In Sunless Lands - Prologue
The sound of whimpering drew Skylark to the thicket.
Foraging alone in the woods, the elven girl thought it sounded like a kicked dog. Had one escaped from the city and gotten injured? she wondered.
Skylark drew closer to investigate, her long skirts bunched up in her hand as she made her way through the underbrush.
The creature, whatever it was, had wedged itself deep inside the thick brambles. Skylark had to carefully pick through the shrubbery to uncover it, and nettles and thorns stung her hands as she did so. Finally, the thicket parted, and she uncovered a boy.
He was young—maybe ten years old, or younger—and at least half-demonic. His skin had a distinct red cast, and small horns peeked through his mop of black hair. He was also terribly injured, heavily bruised, and bleeding from ragged cuts.
Their gazes met. In his black eyes, Skylark saw fear, but also a horrible resignation. The boy closed his eyes and dropped his head, as if waiting for Skylark to do . . . something.
Demonic children were rare—the result of some demon and an unwilling human or elven woman. They were considered the worst omens imaginable. Still, Skylark’s heart couldn’t help but soften for the poor thing, so hurt and alone.
Just then, Skylark heard many voices. Men.
“C’mon, let’s check over here!”
“We need to kill the damned thing.”
Skylark’s heart quickened. They’re after the boy!
The boy’s eyes widened until the whites showed all around the dark irises. “Please,” he said in a cracked whisper.
She shouldn’t get involved. Skylark knew she shouldn’t get involved. Head Priestess Anagale had drilled it into Skylark’s head to stop meddling with the natural order of things. She had often gotten in trouble for trying to save small, injured animals, unwilling to accept that their fate was to be prey.
The voices grew louder. There were bare seconds left to act. Gazing into the boy’s terrified eyes, Skylark felt like she could see into his very soul, something she’d been told demons didn’t have.
She made a decision.
Quickly, Skylark pushed the brambles back into place, covering the boy once more. She was just in time, as a group of eight or so men, armed with clubs and knives, burst into the small clearing.
They froze when they saw her. They were clearly chasing something and had not expected to run into a half-grown elf girl dressed in the long robes of a Druidic novitiate.
Skylark was equally taken aback. Though she was used to running into the odd woodsman or group of hunters and had even ventured into the city a time or two with the elder priestesses for supplies, she had been kept relatively sheltered by the Order. This was the first time she’d ever been confronted by such a large group of strangers while alone.
The young men, most of them teens, wore the rough clothing of the poorer type of city folk. After a moment, the eldest of the lot stepped forward.
“Sorry, miss. Didn’t mean to scare ya.”
Skylark took a steadying breath and shook her head. “It’s fine. Can I help you, gentlemen?”
“We’re hunting a demon.” The man seemed to puff up with his own importance at that grand statement. Knowing exactly what the man hunted, Skylark was unimpressed. She fought the urge to glance at the bush. The boy, to his credit, had gone completely silent and Skylark was loath to be the one to give him away through carelessness.
“It’s a little one, but fierce. Have you seen it?”
“No, I’ve seen nothing of the sort.” Her heart caught in her throat as she said the words. Would they know she was lying? If they did, what would they do then?
The men exchanged glances.
“Could’ve sworn he went this way,” muttered one of the youths.
Skylark fought to remain calm, her face impassive.
Thankfully, one of the others spoke. “We musta lost him in the brush,” he said.
The leader quieted them with a wave of the hand. “Sorry to bother ya, miss. We’ll be on our way. You keep an eye out, though. Thing’s dangerous, I tell ya.” He turned to the group and Skylark knew she’d already been discarded as unimportant in their minds. It was a relief. “Let’s head to the river and see if we can pick up its trail from there.”
The men left, disappearing into the forest’s gloom.
Skylark waited until she couldn’t hear them anymore, and then waited several tense minutes more before returning to the thicket. Carefully, she picked it apart again.
The boy was still there, wide-eyed and breathing hard. Skylark noted for the first time how thin he was—his cheekbones stood out starkly in his gaunt face.
“Don’t be afraid,” she told him.
“You saved me,” he said. His raspy voice sounded like he’d screamed himself hoarse recently, but Skylark could hear the wonder in his tone. Despite his plea, she realized he hadn’t expected to be helped.
She crouched so that she wasn’t looming over the boy quite so much. “We need to get you out of here; those men could come back.” Her voice gentled. “My name is Skylark. What’s yours?”
