Half Wylde | Book 1

One: Ashes to Ashes

I had always thought drowning would be a terrible way to die. Surely something quick would be better. A beheading, maybe. Or poison, if it were the right sort. But floating under the burning surface of the lake, it was hard to argue with the dark and comfortable sleep that beckoned.

I closed my eyes. I had been in the water for several minutes already and my lungs were giving out. I was ready to let go. Maybe, wherever you go after death, maybe there they wouldn't care that I'm half monster. My lips parted, the water flooding in. I could feel myself fading. Leaving. That is, until something splashed above me.

I tried to pry my eyelids open, but they wouldn't budge. The underwater sloshing rippled through my foggy conscious. The heat of a body wrapped around me, and pulled. Up we went. The water grew hot from the fire that floated on it, that burning oil ready to boil us if we came too close. We broke the surface, and I blacked out.

~

I woke with a start, and expelled all the water I had swallowed. Violently. A warm crackle at my back soothed my frozen bones, and told me I was near a fire. My hacking cough didn't subside for what felt like ten minutes, though I'm sure it wasn't actually that long. I listened, but the clanking metal of the raiders no longer rang through my ears. My heart sank. The plainsman raiders had made it to the mountains. And I was thrown to the lake to survive their attack.

I turned my face to the fire, darting my eyes around the bodies that huddled for warmth. I was laying next to women and children that lived by Silver Lake. I wasn't surprised to find that none of them met my gaze. Moans of the injured and dying murmured under the crackling of the fire. 

We may as well have been a pile of dogs crowding the hearth for warmth, we were so piled on top of each other. Some watched me from the corner of their eyes with terror. Others stared ahead, gray faced and motionless. Sitting, watching with hollow eyes as their world burned. And it did burn. I looked over my shoulder to see what remained of the settlements by the lake. The smoldering ruins that held a thriving village an hour ago was now a black, stark contrast to the light snow around it.

An old woman, Gerdie, I think her name was, fell in a heap from where she was sitting on a sack of grain. Almost immediately I smelled the piss. The woman next to her leaned over to confirm what I suspected; she had died. They rolled her out of the way and two more took her place by the warm fire without so much as a word. I said a silent prayer to whoever was listening. Gerdie hadn't been nice to me, but at least she hadn't been mean either.

Surroundings confirmed, I took a deep breath and concentrated on my own body. The first thing to notice was that I was still wet. I couldn't have been there long. Even the ends of my hair hadn't dried out yet and they slapped the ground wherever I moved my head. My plain grey dress clung to my bony frame, still soaked through. I would have a bruise where Bryn grabbed my arm and threw me in the water, but I was otherwise unharmed. I sat up quickly, dizzy from the sudden movement.

Bryn!

Where was he? I looked around, my heart raced with panic but my face kept still as stone. Know your surroundings, my head echoed with old lessons. Knowing can be the difference of life and death in the mountains. I stayed quiet, and observed.

The war band had finally come east of the mountains, that much I could see. The village burned. The lake burned. The dry autumn trees burned. The dead burned.

"Everember oil, they called it." Shanna, the fisherman's daughter, whispered nearby. "It's on everything." Her body and voice both shook, stubbornness being the only thing holding her in one piece. Always the proud thing, she carried herself like a duchess. Even though she had the same plain brown features that I did. That every girl within a hundred miles of here did. Shanna glanced at me with those sharp eyes, and then as if she had realized who she was talking to, she turned up her nose and stared ahead. The sights before her haunted her. Still, no one wants to talk to the half monster. Especially not Shanna.