It was high noon in the thick forestry of the Briars, there wasn't a soul in sight, and I was about to break the law.
Again.
Though accustomed to my ritual, the silence surrounding the forest came to life upon the touch of my voice.
That was exactly why every morning, noon, and night, I escaped amongst the brambles and the thistles to sing to the hummingbirds matching my tune, far enough away that no one else was around to hear it's deadly call.
Soon enough, I'd return with tawny dirt marring the homespun wool on my skirts and I'd be chastised yet again for wandering away, for venturing where I could be heard, could be caughtâbut all those worries disappeared as the sun crested atop the pines and blasted the earth in a gilded haze, chasing away the lingering morning chill that accompanied the time closing in on the harvest.
Pulling my hand bound journal from my corset top along with my pen that I'd snagged from the market without anyone noticing my presence, I sat atop a fallen log coated in mildewed moss.
The words to the poem stuck in my head flowed out onto the pages with ease, save for the cramping in my wrist, and the melody carried itself away on a staggered wind.
The Briars swayed heavily in the early afternoon breeze and a lyricism floated by on the harvest season's air.
Though the chill that had once been stolen by the sun suddenly found its way back to my heart upon the opening of my mouth.
It was a gift, this voice, but also a curse.
A curse so horrible that I shouldn't have ever been able to open my mouth again after what it had done, but the voice wanted out.
The voice demanded to be let out.
A poison soaked my bones to the core if it did not come out often and sometimes even three times a day couldn't cure the venom rushing through my blood just begging to be heard.
One by one, the birds hovering nearby raced to my spot where I'd sat so often there was a distinct divot in the wood despite only having been living in the nearby village for a short amount of time.
Their wings flapped in time to the beat as my voice soared high above the whistling in the trees, listening intently as the gift tore out of me with renewed fervor as if I hadn't just ripped my throat threadbare not six hours earlier at dawn.
As if this did not happen so often that I desperately wished for a break from the undulating sweeping notes and dips and valleys of the voice I'd come to loathe, even in warring disposition with the awe from the raw beauty of the sound.
How many people had this voice killed? I'd lost count after the only ones who matteredâto my heart, anyway.
How many times had someone stumbled across the relentless song dripping from me, only to be struck dead at my feet, burgundy blood swirling and pooling from the eyes, nose, earsâkilling them in one fell swoop?
How many times had I been forced to run from the persecution and the fear and hatred that followed me just as surely as the fog rising up from the valleys in the mountain range below the village, below the whole of Avanth?
How many times had his face swam in my vision only to be snuffed out as surely as a lick to a flame, to be killed and cut down by the enemy inside of me that cheered every man's death as if it were a triumph instead of a tar stain coating my soul with poison?
Slow, calculated rustling in the bramble bush alerted me to another's presence and I instantly closed my mouth even as the song begged to be released, my throat involuntarily producing the sounds to hum them out even still.
"Well, don't stop on my account."
The voice was male and rich and laced with sarcasm and dry amusement, but that wasn't the first thing I noticed about him.
No, the first thing I noticed was that he was actually alive.
He'd heard my siren's lull and remained undaunted, but that voice...so eerie and so familiar yet not at the same timeâthat voice was of a mystery man who'd heard my voice yet remained conscious, standing upright with no visible signs of the bleeding that accompanied my awful, terrible magic.
Who he was, however, was a much better question to ask rather than how he'd survived me, but it was hard to determine just exactly who was speaking to me when I couldn't see a single inch of his body.
That is, until he angled himself around the bushes and the nearest Briar pine, graceful and nimble as a mountain cat, a predator on even legs who'd stalked his prey for years and years until finally allowing the hunting instincts to take over and close in on their meal.
My breathing ceased immediately.
There was nothing remotely human about this man, but something called me to him, as if the monster lying in wait inside of me recognized the one wearing a 'human' man as his skin.
Eyes of smoke and intrigue slanted with a yearning desire, his smile became a lilting mockery of everything human and mundane, because everything in this realm was ordinary compared to him, and the dancing mirth in his shadow veiled eyes screamed that he knew it, too.
I drank him in, if only for a moment.
A masterpiece carved from the gods of old, smoldering and sinful possession lingering in a stare that rooted me to the spot, unable to move, only to witness his slow arrival with a remedied reproach in my features.
"Who are you?"
I wanted to ask how he'd survived, but men had used cotton filling their ears once before to live through my magic, so maybe that was what kept him from falling dead at my feet from the sound of the song still floating on the harmony-tinged gusting air.
"It's been a long while since I've heard music from someone in this realm. Almost ten years, actually," he spoke, evading my question as dread surfaced within me.
