The drumbeat grew faster still. Time galloped like a running horse, and from its back Clay watched as the golden years with Saga blurred past—the memories so numerous they flashed by only in glimpses. He saw a host of living trees laying siege to city walls, a fortress of black glass buried by earth and time. He heard the laughter of friends, the sighs of lost lovers, the screams of those he’d killed, and killed, and killed.
And here was Kallorek, slick and fat, while Gabriel stood behind him with a smirk on his face.
Our friend here says you can fight.
All at once the drumming slowed. The silence between every beat stretched into eternity. When they came at last they fell in pairs, resounding in his head like the languid breaths of an exhausted heart.
Ba-dum.
A knife scratching at the skin of a white tree.
Ba-dum.
Wait, please. His mother, begging for her life while Clay cowered in the dark.
Ba-dum.
The whisper of rain on the roof above his bed. Raised voices in another room.
Ba-dum.
The glimmer of sunlight through the sway of green leaves.
Ba-dum.
A blond boy points to the field of windblown grass behind their home. Why can’t I go there?
Because, he is told by a voice he can barely remember, there are wolves.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
Chapter Thirty-three
The Flesheater
When Clay woke it was still dark. All but a few of the coloured mushrooms had lost their uncanny light. The bats had left to hunt whatever it was glow-in-the-dark bats hunted. Glow-in-the-dark mice, he supposed. Matrick and Taino were engaged in a clamorous snoring contest. Ganelon and Moog were sound asleep, and even Gabriel, who barely slept most nights, had managed to drift off.
Larkspur—or Sabbatha, as she’d called herself earlier—was sitting with her arms around her knees, one wing folded over her shoulder like a blanket. The other, the broken one, loomed crookedly behind her. She was near enough to what remained of the fire that Clay could see her face: the strong jaw, the arched brows, the large dark eyes that gleamed like starlit pools by the light of dying embers. She didn’t notice he’d awoken until Clay quietly cleared his throat.
It seemed an effort to pull her gaze away from whatever it was she’d been watching with her mind’s eye. When she did she smiled, and Clay felt his heart skip a beat.
“I had dreams,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Good ones?”
Clay had heard his mother whimpering in the dark. “Not really, no.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Though I remembered a part of my past.”
Clay’s mouth went dry. His mind started running scenarios that began with Larkspur lunging across the fire and mostly ended with him dying at her steel-shod hands. He considered going for his hammer, which lay just out of reach, or maybe diving for Ganelon instead, since waking the warrior was probably his best hope of survival. Finally he swallowed his fear and asked, as evenly as he could, “Like what?”
The daeva chewed her lip for a moment. “Do you know how my kind are born?” she asked.
Eggs? he almost guessed, but instead just shook his head no.
“Immaculate conception.”
“What? That’s impossible,” he blurted, before considering whether or not it was polite to do so.
She laughed quietly. “My father’s reaction was much the same, I’m told. He was away in Phantra when I was conceived, and when he came back north to find my mother pregnant he nearly killed her. He nearly killed me, too. When I was born he left me in the snow overnight as an offering to the Frost Mother.”
“But you lived,” said Clay.
“I lived,” she confirmed. “My father found me the next morning wrapped up in my wings—hungry, but otherwise hale. He left me alone after that. He must have assumed I was blessed by the gods.”
What was it about fathers, Clay wondered, that compelled so many of them to test their children? To insist that a daughter, or a son, prove themselves worthy of a love their mother offered without condition?
“But as I grew older,” Sabbatha told him, “the other children in my village were afraid of me. They thought me a freak, a monster. They called me ‘harpy.’” Her grin turned savage. “I didn’t mind. I even found myself a nest—a cave on a steep hill where I went to be alone. But eventually, when they realized their words had no power to hurt me, they used fists instead, or stones, and neither the gods nor all the feathers in the world could protect me then.”
Clay couldn’t say for sure whether the sympathy he felt for her was real or artificial, but at some point while she was speaking he had ceased suspecting she was about to attack him. “Is that what you dreamt of?” he asked. “Being tortured by those kids?”
The shake of her head was almost imperceptible. “I dreamt of killing them, of hunting them down one by one.” She appeared to take no pleasure in saying this—insofar as Clay could tell—but nor did she seem aghast at this shadow of herself revealed by Taino’s drug. Her voice was strangely even, as though she were still half immersed in the dream, dictating out loud what she was seeing with her mind’s eye.
“The first was a boy named Borys, the village headsman’s son. He had a knife, which he held against my throat while he groped me. He would have done worse, I think, but I took his knife and used it to kill him.”
Clay shifted where he sat. The mudweed had alleviated the gnawing pain in his back, but the daeva’s confession made it hard to get comfortable, even on the bed of plush moss. “Borys had it coming, sounds like.”
Sabbatha’s eyes flickered briefly to his. “Of course he did. And so did the next girl, Sakra. She’d thrown me down a flight of stairs once, so I pushed her off a cliff. And after that was Crystof, who was especially cruel. He beat me worse than any of them, and so I tied him to a tree, and I used a rock to break him, little by little, until he died.”
One of the mushrooms above them lost its lustrous blue glow, leaving the daeva’s face bathed in ruddy red light. “Misha used to cut me. She was younger than me, and smaller, but she’d have one of the others hold me down. Once she pricked my eyes with the point of a nail and threatened to blind me, so I …” Sabbatha trailed off, unwilling or unable to divulge the gruesome details of whatever revenge she had taken upon the girl. “She screamed and screamed, and in the end she begged for mercy. I don’t know why … but I let her go. I might have made her promise not to tell the others who it was that hurt her, but I didn’t. I think I wanted them to find out … to know what I was capable of.”
Clay had a fair idea as to how this story ended. He wondered if all of this had been a part of Sabbatha’s dream, or whether, like himself, she had glimpsed her past in a succession of broken shards and was only now piecing them together.
The daeva blinked several times in rapid succession. Her tongue slipped out to wet her lips and Clay felt his breath catch. “I spent the following night in my nest. By the time I returned to the village my parents were dead, our home burned to the ground. They had cut my father’s head off, left his body in the yard for the dogs. My mother was hung by her feet from a tree and pelted to death with stones.”
“And yet they spared you,” Clay observed.
“Apparently so. Though I can’t recall why, or what happened next. It’s like … a veil, or a fog I just can’t see through.”
The last of the fungal lamps went out, so that only the seething embers remained by which to see. Somewhere beyond the shroud a wild thing howled in the dark as it killed, or was killed. It was hard to tell one way or another with bloodcurdling howls.
“Maybe it’s for the best if I don’t remember who I was before,” she said. In the dark her voice sounded closer than before, more intimate.
“Why is that?” Clay asked.
“Because I can’t have been a very good person. After what happened to my parents, and what I did to those children, what could I have become but a monster?”