“You shouldn’t have come,” said Batuk, wolfish. “You ruined the hunt for us.”
It seemed Batuk was not content with waiting for her fit. He struck her on the back of the head, in the place that hurt more than any other, as he knew well enough. A light flashed behind her eyes, a moan bubbled up from deep inside her, and she fell to the ground, screaming like an animal being butchered.
But no. That was not her screaming. Batuk screamed. The white-headed eagle was on top of him, scraping his face with its talons. Even in the tangle of hands and black feathers, the telltale red splashed.
The rest of the party rushed back, but they were far away. By the time they arrived, Batuk’s face was a ruin.
Khaidu retched on the ground, barely managing to avoid fouling herself with the sickness. Her body throbbed with pain, her mouth was fuzzy and tasted of metal. With an effort, she moved her tongue over the inside of her cheek—it was thick as felt and ragged. She suspected she had bitten though her tongue. Something sharp and insistent pounded at her left hip. She sobbed. To her own ears, she sounded like little more than a wounded animal. Something reptilian and repulsive, worse than a lamed horse or a sick dog.
Etchigu picked her up. His expression was difficult to read.
“Khaidu, did Batuk attack you?” he asked quietly.
She shook all over but managed to force her head up and down. Etchigu sighed.
“Then he deserved what he got. But Mamai will be furious. There’s something you must understand, little wolf. You are responsible for that eagle now. If it attacks anyone else, you will have to put it down. You do not know the pain of killing your own eagle. It is worse than losing a prize stallion.”
The hunters stopped soon afterward, warding the four corners of their makeshift camp with the ragged spirit-banners. The pain from her fit was now a dull throb. Etchigu helped her set up a stoop for her eagle inside her travel tent, as was traditional for a full-fledged hunter. Khaidu nearly burst with pride, looking at her eagle. But the eagle ignored her, staring into space for a long time, still as a statue. Khaidu fell asleep.
She woke up to someone shaking her hard. A woman. In panic, Khaidu looked at the stoop. It was empty.
“What have you done to my—?” Khaidu cried out but was struck dumb at the sight of the woman.
She was dark-haired, slim, her skin the color of olive-meat, reddening at the cheeks. But it was her dress that stopped Khaidu—heavy wine-red brocade embroidered with gold suns and moons—a dress of greater worth than the entire horse-clan of Mamai jani-Beg.
“What have you done to me?” the woman said. “Who are you? Are you a wielder of power?”
“I don’t know what you—?” Khaidu fell silent. She was talking. Like a normal person.
Khaidu looked down at herself, and her legs were rounded with muscle. They moved when she willed them to. With trembling hands, she traced the too-familiar path of the scars running down her face, but they were gone. Her face was whole, intact, symmetrical. The drooping, scarred half was as firm as a ripe pear. She was herself again.
“I am Sabíana, Darina of the Vasylli,” whispered the woman fiercely. “I am also, as you so rudely suggested, your eagle. I demand that you tell me who you are, and how you bound me to yourself.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Sirin of Fire
The morning fog, dripping wet on the spruces ringing the oval pool, was doing its best to stop the sun from rising. The sun fought half-heartedly, its light a sickly yellow. The grass, inundated with dew just on the verge of hoarfrost, shivered from the breeze as though it had lost its patience with the long winter. Voran shook with the grass and tried to remember what a beautiful sunrise felt like.
This same sort of fog had marred his last morning with Sabíana, what seemed like twenty lifetimes, not years, ago. Then, they had been young, their hearts bursting with fire. Voran had just been exiled for life by Sabíana’s father, but neither of them had expected that separation to last long. He would find the Weeping Tree. He would bring the healing power of the Living Water back to Vasyllia. He would bring the Covenant Tree back to life, restore the Covenant with Adonais, and Vasyllia would embark on a second golden age. And they would marry and live out their lives with ten children tussling by the hearth-fire.
Instead, he had hacked down the Weeping Tree, unwilling to take responsibility for its power. Vasyllia had fallen to an army of Gumiren nomads who had allied themselves with the demonic power of the Raven. And Voran had not so much as seen Vasyllia in twenty years. At first, he had tried repeatedly to return home. But the Raven had set strange traps for him. Everywhere along the way into Vasyllia, he had placed hidden doorways into other realms. It could be anything—a low tree branch leaning over a mountain path or a pool of rainwater under a tree. All Voran had to do was touch one of them by accident, and he would suddenly find himself lost in the Lows of Aer or in a different place entirely. How the Raven could manipulate the doorways so effectively, Voran had no idea. But no matter how many roads he tried, they were all impassable.
To add insult to injury, now a wall stood between Gumiren-occupied Vasyllia and the rest of the world. Voran had traveled the length and breadth of that wall, as far as humanly possible. It extended all around Vasyllia in a semicircle that ended only where the Vasyllia Mountains became virtually impassable, where the peaks were almost indistinguishable from the clouds. The peaks that the first-reachers often called “the Footstools of Adonais.” Beyond them, no Vasylli had ever ventured, and not merely because they were so tall. They were taboo. No self-respecting Three-lander would dare cross over into the unknown country on the other side, on pain of eternal damnation.
