Into the Raging Mountains Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Image

  Map of Vestra

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One What Good Cometh From This

  Chapter Two Something Doesn't Feel Right

  Chapter Three What Comes Creeping Here

  Chapter Four The Truth Cannot Be Hidden

  Chapter Five What is Sown

  Chapter Six The Messenger's Need

  Chapter Seven The Price of Deliverance

  Chapter Eight What Encircles

  Chapter Nine At the Edge of Sight

  Chapter Ten The Worth of Friendship

  Chapter Eleven Snares and Brambles

  Chapter Twelve No Way to Safety

  Chapter Thirteen True Friendship's Price

  Chapter Fourteen Freedom's Dangerous Path

  Chapter Fifteen Surrounded

  Chapter Sixteen Causes and Fulfillments

  Chapter Seventeen The Duty of Knowledge

  Chapter Eighteen What Moves Wisdom

  Chapter Nineteen The Defiance of Guilt

  Chapter Twenty Gardener's Journal

  Chapter Twenty-One The Journeys Twain

  Chapter Twenty-Two To Do What Must Be Done

  Chapter Twenty-Three The Meaning of Courage

  Chapter Twenty-Four The Lesser Sacrifice

  Chapter Twenty-Five Crossroads

  Chapter Twenty-Six Persistence

  Chapter Twenty-Seven The Will to Fight

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Coming Winter 2013 Fire in the Mountain

  Into the

  Raging Mountains

  Book One of

  the Tears of Bira Tre

  Caroline A. Gill

  St Helena Press

  Santa Rosa

  Into the Raging Mountains

  A St. Helena Press Book / June 2013

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2013 by Caroline A. Gill

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: St. Helena Press

  Epub Edition

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Gill, Caroline Aimée.

  Into the raging mountains , book one of the tears of Bira Tre / Caroline A. Gill.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-9890466-1-9

  Series : Tears of Bira Tre.

  1. Fantasy. 2. Fantasy fiction. I. Series. 2. Title.

  PS3557.I3673 In 2013

  813.6 --dc23 2013905802

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  For my two Roses,

  my Darling and for the

  Wolfpack: We are family.

  Chapter One

  What Good Cometh From This?

  The world broke open with her scream. Salt from her sweating brow drifted abruptly into Tatanya's eyes, stinging the woman even as she blinked and blinked. White as clouds, her breath had covered the only window in the room, way up high and small in its size so that it seemed the sky had fallen into the house. Moonlight diffused and blurred through the condensation, but Tatanya didn't need to see, not for the work ahead.

  Held in the grip of an unanswerable need, her lips pulled back as a wretched sound reverberated off the plaster wall. Echoes of her pain cocooned the room.

  Distantly, she could hear the sound of her sister's footfalls as she furiously paced outside the door. There Sansha waited to enter, waited for the cry of life, waited for the baby's coming. Sacred traditions of the Flames held anyone from entering; secret rites and passages that had to be followed left the struggling woman alone with her uncontrollable body, alone in her pain. This was her own fight: her battle, warrior to warrior, life for life, to the death.

  Silence had settled across the far mountains, cloaking the world in a blanket of stillness, a covering that was slashed through as her feral wail echoed out through the heavy fog of nightfall, waking neighbors with a start. Uncaring, her hair dripping with the effort, she crouched in the corner holding tightly with one hand to the thick wooden frame of the bed. On the short table, water condensed on the edge of the clay cup which rocked with her exertions as her swaying frame was engulfed again with the tidal pull of insistent need. Most of the water spilled out, wasted.

  Tatanya's tears blended with the sweat of her temple, dripping to her chin, falling as silent witnesses to the well-worn wooden planks. Then, abruptly her head was thrown back with the demands of her body as her entire back arched against the surging pull and push. Another gush of air, another deep and wordless cry, another battle in the war was decided. She struggled just to catch her breath again before the pain pulled her down within the limits of her sanity.

