Emissary

Sayblood's Children: Part Eight

Sayblood’s Children is a folk horror/romance novella, serialized in twelve parts. This is Part Eight.

Click HERE to start at Part One, or click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page.

Previously, Sayblood attempted to appease the island, learned new secrets, and a holiday brought unexpected gifts.

In this chapter, the first of One Prince’s messengers gets too close for comfort, and Sayblood must make a difficult choice.

Enjoying this story? Let me know with a like, comment, or restack.

If you would like to follow this story as it unfolds, subscribe for free!

---

Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash

From Shrike, I learned forgiveness. He told me that to forgive is to refuse to hunger for vengeance any longer, to release that appetite into the openness of the sky where it dissipates.

There are things I can learn to forgive my father for. His ignorance of how to raise a child. His riddling answers, which I now understand as cowardice. His harshness, even, and his devotion to a god that taught us only to take, and take, and take. This was something he was also taught, and never thought to question.

But I cannot forgive him for taking my mother from me.

And I cannot forgive him for spilling the poet’s blood.

Let these sins burden me to the grave, like stones in my pockets.

*

Shrike and I had made our plan. There were parts of it he hid from me; secret byways that only he knew, names of those along our path who would help us in our climb Above. We were ready. Ready to make our escape, to build our new life.

But though I never told him, and I believed that I hid it well under my robes in those early days, my father sniffed out the swelling of my womb.

He called me to his library and I stood before him, bare feet on cold stone.

“May you make a choice meal,” he said.

“May you fall prey to none but Him,” I replied.

He looked at me, and there was a test in his eye. “All appetites are the same.”

I nodded.

“It is blasphemy to set one above the other. Survival is the highest good.”

I nodded again. “As I have been taught, Grand Delius.”

“Be pleased to tell me who it was that sired this within you?”

“The poet,” I replied, without emotion or stumble. I knew that if One Prince saw me as agreeable, docile, calm, he would have no reason to sniff out our plan.

He nodded, reaching out a hand in blessing. “Your child will be Sumble’s choicest meal, every hair and every digit. Your child will be our savior.”

I could not show fear. I thanked him.

“You please me,” he said, his voice deceptively soft. “You always have. And it will be my greatest joy to watch you strengthen in ways you could never imagine. Dread Lady. My daughter.”

I smiled to show I was listening, that I was happy.

“To guarantee the health of your child,” my father said, his gentle tone unchanging, “you will please me further to lay the poet on the thorns. For there can be no better gift than such talent, and Sumble cannot refuse his blood.”

He watched me. I wrestled with my eyes, shrilled at them to stay peaceful and empty.

I nodded. “May it be so.”

One Prince stood, then. He dwarfed me, crowned head reaching for the rafters, long fingers taut and itching for pain, for practice, for a lesson. He stepped forward.

I flinched.

Curse me, I flinched.

It was only a moment, yet how often ruin begins in quiet and weakness tells on itself. He smiled down on me, his eyes alive with the knowledge of my secret. He knew. He saw it in me, written on my skin, reflected in my eyes, guttering like a fretful flame in the flinch of my muscles.

He knew that I was preparing to run.

*

Shrike did not appear in the ballroom at our appointed time. I waited, and he did not come. I asked, and no one had seen him.

Fear rose in me like bile. I searched for my lover through the streets of the city, under the cold lights, passing along the blood-soaked gutters of the place of my birth.

Where once I saw home, now I saw only despair, and decay. It could not last. The glory of the Underside was a cracked mirror, irreparable. All of our appetites were mere distractions, shovels of earth thrown into the grave.

We did not thrive within a living god. We were slowly being digested by a dying one.

And someday, nothing would remain to say that we were ever here.

In my wandering, my searching, my calling out, I reached the garden of One Prince and followed the path of my longing, knowing—knowing, a terrible knowing—what I would find.

He was not hidden. He had been put on display, pride of place.

My lover hung upon the thorns.

I ran to him, slipped the twin blades from my belt with trembling hands to cut his bonds, but One Prince was cunning; he had used chains, not ropes. I pulled and slashed and heaved and screamed, but I could not free the poet. My blood mingled with his as I tore at the thorns, the chains, the blades.

