked again at her mother.
As her regrets whirled in her mind, she knew that even if it all played out again, her choices would be the same.
But in the last few hours, as she listened to the warband outside drawing ever closer, she began to consider Astegur’s words. She replayed the conversation again and again in her head, staring at her mother. Calavia had begged, pleaded, held her tight, then did so again, already knowing deep down inside that everything she did meant nothing. Her mother was gone.
She closed her eyes tight and inhaled a trembling breath. She listened as Astegur and her thralls moved whatever they could find within the temple to block the entryway and any room that had crumbling walls.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again to her mother, who had not stopped screaming since Astegur lowered his axe and walked away. “Please hold the barrier,” she begged, trying to soothe her, trying one last time to reach her. “Just long enough for me to take it from you. Please.” But each time she tried, just like every time before, for countless worldspins, her mother didn’t hear her words.
“Give up, hag, you cannot save what is already lost!” A horseman yelled from afar, making her look up. He had been yelling since the first rain of arrows pierced her land. Their attack on Prayer had stopped after Astegur pulled her back into the shadows, but with each hour that passed by, their threatening yells grew nearer and nearer.
Spittle hit her face, and she returned her attention back to her mother. Ghoulish wide eyes glared back at her, almost expectantly. She heard Astegur’s hoovefalls sound behind her.
“We’ve done what we could,” he said hollowly as Calavia faced him. His eyes were on her mother with unabashed disdain. “Now we wait.”
She nodded, rising to her feet. “I am ready now. Will you help me move her to the altar room?”
He huffed in answer, flexing his hands, but he moved past her and hauled her mother over his shoulder. They walked to her altar in silence. He placed her mother in the corner where the vines were at their thinnest.
Calavia’s hands shook as she moved to her altar, lighting the last candle that remained atop it. The stone was flat beneath her feet, relaying how little wax she had left, and unless she wanted darkness to blind them, she could not gather the few candles throughout the temple they had left in place to light their passage.
“I do not like this.”
She wiped out her bone bowls with the skirt of her dress and set them in front of her. “You do not have to like it,” she whispered.
He moved behind her and pressed into her back. “This kind of magic is not worth the cost. It is the same kind of magic that the mist is borne from.”
His body heat threatened to engulf her.
“What other choice do we have?” She lifted her palms to look at the raw, still-healing cuts upon them and the cove and wax covering the wounds. As
tegur’s arms came around her to cup her hands and spread out her fingers. “Are you willing to entreat them?”
Her long hair fluttered as he breathed against the top of her head, snarling. “We have nothing to offer them.”
“But our lives.”
“And your blood, your body.” He released her hands and pressed his own against her chest, sliding them up to caress and elongate her neck. “They will not be nice to you, not after all that has happened.”
“As you have?” She closed her eyes and let him move her head from side to side, relishing the contact for what it was. Power.
He growled in answer, his hands tightening upon her skin, squeezing. Her breath hitched, and he released her, stepping away.
“I swore an oath to keep you alive,” he said. “But when they stab the life out of me with their spears, crush my bones under their hooves, and cut off my head, I won’t be able to control what comes after.”
Her hands trembled anew at his words, but she hid them in her skirts and pulled out the herbs that she’d collected earlier from her stores, placing them before her. She couldn’t think about him dying without losing more of her focus.
“It won’t come to that.” She said it as much for herself as for him. She could do what comes next, if she believed she could. She had to believe she could.
“I will try to kill you before it does.”
Calavia flinched, but nodded again. She needed to trust that Astegur knew her fate if she remained alive. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he walked to the doorway and prepared to guard it, one hand hovering over his axe and the other twitching at his side.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
His eyes snapped to hers. “I am always ready for battle.”
Her mother’s gargling noises filled the space between them.
She looked down at her supplies in front of her and picked up the willow growth with her fingers and dipped it into a bowl filled with water.
“Calavia,” Astegur drew her attention away again. “I will stop this if it goes sour.”
