“Freya?”
“It was hers—”
“Then she wasn’t as in love with him as he thought,” I said to myself, frowning as I swept all my loose thoughts into one basket, making sense of them.
“It would not surprise me,” Theo said. “She may have been once, but when she learned of his dealings with the devil—what he did to his daughters—I’m not sure she truly ever looked at him in the same way.”
“What he did to them?”
“Killing them.”
I frowned, confused. “Why did he kill them if none of them would’ve lived past eight days anyway? And why would his lack of an immortal partner mean all his children die?”
“I have only theorized thus far, and all I have come up with is that he needs to mate with an immortal woman. Perhaps, since my father is an abomination, nature will not permit him to mix his seed with a pure, mortal lifeform. Perhaps, unless he mates with another abomination such as himself, every life born from it will perish, as if it were a defect that mother nature must correct to restore the natural order of things.”
“But they were just babies. It’s not their fault.” I touched a nameplate delicately, wondering about this massive army we were supposed to have. “So… none of them survived?”
“Not one.”
“Then there’s no army?”
“No. The rumors of it are enough to deter others.”
My hand dropped back to my side and a hot rage filled me. “Then why does he keep having more babies?”
Theo’s face opened up in surprise at the volume of my voice. The words echoed for a moment, carrying around the room like the rage of the oppressed.
Reverently, almost too calm, he shook his head. “Last week, I confronted him with my new knowledge—that he was not born the son of Carne. And he did not deny it. He told me simply that he prays to Carne, offers sacrifices so that he will forgive him for taking on immortal form.”
“So, what… he thinks Carne is killing his babies to punish him?”
“Yes. And he will not listen to reason. He will not take a scientific explanation.” Theo started getting louder. “He will keep taking wives in the hopes that their blood may be the next to bear a living son, and the closest we’ve gotten to him accepting that he must breed with a unique type of woman is when he chose you. A half wolf.”
“He thinks I can make a difference?”
“Yes. But you won’t. I know that now. He needs an immortal woman. Most likely one made from the same spell he was.”
“Can we find him one?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because there are no witches left, Red. He killed them all—at least, every Raven witch.”
“Raven witch?”
“The Ravens were a coven that once owned these lands.”
“What?”
Theo’s shoulders sunk and he pressed his lips into a thin smile. “Come on. It’s time you learned the truth about your pack.”
***
People were edgy. Any day now Luther would return to find his wife gone, and someone was going to pay. I knew I should be edgy too, but I just didn’t care after what Theo told me. He didn’t scare me. The Great Luther Reave of Ravenswood was just a manmade wolf with anger issues and very little modern intelligence. I could probably convince him the next eclipse was a result of my supreme imaginary power.
The afternoon sun sat at the peak of the west tower, right above my room; and for a moment, before we entered the door underneath it, I could see my lonely face looking out, wishing for a better life. Somehow, a part of me felt like I was on the cusp of something better, but I didn’t know why.
“Theo?” I said softly in the quiet of the west entrance. There were no staff around, no one even passing by, but I still kept my next words hushed. “You never answered my question before.”
“Which one?”
“Why did Luther kill all the baby girls if they were going to die anyway? And why aren’t they buried with the boys?”
“They are not buried with the boys because there is nothing left of them to bury.”
“Nothing left of them?”
“He didn’t kill them, Red,” he added, closing the front door. “He sacrificed them to Carne.”
I stopped dead, taking hold of the wall and focusing on my cold, wet toes to stop from passing out. I could see them all—hundreds of sweet-faced babies on altar tables… “Why would he do that?”
“When you lie to yourself for so long, eventually, you start to believe it.”
“What do you mean?”
“It began with the death of my mother and the murder of my sister, and became what I am now certain is madness.” Theo walked, so I followed, but instead of taking a corridor or the stairs, he stopped right in front of the decorative wall panel with its artistic carvings that formed a two-inch thick frame around each one.
“You think he went mad after he killed his own daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, but you’re not mad. So why didn’t you have him committed or something?”
“I may not be mad, Red, but I was undereducated—kept here away from the world just as you have been. I never questioned him until more recently, because I never realized there was a need to.”
“How could you not—”
“The world makes sense to you in a different way, because you were given an education from an early age. A modern education. Science. Medicine. Religion. For me, it has only been blind faith and curiosity. I believed inward and outward that my father was a god, and I believed every one of his daughters was damned to kill its mother—an act, my father told me, of revenge; a curse placed on him as he killed the Raven Lord and all his family.” Theo lowered his head and his voice shamefully. “I believed that every apparently cursed daughter he sacrificed would bring him happiness in the form of a living son.”
“So what changed?”
He pressed his mouth into a tight line, angling his head to the panel as he brought a finger up to a carved depiction of a winged woman. “I looked beyond what I could already see.”
“What is that?” I came closer and got on my toes to look at it properly.
