Braid of Sand Read online

  “Won’t you, now? And when did that change of heart occur?”

  The air grew too think to breathe. Several courtiers gasped and more than a few ladies clutched their throats.

  “You’re certain this isn’t a sign of the Goddess’s return, then?” Castien broke the silence before anyone grew dramatic enough to faint.

  “There is no Goddess!” Herodes barked so loudly Hagan cowered into a ball on the floor.

  “She was real enough when she turned the seas against us. She was real enough when she sucked the nutrients out of the ground. She was real enough when she turned our forests into deserts—”

  “Enough!” Herodes panted with anger at the reminder there were forces in the universe beyond his control. Castien executed a sarcastic bow.

  “I will look into this for you, Sire. If an alternative source of food exists, it is in everyone’s best interests that it is found. Though, I did hear word SIAR Labs has released a new pill that packs all the nutrients of a four-course meal into a single capsule. With that kind of achievement what do your people need these greens for?”

  Kephas’s head snapped up.

  “Don’t pretend your fate will be any different than the rest of ours if you fail.” He glared at Castien’s arm. “After all, you were one of us once!” Bitterness twisted his handsome features. Castien bared his teeth in a cold smile that caused the other man to take a half-step back. He allowed his gaze to drift from Kephas to the King, who wiped his forehead on his sleeve and gestured frantically for his attendants to fan faster.

  “And once, we all worshipped the Goddess.” He turned his back on them and headed for the door. “Times change.”

  5.

  In the three days that followed Raziela’s unsanctioned harvest, there was no sign of the Great Mother. That wasn’t unusual. However, Raziela couldn’t help but regard her absence as a prelude to her punishment. It was her first true act of defiance since she entered into service of the Goddess. Perhaps Naiara was thinking of a way to ensure she never disobeyed again.

  To make matters worse, if the woman, Zola, received the basket she didn’t have the grace to thank the idol who’d delivered her prayer.

  Each hour that passed with no word from either only made Raziela more irritable and anxious.

  Guilt smoldered in her belly like a phoenix egg. It broke open at unexpected moments when she was hacking at weeds or savaging her practice dummy. Keeping secrets from the Goddess bordered on sacrilege. If the humans never received the offering, then she’d risked everything for no reason.

  The anticipation lent agony to days already painful with waiting. Waiting to be deemed ready. Waiting to be called into service. Waiting for anything interesting to happen to her at all.

  It was late afternoon on the third day when she sat beneath the trailing willow boughs listening to the music made by the zephyrs flitting through their leaves. Every so often, Aeris joined in by making an entire limb rustle out of sync. The gusts of wind shook some of the willow leaves loose, and Raziela winced as the dryads chattered and scolded like angry squirrels.

  She drummed her finger against her bent knee, keeping one eye on the sky and her ear tuned toward the Temple. Where was the Great Mother? Why was she taking so long to return?

  “This is no time for games, Aeris. Mazin’s finally settled back down.” Raziela rested her back against the stringy bark of the weeping willow. She balanced a dirk by its point in the dirt to let the sunlight dance up and down the polished steel. Wispy gray clouds formed a sheen across the sky, weakening the glare.

  “What difference does it make?” A dryad named Caprea lay stretched out beside her with her long legs crossed at the ankles and her hands clasped behind the cap of pale green catkins that served as her hair. “He wants his mother and father. So unless anyone here has shapeshifting powers they’ve been hiding, nothing we try is going to work.”

  In the distance, a faint rumble heralded Mazin’s burgeoning temper. The dryads huddled together, bracing for the next wave of storms.

  “I could try singing to him again. Maybe he’ll calm down if he hears one of his mother’s songs.” Raziela studied the darkening sky warily.

  “Not if you’re the one singing it,” Caprea’s low voice held a wealth of scorn. “He’s likely to bring down the Temple if you try singing to him again.”

  Raziela clicked her tongue and sent Caprea’s a reproving glare. Her voice wasn’t that out of tune.

