Soul Marked: After the Fire Book 1

by C. Gockel

  Shaking her head, Tara steps behind a pair of elves who’ve moved between her and Lionel and his mother. Lionel’s mother does look like him. Lionel’s mom has the same white-blonde hair, their eyes have the same shape, she has a narrow chin that Lionel has kept though the frame of his face has broadened, and they have the same dimple in their left cheeks. Tara hadn’t liked the laugh that she’d heard when she’d mentioned it.

  Shivering, she tries to push back a long, wet tangle of hair and a bit breaks off in her hand. She has a moment of panic as it drops into the mud—a disease from the water? And then she remembers it catching on fire the night before and the blackened ends of Lionel’s bangs, too. “Just fire damage,” Tara says in English and winces. She’d never thought she’d use that expression to describe her hair.

  “You speak English?” The whispered words in her own language make Tara draw to a stop. A foot away from her stands a tiny Elvish woman. She’s gorgeous, with almond-shaped green eyes. They’re intensified by being red-rimmed, as though she’d been crying. Honey-colored hair peeks out from beneath a sage-green hood.

  “Yes,” says Tara. She looks down at the shallow water she’s walking in. Did she misunderstand its effect on Lionel’s magic or does it not inhibit everyone’s magic?

  “The waters of the delta twist my magic,” says the woman in an accent that Tara would peg as maybe Scottish. “But after knowing your kind for over a thousand years, I don’t need magic anymore.”

  It’s pouring rain, and cold. “Oh,” says Tara.

  The woman swings a knapsack around and takes out a cloak. “You’re no longer contaminated. Wear this.” She holds it out in Tara’s direction. It’s woolen, and will be soaked in minutes, but when Tara puts it on, she is warmer. She decides to savor the warmth for however long it lasts.

  The woman says, “My husband and I, we kept the plague away, you know.”

  “The plague?” says Tara.

  “From our MacGregor clan,” says the woman, “in Scotland.”

  Tara imagines there are probably a lot of MacGregors in Scotland, but she nods as though she knows what the woman is talking about.

  The woman’s voice cracks. “The gate we use was flooded by the Dark Waters. We’ll never be able to go back. Fiona is going to have a baby; I was going to be the godmother.” Tears spill from her eyes. “I’m not allowed to have a baby. I have no one to pay the child price. The MacGregors have been my children for over a thousand years and now I can’t see them!”

  Tara stammers, “I’m … I’m … sorry.”

  The elf woman sniffs. “Of course you are. You are human.” She tilts her head and wipes her face with her sleeve. “From Chicago … I hear the Dark Elves are emigrating there.” She takes a step closer. “Taking their families, escaping this swamp and the queen.”

  New goosebumps rise on Tara’s skin. She remembers the child who’d been beaten. “Emigrating?”

  The woman nods.

  She hears splashing behind her and turns. The other elves are far ahead of them, except for a single man running toward them through the rain and muck. “Kalee, don’t talk to her. She’ll tell Lionel, and he’ll tell the queen!”

  “Let him tell the queen!” the woman who must be Kalee responds. “We’ll be long gone! The queen can’t control us anymore.”

  The man stops beside his wife. “Chicago is far away from Scotland.”

  “Fiona told us about the aeroplanes.” Kalee protests. “We’ll use human magic to go back to Scotland and rejoin the MacGregors.”

  The man looks at Tara. He shuffles a bit. “Are there such things as aeroplanes, truly?”

  Tara nods.

  He licks his lips. “And they can take us from Chicago to Scotland.”

  “Yes,” says Tara.

  “We used to live in Scotland,” he says. “Before Odin made all of us leave Midgard.”

  Kalee makes a derisive sound. “And the queen agreed, probably so she could have her talons in us all.”

  Tara’s shoulders hunch under the onslaught of the rain. She isn’t sure where this is all going, but she has a feeling she might not like Lionel’s employer. “Odin …” she murmurs. Her eyes go to the path the ravens had flown in. Were they his birds?

  “Why don’t you ask Lionel about him,” says Kalee, her chin dipping. “I suspect he knows rather a lot about Odin.”

