Author's Preface
Even in hindsight, there was little that either Pashara or Amira could do to change their fate.
Though Pashara normally objected to lacing her divine messages with personal opinion, she was no longer afraid to bolster them with warning and ill omen. In secret, she instructed Amira to speak often with the very few other village children—if Amira could convince her friends to fear the Saelics, then perhaps that fear would transmit to their parents, too. Most of the villagers were resistant to such messages, even whispering amongst themselves that the Saintess and her daughter were compromised.
But even for the very few who believed, there were still few options. What were they to do? Pack up everything and leave the only homes they had ever known? And even if they left, where would they go? The cities were gone. Most of the Alamar Isles were unsettled mountain ranges, but contrary to the Saelics’ portrayal of them as savage hunter-gatherers, few of the villagers were skilled in wilderness survival. They were accustomed to oven-cooked food, comfortable woolen mattresses, soft oil lighting, and the security of the caves that had protected them for generations. Some of the more paranoid villagers suggested building a ship, but their mastery was in building small fishing vessels, not a massive ship big enough to evacuate a whole village. And even then…where to next?
Even if the village had been all in agreement on a plan of action, though, they would have no time to complete it. Less than a week later, ships were spotted on the horizon. Warships. A half dozen at least. They lingered all morning and evening, not budging an inch, so the villagers cautiously wrote them off as being anchored for some other purpose. After all, they reasoned, surely the Saelics would not bring an army to punish a tiny village…
In the middle of the night, Amira awoke to a great thundercrack. It echoed and reverberated around her little stone room like nothing she had ever heard before, and instinctively, she began to cry. Had the cliff split open? Was there a storm inside the cave? Later she would learn that the sound was gunfire. But she instantly recognized the sound that quickly followed. Screaming. Terrible, agonized screaming.
Her instinct was to duck under her covers and hide. Then, through the loose weave of the quilt, she saw a faint glow enter her room. Pashara rushed to her side, a small orb of yellow magic hovering in her palm.
“Amira?” Pashara called. “Amira, get up! You need to run!”
She grabbed her daughter’s arm and hurried her out of bed. There was not even time to don a veil or shoes. Distantly, Amira could hear the garbled voices of men. Foreign men. Angry men. “Mama,” she sobbed, whirling around to hug Pashara.
But Pashara just pushed her away. “ Run , Amira,” she snapped. “Run and hide.”
“No!” Amira protested. “Don’t leave me alone!”
For a few precious moments, mother struggled against daughter, until a sharp and louder CRACK! resounded around them. The sudden fright made Amira lose her grip, and both she and Pashara stumbled to the floor. The yellow orb rolled from Pashara’s palm and snuffed out.
The darkness did not drown them for long. A second later, an angry orange light filled the room, the bulb of one of the Saelics’ strange lanterns. Soldiers poured into the tiny bedroom. One grabbed Amira. Two grabbed Pashara. Yet another drew a pistol, and with a wicked laugh, pressed it up to Pashara’s forehead.
“MAMA!” Amira shrieked.
When the shot rang out, it was so close that it silenced all sound. She could only hear through the vibrations that her throat made as she screamed and screamed and screamed. She thrashed and fought with such fury that, when the soldier leveled the gun at her, he must not have been able to get a clean shot. So after a minute, he pulled out a knife. Then he plunged it into her chest. Her body dropped to the ground.
Amira awoke with a start.
She was back in her bed. A great thundercrack rang out. It echoed and reverberated around her little stone room like nothing she had ever heard before…except that…that wasn’t true. She had heard it before. Just a few minutes ago. But that didn’t make sense. That would mean…
A glow appeared in the threshold of her bedroom door. Pashara, with a small orb of yellow magic hovering in her palm.
“Amira?” Pashara called. “Amira, get up! You need to run!”
This time, she did as she was told. What had just happened? Was it just a dream? Or a vision? It was too clear to be a dream. Amira knew without a shadow of a doubt what would happen if she stayed in her bedroom even a second longer. But for these precious few moments, her house was empty. Mama stood by the door, magic swirling around her wrists and ankles. Amira knew what this was; they had practiced for this, she had just been too cowardly to accept it as reality the first time. She would not make that mistake again. Mama was going to buy her time, stall the soldiers, and give her as much of a head start as possible. Amira just had to run.
