Chapter 4
The celebration started immediately. Was it strange that the group was celebrating so soon after their leader, Red, was badly injured, and the horror of the riftwolves?
Not really, not in this place. You dealt with the bad and took the good at face value. I had my back to the fires, looking toward the seam that they’d pulled me out of.
Darkness, that maw that had spit me out was nothing but darkness.
I took a few steps to the side and leaned against a tree.
Tilting my head back, the ache in my ribs protested, and my spine pressed against rough bark.
I couldn’t help but draw in a slow deep breath of awe.
The trees around camp rose like sentinels carved from shadows, their trunks impossibly straight, vanishing into the sky as though the earth itself had grown spears and thrust them toward the heavens.
And between them—the star speckled canvas.
Not the fractured, dust-choked sky I’d clawed toward when I’d been inside the Rift. Not a seam in stone. Not a wound in the world.
This was an ocean turned upside down.
Stars flooded the space between the towering trees, spilling silver light through their green crowns. The Milky Way cut across the darkness in a pale river, luminous and endless, a scar of light stitched across the belly of the night.
Another slow breath that ached in a far different way than the break in my ribs.
I was alive. Which I knew was more than had been expected of me, when I’d been dropped into that Rift.
The scent of sap and growing things, the smell of cooking food, and laughter from the others wrapped around me.
The trees hummed with quiet strength that I could feel as I leaned into the trunk.
They had stood through the Breaking. Through the seams and Rifts tearing open.
Through creatures crawling out of places that should not exist.
The beauty of the moment, of the trees and the stars did not cancel the danger.
They coexisted.
Just like me.
I exhaled slowly, feeling just how fucking small I was beneath the trees, beneath the stars…. Whatever I had been before the Rift, whatever pieces were missing, the part that had survived the fall was still here. Still breathing.
Still looking up. Still hoping.
The world was broken, sure.
But it was also breathtaking. A smile lifted the corners of my mouth.
There it was. A truth that I needed that was not violence and survival.
A cluck of that fucking sorrowbird echoed, breaking my quiet moment. I looked over a tree to see him there, watching me.
“Go on,” I made a shooing motion with my hands. He flipped his wings back at me, as if shooing me away. I rolled my eyes. “I should have shot you.”
Another cluck. “Try?”
Gods, that bird had sass. I didn’t want to like it.
“Mallory, come have some!”
I turned away from the sky and the sorrowbird and went where I was called.
Dakota’s bow was over my back; the quiver tied to my waist and thigh.
The weapon seemed to mold itself to my body making it feel like I didn’t even have it on.
Lifting a hand to the group that called me over, I took the offered food.
Roast karruk, a few root vegetables, and a hunk of coarse bread that had a few grains of sand in it.
“Thank you.” I didn’t sit with them but stood so I had the seam to my right, and the fire to my left.
“Nothing comes out of the seams twice in one day,” a whip lean older man, most of his hair gray as a storm cloud, gave me a nod. “The Rift only throws violence out once a day.”
I took a bite of the roasted bird, choosing to listen and not question something that seemed ridiculous.
“Yancy, that’s stupid and you are old enough to know it,” another man said.
They argued across the fire at each other. Good natured. Easy. Kindness behind the ribbing.
I didn’t hear the sorrowbird, he just dropped to my shoulder, snagged a hunk of the meat and sat there, eating it.
I tipped my head to look him in the eye, taking good note of the silver flecks in the black orbs. Silver flecks. My heart stuttered. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Yum yum.” He gulped the meat back, wiped his beak on my hair, and flew off.
Did I laugh or did I shoot him out of the sky? “Fucking bird,” I muttered though I didn’t so much as reach for the bow. I mean…the bird was a harmless thief. And there was some entertainment value in him. At least for me.
But that didn’t stop someone else shooting at him, the arrow falling far short of hitting the stupid bird. Well, maybe not so stupid, he’d taken most of my dinner. I sighed and started on the root vegetables.
The silence made me lift my eyes to find everyone staring at me. “What?”
The woman sitting next to Yancy, with hair as gray as his, wobbled to her feet. Her voice was a bit scratchy.
“One for sorrow,
Two for lies,
Three for a Rift that never dies.
Four for blood,
Five for flame,
Six will call to you by name.
