by Cora Carmack
She held her new shoes in her hands, and the minister smiled, approving her choice.
“Repeat after me,” Vareeth said. “We call to the heavens, to the Sacred Skies.”
Sly glanced briefly back at Roar, then at Locke, before repeating the words the minister spoke.
“We call to the souls ancient and wise. We humble ourselves before your strength. We beseech you for your mercy. We honor your power and control.”
The minister gestured for her to place her shoes upon the altar where dozens of other items already lay. Like most Storm altars, it was made from a mineral. This one was a glassy black crystal, cut through with brownish-red stone and sediment. Locke guessed it was fulgurite, which formed when skyfire met sand, cut to form a raised circular altar. Sly set her shoes down carefully and repeated the last of the minister’s chant.
“We offer a sacrifice to you in hopes you find it worthy and true.” When she was finished, the minister ran his thumb vertically from the bridge of her nose to the top of her forehead, where the Sacred Soul followers often wore painted markings in their more formal ceremonies.
“May the Storms grant you mercy and peace. Welcome to Toleme.”
Sly took the blessing in silence, and then stepped aside for the next in their group. No one immediately came forward, so Locke pulled a blade from a holster at his hip and took his turn. He repeated the same invocation, then before the last lines, pricked his thumb with the tip of his knife and let the blood drip onto the black stone as he said the final words. He pulled a kerchief from his pocket to stop the blood and stood patiently as the minister gave him the same blessing. When he backed away, his eyes shifted to meet Roar’s wide-eyed gaze. He watched her observe the others, as one by one they made their offerings. Ransom gave a knife, and Jinx one of the many rings decorating her fingers. Then finally, Bait spilled his drops of blood, and it was Roar’s turn.
She squared her shoulders, set her jaw, and stepped up to the altar. He saw her hand shake as she reached back to pull a knife from the harness at her back. Her pale skin had gone ashen, and she looked … nervous. She usually did her best to hide all her emotions but anger, but now, it was as if she couldn’t.
It only took a second for him to decide, and he turned to the minister. “Father, if I may, can I stay with her? She is new to our party, and this is well beyond the scope of her experience.”
It was a testament to her anxiety that Roar didn’t even argue when he removed the knife from her grip. He took her shaking hand in his as the minister began to speak.
* * *
Roar felt so ashamed, so embarrassed, but not even those emotions could push out the one that crowded in her chest and made it hard to take a full breath. Worse, she couldn’t even give the emotion a name. She only knew that as each of her companions had recited the words, calling out to the heavens, she had grown more and more uncomfortable, like a heavy weight pressed down on her shoulders. She was not afraid of a tiny prick of a knife when she had willingly taken a blade to her arm not so long ago. But some bone-deep instinct whispered of danger here.
She wished she had taken the time to find a token, but the only true belongings of worth she had were the twister ring about her neck and the Finneus Wolfram book that she brought along for comfort and inspiration. Both meant far too much to sacrifice, but something about the notion of dropping her blood on that altar did not sit well with her.
The minister began to speak, and Locke steadied her hands. She would worry about the vulnerability she was showing him later when her heart did not feel like it was about to burst from her chest. She squeezed his fingers, pressing them into the knife he held, and she dared not look at him. “Easy,” he whispered. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She took too long to say the first line of the invocation, so the minister repeated it again, as if she hadn’t heard. Her voice came out as little more than a whisper as she said, “We call to the heavens, to the Sacred Skies.” Little bumps lifted along her skin, her hair standing on end as she continued: “We call to the souls ancient and wise.”
Out of nowhere, lightning streaked overhead, splintering the quiet sky. She jumped and turned away and Locke was there, his chest wide and warm and solid against her cheek. When no more lightning appeared, she eased herself out of his arms.
The minister watched her with confusion, but it was Sly just behind her shoulder that stared with clear, unadulterated distrust.
She was being silly. It was only blood. She had sprinkled far more than a few drops of it along the southern road out of Pavan. She nodded for the minister to continue, but the moment she spoke her next words, lightning lit up the sky once more. She finished the sentence quickly, praising the strength of storms as one attempted to make itself known overhead. She glanced at Locke for the first time, and she could not help but let him see her fear. If a storm formed now, here with these strangers, and she reacted badly …
His hand rubbed soothingly up and down her spine. Any other time she would have shrugged off the touch. There were too many people around. But it did calm her. Just that little touch made breathing feel like less of a challenge. “Don’t worry about the skyfire. It’s only in the clouds for now,” he said. “Finish this, and we’ll go inside. And if a storm comes, the others can handle it.”
That only made her more furious with herself. She didn’t want the others to handle it. In fact, she should be jumping at the chance to face a skyfire storm. That was her family’s strongest affinity, and she could not go back home without it.
You are lightning made flesh. Colder than falling snow. Unstoppable as the desert sands.
She couldn’t say the rest because she was done pretending to be Stormling, but the rest was true. Her blood, like her ancestors’ before her, was filled with the light of skyfire. She knew her heart could freeze out fear and doubt because she had done it all her life. And her will, her desire to obtain storm magic, had pushed her through far worse situations than a tiny drop of blood on an altar.
