Finding Her Heart (Orki War Bride #2)

by Isoellen

  "Lurann is cream and you are my daughter," Mama's ghost reminded her.

  When something was fine, it was cream. She had memory after memory of her mother sitting back in her chair in the sun with a satisfied smile. "Now, that is cream," she would say and rub her belly as if she tasted something delicious.

  When the boys showed her their good school marks, it was cream.

  When Benjere had the fields planted and finished on the home farm, it was cream.

  When Mama went to bed at night with the house clean, not a thing out of place, it was cream. When Annabell cleaned her room, made her bed, and washed her face and hands until she turned pink, it was, "You are my daughter."

  "That fine, childless family of his and his tavern keep him busy. And Mac Hessy won't sell to me unless Kejere, the councilman, is there because I am your daughter. Papa died under two red moons, and you slipped away to go to him while the Child played. And all of that means trouble for me," Annabell told the empty room as she stood up and pushed the chair back under the table just where it belonged.

  To avoid handing Bossiest Benjere another chance to go on and on about the risks of solitary farm life, Annabell decided she'd walk to town and visit Kejere or Vejere for help.

  The bossiest hadn't bothered to cross her fence line for weeks, not since Daisydoo birthed her calf. Annabell liked the absence. Often, she wanted to throw her boot at him rather than listen to him remind her of all the things she couldn't do right.

  Less bossy, just as opinionated, her brother’s Kejere and Vejere were both on the town council. If she accompanied one of them, even Mac Hessy's suspicious and anxious wife wouldn't stand in the way of Annabell buying what she needed.

  Getting up early to tend to her animals and double-check all her gates and doors, Annabell kept good time. She stood at the rise overlooking her personal little valley before the rambunctious Child's bright light eclipsed his Mother and Father. Hidden behind silverleaf trees and the peach orchard, her farm didn't get the morning light in its windows as most did. It always felt like it was under a shadow.

  She loved the morning sun, full of energy on clear sky days, the air crisp and cold, an apple crisp out of storage. No matter what she met in town, she wouldn't let it ruin the day. She had things to do, and the unsettled feeling hovering on the horizon at the edge of her thoughts like a foul smell, would not ruin the day’s sunshine.

  "Let the gloom find its own. There are enough rats in the barn."

  "I'm not looking for gloom or rats today, Mama," Annabell said to the Child in the blue sky.

  "There are no treats for wicked girls who don't do their chores," Mama's ghost answered.

  "Wicked pays its place," Annabell said. Counting fence posts as she walked, she picked out familiar landmarks like touchstones. It was a good day to walk into the village, yet she couldn't shake the ill feeling. Hidden rats indeed, rustling unseen in the back of her mind. Had she left something unfinished at home?

  The odd wrongness nagged her.

  As family land, Mark earned his farm after saving enough money to buy it from his father. He'd placed the house in a deep valley next to a ribbon of a creek flowing into a pond. The terrain of the land gave the impression of being flat. At one time, the creek had been a tributary of the river, carving its way into the soft, loamy dirt. People often said if they didn't know the farm was there, they'd never be able to find it.

  After Mark's death, Annabell found herself out of sight and out of mind. His family never once visited. His parents hadn't approved of her, and the brothers and sisters followed the example.

  As her nearest neighbor, Benjere was up the road, the buildings of his homestead painted white and red—seen for miles. Beyond him, the road led to Boat-Station, the smallest town along the river filled with boat makers, fishermen and a single little tourist inn. From the mountains, her village of Righteous Way was the first stop on the river for any visitors to the Peace Valley Refuge.

  Her neighbors in the opposite direction were the Johssons. They blamed her for the death of their old patriarch. Their large family lived in the original settlement shack, a one-room cabin with add-on’s built by the Elder Johsson rather than craftsmen who knew what they were doing.

  Before they got superstitious, the Johsson boys helped Annabell three times a week, earning pennies or food. Mama's memory nagged. "Decent boys who know more about farming than you do, Annabell Roe. All that time at your father's heels, when you should have been with me."

  "Papa was always sending me back inside, away from him. I was too young. And you would make me dust, sweep, or scrub the tin-tub," Annabell answered back, remembering the daily chores of her childhood she tended to when she wasn't in school.

  The Johssons kept their sheep in a field close against the main road. Every new season at least one lamb escaped. Who didn't love the lambs, even if sheep were not the smartest creatures. Their frolicking made everyone smile. Even a jaded old farmer like Benjere. In better times, when Annabell owned her early mornings, she took walks just for the opportunity to watch them.

  Despite not being the season for lambs, habit turned her head in that direction to look for them.

  Where usually green and yellow grasses grew, black scarred the land like a wound. For a breath of a moment, Annabell thought the color caused by a patch of fire—until the smell hit her. As if seeing the marked sheep pasture made gave the smell shape and reality. Empowered it. Filled it. The putrid smell of death punched her in the face, her eyes watering as she choked on it.

