The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) (4 page)

“You’re ruining your boots,” I told him. Blackstone cuts everything, even the thickest skins. Atanurat hoisted me by the arms to drag me across the cache to Urasuq. The old man loomed, hard and sinister as a spire of crystal.

“Tie her up,” he said to Atanurat. “You shall return her to the Elders. Let them decide what to do with her. I will not train her further. She is tainted.”

B
ack
in the Kaluq camp
, Atanurat was set to guard me at all hours. He paced outside of Ikselian’s summer tent, his boots padding softly. Occasionally he poked his head through the flap. “Do you need anything? Water? Food?”

I shook my head. Two nights had passed since we’d returned from Urasuq’s, and nearly a moon since I had become The Cedna. The transition had changed me in two jarring ways: first, the utter absence of my mother’s mind. All my life she had existed within me; suddenly she was gone, as if someone had scraped out my skull with an ulio. Second, the black door, the living threat that had long lurked in my mother’s mind, belonged entirely to me.

The chains that held the beast at bay were my responsibility. That onus terrified me more than any other duty of being The Cedna. I shoved every bit of mental resistance I possessed onto that door. I understood why Ikselian had been so horrified when I’d let it open for that brief moment of confusing after my mother’s death. The black ocean magic was too much, ungovernable, untameable.

“You have to eat,” Atanurat scolded, drawing me out of my thoughts. “You’re so thin you might blow away in a strong breeze.”

I frowned. No Gantean woman liked to hear such words; to be thin was to be ugly and incompetent, here in a land of scarcity. Having flesh meant having the skill to get and store enough food. I was sensitive to criticisms, being too foreign-looking for Gantean tastes, my red hair too light, my green eyes as bright as southern magelight. It rankled that Atanurat, such a paragon of Gantean attractions, could rib me so lightly.

“Fine,” I snapped. “What have you brought?”

Atanurat beckoned me outside with one finger. “Delicacies,” he joked. Of course Kaluqs had no delicacies. Of all the Gantean clans, the Kaluqs had the most difficult lot when it came to feeding themselves. With no river running through their lands, they had no access to the bounty that fed the other clans. Kaluqs ate cod, whale, deer, and seal, or they ate the scant vegetation the land provided, such as berries, tuttu moss, and pungent saranaki roots.

Atanurat handed me the typical Kaluq breakfast of tuttu moss and seal lard. “The Ikniqs used to eat salmon,” I said. “They smoked it, and it would last all winter.”

“Ikniqs are as soft as southerners. Kaluqs could live on rocks alone.”

I snorted and tried a bite. Atanurat turned and gazed over the horizon. “Do you see that?” He pointed west.

I squinted. A black figure lurched across the barren plain, moving in our direction.

“Spirits, that’s Urasuq.” Atanurat studied the man’s awkward gait.

“What does he want?” I did not wish to face the master again. “We’ve only just left him.”

The silhouette gestured, and Atanurat put down his breakfast to haul me to my feet so quickly I dropped my food.

“Come! There’s no time. Come with me.”

“What—”

“A raid.” Atanurat cut me off as he yanked me down the path towards the granite rock face that contained the Kaluq caverns. “Into the caverns. Now!”

As we ducked into the cavern tunnel I said, “But there’s never been an Entilan raid upon Kaluq lands! They don’t come this far east. Perhaps Urasuq needed to speak with Ikselian or one of the other Elders.” Atanurat’s reaction, while valiant, reeked of overkill.

Atanurat pushed me deeper into the caverns. “I know what his gesture meant. Besides, he doesn’t move that fast, not ever. A raid is the only explanation.”

His certainty annoyed me. “If it is a raid, shouldn’t we go warn the rest of the camp?”

“I was charged with keeping you safe. That is the task they gave me; that’s why I went to Urasuq’s with you. Until you name a successor, that is what I must do.” Atanurat’s eyes gleamed with fear and concern. He didn’t want to be in here with me. He wanted to warn the others, the brothers and sisters of his tiguat, the sail-fathers and the stitch-mothers, even the Elders. He worried for the clanspeople, and he wanted to fight Entilans—a desire written plainly on his face. I was a duty to him. A duty and a burden.

“Go then,” I said softly. “Go warn the others. I’m safe in here. I won’t leave.”

His jaw tightened, and he shook his head. “I cannot. I was told to keep you safe.” He pushed me into a small cave, one I had not been in before. These granite sheers were riddled with thousands of such places, painstakingly carved out by generations of determined Kaluqs.