  Wave after wave, roll after roll, she was pulled down and through each building crash, clinging to only one thought: Come! Come! she demanded.

  She begged.

  She insisted. Time passed, but she could not have said if it was a candle, a day, a fortnight or a season. Held there, a prisoner in her own body, to her own body, Tatanya fought.

  Clawing onto the bed, lifting her numb legs that crashed and fumbled under her need, she resisted any thought of failure, any emotion at all. As she tucked her head down into her heaving chest, the swelling urges came again, gripping her unceasingly. Another and another, crest and trough blended into a flood of pain and passion. White knuckles gripped the bedding as a howl of determination and endurance shook every muscle at once.

  A long and lonely cry came from her throat. A fierce challenge filled her heart. The waters washed over her, slipping and pulling, blooming and releasing. As her cry of pain eased and finished, another sound joined it: the cry of life.

  Exhausted, the sweat-soaked woman rolled over and pulled the child onto her quivering belly.

  *

  Sansha flew into the room, not waiting to be invited. With tender hands, she rushed to assist her sister, gripping Tatanya’s fragile arm. Kissing her hair, Sansha reached for the baby, who rose and fell with her mother's sighs.

  The baby didn't move.

  Certainly she knew she had heard the cry, yet the newborn lay still and blue in the candlelight. Sansha's breath caught in her throat. Her eagerness died on her lips. She looked to the spent mother for any recognition, any direction, but Tatanya's face was pale; her eyes were closed.

  Tatanya lay on blood-soaked sheets. Sweat dripped down her forehead, catching on each cluster of hair, then falling onto the sodden pillow. She was exhausted. Relief was the only emotion that emanated from her worn body. Very softly she began to sing a lullaby, shifting slightly back and forth with her hands cupping the little, blue body.

  The child is dead. It was certain.

  Motionless, the baby lay on her mother's belly, blue from the strangulation of life at the moment of birth. Tears fell down Sansha's cheek. A terrible silence, an awful cessation filled the room.

  Cutting the cord, rubbing the limbs, Sansha worked feverishly, willing the baby to live, to breathe in the air of the victorious. Like a tiny doll, the blue body moved with her insistence, submitting as clay to the potter's hand. A little girl … Determined, Sansha did everything she had been taught and kept waiting for the pinking up, which did not come.

  Little footsteps behind her told Sansha of her niece's arrival, eager hands and a joyful smile that fell away into the deep, uneasy silence. She heard Laylada's whispered worry, concern, and wonder mixed in a puddle of blood and death. Sansha made no answer, her heart couldn't bear to speak the wor
ds.

  Their finality overwhelmed her courage.

  Tatanya's lips moved weakly, an old mountain lullaby whispered to her child. Between Sansha and Laylada, a sorrowful look was exchanged; Tatanya didn't know, couldn't yet know that the baby was gone. Tears filled both their eyes as the familiar music filled the room. The birthing battles were won but the war lost.

  Gingerly, Laylada had edged around her aunt's ample skirts and entered the room. The girl reached over with her tiny hands and touched the bedding. Following her aunt's example, she whispered a word of peace and kissed the mother's damp forehead with tenderness.

  She is so young, perhaps too young to see such sadness, thought Sansha.

  This was the first of any birth the girl had ever witnessed. The tragedy marked her youthful eyes as well. Tears fell. With the simple guileless love of the young, she curiously reached to touch the cold, still body that rose and fell with each of the mother's breaths. Laylada gently stroked the precious baby’s tufts of hair as the little one lay motionless on Tatanya's belly.

  *

  To Laylada's perception there was only the pall of quiet—the odd lack of any laughter and joy in the tiny, cramped room. It was full of Tatanya's clipped, staggered breathing, and the murmur of lullaby, that seemed to be the only living noise. Laylada’s hands moved in the same soothing rhythms she used with the barnyard cat. Alone in that awful moment, she closed her eyes, feeling the softness, the perfection of the little, lost baby, full of the knowledge of youth but not yet the wisdom of experience.

