Thirteen Years Ago
He did not understand the day they took him from his mother.
He did not understand why the soldiers behaved so cruelly, or why his mother did not object. She only watched with tired eyes and turned away as he kicked and screamed and bit at the soldiers’ wrists to tear himself free. When he managed to break away, he ran and slid the last distance on his knees, his threadbare clothes doing little to keep his skin from scraping against the stone. He ignored the sting, and clutched at his mother’s legs, burying his face in the fabric of her skirt so he did not have to see the way she still kept her gaze from him.
Cruze had known he was not like other boys. There was no large, happy family waiting at home for him. But he had had his mother. Until the king’s soldiers peeled his scrawny arms away from her knees and dragged him away. She never looked back at him, no matter how he screamed, not even so he could memorize her face one last time.
Once his fingers were wrenched from their last hold on the doorway to the room he and his mother shared, there was no stopping the men who carried him. He was hauled down the stairs and marched outside the ramshackle building. The other women he had grown up around watched warily, but did not speak a word on his behalf, not even the kind ones who had offered him refuge in their rooms while his mother worked. They watched from their doorways and windows as he was shoved into the back of a wooden wagon. The soldier threw him, and he landed on his side, his hip striking painfully against the floor of the cart. Before he could regain his footing, they slammed and barred a wooden door, locking him away in the darkness.
He beat at the door. Even once he felt the cart jerk and the horses began to move, he rained fury upon the wood with his fists, shouting for his mother, as though she might still hear him as he moved farther and farther away. And when that did not work, and his voice began to grow hoarse, he broke and he shouted his father’s name too. Even though it was not a name he was ever supposed to say aloud.
His sire did not come either. And the wagon kept going and going, long past the time his voice gave out and he had only his fists with which to speak.
“Enough,” a soft voice said, floating toward him from somewhere in the darkness. “You have hurt yourself enough.”
He stood quickly, and spun to plant his back against the door.
“Who’s there?”
There was shuffling in the darkness. “Someone like you.”
It sounded like a girl. A scoff curled in his throat and he said, “I doubt that.”
“We’re locked in the same cart, aren’t we? That’s one thing in common. And I can promise there’s at least one more thing that makes us alike. Neither of us are ever going back to the lives we had before.”
The boy absorbed that knowledge. It was a reasonable conclusion, especially given the soldiers and his mother’s reaction. He thought he ought to be more sad to have lost his whole life. But he had always thought it was a rather abysmal life anyway. His mother rarely let him leave their small one-room home. There were no other boys or girls around to play. His father used to visit on occasion when Cruze was younger, but he had stopped coming several years ago. And if not even his mother had cared to keep him, why should he care to stay?
“Maybe we’ll have better lives,” he insisted.
The darkness stilled around him, and the girl did not reply. After a while, he realized that was her answer. His fists had begun to throb, so he slumped down on the floor and cradled them carefully in his lap. Gradually, the gentle sway of the wagon lowered his defenses, and sleep helped him forget the pain.
He was shocked awake sometime later when the doors were opened and another boy, this one even younger than he, was tossed inside. The boy cried for his father all the while, his eyes red, and his nose running freely, pathetically. “Papa, papa, papa,” the boy wailed—his cries a chorus that swelled inside the small wagon, no matter how small the boy’s voice grew. Cruze wondered if he had looked that pitiful. In the brief wash of sunlight before the doors crashed closed again, he saw the girl—she was a year or two older than him with dark, unwashed hair, haunted eyes, and a horrible purple-red mark around her throat that made the wounds on his fists look like child’s play. Their eyes met, and he knew for certain that wherever he was being taken, it was not somewhere better.
By the time they reached their destination, there were eleven other children crammed into the wagon. He and the girl ended up side by side. The stench of dirt and sweat collected around them and the trip seemed to go on forever and ever.
After a while, the girl leaned over and whispered, “What got you here?”
His brows furrowed and his lips pursed. “How should I know?”
“You don’t have to pretend. Everybody here is like us. It’s why we were all taken.”
“Like us?” Cruze asked.
She shifted in the dark, and he was not sure how, but he knew she was tracing that line on her throat. He wanted to ask how it had happened, but he could not push the words off his tongue.
“We’re all … different,” the girl whispered into the slim space between them.
Cruze thought that over for a moment. He had never been normal, that much was certain. But he’d always assumed that had far more to do with his bloodlines than anything else.
“Who are your parents?” he asked the girl.
“It does not matter.”
Then what did matter? Why had they all been taken?
He did not get an answer. Not when the wagon finally stopped what felt like hours later. Not when the children were dumped out into wild, jungle terrain and held back at sword-point when they tried to move. Two soldiers kept them controlled by fear, while two others barred the doors of the now empty wagon. Within a few breaths, the soldiers had loaded into the wagon and given the horses a hard whip that set them off at a gallop.
Some of the children ran after them, wailing and weeping, falling quickly behind, and losing them completely when the wagon turned around the first bend. But Cruze stayed behind, surveying their surroundings. They were near a river; the soldiers had done them that courtesy at least. But there was little in the way of shelter or protection. The leaves and vines were so thick on the trees overhead that they blocked out most of the sky, making it difficult to determine where the sun hung overhead, or if it did at all. They had to be far, far away from the city. Not even the great looming castle that sat atop the gloomy ocean-battered cliffs could be seen from wherever the soldiers had left them.
He set about exploring, mostly so none of the others would see the way his eyes turned red, and his lip shook with every breath in and out.
“This is better,” Cruze told himself. He would make a better life for himself. He could. He might have lost his mother and his father and what little home he had. But he had his wits, his strength, and he had the goddess. His father, before he had stopped visiting, had always told Cruze he was goddess-blessed.
And the goddess would protect him now. He believed it.
He had to.
Because as he climbed up a tree in order to kick down a few coconuts for the group to share, he realized it was not the canopy that blocked out the sun overhead. It was a storm. Dark clouds unfurled like the wings of some beast of the night, and he heard it roar on the wind. Cruze did not know how, but when he looked on that tempest something in it seemed to look back at him. Icy awareness trailed up his spine and then he heard a voice—not in his mind, nor in his heart, but everywhere in him and nowhere all at once.
“Destroy,” it whispered. “Death. Decay.” Again and again, the words took up residence inside him. “Destroy. Death. Decay. This is the will of the goddess.”
“Did you say something?” a voice called out below, jerking his attention away from the clouds.
The girl hovered below him, her arms full of the coconuts he had already freed, clearly waiting for more.
“What?” he asked.
“Did you say something about the goddess?”
Cruze’s mouth went dry, and he refused to raise his eyes again to the storm overhead. Instead, he slid carelessly down the tree, earning what would prove to be several monstrous bruises later, no doubt.
When his feet met solid earth, he looked at the girl and said, “There’s a storm coming. We need to find shelter, or we die.”