by Beth Ball
“Anything, Father.”
“The beast you hear is the last remaining child of the alpha. If allowed to live, it will try to turn the werewolves against us, which will put all of our people in danger. Is that something you want?”
Rennear hadn’t heard a beast. He had only heard a girl. Was the beast threatening her? Father wasn’t making sense. Why would they wait so long to help her? Rennear didn’t know what to say.
The metal door of the arena clanged open. Talax emerged, pushing a struggling young woman in front of him, his grip tight on her arms. Thin, dirty rags barely covered her body. Rennear looked away, but Father rose and clamped his hand on Rennear’s head, twisting him back to face the arena. The girl was older than he’d thought, in her early teens, but very thin. She tried again to wrench herself free of Talax’s grasp, but he was too strong. The large werewolf murmured something in her ear. He threw his head back and laughed. Her large brown eyes darted around the chamber until they landed on Rennear and his father.
Rennear had never seen eyes blaze with such hatred before, but her gaze glowed. She gnashed her teeth then, snarling. Her canines lengthened.
Father grinned and held out his hand toward Captain Gustaf. The man withdrew a dagger from the bandolier strapped to his chest, and Father knelt once more and tucked the dagger into Rennear’s hand. “It’s up to you, son. Will you do what it takes to protect our people?”
His mouth fell open. Surely Father could not be asking him to slaughter this girl. Her growls rose up all around him, shaking the walls alongside Talax’s laughter.
“Climb down, son.” Father pushed him toward the stone stair, and Rennear walked over slowly. Father and Captain Gustaf followed.
He turned at the base of the stairs to survey the arena as his fighting masters had taught him. Talax stood smiling. A small but fully transformed werewolf writhed in his arms. “At your command, Senator.”
Father nodded.
In a whirl of fur, the young woman tore free from Talax and leapt at the guard beside him. The man screamed and fell to the ground, clutching his neck. Rennear froze. He had practiced sword fighting in the training yard, but nothing like this. The metal blades he had used before were blunted or covered.
The dagger in his hand gleamed bright silver.
A silvered blade for killing werewolves.
The werewolf spun away from the fallen guard, snarling at Rennear. She rushed forward.
Still he could not move.
“Captain.” Father’s voice was low and even.
The captain stepped forward between the sprinting werewolf and Rennear, blocking her path. She lunged, clawing and biting until she found a weak spot in his armor near his elbow.
Captain Gustaf cried out and fell to the ground.
The werewolf girl’s dark eyes darted back and forth between Rennear and Father.
“Rennear, it’s time.”
At Father’s words, the girl’s slathering jaws spread wide in a grin. She twisted in the sand and bounded toward the senator.
Mother had been so cold when he found her. The women who helped her, who had been by her side through her long sickness, held one another and sobbed. Rennear had curled up beside her and cried, holding her hand and begging her to come back to him, to not leave him alone.
The healers had pried his hands loose, and Father had stood, stern and stricken, by the door. His jaw twinged as they carried her body from the room.
They’d covered her casket in blue flowers.
He couldn’t lose Father too.
Rennear threw himself into the girl’s side, knocking them both to the ground. She sprang to her feet and howled in rage. Rennear crawled away as she stalked nearer. He’d dropped the shining dagger just out of reach.
In a single bound, she landed on top of his chest, pinning him against the sand. Her saliva speckled over his face, and a red glow shone behind her eyes.
The wild evil Father had spoken of.
Her jaw clamped down on his neck, and Rennear screamed in pain.
A soft hiss above him, and her jaw slackened. The werewolf’s body toppled to the side as Father withdrew his sword.
Solid footsteps stomped nearer, and a brawny arm wrapped around Rennear’s waist and pulled him away. Talax held him tight to his chest.
Father scooped Rennear’s discarded silver dagger from the sand and sank it deep into the werewolf girl’s heart. “I will free you and your people from this weakness, Talax,” he said. Father withdrew the silvered blade with a flourish. “And from the tyranny of the moons.”
The girl lay still, her blood staining the surrounding sand.
Father rose, fixing his gaze on his son. “This is your destiny, Rennear. You will lead elite troops the likes of which this city has never before seen. A true alpha. Talax will show you the way.”
Rennear’s body convulsed as the lycanthropy took hold. His head slammed back, jarring his senses. “Father!” he screamed.
But Father walked away across the sand.
“Fear not, little master,” the werewolf holding him growled, “the moons have much to show you. And then, you will lead a pack all your own.”
Chapter 17
“WHERE ROOTS REMAIN”
As Cassandra taught us, we retell the stories that first bound our destiny. These stories make us her chosen people. Their telling reaffirms who we are.
In one of these first stories, a young saudad lost her mother at too early an age. The two alone of their muster escaped Orison’s fall, the city’s destruction claiming their family’s tragic fate. It was all the mother could do to see her daughter safely to shore. She hid her inside an ancient forest, its wisdom vast, its canopy great.
Though the child could never have known it then, Cassandra smiled upon her still. It is a truth we hold dear to heart—the goddess of fate abandons us not. No saudad walks the worlds on their own.
