Song of Blood & Stone (Earthsinger Chronicles Book 1) (10 page)

The chanting is frenzied now, the noise unbearable.

I am laid on the smooth stone altar. It vibrates beneath my skin. Mother does not shed so much as a tear for me. Her smile cracks me in two. I am not her daughter.

Not anymore.

I am everyone’s daughter now. I belong to the Folk, to the caves, to the drums.

When the blade comes, I do not close my eyes. The pounding in my chest fades as the sharpened stone pierces my flesh.

My blood belongs to them all now.

Jasminda clutched at
her chest, pulling at the neck of her dress only to find her skin smooth and unmarred. Her breath came in shallow bursts. Her vision swam. There was no knife plunging between her breasts. No warm blood fleeing her body. No odd, chanting crowd watching, enraptured.

When her eyes focused, an anxious face filled her view. Firelit eyes regarded her and a familiar scent filled her nostrils. A man’s arms surrounded her. This was safety. Comfort. She knew him, though she couldn’t quite recall how. His face relaxed as she stared up at him, hypnotized by the color of his eyes. Voices spoke nearby, but she did not recognize the language.

“What happened?” she said.

He frowned. “I should ask you that. You collapsed. Why are you speaking Elsiran?”

She did not understand his question but caught sight of her hands. Held them up in front of her face. They were back to their normal hue, not the sickly, almost colorless gray they’d been before. “I died.”

“I can assure you, you did not,” he said, his mouth turned down at the edges. He brushed her hair from her forehead, then sat back as she struggled up to a sitting position.

“No, not me. I was someone else.”

“Someone who died?”

“Yes.” Her body was heavier now than it had been. Larger and thicker.

“What is she saying?” an aged voice called out in the strange language. She was surprised that she could now understand it. She looked up into a disapproving face that was both familiar and not. People were gathered around her, concern in their eyes, but the only one she recognized was the man. His name danced just at the edge of her memory.

“The mountain demanded my blood.” She repeated the words in the language the old man had spoken, testing it out on her tongue. It tasted wrong somehow, as though the syllables didn’t fit together properly.

“Did she hit her head?” a woman said.

“Give her some space.”

“Try to sing again, child.”

“No! That’s what got her in this state to begin with.”

The voices went back and forth. She couldn’t hold on to them. Her vision swam again, but she didn’t want to go back to that other place, the place where she was just a sacrificed girl, only worth the weight of her blood.

Something pulsed inside her, something demanding attention. She closed her eyes to focus, and it grew with her observation. Surprised, she opened her eyes again. The man watched her intently. She reached out a hand to him, and he did not hesitate to take it. She focused once more on that little pulse inside her. It swelled, unfurling itself like the wings of a bird and taking flight toward some larger rhythm. The rhythm scared her, but it was also beautiful. She plunged into it and let it consume her, leaving her in a darkness far greater than the one behind her eyelids.

“
She’s coming out
of it.”

“Again.”

Swimming to the surface this time was easy.

She opened her eyes to Jack’s fraught face. “Did you die again?”

“No,” she said, this time in Lagrimari. How could she not have understood the language before? She sat up, putting herself just out of reach of the cradle Jack’s arms provided. Embarrassment tinged her cheeks.

“You’re not going to pass out again?” he asked. His touch calmed some of the mortification. His palm against the back of her neck was a balm. She longed to lean into it, but the ground was cold and hard beneath her, and she was self-conscious about what had just happened.

She’d never fallen unconscious from singing before. And to have it happen not once but twice? The elders hovered over her, and she rose on shaky legs.

“Are you all right?”

“Can you understand us?”

“What happened?”

Jack kept a stabilizing hand at the small of her back. A tiny point of contact, but one that anchored her. “I saw— No, I was— I was one of the Cavefolk. I’d been chosen to be sacrificed to the mountain.”

While the others looked at her dubiously, Jack frowned. “The Cavefolk practiced human sacrifice? And you were there, you say?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t me, though. I was a girl being led up to the altar. A girl they killed.” She shuddered, thinking back to the vision. “Mostly I just remember the feelings. The betrayal. The anger. The fear. They were using my blood for magic, a protection spell.”

