Page 3 of Anathema

Thank the gods! He still breathed. On a tearful exhale, she held him tighter and kissed the top of his head. Her sweet child had survived being cast into sablefyre–a fate that would’ve left any other a pile of ashes like the poor soldiers.

Yet, he had survived. By the miracle of the gods, he’d been spared.

The babe awoke, and the once innocent blue of his eyes showed as a gradient of wine red with swirls of orange and gold that converged at the center in a black eclipse. The silvery wisps of hair that’d begun to grow in had burned away. Gone was the soul of a harmless, loving child. In his place lay the vestiges of an aberration that the gods would surely forsake.

Squirming in her arms, the child cooed and babbled, a peculiar sight, given what he’d suffered moments before. The gash at his face had blackened into a deep groove that mirrored the vein from which he’d been pulled. At the edges of the wound, smaller black veins branched out like rivulets on a map.

She ran a trembling finger over them, and on contact, she recoiled at the scorching pain that streaked across her skin. “How could you do this?” she whispered, lifting her gaze to her husband. “How could you do this!”

Lord Rydainn sobbed in the distance, and her hatred for him grew with every new discovery of her son’s curse.

Branimir approached, his eyes wide with wonder. Tears in her eyes blurred his form at the memory of Zevander’s birth, when the boy had looked upon his infant brother with the same curiosity. How precious and innocent it had been then, those memories nothing but a forgotten dream.

He reached for Zevander, running his finger over the marking on his chest, a curious black swirl that’d seemed to anger Cadavros. On closer examination, there seemed to be words written in ancient Primyrian embedded in the swirl in a way that reminded Lady Rydainn of a wax seal across his heart. Branimir’s lips twisted to a snarl as he whispered the words that stabbed her conscience. “Il captris nith reviris.”

What is taken will never return.

CHAPTER ONE

MAEVYTH

The Village of Foxglove Parish

Present Day …

The forest hadn’t eaten in a while.

I peered past the macabre archway, into the depths of Witch Knell, the cursed stretch of woods where sinners went to die. It’d earned its name centuries before as a place where witches had once been sacrificed, its grim history upheld as a form of banishment for the heretics and morally corrupted. The Eating Woods the villagers called it, because sometimes the carcasses of those casted off were recovered along the edge, their bodies having been stripped of skin and flesh. Some so badly ravaged, only the metal cuff of their shackles confirmed them as banished.

Sharp bones and knotty sticks, covered in hoarfrost, twisted around each other to form the ominous entrance to the woods. Flanking either side of it, the gnarled and weathered oaks, smothered in icy webs of thorny briars, weaved an impenetrable wall that stretched for hundreds of acres to either end. A heavy gloom of overcast offered little light to see through the maze of crooked trunks that reminded me of corpses twisted in pain and reaching for the sky. Wild and hungry, the forest awaited its next meal, which was due to arrive at precisely noon.

I stared down at my weathered boots, the tips of which didn’t quite meet the rocks directly below the archway, the boundary that, once crossed, awakened the monster on the other side. It was the closest I’d ever stood to the nefarious threshold, the doorway to whatever violent things happened within those trees. Curious as I’d always been to know what existed beyond it, I didn’t dare set foot inside that misty labyrinth of trees. No one ever did, unless prodded by force, because The Eating Woods never returned what was given.

A wintry gust rippled the hem of my black dress, the tickle at my calves taunting my nerves. The cape around my shoulders did little to shield me from the punishing cold that gnawed at my bones. It wasn’t the wind or cold that left me shivering, but the rumors of what lived amongst the trees.

Some villagers whispered stories of the wrathavor–a demon with a voracious appetite for human meat. They believed him to be a punishment from the indigenous, who’d been pushed from these lands to the north. Others told stories of wickens, small woodland fairies that housed the souls of scorned witches, who lured and scavenged the lost by mimicking familiar voices. Most in Foxglove Parish, including the governor, believed the angel of judgment dwelled in the woods and punished those who’d rejected their beloved Red God.

Whatever it was, it ate indiscriminately, because certainly not all who were banished were bad, seeing as the forest had been known to snatch a toddler once, or twice.

Even a small baby.

I was no more than a few days old when I’d been found abandoned before that cursed arch in a wicker basket, a single black rose upon my chest. No one knew who’d left me there, but every villager speculated that, whoever they were, they must have hoped the woods would eat me, as well.

Fortunately, someone had found me before then, and placed me on the doorstep of the Bronwick family. Otherwise, I’d have probably ended up like so many others who’d fallen victim to the forest’s voracious appetite.

So many souls. Hundreds, maybe. The man I’d called grandfather, Godfrey Bronwick, was likely one of them. Said to have wandered beyond the archway after too much morumberry wine and gotten swallowed up in its misty depths.

Unfortunately, no one had braved searching for him there. Not even father.

Father.

A formal letter, held loosely in my fingertips, flailed for its freedom, while I mindlessly caught glimpses of the decorative calligraphy printed on the thick parchment. It’d arrived that morning in an envelope sealed in red wax with the royal stamp of the king. A fancy way of confirming that my adoptive father had been killed while serving the fanatical Sacred Men, the religious branch of the Vonkovyan armies that ruled with an iron fist over most of the continent. A small faction of defectors maintained a hold over Lyveria in the northern part of the continent, and my father had ventured there as a missionary, to convert the Lyverians for the glory of our good country.

Two months had passed since he’d gone missing, presumed to have been murdered by the defectors, which had left me and my sister Aleysia in the care of our step-grandmother, Agatha. An intolerant woman, who’d have probably tossed the two of us into the woods herself, if my grandfather hadn’t insisted on otherwise in his last will.

“What now?” I murmured, as I stared through a mist of tears into the endless dark wood, trying to imagine what the future might look like.

Unwed girls without a father to protect their claim suffered one of two fates. They were either promptly forced into marriage. Or sent to serve the church as one of the Red Veils—clergy women ordered to worship obediently until death. Even if I’d wanted to be married, and I certainly didn’t, the whole parish looked upon me as a pariah, so the odds of a respectable suitor were slim.

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