BLOOD OVER BRIGHT HAVEN Chapter 1: A Field of Flowers (Patreon)

In place of our usual Seven Forsaken chapter, I'm sharing this VERY early sample of my upcoming(ish) release, Blood Over Bright Haven (more info on the project here). I probably won't release this chapter outside Patreon for a few months yet, so bear in mind that it is a super early draft and therefore subject to change in revisions.

EDIT (11/30/21): I've replaced the text below with a lightly edited version to correct some errors. You're still looking at a relatively early draft.

_______________

BLOOD OVER BRIGHT HAVEN Chapter 1: A Field of Flowers

“The cannibals are less than a day behind us.”

Thomil watched the words send a shudder through what remained of his tribe. There were no cries of shock or denial from the huddle, just that wordless breath of resignation. The day Thomil had spent scouting and the frozen dusk trekking back almost seemed a waste of energy. His report had only solidified what everyone already knew: there would be no rest before the plunge. No way but forward onto the ice.

“Are you ready?” Arras asked, because that was the kind of inane question he liked to ask.

“No.” Thomil tried not to sound annoyed with his brother-in-law. But really, how ready could a person ever be for near-certain death?

Slipping into a hunter’s crouch by his family, Thomil tried to focus on the glow beyond the lake. Everything about the city on the far shore was alien to him—the towers taller than any hill, the boom and whir of incomprehensible machinery. It would never be home, but it was hope. A magical barrier glittered around the city of Tiran, shielding it from, Blight, winter, and everything that had driven the Caldonnae to the brink of extinction. Safety beckoned in the form of those foreign spires. But, gods, it was so far...

Maeva reached over and squeezed Thomil’s hand, her grip as reassuring as it had been when they were children and he came crying to her with nightmares of wolves with many mouths. Thomil wanted to slip his deerskin mitten off and grasp her hand in earnest, in case this was the last time. But there was a silent agreement among the Caldonnae not to say goodbye. They had to keep believing, however foolishly, that they would all live to see the sunrise.

Maeva and Arras’s daughter mumbled sleepily on her father’s shoulder, and Maeva betrayed her anxiety by clutching Thomil’s hand a little tighter.

“Carra’s going to be alright,” Thomil said. “If nothing else, Arras can run.”

“Was that a veiled dig at my intelligence?” Arras glared at Thomil.

“Was it veiled?”

“I swear, little brother, if my girl wasn’t sleeping, I’d deck you so hard.”

“I know.” Thomil grinned at his broad slab of a brother-in-law. “Why’d you think I waited until she was asleep?”

It was a stupid exchange, but it had gotten Maeva to laugh. And that was all that mattered. That their last moments as a family here on this shoreline be warm ones.

The whole tribe—less than fifty strong, counting the children—stood at the lake’s edge. It would be a miracle if ten of them reached the opposite shore. But only hypothermia and starvation waited in the Kwen behind them, even if they somehow escaped all the neighboring tribes that had turned to eating human flesh. Blight had taken too many of the animals the Caldonnae hunted and the summer crops they would have stored to hold them through this frozen season.

“It’s nearly time,” Elder Sertha’s voice creaked like an oak above the murmurs among family groups. “Get the blood moving in your legs.”

“Up, now.” The tribe’s lead hunter, Beyern, walked along the shoreline, pulling the sickly and sleepy to their feet. “It’s not getting any colder. If the ice at the warm end is ever going to hold, it’ll be now.”

Already, the extending days had started to weaken the ice between the Kwen plains and the city of Tiran. The Caldonnae were no boat builders. If they didn’t cross now, they would have to wait until the water warmed enough to swim, and even the most optimistic among them knew the tribe wouldn’t last that long.

Five-year-old Carra stirred again, and Arras adjusted her weight in his arms. The children her age and younger couldn’t run through the shin-deep snow and would have to cross in the arms of adults. Thankfully, Arras had retained his massive strength and stamina through these leanest of times. He could make the two-mile run under the extra weight if fate allowed it. But that too was a slim hope. The greatest danger out on that lake would not be cold or exhaustion. It would be Blight, magnified tenfold.

“While you can still breathe, keep moving,” Beyern was saying. “Stop for nothing. Turn back for no one. Not even your own blood.” The words turned white before him and hung there like a mourning shroud. “We are one blood now, one name, with one purpose: cross.”

