Airel: The Awakening (Airel Saga Book One)

Chapter XI

KREIOS FELT A THOUSAND accusative stares arrayed around him like weapons. His flight to Gratzipt was a torch in the night to the Brotherhood, and he knew he would be watched and followed. He did not know how they knew when his kind took flight. He did not know what mystic connection his kind had with the Brotherhood, but it was deep and unbreakable. He could feel blackness coming for him. The battle that would be fought was inevitable now. He needed to craft a strategy, and quickly.

He landed outside the town’s extents in a little deadened glade that provided some cover. The baby wriggled against his body and cooed, cutting him right to his heart. He loved her more than he could have imagined possible. She was only a day old, but the love he already felt for her seemed to him as old as the heavens. He hurried his steps. She needed to eat, and soon.

Kreios strode directly to a solitary hut at the fringe of the town’s boundary. Like him, his kinsman Zedkiel was an outcast from society, publicly regarded as a sorcerer, courted only by the desperate under cover of darkness. Some came to him for his unique and bewitching ability to craft vessels of glass, which would have been easily explainable to an unsuperstitious mind, but such thinkers were few and far between. He raised his hand to knock at the door, but it opened first.

“Welcome, my kinsman,” said a broad and smiling face. “Come inside. I have been waiting for you.”

It was Zedkiel. Kreios embraced him, being careful to turn slightly so as to not crush his daughter. It had been half a cycle of the sun since these close kinsmen had allowed themselves to see each other. The last bit of news they’d shared was that Zedkiel’s wife was with child, and that she would give birth in midwinter.

Like his own wife.

The bond they shared ran deep, knitting them together in thought and spirit though the distances between them were sometimes great. Zedkiel knew. He beckoned Kreios with moist eyes, and he stepped inside his kinsman’s house, closed the door behind him, and looked around. “I am sorry, my brother, for putting you in danger like this.” He looked at Maria, who was standing nearby with a warm smile on her face.

“Do not worry, Kreios,” Zedkiel said. “We are family. If that means we fight, then we are prepared to do that.” He stepped closer and grasped arms with him. “Kreios, I am very sorry for your loss.”

“You are a good brother, Zedkiel. I only hope we never have to face the Brotherhood in battle again. You are steward over a fine village, and I can feel that you love it here.”

Zedkiel nodded and pulled Kreios’ cloak away to reveal his new niece’s sweet face. She was awake and looked up at her uncle, smiling. “She is lovely. Looks like her mother, thank God.”

Kreios laughed weakly and allowed his brother to hold her. Zedkiel looked down at the newborn girl and kissed her on the forehead. Without another word, he turned and gave her to his wife. She smiled and excused herself to another room, and Kreios breathed a heavy sigh of relief. His daughter would live.

“Maria is due by the next new moon,” Zedkiel said. “Not long from now; perhaps a handful of days. We will care for your daughter as if she is our own. You have blessed us with a gift, Kreios.”

Kreios shed his cloak and both men embraced again before sitting down by the fire that blazed within a ring of stones on the floor in the center of the room. The fire crackled as Zedkiel tossed another log in, making sparks jump up and pop in the air. It was another cold day; the wind beat the clouds across the face of the sun and shoved violently through the small, unprotected village. There was no forest to break it, no wall to defend against it. The town of Gratzipt was dotted and spread throughout a broad, high mountain valley, where the livestock grazed freely on wild pastures in summer.