Atanurat closed the entrance to the cache with its rolling stone door, cutting off the last remnants of daylight that had filtered through the tunnel. We huddled together, surrounded by a sinister silence. The darkness pressed against us, as heavy as cold water. Atanurat took my freezing hand in his.

No sounds from the outdoors could penetrate the stone fastness. All we could do was wait. And wait. The air thickened. My breathing became tighter and tighter, and I recalled too vividly the heavy airlessness of my mother’s drowning.

“I—I need to get out,” I rasped. “I need fresh air.”

Atanurat’s hand tightened around my wrist. “We cannot leave yet.”

“How do you know?” I cried, desperate to escape.

“Hush. I can see out there in Yaqi.”

Yaqi acknowledged no physical boundaries, and when immersed in the Spirit Layer, one could see through all barriers, even granite.

“How?” I hissed. “How can you see Yaqi? You’ve not let your blood.” I wrenched my hand from his grip. “You never told me you were quayanaq!” Some people developed the ability to slip between the Layers without assistance from bloodletting or ritual. We called them quayanaq—slippery.

“I thought you knew,” he said.

“You can enter Yaqi and see what is happening out there?”

“Hazily,” Atanurat admitted.

“What do you see?” I waited for his reply, but none came, only a sharp, inward hiss that made my stomach lurch.

After what felt like days, after my mouth had dried out completely and my stomach had forgone its hunger pains, Atanurat roused me and said, “We can go out now. They’ve gone.”

We couldn’t stand up to our full heights until Atanurat had pushed away the rolling rock concealing the tunnel mouth. My legs and back screamed their resistance as I tried to straighten and walk.

Atanurat remained silent as we wound out of the caches. Light filtered in from the wide cavern opening, and my eyes burned.

I paused with a hand on Atanurat’s shoulder before we stepped into the full daylight. “How bad is it?”

I had heard stories of the Entilan raids on other camps. Ever since my mother had killed Ronin Entila, the raiders had been merciless. But they had never come to the Kaluq lands. Never.

“Bad,” Atanurat said as he stepped into the sunlight.

I followed him down the dusty path towards the tents, squinting in the harsh glare. How long had we waited in the caches? A lone tern wheeled in the bright sky, screeching, as if to warn us to turn back.

Atanurat’s braids had loosened during our time in the cache, and several of them had come unbound entirely. His black hair fell over his back like a straight curtain, and as he drew up at the edge of the Kaluq camp, I wanted to hide behind that soft scrim forever. His breath came in labored gulps.

He would not move, and so I stepped around him to gaze upon whatever sight had frozen him so completely.

The line of bodies stretching before us contained familiar faces—men I had seen working, women who had offered tentative smiles when I passed their tents, others who had never shared anything but a judging glare. It must have been much worse for Atanurat, who had grown up with these men and women serving as his fathers and mothers. They had never accepted me, but he was one of them.

He stared at the row—the bodies were laid out in one straight, long line that led into the circle of felt and leather tents.

I lifted my gaze at a strange, echoing sound. At the center of the wide circle, where the Kaluq totem wood had once been, stood a long metal pole that had never been there before. This gleaming pole had been shoved into the ground. Two flags, anchored to the pole, ripped through the wind. The flag atop, a square of purple emblazoned with a crested serpent, snapped viciously: the sigil of House Entila, our Lethemian enemies. The flag below showed a grey field with a golden flower that boasted too many petals to count. I did not know that device.

“Which one is that?” I blurted, pointing at the unfamiliar flag.

Atanurat turned, his gaze hollow and lifeless. “The Galatiens’, of course. The ruling house of Lethemia.”

Rage settled like a mantle over my shoulders as I walked with Atanurat down the row of slain Ganteans. Six men, three women. All of them had been felled by stabs to the gut, messy, bloody deaths that had left pools of coagulating blood on the earth. I had to swallow my own vomit, and I averted my gaze. The smell of blood made me sick. Atanurat chanted the prayer for dying over them.

Every Gantean was raised to hate the Lethemians, the sayantaq southerners who had no care for the delicate balance of magic. They were ignorant, spendthrift, and unreasonable. But I had been so separate, growing up, that I had never fully absorbed this prejudice. How could I, when they told me I was one of them?