She kept her eyes on the sky as she said the next two phrases.
“We offer a sacrifice to you…”
She did not flinch as the skyfire above her bounced from cloud to cloud, lighting up the sky from horizon to horizon.
Locke peeled back the fingers of one hand she had been fisting at her side. He smoothed his palm over hers, once and then again, tracing the healed scar from when she had cut her palm to sow the tale of her kidnapping. Then he made the tiniest of pricks on the tip of her index finger. She watched a single drop of blood land, and above her head, the sky exploded with light, so bright that it burned like the sun in her peripheral vision. She snatched her hand to her chest and threw her head back, but the sky was dark and still once more. She spat out quickly, “In hopes you find it worthy and true.”
Then she put several steps between her and the altar, clutching her blood-smeared finger inside her other fist. The minister didn’t approach to touch her, but rather said his blessing from afar, his eyes wide and fearful.
Listen to her roar. Listen to her wail.
Listen to the grief that lives inside the gale.
—“At the Heart,” a Sacred Souls hymn
17
The outside of the inn was nearly the same color as the reddened earth it sat on. It was plain and squat. But the inside was a sunburst of color—rich woven tapestries, intricately painted pottery. The calming smell of incense hung in the air.
She could feel the others peeking at her when she was not looking, and nausea rolled through her stomach. A headache throbbed at her temples. One by one the hunters collected a key from Duke. Quickly, she reached into her pack for her coin purse, glad she had brought enough with her to last a while. When she asked Duke how much she owed, he shook his head.
“No need.”
Sly, who had just received her own key, gave Roar a hard look before walking down a hallway to the right, her feet muffled by the thick, blue rug that stretched the length of the hall.
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“I have money. I can pay my way.”
“Keep your coin,” he said. “None here have paid their own way until their training ended and they began receiving a cut of the market sales. You will be the same. It is our investment in you.”
Roar had been a lousy investment so far, and would continue to be so, for she had always planned to leave once she had what she needed.
“Please,” she said, “I would really prefer to take responsibility for my own needs.”
“It’s already done, child. I’ll not argue with you. You have Locke for that,” he said with a knowing grin. Her face flamed, and she took the key without another word.
“Last room on the right.”
She kept her face forward as she walked down the hall. She sorely needed a bath and sleep, and everything else could wait until tomorrow.
But her mind refused to wait. Thoughts beat at her as she bathed in the cramped tub in chilly water brought by a young maid. Her feet were raw from breaking in boots that were fitted to someone else’s feet, and she carefully covered her blisters and wounds with a healing salve.
But for every measure of pain the salve soothed, the more room she had to think of home. What was her mother doing now? Surely, she had received the note Nova was supposed to give her. Was the queen furious? Was she afraid?
Roar pulled her worn copy of The Tale of Lord Finneus Wolfram from her pack. Lord Wolfram was the nephew of the last king of Calibah. Southwest of Pavan and just north of Locke, Calibah was all dangerous swampland and ruins now, given over to the predators who lurked in the murky waters. A year before she was born, the kingdom had been beset by storms. Again and again, it was ravaged with no reprieve, until not even the royal Stormlings could hold them all off. Many died. Many times many. Wolfram volunteered to lead an expedition out to sea in the hopes of finding a land that was not afflicted by storms. That had been in the year of Aurora’s birth, eighteen years prior. The ship was never heard from again.
The book was neither unrealistic fairy tale nor harsh cautionary tale. It walked a fine line between hope and despair—a land that Roar had walked most of her life. And if there was some small chance that Finneus Wolfram had lived to find a land safer than this one, perhaps she could too.
She’d read the book so often that the pages had grown thin with use. The spine was cracked and the edges worn. No matter how many times she read the story, it had never failed to enthrall her.
Until now.
For tonight, she was much closer to despair than hope, and she could not see the potential for truth on the pages, only fiction. More likely, Finneus Wolfram had gone the way of every other Stormling who had ever ventured out to sea. And she was a silly girl if she thought she would meet a different end.
“Enough.” She threw the book down upon her bed and stood. She could not stay here and wallow in her fears and doubts any longer. She dressed quickly, pulling her boots up over brand-new bandages. She no longer had a cloak, and a chill clung to the rocky desert outside. She still had the cream-colored scarf that she had wrapped around her hair when she left Pavan, so she draped that around her shoulders like a shawl and sneaked out of her room, down the darkened hallway and out into the night.
She kept to the shadows, darting down roads without any specific destination in mind. When she found a gap in the village wall, she climbed over the rubble and outside. Her feet sank into the sand as she walked. Overhead, the stars blazed from horizon to horizon, brighter than she had ever seen them before. She found an area without brush and cacti, where the red sand was thick enough to be soft, and she lay back, stretching her arms and legs out, until she saw nothing but sky.
