Bloodflower

by K. J. Harrowick

  Great. Barely twenty minutes below deck and already he made demands. She needed sleep, and curling up in Jon’s arms to do it sounded just fine to her.

  Jàden crouched near her saddle bags and pulled out a set of clothes. All were soaked through except a pair of breeches and a single over-shirt. She pulled them on, along with a pair of dry socks, shoving the data pad under a blanket. The rest of her clothes she tacked to the wall, hoping they’d leach out the moisture.

  “Let’s go,” Thomas said.

  She followed, untangling her wet hair with her fingers. The others ignored her. Jàden glanced back at the entry, hoping Jon might meet her eyes for some small measure of comfort, but he was hunched over his ankle, stitching his wound.

  The loneliness crept in, widening the hole in her chest. She wove her hair into a loose braid and tied off the end, every inch of her body screaming in pain. Fire burned in her hip as they entered the midship galley.

  A box built into the middle of the floor held sand around an iron pot. Flames crackled from the burning wood inside, the fire’s orange tongues reaching through the grate to a pot chained over the top.

  Thomas dished a bowl of gruel and shoved it in her hands. He nodded toward the table. “Eat.”

  “I’m not…” She pressed her mouth closed under his intense gaze. Hungry.

  Jàden grabbed a spoon and sat at the table, curling her legs tight around the bench so she didn’t fall backward each time the ship rocked. She shoved her spoon into the steaming blob of food, pushing it around to release the heat against her face.

  Thomas tossed a second bowl onto the table and sat across from her. “You’ll eat what I put in front of you, every meal.”

  She tightened her fingers around the spoon and opened her mouth to speak.

  “You’ve got no strength and no fire in your eyes. Ain’t been a female Rakir in more than a thousand years, but Captain says you need to fight like one. So for now, I have two rules: stay dry and stay alive.” He nodded at her food. “The sooner you eat, the sooner you sleep.”

  Jàden stared hard at the food in her bowl. Two bowls. She’d never be able to force it down without throwing half of it back up.

  She never should have made that deal. Though, the moment she thought it, Kale’s voice burrowed into her head, whispering for her to be strong.

  Determined to fight Thomas for sleep first, fatigue pulled at her senses, and she shoved the first spoonful into her mouth, followed by the second. The sooner she found Kale, the sooner they’d be off Sandaris. Off Hàlon. Maybe then she could control her connection to the Flame before it consumed her. Before she turned into a planet-eating monster.

  An ache lanced across her stomach as she finished the first bowl. Barely two bites into the second and the pain grew sharper. She couldn’t shove any more in, not without her stomach twisting it back up. She leaned her head against her hand, closing her eyes for a moment to rest.

  Thomas slammed the table with his hand. “Wake up.”

  She jumped, meeting his intense gaze. A sparse blond beard grew along his jaw. Yet for the ferocity in his eyes, Thomas’s features were surprisingly youthful. He massaged one of his arms but pinned her with his eyes.

  “No sleep until you’re done eating.” He nodded toward her bowl.

  “Could have waited until tomorrow.” Not like I didn’t just save Theryn’s life. But it was Mather in her thoughts now as guilt pushed tears into her eyes.

  “Yesterday is too soon, tomorrow is too late,” he said.

  Jàden had no idea what he meant, but she was too tired to care. She shoved her spoon into the gruel, side-eyeing Thomas’s movements. “I can help with your pain.”

  “No one can help.” Thomas stopped rubbing as if he was fine but still held tension in his arms.

  Sighing deeply, she dropped her spoon and held out her hand. “Give me your arm.”

  “Eat, Jàden.”

  “Do you want to sleep tonight or be in pain?” Her grandfather’s horses sometimes got muscle cramps, and she’d gotten pretty good at working out the aches.

  Thomas laid his wrist in her hand and said nothing.

  She untied the bracer on his arm and pushed up his sleeve. His pale skin was hairy and freckled, with a nasty scar near his elbow. Tracing her fingers along the inside of his arm, his skin hot to the touch, she massaged from his wrist to his elbow.

