Brawna Baltain
What the fuck are you?”
Brawna and the King of Waldovia had gotten off on the wrong foot—which is what happened when one emerged from a black, floating jaw in the middle of a king’s throne room, flanked by thousands of rotting bodies.
But now she sat across from a silent King Yarro. They’d been having a meeting before his youngest stormed in and demanded to sit in. Yarro had laughed at him and gestured to a seat at their mostly vacant table.
“I need more birds,” Brawna said calmly, a raven nibbling the piece of bread in her lap.
“We’ve found you hundreds. Is that not enough?” Prince Qwinn, the son, argued. He had his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s bright hair, pulled back against his scalp. His face was the halfway shade between his dark mother and pale father, almost too sunny to exist in this frigid kingdom.
“Hundreds is a start, but I’ll need a thousand,” Brawna said, playing tug-of-war with her feathered friend. It won and gobbled the piece of bread whole.
“The branches are silent,” Qwinn pressed.
“In Hark-wald, maybe. But there are birds between here and Thern.” It was unnerving, the extent of her new senses. She could see into the crags of the wooden table in front of her, almost down to the little bugs that squirmed inside them.
“And how do you know that?”
Brawna peeked up at him through her lashes.
“Because I can hear a woman in the kitchen cutting carrots, and I can hear the bubbling of her soup. I can hear the giggles of your children ten floors above us. I can hear all your small, human sounds day and night. But in the mornings, when the world is still and coldness stamps out all your petty noise, I can hear clear to the mountains. And in the mountains, I hear chirping.”
Brawna could smell the very sweat beading in Qwinn’s pores. His heartbeat marched in her own ears.
“Just two hundred more. We will make do with that amount,” she said, keeping his gaze. “And then I shall send them.”
“Through the thing you traveled here with?” Qwinn asked, eyeing the little black bauble around Brawna’s neck.
“Aye. It is faster than sailing across the sea.”
“Where will they be sent?” Qwinn asked.
“Where love is hidden.”
“Stop with your cryptic messages,” Qwinn growled and slammed his heavy hands on the table.
“My father has allowed you and your rot monsters to inhabit our city. We have given you shelter in our home. You say you will bring us victory against Micrea while they are weak and without a king, yet and all you have done so far is hoard crows and pigeons.”
Brawna cooed at her “hoarded” raven friend and smiled sidelong at Qwinn. “Ask your father what the birds are for. I bet he knows.”
Qwinn’s eyes slid to his father, who had sat in perfect silence during the whole encounter. King Yarro wasn’t a lover of conversation, but he was shrewd. Brawna often felt like he’d understand her even if she never said a single word.
“What are they for?” Qwinn asked.
Yarro’s mouth quirked into a strange smile under the mop of his mustache.
“To do as birds do—carry a message,” he said, patting his son’s hand.
“Do not worry yourself with this affair, son. Go to your apartments. Your children are here for the season. They’ll return to their mother soon.
Waste not your time with the duties of adults. ”
Qwinn was twenty-seven. He was absolutely an adult. But before he was an adult, he was a son.
Qwinn ground his jaw, but he shifted back from the table and left them. He might have wanted to slam the door on his way out, but he didn’t have the insolence for it.
“He should never be included in these sessions,” Yarro said, swallowing the wad of blood in his throat. Perhaps that was the other reason he did not talk.
“He is not a child,” Brawna said. “I was doing far more at his age.”
“As was I. It is why he does not do so much,” Yarro said.
“I have six children. Suffering is for his siblings. He is a good son, but he is a soft one. His curiosity has never served him well. Do not tell him what you wish to do with Micrea. Should he ask, lie, or simply tell him to leave. He will obey. It is his nature.” Yarro stood, clad in his heavy robe, midnight blue and embroidered with the names of his cities.
The bottom mopped up the floor’s dirt, so some seamstress always had to replace the hem.
That was the job of a king, though—to ruin with no personal consequence.
“If you say so,” Brawna said, waving him away.
The old man left without another word.
Brawna sat and waited. Eventually, there was noise outside of the door. Yarro had long since creaked off to his room. It was likely a maid stuffing linen into every crack and cranny in the castle to prepare for the dreaded freeze. A blizzard approached.
Brawna nuzzled her raven, and it jumped off her lap to a window, the last one not sealed shut for the winter.
Brawna frowned but opened the window to let the little thing escape anyway.
She was no longer slave to her old body’s delicacies.
The cold could bite at her all it wanted; its jaws would not pierce this new skin.
Hark-wald, the Waldov capital, was a sprawling, ice-kissed place that extended until Paradise’s End, the gorge that marked the end of the habitable part of the mountain the city was carved into the side of.
It was inescapable. Waldovia had no nice seasons, and the sun barely mustered the courage to warm even the tops of trees.
The name Waldovia itself translated as “surviving”—which was exactly what the black-and-blue Waldov people had done for a millennium before any Asterou man had set foot on the continent across the sea.
Glints of silver atop temples and ancient state houses shone in the few drips of moonlight not stolen by the snow clouds.
Night women and guards, both too prideful ever to take an evening off work, prowled the streets while households barricaded their doors against the storm.
And at the outskirts of the city, Brawna’s men creaked and groaned as they waited.
They didn’t speak. Vocal cords tended to decay even if they were not first gobbled by fire, but the wind rattled their bones like chimes in the night, and the more fleshy ones managed to produce a rumbling sound.
