HISTORIAN'S NOTE
The events recounted herein begin concurrently with those related in Haven Divided: The Dragon’s Brood Cycle, Vol. 2. After the young urchin boy Daniel caused a catastrophic diversion in Marianne’s crystal mines to help Emily and Corbbmacc escape (Haven Lost: The Dragon’s Brood Cycle Vol. 1), he was captured by a band of desert slavers known as Reavers. Maddy, a young woman also held prisoner in the mines who had developed a close bond with Daniel, set out with a fellow prisoner, a sarqin named Galak, to rescue Daniel, eventually meeting back up with Emily Haven and her friends, although that reunion is still in the future.
Familiarity with Haven Lost and Haven Divided is recommended, but not required, to enjoy this tale.
***
Maddy gnawed the bone in her hand and stared moodily into the dancing flames of their campfire. The meat from the bird they’d roasted was long gone, but she wasn’t ready to stop gnashing her teeth. It was a feeble distraction, but she’d learned to make do since leaving home. In a while, perhaps, she’d take out the crystal she’d been carving and let her hands take over for her teeth.
There was no point dwelling on what had happened to Danny. They were on his trail, and he’d either be all right when they caught up to the Reavers who had taken him, or…
Even just brushing against that thought chipped away at the carefully constructed crystalline armor around her heart. Worrying away at Danny’s plight in her mind wouldn’t get them any closer to him, and grief or self-recriminations would only slow them down.
And she didn’t want to slow down. She wanted to get back to what she was supposed to be doing. Absently, she touched the palm of her left hand and the invisible mark that burned there.
The high, piercing caw of a risp sliced through the stillness of the dwindling twilight, echoing off the mountainside and rolling out over the expanse of desert that lay ahead of them.
“Kitsper got your tongue?” Galak asked, his tone more subdued than she was used to hearing from him. There was still a hint of gentle teasing though, and she knew he was trying to draw her out. He was always trying to draw her out. Why couldn’t the great lummox let her be?
“Not really,” she said at last, tossing the bone into the fire and watching it blacken. She pulled her pack into her lap and dug out the long narrow piece of crystal she’d taken from the mines, running her fingers over the smooth edges she’d already finished and letting them linger on the rough patches she had yet to shape.
Across from her, Galak’s furry form sprawled beside the fire, his great bulk casting an even larger shadow in the light of the flames. He stretched like an overgrown cat, causing his joints to pop and crack.
“I’m still hungry,” he grumbled.
Maddy snorted. “You’re always fuckin’ hungry.”
“Not always,” Galak protested. “Only when there’s not enough to eat.”
“Then there’s never been enough to eat.”
There was a pause before he answered. “Yeah, that sounds ‘bout right.”
Maddy snorted again. Somehow, Galak always made her laugh, no matter how dark her mood or the bleak paths her thoughts had wandered down. It was both wonderful and irritating.
“Tell me a story,” he said, crossing his gargantuan ankles and pillowing his great shaggy head on his arms.
“What?”
“Tell me a story,” he repeated. “That’s what my mama always did when I was hungry to make me forget.”
“I don’t tell stories,” Maddy said more sharply than she’d intended. There was a sharp ping inside her chest—a pickaxe against stone—and she felt another flake of crystal fall away. No, she’d never been the storyteller. Lessa had been the storyteller. In her lap, her fingers moved faster over the crystal, feeling for the lines she would soon be drawing out.
“Ah c’mon,” Galak wheedled, the deep rumble of his voice completely at odds with his tone.
“I don’t tell stories,” she said again, more gently this time.
“Well, then, not a story. Just something that happened to you once. You don’t have to make it up. I won’t know the difference.”
Maddy sighed, lay back beside the fire, and looked up at the stars. There’d been a few flurries of snow higher up on the mountains, but now that they were coming back down and approaching the desert, the air had that pleasant coolness she had always associated with the autumn nights leading up to Samhain.
Oh, how Lessa had loved Samhain. But Lessa had loved all festivals, hadn’t she? Lessa had loved life. Where was Lessa now? Out there somewhere.
Again she found her fingers worrying the warm spot on her palm, and she forced herself to stop.
After she and Galak found Danny, it’d be time to resume her search for Lessa.
“All right,” she said finally. On the other side of the fire, she heard Galak make a sound that, if he wasn’t a seven-foot-tall, eight-hundred-pound Sarqin, might well have been a squeal of delight.
“Will there be monsters!” he demanded. “Oh, and faeries! The best stories always have—”
“Galak?” Maddy singsonged, interrupting him.
“Huh?”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Her friend fell silent, and for a time, she only lay there, staring up into the sky.
“My name wasn’t always Maddy,” she began…
***
My name wasn’t always Maddy—not really. Until I was fourteen, no one ever called me that. It was too familiar…too common. No, I was Madeline, only daughter of Lord Calom and heir to his little kingdom, which encompassed the city of Ravenhold and the surrounding villages. Not that any of it was really ours, of course; the sorceress Marianne ruled over all, but as long as we paid our taxes and didn’t cause too much trouble, we were left mostly to ourselves and could go on pretending that it was ours.
The first time anyone ever called me Maddy was kinda funny. You wanted a story, right? Okay, here’s your story.