Being formed of natural caves, with only a few man-made carved hallways to connect them, the village had more dead ends than any foreigner could hope to navigate. Even if the Saelics had found one home, there was no guarantee they might find the others. This was the villagers’ main strategy for survival: to use the cave system’s twisting corridors to their advantage, allowing them to burrow deep into the earth to escape their predators. But even for Amira, who had been caving since she could crawl and who explored these tunnels every day alongside her friends, the once-familiar maze was now nightmarish and alien. For the first time, she was doing it alone. Pashara was gone. Her friends weren’t here and might already be dead. The wails of human agony echoed off of every floor and ceiling, disorienting her sense of direction. Every few moments, the air would shatter with a gunshot that wrenched an involuntary sob from her throat.
Up ahead, orange lantern-light flickered against the wall. Amira skidded to a stop, then pivoted on her heel to turn back. But no sooner had she started running than she heard the shouts of men back the way she came, growing closer. The massacre was closing in on her. She was trapped. Desperate, she began to grope around the walls, unable to make out anything in the darkness except for what her hands could feel, until—there! That was it! A small crevice in the rock, barely the width of her shoulders. She turned to the side to shimmy through it, and just like that, disappeared into the wall of solid stone.
The village elders always warned of following the cracks within the earth. Too many villagers, tempted by the thrills of exploration, had perished within the uncharted fissures and tunnels. Their fates are the worst of all, Pashara once told her. We cannot even follow to find their bodies, lest we, too, join them in eternal decay.
Amira knew well the risk that she might burrow too deep, into a crevice too thin, and find herself trapped. No doubt these tiny channels were entirely unmapped, even by the diligent villagers. They were so narrow that even Amira, a child who was quite small for her age, had to suck in her breath and twist her body unnaturally to pass its tightest squeezes. At any other time, in any other circumstance, she would never dare to climb this deep or this far from the familiar tunnels of her village. But up ahead—very faintly, very far, and very high—she could barely glimpse a pale blue light. Moonlight. There was an exit. Somewhere. And freedom beyond it.
At one particularly narrow squeeze, she was forced to stop and rest on a flat rock outcropping. All things considered, she had not been climbing for terribly far, probably a hundred feet at most. But fumbling in the dark, terrified and crying, had slowed her progress. Her hands and feet were raw and bleeding, and her knees and elbows scraped to shreds. By now the gunfire had stopped. So had the screaming.
It was over, Amira knew. Her village was gone.
Thus began a week of suffering unlike any a child of five should ever endure. For the rest of the night, Amira curled up in the crevice and slept. It was a restless sleep. Any semblance of rest was plagued by a wild and feverish woe.
“My mama is dead,” she whispered, half-conscious, over and over. “My mama is dead!”
She woke in a cold sweat, having tossed and turned so much that her head was bashed and bruised against the coarse rock. Blood seeped from a cut on her brow and caked one eyelid shut. But with all of her tears cried and the sweat having removed the last drops of water from her body, her dehydration pushed her into a state of numb determination. She did not cry anymore. She did not hesitate. Her body moved as if on its own. The scraps of light above were brighter, signaling daylight. She climbed towards them and did not stop until she breathed fresh air again.
For six days and five nights, Amira lived off of the wild. The tunnel exit put her on the edge of the cliff and the mountain forest, close enough that she could look out and see the warships moored at the village docks, with their white sails and tall black funnels. Sometimes, she could even watch the Saelics scurrying across the decks and masts. She dared not get any closer. They had killed her before, and they would do it again. So she waited. She slept in the hollow of a tree and drank from a mountain stream. She looked for fruits, but it was so early in the season that nothing was quite ripe. On her third day, she was so hungry that she ate them anyway. She paid for it dearly. She spent the remaining days in a hysterical fever, passing in and out of consciousness. In one such conscious moment, she had an epiphany.
This must be death, she realized. I must already be dead.
That was the only possible explanation. The wounds and scrapes on her body were not healing. They were scabbed and oozing, like the festering of a corpse. Every movement hurt. She could not keep down food or water. So she must have already died, and her pain now was simply the pain of slow, gradual decay.
If she was dead, then there was only one thing to do. During her brief moments of lucidity, Amira crawled down to the beach, simply dropping to the ground whenever her vision darkened. When she regained consciousness, she would grit her teeth against the pain and continue forward.