He'd heard my question, and revealed that he had indeed heard my song as well.
Was this man, ethereal and strange and treacherous and foreign, really immune to the voice that usually struck a man down within seconds of hearing it?
Stepping further into a shaft of honey sunlight filtering through dying fawn pigmented leaves the same color as his skin, he arose into sight along with the rest of his body.
Impressively built and intimidatingly so, the man was nothing short of a marvel to look at, to glimpse through down-turned eyes and beheld amongst blushing rosy cheeks.
As towering as the pines and oaks that resided in the Briars, the man stood tall as I took him in, unabashed and unblinking as I scrutinized the shadow cresting along his jaw.
The scabbed slice along his forehead that retreated into a hairline colored in deep hazel and umber.
The thick black armory coating his muscular chest and finally the two paired swords strapped to his back, as if one weren't enough in those lethal looking hands clenched at his sides as if in agony at the thought of my perusal of his form, so vulnerable out in woods so thick no one for miles could hear his screams.
I began to open my mouth, ready to feel the heady rush of the music flowing out of me as I prepared my escape from the man who was so clearly from the King's Guard, but he held a brutally scarred hand up as if to sway me, to keep me there, sitting on the log.
As if he weren't a threat.
"I don't mean you any harm, and I definitely don't want you to be afraid of me, it's justâno one in this kingdom has dared sing a simple melody, not even to honor their dead, since the King of Valencia's law. I wouldn't hurt you, I won't."
I couldn't tell if he was trying to convince me of that, or himself.
There was an undercurrent beneath his words, something nudging at me to run, to try my voice on him one more time and see if it would ring true like it did every other man who crossed my path, but there it wasâthat spark of rage that filtered through my blood undiluted and unmatched in any power that ran like a current throughout Avanth or any of the Allied Kingdoms.
The rage that only appeared at the mention of the king who had hunted me across lands that were not his own, through rough terrain and blisteringly cold expanses, throughout the biting heat of the desert and the snarling forests teeming with beasts who could swallow me whole if they were in the mood for a Siren who was more human than magic.
Fragile. Weak. But not when it came to my voice. Never then.
"I don't want to talk about the king, or his laws. I don't know who you are, but if you were looking for a free show, you were either sorely misguided, or just a naive imbecile. My bet is the naive idiot, though."
There. If my song didn't kill him, at least my insult might keep him from coming any closer, giving me time to run.
Except the man didn't redden in anger and stomp away like the ignorant fools who'd endured my insults before.
No, he did no such thing.
Instead, he crept closer as a grim smile tugged up one side of his mouth, one hand going to the sheathed dagger at his belt just as I casually leaned lower, fingers desperate to grasp the hilt of my own knife hidden amongst the billowing material of my skirts that had been tinged brown from the grit of the earth it had brushed on the long trek to my spot.
The long trek, I realized with a start, that I'd have to speed through at triple the rate I'd normally walked in order to escape the man, but even that speed might not be enough to outlast him.
I'd simply have to rely on the training my sister's husband had given me, and pray to whatever old gods were still around to hear me that I would survive.
"Naive, an imbecile and an idiot? And coming to listen to a beautiful woman's song makes me all of these things?"
A bold, arrogant, naive idiot.
That was what he was, and as the mocking incredulity of his tone reached my ears I was already halfway to my feet when he finally entered the clearing fully.
Soft yellow sunbeams illuminated the irises of his eyes and it took me longer than it should have to tear my gaze away from the promise in that amber gilded stare.
Razor-edge cheekbones carved out a path on his face as stubble rose along a similarly sharp jaw bone, something equally violent in the depths of those eyes that observed me as if I were nothing but a mere attraction, something for the amusement or entertainment of others, and yet there was an air of surprise, as if he hadn't been expecting something quite like me.
Was he a king's assassin, come to take me out at last?
And if so, why didn't I run?
Why did I stay, standing still in my spot amongst the wet earth below my brittle shoes and soaking in the sight of this deadly beautiful man, as if he were my damnation and salvation all in one?
He stalked closer still, and to my horror I found I could not move a single muscle in my body save for the breaths that came in quick spurting pants and the erratic thump of my heart against the cage in my chest.
"Actually, an idiot and an imbecile are the same thing, but yes, you are most likely all of those things for sneaking up on me."
His mouth sharpened into a feline smile.
The hilt of his bronze dagger glittered in the high noon sun, the twin blades strapped across his back gleaming as if freshly polished by his lethal hands marred with trauma in the form of deep, gouging scars.
Disfigured by years of trauma, or defense?
War and battle, or abuse?