The sun exploded into life, so quickly that it took Voran by surprise. Then came the music—a soft whisper of wind whistling through reeds. So, it was not the sun after all.
A Sirin of fire materialized before Voran, her woman’s face brighter than the sun, every feather of her eagle body a golden-red flame that pulsated with light.
“You are Voran, soul-bond of Lyna, the eldest of my sisters.”
The Sirin were often prey to bouts of painful obviousness. There was a time when it had amused Voran, but in the absence of Lyna, it only irritated him.
“You are not Lyna, so-called soul-bond of Voran. I do not know you.”
She didn’t answer, though he felt the heat of her disapproval, even more intense that the light cascading from her feathers. Her feathers. They were like the flame-feather etched on his sword, given to him by Tarin the mad warrior-storyteller. The sword that he had abandoned years ago, swearing never to use it again.
“I can practically hear you saying it,” he grumbled. “Go ahead. Say it. No one has for so long. Clear the air.”
“It is your fault that Lyna avoids you.”
“And there it is!” Voran struck the trunk of a tree with an open palm. It did not make him feel better, and now his hand throbbed. “Always the same. Always the fault of the human. And what about Lyna? Where was she when I failed to heal the hundred children in Negoda? Where was she when I had no strength left to move, much less heal all those hacked down by the Internecine War? Where was she when I needed her? I became the Healer, the bearer of the only Living Water left in the Three Lands. The only person capable of stemming the blood of the wars. All those lives. All those deaths. All on my back. And do you know how heavy the water it? How it weighs on my very soul?”
Her glance was incorrigible.
“Where were you when she needed you?” she whispered.
“Do the Sirin even need us pitiful humans?”
Her fire flared, and now her eyes—they shone green in the midst of the red and orange tongues of flame—bored into him. He thought they might actually leave smoking scars on his face.
“You have seen so much, Healer. And yet you persist in your stupidity. To give love without expecting return is not the gift of the Sirin. It is the torture of the Sirin. We need your love even more than you need ours. But
we are the stronger, so we can endure more neglect. You of all people should know that.”
Only then did he notice that it wasn’t disapproval emanating from her like steam from hot springs. It was pain.
“You also have a soul-bond?”
“I did. But I broke our bond as a final gift to my beloved.”
“Who?” As soon as he asked, his heart gave him the answer.
“You know who.”
Voran’s heart tried to flip over in his chest.
“Is Sabíana…” He had to stop to catch his breath, it came in such ragged bursts. “I can’t even ask it.”
“I do not know where she is. She flew away from Vasyllia, choosing the form of the eagle.”
“Choosing…I don’t understand.”
Ox-horns blared to their right, no more than a league away. Another battle. Who would it be this time? How many brothers would shed more fraternal blood?
“Voran, I do not have much time. Listen. Do you know of our dark sister, Gamayun?”
“The bird of prophecy. She who sings the futures.”
“She has disappeared. All the Heights are in an uproar searching for her. All she left was a final prophecy.”
Voran scoffed. “Words, words, words. What do they mean anymore?”
The Sirin of fire grew into a conflagration. Voran flew back into a tree. It knocked his breath clean out of his chest.
“Silence! Believe what you will. Only listen. The infection in Vasyllia is nearing the heart. Only the lame horse, the flightless eagle, the sword-less warrior can stop it in time. Look to the East!”
The ox-horns blared again from the West. The Sirin of fire was gone.
“They speak words that make no sense. And then they leave. It’s always the same.”
Voran scraped himself off the earth. His hip throbbed. The flask of Living Water was a stone on his hip and his heart. He picked it up. It looked like a dark flower bursting from vines. He had thought it so beautiful five years ago, when he found it at the walls of Vasyllia in the hands of a dead Vasylli girl that had come back to life. What had she called it? The final sacrifice of Llun the smith.
Will his sacrifice ever bear fruit, I wonder?
He bent his back toward the ox-horns. The Healer had work to do.
CHAPTER THREE
The Strange Queen
Sabíana, the beautiful queen of that faraway kingdom that Khaidu had already forgotten the name of, paced back and forth in the small yurt. A caged animal in everything but appearance. Every three or four rounds, she stopped by the flap, seeming to assess the possibility of leaving the yurt and testing Khaidu’s binding.
Khaidu ignored her. She was too busy pushing her thumbs into the full muscle of her thighs. She couldn’t even feel the bone that usually jutted out through sickly-thin skin.
“Now that you know I am not just an eagle,” said Sabíana, “free me from that hold you placed on me!”
Khaidu shook her head, agog at the feel of her body, whole.
“I order you to release me!”