The boy looked down, shamefaced. “Don’t have one,” he whispered.
Skylark’s heart broke. Had no one ever cared for this boy? She knew demons were reviled—and with good reason—but this was a child. He must have had a mother, once. Had she abandoned him, the way that Skylark’s mother had abandoned her on the stoop of the Dianic Order of the Moon?
“Do you have someplace safe to go to, somewhere I can take you?”
The Order had a strict curfew; all novitiates were to be within the sect’s walls by sundown. It was already late in the afternoon. Skylark would likely be caned and made to kneel on pebbles if she was tardy, but she’d take the punishment with a glad heart if she knew she had delivered the boy to safety.
The boy shook his head. “I was trying to find the river. I was going to follow it until I found another town. Jeremi said towns are usually on rivers. He’s a Maji, so he would know.” Maji were itinerant traders who migrated through the land of Asfarid. They were known to be strange and disreputable, so Skylark supposed it made sense that one would converse with a demonic child.
While there was a good-sized town downstream, it was quite some distance away. A day’s walk or more. The child would never make it in the state he was in. Besides, the men would likely be scouring the riverbanks for him.
She had to take him back to the sect; it was the only option. The punishment for sneaking the boy in would be much worse than the one for missing curfew, but Skylark didn’t hesitate before offering, “I live nearby. Why don’t you come with me? I can treat your wounds and get you some food.”
She held out her hand.
Hesitantly, the boy took it.
#
The boy stumbled as he emerged from the brambles and limped the first few steps across the clearing. Skylark stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, unable to watch him stoically forge on despite the pain.
He flinched at the unexpected contact.
“Let me carry you,” she offered, her voice as gentle as morning sunlight.
“Why?”
“I can wrap you in my robes and that way no one will see you,” Skylark invented quickly, realizing as she did so that it was a good idea regardless.
He consented to that, and they set off.
It was slow going. Even with her elven strength, his slight weight grew heavy with time.
They reached the Order just as the sinking sun stretched its rosy fingers across the sky. She was glad to see the Order’s white stone walls, despite her growing anxiety. How exactly was she going to pull this off?
Taking the boy to the shared dormitory was out of the question.
Luckily, she maintained the Order’s vegetable garden. The Head Priestess had assumed that, as a wood-elf, she was particularly suited to that task. The gardens were accessible through a small back gate that Skylark had the key to; she needed it to fetch water from the river.
At this time of day, the priestesses were busy preparing for the nightly rituals, and the novitiates would be eating supper. There was no one in the garden to see Skylark dart into the small shed that housed the gardening tools.
It was dark in the shed, and cramped. The floor was hard-packed dirt. She used her outer robe, which was already stained with the boy’s blood, to make a small pallet for him to rest on. Cautiously, he lay down.
“You’ll be safe here,” she told him. “Just don’t leave or let anyone see you. I’ll be back tonight with some medicine and food.”
He nodded, his eyelids heavy with exhaustion.
#
Skylark made it to the dining hall toward the tail-end of the meal.
This suited her since it meant no one questioned why she bundled up a loaf of bread, fruit, cheese, and some meat into a napkin for later. She had told her fellow novitiates, of which there were twelve, that she’d planned on spending the day in the woods, so no one thought it strange that she was late, either.
That night, in the shared dormitory, Skylark waited until the moon was high in the sky before slipping out of her bed. Soft snores filled the room, masking the slight sounds of her making her way to the door. She walked barefoot across the cold, wooden floor, her boots in her hands.
Her luck ran out as the door creaked open.
“Wassat?” came a sleepy murmur from the bed closest to the door.
Silently, Skylark cursed.
“Who’s there?” the novitiate, Madely, continued.
Skylark snuck closer to Madely’s side. “It’s me,” she said, her voice hushed so as not to rouse anyone else. “I’m just going to the chamberpot.”
“A’right.” Madely turned on her side and began snoring once more.
She did not go directly to the shed. Instead, she stopped by the infirmary, grabbed a pot of healing salve, and filled a bucket with the pre-boiled water that the priestesses liked to have on hand. Then, she made her stealthy way to the garden.
The boy was still there. He was awake, showing that his fear of discovery outweighed even his evident exhaustion.
“It’s me,” she said needlessly.
“You came back.”
“I said I would.”
Skylark whispered one of the few charms she knew, and a dim light illuminated the small space.