  “What happened here?” She touched his scar.

  “Just an old wound.” His tone was biting and cold as the corded muscles in his forearm tightened.

  Must be a sore subject. Jàden continued massaging, taking the occasional bite of gruel. But as she worked each of the aches out, Thomas visibly relaxed and even seemed to feel some relief from the pain.

  It took nearly another hour for her to finish eating, woken three times by Thomas’s slap against the weathered wood. When she finally scraped the last bite out, she shoved her bowl toward him and covered her mouth.

  “Good, go take care of your wounds and get some rest.” He pulled down his sleeve and tied the bracer back on. “We start training in a few hours.”

  Oh goody. The food burned in her throat. Jàden didn’t argue, moving like molasses away from the table and down the narrow corridor. She kept one hand over her mouth as the ship rocked. Her shoulder slammed against the wall. Eyelids grew heavy.

  How long since she’d slept? Nearly two days by her count.

  She stumbled into the bow, the horses blanketed and resting with their heads hung low.

  Theryn and Dusty curled up near Andrew, Ashe keeping watch and sharpening his knives. He glanced at her then went back to his work.

  Jàden searched for Jon, her lifeline in this world, but wooden walls stared back amid the darkness and Andrew’s loud snores. She grabbed a dry blanket and the data pad. The firemark she’d borrowed was still in the gun, and it was too dark to go searching for another.

  She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders and clutched the pad to her chest. It was a link to her past. To Kale. She searched for the darkest corner to be alone and curled up in the blackness, an arm under her head. Jàden pulled the blanket tight, wishing for Jon’s warmth at her back.

  Red light sparked, illuminating scruff across a strong jaw in the far corner of the stall.

  She tensed and scrambled back, her burn pressing against the stall planks. Heat seared into her leg, and Jàden bit back a scream.

  The stranger lit a cigarette, his features illuminated behind the smoldering tip. “You get those injuries taken care of?”

  Except that voice was no stranger.

  “Jon?” Heat blossomed in her cheeks as he lit a small lantern.

  He’d shaved his beard down to a few days’ growth and cut his long hair to shorter locks, spiked and shaggy atop his head.

  Underneath all the mountain shag, he was one of the handsomest men she’d ever seen, and her body responded with an ache for his arms around her.

  But his eyes were the same soil brown, deep and thoughtful with an intensity that pierced straight through the loneliest part of her heart.

  “I’ll do it after I rest,” she said.

  “Thomas tell you to do it now?” He blew out a stream of smoke, but the tension in his shoulders didn’t add to the illusion of relaxation. “I’ll assume your silence means yes. No sleep until your wounds are cared for. Don’t want to risk infection.”

  Did these men never sleep? She sighed and dropped her head into her hands. If she was on Hàlon, she could slap a medpatch on her wrist and never worry about infection. She set the datapad aside and unwound the blanket from her shoulders.

  Jon shifted next to her. “Lay flat. I’ll help you.”

  Curling the blanket like a pillow, she lay on her stomach and stretched out her legs, biting back a scream when he pulled aside her breeches. Branded skin clung to the fabric, the fiery burn slicing like razors down to the bone.

  Jon laid a wet cloth over her hip to
soothe the wound. Waves of pain throbbed through her flesh. “It’s their emblem, isn’t it? Like yours. The tower and moons.”

  “No.” Deep anger edged his voice. “Our brands are for soldiers. You’ve been marked as a servant.”

  Lower than a soldier, owned by a withered old white-haired man with a hole in his chest. Dread clutched her stomach. “He doesn’t own me now. I shot that bastard.”

  “No one will ever own you, Jàden.”

  She breathed deep of the comforting smell of his cigarette smoke, a reminder of her grandfather and all the quiet moments they’d spent together.

  “It’ll be a few weeks before you’re comfortable.”

  “There is no comfort in this world,” she said. Yet Jon’s was what she craved as she grabbed his wrist. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? Those soldiers.”

  Jon took a long drag on his cigarette. He stripped from the waist up and twisted his left shoulder toward her. Branded into his skin was the Rakir’s tower and two moons emblem wrapped in the infinite circle. “Since I was fifteen years old.”