It was late summer, and I’d spent the day having one of Lord Calom’s drivers drag my pretentious ass in my pretentious velvet-draped carriage to all the pretentious little shops I loved. I’d stuffed myself on sausages and all kinds of good things to eat. I’d bought a new gown, not that I needed another one. The thing was, I didn’t have any brothers or sisters; I didn’t know how else to fill the hours, apart from my studies, and those had bored me for years by then. Besides, Lord Calom was only too happy to keep me occupied and out of his sight.
As the carriage came to a stop alongside the castle’s fountain, its decapitated mermaid sending a fine mist into the summer sky, I saw one of the servant girls rush forward.
Good, I thought, someone has thought to send a servant to help with my packages.
The girl helped me down from the carriage, which was funny ‘cause she was a whole lot smaller than I was. As my feet touched the pavement though, my heel caught on the hem of my skirts, and I stumbled.
The last of the little sweetcake I was eating slipped from my fingers and broke apart on the cobblestones into a little pile of crumbs between my feet.
As quick as a flash of lightning, a small figure darted forward—apparently out of nowhere, though I suppose he must’ve been part of the crowd moving along the street. He scooped up the crumbs, brushing my satin slippers with his grimy little fingers. Before I could open my mouth to reprimand his insolence, he was running away.
I could say I don’t know what came over me, but that would be a big fat lie. I was a pretentious little princess, and I was not gonna let some filthy little street rat touch my precious slippers or make off with my sweetcake. Gods knew why I cared. It wasn’t like I was gonna eat the fuckin’ thing after it had landed on the filthy street, but there I was, running after that urchin like I had a horde of deaders on my heels.
My legs were as long then as they are now, and he was just a tiny little thing, no more than five or six. I caught up to him in half a dozen strides, grabbed him by the scruff of his dirty neck, and hauled him around to face me.
“What are you doing!” I demanded, or something like it. I can’t quite remember. He was a satyrian boy, those great spiraled horns framing his pointed little rat’s face. I could see his jaw muscles moving as he chewed as fast as he could; I saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down, and there was a smudge of icing at the corner of his mouth.
I slapped him across his face—hard. He didn’t cry out, only stared at me, blinking rapidly and saying nothing. He wasn’t even trying to get away, although he could have. I’d let go of him as soon as I’d seen how filthy he was.
I raised my hand to slap him again, and a set of tiny fingers wrapped firmly around my wrist, holding it still in midair. I looked at those fingers for a moment, marveling at how pale they were against my own brown skin.
“Off you get,” a lilting voice said at my ear. The satyrian boy’s gaze shifted from my face at last, and he turned and started away. He didn’t scurry off like the rat he was; he just shuffled down the street, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed, staring at the ground between his bare and dirty feet.
I rounded on the owner of the hand that had stopped me, fresh words of outrage already forming on my lips.
It was the servant girl. She was staring daggers at me, in a way that no servant had ever looked at me. I was so surprised that whatever I was gonna say died in my throat. Probably for the best.
“And what the devil did you think you were doing?” she asked me, letting go of my wrist and putting her hands on her hips. She looked like my old governess in miniature, although the intimidation that venerable lady had once wrought in me was not equaled by this little elf of a girl who was head and shoulders shorter than I was. She had the same orangey hair, though, save for the streaks of gray that had highlighted my governess’s locks, and tiny delicate features that put me in mind of a pixie.
“That street rat stole my cake,” I spat, grinding my teeth.
“No he didn’t,” she retorted. “You dropped it, and the poor hungry kid picked it up off the filthy ground before the birds could snatch it or you could grind it into the cobbles with the heel of one of them fancy slippers. For all you know, that might be the only meal he’ll get today.”
Her tone was fierce, and I could feel heat rising in my face. I looked down at said slippers and shuffled them. The seconds ticked away, and I heard the carriage rattle off as the driver went to put it in the carriage house.
“Not everyone is as well cared for as you, mistress,” she said, her tone softening.
I looked back up at her, really seeing her for the first time. I don’t think I’d ever really seen any of the servants before that moment. They were always just faceless bodies that did what you wanted when you wanted it and got out of the way when you told them to. And she was looking at me in such a strange way. There was something in her eyes that I’d never seen cast in my direction before—not once in my whole life, and certainly not from one of the servants. I didn’t know what it was then, not exactly, but I suppose now it was pity. All I knew then was that I didn’t want her to look at me that way.
“What’s your name?” I asked her. It just popped out of my mouth like my tongue had suddenly acquired a mind of its own. What was I doing, socializing with the servants? Lord Calom was liable to flay me alive.
For her part, the girl seemed as taken aback by my asking as I was. She blinked in surprise and cocked her head to one side, looking me up and down speculatively. At last, she said, “Lessa.”
“Lisa?”
“No,” she said very slowly, as though speaking to someone a bit dim, “Lessa.”
I frowned at her. “That’s a strange name. Why don’t you just be Lisa?”
“Why don’t you go by Maddy?” she snapped tartly, her eyes flashing. They were beautiful eyes—a rich purple color, like the sky at deepest twilight. I hadn’t ever seen anyone with purple eyes before; not since, either, actually.
“That isn’t my name,” I protested.
“And Lisa isn’t mine.”
We stared at each other for another moment, and then she inhaled a slow, steadying breath and took my arm.
“Come along, mistress Madeline. We’ve made enough of a scene for one afternoon.”
I let her steer me toward the castle steps, only then becoming aware that a small crowd had gathered to watch our little confrontation. I heard titters from the onlookers, but none dared say anything. I was Lord Calom’s only daughter, after all.
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