“Everyone, ready,” Elder Sertha said, and the last of the Caldonnae took up position along the rocks. Numbers were supposed to help. No solitary runner had ever made this crossing in one piece, but in big groups, sometimes, there was a chance.

“Move!”

As one, the Caldonnae surged onto the lake.

Thomil felt the difference the moment his boots hit the ice. He sensed the Blight in wait like seers sensed impending storms—a slight change in pressure, a promise of the evil to come. And come it did, in a flash of light.

White ignited the dark ahead of Thomil, marking one of the teenage hunters out front. When the light caught the boy’s sleeve, he jerked to a stop, and when it flared to illuminate his face, Thomil recognized the Blight’s first victim. It was Drevan, an orphan of the last winter, a gifted small game hunter, a quiet boy… He was not quiet now. No one was when the Blight pierced their flesh.

Drevan’s shriek was magnified by the uncaring expanse and sharpened by the cold. Skin unraveled from flesh and flesh from bone like unspooling thread. A few of the young hunters running nearest Drevan stumbled to a halt in horror, even as the elders at their backs called, “Keep running! He is lost! Keep running!”

Drevan had been among the youngsters who had pulled far ahead, meaning the whole tribe had to watch him disintegrate, screaming, until the ribbons of light peeled the lips from his teeth, the skin from his ribs, and at last unmade his lungs. In seconds, the little hunter had crumpled to a pile of cloth, hair, and stripped bones. The blood that had spun from his body made the impression of a flower on the snow, mocking life.

“Forward, sons!” Beyern grabbed two of the young men who had stopped and hauled them back into motion. “Forward! Look back for no one!”

Blight would have been easier to face if it selected by some knowable process, but it struck old and young with the randomness of lightning. The next to die was Elra, a nine-year-old boy struggling through the snow near the back of the group. A woman—in his periphery, Thomil couldn’t see if it was Elra’s mother or one of his devoted older sisters—wouldn’t let go of his hand, and the Blight took her too. Not sated with the body of a malnourished boy, the light spun straight to its next meal the same way it jumped from one wheat stalk to the next when wind brushed them together. Boy and woman unraveled one after the other, overlapping flowers on the lake’s surface.

The air was thick with terror now, people praying and sobbing as they ran. The Caldonnae may have been great hunters once, but here, in the face of the Blight, they were purely prey. Like caribou, blind in the dark and beset by wolves, all they could do was run and hope they outlasted death.

Thomil couldn’t blame the younger Caldonnae who faltered, retched, and wept at the sight of their fellows in ribbons, but at twenty, he had seen enough loved ones die of Blight that he was hardened to it. He forged ahead alongside his sister and her husband, pacing himself carefully, no matter what he heard, no matter who screamed.

Had Thomil paid attention, he would have recognized one scream as belonging to Synach, his childhood friend and the last practitioner of their tribe’s traditional woodwork. He would have seen the light claim Feol, who knew all the old hunting songs, Herithe, who had breastfed Carra when illness dried up Maeva’s milk, Nathor, who was the last descendant of the tribe’s founding line…

Mercifully, as the screams multiplied, they merged into one rending, all-encompassing howl in which the keenest ear could never discern an individual voice. How many had they lost? A dozen? Two dozen? How many of them were still left running?

Instead of wondering, Thomil focused on Arras several steps ahead of him and Maeva at his side. As long as they were with him, he could keep going. And if, at some point, they weren’t… well, Thomil had steeled himself for that too.

As they neared the middle of the lake, the remaining youths who had sprinted ahead were flagging. It was the seasoned adult runners like Thomil, Maeva, and Arras who pulled ahead now. Powerful Arras was running at the head of their cluster, faster than everyone, even with little Carra in his arms. All Caldonnae were winter runners, but even the best-conditioned lungs could only draw in so much frozen air before the cold inflicted permanent damage and overcame the runner. Thomil was starting to feel the freeze dangerously deep in his chest. He had just fallen a few paces behind Maeva in the hopes of slowing his breathing and easing the damage when, ahead of them, the white struck again.

Right between Arras’s shoulder blades.

Maeva’s “No!”—more a plea than denial—couldn’t stop the inevitable. Arras turned back to his wife, and Thomil had never seen such mortal terror in his steel eyes. His roar was just recognizable as words. “Take Carra!”