  At that moment, she hears Lionel’s voice. “Tara!” She turns to find him stepping out of the rain. He has a dark blue cloak on that’s too small. His mother is beside him, jogging to keep up. A moment later, he’s beside her, glaring down at Kalee and the man. “They didn’t try to entrap you, did they?” he says, his voice nearly a hiss.

  “What? No!” says Tara. “We were just talking.” Lionel’s head whips toward her. She remembers the man’s fear that Lionel would report them. “About Earth.” She gives him a tight smile. “They’ve never been.”

  She sees the man and woman relax. Lionel raises an eyebrow but doesn’t comment. His mother is looking wildly between the elf couple, Tara, and her son.

  The couple nod at Lionel, split apart, and run around him, heads bowed as though they are afraid to look at him.

  He frowns as they dart past.

  “They don’t know how to treat you, Lionel,” his mother says. “They don’t know who you are.”

  “And who am I?” he asks.

  His mother bows her head.

  “Forgive me, Mother, I shouldn’t have asked,” he whispers.

  Tara swallows. She thinks of Emmett Till getting brutally murdered for not knowing the unspoken rules of the Deep South.

  She’s stumbled into the politics of a world she barely understands. She has a feeling she’d better figure it out quick. … her life might depend on it.

  Lionel is cold and wet. The knowledge that he’d invoked the Destroyer gnaws at him, his body is alien to him, and his neighbors’ glances are hostile. He’s heard whispers of “half-breed,” “abomination,” and “now we know who his father is.”

  Despite all that, Lionel’s heart lifts when he sees the trees of the delta clearing and the Golden Road. Beyond the road, he can imagine the rolling fields of green interspersed with well-tended forests and tidy villages. The clouds end at the road, and he can see the white-blue glow of Alfheim’s sun. He puts his hand on Tara’s lower back to urge her on … and because his hand wants to be there.

  “What exactly is the child price?” Tara asks.

  His hand drops. She’d evidently spoken about more than Midgard with Kalee and Jaben.

  Lionel’s mother draws to a halt and he can feel her unspoken, Should I tell her?

  Stepping onto the road, Lionel pauses. The child price is something all the other magical races find abhorrent. He doubts that a human, with her seven and a half billion kindred, will think better of it, but he shrugs as if to say, Why not? Better she learns from his mother than some other elf.

  Walking next to Tara, his mother says, “For a baby to be born, someone must die, or there would be too many to feed.”

  Lionel frowns. Though there are less than a billion Light Elves on Alfheim, and the land mass is comparable to Earth’s—surely they could sustain a few more?

  His mother continues. “Elves are immortal.”

  The words make his chest constrict. Is he immortal? He’d always assumed so, but now …

  “That’s … interesting,” says Tara. “Exactly how is the person who is going to die chosen?”

  There is fear in her voice. Lionel says quickly, “It’s not some sort of blood sacrifice like your Aztecs. Someone volunteers, and then they will themselves to die.”

  “Oh,” says Tara, carefully looking at the ground. “What if no one volunteers?”

  His mother answers. “If the mother decides to see her pregnancy through, the baby may stay, but the couple has broken the queen’s law. They will be tried, may be found guilty, and if so, will be sent to the Dark Lands.”

  Had his mother been tried? Had her s
oulmate’s accidental death not twenty months before Lionel was born—just a few weeks longer than normal elf gestation—been considered payment of the price? Or had someone interceded? The same someone who interceded to see he was allowed to study magic after his accidental trip to Midgard as a child?

  As they make their way to the gathered villagers, the enchantment woven into his cloak activates. All the water slides from the fibers and they warm to the perfect degree.

  “Oh,” says Tara. “My cloak …”

  “Is magical,” says Rolleim, coming forward with a smile. He stops not a pace away from Tara, reaches out, and drags a hand down the garment’s front, as though testing the fabric, fingertips grazing her breasts. “It’s warm now that you’re out of the Delta of Sorrows, isn’t it?”

  Tara’s lips form a small ‘o’ of shock.

  Technically, Rolleim has done nothing outside of normal Elven etiquette, but Lionel’s jaw tightens, and a charge of magic rushes to his fingertips.