Truly, it was only by happenstance that the Saelics remained anchored there long enough for Amira to surrender. But after purging the village of its inhabitants, the captain must have decided there was not enough bloodshed for his liking, as he took the soldiers out with him on a hunting expedition. The Saelics remaining on the ships, most of them humble sailors too low-born to accompany the captain, were slowly growing sick and tired of this. They were technically not allowed to leave the ships— these lands are too savage for mere sailors, the captain had warned them. But days had passed and none of the native Alamarics were seen on the shore. The captain must have succeeded in exterminating them. So really, what was the harm in taking the lifeboats out to the picturesque island beach for fishing, swimming, sunbathing…?
On the seventh day, as the sun was nearing its zenith, two of these sailors lay on the sand, sharing a bottle of rum between them.
“You know what I would kill for?” asked one.
“What?” asked the other.
“Snow,” said the first. “It’s still snowing in Saol Eile, I’ve heard. A freak April storm. Gods, I’d give anything to see snow again…sick and fucking tired of the heat.”
“You’re crazy,” said the second.
“What, don’t tell me you like it here?”
“Are you joking? Gods, this is paradise. My wife always talked about places like this, she read about ‘em in some pulp novel. Got the idea in our son’s head, too, and now all he writes about is about the island. Can’t even be damned for a ‘hey, Dad, how are you.’ Just wants to know if I’ve seen dolphins.”
“At least your kid writes to you.”
“Yeah…guess I am lucky. Oh, heads up—animal, down the beach.”
They turned to look. At the other end of the beach, emerging from a copse of trees, was a small, dark creature. It walked on all fours, and had a strange, mottled blackish-red fur…except it wasn’t walking, it was crawling. And it was not fur, but rather ragged cloth and tangled hair. A human. A child.
The sailors leapt up. The soldiers had told some vivid tales of this island’s natives. Stories of human sacrifice, burning people alive for barbecue, and all sorts of other unsavory things that the sailors didn’t quite believe, but which if true, made them wary about ever meeting an Alamaric. When the two sailors saw the child’s black hair and dark skin, the fear of being roasted over an open flame did briefly occur to them. But this was just a child. And she seemed to be injured.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” said one.
“The captain’s gonna kill us,” the other muttered, but ran towards the girl anyway.
Amira does not remember reaching the beach, or being found by the sailors, or being taken on board. All she remembers is awakening to the sounds of muffled men’s shouting, the stench of coal smoke, and an ache in her head.
Everything around her was strange and surreal. Later, she would learn that she was taken to the medical bay in one of the warships and treated by the ship’s doctor—and against all odds, despite severe malnutrition and nearly fatal poisoning from unripe fruit, she pulled through. She had been sleeping peacefully for a full day. But she did not know that now, only that she was lying on a cot in a foreign place with a roughly-shaven Saelic man sitting nearby. He bolted straight up when she stirred, and smiled when he saw she was awake.
“Oh, thank the saints,” he sighed. “You gave us all a real scare, kiddo.”
Amira just looked around, confused. She felt around her body. She wasn’t in pain anymore, but her arms and legs were covered in strips of white cotton. Just like the linen wraps Pashara used to prepare a corpse for their final journey. They didn’t cover all of her, only the wounded parts, and there was no oil to accelerate the flame. But maybe they weren’t done with funeral preparations yet, she reasoned.
She was still exhausted. But…if her village was gone, and her mother was dead, then she was the saintess. She had to make sure this was done right. “This is…my final journey?” she asked, her voice weak and hoarse.
The sailor frowned, but after a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Uh…yeah. You don’t need to worry, we’re not going to hurt you. We’ll arrive soon.”
“How soon?” Amira asked. “There’s no oil. How quickly will it burn?”
“Burn? As in, fires?”
She nodded.
“Well,” said the sailor, scratching his chin, “we use some pretty nice coal. Only the best for the Queen’s steamers, after all. Speedwise…twelve knots, on a good day. So pretty fast.”
Amira didn’t know what knots or steamers were, nor what the Queen had to do with any of it. But she knew that coal was good for burning. And if the sailor was confident that it would do the job, then she trusted him.
“And my village?” she asked.
“Um…what about them?”
“Are they coming too? On the journey?”
A longer hesitation. “Um…yeah. Yeah, you’ll see them soon.”
Then her job as the saintess was done. Even if she had to entrust it to strangers, it was done. A wave of peace washed over her. “Thank you,” Amira whispered, before drifting back into a deep and dreamless sleep.