  Caused by blood, bone, and sinew, the black stain represented death, not fire. Death. Absence of life. Something feasted days ago, leaving a mess behind. Ground foxes, scavengers, or coop weasels, or bigger, one of the rare shaggy graybacks from the mountains, come down to feed. Annabell was looking at and smelling all that remained of the sheep, torn apart in their own field. Their bones scattered over the land like broken toys, except for the heads. Carrion-kissed heads faced the road, lined up in a crooked row, watching her from empty eye sockets.

  Annabell gagged. She needed air, but there was nothing breathable to be had. Instead of oxygen, every inhale was a sticky, noxious smell. The cloud of death insects rose and settled as if they knew she was standing there, watching, and they didn't like the attention.

  No wild animal, big or small, would line up the leftovers of its supper like that.

  Had she been smelling this wrongness all morning?

  The strange sight confronted the wall of her practical understanding.

  "These are the Peace Lands and the humble life. Nothing happens here but farming, fishing and gossip,” Mama’s voice whispered.

  "Something happened here," Annabell answered the quiet. The sound ruffled the bugs, a fog of black lifting and settling.

  "Look with eyes, not emotion."

  Annabell could barely look at all.

  Behind the slaughtering ground of the field, down the lane, an ominous aura hovered over the Johsson house and squat sheds. Too quiet. Empty. Annabella saw movement. A flash of wing. Death birds.

  Moving along the fence line to the house, she searched for the family. That smell… Her stomach bounced, a visceral dread building. No Elder Johsson and not a single other soul. No sound but flapping wings and something knocking in the light breeze.

  Closer, her eyes caught a bit of color on the fence. Blue checks. The kind of work shirt favored by many of the village men. She thought someone had taken his shirt off, discarded it over the side of the fence in the sun, but as she drew closer, she saw other colors.

  Feet moving, hand over her mouth, Annabell walked up to the sight. She recognized the shape of a person, a man; his clothing turned to rags. Decaying, identifiable by a single clean corner of blue checked fabric, one of the Johsson men dangled on the pine fence, a grisly rag doll.

  Annabell's thoughts stopped moving. Dropping her basket, she ran up the drive to the house. The yard was empty.

  And then it wasn't. The lump of another
Johsson, pants and shirt shredded. Another dead person. More than a week dead like the sheep.

  The front door to the little wood house hung open, a silent scream, the windows turned to eyes in glass-shattered death throes. The pained moment settled hard, dared her to step into the next horrific sight and go into that house. Unable to turn away, to think, to ask sensible questions like who had done this and where was that person, Annabell's brain split. Her mind went silent as her feet propelled her forward.

  She was not thinking. Only moving, seeing, experiencing. The world changed, reality disjointed and wrong. She existed outside of it, a confused spectator moving through a decaying fog of what was left of the Johsson farm and family.

  The inside of the house was dark, lit with motes of from the sunshine outside, streaming yellow through the door and windows. Splayed out on the floor, half her body in shadow, was Elder Elmer Johsson's widowed wife. The poor thing was naked, twisted in angles, her head grown to the size of a melon. It must be the grandmother, not a youth. Half her unbound hair was missing, but there was more than enough of the dull gray streamers left to identify her.

  Annabell didn't throw up until she found the Johsson children. Two of them. Untroubled by scavengers, but covered in rot and insects in active harvest, they lay at odd angles on the floor of a back room.

  And then she was running, panting, body straining, going to her brother's house.

  Her mother screamed accusations in her mind. "Annabell Roe, what have you done?"

  She stumbled and tripped, sobbed, two dead children in her mind's eye. Crossing over fields and behind her own house, climbing fences and approaching the back way. She ran until she saw Bidly, stretched out on his side, looking flat. The big, white wooly dog guarded the place. Bidly didn't move an inch. She stopped, sinking to her knees—fear and understanding filling her up—strangling her with the pain of it.

  The house, the barn, the whole yard held its breath in the last gasp of something awful. It felt the same as the Johsson's. It felt like death. Like that moment when one entered a room expecting to find a person and instead found a discarded shell of what was. Annabell knew that moment very well. The mark of it was an ugly, obvious gash in time and space. She could feel it. Smell the toxic fumes. Pain and woe sucking up the air and leaving her with a racing heart and shaking hands. Questions yelled so loud she couldn't hear any of them over the roar of understanding.

  Death.

  She was going to walk into that house. See things she did not want to see. Bad things. The entire world was dead, and Annabelle Roe, Woman of Woe, the only survivor.

  This was her family. Whatever was in that house, in the barn, beyond, they left her to clean it all up. Annabell whispered her mother’s words out loud, "Are you sure you aren't a little poisoned by the creeping dark? Are you stained? Then a little water does redeem."

  Alone or not, there were things to do. She had to fix it. This was not the first time the world flipped and turned upside down, and it would not be the last. She had a big family, after all, and not one of her elder brothers knew how to take care of things that needed doing. They turned into lumps staring at walls, leaving Annabell to see to it. To keep moving.

  "You should be the one to do it. Family is family," Mama agreed.