  She traced her fingers over the obsidian melted into his arm, trying very hard not to notice the thick, corded muscles rippling his tawny skin. “They brand as if you were livestock.”

  “And add the metallic obsidian before the second burn.” He scratched his chin. “The throbbing you feel is the high council’s imposed will. Even now, we all sense the pull to return north.”

  Power wielded through metal, just as the Alliance had been doing for thousands of years. It was how firemarks powered everything from a clock to a datapad to a starship—theric energy from the glowing bacterium in a focused beam.

  “The old men showed their power before they branded me.” She swallowed the lump in her throat, tracing her finger along the black shimmer. “Like oil. Suffocating. It was horrible.”

  She’d give anything to erase the unease the old man’s power left behind. After such an encounter, Kale would have held her in his arms and whispered strength against her cheek. The hole left by his passing refused to close as she caressed Jon’s arm down to his bloodflower tattoo.

  “How many of the old men did you see?” Jon dipped the rag in cool water and pressed it against her wound again before he leaned on his elbow and met her gaze.

  “Two. One is for sure dead.” Would Jon hate her if she pulled him onto the blanket? Could she live with herself knowing it was to satisfy a hunger to feel loved? She’d already forced his energy to bind with hers, a criminal act in the eyes of Hàlon’s Enforcers.

  Exhausted beyond reason, she wanted to feel more than the pain in her body and the loneliness in her heart. She ached for softness, intimacy. Something good she could clasp onto in this cold, wretched world. His strength in her veins tugged at a deep longing as he brushed back a few strands of her hair.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, her eyelids growing heavy. “For saving me.”

  “You saved yourself. And Theryn.” He caressed his fingers along her temple, his voice no more than a soft whisper. “Rest, Jàden.”

  She traced her thumb along his arm, the gentle heat lulling her senses. “I’d be lost without you.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The Lonely Sea

  A staff plunked onto the wooden planking, barely an inch from Jàden’s nose. She gasped and scrambled away, her mind and body sludging through half-sleep.

  “Morning.” Thomas crouched next to the staff, a mischievous gleam in his blue eyes. “Ready to feel some pain?”

  Her stomach squeezed tight. Too tight. Jàden slapped a hand to her mouth as last night’s dinner pushed into her throat. She scrambled to her feet and raced past Thomas. Twice she tried to swallow everything back, but as soon as the icy air hit her face, it was a losing battle. She grabbed the deck rail and leaned over the side, throwing up everything in her stomach. This time because she’d eaten too much and her body couldn’t process it fast enough.

  Jàden leaned her head against the weathered wood and breathed in the frigid air until her stomach settled.

  Theryn yelled across the deck. “Ready for breakfast, Jàden? Dusty and I just caught some fresh fish.”

  She glared at the splintered rail, flecks of paint still buried deep in the cracks. Jàden may have saved his life, but now she wanted to punch the laughter right out of his throat.

  Gray swells rocked the Darius. Snowflakes fell in a quiet haze, the wind gusting them every so often into dancing swirls. A wall of mist surrounded the ship, making it impossible to see further than a few hundred spans. Jàden lifted her head, breathing in the icy storm.

  “If you’re done throwing up, let’s get started.”

  Thomas. His voice needled at her senses as he waited behind her like a heavy boulder about to squash her flat.

  For Kale, she told herself.

  Jàden sighed and turned away from the gentle beauty of the mist.

  Thomas led her below deck, away from the laughter of those who had witnessed her weak stomach. Back to the enclosure where he grabbed a bucket and shoved it in her hands. “The horses get taken care of first. This is your duty now. Food, water, clean stalls and brush them down. If they aren’t well and healthy, we don’t ride.”

  A small sense of relief flowed into her. This, at least, was something she could do. She’d spent years taking care of her grandfather’s horses, mucking out stalls, feeding, training, and even taking notes on his research while he had his eye to a microscope.

