A Thirst for Vengeance (The Ashes Saga, Volume 1) (2 page)

And, for what it’s worth, he smiled far more than three times when he killed his property. He enjoyed it because he thought he was giving sacrifice to the great God Xune.

However, being made a tribute was not my fate. I was left to a much crueler master:

The Arena.

Three-Grin raised children for the Arena. After being sold by the gypsy woman, I was thrown into a dungeon and forgotten.

I was not alone in that wet, dark pit. Other children made noises around me. Some gurgled. Most cried.

Even the most precocious child will cry for his mother for days on end without giving up. That sort of stark stubbornness has to be admired.

It is something I lacked entirely.

My mother had tried to kill me. The woman whom I thought replaced her handed me off to a man who dumped me underground. My life had been short, at this point, but it had also been hard.

That is to say, I knew Mother would not come. I did not cry.

That silence served me well. At first, the older children thought me dumb. Later, when they saw the spark of intellect in my eyes, they mistook it for something else:

Insanity.

One man took care of us beneath the earth. He did not speak, either. When I reflect on my time there, I now realize that he may have been mute.

He wore the same ashen gray robes every day. Perhaps he had been a child in my position once who had grown up and survived the Arena. But I did not take him for a fighter.

If he had a name, he did not share it. His eyes were blank and empty. Despite that, he had overwhelming patience for the children.

He brought us hard bread and water. He moistened the bread for those too young to chew and dabbed it at their lips. Somehow, that was enough to prevent starvation.

I remained in those dungeons for five years. I never spoke. I did not see the sun. I just watched, listened, and
waited
.

I saw Three-Grin once every other month. He would come down to the dungeons reeking of beer and piss. He would take stock of his property, point to one of the older slaves, and walk away. In the days that followed, the child he picked would simply disappear.

Sometimes, Three-Grin came down in a blind rage. He would have a sword in one hand and a cudgel in the other. At random he would pick one of the children. Usually it was the one who screamed the most.

Three-Grin could not abide crying.

He would kick the child to the center of the room. He liked making a spectacle of things. He would impale his sword through the crying child’s shoulder, pinning him to the ground. Then he would laugh, and, using the cudgel, beat the poor child into a bloody pulp.

Then he would spin round and round and scream as his crazed eyes found us in the shadows. “
Xune knows all! Xune punishes sinners! Hear me, for I am the great God Xune’s one true messenger
!”

He did not know how right he was. Xune was watching. And Xune was preparing to punish sinners.

After Three-Grin left, our robed caregiver would kneel beside the broken body of the latest sacrifice. He would cradle the child’s head and hum a haunting melody into one unhearing ear.

It dawned on me later that perhaps the robed man was a disgraced priest. Many worshipped Xune in their own ways. The Church did not have the same influence back then that it does now. But they were growing, and the lies of the religions were spreading like fleas on a ship.

But I digress. Over the years, the Church has been both a great enemy to me and a steadfast friend. I will get to that at its proper time.

Some months after my sixth birthday, I was selected by Three-Grin on one of his patrols. To say I slept poorly that night would be a lie. I did not sleep at all.

Yet it was not fear that kept me awake. It was hope. Being selected was the only way out of the dungeons. I had had enough of that dank place.

Let me remind you that, until that day, I had not heard a human language spoken since my time with the gypsies. Three-Grin’s rhetoric did not count. My mind was fallow and ready to absorb anything it could as easily as a sponge.

So, in the night, when I was cloaked, bagged, and abducted from my spot against the wall, I felt the primitive bloom of joy spread through my chest. I did not know what happened to children who were taken in the night. Anticipation trembled in me like a coiled spring.

I was brought up one flight of stairs and dumped to the floor.

That was it. One storey up. It was another dungeon, slightly larger, and right above my previous one.

But even that could not hamper my excitement. My world had just doubled in size. I was overjoyed.

Until somebody drenched me with a bucket of ice cold water from behind.