“The Cavefolk had magic? Earthsong?” Jack’s voice was incredulous.

“No, something else. Something darker. When I was . . . there . . . my Song was silent. The magic needed the sacrifice.”

Everyone in the cave fell quiet. Jack appeared lost in thought. Gerda and Turwig gave her piteous looks that said they didn’t quite believe her. She wasn’t mad; she knew what she’d seen.

The Cavefolk were among the original inhabitants of Elsira, from a time before recorded
history. Just a few tools and skeletons had survived to tell their story. Her books had not included much about them other than the fact they dwelled in the mountains. Elsira had been a harsh and unforgiving terrain, a rocky desert that barely supported life. Before they mysteriously died out, the Cavefolk and the nomadic clans eked out a meager existence. And then the Founders arrived—the Lord and Lady from some distant, unknown place—who transformed Elsira into the lush, beautiful land it was today.

They and their descendants ruled for millennia, years of peace and bounty. The Queen Who Sleeps was last in their line, but She was betrayed by the True Father and cast into a deep sleep. Her last act was to create the Mantle, protecting her people from the worst of the True Father’s power.

The fate of the Founders and the Cavefolk was lost to history. Jasminda had long been fascinated by the mystery, as had many scholars. She’d ordered and read every book on the subject she could get her hands on, but the secrets of the ancients remained hidden.

She kneaded her forehead, searching her memory for anything that would bring what she’d seen into focus. Why that vision? Why her?

“As long as you’re all right,” Gerda said, patting her arm.

“Can you sing, child?” Turwig asked, his brow drawn low over his eyes.

She drew in a shaky breath. Though part of her was afraid to try again, another, bigger part was curious as to what would happen this time. The foreboding she’d felt when first entering the cave was still there, but curiosity won out over the fear. She opened herself once more to Earthsong. The normally strong pull of the power was near overwhelming; the tide tried to pull her under, harder than ever before.

“I feel untethered. I can barely hold on.”

“Can you lead us through the tunnels or not, girl?” Lyngar snapped. Jack shot a warning glance in the old man’s direction, but Jasminda saw it as if from far away.

Her attention was on her awareness of the cave, the tunnels beyond, and the mountain surrounding them. Ghosts of the ancient inhabitants brushed the edge of her senses. There was power in this mountain, but it hummed with a different pattern than Earthsong.

Still, a thread of life wove through this place. Insects and creatures too small to see, and mosslike vegetation that needed no light. She pulled the energy inside her, and it formed a path, though faint, that led through to the other side of the mountain.

She let the power slide away. “I can sense the route, but it’s long. I’m not sure I’ll be able to stay connected and sing for the whole journey, though.”

“Of course the feeble halfling is the one we must follow,” Rozyl said from her position against the wall. Jack’s breathing turned heavy as he glared, lighting a spark of satisfaction within Jasminda at his reaction.

“Perhaps she can link with someone,” Turwig suggested.

Rozyl gave him a look that could shear the shell off a beetle. “Why can she sing and no one else? What is wrong with her? I’m not linking with her.” Jasminda flinched internally at the bite in the woman’s voice, though she had no desire to link with Rozyl either.

“What’s linking?” Jack asked.

Gerda patiently began to explain. “It’s when two Earthsingers share their connection. They—”

“It’s when one Singer gives control of their entire Song to another to do with as they please,” Rozyl interjected. “And
that
is not going to happen.”

“It’s a sharing of power,” Gerda continued, “but only one Singer can be in control. It must be done voluntarily, of the giver’s free will. If we still had our Songs, we would do it.”

“Speak for yourself,” Lyngar spat, and Jasminda tensed. She had linked with Papa when she was young and still learning. He’d shown her how to control her power through the link, but she could not imagine linking with a stranger. To do so was to become extremely vulnerable to another. It was like letting someone into her soul.

