Age of Swords (The Legends of the First Empire #2)

Roan woke up in the blackness, wondering where she was. Usually she saw the orange glow of the slumbering coals in the center of the roundhouse, but it was dark. Iver wasn’t snoring. Waking to silence always frightened her. Doing so meant that her nightmares had followed her into the waking world. Nightmare, not nightmares, she corrected herself. Roan only had the one.

She heard a sound, some kind of movement. Roan prepared herself, held her breath, and turned her head. It wasn’t Iver. In the glow of the green light, she saw Persephone, Moya, and Arion sitting near the center of the stone chamber. Everything came back. She wasn’t at home; she was trapped in a foreign land a mile beneath the world in a stone tomb with no water and little food, and there was a demon who would soon break through their barricade and kill them. Oh, thank you, Mari! Thank you! She sighed in relief and relaxed.

The little men were also awake, sitting together a few feet away from Persephone, Moya, and Arion, two trios gathered like sets. The larger glowstone lay on the ground between them. Roan spotted the light of the other farther away, near where the desk and stack of tablets lay. She figured that was where Brin, Suri, and Minna were.

Roan found it odd that she had fallen asleep. She hadn’t planned to, hadn’t even remembered lying down or closing her eyes. Most of all, it wasn’t like her to sleep so easily. Most nights she struggled, tossing and shifting. Iver used to collapse and pass right out. Moya, Roan discovered, slept well into the morning, even in the winter when nights were long. Usually, when Roan managed to sleep at all, it was only for three or four hours. The slightest sound woke her, and once up, she was completely awake with no hope of returning to slumber. Roan found it strange to discover she was still tired, groggy, weak, and bleary-eyed.

Maybe I’m sick.

Roan was rarely ill, but when she was, it was horrible. She thought back to the last time and realized her mistake too late.

Gifford.

She saw his face in the darkness, smiling at her the way he always did—with his lopsided grin, the one that made the boys call him goblin. When she was bedridden from the fever, he had made her soup. Perhaps the best soup she’d ever tasted, which meant he didn’t make it by himself. Gifford was many things, but he was not an especially good cook, and soup that wonderful could only have been made by one person. He had gone to Padera. Gifford never went to her. They didn’t get along, which Roan always found odd, as those two had to be the nicest people in the world.

Gifford was always doing things like that, sacrificing himself on her behalf. He gave her his best pottery. Once, when he was trying to get honey for her birthday, he’d been stung nearly to death. And because of his leg, hunting copper for her in the pits near the river wasn’t just agonizing but dangerous. She wished he wouldn’t do it. Sweet as it was, he made her feel guilty. The worst part of getting sick was knowing how much it would hurt Gifford.

Right now, Gifford is lying under the wool, battered and bloody because of me, because I couldn’t stop thinking. And yet I didn’t think. She never thought the right way. People like Persephone could always reason things out so much better than she. Others understood not only what to do but how and when to do it. Roan always had problems with things like that. Moya said it wasn’t her fault, that Roan hadn’t lived a normal life, but Roan knew that people—the nice ones—made excuses for her, too many excuses.

Gifford didn’t make allowances; he refused to see her faults and failures. And she had plenty of both: like the leg brace that threw Gifford in the dirt or the spear thrower that proved to be useless. Gifford saw only the good in her, and that was the problem. He had been beaten because he couldn’t see what was so obvious to everyone else.

You’re nothing, Roan. Iver’s voice always groaned from the back of his throat the way most people sounded only in the early morning. That’s what ‘Roan’ means…‘nothing.’ That’s why your mother picked that name. She knew you would never amount to anything. You were a burden to her, and you’ve been a burden to me, and you’ll be a curse to anyone who cares about you. That’s what you really are, Roan, a burden and a curse.

She used to pretend it wasn’t true, but how could she keep believing when there was so much evidence to the contrary? What had happened to Gifford was a prime example. She could still see his bloody, beaten face.

You’ll be a curse to anyone who cares about you.

“Roan?” Brin said, her outline blotting out the light from the small stone. “Are you awake?”

She nodded, realized that was stupid, and said, “Yes.”

“Oh, good, I came over before, but didn’t want to wake you. I wasn’t quite done anyway.”

“Before? How long was I sleeping?”

“Don’t know. But a good while. Long enough for me to decipher quite a few tablets. I think I know what happened. I’m going to tell everyone, and I want you to hear, too.”

“Okay.”

Roan sat up straighter and scrubbed her face with her palms, trying to drive the grogginess away. The stone floor had sucked away her body heat and left her chilled. When she was done with her face, she rubbed her arms and thighs. Feeling a bit warmer, she got up and walked to where the others were gathered. She felt heavy, as if she’d gained weight, and was relieved to sit back down between Moya and Persephone, who smiled weakly at her.

Arion didn’t look up. She faced the stoned-up crack. The bald Fhrey lady sat hunched over, her legs crossed, her hands in her lap, eyes closed almost as if sleeping. Just in front of her crossed ankles, dark dots marked where blood had dripped from her nose to the stone. They all looked exhausted. Persephone and Moya had dark circles under their eyes, and it seemed that even sitting took quite an effort.

“Have a good sleep?” Moya asked.

Roan thought about it and shook her head. “Still tired.”

“Yeah, I think Arion has been needing more energy to keep the door closed,” Persephone said.

“Perhaps she’ll put us to sleep when the time comes. Might be better that way,” Moya added.

“There’s no point in thinking like that,” Persephone said. But Roan wondered if their chieftain really believed her own words.

Brin came over, holding one of the tablets. “So let me explain what I’ve learned.” The girl placed the stone on the ground in front of them and sat beside Roan.

“What about Suri?” Persephone asked.

“She knows this already.”

“Where is she?”

“Memorizing the table tablet.” In the green light, Roan could see dark circles around Brin’s eyes, too. The girl’s normally round face drooped, but she seemed buoyed by the thrill of telling what she’d discovered, revealing a secret.

“So I’ve been studying the tablets as best I can. I still miss a lot of the words. They’re in reverse order, meaning that the first tablet is on the bottom and the last one that was created is on top. So I started the story backward.”

“Story?” Persephone asked.

“The tablets are about the person who was imprisoned here.”