She had done this more times than she could count back home in Pavan. But the earth there was soft in a different way; it did not shift and stick to her skin as the sand did here. She missed the breeze blowing through the wheat stalks. Here, the wind was either absent or blowing in great gusts that dragged the sand along with it. No in between. The stars at least were the same.
It should not have been a comfort, to feel so small in comparison to the rest of the universe. But she didn’t mind feeling small. When the world loomed large above her as it did now, it was easier to have hope. Because surely somewhere out there in the far reaches of the world, there was a place without storms. A place with answers. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the gusting wind, the sprinkle of sand as it settled in a new place, and the call of insects as they poured their songs into the night.
“You have a real bed and a room to yourself, and you choose this?”
She startled, jumping up into a sitting position, and twisting to find Locke behind her, his hands shoved into the pockets at his hips.
“What are you doing here?”
It wasn’t enough that he kept intruding on her thoughts, now he interrupted her solitude as well.
“I could ask the same of you.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she snapped.
“Sometimes that happens after a while on the road. You teach your body to only sleep when exhausted, and it is confused when the routine changes. We could go for a run if you would like.”
She snorted. “I’ll pass.”
He settled into the sand beside her, his long legs bent at the knee with his elbows braced on top. “I’m not that bad, am I?”
“You are relentless and demanding and unwavering.”
“I only hear good things coming out of your mouth.”
She laughed, and he lay back like she had been before, his hands pillowed behind his head, completely at ease. Curse him.
He smiled and said, “That sounds good too.”
“What?”
“The way you laugh.”
She frowned, wanting to lie down again, but too afraid of how it would feel to be that close to him. So instead, she folded her legs and sat with her hands in her lap and her head tilted up toward the sky.
“I went by your room to see if you needed help changing the bandages on your legs. And … if you wanted to talk.”
Oh heavens. She imagined what would have happened if she had been in her room, if he had come inside and sat on her bed and touched her legs. It was enough to make her shiver and pull the shawl tighter around her shoulders. She was a fool. A stupid, stupid fool.
“I changed the bandages myself.”
He said, “Earlier … at the altar—”
Roar sucked in a breath. Could this man do nothing but poke at the things that she was trying desperately to ignore?
“It was nothing,” she said quickly. “There is very little religion in Pavan. The old myths are but fairy tales there. I suppose I let myself get spooked by the idea that the storms could hear us, could listen and choose and act as a human might.”
That was a good enough reason, and might have even been the truth.
“I don’t know that they listen. But choose? Yes, they do that. You will learn quickly in the field that you can never depend upon a storm doing what it ought. The more potent a storm’s magic, the more … sentient … it seems.”
More things for her to fear, to fill the swirling mass of information in her brain that just wouldn’t stop.
“Are you superstitious?” he asked.
“Not particularly.” Though fear was its own kind of superstition.
“Then why worry so much over a bit of blood on a stone?”
“Because clearly I know scorch all about the world. About this life. Even about myself. Perhaps I should be superstitious.”
After all, hadn’t lightning flashed overhead as she spoke the invocation? Maybe it knew what she was after, that she meant to steal its heart and return home.
“Blind belief is a comfort; it is the frame that puts the rest of the world into context. It allows us to block out the things that don’t make sense, that which frightens us. It narrows our vision so that the world does not feel so large. Would it comfort you to have the frame of superstition? To believe that if you say the right words and sac
rifice the right things, then your world will stay exactly as it is? Or do you wish to choose what you believe, what you trust and understand?”
“I do not wish the world to stay as it is. I do not wish to narrow anything. I spent my entire life confined in Pavan, confined in my thoughts and my actions. No. I would not wish the world small, not even to be less afraid.”
“I do not think you could be small if you tried.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” She had been poked fun at for her height before, most often by petty boys who had to look up to meet her eyes and did not know she heard their whispers. She hadn’t expected it from him, even with all the friction between them.
“I did not mean it as an offense,” he said, sitting up, his body suddenly much closer than it had been. She abandoned looking at the stars to stare at her hands, the lines on her palms and the curve of her nails. “I only meant that you are … rather impossible to ignore.”
She scoffed. “If you’re not meaning to give offense, you are spectacularly bad at giving compliments.”
“I never seem to say the right thing to you.”
“It’s just as well,” she said. “I have lost all appreciation for compliments. They’re little truths and half lies that say more about the person offering them than they do about me.”
“I don’t think I have ever met a woman who hated compliments.”
“Not hate. I just don’t trust them.”
“I’m sensing a pattern when it comes to you and trust.”
“And I’m sensing a pattern when it comes to you and saying the wrong thing.”
He laughed and held up his hands in mock surrender. “Very well. I am done pushing.”
He didn’t continue, and she didn’t know how to reply, so the night grew quiet between them. A gust of wind picked up her hair and blew it across her face. She turned to dislodge it and found him staring at her, his body leaned back and propped casually on his hands. She faced forward again, and let her hair blow as it would. She asked, “What do you believe? What frame do you choose for your world? Or do you believe in anything at all?”