by V. K. Ludwig
“Shit,” Adair said. “Uncle Peter, you gotta get your ugly face out from behind me. Rowan’s calling, and we need to ease him into your story once we’re back. He isn’t taking well to, uh, strangers, and we can’t tell him that we were this far out. Got it?”
Rowan’s holographic image suffocated the cabin of the car, and Adair fumbled anxiously to scale it down. All the while, Rowan shouted through his bared teeth. “Where the hell is everyone? How am I supposed to rule a clan if everyone I trust suddenly disappears? I tried calling River, but he didn’t pick up.”
“Sorry,” I shouted from the backseat. “Somehow my holo-band must have switched to silence.”
“Yeah.” Adair rubbed his eyes and took a deep breath. “We’re all in the car right now. Ayanna wanted to see the outskirts, but we’re already on our way back.”
“I need you to come to the longhouse as quickly as you can. I’m up the creek without a paddle here.” Rowan shook his head and muttered a sharp fuck into his beard. “A few minutes ago the Districts contacted me, and requested Ayanna back tomorrow morning at the latest.”
Chapter 23
Memories
Ayanna
In wrinkles but otherwise expressionless, Rowan’s face stared back at Uncle Peter, who threw himself onto his knees under trembles. Desperate questions burned my tongue, but the chieftain waved them all off. He pointed at the stranger like a lion tamer with his stick, his words slow and monotonous. “Who the hell is this sorry-looking pile of —”
“He is my uncle, Peter,” River said, “and we found him while we were out there. He supplied proof, too. Had my locket and a newer picture of my mom. Could tell me lots about her too, but —”
Rowan flung his hand up. “How do I know that this guy isn’t some sort of spy from another clan? Why Would he come so close to our territory, unless he is either with them or plain stupid?”
“Look at him, Rowan.” Adair pushed Uncle Peter’s shirt up, revealing a sunken in stomach with wide bony arches atop. “They’ve got a lot of game up there in the mountains. This guy hasn’t gotten a decent meal in his belly for months, or years even.”
Rowan threw his hands over his face and flung his head back as if the ceiling might keep him from going insane. “This day can’t possibly get any more complicated. Alright, explain something to me, Peter. Who is River and where did he come from?”
Uncle Peter pushed himself up, tremulous and wide-eyed. “Yes, chieftain Rowan. Well, uh, see… River here is the son of my later sister Katherine, but I always called her Kate. Kate’s her name. Clan of the Mountains, that’s where she came from. That’s the one all the way —”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Rowan spun his finger around and shook his head. “All the way at the Western mountains. Now we know where River comes from, but I still don’t understand why his mother made a trip all the way over here. With a baby peeking out from between her legs.”
Uncle Peter strutted his flat chest. “Ay, Kate was the wife of our chieftain, Olaf. He was a decent lad, honorable, making sure the women had guards and were treated well.”
Rowan’s eyes narrowed, letting their stare wander across River’s petrified face. In fact, the entire room stared at River now, who clenched his fists and rocked himself back and forth. The scattered light of the longhouse turned his face paler than a dreary day, and Adair wrapped his mouth in his palm.
“Got himself killed,” Uncle Peter continued, “in cold blood with a dagger to his back. Kate had to get as far away as possible, or they would have come for the baby. I came with her as far as I could, worked ourselves through the rotten highways until junk piles so high, we couldn’t find a way through. We got attacked and had to split up so I could fight them off while she gets herself out of harm's way. Been stuck in this area ever since and don’t belong to no one.”
Rowan grabbed a clay mug and gulped the content down, droplets forming at the edge of his mouth and making their way down. He ran his arm over his soaked beard and smiled. “Son of a gun, I am harboring a dude with a claim by blood. Isn’t that something, Adair?”
Adair crumbled his face into a grimace and scratched the side of his neck, his nose scrunched and his eyes narrow.
“He can stay for now.” Rowan nodded and turned his gaze toward me. “You, however, will have to leave, sweetheart.”
