the sleeping village.
Six
Seconds ticked by. Kaie stared at the door, half convinced he just imagined it. He glanced over at the Lemme, expecting her to give answers to all his half-formed questions. She saw the future. Shouldn’t she know what was going on?
She wasn’t watching the door though. She wasn’t watching the fire either. Her eyes were locked on him. “Decide.”
She didn’t sound like she was dying anymore, and there was no trace of the sad sister mother from a moment before. Now she was the Lemme in truth, a woman who saw the gods’ will and saw it out within the people. She wasn’t to be taken lightly. His heart was already lodged firmly in his throat, but it still managed to terrify him.
“What?” He wanted to obey. But, for the life of him, Kaie couldn’t figure out what she was demanding of him.
“You must decide. Will you allow your friends to sacrifice themselves for you?”
The scream came again. Not his imagination. He pushed himself to his feet, too panicked by what might be happening outside to spare the old woman another thought.
He didn’t get one step toward the door when a hand burst through the flames to wrap around his forearm. He stared at it, trying to figure out what was happening. Her arm was right in the middle of the fire, and she wasn’t trying to move it. Kaie gagged as the disgustingly mouth-watering scent of cooking flesh filled the room.
“What are you doing? Let me go!”
“Decide!” Her voice was dangerous, and he heard no sign she felt the pain of her burning skin. There was no ignoring her command this time. He would decide, or she would hold him until they both burnt to nothing. He saw the truth of it written in her eyes.
So he decided.
He opened his mouth to tell her, but she was already letting him go and slinking back into the darkness. A third scream cut through his indecision. He gave one more backward glance at the Lemme’s apparent disinterest, and then Kaie was pushing through the door and back into the cool night.
Even with all the Lemme’s warnings, Kaie wasn’t prepared for what was happening in the darkness.
There were strangers everywhere. He wasn’t born the last time there were outsiders in the village. His mother spoke with them two years before he was born. He always expected to be at her side when she spoke to them again in his nineteenth year, when the Urazin Empire sent their representative. The old laws set in place by the High King back when the Ancients ruled all of Elysium, protected his family. That was part of the oath, just as much as the role the Lemme saw for him. The Empire held to those old laws but they still came and asked his family to join them. It was his mother’s job – the leader’s job – to say no without offending them.
These strangers weren’t representatives. Or, maybe they were. But they weren’t asking anyone to join them. He saw the hulking figures clad in armor, heard the clank of metal as they moved, but he could not sort out what the foreigners were doing running through the spaces between the huts of his village. Not at first. They couldn’t be Finders. Those kept to the woods, targeting people on their own. Everyone knew that. It was why they hunted in groups of five and were never so far apart that a shout would not bring help in moments.
There were stories, ones the children weren’t supposed to hear. Ones about soldiers descending on villages of the Free People like locusts, destroying everything they touched then disappearing along with all the people who lived there. He and Sojun would listen, excited and fascinated as the adults spoke in hushed tones and never noticed the two boys in their hiding places. Amorette refused to join them, saying she didn’t like being scared, but the two of them never were. They were safe, protected. The old laws said so and no one would dare go against the High King. Even the Empress knew to fear his wrath.
The first hut to go was at the far west edge of the village, just inside the tree line. It went up in a blast so intense that a wave of heat slapped Kaie all the way at the Lemme’s door. That was the moment he understood. These were soldiers. And, if they knew about the High King’s protection, they didn’t care. They were here to destroy his home. To take his people and leave nothing but scorched, bloody earth behind them.
His legs were moving, propelling him forward, but Kaie didn’t know where he was going. There were too many people to save. He was fast but his family was too big for one boy to rescue from this terror.
There was more screaming now. So much that he could hear nothing else. Not until a second hut exploded in a whoosh. He skidded to a stop, blind from the sudden burst of light. Reaching behind him for the wall he just passed, Kaie stumbled backward. When his vision cleared a moment later he bit back a shout of surprise. Not five feet away, a soldier was dragging Navin, one of his father’s friends down the road by the hair. He was hidden in the shadow cast by the wall. If he moved even an inch the soldier would see him too.