I could not free him. Curse these hands, I could not free him.

And it would not have mattered anyway. In my haste, in my panic, I had not seen that Shrike was already gone. Not content to let him die in the ritual way—the slow way, risking rescue—One Prince had slit his throat before leaving him for me to find.

It was not an execution, then. It was a message.

I sat in the dust, my lover’s blood and my own on my hands, and I found that I could not weep. I was mute, undone. All my hopes shattered in an instant, all the love I had learned to nurture within myself had been crushed into the dirt.

Only an animal of blood and appetite after all. Only a devil that the people Above would scorn. A creature of a colorless world, of the grave. Whatever goodness Shrike had seen in me was only an illusion.

I looked down at my blood-soaked hands, and they strayed to my womb and lingered there. His blood and mine, and our child within.

And that’s when I knew: whatever illusion there may be of me, our child was not one.

And this child would never belong to One Prince, to Sumble, to any decaying god of despair.

This child was mine.

Wrath rose in me, a cold tide, and I climbed to my feet. I rested my hand on the poet’s cheek and kissed him, one last time. And then, I walked through the paths of the garden of One Prince, past the thornbushes with their blood and bones and flesh, their bodies and their hair and their stain, and out into the dark pathway beyond where I had never been allowed to tread before.

*******

Any day now.

Othniel breathed in the wet, crisp air of early January as he shouldered his rifle and settled into the underbrush mere meters away from the deer path to wait. The Christmas snows had melted away and it was only a constant drizzle these days.

Sayblood’s child was due any day now, and Othniel felt perpetually on edge, watching her for every wince of pain, sleeping with one eye open. To cope, he spent his days busy: building a cradle in the barn, and whittling toys, and gathering supplies, and making sure that the cabin was as comfortable as possible.

Or hunting, like he was doing today. The idea of feeding a nursing mother through spring and summer weighed on him, and a hearty supply of game seemed the best course.

In his travels and in his time Othniel had been present for more births than one might expect, though he had never truly been involved. His own mother had given birth to two of Othniel’s siblings when he was old enough to remember.

But this felt different in every possible way. He was no midwife, and he had no notion of how Sayblood would handle birth. He felt responsible, if not for the child itself than for the child’s mother.

In this, the feeling between himself and Sayblood had grown. What it could truly be called he could not say. At his age, a mature thirty-four, Othniel had long since assumed that the courtship rituals and marriage of his younger counterparts in England would be denied him out here in the wilderness, and he had accepted that. Let his legacy be the settling of the land, he thought, if it would never be children.

But this was unlike any courtship he had ever known. Sayblood had climbed up out of the darkness and settled in his heart and home as if she always belonged there, and he had allowed it, because…because she did belong there, somehow.

Othniel shifted, raised his cupped hands to blow warm air into them. Peered up at the white sky visible through the treetops. Thinking of Sayblood brought a flutter of peace to his heart, made things seem possible that never had, before.

What had once seemed an omen of woe had transformed into hope.

“Othniel.”

The voice of the ghost—of Shrike—shattered his calm, strong beside his left ear, and Othniel’s attention snapped back down to the deer path ahead of him.

There was nothing amiss. Nothing that he could see, anyway.

Othniel’s heart raced. He had grown used to the calm; he had not heard the ghost’s voice in weeks. Now he felt the presence strong beside him, a cold hand gripping his shoulder.

“What do you want from me?” Othniel whispered. He was snappish and irritated but still wary not to frighten any deer nearby.

“Watch,” the voice said.

Othniel opened his mouth to protest—what was there to watch except empty, dripping woods?—but before he could speak, a feeling of dread seeped into him from the ground up, as though the very earth was giving him warning. He closed his mouth, tasted the tin flavor of panic on his tongue.

“Wait,” said Shrike, once more. “Watch.”

Othniel waited with a hunter’s patience. And when the shape materialized on the path, it did so soundlessly. Had Othniel not been looking at the right place he would not have noticed it.