I gasped and shot up. Two coarse, rough hands grabbed my arms. Instinct told me to fight, but my frozen muscles did not respond. I was picked up and tossed into a tub of steaming water as easily as a ham.

Do you know the pain that comes when you follow a hot mug of
Kaf
with a shot of rum that has been chilled in the snow? The pain that makes your teeth feel like shattering?

That was the pain I knew then, except an order of magnitude stronger. It consumed my entire body. I opened my mouth to scream. Before a single sound could come out, that rough hand found my hair and shoved my head underwater.

I flailed as the deadly liquid filled my lungs. I was drowning. I knew, in the most primitive way possible, that it was my turn to die.

But death was not yet in the cards for me. It still isn’t, in fact. Though Xune knows I have tried to seek it out.

I was brought back to the surface. Those rough heavy hands turned me around. I saw my tormenter for the first time.

It was a girl.

No. Saying it that way does not do justice to the surprise I felt. She was not just a girl. She was a beautiful girl. Her bright green eyes seemed to shine in the dim light. Her hair was the color of daffodils. It fell around her face in lush, cascading waves. She smelled sweet, like vanilla with the faintest hint of honey. She had a perfect rosebud mouth, a tiny, delicate nose, and the longest eyelashes I have ever seen.

She was an illusion. A specter. She could not be real.

With no words to guide my thoughts, my mind struggled to understand what someone so beautiful was doing here.

Then she grinned, and dunked me in the tank again.

I sputtered and coughed and gulped down air every time she brought me back to the surface. I still thought I was going to die. But it comforted me to know that I would die at the hands of an angel.

The waterboarding stopped. She picked me up and flung me on a table. When I saw her raise a knife, I got a discomforting sense of
Deja-vu
.

I did not scream or cry. I simply stared at her, transfixed by her beauty. It astounded me how someone with a face so fair could treat another human with such cruelty.

She raised the knife. I closed my eyes. I wanted my last memory of her to be unmarred by fright.

She brought the knife down and chopped off my long, dirty hair.

I blinked, stunned.

And then, I started to scream.

You cannot understand the shock I felt. The betrayal. My hair had never been cut. I thought of it as an essential part of me, as important as any of my limbs or my fingers or—

“Or your penis!” Earl roared, laughing. “What do you say to that, eh? Not a single word in that little brain of yours, but already you’re thinking about gettin’ yer pecker wet!” He beamed at Patch, who was starting to turn a bright red.

“No,” Dagan said. “My love for her was pure. I cherished it and held it tight for years after. It was not twisted by lust. Not yet.”

Earl noticed the growing color in Patch’s cheeks. “What’s wrong with you, lad? You never seen the upside of a woman’s skirts?” He exploded into another bout of choppy laughter.

Path glued his eyes to the floor and burned bright.

“Earl.” Dagan’s voice cut through the man’s laughter like a spear through a dying boar. “Look.”

Earl stopped and took note of Patch for the first time. He saw the way he drew in on himself. He saw his untouched mug of ale on the table.

He saw the boy’s innocence.

“Ahh, lad,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—” he broke off with a cough, “—I mean, I didn’t expect you to be, uh…” he snuck a glance at Dagan, suppressed a shiver, and changed what he was going to say. “I didn’t expect you to be
so young
. I forget, sometimes, how few summers you’ve really seen. It’s a testament to yer… ahhh… maturity.”

Patch’s eyes shot up. They burned with a deep but furious flame. “I’m
not
unsullied,” he retorted. “I’ve just got more respect than you. That’s all.”

Suddenly his eyes widened, and he seemed to remember his company. “I interrupted your story,” he said to Dagan, abashedly.

“Perhaps it’s time for us to hear yours,” Dagan said, not unkindly. “Who was she?”

Patch looked down again, uncomfortable being the center of attention. “Nobody,” he muttered.

“Ah, lad, come now, we won’t tease,” Earl said. “My first love was named Lysa. Fair as the wind, she was, and as spirited as the wildest mare. It took me five long years to get her to warm up to me. But I didn’t give up.”