  Rolleim’s eyes go to Lionel’s hands. Everyone else takes a step back. Lionel catches a whispered, “half-breed” and “savage.” A muscle in his jaw jumps, but he doesn’t look at the whisperer, afraid he might turn them to ice with the sudden jolt of power.

  He glances at Tara, and sees her eyes have settled upon the speakers and narrowed. A heartbeat later, she’s schooled her features to neutral. Her fingers flutter on the top of his hand. They’re cool and it is the most innocuous of brushes, but his anger and magic turn to something else completely different.

  His neighbors press closer to Tara, carefully avoiding Lionel. Martier, one of the oldest matriarchs of the village, says, “Our village hasn’t seen a human in over two thousand years.”

  Jaylee says, “You must stay for the night!”

  The village’s only two children say, “Will there be a feast and a dance?”

  “Yes, yes!” says someone else. “The queen will fetch her tomorrow to return her to Midgard … we must celebrate tonight!”

  Tara’s eyebrows hike. Seeing an unasked question, Lionel bends near, and she whispers in Elvish, “Does time work like normal—I mean, like Earth—here? If I stay for the night, am I going to wake up fifty years older and half my life gone?”

  Kalee bristles. “That happened one time, and it wasn’t even in our village. Still, it’s all anyone talks about!”

  Tara’s eyes go wide.

  Lionel gives her hand a gentle squeeze, and then doesn’t let go. “Time is the same,” he assures her. “But that particular mortal wished to stay.”

  “The queen, in all her great wisdom, made those villagers send him back,” says Martier grumpily.

  “Ah,” says Tara.

  “I will make sure you get home,” Lionel’s mother says. “You brought my son back to me. I am in your debt.”

  A hush goes through the gathering at the statement, and Lionel feels the breath rush from his lungs. Around him, jaws fall open.

  In his hand, Tara’s fingers go slack. “Oh, no, you can’t say that. You can’t be—”

  “But I am,” says Lionel’s mother. “And it is settled.”

  In the village a hadrosaur lows.

  Martier nervously clears her throat. “I’m sure that Tara and …” She ducks her head.

  “You may call my son Lionel,” his mother says.

  “Come this way,” Martier says. “You must be hungry.” Lionel can’t help but notice that she hasn’t used his name.

  Unbinding

  Tara licks a bit of lingering honey from her lips, and feels her eyes droop. For breakfast, elves eat pancakes with honey and butter, lingonberry jam, and a soft sort of cheese like Brie on the side.

  “Are you sure you can’t eat more?” says a blonde, blue-eyed elf child, poking his head between Tara and Martier, the two-thousand-something-year-old woman who looks all of twenty-one. The little boy looks to be about five. She imagines he is what Lionel looked like once.

  “I’m sure,” she says. She feels stuffed to the gills. She’s also warm in borrowed clothes—they even gave her a scarf to cover and tie back her still-wet hair so it isn’t dripping down her neck. The food and the comfort have left her sleepy despite all the excitement.

  She glances down the table in Martier’s cozy kitchen. Lionel is at the other end. His mother has disappeared. She wishes he weren’t so far away. There is so much going on that she doesn’t understand. Like how she thinks they’ve put them both at positions of honor at the table ends, men and women serving them both like they’re royalty, but the elves won’t look at Lionel, and they called him “half-breed.” Is the reason for his change that he isn’t full-elf? Why the deference on one hand, and what almost seems like disgust on the other?

  “You’re so much bigger than us!” says another child, poking his head around her other side. He has hair with curls that are just slightly looser than her own, and his skin is almost as dark.

  Leaning toward his friend, the first boy says, “I hear humans age very fast, and you might be older than us!”

  That makes Tara wince, but then the second says, “Do you like to play children’s games? We would like another playmate.”

  They’re adorably irrepressible, and Tara finds herself grinning and winking at them despite her fatigue. “Sometimes I play children’s games.” And then she’s simultaneously hit with the worry that she’s broken some taboo and a longing to see her little cousins. To her relief, she hears the adults around her laugh good-naturedly.