It was the creature. The shape. The blood-red thing he had seen at the treeline, weeks before. Or it was something very like it; he couldn’t be sure it was the same one.

It crawled along the path silently, stirring nothing, wide white eyes shaped very similarly to Sayblood’s, though even paler. Flesh a strange dark red, misshapen, all bones. It moved with purpose, like a habit. As if it knew the path.

“It has been watching you,” Shrike said. “It has been lingering in the woods, watching you and reporting back to her father.”

“What is it?” Othniel whispered, breathless.

“It is a starveling. A class of acolyte to Sumble and servants of One Prince. They paint themselves with blood to better hide in the caverns and do One Prince’s bidding in secret. Here, the red is not camouflage. They don’t know color. They don’t know green.”

Othniel watched, transfixed.

The starveling paused and raised its head to scent the air, and Shrike’s grip on Othniel’s shoulder tightened.

“It will sniff you out. Kill it.”

Othniel raised the rifle. Despite long years of practice his hands shook and he breathed deeply to steady himself.

The wind shifted. The starveling caught the scent and swiveled, staring right at Othniel with its strange eyes, and it opened its mouth wide.

Sharp teeth glinted within, but there was no tongue.

It leapt. Othniel fired.

The bullet struck home just above the heart. The creature fell on Othniel with a rattling moan, clawed hands scrabbling viciously at his coat. The weight of it threw Othniel backward against a tree and the starveling fought, ferocious, using its hands and feet to pull him closer so that it could lash with its teeth.

All Othniel could smell was dried blood and all he could see was deep red and snarling fangs as he used the rifle to push back against the dying creature. The woods were filled with the sounds of struggle, eerie and voiceless.

Finally, as the life drained from it, the starveling’s legs failed it first and it crumpled down onto its knees. Othniel was able to knock it onto its back where it lay hissing, gnashing its teeth. He aimed the rifle at its forehead, ready, but in the end there was no need to fire a second time. The creature died there on its back, arms splayed, big eyes staring at the cloud-heavy sky.

Othniel fought to regain his breath, leaning back against the tree, panting. He half expected the starveling to rise again and leap for his throat, but it did not stir.

“You need to show her,” Shrike said.

“What?”

“You cannot keep this hidden from her. Not like you did before.”

Othniel felt a shiver of resentment rush through him. “I was trying to protect her. I didn’t want to upset her.”

“It may have cost you precious time,” Shrike said. “She has more to fear than being upset, and so do you. Show her.”

The ghost had been right about everything else. So Othniel carried the corpse home through the woods. It was light to carry, all limbs and bones, the dried blood flaking from its flesh and revealing the gray skin underneath.

At the cabin, Othniel laid the starveling in the yard at a safe distance from the animals and called Sayblood out to see.

She came out onto the porch wiping her hands—she had been washing the breakfast dishes, from the look of things—and her smile upon seeing him turned quickly to an unsettling expression when she saw the corpse. A macabre echo of her past.

“I shot it on the deer path,” Othniel said, by way of explanation. “I think it’s been watching us.”

If he had been unsure how she would take the sight, he certainly didn’t expect this.

She was uncannily quiet as she stood over the starveling’s body, looking down at it with a mixture of disdain and cold calculation. For a moment, Othniel could imagine it: Sayblood Queen, Sayblood Powerful, the Dread Lady of an underground kingdom he could not fathom. He saw her dripping with gems and silver and crimson and cold light and darkness. He could see it on her, the weight of royalty, the impassive cruelty of a strange god.

But then, just as quickly the vision passed, and she was just herself. Just Sayblood, and even more beautiful for it.

When the silence had stretched beyond comfort, Othniel asked her, “What does it mean?”

Her fingers twitched. She raised her gaze to look at him, and there was sorrow in it.

“It means I am found,” she said. “And it means we are in danger.”

*******

Telliss. The she-starveling’s name had been Telliss. Sayblood remembered her. She remembered all of them. She had been there in the temple standing at her father’s side when Telliss and her sisters took the oath, pledged their appetites to Sumble, lost their tongues, and began to change. To lose their will.

