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Ecw Press - S.M. Beiko

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247 pages

English

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The dazzling second book in S.M. Beiko s Realms of Ancient series Three months after the battle of Zabor, the five friends that came together to defeat her have been separated. Burdened with the Calamity Stone she acquired in Scion of the Fox, Roan has gone to Scotland to retrace her grandmother's steps in an attempt to stop further evil from entering the world. Meanwhile, a wicked monster called Seela has risen from the ashy Bloodlands and is wreaking havoc on the world while children in Edinburgh are afflicted by a strange plague; Eli travels to Seoul to face judgment and is nearly murdered; Natti endures a taxing journey with two polar bears; Phae tries desperately to obtain the key to the Underworld; and Barton joins a Family-wide coalition as the last defense against an enemy that will stop at nothing to undo Ancient's influence on Earth - before there is no longer an Earth to fight for. Darkness, death, and the ancient powers that s

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Children's

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	25 septembre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773052298
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Children of the Bloodlands
The Realms of Ancient, Book II
S.M. Beiko

For the families who made us, and the ones we choose along the way

Contents
The One True Child
The One True Child
Part I: Tremor
A Burning Shade
Tribunal by Air
Ashes to Ashes
Far from Sea
Hollow Spirit
The Stonebearer’s Burden
Part II: Quake
The Ice and the Inua
The Conclave of Fire
The Scars Beneath
A Chosen Daughter
Part III: Fissure
Black Water
United Front
She Wakes in Flames
Come to Roost
An Empty Sky
The Cold Road
Son of the Wind
Part IV: Rupture
Uncanny Shores
The Devil You Know
The Cost of Freedom
Enemy of Ancient
Part V: Calamity
A Shattered Sea
The Horned Quartz
Black Bastion
The End of the Narrative
Answer
Acknowledgements
Sneak Peek: The Brilliant Dark (The Realms of Ancient, Book III)
About the Author
Copyright