“My mother. Daughter of The Raven—a man who was both Lord of the Raven witches and the former king of these lands in a time at least a century after all werewolves had been wiped off the earth, and barely a decade before they returned. He was not a great king, but a mighty one. An even mightier warrior. Respected and revered.” He slid his finger along the carving to show a king with the head of a raven, sitting on a throne with carved beams of light shining out of his hand. “And, as I told you earlier, also a member of a powerful witch family.”
“Real witches?”
“Yes.”
Things started making sense. I could see shape to Luther’s past, knowing he was made by a witch.
“My father came from a wealthy family, who owned many lands. But The Raven raided those lands and killed his parents, taking everything for himself.”
“And he vowed revenge?” I said with a half-smile, because it was just so typical of the times.
“That he did, little Red. His vengeful undertaking led him to a land across the sea, where he sought out this Raven witch and challenged him to a duel—the victor taking everything the defeated owned.
“It was laughable that a young man could hope to defeat a powerful warrior, and witch at that. But my father’s heart was filled with vengeance—a potent and powerful emotion—and little did anyone know, he had been trained by the great warrior Bayon Black, who I named my firstborn son after.”
“So Luther won the duel?”
“He did.” Theo pointed to a carving of many little soldiers with their swords at their feet. “See, Luther did not fight the warrior, the king, or even the witch; he fought the foolish man’s ego. All my father had to his name at the time was a lucrative tanning business, but he risked it all for the sheer joy of finishing what he started a decade ago. W
in or lose.
“After The Raven Lord’s bloody death—” he pointed to another carving, “—all his lands and all the riches he’d stolen became Father’s, as did the people. Father killed all that were loyal to the old king and Lord, keeping the daughter alive for his own amusement.”
“The winged girl? Your mother?”
“Yes. But he fell in love with her. And then, rather than tearing this mansion down and making it his own, he built on it, both literally and metaphorically—as he did with my mother.” Theo turned and nodded to the colored glass window overlooking this corridor. “You can see in which time period each wing of this mansion was built by studying the embellishments.”
Up there, preserved eternally in glass, a mighty raven sat above a forest, and in the window beside it was a king with a raven’s head and wings, but a man’s body.
“Did they have wings—the Raven and his daughter?”
“No.” He laughed. “The raven was merely a symbol—a bad omen, you might say—representative of the destruction, the fear he brought on his neighbors and all who crossed him.”
“So… Raven, and woods.” It clicked. “I always thought we were the Ravenswood pack because there’s a lot of Ravens in the woods here.”
Theo laughed again. “I suppose many believe that. But no, we are the Ravenswood pack because my father married a Raven witch and she, later, cast a spell that made him an immortal wol—”
“How did she do it? I mean, what made her choose to make him a wolf?”
“A conqueror, in those times, was often referred to as a wolf. You might see a wolf on his family crest if he had had many victories, so it was only natural that they would choose such a powerful and majestic beast to bind the spell. However, she did not use wolf blood for her own immortality spell.”
“What did she use?”
“Raven blood. In honor of her defeated family. And after that, the union of the wolf and the raven, they became known as the Ravenwolfs.” He lowered his head sadly. “But time changed that.”
“How?”
“After Mother died, Father became somewhat of a recluse. He sold off many of the lands he’d won in the same kinds of battles that got him the Raven lands, and he hid away long enough for fact to become myth, and for no one to remember his name. Sometime in the seventeen-hundreds, he grew bored of his loneliness and left his self-imposed prison to gather a pack.”
“Gather one?”
“Yes. I had always been by his side, the ever-faithful son, and when my sons had sons, and those children went on to have sons, and so on—eventually forgetting their Ravenwolf roots—moon beasts had become great in number and somewhat out of control. Father brought law and order, established packs, taught them to hunt game instead of humans. He rebuilt his empire, but with his heart torn by my mother’s betrayal—her death—he could not bear to speak the old pack name, and so we became the Ravenswood Pack.
“Time moved on then, and as his fortune grew around him so too did the number of dead sons and wives, and his madness, or what I now know to be madness, grew deeper. Then, after his second love Freya died in 1814, he once again became a recluse—divided the packs and sold off lands, keeping enough money to sustain him for a few centuries—hiding away here in the Ravenswood mansion.” I watched his fingertip make a line from one portion of the carvings to another. “All of this is written right here for anyone to see, if they so cared to do so. But no one ever has. No one has ever questioned him, not even I.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I offered, both of us breaking apart for a moment as a slave passed, apologetic, and scurried away to the other corridor. “Most people never do question their parents. Not even those educated from birth, like I have been.”
Theo nodded gratefully. “I appreciate that, Red.”
I offered a regretful smile. Poor Theo. After all these centuries, knowing what he knows now, thinking with a more modern head, he must feel like a stupid idiot. As much as I liked Theo, he was kind of an idiot for believing Luther, but that judgment came from a place of higher education, so it wasn’t fair to him really.
“So why did your mother die?” I asked, exhaling to release all the pent-up emotion. “I mean, if not even a knife to the heart could kill Luther, how could a baby kill Anora?”