The goddess called upon souls nearby to join the young saudad. Spirits of the earth wept with the girl, and the waters trembled, edging near.
The air alone knew what to do.
Gentle breezes awakened faery spirits and sent them to the girl’s side. They drifted around her, holding aloft glowing orbs of colorful light. “Come away with us,” they called.
But the girl, set adrift on her internal sea, refused their invitation. “I cannot leave my mother’s spirit here alone,” she said.
One by one, the faeries nodded. “We will come back for you tomorrow.”
As each new evening saw its dawn, the faeries returned, carrying dusk on flitting wings. “You will come away with us today,” they sang.
But the girl again declined. “Who beyond myself will watch over her grave?” She had not yet heard of the spirits of the earth, wind, and trees.
The faery chorus knew of a verdant land where the saudad’s spirit could revive and renew. There they would teach her their magic and stories. There they would share what they knew.
Whatever the girl had chosen for herself, they could not leave her to such a bleak and lonely fate.
As she again turned down their offer, the heart of the youngest faery was the first to break. “How are we to show her a world she does not know?” the faery wondered aloud.
Her question flickered across the anxious faces of her fluttering friends. Such small beings, their hearts resting high, just beneath the coverings of their chests.
“She is right,” the others cried. One by one, they flew away. Tempered moonlight and the stars cast their glow upon their wings.
The girl looked up as the flutter ceased. One small faery, the one who had spoken first, remained. “Why do you wait here with me?” asked the girl. The sharp edge of hurt glittered in her tone.
“Because no one should have to mourn alone.”
For three days, the faery sat by the girl’s side as she tended to her mother’s grave. “She was the boss of our muster,” the girl explained. “She carried our courage, our destination, in her heart.”
&n
bsp; As dusk returned in deep orange light, a flower rose from the surface of the earthen mound.
The girl’s eyes were wide as she addressed her faery friend. “What do you think it means?”
“We shall see,” the faery replied. For though she knew, the truth was for the girl’s heart to descry.
As the days continued on, the saudad added garlands to her mother’s earth-covered tomb. Each day, the flower blossomed, petals outstretching into bloom.
Your mother’s spirit speaks, the faery longed to say. She knows the hearts of earth and sea, of sky and trees, and seeks to share them with you.
A quiet wisdom stilled the faery’s words with a melody all its own—Understanding comes with time. It needs a chance to grow.
Every winter finds its spring, as so many stories show. The same was true for this our tale, of girl and faery, love and woe.
In time, the saudad came to perceive the unique offerings nature made, how each carried her mother’s cherished memory. Their times on horseback returned on the fragrant breeze. Her welcoming arms that pulled her daughter along on adventures were traced in the delicate, angling reach of the trees. And by the brook, the way her mother laughed as she sang echoed back to the girl. Finally, the earth’s embrace, which now cradled her mother’s body, returned the girl to herself, her mooring reattained.
“Do you miss your faery friends?” she asked her companion one day.
“Of course I do.” The faery smiled. “I have ever since they went away. But something compelled me to stay by your side—”
“So that I would not mourn alone?”
“Yes,” the faery continued, “but it was more than such a sense on its own.” Her tiny features contorted, scowling bark, furious wings. “We have so much more to show you,” she said. “The world is richer still than it seems.”
A single tear fell from the girl’s eye as she looked back upon her mother’s grave. “Go now, cher’a,” she heard her mother say, “you carry my spirit with you, on this and every day.” The magic flower then lifted her head and stretched up to the sky. “Take me with you, as a sign. We all must live and die.”
Her hand trembled as she cupped the fragile flower in her palm. “But there is no need for you to die today.”
“With the two of us together,” the faery carefully said, “she continues to live on.”
The girl sighed and ever so carefully plucked the flower at her stem.
Bright red blossoms shuddered. They opened and closed—and she heard the flower’s voice again. “Still I blossom, still I bloom, so long as my roots remain. Go along from here, sweet saudad child. Inside your heart, dwells always your domain.”
Girl and faery took up the floral song as they walked over field and fen. From this great loss, love and stories did their work—they offered healing to those who remained.
Chapter 18
Cerdris ran his fingers through his hair. “Hold on, Persephonie,” he said, scowling at the storyteller on the opposite side of the table, “so are you saying that Faela was or wasn’t in love with Meris?” Persephonie had spent the last hour setting up the love between a saudad man and a fae who stood at crossed fates only for the fae to turn from her love for a different path.
“Both.” She stared back at him as if this response was completely expected instead of falling outside the norms of every story he had heard and loved. Persephonie giggled at his confusion and took another sip of her wine. “Faela loved Meris, but in her heart, she loved her forest more, and it was her forest who truly needed her.”
He thumped his forearms onto the tabletop. “That’s it? Her forest needs her more, so she sacrifices herself for the forest and never sees Meris again?”
“No, of course not.” Persephonie sighed and shook her head, adopting an exasperated expression she seemed to have plucked straight from Tess. She scrunched her lips together, mulling over how best to explain the gaps in the story to him. “Let us try this way. Competing loves are not difficult to understand, are they?”
He shook his head. “They’re relatively common in most storytelling traditions.”