The One True Child

The One True Child
Northern Scotland
S top crying and be braver , Albert had said. But now his mouth wasn’t moving. The skin of his forehead was as split as the crack in the world they had found, but his forehead was leaking red, leaking too quickly and too much. Saskia had crouched stiff and numb more than an hour, pressing her whole body weight into the wound to make the red stop.
Stop crying!
But she couldn’t. Not in the dark, in the cold, as she made slow progress through the woods. She thought about all the things Albert had said, the things that led to this.
She exhaled a shaking breath, dragging the heavy sack through the crunchy leaves. The rope burned her small hands. Albert wouldn’t say a thing anymore.
~
It had been their secret — his and Saskia’s. What they’d found down in the woods at the bottom of the scrabby glen that day, months ago, just after Saskia had turned eight. Papa had been home, rare occasion that it was. She understood that they needed money to pay the bills and that Papa needed to work as much as he did, but sometimes she resented the long road that kept him from them for weeks and weeks. And there was also the invisible road inside of them that divided their hearts. The road paved black when Mum had died.
On that brighter day, the day after her birthday, Papa took them for a walk. He wasn’t as strong as she remembered him being. He seemed bowed as a croggled tree. His knees weren’t in good shape, and he was not young. Albert was fifteen, but their parents had had them late in life. Saskia didn’t mind; this is how she thought all parents were. Old and grown and wiser than she ever could be.
But she could see age in Papa’s stiff walk, the hours and days of driving taking its toll. It made her feel sick. “Go on ahead, ye wee gomeral,” he’d said, sitting on the crest of a hill. “I can see ye from here.”
But they’d gone too far into the woods, and Saskia knew Papa couldn’t see them anymore. Albert always had to go far, as far as he could, to make it count. Saskia only ever wanted to be near him. She wanted his protection, and she wanted to protect him, too. But above all, she wanted to show she could be brave.
Albert stopped at a massive split in the rock of the munro — it was as if a big axe had cut it in half. The sun shone into it, revealing the barest crack in the world.
Albert climbed down to investigate. Saskia didn’t protest, but she wanted to.
“There’s something down here,” he said, frowning into the small crater. “You’ve got small hands. C’mon.”
Saskia twisted her shirt in those small hands and picked her way down. She and Albert bent, heads touching, and she put her hand in —
“Sss!” Saskia pulled her hand back, shaking it.
“What?” Albert grabbed her hand, alarmed, and they both stared at the cut, the blood trickling around Saskia’s wrist and dripping into the crack.
The ground shook, and Saskia screamed. Albert grabbed her hand, pulled her up the hill, and they took off in a blur back the way they’d come.
Papa was close to laying an egg because of how long they’d been gone. Albert was too breathless to explain the cut on Saskia’s hand, to waylay Papa’s anger as he wrapped it up too tightly in his handkerchief, making Saskia wince as he dragged them both home in furious silence. “Where did you get a knife?” Papa asked gruffly, not believing either of them when they said there was no knife. Just a crack in the ground whose darkness haunted them all the way home.
Albert stayed up most of the night thinking about that crack. “I had a dream about it,” he said. “We have to go back.” It didn’t matter what Saskia felt about it — she would go where Albert went, and that he’d said we meant he wanted her there, meant she had to. They rushed out when Aunt Millie had fallen asleep in her chair in front of the telly. They knew they’d have more than a chance the minute the whisky bottle clattered onto the sideboard. It was summer — what little they have of it in the north — and out here, children could do as they pleased. They could chase the massive herds of deer, they could scrabble up and down rocks. They could get into trouble. It wasn’t like in the cities or bigger towns like Durness or Thurso. So much desolate freedom here. Saskia knew it’d have to end sometime, but she didn’t suspect it would be this soon.
They went back to the crack, and it was so much wider. The ground around it was black. “Probably that earthquake,” Albert guessed, but Saskia didn’t remember there being earthquakes in the Highlands.
Then there was a bang, loud like thunder, and Saskia jumped and ran, ran fast and far without looking back until she realized she was running alone. She twisted and screamed, “Albie!” But he hadn’t followed. She couldn’t leave him behind, knew he’d never do such a thing to her, so she turned around, and he was just as she’d left him, standing there above the crack, mouth open, frozen in awe.
The grey amorphous thing crawled out of the world and into the air. A column of ash. A straight cloud of smoke. It opened a mouth and words came out. “I am the Gardener,” it said. “Thank you for raising me.”
The voice was soothing, calm and clear. Saskia was shaking all over, but she wouldn’t leave Albert. And when she looked down at her hand, with the big scratchy bandage, she knew this was all her fault.
~
There was no road in the woods. Saskia was following the brook, which crept along an impassable munro. What’s inside the mountains? Albert had asked whenever Aunt Millie took them driving for a change of scenery. The sharp, dead peaks have many secrets , she’d say, but Aunt Millie wasn’t prone to fairy stories. Or tales of monsters.
But they’d found themselves in a monster story anyway.
Saskia stumbled, pitched, and slid on her knees. She’d dropped the rope, but when she whirled around, the sack was still there. She’d wrapped Albert in his Ninja Turtles bedsheet, but it was faded from years of washing. It seemed to glow in the dark.
She whimpered when she noticed the dark patches showing through. She clenched her bloody hands and stood on shaking feet.
Her hands stung even worse now, as if the cut were still fresh. Picking the rope back up and continuing on was so much harder than starting out. Why did she have to be such a crybaby? Why couldn’t she be like Albert? Why did she have to do this alone? There wasn’t much she really understood — not in the way grown-ups did — but she knew that if she didn’t do this, she’d lose her brother forever. She would be in the biggest trouble of her life. And not with Papa or Aunt Millie. What waited for her in the dark woods scared her most.
She could tell she was getting close, though. The humming in the ground thrummed through her tired legs into her bones. So she kept going.
~
Urka told Albert and Saskia that they were special. That it had come from a land plagued with ruin, and that she and Albert were the key to saving the three rulers of this faraway place who were imprisoned there forever.
These three rulers, according to Urka, had a precious child, and it had been sent to the Uplands — that’s what it called Earth — to get help. To find a family. And Saskia and Albert were the family they were waiting for.
Every day that they snuck out to visit it, Urka got bigger and the forest around it got smaller. It said that eating the trees was the only way to get its strength up after the long journey, and that the trees here weren’t like the trees back in its home. “But soon that will change,” Urka promised. “Soon this world will be covered in the trees I know.”
Saskia tried to look Urka in its eyes, all six of them, to try to see if it was telling the truth, the way she did when Albert told her a fib to get a rise out of her. But it hurt to look into those eyes — like looking too long at the sun. She should have known then.
Albert asked, right at the start, if Urka could grant wishes. Urka was quiet a long time as its ash body hardened to stone, grew huge in the shadow of the mountain that hid it. It said yes, a horrible bone-grating affirmation, then praised Albert for his cleverness. Saskia scrunched her nose and questioned how , especially because Urka could barely move a few feet from the crack it had crawled out of and seemed weak despite how many trees and dead things it had shoved into the big mouth in its growing belly. That was when the eyes fell on Saskia, and she turned away. That was when Urka saw she doubted. That was her second mistake.
~
In the deep, dark woods, she finally collapsed. The moon shone through the cleft in the rock, shone onto the place where the crack had opened into a valley and devoured the light. Her head pounded and s