Chapter 2

“Ada doesn’t understand.”

            Alexai looks up at the sky, all bruised gray and columned with pale sickly light, then down at the blanch barked trees. He has a small scuff of soot on his hands from the funeral pyre that had been stamped out hours ago. He licks the skin clean, gums tightening against the coppery tang.

            “All she knows is that her mother is gone,” he replies, careful to look the suzerain right in the face as he speaks.

            “She would have been removed from her mother’s care soon at any rate. You’ll continue to watch over her until the camp decides she needs to be on her own.”

             Alexai had found his brother’s widow dead by the river that slashes through the middle of Hera 6, near the Marked Mountains. The same river that cuts a line between his people and the ones who live in the caves. She’d been stabbed through with a shortblade sword, the skin of her chest and sides shredded. The men she’d been with were dead too. They’d only been collecting water from the Sora River. 

            “Do I get to have any say?” he asks before he’s able to stop himself. A stupid thing to ask. Easily misconstrued as emotion. All he has to do is feed and shelter her. Beyond that, she should be of no concern to him.

            “Why would you have a say?” the older man responds.

            The wind whistles shrilly through the air, through the black leaves, and Alexai glances towards the camp, nestled out of site past the forest the two men are standing in.

            “If she lives with me,” he continues, after gathering his thoughts, “I’m sure I’ll be able to gauge how ready she is for independence.”

            “Leave it to us.” Short. Abrupt.

Alexai feels an unseemly bite of anger. He’d been helping Ala take care of Ada since his brother had died in battle. It hadn’t been a long time (at least not to his people), but long enough to make the sting of her absence smart a bit now that he has a child to handle all on his own. And to think he’ll be playing feeder and giver to another mouth without any say or sway in her life makes him bristle.

           Ademar glances up towards the sparse, black leaves. “With another dead, someone else can finally have a child.”

            The words sting a bit, but Alexai doesn’t show it. He nods his head, trying to look at the pragmatic side of it. Ala had been alive for only 298 years. Still a vibrant woman. But her death paves the way for another birth, and the painstaking process of picking a couple who could be granted the (secretly desired) permission to have another child will take up most of the camp’s attention for at least a few weeks.

           Alexai doesn’t think Ada will find much comfort in that fact. But he keeps his gaze steady and simply nods, turning to return to the camp.

           The smell of roasting game and firewood drifts through the trees, and he’s a few steps away before the suzerain decides to stop him again, his words carefully detached.

           “You know we found the bodies shredded.”

            Alexai stops. No one knows that he had torn into the bodies of the men at the river, the ones who had failed to protect Ada’s mother. Does the suzerain know? He wonders if this is a trick. But Ademar can’t know.  No one knows and no one ever will.

            He doesn’t turn around. “Probably boers. Or coyets. Fresh meat attracts all kinds.”

            He waits for the other man to say something but when nothing seems forthcoming, he walks on, feeling a bright sting of pain, like the edge of knife pressing into his skin. It’s shame, he knows. He tries to forget that moment of weakness, but at night, even after reigning himself in, he still often lies in his small tent and listens to the rhythmic breathing of his niece (now his daughter, by camp custom) and imagines thousands of little eyes peeking out of the caves where the other ones live, blinking with laughter at him and his misfortune.

Author's Note

Is this too short? Should I connect it to the next chapter without interruption?