  “The child is right. We must do what we can to sooth him,” said Bebb, the oldest of the dryads. “His mother cannot comfort him, and his father hides in the Shadow Realm. If even we turn our backs on him, can you blame him for being lonely and starved for affection?”

  Raziela stopped playing with the knife. No, she couldn’t.

  “After all,” Bebb reached out to pluck at a wayward curl on Raziela’s head the way a human plucked a blade of grass to worry it between their hands. It was meant to be a soothing gesture even though it was Caprea she was trying to calm. “He is only a child.”

  Caprea catapulted to her feet.

  “He has been a child since the dawn of time!”

  Bebb cooed like a pigeon settling into its roost.

  “He is a god, Caprea. He was a child when time began, and he’ll remain so until it ends again. It is his nature to bring rain just as it is his father’s to bring darkness and his mother to bring light.”

  Caprea kicked at a pile of leaves Aeris’ earlier antics had shaken loose. They flew up with a harsh rattle, and just when they reached the height of their arc, Aeris blew them back into her face. Her long arms pinwheeled as she struggled to keep her balance. Raziela tucked her chin to keep from laughing, but Bebb indulged in a throaty chuckle.

  Caprea bristled. Looking at her, no one would believe she was the spirit of a tree as graceful as a willow. It was easier to imagine her feeling at home in a briar patch.

  “It’s all right for her!” Caprea pointed one long, knotty finger at Raziela. “She can ride out the destruction safe in her pretty tower. It makes no difference to her if our trees lose all their branches.”

  A tense silence fell. Bebb’s beaky nose grew more pronounced as she looked down it at the younger dryad.

  “If you insist on being unkind, then I will ask you to leave.”

  “Thank you, Bebbina, but I can stick up for myself. Besides, she’s right. I was safe last night while you all were forced to weather that storm.”

  Last night had been bad. A crash like cymbals outside her window woke Raziela sometime around midnight.

  “It cannot go on like this.” Emboldened by Raziela’s agreement, Caprea put her arm around a short dryad young enough to still have the light green color of a sapling. “He’s only getting worse. Hakuro’s sister lost an entire limb last night! We should send him to his father.”

  “You know Naiara won’t allow it.” The small dryad, Hakuro, rubbed the back of her arm and hung her head. “She’d drown him in the ocean before giving him over to Itzal.”

  “You shouldn’t speak of her that way.” Raziela’s voice made them all flinch. Frustration with Mazin’s tantrums she could understand, but she would not tolerate any of them speaking ill of the Goddess.

  “Mazin is her child. She would never harm him. It is not her fault that the traits he inherited from Itzal banish her light.”

  She slammed her dirk back into its sheath with a decisive click and got to her feet.

  The dryads went stiff. Their leaves and limbs creaked and rustled as they switched from human speech to the Language of Trees.

  Shame prickled across Raziela’s skin like a swarm of ants.

  It was as if they’d taken turns to slap her.

  She didn’t have leaves she could rub together to form the sounds necessary for tree speech, and there were as many dialects of their language as there were varieties of trees. The difference came from the shape of their leaves. Smooth edges had an accent altogether different from those with spikier ends lik
e holly or serrated leaves like elms.

  Over time, she had grown accustomed to these creatures with their bodies molded from leaves and twigs, air and foam. They didn’t have human eyes or mouths, but knots and whorls in their bark. Yet despite her initial fear of them, she’d accepted them for being what they were. However, anytime she said or did something they didn’t like, they were quick to shut her out. No matter how often it happened, it still hurt.

  She stood there debating whether to force them to acknowledge her to stalk off in a huff. Either option felt too much like rewarding them with a victory. Dryads were stubborn creatures—set as deeply in their ways as the roots of their trees in the soil. Those that belonged to saplings were flexible enough to show sympathy, but the older more jaded tree spirits were steadfast and unyielding.

  A spiral of hard air sped straight down on top of Raziela to swirl around her like a tornado. The dryads flailed helplessly back and forth until Aeris let them go.

  “My leaves!”