“Five
years
?” Patch asked in wonder. He could not fathom Earl waiting for someone that long.

“Aye, five years. And let me tell you, it was worth it in the end. Five years is what it took to get one night together.”

“And… after?”

“The next day, her husband found out she had left in the night. He beat her. He beat her until she couldn’t crawl, then locked her in a room and let her die.” Earl’s voice hardened. “When I found out why she did not come and see me again, I broke out in a wild rage. I killed the bastard with my own hands. Wrung his neck like a duck’s.”

“When?” Patch’s voice came out as a whisper.

“Forty years ago, maybe more? I vowed, on Lysa’s grave, that I would never love another woman the way I loved her. That’s why I am the way I am, lad. So, don’t be taking offence to the things I say on account of me. They’re not meant t’be malicious.” He pronounced it
maleeshus
.

“Your turn, now,” Dagan reminded Patch gently.

Patch picked up his mug and took his first swallow. He set it down and spoke fast.

“Her name was Eleanor. She grew up beside me on the farm next to my Da’s. Well, the farm that used to be my Da’s. When the soldiers came looking for recruits, she hid me in her basement. She was a year older than me. The soldiers took my Da.”

Patch blinked once and continued. “Four months later, they came back. I hid again. But, they found me. I never saw her since. She promised she would wait for me…” He trailed off and peered into his mug. “That was two years ago.”

“Two years ain’t nothing,” Earl said, seeing the boy’s sadness and trying to comfort him. “If she thinks of you th’way you speak of her, she’ll be there when you come back.”

“Whoever said I was coming back?” Patch whispered.

A silence fell upon the three men. It was a silence like the one that comes after the headman’s axe has fallen. It was a silence like the hollow ring of an empty barrel.

It was a silence like death.

Dagan broke it. The silence did not bother him, just as death did not bother him. He had seen death coming for him so often that it provided him familiar comfort by now, like an old friend or lover.

He knew it would come for him once more tonight.

“So,” he said, “how about the rest of my story?”

Chapter Three

When I lost my hair, something broke inside me. I screamed. I screamed in sorrow. I screamed in pain. I screamed for all the time I had kept quiet in the dungeon.

The girl smiled. She picked me up and brought me to her breast. She rocked me as the screams turned into sobs. She rocked me until my throat was pained and raw.

Then, she set me down, kissed my forehead, and left.

***

I did not find out who she was until three months later. In the interim, I was treated to varying degrees of torture by a trio of small, masked men. One wore the mask of a hyena. The other, a pig. The last, a wolf.

I was flogged. I was beaten. I was thrown into a fire and then doused with sawdust to stop the flames.

I didn’t know it then, but all of that treatment was done to prepare me for the Arena.

Let me paint a picture of my captivity so that you might better understand my struggle. Whereas before, in the dungeon beneath this one, I was merely forgotten, now, I was a target.

I was also somewhat of an enigma.

No matter what the masked men did to me, I did not make a sound. It was almost like I had exhausted my capacity for it the day my hair was cut.

That made my captors curious. Could I not feel pain? Was I immune to their torture devices?

I think it took less than twelve hours for them to make a game of it. The one who would make me scream first would win. Their torture became more and more elaborate. It became more and more creative.

You have to understand one thing about Three-Grin’s men. They were there only to train me for the Arena. Anything that would put me at a disadvantage was off-limits.

They would not break my bones. They would not blind my eyes. All they did, and all they were supposed to do, was acclimate my body to pain.

For if I embraced pain—if I could endure it—I might survive the Arena long enough for Three-Grin to make a small fortune on me as a fighter.

So, after they flogged me, they applied balm to my wounds so my skin would heal. After they beat me, they gave me nectar of Red Clover so I might sleep. And after they threw me into the fire…

Well, let’s just say that miscalculation nearly cost them their lives.

The girl who cut my hair entered the room just as the man in the pig mask was carrying me, smoldering, from the altar. She gave a horrified gasp and sprang forward. She opened her mouth. Sound came out.