Khaidu laughed. “Command all you like. Won’t do you any good. I have no idea how to undo the binding. I’ve never read the story where the eagle comes to life as a person and asks to be released. Have you?”
“It’s not enough that I saved you from that brute who attacked you?”
“You’re bound to me,” said Khaidu, smiling at the thought. “You had no choice in the matter.”
Sabíana narrowed her eyes, her words frosty, “Even if you did know how to, you still wouldn’t release me. Am I right?”
“Look at me!” Khaidu wiggled her toes and nearly exploded in laughter. “I am whole again.”
Sabíana stopped pacing.
“Child, don’t you realize…”
“What?”
The lady’s fury seemed to soften—a change from red to pink in her cheeks. She looked at Khaidu with pity.
“No, you couldn’t possibly know. You’re not Vasylli. I can walk the nether-region of dream and weave images around me. I can also invite others into the images. In Vasyllia, I did it to soften the despair of those who lost everything. It’s…well, almost second nature by now, really.”
Khaidu’s heart fell. She should have known it was too good to be true.
“You mean that this body…it’s an illusion?” Khaidu asked, not even recognizing her own voice. “But how? Is it somehow connected to your transformation?”
Sabíana’s eyes were full of remembered pain. “No. It’s an old gift that was given to me.”
“So… I’ll wake up as a cripple again. But at least…Even one night…” Khaidu felt the self-pity creeping in on cat-like feet. It enraged her. “What could you possibly understand about it? You who are so perfect.”
Sabíana flushed violently.
“I do understand…” Sabíana tried to continue, but it was visibly difficult. “I was on my way to die.”
Khaidu was astounded by the strangeness of her. Everything about the lady spoke of wealth and health and beauty and comfort and joy. What business had she to speak of dying before her time? She was not a slithering half-broken thing.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Khaidu said.
“What are you, some Gumiren runt, that you speak to the Darina of the Three Lands thus?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, yes. I am Gumira. Didn’t you know? And we are nowhere near your Three Lands.”
That shocked the lady.
“Have I come so far then? Where is this place?”
“In the heart of the Steppelands, lady. My name is Khaidu. I am daughter to Mamai jani-Beg.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”
“Mamai’s is the lost horse-clan of the Gumiren. She leads all the ones who did not follow the Dark Father into the West. I think you’ve met our cousins who did follow him.”
Realization softened the lady’s eyes. She sank to the bare ground, her skirts like ripples of water around her. She sat there, thinking, for a long time.
“I am just as broken in body as you are, Khaidu,” she said, and even the pitch of her voice was lower, as if burdened by the weight of the truth. “You at least have strong arms. I cannot even move a finger. What you see is not me, no more than your wholeness is real. In Vasyllia, I am an animated corpse.”
Khaidu felt herself going red and hot with shame. She did not answer.
Pain crossed the lady’s face as vividly as though someone had painted it with a brush. “I chose to take the form of the eagle. I could not bear the pain anymore.”
Khaidu intuited something, and it made her angry. “Wait… Are you saying that you left your body behind willingly? That the eagle form is a new set of clothes for your spirit?”
Sabíana nodded.
“You coward!”
Sabíana snapped out of her thoughts, surprise obvious in her face.
“Would you not do the same, if you had the chance?”
Khaidu’s nails bit into her palms, and her jaw ached with the clenching. “If? We mere mortals do not have the chance. We must live in our broken bodies. We must submit to taunts and kicks and jabs. But you! You ruled a nation. You had the responsibility of thousands under your care. A little discomfort, and you lose all patience and become a bird. Flee the golden cage. What about your people? What about the sacred duty of a queen? You are disgusting!”
“Idiot,” whispered Sabíana, her face white with fury. “You have no idea what I suffered.”
Khaidu was so angry that she was unable to continue speaking. She turned over, wrapped herself in her furs, and wiggled her toes again until they cramped. Even such a cramp was pleasant compared to the usual deadness. The lady said no more, and Khaidu soon fell asleep.
When she woke, she was her broken self again.
To read the rest of The Heart of the World, purchase it by clicking here (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079ZCK1JN).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nicholas Kotar is a writer of epic fant
asy inspired by Russian fairy tales, a freelance translator from Russian to English, the resident conductor of the men's choir at a Russian monastery in the middle of nowhere, and a semi-professional vocalist. His one great regret in life is that he was not born in the nineteenth century in St. Petersburg, but he is doing everything he can to remedy that error.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE - Llun the Smith
CHAPTER TWO - The Consistory
CHAPTER THREE - Mirodara
CHAPTER FOUR - The Sons of the Swan
CHAPTER FIVE - A Deal with the Dog-man
CHAPTER SIX - The Darina of Vasyllia
CHAPTER SEVEN - The Choice
CHAPTER EIGHT - The Creation
CHAPTER NINE - The Escape
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The Curse of the Raven (Raven Son Book 2) Page 9