Blood spiked my brain, bringing me back to the sad truth of why we're here. I stomped my foot to the ground in a hissy fit. “I refuse to go back!”
People can’t see how much your arms tremble if you cross them in front of your chest. It looks like you’re giving yourself a hug, but really, you’re just keeping yourself from falling apart. My mouth turned dry, and each word I spat scratched the back of my throat like a nasty cold. “Then send someone else to replace her. I am not done here yet, and I refuse to go back.”
“Ref… what?” Rowan flung his head back and gripped his hair by the handfuls, pulling and straining until his hairline turned white around the edges. “Girl, do I look like I have any say in this? You aren’t one of us. You’re one of them, and they want you back right fucking now. I will not put trade agreements at risk just because you refuse to go back. Granted, my sister fucked up big time, but she will be dealt with once we found her.”
River stopped pacing around the fire pit. “You are not listening to her. Why don’t you offer the council someone else in exchange until Autumn has been found?”
“Oh yeah?” Rowan jerked his head in River’s direction, “Like who? We barely have any women here, and I won’t risk sending another one behind those walls. It’s obvious that they can’t keep tabs on our people, isn’t it?”
“One of your men then,” I said.
Sarcastic laughs and huffs spread through the longhouse, and Adair flung his hand up. “I’ll gladly volunteer.”
“Take a number,” Rowan said and pointed at him as if to make a point. “Do you really think the council will allow one of my men inside your walls? Damn it, I wouldn’t even trust them enough to set them loose on… on… just how many women do you have?”
“Around —”
He shook his head and choked me at the wave of his hand. “Don’t tell me, or I might not get any sleep tonight.”
My body ached at the hollowness inside me, like some sort of phantom pain that has neither a source nor a cure. River stared down at his feet, which he placed carefully in front of each other, but with no direction or purpose. His arms hung by his sides like the lowered flags of a defeated raiding party, and the weight of his arms pulled his shoulders towards the gray fur underneath his soles. The words that haunted me at night had crept into the daylight — we will be the downfall of every man with a beating heart in his chest.
I gazed behind the tear which rolled down my cheek and dropped onto the floor. In an instant, the salty droplet bleached the dark-stained wood into the bright pine of my childhood home. And there, stuck between a deep groove and chipped wood filler, a red glass marble waited to be picked up by me. But I didn't dare to move, or they might hear me.
Twelve years earlier…
“You agreed,” my mom whispers. “I asked you three times if you really want to go through with it. Look at me and tell me that I didn’t ask you on the day of the procedure. In that waiting room with the one-channel TV, and the —”
“I agreed because you had me by my balls with your constant nagging. And because I wasn’t considered good enough to put a baby inside my own fucking wife,” my dad shouts.
“Sh.” For a moment, silence returns to the old farmhouse, and the sun warms the surroundings as if no unkind words had ever been spoken. The taste of over-ripe peaches still clings to the air, sweet and heavy, just like a Sunday in August should smell. “For heaven’s sake please lower your voice.”
“All the time you cried in my ears about how you want a child. And how Jennifer and Roy settled on a sperm donor. How much Brandon adores his little son. And how we should do it too. What was I supposed to say?”
<
br /> I trace the rose branches with my dirty fingernail, which climb the green and white wallpaper all over the house. Except in my room, which she painted pink for my fifth birthday, along with a crooked castle, but I didn’t care. Lots of princesses live in crooked castles, right? Anyhow, I am too old for fairytales now, and I pushed my wardrobe in front of the castle years ago.
“You told me you wanted a child,” my mom says.
I sneak onto the next lower step and ignore how cold my limbs turn underneath the strain of my muscles. This step feels much colder than the one before, but I know my bum will warm it up soon enough. Is she pointing her finger at him? She does that sometimes when she is angry. Which is pretty much all the time lately.
“I wanted my child,” my dad says, his voice shaky. “Not his! But I would have been completely content for the rest of my life with what you and I had. Why did you have to ruin it?”