The elders and Rozyl bickered over what to do. The four armed Keepers were the only adults who had not been forced to give their Songs in tribute to the True Father. Jasminda shuddered to imagine life without her Song; it was a part of her, weak though it was.

A small hand slipped into her own. Osar’s round face beamed up at her. She squeezed his hand, and he leaned in, resting his head against her leg.

“You would link with me, wouldn’t you?” she asked, smoothing down his hair. “You’re not afraid?” He shook his head, then offered her his other hand, which was closed in a fist.

“What do you have there?”

He unfurled tiny fingers to reveal a shoot of green with delicate white petals sparking out of it.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, incredulous, picking up the tiny flower. It could not have grown in the cave, and with the snow outside it was doubtful he’d brought it in with him. Yet here it was. Something beautiful and impossible in the midst of the bleakness. “Thank you.”

Silence descended. Jasminda looked up to find the others staring at her and the blossom in her hand. She straightened her shoulders, looking at Rozyl and Lyngar as she spoke. “Osar will link with me.”

Rozyl narrowed her eyes. Lyngar merely turned toward the exit, speaking over his shoulder. “Fine. Let’s get going. We’ve wasted far too much time as it
is.”

Jack kept to
the rear of the party as they made their way through the tunnels. He did not like to be so far from Jasminda, who led the group with Osar at her side, but he also did not trust Rozyl or the other armed Keepers at his back. They seemed to feel the same about him, which left him walking side-by-side with a tall Lagrimari woman, Rozyl’s second-in-command, who never said a word to him.

On the whole, they were not a talkative bunch. The only sounds they made were footsteps echoing against the oddly smooth cave walls and the soft babbling of the youngest of the children. They did not dawdle, either, deftly navigating the twisting path, which edged steeply downward, leveled off, then dipped low again.

They took no breaks, and not even the smaller children walking on their own complained. Nor did the elders, who were remarkably spry for their ages. Strips of some unidentifiable food source, gray and brittle, were passed around and eaten while they walked. Hours passed like this, the silence companionable but complete.

Jack focused on the back of Jasminda’s head, keeping her in sight at all times. Whatever reaction she’d had in the cave did not recur, but he was uneasy all the same. No one had any idea what had happened to her or why she was the only one who could sing inside the mountain.

Her vision of the Cavefolk was disturbing, as well. Barbaric practices like human sacrifice were said to still be performed in Udland, their northern neighbors, but the thought of such things taking place in his land, even in ancient times, was unsettling. Jasminda had been so deeply shaken, he hadn’t questioned her tale for an instant. After having his entire body rendered unrecognizable to the point where his own mother would not have identified him, his threshold for belief in the unbelievable had nearly vanished.

Not that his own mother was likely to recognize him anyway. He’d been only a child the last time he saw her.

The woman next to him glanced over sharply before going back to ignoring him. He gave her a brilliant smile and tipped an imaginary hat.

Slowly, the air began to change. The pathway leveled off again, and fresh, clean air filtered in. It was the way he’d always thought a mountain would smell. They extinguished their lanterns when light glowed softly up ahead. Over the thump of their footsteps, water trickled, insects whirred, birds called.

Home.

The tunnel ended abruptly, leaving them at the edge of a huge cavern, much like the one they’d entered on the other side with some key differences. Sunlight streamed in through openings in the rock far overhead. Before them stretched a vast forest; trees and vines and greenery filled the cave. A narrow and somewhat hidden path led down to the forest floor. Just beyond it, a stream of water flowed gently down, vanishing below. The view stole his breath.

The group formed a queue as the path was only wide enough for one. Jasminda disappeared from view first. Not being able to see her made his palms itch. He was returning to civilization and, with it, all of his duties and responsibilities. With no home and family, Jasminda was now listed among those responsibilities, but he was glad of it. He hadn’t yet figured out what to do about her, though. Could he find her a farm near the Eastern Base? Possibly. But that would be too dangerous with a breach imminent. Could he keep her safe in the city, far away from the fighting? And then not see her for months or longer . . . The possibilities raced through his mind. All of them included seeing her again. As often as he could manage. Was that even something she would want?