  Hakuro reached up to adjust the leaves she had styled into a nest-like arrangement.

  The zephyr brushed a caress against Raziela’s cheek before swooping back into the air again. With her arm still around the younger dryad, Caprea glared into the canopy even though Raziela was certain the dryads couldn’t see the zephyrs any better than she could.

  “Since you have so much sympathy for the whiny little beast, do us all a favor and calm him down before he destroys every tree in the forest.”

  Raziela gathered the ends of her hair so that it didn’t tangle with the dangling fronds. They watched her go with the unnatural stillness only trees possessed. She tried not to let it unnerve her as she tucked the ends of her hair through the loop stitched into her belt. Small clouds of dust kicked up with each fall of her sandaled feet as she approached the hidden gate in the garden wall.

  She looked over her shoulder, wary that the phoenixes would be watching. They were less likely to attack during the day, but Raziela didn’t want to take any chances. Although nothing had come of her unsanctioned trip into the gardens, she couldn’t shake the fear that her punishment was still coming. She wouldn’t put it past any of them to dive bomb her when her back was turned.

  Her fingers pushed the hidden stone that triggered the door. There was nothing extraordinary about it other than it had less moss on its surface from being pressed so often over time. Still, one had to know where to look, and with the miles of wall surrounding the gardens, it would take an eternity to press each and every last one.

  The stones growled as wheels within the wall turned, lifting the patch of door just high enough for her to squeeze through. A rush of air swept past her as Aeris came too.

  No matter how often she came, the Sacred Grove never ceased to steal her breath. It was as if all the forests of the world came together to form one tree.

  Whether by the Goddess’s power or its own, Vitales could only be seen once she stepped through the wall. Flat mushroom discs formed a spiral staircase up the twisting roots of its trunk, and the air hummed with the melody of bees flitting from the small pink and white flowers to the thick globes of red and gold fruit dangling from every branch.

  Just looking at them was enough to make her mouth water, but to smell them! That was the real danger. Each apple represented a life. When a child was born, a new bud appeared. As the child grew, the bud became a flower, and by the time the child reached adulthood, the flower had become a fruit. From that point on it was a steady decay until death took the human and the withered fruit fell from its limb. But just as humans could be cut down at any stage of life, so too could their bud be severed at any time.

  Taking from the tree was as an act as heinous as murder.

  The apples were meant to have a rich, rose-gold skin, but each season they were getting smaller and turning more sallow.

  With a small sigh, Raziela took stock of the fruit that littered the yard. Too many since the last time she’d been to visit. What was happening? Why was the tree dying?

  “Something troubles you, my pet?”

  Raziela jumped at the Great Mother’s silent appearance behind her. At once, she dropped to her knees and pressed her forehead to the springy grass. Nerves wriggled like snakes in her belly. Was that an accusation sheathed inside a harmless question?

  Bright white light blazed from Naiara’s toes as if she’d painted each nail with starlight. It was her divine essence seeping through the human costume she donned whenever she came to visit Raziela. Once, Raziela had caught a glimpse of her without the illusion, and it was like a bottled star, so intense it nearly left her blind. It had taken a week of poultices made from the healing sap of Vitales to clear the scar tissue from her corneas.

  The holes in the Goddess’s disguise were never quite the same. Sometimes her skin was so freckled with light she looked like the night sky. Other times it was her eyes and nails that blazed. On a few rare occasions she’d even seen Naiara’s usually long black hair transformed as if each strand was spun from platinum. No matter how she appeared, she was always a towering figure dressed in robes that billowed like clouds.

  “Forgive me, Great Mother, it is nothing. The dryads are upset with Mazin again. He broke some of their limbs last night.” Toeing the line between truth and deceit was difficult. Shame brought a rush of color to her cheeks. At the same time, she was careful not to point any blame at the Great Mother. Above her, Naiara gave a weighty sigh.

  “How like his father he is, indifferent to the misery of others so long as he gets his way.”

  Raziela dared glance up then. There were no pupils in the Great Mother’s eyes, just swirling white light.