  Time slipped, though it was hard to say how long she stood by the bedside. The hush was broken only by the sighs and creak of the wind across the shingles of the mountain home.

  Then, just after the rising sun's first ray broke across the hidden lands and poured into the numb, sorrow-filled room, as the girl stroked the remarkable, downy hair, the baby turned.

  “Goodness!” she cried, shocked. Jerking her hand away, confused and yet delighted, the young woman looked to her aunt for guidance. What does it mean?

  Laylada stretched forth a tentative hand, fingers lightly touching the downy hair of the newly-born life. She could hear a bird sing somewhere nearby, and the song of the mountains filled her heart. A stream of tears spilled down her young cheek as she reverently touched the pale, blue skin.

  It was goodness. Little eyes and little ears turned toward the dumbstruck women and no one breathed. The baby lived? The baby lived!

  Indeed, the little thing breathed. Her chest visibly rose and fell as her cloudy eyes watched them all. Every movement a curl and a stretch, every sound a first.

  With a simple, encompassing pressure, Tatanya lifted her daughter to her chest where the baby nestled in and suckled. She never seemed aware of the miracle that had occurred. Perhaps exhaustion had blurred her mind, or perhaps her song did. Yet her baby's tiny body remained colored, as if the child had been dipped in a pail of blanket pigment.

  A bright blue baby was alive! Impossible, but true. Shock and surprise filled both their faces as Tatanya blissfully continued her mother's lullaby. Smiles broader than the sunrise filled the room, echoing the joy and wonder of this new life.

  The pigment of the child did not change; the little girl did not pink up. Unlike any that had come before, the bright, blue eyes looked up at them from a brilliant-azure face. Sansha's eager hands wrapped the child tightly in the welcoming towels as the infant's tiny face peered out the front windows into the mountain passages, blinking in the warming light of sunrise.

  *

  Day after day passed, the sun rose and fell in its constant journey. Growing season faded away into harvest, and then into the hard cold, dreary and quiet and then reviving in an endless cycle. High up in the vastness of the wild mountain range, life ticked onward, relentlessly so. There was no newborn anymore, but now a child's questioning mind and grabbing hands.

  Never a calm and quiet household, the air around Tatanya's was frequently pierced with screams of delight and wails of dramatic sorrow. Each day was a learning experience and each nightfall brought an exhausted sleep. Unexpected surges of song were interrupted with squeals of discovery, delight, and destruction. Soon, aquamarine hair in little spiral curls bounced merrily along, accompanied by giggles from a girl of four cycles.

  Time settled all things, wiped clean the slate of miracles from the villagers' memories. The seasons turned into another cycle and another. Azure was just another one of the children in the remote hamlet. Prone to the scraped knee or the innocent absence of clothes, there was nothing remarkable about that little girl except for her entire blueness.

  Soon after her birth, the Council of Elders had met to review the situation and decide the town's public reaction to the unprecedented arrival of a blue human. Tatanya's parentage and family lines were well established. It was clear from Azure's well-formed face that they were indeed mother and child. Why such a strange skin color would occur dumbfounded the knowledgeable Elders in every aspect.

  Finally after much debate, squandered time and superfluous conversation, the Council of Elders unanimously decided to do nothing at all. Time would prove them wrong, but as she grew in pace with the other youth, they all nodded in their passing moments that this was just another child among children, a bit odd in fact but not in deed.

  *

  The theft did not go unnoticed. What theft ever does?

  Avenging justice was coming, not always swiftly, though come it would. Tearing across lies and deceit, sundering the veils of truth and ripping the fruit of greed, the balance would be restored. So it always has been. So it always will be.

  No theft goes unanswered even if the repayment takes the span of eternity and the depth of the farthest seas.