I found myself wanting to know more about those scars, and who had given them to him.
When he was close enough that I could spot a set of matching dimples in his cheeks poking out from the grin that stretched his face ear to ear, that frozen panic that had coiled my body like a taut bow string just before the release suddenly snapped and I jolted, rearing back one step, then two, as he finally came to stand by my fallen log and the contents of my poetry journal splayed out across the ground like a forgotten memorial to the girl I had once been before this living, writhing thing inside of me had turned me into a killer.
"You know, your father must be very worried about his daughter, loitering around in dangerous forests with nowhere to run. What kinds of beasts might be lurking around the next tree? What must he think about your foolish actions?"
One breath, then two, and suddenly he was perusing my life's work as if it were a menu of tasteless wines or mead that didn't meet his lofty expectations.
He flitted through the pages of the hand bound journal in his fingers, the value of the dingy, ink-splattered pages worth more than the golden blood that flowed through my veins, at least to me.
"I wouldn't know. He's dead."
I didn't know why I had answered his line of questioning, but this didn't seem to bother the man as he continued his assault on my private thoughts, like he was amused at my attempt to sort through my thoughts and the 'gift' bestowed to me by the old gods who must've been cackling in their unseen realm at the mess that was my life.
My father was my first victim of the 'gift'. My mother cast me out with my sister, just in case she grew into the power as well.
I still saw his milky, blank expression every time I closed my eyes to sleep.
"Ah, yes. One of your kills. If only someone had taught you control over your gift, all of these tragedies could've been avoided."
He continued roaming page after page until he inevitably reached the point where I'd poured my soul over the tear stained pages, reading about the one true love and loss of my short life.
"Oh, even this one. Poor Peter. Seems like you held quite a bit of affection for that one. Pity."
I snarled as my eye twitched when the name slipped from his lips, the name that no one else was allowed to utter.
"Do not speak his name," I ground out, fingernails slicing into the thick skin of my palms as a trickle of blood escaped me, hands and fingers aching like the raucous, fickle heart that didn't bother to stop beating once his did.
If only death could come for someone like me, I would've gladly gone with him into the Everworld, but just as death was his curse, so life was for me, along with this voice.
This voice that I'd use to kill, and kill, and kill until that pathetic excuse for a wisp of a soul shriveled up inside of me and I was a husk of who I had once been.
"It all could have been avoided, you know, if only I'd found you sooner."
The dark tenor of his voice sent a shiver of curling disgust radiating through me.
Hidden in a beautiful casing, his body was nothing more than a clever disguise, something to hide the pure evil emanating from inside.
He was something else, something able to withstand my song, something so ethereally and blindingly beautiful that he could make anyone do anything he wanted.
Well, almost anyone.
"And who are you, then, to teach me things like false hope and control when no one else has been able to before?"
"Me? I go by Orenthal, but you can call me Oren. I can help you learn the control you need to access your true potential, and to harness that power inside you that threatens to tear you apart, to keep you from harming those you love, to take you to the one true family who has been anxiously awaiting your return. Come back at dusk, I will be waiting."
"You think I'll come back just from your word alone? You're either a killer, a king's assassin, or off your mind on the mushrooms growing behind you. What makes you think I'd ever want to see you again?"
I was seething, desperate to snatch my journal from his long fingers, but his noncommittal shrug and unconcerned expression only aggravated me further.
I would've ran until my feet blistered if I wasn't so terrified to turn my back on him.
"Because no one in your entire life has ever offered to help you with what you are. I'm right, aren't I? They're all too scared of you, what you can do to them if you open your mouth. There surely are no men willing to be your test subjects to check your progress. You will come back because I can promise to take you to your own peopleâpeople who won't judge you for who you are, because they can do the same things you have, and have killed far more for far less. You'll be back."
His voice was so full of confidence and surety that for a moment I almost started to fall for it, almost believed himâand as that damned hope blossomed into a full flower inside my chest before I had a chance to stamp it down like I'd always done before, I almost let myself believe that I could be helped, that I could be saved, and that there were others who'd done such egregious things that my own sins could be forgiven and washed away as accidental or due to my lack of control, but it wasn't true.
When I'd killed before, aside from the incidents with Peter and my father when I was a child, I had known exactly what I was doing, and why.
I didn't say a word.
I refused to, even as the questions begged to pour out of me just as steadfast as the voice demanded to be released from the depths of my body.
Confident striding steps allowed the man, Oren, to walk away with his back to me as if I were no more of a threat to him than the bounding rabbit crossing his path.
I was still staring past him long after the wind had ceased the whisperings of his footsteps on its current.
The World of Irena: