Total pages in book: 146
Estimated words: 137226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 137226 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 686(@200wpm)___ 549(@250wpm)___ 457(@300wpm)
“We must stop them,” her father had once said to her as they sat side by side on the edge of the docks, cleaning the kelp crabs he’d caught for dinner. He kept his voice low, knowing that there were few allies, even among the impoverished fishermen such as himself. “If we don’t, I fear it will be the end of the world as we know it.”
The girl remembered pondering that as her legs dangled above the clear blue water, her fingers green with the crabs’ blood. To her there was no other world than Esland. She’d barely seen the land beyond the capital. Once, her father had taken her on the boat along the south coast to check out new fishing grounds, and she was able to take in as much of Esland as she ever could. It was dry, desolate, and inhospitable, but the girl found something so imaginative and dramatic about the sandstone cliffs above the bright blue water, the rolling hills that huddled behind the convent that she would later be imprisoned in and the sparse desert beneath, the far-off peak of the dormant volcano that pierced the cloudless sky, a symbol of the Banished Land to the south. The fact that there was a world beyond this one was hard to comprehend, especially when Eslanders weren’t allowed to leave their continent to visit any of the other three realms, and outsiders were rarely let in.
“What will happen to the world?” the girl had asked. She’d often heard her parents talking about the end, but so did the followers. They were obsessed with it. The devout called it the Reckoning of Flames, and they believed that one day Zoreth would return to their world and release the dragons that were confined inside the magicked wards that surrounded the Midlands island in the center of the ocean. They believed that the centuries that they had been feeding the dragons with their supply of rockdeer (and the lowly human sacrifices) would mean the dragons would spare them but incinerate the rest of humanity, ensuring that the Saints of Fire would be the rulers of the world with dragons at their side.
But her father, and those in the rebellion, had a more horrifying vision of the future.
He had looked around at the other fishermen on the docks, wincing at the unrelenting sun, and once satisfied they weren’t listening, he leaned in close to her. “The wards will collapse in my lifetime, if not yours,” he whispered, never one to hold back the truth. “Not because of Zoreth. He’s dead. He’s not coming back. They’ll collapse because this government will have enough magic to destroy those wards. But the people of Esland will not be spared like they think. Dragons aren’t sentimental.”
Strangely the girl didn’t feel terrified then about the end, and she didn’t feel terrified now, even as she was led toward her chambers in the depths of the convent. If anything she welcomed the dragons’ return. Anything was better than living a life of silence, under rules she’d been taught to break, while both her parents were dead.
The old woman brought the girl to a stop outside a big black door and knocked on it with her bony hands, hard as stone. She waited a beat and then opened it.
Inside was a row of twelve beds, each one sparsely covered with a thin pillow and rough bedspread. At the foot of each bed was a preteen girl on the cusp of womanhood, each scalp shaved, body cloaked in black, head bowed and attention on the floor.
“Daughters of the Sixth Ward,” the woman said. “I want you to meet the Daughter of Pain. She will be joining us for eternity.”
The girl wouldn’t have spoken even if she had been allowed to; still, she found it disconcertingly eerie how silent the room was. How unnatural all of this was. The Daughters didn’t even take a vow of silence; it was an order thrust upon them. They weren’t allowed to whisper to each other when alone, let alone cry, and the girl suddenly felt so stifled by it all that she longed to scream.
The old woman poked a long sharp nail into her side, anticipating this. “Behave yourself and you’ll endure your pain with dignity. Rebel and the rest of your life will be a living damnation.”
You don’t know who my parents are, the girl thought bitterly, though the irony was that of course she did. That was why she was here. But the Harbringer didn’t know how deep their rebellion lived in her veins.
So the girl would be silent for now. She would bite her tongue and plot and wait and find the perfect time to let it all loose. She would find one moment to gain her freedom or she would die trying.