“My baby sister didn’t kill my mother.” He walked away, stopping in front of the stained glass window, the reds and blues leaving colored squares over his face. “Women die sometimes in childbirth. It happens. But it is never the child’s fault.”
“But he thinks they’re all cursed—”
“Because he thought she was immortal. They had not tested the bounds of their mortality at that point. But there were things that could kill them. Both of them.”
“Like what?” My ear tuned eagerly in to this response.
Theo laughed once sardonically, but didn’t look at me. Didn’t answer me.
“Is that it?” I asked, grasping at straws. “Can his daughters kill him? Do they have like, magic blood or—”
“No. Nothing like that,” he said with another, this time gentler laugh. “Those babies were just babies. Nothing more. He killed my sister because he was enraged, believed it to be her fault Mother died when, in truth, mother was never truly immortal to begin with.”
“She wasn’t?”
“Not to my knowledge.” He lifted his hand and pressed the sturdy ring there between two fingers, rocking it around.
“What’s that?”
“This?” He sighed, curling his hand inward to look at it. “It’s our old family crest—the one from when I was a boy—consisting of a running wolf with a raven set upon its back; the circle is the moon by which they draw their power.” He held up his hand and showed me the ring. At first I couldn’t make out the raven; it just looked like the wolf had wings. But she was there, set against its back.
“Ravenwolf,” I said to myself.
Theo nodded. “What my father did not know then, and will not admit today, is that my mother did not truly love him. To save herself from her captor’s cruelty she played a role, won him over with false love. She knew she could bear a life with him, but not an eternity. So she lied about her reasons for using raven’s blood in the spell in order to disguise the fact that she was creating a potion for herself that cured illness and age, but not injury. That way,” he added sadly, “she could control at least one thing in her life.”
“That one thing being her death,” I said with a nod. And wow. A huge portion of me just felt kind of sorry for Luther. Until I thought about the sacrifices, and then I was glad Anora did that! If she were here, I’d have high-fived her.
I turned back to the wall panel and studied them with my arms folded. All of this truth had been here for centuries—carved out for anyone to see. And now I knew what Theo meant earlier when he said, “I looked beyond what I could already see.” I mean, wow, when he realized the truth, that must have been like a profound brain bomb going off.
Dead now, the beautiful winged Anora would forever look out from the wood frame, perhaps one day a reminder to all that there were ways to escape your captors, or even the proverbial confines of a sheltered or sad life. You just had to be clever. You just had to fight.
I took from that message that I had to rise above it, not let it take me down, and I was resolved then to fight. To choose a future for myself that didn’t have Luther in it, no matter what threats were imposed against me.
He didn’t own me. I wouldn’t sit by any longer and let him.
I glanced back at Theo and as I took in his sadness, I saw a small boy there instead of the strong, fully grown man. His whole world had just fallen apart for him recently, and he was busy reshaping his reality. I knew it would take time, but I also saw in him an ally now, even more so than before. I just wasn’t sure how wide his bubble of disdain extended past himself, toward his father.
“So, when did you realize the truth?” I probed, motioning to the carvings. “And what do you intend to do about it?�
��
“It was shortly after you arrived.” He walked over and leaned on the wall in front of me, his hands behind his back. “Katy said the gender of a child’s birth was not owed to the mother’s desires, but rather to science. Of course I didn’t understand that then. How could science determine the gender of one of God’s or Carne’s creatures? So I opened a computer for the first time and, after some awkward navigation and a few soul-changing images scaring my mind, came across an encyclopedia within the world of the web—”
“The internet. Or world wide web, you know… www-dot.”
“Right. Is that what that stands for?”
“Yep.”
“Well, I spent three days reading. Researching. Looking at myself in the mirror and wondering how I was ever so blind and downright foolish.”
“Without ever being taught, how would you know? How would you even know you didn’t know?”
Theo laughed. “That is what I’ve told myself. And what the kind people of the forum told me also.”
“The forum?”
“There is a place where one can ask any question they desire, no matter how insane, to which kind people come to answer it, in often,” he said with a laugh, “bold and cruel ways, almost unreadable ways.”
I laughed hard, my cheeks filling with warmth and removing some of the winter sting. “Don’t blame yourself too much for not knowing, Theo. This place is pretty far removed. Look how much Katy knew, and look at her now.”
“Yes.” He walked over to a banner hanging on the wall and touched the tassels. “I will live a long life of regret for some of the things my father has done—things that happened while I stood by, ignorant—”
“Then tell me you’re going to do something about it.” I rushed forward to stand beside him, desperate to catch this whisper of remorse and shape it into action. “You can fight him; you can—”
“I’m no match for him, Red. And his followers are loyal and—”
“They’re not,” I demanded. “I bet if you look into the eyes of each slave, of each goon and each wolf, you’ll see that they don’t love him all that much.”
Theo’s face changed, as though this was a revelation.
Red: The Untold Story Page 21