  “What if Mazin went to spend some time with Itzal? Perhaps if you give the dryads a reprieve, they will not be so tired of caring for him.”

  “You know that cannot be!” The weight of Naiara’s displeasure pressed Raziela flat to the ground. Blades of grass tickled the inside of her nose and dirt forced its way between her lips. Panic seized her at the rush of helplessness she felt being caught in the Goddess’s power.

  Naiara reached down to stroke her hair.

  “Little one, you know what he did was unforgivable. Had I not fought my way free of the Shadow Realm all light would have vanished from Phalyra for good. How could I send Mazin there when I cannot trust that place won’t try and extinguish his light too?”

  “Great Mother?” Using all of her upper body strength, Raziela pushed up enough to gulp a fresh gasp of air. “What if Itzal is sorry?”

  For a long moment there was absolute silence. Raziela braced for another blast of displeasure, but instead there came a tug on her scalp as the Great Mother lifted her braid by the nape of her neck and bid her stand like a trained dog.

  “How pure and innocent you are, Raziela. Your kindness does you credit, but you do not understand the world of gods and men. Itzal is not sorry for what happened, only that things could not work out between us the way he wanted. Now, enough of this. Show me what you have been practicing. I trust your aim has improved. There are grave happenings in Phalyra. I need my blade sharp should any of that danger trespass here.”

  Raziela’s eyes widened. Grave happenings? Had the man’s death been part of something bigger?

  “Do you think danger will find us here?” Fear and a strange longing sent Raziela surging to her feet. She reached for the reassurance of her dirk. The Great Mother patted her head.

  “Of course not, but it does not hurt to be ready for the possibility.” Naiara waved her hand and a lash of fire touched Raziela’s side as the dirk and sheath transformed into a saber in a smooth, silver scabbard. At the same time, a gleaming sword appeared at the Goddess’s side. When she laid her hands on it, the crystal set just above the guard blazed to blinding light. The Gleaming Brand. Soul-Eater. The sword was almost as legendary as the goddess who carried it at her side.

  She gave Raziela only enough time to draw her weapon before she blurred into action.

  Naiara struck
with the force of an avalanche. She could attack from ten directions at once—and so would an army if humans ever breached the Realm of the Gods. If Raziela was going to survive she’d have to be faster than fast and willing to mow down any invader who stepped into her path.

  Not expecting the training session, Raziela’s throwing knives and daggers were all put away in the armory. If Naiara wanted her to use them she could fashion new ones for her just as she’d given her the sword. Still, having a few projectiles would have been useful to drive the Goddess back and give her an opening to dance out of range.

  The Goddess dealt her a backhand to the ribs that lifted Raziela off the ground and flung her several feet away. The sudden reunion with the earth knocked the air from her lungs in a painful gust. Her saber clattered from her hand even as her fingers fumbled to hang on to it. Rather than press her advantage, the Goddess stood over her.

  It was impossible to read her eyes when they were twin pools of light.

  Thunder crashed in the distance. Naiara turned her head and made an impatient sound.

  “Just like his father,” she murmured again.

  In the time it took Raziela to blink, the Goddess vanished. Not even a goodbye or critique of Raziela’s progress.

  Raziela stayed where she was, feeling every one of the bruises forming beneath her skin. From beyond the Sacred Grove came the steady drum of rain.

  Rain, if it touched the Tree of Life at all, never penetrated the dense canopy. Once Raziela had waited in the Grove through one of Mazin’s worst storms and not felt a drop of water. However, there was a definite rise in the humidity that caused the sweat already dripping across her skin to form a slick film that glistened in the perpetual twilight of the Sacred Grove.

  The sheepskin lining of her gorget itched as it soaked up the sweat sliding down the back of her neck.

  Groaning, she rolled onto her side. She had no wounds this time. That was due more to Mazin’s timing than her own mastery of swordsmanship. In training, the Great Mother held back only enough that Raziela could walk away at the end. If she wanted to, she could flatten her into dust by simply batting her eyelashes.