No blinding flash, no thunderclap marks the passing of one life or the return of another; the sparking lights and the pounding of my own blood in my ears simply fade to calm and silence.
The witch, released, staggers to the hearth and crumples, a ball of feathers and matted hair. I rush to her but she waves me away. “Too much,” she rasps, her hoarse voice scratchy like a gull’s caw, fading as she slides into exhausted sleep. “Too much. Couldn’t stop. He’s gone....”
She’s right. Across the room lies the burnt husk that was once my brother. His unmoving figure seems to occupy only half the space it had before, the presence and vigor drained from him like wine siphoned from an oaken cask. His open staring eyes lie sunken in the hollows of his skull, his face a shriveled rictus.
My head and heart rage each against the other, weighing the thousands of lives my brother took against the single one he saved—no, two lives: mine, and now Katte’s.
Katte rises, gripping the edge of her deathbed. Her features glow with health, her eyes bright, her lips red, her beauty more perfect and pronounced than ever. “Sigra?” she says, standing straight, holding out her arms. With tears welling in my eyes for the second time that day, I stumble into her embrace.
Letting go of Katte, I draw back, reach past her to tug the linen sheet from the bed and stoop to drape it across the warlord’s son—my brother—to cover his splayed limbs, his now-hollow chest, his gaunt face.
The sound of metal sliding across metal freezes my blood as I stand and turn. The open doorway frames the faces of the Mekklan warriors, their polished leathers gleaming dully in the cottage gloom, their beards and trinkets and strange Mekklan scents overwhelming among the witch’s herbs and linens and gullfeathers.
The metal scraping had been the sound of the foremost warrior sliding his sword from its sheath. My stomach churns with icewater even as fearful laughter bubbles in my chest. Will these strange, brutal men blame me for their leader’s death? Will they blame Katte? The witch?
My neck tingles, preparing to be slit.
The man steps forward, all iron and leather and jangle. I move without thinking, shifting to stand in front of Katte. On the floor near my hooves I feel keenly the presence of the shrouded form of the dead heir of Mekk. Heat rises from the body: the heat of life and healing and love and death.
The warrior lifts his sword and my heart skips. “Warlord’s daughter,” he calls out, his voice as steely as the weapon slicing the air in a descending arc toward me. But he drops into a kneel, and my heart resumes its beat when I see the sword he thrusts in my direction is aimed hilt-first. He meets my eyes briefly before bowing his head, his expression inexorable, inscrutable in the manner of his people. “Long live the heir to Mekk,” he says.
The eleven men behind him ripple, a wave of creaking leather and tarnished tinkling bells as they sink to their knees. Long live the warlord’s daughter, they rumble. Long live the heir to Mekk.
Mekk. A place I’ve never seen, never known, with a ruler and a history and a people I’ve been taught all my life to loathe and fear. All but one: Katte, a lonely outsider like myself, whose words of love sent from an enemy land across a narrow sea have kept me sane.
No, not from an enemy land. Those words may have come from the sister of my heart, but also from my true home; from a home I’ve not seen since birth—a home I now must learn to love and rule. Mekk.
* * *
This is how I choose to remember it....
My brother is alive and well. He’s strong, perhaps stronger than he was in life, and good—certainly better than the man who killed thousands and left an entire realm leaderless, with its counselors and champions and regent dead under the pile of smoking rubble where once the mighty fortress of Toth stood for a thousand years.
And had that brother grown to be the man he might’ve been, the man he could’ve been, and I the sister by his side, what then? Might Toth still stand? Might it even now be united in friendship with the realm across the narrow sea?
Would that I could meet that man; would that I could know him, and be proud to call him brother.
But best of all is the childhood I construct for us, build for us like a castle in the sand on shore, as any child might. He’s a dark-eyed boy of nine years old, now ten, now twelve; and I a little girl of two, of three, of five. This brother is also strong and good, his fused hand like a lump of hardened clay when he places it in mine and we run together on the beach, splashing, laughing—not the familiar bitter laughter I know so well, but the happy, singsong laughter of playing children....
This is merely how I choose to remember it, as I raise a hand to shield my eyes and peer out toward the ruined cliffs of Toth from the walls of Mekk; merely how I indulge in remembering it as Katte and I walk along the ancient salt-worn stones lapped by the same waters I’ve known all my life, though from the other side of the narrow sea.
And in my imaginings, it is so.
Copyright © 2010 Camille Alexa
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When not on ten wooded acres near Austin, Texas, Camille Alexa lives in an Edwardian home in Portland, Oregon with an assortment of broken fossils, dried hops flowers, twisted willow branches, and other very pretty dead things. Her first book, Push of the Sky, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the 2010 Endeavour Award for outstanding speculative fiction by a Pacific Northwest author. Find more information and an updated bibliography at camillealexa.com.
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COVER ART
“Into the Unknown,” by Kerem Beyit
Kerem Beyit is a freelance artist born in Ankara, Turkey. He started drawing in his early childhood with the influence of comic books, and he trained himself from great fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta and Gerald Brom. He has won Master and Excellence Awards from Exposé 7, and his artwork has been used for covers of European editions of fantasy novels by Tad Williams and George R.R. Martin. Visit his website and gallery at www.theartofkerembeyit.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2010 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
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