by Crissy Moss
Contents
Mother
Father
Winifrey
Town
Funeral
Magic
Travel
Docks
Theft
Pass
Grasslands
Demon
Caravan
Sleep
Love
Orin
Training
Cold
Sword
Secrets
Doubts
Ludwald
Streets
Epilogue
Author’s Note
About the Author
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Dragon’s Flame
Half Blood
Sorceress
Book 1
Crissy Moss
~
Winter descended from the mountains, a cloak of ice wrapped about his shoulders. A living force of nature, his very presence consumed all before him.
A blanket of snow and ice spread out at his feet, the earth crunching beneath his footfalls. A shroud of mist hung behind him, waiting for his invitation to slip down into the valley and consume all before it.
Even the sun, once bright and warm in its track, cast a cold glow upon the frozen landscape. Brittle ice caked outstretched tree limbs, weighing them down and snapping off the fragile ends. Dark rich earth and pale green grass gave way to a blanket of frozen crystals as he passed.
Silence enshrouded the unnatural winter as birds fell from the sky and rodents scrambled into dens, never to emerge, their blood frozen. No being could come near to the vision of ice. For miles, nothing ventured beyond the grip of winter. No sound. No animal. And no man. Nothing save the wind, and footfalls of the one carrying ice in his very soul.
Word spread of winter’s passage, and villages fled south in terror. But few men lived in the north near the mountains, and fewer in the path of winter’s fury. The great leaders of the cities to the south did not see the danger creeping steadily closer to them. They could not feel the cold of winter or hear the fury of the winds descending from the mountain—to the south, where men slept peacefully in their beds, ignorant of the danger descending upon them.
~
Mother
Soft light fell in a dappled pattern across my mother’s bed like lace made from sunbeams. I had hung the lace curtains for her just two summers ago when the sunlight had become too much for her weakening body.
I sat on the edge of her bed, taking her hand in mine. So thin. It was like clutching a skeleton with thin paper wrapped over her birdlike bones.
This was my mother, or what was left of her. Only thirty-eight, and she was succumbing to a wasting disease that no cleric could seem to heal. Not that there had been many clerics visiting our small village.
“It won’t be much longer,” she said.
I had to lean forward to hear her words, like crushed leaves on the breeze, cracking and popping as she spoke.
“Don’t say that, Mom,” I protested, clutching her hand just a bit tighter. “You can’t go yet. You haven’t even given me away at my wedding. And what will Dad do without you? He needs you. We both do.”
She reached up with her other hand and patted me. “You’ll do just fine, Sybel. You’re stronger than you think. You’ll be ruling the world in no time.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it, even at this stage. Mother always had an odd sense of humor. Ruling the world? From the back of a plow horse? A farmer's wife didn’t rule much more than her kitchen. I might not have been a wife yet, but I knew it would come soon, and all the stories of mages and dragons mother shared with me would be replaced with babies and laundry.
“And Dad?” I asked.
“Don’t be too harsh on him, Sybel. Your dad’s been through a lot more than he’s willing to admit. He’s been there for us, more than I had any right for. He loved me when I couldn’t love myself. Things might get difficult for you after I’m gone, but remember that somewhere inside him there is love.”
I didn’t understand it then, but my mother already knew what would happen when she passed on to the other side. She had been married to my father for twenty years and knew all too well his temper. I knew it, too, and had been on the wrong side of it more often than not. I tried to brush it off, to remind myself that he loved me, but it had gotten harder to do so since mother took ill. He’d been rougher than usual.
I’d done my best to hide the bruise on my arm where he’d gripped it a bit too hard. It wouldn’t do to upset mother on her deathbed.
I didn’t want to admit that it was her deathbed, but there was no denying it anymore. She was dying, and there was nothing I could do. No wizard to call. No demon to summon. My mother was going to slip into the next world, and it would be soon.
What would I do afterward?
“I’ll remember, Mother,” I said and leaned down to kiss her on the forehead. Her skin was warm beneath my lips and smelled of sour elderberries. It was the smell of wine and sleep, something she’d been imbibing in far more lately. I couldn’t even try to be upset with her; I could see how much pain each movement was causing.
The wasting disease had come on two summers before, slowly creeping inside her. First, she couldn’t stand for very long and took to working the farm from a chair that I carted around for her. Then she couldn’t stay awake for long periods of time and started taking naps throughout the day. At the beginning of the spring—when others were out sowing the seeds for the next harvest—my mother couldn’t rise from her bed. Her muscles had atrophied, leaving behind a husk of the woman I’d known. The strong jaw, and quick smile had been replaced by a skull covered in thin parchment.
The sicker mother became, the angry father seemed.
“The garden just hasn’t been the same without you,” I said. It sounded hollow, even to me, but I had to say something. Didn’t I? Tired platitudes about getting well seemed out of place. There was no getting well, not anymore, and we both knew it.