  Annabell did the things. She found the bodies of her brother's children. The basin for cleaning sat tipped over in the middle of the floor. Grabbing it up, she warmed water, found soap. She'd thought she would wash the bodies, like she washed her Mama, like she washed Mark.

  She'd put them to bed properly.

  But time worked fast. Touching bodies dead for more than a week challenged Annabell's skills and her stomach. She found a kerchief so she could breathe through her mouth and keep the death bugs from getting inside of her.

  This house was empty. Nothing lived here. Spirits gone home to the stars and forefathers. With no spirit to hold them together, the bodies were returning to the earth in a mess of smells, gasses, and fluids. These were not people anymore.

  Taking blankets from their beds, quilts made by a grandmother who never had the chance to kiss their cheeks, she transferred the children. Did what she could. The garden was just-plowed soft. She'd bury them with their parents.

  Pinned to a wall by kitchen knives and garden stakes, Benjere gave her the same trouble in death as he did in life. She couldn't leave him and didn't know how to get the decaying shape down. Task at the forefront of her mind, Annabell kept moving. Step by step. Eventually dragging him out of the house on a hand-sewn blanket from his childhood, one so loved that the fabric pieces spelling his name no longer retained any color.

  Looking for buckets and tools for cleaning in the barn, Annabell stumbled upon the two young men who worked for Benjere. Here, the walls looked blackened by fire, but she couldn't tell the cause of it. It was a spotty kind of fire, leaving pitted holes. There was more violence, more strangeness. The bones not as they should be. Two heads, sitting up on a workbench, facing the door, sightlessly greeting her. Nothing had feasted on these bodies. In the throws of high decay, she could still recognize every face she saw on Benjere's property.

  All her senses focused on taking care of things, Annabell kept moving. She added the boys to her list of things to do. Step by step, methodical movements. Very much the way most days went.

  "Dust is a vanguard of sin, a symbol of idle hands, and the evil loves employment for those," Annabell remembered her mother singing the tune. It was loud now, with her heartbeat and the cold chill on the back of her neck, and the smell she would never be able to wash from her mouth and nostrils.

  Annabell sang it back, her words a horse whisper. "Dust is a vanguard of sin, a symbol of idle hands, and the evil loves employment for those."

  Digging graves as deep as she could. Covering them up without seeing or smelling anything. She scrubbed up the mess of their endings as if it was the butchering of a cow gone bad. She kept moving until there was nothing left to do.

  In a daze, she went home, back to her house. Her mind numb.

  Chapter 3

  Into Woe

  Head aching, disoriented, Annabell woke up in her own washroom. Her shoes were off, along with one long sock. She couldn't feel her feet, her arms and hands hurt, and a rhythmic squeezing pulsed around the top of her head. Cataloging her body, she lay still in the dark space, wondering where the lamp was, what time it was, what day it was. She moved her feet, willing sensation back into them. Her hands felt achy, swollen, like they did when she spent a day digging or chopping wood.

  Her world bled the color of the curse, the Mother and Father moons fulfilling the prophecy of her childhood name. Everyone around her died, and then she was left to bury them.

  Almost everyone. She found no body of her sister-by-marriage, Bess, or the orphan girl hired to help with the children. The remains of the younger Mrs. Johnson or their daughter and a third young woman from that household were also missing.

  What had happened?

  "These are the Peace Lands and the humble life. Nothing happens here but farming, fishing, and gossip." Mama said that many times to Annabell.

  Fed on her papa's tales, Annabell longed for those adventures, much more interesting than putting up peaches or house tending. Mama would catch Annabell idle, dreaming, and remind her the humble life was the opposite of adventure. The humble life was good, safe living, and she should be thankful for it.

  Bad things did not come into their village. Her father would have told her. That story would have rolled off his tongue in a weekly epic dinner time tale of death and sacrifice. He would have relished it. Righteous Way was a safe place. Traders came through, sometimes tours of people from the Steel Cities in the summer. But not bad things.

  Big parties couldn't travel the mountains in winter. The snows, combined with hungry shaggy graybacks and a flying predator called an orma, a creature that loved the darker months, kept the mountain roads into the village closed. One man might make it, if he knew what he was do
ing. Two, if careful. But the buffer of the Orki Originals Peace law surrounded the valley. Righteous Way was safe.

  The lands outside the civilized steel cities and the Peace River belonged to the Orki. The Originals carried a history of dominance on the planet based on their warlike capabilities. Built on a huge scale, armed with all kinds of barbarian weaponry, riding wolfish horse-sized creatures they called their war beasts, nothing escaped the Orki. They hunted and patrolled their land ruthlessly. A planet-wide agreement existed with every sentient humanoid creature, even the dangerous, greedy Ministers and Corporations in the Cities. The giants made sure there was no reason to break the law and trespass.

  No one knew how they did it. But they apprehended and made an example of lawbreakers. In school she learned that the longest it took an Orki hunting party to catch a trespasser was three months. If the Orki did these murders and they were exacting punishment, everyone who broke their law would be dead.