Kaie sucked in several deep breaths in the second he took to think. The soldier wasn’t dressed in the shiny metal armor from the stories, but the leather substitute looked plenty tough. And the silver sword in the man’s free hand was already red with the blood of his family. But he couldn’t just sit here watching as his father’s friend was hauled off into the darkness. The only chance was if he attacked the man’s back. Under the circumstances it didn’t seem nearly as cowardly as it used to. He just hoped surprise was enough to make a difference.
He tensed, waiting for his moment as the soldier trudged past. Just as he was about to spring Navin’s eyes met his. The man’s head shook and he was mouthing something. Kaie couldn’t make out the words but he knew what the gesture meant. He hesitated. He decided it didn’t matter what Navin was trying to say, he needed to try. But his moment was past. The distraction had cost him his chance.
There wasn’t a second to mourn. Now Kaie knew where he needed to go and there was no time to spare. He offered up a whispered plea for forgiveness as he ducked behind the next hut. There weren’t any soldiers on that side so he dropped his head and ran as hard as he could.
The world erupted around his feet, sending him toppling backward like a leaf caught by a strong wind. His arm struck something hard. An instant later his head did, too. He hit the ground rolling, dirt filling his mouth and nose and eyes. Gasping for air, his throbbing head made it hard to tell if he was moving or not as Kaie struggled to climb to his hands and knees.
Where moments ago there were huts and trees and gardens, now there was nothing but fire. A wall of it. He struggled to catch his breath, waiting for it to fade or die down but it only grew higher. Stumbling to his feet and blinking against the heat Kaie careened forward again, all sense of balance or direction lost in the explosion.
He collided with something tall and unmoving. A tree. He knew that tree. Didn’t he? His fingers roved over a knot in the trunk, finding the crack just beneath it where Amorette used to hide acorns and pretty rocks when they were little. Her treasures.
Kaie rested his head against the trunk for a moment, trying to remember where this tree sat in the village, trying not to think about whom the screams might belong to. It was next to Delia’s house. Which meant he needed to go…through the fire.
His knees threatened to buckle. He choked on the sob in his throat. No time for that. There was a branch, thick and solid, that he could almost reach. Jumping was hard. He tried a second time. Caught it. He hung there for a while, arms shaking from the effort, legs swinging. Couldn’t fall. He didn’t think he could get up again.
He managed to catch one of his feet on the trunk. With a lot of scrambling, Kaie got himself up on the branch. He could go higher. Maybe. But there was no need. He could see the whole village from that vantage and understood why the soldiers were running around in the dark before the first hut was lit. The fire reached from one end of the village to the other. It could only be magic, keeping it burning so high and so constant.
He would never reach his parents. He was on the wrong side of the wall, tossed back just a few feet from the home he
was born in. There wasn’t anything left of it now. He did nothing but stare. For a minute. For ten. Maybe for an hour. Time was meaningless.
At some point, he noticed the curve in the blaze. The burning wall was no straight line, dividing the village in two. It was a loop. He wasn’t high enough to see but he was sick with certainty. Not just his parents. Amorette’s family home deep in the center of the village would be ensnared by this fire. And Sojun.
Gods! Sojun! How could he leave Sojun behind? Sleeping alone, in a part of the village that was almost entirely vacant, waiting for children to enter adulthood and move in. Did the screams that alerted him even wake his friend? Was his heart’s brother burnt to ash underneath the rubble of his home? He needed to follow the curve of the wall back to the southern end, find how far it went. Maybe Sojun was ok. Maybe he needed help.
His home, his parents, his friends. They were taking everything, and he was helpless. He couldn’t even stop one man from taking Navin.
Navin. Pleading with him.
The man’s words struck him suddenly. He cursed the soldiers, the gods, himself. He needed to go help Sojun. Except…
“Save the Lemme.”
That’s what Navin was telling him. That’s what was more important than the man’s own life, more important than any