“You are ridiculous.” The slippers of my mom clip-clop over to the sink where she plunges pots and pans into the water. Metal clatters against ceramic, and I know now is the best time. Muffled by the swishes of an angry dish brush, I dart my hand towards the marble and fumble it out. Gotcha!
“Ridiculous?” My dad snorts and pulls a chair out from underneath the farmhouse table. “For the last fourteen years, I have been raising another man’s child. Now, that is ridiculous. She is your daughter, not mine. To me, she is nothing else but a test-tube baby. All because I wasn’t enough for you. You are nothing but a cold-hearted whore who flushed our marriage down the drain for the sake of her child-wish.”
“You take that back right now!”
“Or what?” Something heavy settles on his voice, like the weight of a million swallowed tears. “You’re gonna cut yourself with that knife again?”
The sun disappears beyond the clouds, and a shudder runs over my back. Our house looks dirtier now, older and maybe less loved. Even the steps behind me seem to have grown new scratches and dents that weren’t there just a second ago.
“I loved you so much,” he sobs. “And I agreed because I wanted to see you happy. I thought I could manage just fine. I swear I did! If I would have known how it makes me feel to look in her face every day that face that has absolutely nothing of me but everything of him…”
His voice trails off, but I think I can hear more sobs muffled by his palms. He plunges himself into the chair which gives a shriek. I hope the leg won’t give in today. Mom asked him a dozen times to glue it back in, but he never got around to do it. Just like he never got around to teach me how to ride my bicycle. Or how he still can’t come to my plays.
“I hate myself for how I feel,” he says. “Every day I hate myself. And then I hate you. And then I hate her. How could you choose her over us?”
“You don’t mean that.”
The clinks and clanks drown muffled to the bottom of the kitchen sink, buried by what I imagine are my mother’s salty tears. I gaze into the red cat-eye swirl of the marble and believe it is a sailboat -- ready to take me hundreds of miles from here, where things are new and bright. Should I go back upstairs? Perhaps I should sneak up the next time their voices grow louder again. I have my marble now, which gives me so much comfort when they yell and scream. It rolls around my palm soft and smooth, with no corners to cut myself on.
“Oh, I mean every word I say.” I rise and place one foot onto the step above. It’s time for me to leave. “Women like you will be the downfall of every man with a beating heart in his chest. You can’t love. It’s almost like they try to breed it out of you. All you care about is that perfect princess upstairs.”
I better go back upstairs now. I have to go back. You have to go back.
“You have to go back,” Rowan said and scratched his beard. “I am really sorry this didn’t work out, Ayanna, but we will drive you back tomorrow at six-thirty sharp.”
My limbs, too heavy to throw them up in defeat, hung by my sides like the snow-bent branches of a tree. I got nothing accomplished and would go home with empty hands, and an empty belly. Unless you count the beating heart, which I would leave behind in River’s chest, shattered and spoiled.
Adair kicked against a bench which scuffed along the floor like gunfire. “Fuck this! We should keep her until they found Autumn. If they can’t give us one of our women back, why would we hand over Ayanna without a fight?”
“Calm down,” Adair ordered. “They provided proof that she broke into one of their server rooms, stole sensitive information and kidnapped a man from the research center. They can’t find her, because she doesn’t want to be found. Keeping Ayanna would only complicate things more.”
“But why would Autumn do something so radical?” Oriel raked his hand through his hair several times as if tugging their roots might spark an idea. “Unless, of course, she found stuff that was worth the risk. Who knows what kind of weird stuff the Districts are hiding in there. Or perhaps they wanted to inseminate her against her will, or —”
“That’s absurd,” I chimed in. “We don’t inseminate women against their will. The Districts don’t do things like that.”
Rowan shook his head, his forehead in frowns. “Sweetheart, you do not understand what your government does when their community isn’t looking too closely. Crappy hygiene pods and broken holo-bands aren’t the only things the council dumps here.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Nevermind,” Rowan said and pushed the glistening logs around. “It’s not any of your concern, and I suggest you forget what I said. River should take you to the cabin now, so you can pack your stuff and get ready for tomorrow.”