She cleaned the boy’s wounds with the bucket and a clean rag, then applied the salve. The ointment, which had been blessed beneath the full moon by the Order priestesses, glowed a faint green as it closed the broken skin. With the charmed medicine, healing required little of Skylark’s native power, which was good since her wellspring of magic was rather shallow.
She applied a second layer of medicine to the boy’s ankle and chanted a short blessing as she rolled his foot in small circles, willing for the joint to heal.
The harsh lines that marred his face faded as his pain eased.
“Does that feel better?”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said, his voice quiet but thrumming with some unnamable emotion. “I . . . thank you.”
”Do you think you could walk, now?” Skylark asked.
He got to his feet and paced a small distance in front of her. His gait was steady.
“Thank you,” he said again. It seemed like the only thing he could think to say.
She smiled, somewhere between charmed and amused. “You’re welcome. Here, you need to eat.” She gave the boy the food.
He ate slowly and sparingly, wrapped the rest of it up with a clean rag, and stuffed it in his pocket. Skylark was struck by how resourceful the boy was. He had to be, she realized, to have survived this long.
She thought about leaving then, but she hated the idea of him alone and scared in a strange place, unable to sleep. She rearranged the pallet and motioned the boy over.
“You need rest,” she said. “I’ll keep watch.”
Warily, he laid down. With gentle hands, Skylark encouraged him to rest his head on her thigh. She snuffed out her charmed lights.
A few moments passed. Tentatively, she ran her fingers through his hair, which was matted and greasy.
“Why did you help me?” His voice was heartbreakingly small in the darkness.
“It was the right thing to do.”
Like most little children, he had a follow-up question. “Why? No one else helped me, so how was helping me the right thing to do?”
“Not everyone does the right thing, but it’s still important.” Skylark struggled to articulate something she believed on a level beyond words. “It’s important to help people, even if they can’t help you back, or if they’re weak. Especially if they’re weak.”
“Why?”
“Because!” It was an answer much younger than her sixteen years. She tried again. “No one should be in pain or unhappy. I mean, sometimes you have to be, but if someone can fix it, then they should. I don’t want you to be hurt and scared; that makes me sad. Isn’t it better when everyone is happy? Wouldn’t the world be better if we could all just live together and get along?”
There was silence as the boy considered this. “That would be nice,” he finally whispered.
She nodded, even though he couldn’t see her. She was glad someone agreed with her. Among her peers, not many of them cared about getting along. Certainly none of them cared whether Skylark was happy or feeling included. Then again, all of them were human and had aunts or cousins among the priestesses. Skylark wasn’t and didn’t, and this automatically created a divide between them.
He didn’t ask any more questions, but by his breathing, she could tell he was still awake. She started to sing softly. “Lark’s wings fluttering in the sky; away from sunless lands you fly. Your sweet song makes the flowers sigh; I whisper goodnight as you pass by.”
The words and rhythm of the old lullaby—the lyrics of which had provided Skylark her name—comforted her. They seemed to have the same effect on the boy, and eventually, his breathing evened out with sleep.
She eased his head off her lap and down onto the bunched-up fabric of her robe before sneaking out of the shed and back into her dormitory. It felt like she’d just slipped between her sheets when the morning bell rang and her fellow novitiates began to stir.
All through breakfast, the morning prayers, and lessons Skylark was distracted, her mind wandering back to the garden shed and the boy hiding there. How strange he was, appearing out of nowhere, nameless and alone. How had he lived so long in a world so hostile to his very existence?
She wanted to know his history, but beyond that, she wanted to know what to do with him. He was healed now, and safe for the immediate future. In some ways, she felt like she had done all she could for him, given her limited resources. Anything more and she ran a real risk of being discovered.
A larger part of her felt that, having taken him in, she was now responsible for the boy and that it would cruel beyond words to abandon him. But she couldn’t keep him in the Order indefinitely.
She could gather food, clothing, supplies, they could leave in the dead of night, but where would they go? No place in all the realms would welcome a demonic child.
Her thoughts ran to wild places. Maybe we could live in the woods, away from people? Or I could disguise him with a glamor, but no, my magic isn’t strong enough for that. If he stayed hooded and cloaked, or bandaged up like a leper, could we live in a city? Oh, if only we could sprout wings and fly like larks to the sunless lands of fable.
She wasn’t able to get away from her duties until well into the afternoon. Every time she tried, someone forestalled her with some chore or other. Skylark’s frustration and anxiety built up until she thought she’d burst.
When she finally managed to sneak into the shed, however, the boy was gone.
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