Driven by primal maternal desperation, Maeva managed a superhuman acceleration over the last few feet of snow to her husband. She snatched Carra from his arms just as he came apart in a spiral of light, blood, and unraveling muscle. Little Carra shrieked as a stray loop of the light clipped her face—then went abruptly quiet. Unconscious, Thomil hoped to the gods. Just unconscious. The light had only grazed her face; it hadn’t successfully jumped from Arras’s body to hers.

“Arry!” Maeva wailed as her husband fell into red on the snow, a flower indistinguishable from any other. “Oh, Arry…”

But the only thing she could do for him was keep running. With a limp Carra clutched in her arms, she staggered forward.

“I’ll take her!” Thomil called over the screams, recognizing that his stricken sister wouldn’t make it under the extra weight. “Maeva, I’ve got her!” He fell into step with Maeva and scooped Carra into his arms without breaking stride. “Just focus on running!”

The frozen air had turned from a burn to a stab in his lungs, but it no longer mattered what long-term damage he sustained. Not now that he was Carra’s only chance at making it to safety.

He wanted to believe that Maeva’s slowing steps were only temporary, that she would rally once she had shed a few tears for Arras. But the ragged quality of her breathing made him fear that that last sprint for Carra had taken a fatal toll. For all her tenacity, Thomil’s sister was not a robust woman, and her little lungs were at their limit, rasping audibly as they fought to sustain her.

The remaining runners were three-quarters of the way across the lake now. Almost there, and there were still some of them left. Thomil didn’t look, but he could hear their boots crunching snow whenever there was a break in the screaming. That snow thinned before them, growing wetter as the glow of Tiran’s barrier loomed closer. The warming air would have been a welcome reprieve if Thomil had not already burned his lungs numb.

The twang beneath his boots—falling too heavily now that Carra was in his arms—was meaningless to him until it grew louder, and someone far behind cried, “The ice! It’s giving!”

Thomil looked over his shoulder just as the first person went through the lake’s surface. It was Beyern, the hunter—turned prey in the jaws of the lake, which swallowed him whole. Jagged ice gnashed closed above him like teeth. As the cracks shot outward from the first break, the men and women behind Thomil stumbled—all six of them.

Gods, were there only six of them left?

That couldn’t be right… But the snow behind the breaking ice spelled the truth in a meadow of red flowers. Forty-some Caldonnae, reduced to blood in the cold.

Only six still stood—and the ice beneath their feet was breaking. It happened in terrible succession, like the Blight jumping from one living thing to the next. The ice split along many seams, pitching the remaining Caldonnae into the water.

“No!” Thomil gasped as the indifferent lake swallowed his sister.

When Thomil’s mother had died giving birth to him, Maeva had been there to hold her new brother without selfishness or blame. When Blight had taken their father from the fire beside them, Maeva had scrubbed the blood from Thomil’s face. After all their aunts, uncles, grandparents, and siblings were gone, Maeva had been there.

The single constant.

Thomil’s resolve broke with the ice. His legs gave beneath him, but a piercing “NO!” jolted him brutally back to attention.

Maeva was submerged except for her head, the chill of death already clinging to her lips, fiery hair frosted to her cheeks. She had clawed her way up a tilting pane of ice—not to live but to scream, “Run!” It was her last wish in the living world. “Thomil, RUN!”

And a truth snapped painfully into place: Maeva had carried Thomil all this way for this moment. So that, at this last stretch, Thomil could carry her daughter.

The water had lit up bright white in two—three, four, five—places that quickly turned a churning red as Blight claimed the drowning victims.

Nearly the last of the Caldonnae. But not quite. Thomil clutched his niece close. Not quite the last.

We are one blood, Beyern’s voice resonated even as he, and Maeva, and all the rest slipped into the blazing arms of death, One blood, one name, one purpose…

Empty of all things but that purpose, Thomil stood and sprinted for the city.

No longer caring if he destroyed his body, he ran as he had never run before. Several times, he thought he felt the cracks biting at his heels, thought a glint of moonlight was the Blight catching his arm, but somehow, death didn’t close on him.

The rocks along the edge of the lake glowed gold with the magic of Tiran. Warmth. Salvation.

Thomil’s boots went through the ice at the last few paces, where the heat of the barrier had reduced it to a thin sheet. It didn’t matter. The water here only reached his shins, and he plowed forward, smashing his legs on the breaking ice, unable to feel the damage through the cold. He reached the rocks a madman and scrambled up them into the golden glow of safety.

The barrier didn’t resist Thomil’s entry—just washed him in brightness that prickled painfully on his chilled skin, then turned to pure summer as he broke through the other side.