River combed his fingers through his beard and eventually rubbed his palm over his entire face as if he tried to rip this nightmare off his face. My stomach rolled at the thought of leaving him behind, but once again, I couldn’t help but wonder why.
I didn’t deserve his love because nobody ever taught me how to love a man back. He wanted to give me everything he had, neatly wrapped with a red bow on top. Selfish me would have clasped it from his arms and taken it to the Districts. Three days until ovulation.
The picture of my daughter pushed back into my mind. Nothing but a daydream, but those have always been my favorite! Her hair, dark like the wood of an ebony tree, sprung into two curly pigtails wrapped in forest green ribbons. She stuttered and stalled over each word in her book, starting a sentence over and over again until she got it just right. Relentless like the constant gush of a waterfall, and I stared over to her in nothing but pride and love. If Bry asked me now if I would love my less than perfect child, I would have the answer. But that didn’t matter now, did it?
“There is something else,” Adair said and walked over to Oriel. Both men looked at each other, their foreheads in wrinkles and their eyes thoughtful. As if they exchanged a silent negotiation, their heads bobbed from shoulder to shoulder, and hands flung up and bumped back down. Each one of them gasped, sighed and eventually turned to Rowan.
“River got a little too close to our guest here,” Adair said and huffed as if he couldn’t decide if he felt relieved or burdened. “I just wanted to bring it up because we all need to —”
“How close is too close?” Rowan lowered his head and pinned River down with his cold stare.
“Um.” Adair rubbed the back of his neck and shrugged a shoulder. “Like fourth base Home Run kinda’ close.”
Chapter 24
Sacrifice
River
The taste of iron clung to my gums as if a freight train had parked itself between my jaws, and my tactical boots dangled two feet above the ground. A high-pitched hum zoomed through my eardrums, probably because my eyes would pop out of their sockets any moment now. Blurred and distorted, the faces around me have been wiped of their expressions, leaving me unable to evaluate how bad this was. Probably pretty bad though — hey, where did everyone go?
My listless body plopped shoulder first onto the tough oak floor and trundled on like a bowling pin. One mig
ht think by now I should be a natural at being half-conscious, but I got the feeling I didn’t make it look any prettier than the last time. Only bloodier, perhaps, but that was yet to be determined.
“Why would you betray me like that?” Rowan shouted, and all hell broke loose.
Wood either clashed dull and brittle against each other or screeched across the room. Something cracked, another object clanked, and smoke climbed deep into my nostrils. I pushed myself up, but a warm and soapy puddle made my palm slip away. Ayanna’s voice shrilled through the room, and suddenly the longhouse wasn’t only dark, but also alarmingly quiet.
“I wanted it,” she screamed. “I asked him to do it, and I was even the one who started it. Maybe.”
The room blurred back into my vision. Oriel towered over me, concern written all over his face. Rowan paced the room looking for something else to kick, but all benches and chairs stood tumbled or stacked along the walls.
“You come here, to my clan,” he growled, “and throw yourself at one of my best men? And then you poison another with that freak water of yours? What kind of shit show is this?”
Oriel leaned over behind me, plunged his arms underneath my shoulders and pulled me against the wall. Shaken and defeated, I pushed myself up to sit and let the scene unfold in front of me, unable to do anything but breathe. Uncle Peter cowered in fetal-position by the fire, mumbling senseless words into his hand.
Rowan pointed at me. “He saved my life once, and now I will be forced to send him to the Ash Zones. All because… I don’t even get how this could happen. You are not supposed to feel anything. Where the fuck did you guys get all the lubricant from, so he was able to put his cock in that dry, unwelcoming little cunt of yours? How can he even still walk?”
Oh, her sweet pussy was anything but dry, and as welcoming as a kitchen scented in freshly baked apple pie and whipped cream. That statement hurt my case, of course, so I shut my mouth and continued to swallow small gulps of blood.