My mother, in her mental confusion, had often remembered Ronin Entila with pleasure, and I could never abolish her affection for him from my head. For one lone morning, he had been the sun of her world—a bright light that had made the heavy burdens of her life as the Cedna bearable. She had thought him the most handsome creature she had ever seen, with his green eyes, his elegant bones, his hair as fine as a summer spider’s web. Not for my mother and me the rough, tough masculinity of Gantean hunt-fathers. Gantean men—even strong, comfortable Atanurat—struck me as thick and harsh. Unrefined.

Perhaps my mother’s memories of Ronin Entila were the reason that row of brutally slain bodies shocked me. I had expected something gentler of the sayantaq, that they would take captives only or steal our wares. But this—this wanton slaughter? I had never seen anything like it.

“Atanurat!” Ikselian’s voice rained down on us—a shock that brought me back to reality. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you!” Her voice grated with anger or dismay.

Ikselian caught my arm as she arrived. “You survived,” she said with equal parts relief and regret. She turned to Atanurat. “Go up to the northern circle of tents. The others have gathered there. They’re rigging up dogs and stretchers to move the bodies to the burial grounds.” The Kaluqs were the only Gantean clan that buried their dead in the earth.

Ikselian waved Atanurat off, and he obeyed her woodenly. Panic rippled through me as he departed.

“Come,” Ikselian said, pulling my arm. “We must ritual.”

L
ike a bird batted
from the sky by strong winds, I returned with Ikselian to the Kaluq caverns. Instead of following the tunnel into the network where I had hidden with Atanurat, we turned right into a ritual chamber, a cave room where natural crystal channels ran through the granite and the island’s bedrock all the way to the inland Hinge. The Elders were assembling on the benches cut into the walls. Long shadows danced on the wall in time to the flicker of the oil lamps.

The image of the lined-up bodies would not leave the back of my eyelids; those two flags snapped inside my head as they had in the wind.

I thought of both sigils: the Entilan water serpent and the Galatien flower.
What gave them the right to do this to us?
We Ganteans had occupied our island for thousands of years, well before the Lethemians had come to their southern peninsula from the east. They had no right.

“We must send a delegation to the sayantaq king,” I said, turning in a circle to implore each Elder. “This cannot be permitted! The southern king must hear what House Entila does in his name!” The conflict between the Ganteans and House Entila was, of course, personal. Mother had killed the ruler of that House, and now his daughter—my half-sister—sought to destroy us for vengeance, cloak it as she would in political terms. Surely the southern king could see that a personal vendetta was insufficient justification for what amounted to genocide?

Ikselian continued her preparations for ritual, holding a flask over the flame to heat her damned pujoanuki tea. She still thought me unclean? Even now? “The southern king is well aware of Malvyna Entila’s campaign against us,” she said.

“Have we ever sent anyone to plead our case?” I demanded. “Has the southern king ever had to look at us, to see our faces, to listen to our pleas? He has not! All he has heard is Malvyna Entila’s explanations. We must tell our side of the story.”

“Stop thinking like a child,” snapped Ikselian. “We do not parley with sayantaq southerners. To do so would taint us. Only one infected with the sayantaq stain would suggest it. Drink.” She shoved the warm flask in my direction.

I did not take it. “What will you do to stop the raiders?”

“This,” she replied. “We will ritual and strengthen the Hinge with your blood. If your blood cannot give the Hinge the power it needs, we will offer the blood of others. As much as it takes.”

The beast in my mind groaned and shivered. My hands grew clammy. “Why—why do we not call upon my magic? I can feel it—”

“Idiot,” broke in Ikselian. “You speak on matters you do not understand. We cannot use the Cedna’s magic because the Hinge’s power has ebbed so low that to tap it risks destroying it. We have no choice but to hide and wait until the Hinge is stronger. Now, drink. Offer what you can, you useless girl.”

I took the flask. I did not understand the intricacies of the Hinge’s power and how, exactly, it ebbed and flowed, but Ikselian did not know the whole truth. Power tingled in my fingers. I
could
unleash the Cedna’s power to protect Gante. I knew it in my bones.

I drank the pujoanuki, letting its purgative effect roll through me. When the vomiting subsided, Ikselian cut a line from my wrist to my elbow with her ulio.

The weight of Yaqi descended upon me. I fell to my knees. The Elders spoke to one another, but I could not force my mind to comprehend their words. Ijiq spun away from me, and the viscous, glittering world of Yaqi became all I could see.