Kiromir 4

I pulled Gaffriel off of her. The shiftless boy came from bad stock. I loved him, but his mom had caught the wasting disease—a wastrel. I feared he’d do the same to a partner someday. Also, he spoke less Anil than any one of us. There were toddlers in another flock that spoke more. Niala spent so much time with him, but he just clammed up and switched to English when he had to.

I thought Gaff was confused and in that awkward teenage stage where he tried to hold on to the most comfortable and close things. He’d lost so much in his life with his family that I found it hard to keep blaming him when he clutched to Niala. That didn’t mean I’d approve of it, though. I wanted someone better for her— someone who’d fight for her. Maybe he’d man up someday.

He knew he’d screwed up. He’d been caught peeping and gotten the playful side of Niala’s wrath. If I were her, I’d have hit him a bit harder, let him wear a mark for a few days for it. I thought myself less angry about the peeping than the contact. I didn’t want them together, touching.

“I wanted her to see me! I made noise and everything before I did it.” He groused as I jerked his arm and led him towards the south barracks. The older ones lived there, our elders, and had their ways of giving a boy a dressing down they wouldn’t forget. Gaffriel needed the words. I thought he meant well, but Niala made me defensive and reactionary.

“Yeah, and she did. Did you think about how that would make her feel?” I grumbled as I shook him a little. “Next time, just knock at the damned door.”

“She wasn’t changing or nothing. She was just scruffin’ her wings,” Gaffriel said, hissing in pain as I pinched some tender flesh under his arm to drive my point home.

“Like that’s any better, Alsooth!” That could be just as stirring as catching her bare, and riskier too. I’d never felt a lick of interest in a naked body as much as I had the sight of a beautiful set of wings.

“I just wanted to startle her to see if her fires would come.” Gaffriel winced, and his words stopped me in my tracks.

“That’s not your place.” My heart sank in my chest. The moment Niala got her fires, she wouldn’t be a little girl anymore, not mine or anyone else’s. I knew her fires would come soon, though. You could ‘sense’ it on some instinctual level. All the boys started to give her second glances, but it had been going on for a few months. If she were going to show her colors, she should have done it by now.

“It’s worrying some of us.” Worry plastered over his face. It had been worrying me too.

“Well, peeping on her scruffin’ isn’t going to make her fires magically appear.” I shook him a little before wrenching him loose. “Now go on to your barracks. I’ll let the elders see if they want to bother with you later.” My threats came out empty and hollow. I bided my time until he grew a pair of stones and fought back. Maybe if he ever took a swing back or grew a spine, I’d consider him an option for Ni. It needed to be a strong wildling to match her.

He slouched and walked off, holding his pride. Maybe I had been

a little too protective of Niala. After how I found her and what she meant… How could I be any less protective?

Once again, I found myself thinking back to twelve years ago.

Niala looked up at me, begging for her mom, in a language that less than five thousand people even knew of, that less than two hundred people spoke fluently.

Hypnotized, my feet carried me forward. A hyperawareness of my fire peaked as frost crept around me. Swirling motes of the air’s moisture fell around me like snow and frost crawled along surfaces. My men backed up and whispered swears. They never got to see my fires leaking, and it must have been frightening. I stared at the crumpled form—with her knees to her chest. Steel-blue eyes gazed at me fretfully. Fear brought tears to her eyes. The girl’s spiking aura told me to forget her. I didn’t know auras could be that strong or that complex.

“My name is Kiromir.”

Her wide eyes registered nothing but fear and not a bit of understanding until my name. Her head tilted. I worried that the fear came from my own aura for a moment, but I checked myself. Her fear felt genuine.

She said something in our language earlier. Did I imagine things? “Ti am val Kiromir.” I tried, and complete understanding lit in her eyes!

She started talking in response, her grammar and enunciation strange, some words shifted, intonation archaic. Anil, our language, didn’t have many proper nouns left, but she rattled them off in desperation. She spoke more proper than the oldest of our elders and certainly more so than me. I called myself fluent, but I knew somehow that my speech came off juvenile at best compared to this child before me. Her voice had music in it.

I urged her to tell me how she got there, where her parents were, and she only cried with shaking fear. She’d been there a while, and from the smatterings of Russian she tried to force at me, it’d been long enough to be dangerous.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked her in our language, and she kept saying, ‘And home.’ ‘A cerrai.’

“Where’s home?” I asked.

The words she said to me were too foreign, too out there, like a song, and the men looked to me with wild-eyed fear and desperation. There were no more kids in here, just the one, and I stood in cold anger, my ice flowering off me in flits of fire, and I heard creaking and chipping around the edges of the cell door. A solid jerk had metal breaking like glass. She didn’t even flinch from seeing my fire, though my own men were backing away from me.

She ran to me without fear, clutching my legs. We all knew the tales in the thirties when a flock of us came from Europe, of children being taken, then reclaimed. We knew the experiments and learned of a few grey feathered elders who had lost a wing to dissection. This little girl turned into one of those horror stories.

Their instructions were to destroy and take anything we could.

“Gentleman…. Did we find any thing in here?” I asked.

Quiet spread across the group gathered at the door.

“No sir,” A single voice supplied.

“That’s what I thought,” My fire parted from me, and I picked the dark-haired girl up. She curled her face into my chest, and my heart seized. She was mine. A sharp and protective feeling consumed me as my arms tightened. I couldn’t stand to see suffering children.

I didn’t notice right away the things that I should. Instead, I focused on getting the little girl out of there. I didn’t note her tattoos, didn’t think of her strange dialect or jet-black hair. I didn’t focus on her delicate facial features. Instead, I saw a child, one of our own, a fledgling in need of a flock.

The gold of my eyes had gone blue that day, lit with my own fire. I felt a palpable rage. The cold ached into most people, but it didn’t seem to touch her. Instead, she clutched to me tighter than anyone ever had, wiped her face into my shoulder, and shivered. Her bare feet curled into themselves.

“Burn it down,” I said as we all gathered in and let the light consume us.

Daylight shone brightly when we arrived back at the base camp, no worse for our wear. We were all quiet.

I said in my native tongue to her, “You’re alright. We’ll find your mother, I promise.”

We received confirmation that the base had been destroyed, and I called the client.

“It’s done, but there were complications,” I said.

“The project?” I recall him asking, caginess thick in his voice.

“We got to the room and didn’t find anything but an empty cage and a dead kid,” I told him.

“A kid? Was there anything strange about it?” and our client sounded too interested.

“No, just a normal kid. Could have been any of ours. The men are a bit shook up,” I said, finding humor in a flock of predators having an ounce of sympathy for anything. If they had known where we lived, I’d have been more cautious.

I drew the line at two things: animals and children.

I didn’t know that our simple search of the flocks for a missing little girl would quickly turn into a greater mystery.