  “Casir, I’m sure she’s tired,” says a man Tara might have mistaken for African, if it weren’t for his Elvish frame and pointed ears. Tara fights back a yawn at his words and nods sleepily.

  “Isn’t that right, Missus …?”

  The man inclines his head.

  She feels a prickle on her spine. He’s fishing for her full name. Waking up quickly, she says, “You can call me Miss Tara … from Chicago.”

  The elves laugh again. They don’t sound cruel, yet she shivers. She looks down the table. Lionel is shooting daggers at the man with his eyes.

  “You know our ways!” the man says with a grin.

  “And your teeth are so white and straight!” says Martier.

  “I bet you’re as strong as a Valkyrie!” says the little boy who must be Casir.

  Someone else says, “And no smallpox scars either!”

  There are murmurs all around. Tara begins to feel like a bug under a microscope.

  “Let’s guess her name!” someone cries.

  Someone begins to chant, “Tara McClellan, Tara O’Carey, Tara Johnson …”

  “Stop!” Lionel says.

  All the laughter stops, and for a moment, everyone freezes. Tara’s eyelids suddenly feel especially heavy, and yet they won’t fall. And then she blinks, and it’s like a spell has broken, and time has resumed. People are shifting in their seats. Martier glares accusingly at Lionel.

  His eyes are wide and shocked. “She needs sleep,” he murmurs, and it sounds almost like an apology. Tara wonders what just happened.

  “Of course,” says Martier tightly. Snapping her fingers, she starts giving directions and the elves jump from their seats. Men and women both put the dishes away and clean up after the meal.

  “Follow me,” says Martier, gesturing to Tara.

  Standing fast, Lionel comes to her side. Putting his hand on her back, he whispers, “It will be all right.” Muscles she hadn’t known were tense relax.

  They follow the tiny woman outside, across a square of smooth stones, to a thatched cottage that is larger than the others. “This is our village’s guest cottage,” says Martier as she opens the door. Lionel’s mother Tavende is inside, a broom in hand, as well as half a dozen other elves, all cleaning. Tavende smiles at Tara.

  “All honored guests sleep here,” Martier continues. “Humans, the queen’s couriers … once we even had a king and his retinue stay in this cottage.” The last she says meaningfully … but Tara’s brain is fuzzy and getting fuzzier. She hide
s a yawn behind her hand.

  “This way,” says Martier, leading her through a tidy but snug living space into a bedroom. There is a fireplace to one side, and a large bed on the other. The bed looks very “country,” with a quilt and heavy wood headboard. Elves bustle everywhere. Dumping some firewood into a metal box, one of the elves she’d seen in the Dark Lands says, “I never got your full name, missus …” He smiles, and Tara thinks he glows. She feels the oddest urge to tell him even though she knows it’s wrong …

  “Stop,” Lionel growls.

  The man goes very still. Everyone goes still. Tara feels like her heart forgets to beat.

  “Get out,” Lionel says, this time sounding tired.

  Bowing to Tara, casting worried glances at Lionel, the elves leave the room. Tara swallows. “Are they going to keep trying to find out my name?”

  “Probably,” says Lionel.

  Tara shivers.

  “They don’t mean any harm by it,” Lionel says. “They’re not strong enough to make you do anything drastic … but they’d probably play pranks.”

  “Pranks?” Tara asks, walking toward the bed as though it’s pulling her by a string.

  “Making you cluck like a chicken or walk like a duck,” Lionel replies.

  “Not a very nice way to treat a guest,” Tara says.

  “No,” Lionel agrees.

  “I wish they’d stop,” Tara hears herself murmur as she flops down on the bed, not even bothering to crawl under the covers. She looks up at Lionel standing above the bed and thinks, I wish you’d stay. They scare me. Their pranks aren’t fair.

  She closes her eyes and immediately finds herself in a tangled dream that is obviously her brain trying to tie her crazy day with something familiar and comforting, because Lionel leans over her bed and whispers, “As you wish.”

  “As you wish.”

  Tara’s eyes are closed, and if she heard him, she gives no sign. He hopes it means that his presence has given her some subconscious release from her fears.