“I’m tired, Sybel. I think it’s time I rest.”
The finality in her words sent a shiver down my spine. But there was a smaller part of me that was glad. Mother had been in pain for so long, I just wanted her pain to end. If that meant letting her go, then I would do it. No matter how much it hurt.
I kissed her forehead again and let go of her hand.
“Did you want Father to come in and kiss you goodnight as well?”
The way I said goodnight, it sounded like the end of a long journey to me. Perhaps Mother heard it because she sighed and gave me a wan smile before shaking her head. I couldn’t blame her. The way father had been acting, it wouldn’t be a good way for her to go into the long sleep. I think she held on as long as she did because of him, but now the wasting disease was too much. She was ready.
I smiled back and patted her hand.
Then I slowly stood and turned my back on her, walking away.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It felt like I was giving her permission to die. After all the years she had held on for me and my father, it felt like the right thing to do. She was hurting, and staying would do nothing for her but cause her more pain.
I could handle myself—and father, if need be. But at that moment, we didn’t matter any longer, and I could only think of her failing strength and of the relief that seemed to emanate from her at that moment.
I left, knowing it would be the last time I would se
e my mother alive. I didn’t look back.
Father
Leaving my mother behind, I walked across the yard to the stable. The chocolate mare poked her speckled nose over the stall and snuffed at me, hoping for a treat.
“None today, Gracy,” I said, giving her a pat. I slipped inside the stall door and grabbed a brush off the shelf. Some might have thought it a chore, but brushing Gracy was relaxing. Each stroke eased a bit of the tension that had been building up in my shoulders.
Gracy turned her head and nipped at my arm with her big rubbery lips, more playful than ornery. I patted the old mare and wound my fingers through her mane, leaning my forehead against her withers.
“You’re a comfort, Gracy. Thank you,” I said.
I needed that comfort right then. My heart was breaking, wondering if I’d done the right thing. Should I have waited with my mother, to share comfort with her in her last moments? I know she wanted me to go so that I could remember her as she had been: walking and happy. I wonder if she felt like she had to hold on until I’d gone. Until there was no one there to see the end.
Sometimes I think she would have been happier to die long before she had been bedridden. Before sponge baths and being unable to feed herself. All of the daily life's necessities that I once took for granted, I didn’t take them for granted any longer. Watching my mother waste away had been difficult, but I knew what I had suffered had only been a fraction of what she had been through since the beginning of her sickness.
Gracy shook her flank at me, waggling an ear. Whether it was because of my words or a fly I didn’t care; she was a solid presence. Always the same. Gracy didn’t care if you were having a bad day or a good day as long as you brought her hay on time and brushed her down after a long ride.
The wailing began as I sat there beside Gracy, breathing in her scent of meadow, hay, and the lingering smell of sweat. But the comfort was over. I had to face reality, and reality was heading my direction at that very moment.
I gave Gracy a few last strokes, untangling the mess I’d made of her mane, then put the brush back on the shelf. Stepping outside the small corral, Gracy put her head over the fence, snuffling at my hair again.
“It’s okay, Gracy. Everything will be okay,” I said, wiping away the tears. I hadn’t even realized they were there before that moment.
I gave her one final scratch before turning back to the house. I promised Mother I’d be there for my dad, but who would be there for me? In the end, it didn’t matter; life would go on, and we would figure out how to go on without her.
The slow trek across the yard was punctuated by my father's cries. The closer I got to the house, the quieter they became until I stood before the door. I could hear the soft sobs echoing from within. I could sense that his initial anguish had passed, and now the heartache sank deep inside, ready to consume him.
I pushed open the door slowly, the hinges letting out a faint squeak.
“Daddy?” I whispered.
“She’s gone,” I heard him whisper, unsure if he spoke to me or to the air.
I stepped in, leaving the door open to let in a small pool of light. Father knelt at my mother's bedside, clasping her flaccid hand, tears running down into his dark beard.
“How could you leave me?” he said, kissing her hand. “I still need you.”
I came to stand beside him, quietly waiting for him to notice me. When he did it wasn’t with the fatherly love I had hoped to see. Instead he looked up at me with anger slowly spreading across his face. I didn’t know why, and the confusion on my tear-stained face must have pushed him over the edge because he got up from the floor, towering over me, and began to yell.
“Where were you?” he shouted. “You should have been with her. You could have called me. Saved her. Done something!”
“I…I…” The words were trapped in my throat, my mind blank. What could I say that would ease his pain? What could be said that would ease my own pain?
I wiped a hand across my cheek, waiting. It felt like I was always waiting for my father to decide what to do with me. Yell, curse, scream, blame? None of it seemed to matter then. He could have heaped every possible insult on me, and I don’t think I could have cared. My mother was dead. The sole light in my life had been snuffed out. What more could he do to me?