The Waldov people hadn’t loved watching her band of dead parade through their city, but they’d taken it better than she’d thought they would. As long as they couldn’t smell them, the dead men piled at their city’s edge were of less concern than the blizzard scratching at their windows.
Brawna liked this city and its strange people.
They were bad at jokes and austere. It was fun to tease them.
She could see why her grandfather had given them a piece of Bahn-Nuk when they’d sailed across the sea all those eons ago.
Perhaps she’d return it to them, the place they now bitterly called Kak-sov.
She shut the window tight and eased out of the secret meeting room. One second she was inhaling, the next there was a silver blade at her throat and an arm braced across her shoulders, pinning her to the door.
“What do you need with the birds?” Qwinn seethed. He balanced the silver at her throat, letting it poke just enough for her to know he would do it.
Brawna quirked a brow. “Your father doesn’t know you as well as he thinks.”
“This is not about my father,” Qwinn bit out. “Tell me.” He pushed the blade deeper.
Brawna stifled a laugh, then snatched his blade and twisted his arm behind his back.
She pressed him face first against the opposite wall and dug the pommel of his knife into the small of his spine, just enough to make it ache.
“I don’t think you want to know,” she teased as Qwinn struggled.
He reminded her of a baby bird squirming in the beak of a hawk.
“I don’t trust you,” Qwinn ground out, thrashing against her. “My father may be a senile pessimist, but I’m not. You want to start a war with Micrea? That will kill us—our whole country. I won’t let you ruin my home.”
Brawna raised her brows. “Me? Ruin your home? When Micrea’s already sliced out a piece? They will take more. They always do. You either strike before they take root in you or you are choked out by their weed.”
Qwinn’s body stiffened. He was too young to remember when the land across the sea had been an arm of his home country, but Brawna remembered it well—bargaining with his great-grandfather, feasting with them, trading.
They’d been good neighbors. And then Omniel Asterou had swept in and blocked them off from making any wartime alliances.
He’d starved the region of resources until it had had no choice but to bow at his feet.
Then his son had funded the traitor that had brought it under Micrea’s foot once and for all.
“You’re picking a fight you won’t win,” Qwinn said, but there was no anger in his voice. It rang hollow from his chest. “You’re strong, and you’re terrifying, but you’re only one monster. Micrea has seven of you.”
At the mention of the Wraiths, Brawna’s grip on Qwinn’s blade tightened, forcing it deeper into his spine.
The prince cried out, the sound so sharp it was a knife of its own.
It wasn’t like the cry she’d screamed as she’d burned, or even the one that had ripped out of her when Bravis died.
It sounded like Ryukyhn when she’d bested him in a fight.
He’d always give this betrayingly wimpy sound, and she’d never let him live it down after.
He could, of course, have clamped his mouth shut when she’d swept his legs out from under him, or simply unfurled his full might as an immortal, but instead he’d let her sink her fist into his stomach and he’d whine as he tried to re-inflate his lungs after.
Brawna hadn’t known his true strength until he lifted her like she weighed nothing, walked her to the edge of a cliff, and thrown her into an inferno.
This new body was many things, but Brawna found it best at being a home. A refuge from her near century of suffering, a shield against nature, and a fertile ground for the rage that swelled inside her every fucking time she thought of Ryukyhn.
No—Urias, as his master called him.
She hated him, down to the species level.
Every fucking one of those things, those Wraiths, would suffer for what they’d done on Asterou orders.
They should have understood. They’d been robbed, just as she was, and still they sided with their glorious king.
They’d burned her people in their beds, slaughtered their elderly, razed whole cities with half a thought.
There were parts of Bahn-Nuk where the soil still bled, and others that would forever be ash, all from one night of Wraith tyranny.
The fire never left Brawna. She’d just taken hold of it. It raged in her. Her people were still trapped in the flames. Only she could avenge them now.
She would pay the Wraiths back in kind.
“I’m stronger than a Wraith.” Brawna imbued her voice with magic and Qwinn retched under her.
“I’m stronger than some bastard playing in blood, than a bitch and her shadows, than some motherfucker with wings, than some sniveling fuck who whispers to canaries.
I’ll have their wings, their hands, their shadows, and their heads.
I will sew shut their many mouths. I will tear them apart piece by piece.
And when their screams no longer bring me joy, I will dig a hole in the middle of the Asterou city and dump their parts inside to let the vultures devour them day after day after fucking day. ”
Qwinn’s breaths were short from the magic dripping from Brawna’s lips wriggling into his guts.
“Do you really want to know what I will do with the birds, liprika?” Brawna hissed into his ear. Small bird, it meant in her language—what she used to call Ryukyhn.
Qwinn was in too much agony to answer. His terror filled her stomach, a better meal than any bread or meat.
She dipped her head toward Qwinn’s ear and whispered her plan.
Qwinn’s eyes trembled open with each terrible step until they watered at the scope of her destruction. It struck him stupid, and Brawna stepped away from him, finally pulling the blade from his spine.
Qwinn collapsed against the wall and maneuvered himself around to look at her. His eyes snapped from her face to his knife, still in her hand. “You’re a monster,” he choked.
Brawna tossed Qwinn his knife. She wouldn’t need a blade. Not with the destroying blaze in her stomach.
“I am seven fucking monsters.”