Persephonie pointed her finger at him. “Perhaps that is the problem.” She continued before he could object. “You want each story to fit neatly into a place beside other stories, as though they make up one single tapestry that you could visit, or like they could be crammed together in a library or something.” She leaned back and crossed her arms, her eyes narrowly focused as though she evaluated an invisible masterpiece. “But stories do not work that way.” Her abrupt tone dissipated the illusion.
She drummed her fingers against her lips. “Alright, Cassandra would explain it like this—we are the tapestry, and the stories are the threads. We exist inside of them, not the other way around.”
Cerdris frowned. That wasn’t possible—
Persephonie grinned at his doubt. “I do not know what more to tell you that will help you to believe me beyond that one day, you will see.” She shrugged and slid out of the booth. “I need to see if Tess needs help in the back before I leave.”
“Hmm, as you wish, Mistress Persephonie.” Now he was the one imitating one of Tess’s gestures, in this case, their dubious eye-roll. “Enjoy the concert tonight,” he called after her. Only a few weeks in the city, and already she had caught the attention of the captain of the guard, Patron Ignatius.
Her long hair swung over her shoulder as she glanced back at him. “Oh, I will.” He could have sworn the tavern lights flared around her when she smiled.
Cerdris lifted his goblet, toasting her and her exciting evening. Tess would be along in a few minutes to refill his glass, and then he would need to hide for an hour or so before Patron Ignatius arrived. Though he had promised Otmund he wouldn’t, he was determined to ensure that Persephonie wasn’t about to fall into a trap of some sort designed by the patron’s father. Otmund had mentioned that Persephonie and her mother had ties to the Untamed, which meant that any mixing with the senator’s son was dangerous at best, fatal—or more—at worst.
Two hours later, he peered out from behind the bushes as the black coach slowed to a stop in front of the Green Owl. Seeing the patron up close, Cerdris thought Persephonie’s lack of caution made more sense, but still. There were plenty of handsome men in Andel-ce Hevra. He had met several last week alone—
Persephonie laughed as she traipsed after Patron Ignatius, who gallantly handed her into the carriage and sprang in after her. With the sharp thwack of the reins, the carriage rolled away across the cobblestones.
That was that, and what had he to show for his snooping aside from a throbbing in his left knee from squatting in the dirt for too long?
Ten paces away from the tavern, Cerdris whirled around, alerted by the sound of an overturned pebble behind him. Persephonie’s fox, Juliet, stared up at him with wide amber eyes, her head tilted to the side.
“Hello there.” He mimicked the gesture. “Should you be out here on your own?”
Juliet bounded away down a side street, and Cerdris called out in alarm, chasing after her as best he could in his worn leather shoes. Add new soles to the list of things to replace once Drugas gets back to me about the advance. Surely the guard had received news of his find by now . . .
Cerdris skidded to a stop and rested his hand against his chest as Juliet spun in a circle at the end of the alley. “What’re you after, foxy?” He frowned and crouched down, pulling his breeches up to grant his thighs more space. His left knee twinged at being once again subjected to this cramped position.
“Mewl,” Juliet yawn-cried at him. Even after their fourth storytelling session together, he couldn’t understand the fox’s sounds or expressions without Persephonie’s help.
“Wouldn’t you like to come with me?” He opened his arms wide, inviting Juliet into his embrace. Otmund would undoubtedly be irritated at seeing him return so soon after he had promised to leave earlier that afternoon, but why would he be so quick to turn away one of his favorite patrons? And r
eturning the fox was a perfect excuse. Would Otmund believe Juliet had found him?
The alley shadows deepened, and a hush fell, as though he had suddenly ducked his head below water. A low, rumbling voice spoke from the sudden shadows. “Like isn’t quite the word I would use, no.”
Chapter 19
Persephonie leaned her head against Rennear’s shoulder as the carriage took them through the dark city streets. Her stomach still fluttered at the memory of his lips pressed to hers during the magical mermaid song. Their kiss was a different intimacy from the story he had shared the night before, a picture of his past that he had entrusted into her keeping. She held the fragile butterfly in her hand, clutched closely against the light of her heart.
With his hand wrapped around her hip, he had led her through the crowd to his carriage. Rennear handed her in and directed the coachmen to one of the private parks in City Central. Lamplight flickered across the windows as they rode. He held her hand in his lap as she gazed over the sleeping city. The mermaid’s music drifted through her mind, punctuated by the staccato clomping of the horses’ hooves.
“Are you sure that we can go to this park, Rennear? My mother warned me away from it on one of my first visits here as a child. I was following a butterfly, and she stopped me just before the guards did.”
He traced the back of her hand with his thumb. “You can go anywhere in the city that you want whenever you’re with me.”
“But I will still be me there.” The werewolves’ attack in the alley behind Otmund’s pub sat heavy in the silence between them.
Rennear leaned closer. His bronze eyes flared as they passed a street lantern. “And that is precisely why I want to be wherever you are.”
Their breath mingled. Persephonie closed the space between them, pressing her lips, her chest, her stomach into his. Rennear held her tight against him, and she wrapped her arms around the back of his neck.
