BLACKBLOOD

Excerpt from Chapter Two

The moon has been nearly swallowed by the pitch dark beyond when Aude blinks blearily awake in the night.

With Charna storming into her tent and not returning, the two had elected to rest and either try again or leave empty-handed in the morning. Thus, in a tent cobbled from scraps and riddled with claw-like tears, she sees the blackblood girl leave the camp at moon-high.

Aude scrambles to follow, shivering as she moves into the cold air. The exit Charna had taken was not the entrance but a narrow section that looks as though it had been blasted away long ago. Aude squeezes through and treads delicately over shattered, sharp shards of wood that litter the space between the camp wall and the forest beyond.

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She tries her best to slink through the forest at Charna’s back, but her mind whirls with panicked, what nows.

What will I ask, now? How can I convince her, now? Can we even win, now?

It is when she breaks into the narrow, dark clearing that the questions fall away.

Despite the lack of canopy, which rears away overhead unnaturally, the space before her is dark, muted.

Poisoned, whispers the corner of her mind raised on fear and respect of old gods and older stories. Marked.

Blackened.

On the other side of the clearing stands a lean-to of branches. The space between the charred limbs is a yawning chasm of darkness, leeching light and life from the grass, the air, around it.

Just to gaze on this makes Aude’s gut sour, her skin break out in gooseflesh, her bones chill. As Charna kneels in front of it, Aude corrects herself - this is no shelter. It is a pyre.

Charna is still, the conscious kind of stillness that Aude has yet to see in her, this child of the forest as twitchy and sharp and rough as it takes to survive. The stillness of prayer.

Yet, when she speaks, it is no god.

“Mother,” she whispers, and the stillness is reflected in the forest, the clouds and stars, in Aude’s chest. “Something has changed.”

Now, Aude reels. Two decades of stories and warnings and hisses of fear burning through her like the worst bile, like a rod of heated Valli iron.

She had known, in small amounts, how the blackbloods had come about - first as protectors, then monsters, then as tragedy and chaos - over the course of the Valli invasion and long wars that followed.

She had known the mothers were sacrificed.

She hadn’t known they were burned.

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