Seven tears the world in two—
If eight birds come, they’ve come for you.” She let out a heavy sigh. “Sorrow comes for you, young one. That is why the bird is drawn to your presence. I will speak to Red, for our safety, but…” she didn’t seem angry, just resigned, “you should go sooner rather than later.”
Well so much for me choosing to go on my own. Strange, there was a sense of relief knowing that they were going to just kick me out. Not that I believed in the superstition around the sorrowbird. I didn’t think a bird was luck, good or bad.
“That’s a stupid children’s rhyme, Daph, and you know it,” Dakota stepped into the firelight.
Daph shook her head. “The bird likes her, Dakota. You know as well as I do what happened to the last woman that a sorrowbird took a liking to, a woman who fed the bird.”
Even in the firelight, I saw Dakota’s face go pale, his eyes flutter shut and his hand go to the ring on the chain.
Fuck, his wife was who she meant? His wife had been marked by a sorrowbird?
My guts twisted, knowing that I had brought this on them, by just being here. Digging up memories, bringing them riftwolves, and not even the karruk meal could counter what they believed would be incoming death. Whether that death was mine, or someone else’s, they didn’t want to see it.
I stepped away from the fire while the others argued about the meaning of the sorrowbird.
Not that I believed that the sorrowbird was anything but a pain in the ass, but the people here, they believed it was a harbinger of doom. Which meant I had to go, and that felt like something I’d done a lot of—leaving.
I’d make my goodbyes to Helayne and Red first, let them know I’d decided to go by myself. Between Aron and the sorrowbird, there was no point in trying to stay here longer. It would only bring them more strife, and I’d done enough of that.
I wove my way through the camp, heading to Helayne and Red’s tent. Helayne was slumped in the chair outside, no doubt exhausted by tending to her husband and daughter’s wounds. Her dirty blonde hair was mussed, and her chin was heavy on her chest.
“Helayne,” I said her name softly, not wanting to startle her. Crouching next to the chair, I touched the back of her hand.
Cold.
Shaking, I reached for her chin and tipped her head up—her neck was ringed with purple bruises like rotting violets, pressure prints deep into her soft flesh. Her skin on her neck was cool, it had not been long, but long enough that there was no bringing her back.
As if the sorrowbird had indeed brought strife, sadness and shock were met with the anger that seemed to live inside of me.
My vision blurred with tears for Helayne, for her kindness and for her daughter who…
gods Avalyn…the bond between mother and child was no small thing.
In a world where children were snatched away so easily how much worse to lose the one person who would throw themselves in front of danger for you?
“I’m so sorry, Helayne,” I whispered through a too-tight throat.
A grunt from inside the tent, snapped me around, all my senses going into overdrive. What if something else had crawled out of the Rift and attacked these people…my fault, my fault, my fault.
I pulled the two daggers from the bow and slid through the tent flap, silent, fully expecting some freaky human/reptile hybrid.
And yet, in some ways, it was so much worse.
And the absolute fury had me in its grip, the pain for Avalyn and Helayne burning away under the flames that were about to consume another monster.
Aron was bent over his brother’s bed, his fingers wrapped around his throat. Red wasn’t moving. I stepped closer, setting my legs to take the weight of his body.
“Limp dick.” I snapped and Aron turned as if he knew that was his true name, right into the points of both daggers, one in his heart, the other up into his chin. The weight of his body, the thrust of my blades, the force rippled up my arms and I welcomed the ache.
His eyes bobbed wide, shock, fury. Blood gurgled up as he tried to say something. I flexed and drove both blades in a little deeper, one scraping against bone. He tried to snarl at me, but I beat him to it, a less than human sound rumbling through me.
My pulse pounded, adrenaline and rage screaming to cut him into pieces and feed him to the Rift. “I knew you needed to die. I just didn’t think I’d get to do it.”
I yanked the two daggers free with a squelch of flesh and blood. Without me supporting him, he began to drop. He fell face first with a heavy thud. He didn’t deserve anything more than to faceplant in the dirt at his brother’s feet.
“Red,” I hurried to his side, and pressed my fingers to his throat. A light pulse—he had a chance. I bent over him and started breathing into his mouth, counting. Breathing for him. Moving on instinct. Hoping I wasn’t too late. “Come on. Breathe!”