My Voice for My Heart

Chapter 34: Brothers and Sisters

Maeve

When I whispered in Arden's ear that his daughter was found, he shrugged. Shrugged! As if my concern meant nothing. He was an infuriating, self-centered, toad of a man.

I smiled to myself. I may turn him into a toad before I kill him.

He doesn't know why it is that I care about his daughter, why I care whether she lives or dies. She seemed harmless at first, though I didn't like her, and thought it would be fun to turn her world upside down, but she wasn't.

She was more dangerous than the nine men.

And then there were the men. The ones who stood between me and Arden's destruction. The land would be mine, the house, the wealth, all of it, but even more important, I would finally get revenge.

Why had I thought the little mouse of a girl would fade into nothingness? I should know better. I have taken on that form in the past to insinuate myself into power.

I tapped my finger on my chin, as we bobbed up and down in the longboat. Each time the waves rocked our boat, I gripped the bench with white knuckles.

That girl had magic, and I knew just who had given it to her.

Stupid, snail-sucking sister.

I had to wonder, what was her plan? She had been as injured as I. She'd suffered as a result of Arden's family just like I had.

My mind went back over the millennia. I saw my family, all of us elemental: fire, earth, air, water. The land was ours and we lived in harmony with it. We would be called magical now, part of the plethora of creatures who hid in the shadows. But when we were young, and the land was young, we didn't hide.

There were humans, but they knew their place. They understood their purpose. They didn't grasp for more than what we gave them, and if we asked for more, they gave that, too. They sacrificed what we asked; worshipped us like we demanded.

Then they began to resist, and Arden's family led that resistance.

We'd asked for one daughter. One tiny, insignficant daughter. They didn't understand that her blood would sustain us for decades. And so they refused.

Fools.

Or maybe that was us. But the humans had to learn; this was not their land. They were here at our discretion, and if they weren't going to contribute to their upkeep, then they needed to leave.

We began culling the land. Our focus entirely on eliminating the humans. We had no idea that they were planning to cull us.

My sister, whose power came from the earth, was the first to die. They knew she was tied to it, and they scorched it. They must have weighed their starvation against their extinction and decided the risk was worth the cost. Arden's family set fire to the fields, and then let it spread to the forests. The flames that fed me extinguished the life in my sister. She disintegrated into ash and nothingness.

Then my sister, the one who blew hot and cold, who made the leaves move and the grass sway, attacked the keep. She blew in like a hurricane before taking shape in the midst of soldiers. She didn't know, none of us did, that they had learned their own magic, and harnessed it to destroy us. They threw a rope, one imbued with spells to hold her tight. She couldn't move, couldn't transform, and they were able to kill her as they would any human.

My family wasn't the only one decimated. Many of the creatures that were part of the land were murdered, winked out of existence easier than we thought possible. At the heart of all the destruction was Keela's family.