AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Watching where the shadow had been, nothing more happened.
“You’re being paranoid,” Bryn growled out loud to herself.
Bringing her arm up, she noticed that the hairs along her skin had yet to go down. Everything in the air was still charged as if lightning were about to strike, and that worried her. The storm was over, so why was she still in a state of panic? Why was her adrenaline not lowering? Her extremities were cold, pumping blood to her internal organs in preparation for fight or flight.
“Bryn!” Sage yelled from the front door of the forge, and Bryn jumped, her heart pounding faster at the interruption to her internal panic.
Bryn moved to meet her friend in the road. “Are you all right? I heard you, Justin, and Niamh were out when Travis blew the horns.”
Gold flickering in Sage’s eyes stayed Bryn’s lips.
A trick of the light... again,she thought to herself, but she was having trouble dismissing such things as her nervous system went haywire. The moment she made eye contact with Justin in that little room, when someone whispered to them both... the voice... She’d never heard the woman’s voice before, but a sense of calm familiarity had clung to the words. A familiarity similar to hearing the soothing voice of a loved one.
“Bryndis!” Sage yelled again, and Bryn came back to herself, the gold gone from Sage’s eyes.
“I’m sorry... I am just rattled, I guess?”
“Is that a question? Of course, you are! Come to my home, I’ll make you some tea, and you can rest for the day.” Not waiting for an answer, Sage took her arm, a small shock jolting Bryn at the skin-to-skin contact as she pulled her arm from her friend’s hand.
Bryn did not have a vision, which if Sage wasn’t near death, she wouldn’t... but the shock she’d felt was a new revelation. The same shock she’d felt with Declan moments earlier. Could the sandstorm have caused some sort of electrically charged atmosphere around Ifreann?
Ignoring the weirdness of what had just transpired, mostly since Sage had no idea Bryn could see people’s deaths when she touched them and obviously did not feel the jolt, Sage pulled Bryn to her small little cottage behind the buildings of Saints’ Road.
“Jace is okay?” Bryn asked as she followed her friend.
“Left well before the storm to get some sleep before he was called out to a bedside,” Sage replied, not missing a beat as she focused on getting them to her cottage.
A shadow moved in between the buildings as they made their way through, and again Bryn looked for who or what would have cast it, perhaps one of the guards doing a sweep, but there was nothing there.
Her eyes kept to where she saw the shadow, the flicker of darkness that called to something deep inside her. A memory rose to the surface, one lost to years of trauma. Bryn, a small girl, playing in her room talking to the shadows as they moved about almost as if sentient themselves.Playing with her. Bryn wanted to chalk it up to a small girl dealing with loneliness.
An agitated flapping of wings surprised her, and she ground to a halt, Sage being yanked back by the sudden cessation of movement.
“What is it?” Sage asked, looking around for what had caused Bryn to stop so suddenly.
“Have you ever seen a black bird before, Sage?” Bryn asked, her eyes focused, scared that if she were to look away, she’d lose it.
“Please tell me I am not hallucinating.” Bryn’s voice came out in a rasp and a plea as she licked her dry lips.
Looking up to the top of the forge, Sage gasped, her hand going to her mouth while the one clutching Bryn’s arm dug in. Her nails were sharper than they looked, and Bryn was afraid to tug away lest she bleed to death.
A large black bird looked down on them. Were the birds in the stories she’d read normally this large? She’d thought them small, barely larger than a rat, but this one looked as large as some of the small dogs she’d seen. Its eyes held a steady, almost humanlike intelligence as it focused intently on Bryn.
“Please. . .,” Bryn whispered again, but Sage was quick to tug Bryn and all but throw her through the door of her cottage.
Both women tucked safely inside, Sage paced as Bryn leaned against the door, her body stiff with fear as she waited for her friend to speak. Though Bryn was unsure what she really wanted her friend to say.
“That was a crow.” Sage was breathing heavily as she whirled around and ran to a bookshelf in her small living quarters. “I cannot remember the old saying...”
A crow. Bryn tried to look out the dusty window, letting out a small scream as the crow landed on the windowsill, staring at Bryn with an intensity she was sure had to be abnormal, yet she had nothing to gauge it against.
There hadn’t been a crow, or much of any species of bird, in Ifreann for far too long. The desert hardly seemed a place they’d thrive in. Sage might have seen them before she was brought into Ifreann herself.
Bryn remembered then that Sage, like herself, was not born in the town but brought here. Odd how so much of her past was so focused on surviving that she missed little memories and details about her and her friends from before her father’s death.
Sage was from the town closest to Ifreann; the traders of her town were permitted to exchange needed goods with them. Though the town was relatively self-sufficient with underground water reserves, windmills to help provide the town with energy, and livestock that helped with the small farm and its meager crops, there were still crops one could not grow in the desert.
That was where trade came in, and they traded the most with Tanwen.