They all had names. Every single one of the starvelings and servants and guards and emissaries throughout the years. Creatures of the dark who had never been taught about Above, who had never been given the option to escape. Paying homage to a crumbling empire.

It was not Telliss that Sayblood feared, and she had no rage in her heart for the mindless starvelings, kept at heel by their need for blood.

It was her father that they answered to. It was for his sake that they wandered beyond Sumble’s mouth, searching for her. If Telliss had been lurking in the woods for long enough, watching, it meant that One Prince was readying himself to appear.

Sayblood sat on her bed in the dark storage room, resting her hands on her full belly. Almost too full. Sayblood knew little about pregnancy, but she felt she was too big to be simply carrying a child. She had started to worry that she carried something else within herself. A monster. A mystery.

Any day now.

Her heart squeezed with fear. She knew that Othniel would do anything to protect her, to protect the child who was due soon. All she could see was the stain of Shrike’s blood on her hands, see the thorns. The thorns.

Othniel hanging on the thorns.

Sayblood hissed with pain, a visceral stab of agony. The vision of Othniel bloody and broken in her father’s garden was too much to bear and she groaned, curling over herself. He did not deserve it. He did not deserve to stand between her and her father, to be punished for her crimes against One Prince and his god. It was wrong. Sacrifice, but the wrong kind.

She had already lost one lover, and she refused to lose a second.

Though it hurt her to do it, she knew what she had to do. She had already done it once, and she would do it again.

Quietly, so as not to attract Othniel’s curiosity or concern, Sayblood took a burlap sack from the floor of the storage room and began to fill it with supplies.

*******

The orchard was still and silent as Sayblood approached slowly, heavily. Slow, so slow these days!

Any day now.

She went straight to the old wild apple tree, branches festooned with gifts, and set a gentle hand on its trunk.

“I am here to say goodbye,” she said. “I have to leave now. I cannot stay to see Othniel murdered by my father. It would not be right.”

The tree thrummed a question under her fingertips.

“I will run forever, if I have to,” Sayblood replied. “I will do what I planned, before I met Othniel. I will leave my child with someone Above who will love them well, and I will run until I cannot run anymore, and let One Prince follow me to the ends of the earth. None who love me will die at the hands of my father. He will never find my child. He can run me down, but me alone.”

Her resolve stung her. The idea of leaving Othniel behind pained her. The idea of handing her child—this child, due any day!—in another’s hands frightened her. But it would have to be done. She had not lived this long without being deeply pragmatic. She had been sired and raised in the grave. Death did not frighten her. But the death of those she loved was a thorn in her very soul, poised to destroy her.

Sacrifice, not survival. Shrike would approve, she thought.

The tree swayed gently, though there was no wind. She thought she felt something in its movement. Sorrow? Grief? Yearning?

“I cannot stay,” Sayblood said. “I cannot stay while danger draws closer. But…I will miss you.”

She paused, then asked, “Will you protect Othniel for me? I know that his kind has harmed you and you fear their spread, but he is good, and he will love you well as he has loved me. Please.”

The tree remained unconvinced. Still, and silent. No vision. No agreement.

Sayblood waited for a sign, but the tree refused to give it to her.

Finally, Sayblood sighed, lifted her hand from the trunk.

“I am sorry to part this way,” she said. “But I know I will think of you often. Remember me too, will you? Remember me to your roots and limbs and flowers and fruit. To Bill, too, and his ghosts. And remember me to spring. Oh,” she sighed, heart breaking, “how I would have loved to see you in the spring.”

Before she could weep in the tree’s presence, Sayblood turned and shouldered the burlap sack. She crossed the orchard meadow and entered the woods at the spot where she had seen the doe and twin yearlings weeks before. She followed the path around the yard and the cabin, remaining unseen in the trees as she headed north to the place on the shoreline where Othniel kept his rowboat.

The orchard filled with the sounds of arboreal weeping, a grief unheard by any human ear. But Sayblood did not turn back.

---

Thank you for reading! 🍎

Click HERE for the NEXT ISSUE. ⏭

Click HERE to head back to the Navigation Page.