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“You dare stare at me with those eyes! They were her eyes. You vile creature, I’ll kill you!”
I dodged his blow. I had lots of practice over the years, but he wasn’t drunk with ale this time, only rage and sorrow.
“She was my mother,” I tried to say. “I miss her, too. Can’t you just remember I’m your daughter for a little while?”
“You’re not my daughter!” he screamed. “You were never mine, I just suffered your presence because I loved her. And now she’s gone, and you’re nothing but a weight around my neck, and a twisted memory of her. Get out! I won’t have a reminder of her sins in my home.”
“That-that can’t be true.”
“It is,” he said, standing utterly still before me. There was still the rage just beneath the surface, but he was completely serious when he spoke. “Whatever bastard made you, he also gave her that wasting disease, because she’s been dying since you were born. Slowly slipping away from me. She gave you her life. If it weren’t for you, she’d still be alive!”
The last was a gut-wrenching wail, and he turned away from me, staring down at Mother’s body.
My world shattered in that instant. For all my brave thoughts about standing up to him and not letting his anger get to me, to give him the chance that Mother wanted me to, I was wrong. This man that had raised me, fed me, taught me to care for horses, how to ride, and how to tie a knot: He was not my father?
“You-you’re lying,” I stammered. “You’re just saying that to hurt me because you’re upset about Mother.”
“Lying,” he said, turning back to me. “You were never my daughter. I couldn’t get your ma pregnant, never could. I don’t know who sired you, girl, but it sure as hell wasn’t me.”
I ran.
I don’t know where I thought I was going, or what I was thinking. I don’t think I was thinking at all. I ran from the farmhouse that had been my home for eighteen years. I ran from the mother who lay dead in her bed. I ran from the man who, in one swift blow, had upturned my life on its axis.
The running felt good, burning through my muscles as I tore through the woods. Twigs and branches caught at my skirts and my hair, ripping them to tatters. And still I ran. Deeper into the woods, into a part of the forest I’d never been to before, until my breath gave out and I could barely move one foot in front of another.
I came to rest at the edge of a small stream winding its way beneath the evergreens. Smooth stones blocked up a shimmering pool of water. I sat down to watch fish lazily swim through the waters, trying to catch my breath.
I lay on the bank on a patch of thick moss and cried. I’d lost more than my mother that day. I’d lost an entire lifetime. All of the memories I’d held dear were now tinted with the specter of a lie hanging over my entire life. A lie that I had been the victim of, and more lies told to keep the appearance of normality.
Did my father hate my mother? Or just me?
Did it even matter anymore? If I went back, I didn’t know what kind of reception I’d have. The man I knew as my father wouldn’t have to stand behind pretenses anymore, and the anger he had been building up over the years might not be in check.
Surely, he had loved her. If not, he would have left her, and me, and disappeared into the night without a trace. Other men had done so for lesser reasons; surely a bastard child was a good one.
Bastard. I tasted the word on my lips, hearing it echo from the glade. I was a bastard. Born to an immoral woman who wed a man incapable of having a child. I wanted to tell myself that she did it only because she wanted a child so much, but the truth was harder to swallow. I simply didn’t know. Did she meet up with
a dashing young man who swept her off her feet? Did she go to the local inn and seek someone out? Was it lust, or had she loved another and been unable to stay with him?
I no longer knew who my mother was. I think that hurt more than anything. My father had always been angry with me, so there had been no love to lose. Now it even seemed understandable. But my mother had been the center of my world, and now that world was shattered.
I lay there on the moss, letting the thoughts tumble around in a jumbled mess inside me as the fish swam back and forth across the pool. And somewhere under the afternoon sun I fell asleep.
Winifrey
I woke to the sound of buzzing in my ear. Soft, but insistent, the buzz nagged at me. It pulled me from the dreamless sleep I’d been wrapped in.
Cracking open my eyes, at first I was confused. Why was I in the woods? What part of the woods? I didn’t know this pool of water, and it certainly hadn’t been late afternoon.
Then the memories flooded back.
I think if it hadn’t been for that nagging buzz I would have ignored the world again and fallen back to sleep. Sleep was easier than dealing with the reality I faced right then. But sleep also left me alone in the woods as the sun was setting. The sky had taken on a red glow as the sun slowly sank beyond the horizon, shadows stretching out to grasp me in the twilight.
The buzz drew my attention away from the deepening shadows. I caught a glimpse of a bright light hovering over the pond before disappearing into a bush. It flickered between leaves, shimmering in and out of view. It was odd to see a firefly hovering alone in a bush like that. Usually, hundreds of them were spread out in large glades, shimmering waves of fire that flickered and blinked in and out of existence. I had watched them with my mother as a young child. She once told me that fireflies were wishes made by little girls and the wishes came out to the meadow to be hatched.