  *

  Incense wafted throughout the Dressarna Market, the bustle of last end-of-day purchases, the hired criers bellowing their sales. Sweet and smoky, cloying and heavy, the perfume filled the senses and permeated the clothes and hair. Memorable as the distinct citrus spices of Andal, the special collage of odors so richly represented at the various stalls traveled with a visitor of Dressarna for days after. So powerful in its aroma at first, it seemed impossible to get off the skin and out of the senses.

  The secret appeal of the wafting odor clung like a veil of nostalgia and then, as it declined in strength of perception, a building desire to return again to the country of Tamborinton would begin. For that peculiar smell was the scent of the ethereal marketplace, full of power and longing. Its perfume coated every illicit transaction and blessed each participant in the darkened byways and well-lit shops.

  Hair neatly upswept with a few well-placed, carved-shell combs, Alizarin D’Trellista D’Napthol bent to her task. Taking another deep breath, she smiled. The peculiar smell of the city was honey to her nose. Could I ever get enough?

  It was a good heat. The kind that warms a lonely body from the outside in. Fire and flame gave no quarter to her able hands, burning brightly, cherry-hot in banked coals. From her early childhood, her mother Trellista had always taught her a healthy respect for the power of such elements.

  “Never turn your back on the forces at play,” she would say with a curt nod at the end of her sentence and that oh-so-familiar gesture of hand to wrist that she used to punctuate life lessons.

  Whenever she had taught Alizarin the great important things, that was her own particular mannerism to ensure emphasis and memory: curt nod, hand to wrist. Alizarin never had paid attention to the why of her mother’s methods. Like so many things passed parent to child, it was her life. It was her mother’s way. After all those seasons and cycles, those little lessons had added up to the life she now lived, as a baker with a shop to fill and orders to create. Pounding the bread down, mashing the dough together, sprinkling, sorting, layering, and sifting, Alizarin’s hands moved with practiced precision, beyond any conscious thought, in a simple pattern, repeated for a lifetime.

  Nightfall was the only refuge from the repetition. It was also the most
painful time of her existence. The quiet and the peace that would have seemed a boon not two cycles past, now were fraught with worry and emptiness as Alizarin returned home to an empty cottage. Work at least kept her busy even if it didn’t fill her soul.

  Rolling out the last batch for the day’s labor, the baker pushed with the flour-dusted pin: first up, to the side, then down a ways, moving the dough, forming her pastries. The last customers had gone in a bustle of packages, delighted with her work and eager for home. She dragged out the needed and necessary things just to avoid the empty walls and silent hearth. Quiet and serene, even the thought of their cottage over the small hillock made another pang of sadness lance her heartfire with the repeating word: alone.

  As she sprinkled the spice and sugar, nuts and fruits around the heart of the churned-butter shell, a sigh escaped her. Shoulders stayed straight to the task, hands worked in harmony, but Alizarin daydreamt for large portions of the work. Time did not fly. Time did not skip. Rolling the dough end over end, cutting surely with her knives, and arranging their places on the slate took no thought at all. If the bakery stayed open, it was due to Trellista’s cycles of instilled teaching, not to Alizarin’s heart, for that was gone.

  Bread is a demanding master. She laughed sadly to herself. The needs of yeast made time more easily flow around the boulder of her sorrow. Finally finished with the labors of her workday, she stretched her arms wide, pulling her spine out and up, relaxing from the constancy of discipline.

  With satisfaction, she looked around the merry little kitchen and to the shelves of stocked goods, full and pleasing. Nodding her approval, she donned her newly purchased, pale-yellow cloak and picked up two carrots from the storage. She closed the door to the shop, and gathering her bundle of breads, started off for the empty house.

  Alizarin fell into step behind a mighty, little donkey energetically pulling his tiny, green cart, focused only on arriving at the warmth of the nearest barn and the promise of grain. Next to the work beast walked the brown-haired, lanky Rethendrel, voice softly whispering to the fuzzy ears of burden.