  She moved slow, her skin still burning around the embedded metal, but one horse at a time, she brought them fresh water. Then grain. While they ate, she brushed Agnar from head to tail, checked his hooves for stray pebbles, then cleaned out his stall and tossed the muck over the side of the ship.

  Next was Jon’s black. She greeted the stallion with her palm out. He huffed against her hand, then turned away and grunted.

  So, you’re ignoring me now. At least this was an improvement. Jàden brushed the black, though he did not offer the same affectionate nips as Agnar.

  One by one, she went to each horse, noting how they all seemed to have similar quirks to their companion riders. Ashe and Theryn’s horses greeted her, pushing their noses against her pockets in search of treats. Dusty and Andrew’s horses showed curiosity but shied away and let her work. Malcolm’s horse seemed to know his business, stretching his neck for a brushing or picking up his feet when she inspected his hooves.

  But Thomas’s horse snorted at her hand and reared up before she even had a chance to say hello. Bright red fur grew through the black, making the stallion’s hide a speckled mess of color.

  She’d dealt with strong-willed horses all her life. Holding out her palm, she kept still until the fiery beast exhausted himself trying to scare her off. He snorted a warning as she pressed the soft brush along his nose then his cheek. Soon, the horse settled, grunting his displeasure as he leaned into the brush.

  “I’ve never seen horses like these,” she said. For weeks she’d been with Jon and Mather but never really took notice of the finer points of their mounts. “The lines are different, and stallions never get along this well.”

  “They’re norshads. Tower-bred stallions. Somewhere in the past, strong mountain horses were mixed with notharen blood. These hybrids are stronger, smarter and faster than the average equine.” Thomas patted his horse on the shoulder. “You won’t find better mounts anywhere in the world.”

  “Notharen.” Jàden sized up each horse again, recalling her grandfather’s research on the horse-like notharens. Stallions herded together. They roamed prairie lands and marsh lands and were extremely territorial.

  But the notharen had more in common with an octopus than a horse. Their fur could change color as part of a camouflage defense, and they grazed in shallow tidepools, pulling urchins and small creatures off coral reefs when the prairies were flooded.

  “Twice a day. Fed, watered, stalls cleaned. Brushed every morning, walked in the evening
s on the top deck to keep them active.” Thomas grabbed the bucket from her hand. “Now, we have fun.”

  Every morning over the next few weeks, Jàden could barely move. Pain shot through every part of her body. She ate, held heavy rocks, scrubbed floors, polished saddles, tended her wounds and cared for the horses when she wasn’t training. All part of Thomas’s torture to “build her strength.”

  When she did have a few moments of silence, she was so exhausted she fell asleep wherever she curled up.

  Storms across the sea grew darker, fiercer, and every time Jàden pulled a horse on deck for some air, she kept one eye on the sky and her hood pulled low.

  Frank was still out there. She knew it in the deepest part of her gut. If he followed the ship, she’d have nowhere left to run but the bottom of the sea.

  Jon strolled over, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. “You two ready? I want to see what she’s got.”

  He’d barely said two words to her since that first night. Jàden forced back her frustration as the faintest hint of a smile touched the side of Thomas’s mouth. “You heard the captain. Let’s go.”

  Jàden handed Agnar’s lead line to Dusty to return to his stall. As she breathed the cool afternoon air, Thomas pressed a staff into her hand.

  Waves crashed against the hull as the women running the ship stopped their duties and edged toward Jon’s men to watch, leaning against the rail and whispering with their heads together.

  Hiding in the stall with Agnar sounded like a good idea right about now.

  Except Thomas stood in front of the door to the lower deck. “The captain has two rules of fighting. One, everything’s a weapon. Two, don’t die.”

  He crossed his arms and stepped close, lowering his voice so only she could hear. “Every Rakir spends years in training. You will need to learn everything twice as fast if you’re going to survive.”

  Jon pulled the half-spent cigarette out of his mouth. “We have enemies hunting us on the ground and in the sky. That means we have to be stronger, faster and smarter. There are no secrets between me and these men. We stay alive because we know one another’s strengths and weaknesses, and there is a bond of trust between us. You will have to earn our trust, just as each of us will need to earn yours.”