“A story as brooding in plot as it is dynamic in pace.”
—A. Daphne Douge for Fantasy Novel Review
“A masterfully thickened plot.”
—Jonathan Stillwater, author of Graveyard Springs (forthcoming)
Abstract
A child is born under the darkest of moons. Soon, she finds the elemental power of air has given her strange and frightening magics. Through her mother’s intervention, the girl—Larka—lives to be bound to Gilly, the weather witch.
But the weather witch is a harsh and unpredictable mistress. Escape seems impossible for Larka until the air elemental shows the girl kindness. At this, she entrusts the course of her life to its guardianship. The air elemental, however, has ambitions of its own. . . .
Excerpt
PROLOGUE: EYE OF THE STORM
A feeble torch fought for survival under the darkest of moons, its flame lilting through the ancient trees. Wind blew through the torchbearer’s blue-black hair, blending long tresses into the opaque shadows behind her. The sound of gravel crunched underfoot as the torchbearer reached an area clear of trees on the river’s bank.
A strong gust failed the torchlight. Breath caught in the woman’s throat. She closed her eyes, wishing the umbrage away. Still, eyes opened or closed seemed to make little difference under this new moon, not even starlight to guide her. She let the torch fall from her hand to clunk on the ground. Its ember ghosted into blackness, leaving her to the echoing night.
It was to this desolation that the woman opened her eyes.
And cursed her luck that the contractions had struck her this day. Cursed the truth of the weather witch’s predictions that tonight, of all nights, would be of a dark moon. Cursed that her husband had shoved her out the door the moment her water had broken. With the looming clouds, no one need have known of the sky’s darkness except for what the witch’s calendar foretold.
Another round of pain ensnared her uterus. She plummeted to her knees, catching herself on her hands, rocks cutting into her palms. She rose to a squat. The time had come. She pushed, teeth gritted, hands fisted. The baby slipped out and gave a hearty cry, caught as it was in the woman’s skirts.
The woman thanked the deities that this birth was not her first and the child’s passage through her birth opening had been uncomplicated.
She filched the baby out of the skirts of her dress while, around them, vegetation chuffed in a rush of air scented with oncoming rain. The woman had no sooner cut the umbilical cord than it and afterbirth were snatched out of her hands and whisked away on a mischievous wind. She reflected on the swirling wind but a moment, thinking the gust perhaps aberrant, hoping it was not.
She groped beneath the cloth of her dress and pulled out the blanket she had concealed there earlier. The woman hastily wrapped the baby in that thin material, tactile senses telling her the babe’s face poked out of the blanket.
A bolt of lightning slashed through the air and zapped over the woman’s head; thunder snarled in response. A strong gale ripped the blanket off the baby, setting it a-sail. The storm stomped this way.
The woman shuddered, gaping at the sky. The lightning had been too close.
The woman retrieved the blanket, not recognizing her source of illumination, then gasped before she could wrap the cloth around the tiny girl. Sparks of smoky-blue light coursed around the infant’s form.
The woman stared a long time, even after the dancing light had faded. Perhaps it would be best to fulfill her husband’s wishes; the deities knew the villagers would if she did not. She placed her hand over the babe’s mouth, yet she could not press down; her hand shook as if in spasm. A jolt of lightning struck near her feet, rendering a deafening clap, and the smoky-blue glow reappeared around the newborn.
The woman removed her hand from the babe’s mouth then cast her vision into the galvanized sky.
“I can’t do it. I can’t,” she murmured and embraced her child, kissing the small head and swathing the quiet babe in cloth anew. She contemplated keeping the infant, not going home, but they would surely hunt her down if she did not return, and her other children would be without her protection. She, however, would die before she killed this babe. Her husband and the rest of that lot be damned!
The mother tottered away from the river’s edge through the shifting trees, almost grateful for the glow her newborn provided as the winds caressed the babe’s skin until another light source winked its bleak eye in the distance. The mother’s steps ceased. A fevered revulsion scurried down her spine. She glanced down at the trusting babe, set her jaw, then followed that winking eye.
She found the crone’s cottage in a clearing. Dim light flowed between the slats of the windows’ shutters. The mother sat on a fallen tree on the edge of the clearing, catty-cornered to the cottage’s front, and offered the babe a breast, which the infant took with a meek hunger.
The mother gazed before herself into the darkness with the knowledge that the crone’s Lavender Hills spread over the land in that
direction. The smell of that wind-bruised herb carried on the air.
Gales whipped about them, tugging the blanket and once more exacerbating sparkling surges of blue-gray luminosity on the babe’s skin. The mother sighed as she switched the babe to the other breast. The child fed not with the lusty hunger of her siblings but with a gentle politeness. The mother smiled, the wind still whipping about them.
A faint creak carried over the gushing air. The mother looked up to see the crone standing in the doorway of the cottage, wraithlike candlelight beckoning behind the bent form. A gnarled hand gestured the mother come near.
Fear promulgated the beating of the mother’s heart. Yet, somehow, she managed to raise herself and shuffle her feet enough to stand outside the small doorway, the friction of each gale blast bouncing sparks off the baby.
Creaking words flowed to the mother on the wind. “What power hold you?” Hawk-like eyes perused the newborn.
“I hold no power.” The mother grimaced, knowing the words an untruth as they slipped past her lips.
“Humph” came the crone’s reply, her eyes latching on to the mother’s.
“Come in.” The crone turned and the cottage engulfed her, leaving the mother in the playful breeze.
The mother noted that the gale neither shook the trees about them nor touched anything else in the distance. If not for the sake of her sanity, she would have sworn it followed the newborn.
The baby cooed. The mother’s lips trembled as she tried to smile down at her daughter. The mother swallowed then peered into the shadowy cottage and knew by the heat of the tears scalding her cheeks what she had to do.
Copyright © 2007 by Sherryl King-Wilds
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