They had made it.

Staggering over the last of the rocks, Thomil fell to his knees on the flattest stretch of ground he had ever seen. Not ground, he realized. This was a Tiranish invention. Pavement.

He used the last of his strength to set Carra down gently. Her little face was pale with cold and oozing blood where Blight had burned a crescent across her left eye. But she was breathing. She was going to live. With that understanding, the animal strength went out of Thomil, and he collapsed.

On his back, he opened his mouth to sob, but he was too weak to do more than wheeze. Tears trickled from the corners of his eyes into his hair, melting the crystals where sweat had frozen on his skin, and he hated himself for not being able to scream.

The Caldonnae were gone. A people who had once ruled the southern plains, numbering in the tens of thousands… The Earth should be shaking. The sky should wail for their loss. And here Thomil lay, gulping like a beached fish, unable to muster a sound.

He didn’t know how long he lay there before a boot nudged his shoulder.

“Hey!” a voice said with the impatience of someone who had repeated himself several times. “You awake, Blighter?”

Thomil barely understood the words. They were off—nearly Caldonnish but not. A foreign face swam into focus above Thomil. Green-eyed and snub-nosed under a thatch of brown hair. Tiranish.

“Hey, Benny!” The border guard turned and called over his shoulder. “We got a Kwen over here!”

“Just the one?”

“Well, two, counting the little one, but I think it might be dead.”

No! Thomil tried to say, but all that came out was a burning gurgle.

A second figure appeared above him, distinguishable from the first only by the smattering of freckles across his nose; Elder Sertha had warned that Tiranish could be difficult to tell apart. They were dressed identically too, in the same stiff brass-buttoned uniform. Both of them had guns.

“If they’re too weak to work, we don’t have space for them,” the freckled guard said coolly.

Did that mean…?

“Want me to throw them back outside?”

“No!” Thomil finally managed and grasped the first guard’s boot. He might not be able to speak above a grating rasp or even stand, but his grip was powerful from years of stitching leather and stringing bows. It should speak for itself.

“Please… I can work.”

They were among the few Tiranish words Thomil had learned before the crossing. Elder Sertha had said that anyone who made it to this side of the barrier would need these three words to stay there.

“I can work!”

“Yeah,” the freckled guard looked unconvinced, “not without a lot of medical attention you can’t afford.”

“He’s got quite the grip, though.” The first guard grimaced down at the hand on his boot. “Can’t hurt to take him to the camp and see if he recovers.”

“Fine,” the freckled guard said impatiently. “I’ll get rid of the girl.” He reached down for Carra and—

“NO!” Desperation reanimated Thomil’s body, pitching him forward over his niece.

“Oh, for Feryn’s sake!” The first guard braced a boot against Thomil’s shoulder to shove him aside.

But there was one last thing Elder Sertha had said about this side of the barrier: Tiranish didn’t separate parents from children. Their religious laws forbid it. So, braced over Carra, Thomil croaked the other two words he knew:

“My daughter.”

It felt viscerally wrong to deny Maeva and Arras’s existence when their blood was still fresh on the ice. But it worked. The boot lifted from Thomil’s shoulder, and he resisted the urge to sag in relief.

“Your daughter, huh?” The freckled guard said. And apparently, the Tiranish had the same trouble with Kwen faces as Thomil had with theirs; neither guard seemed to notice that Thomil shared precious few features with his niece. The copper hair and gray eyes were enough for them.

“Fine, then. You go to the camp together. It’s your funeral.”

Thomil looked at the freckled guard in confusion.

The man clarified with spite, “Good luck feeding the little rat.”

If the words were meant to intimidate Thomil, they were a poor attempt. In that moment, all that mattered was that he was alive, Carra was alive, and they had each other. As long as they stayed together, the carnage of the crossing hadn’t been pointless.

The Caldonnae still lived.

__________________________

I might have called this a prologue (would have if it were shorter and I were a bigger fan of prologues) since our POV character here isn't the one we'll follow for the bulk of the novel. He is, however, an important character, so I'm calling it a proper chapter.

I hope you enjoyed this not-prologue of Blood Over Bright Haven... or, I guess, I hope you didn't? I hope it upset you at least a little bit. That's its job. As I said, this is an early effort, so if you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the comments or send them to ml@mlwangbooks.com.

Oh, and someone was cool enough to add Bright Haven on Goodreads, so you can add it to your tbr here.