Page 8 of Terragnata and the Heir of the Earth

I steadied myself. The position of the moon told me the end of that day had just passed. It was likely about an hour past midnight. It took another hour of running in circles, wandering around surprisingly unfamiliar canopies and rock fields, to get my bearings. At first, I was hesitant. Hiding behind trees, throwing paranoid glances over my shoulder. But my mud-skinned body and dirt-matted hair gave me a comforting camouflage. Eventually, when I became convinced no one was following me, I concentrated on finding my way home.

It was easy enough, once I found a landmark I recognized. Each brush of that wood had its own feel, its own heartbeat. Each breath the forest took helped point me in the right direction. After another hour, I reached the edge of the trees, just a few hundred yards away from my cottage. Candles were burning, a soft glow in the windows.

They must be worried sick about me.A familiar pang of guilt emerged, sharp in my stomach.

Determined not to walk through my front door stark naked, which would surely embarrass my father and brothers as much as it would me, I crept silently towards the house. We had an old cellar a few dozen yards away from the cottage, used mainly for old storage and dry goods in the winter. A tunnel connected it to a crawl space beneath the main room, a function my father added for retrieving supplies during cold winter nights. I knewmy father had left some military wear from when he trained to be a soldier in his youth. I had played in the clothes as a child, imagining myself a war hero. They were nothing more than simple camouflage trousers and a jacket, but they would do better than mud.

I tugged on the cellar door and descended into the space, shutting it behind me. I pulled on my father’s pants and buttoned his coat, both of which hung awkwardly snug on my curved body. When I turned to leave, I heard a faint, alarming sound from the tunnel opening. I stilled to listen. The thick round stone that served as the door in the direction of the cottage muffled the noise, but I heard it again. The unmistakable sound of a woman’s cry.

I moved faster than I could think, shoving the first stone to the side and sprinting through the tunnel. The cries mixed with screams and continued to amplify, turning my insides cold. By the time I reached the end of the tunnel, I shook almost uncontrollably, a sinking feeling about who those screams belonged to lodged in my gut. But I attempted to calm myself—in and out went my breathing.Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, my father always said. I ran my fingertips along the circumference of the second stone and loosened its seal. Working my fingers through the crack between the tunnel and the stone, I found purchase on the door. I nudged it, tipped it forward, and lowered it carefully onto the ground.

As silently as I could, I slid on my stomach into the dirt crawl space until I was underneath the main room of our cottage. The wailing remained relentless, and figures came into focus as I rolled onto my back to face upwards. I looked into my house through the small gaps between sweet-smelling piñon floorboards laid carefully by my father years ago. I was looking straight up at the outsider.

CHAPTER FOUR

TWISTED VINES

It wasn’t his eyes I saw this time. I stared at the bottom of his shoes. They were black leather boots, unremarkable in every way, save for some sort of crest imprinted on them. A goblet of twisted vines, a distinction I did not recognize, but more screams ripped my mind away. The cries belonged to my mother.

He held her by the shoulders, and judging by how her cries had turned to sobs and my interaction with him earlier, his grip was not gentle. “Where is she?” he yelled. “What have you done with her?”

“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “She didn’t come back, I swear. I don’t know where she went.”

The man seethed. “If you can’t tell me, Katalana,” he growled, “you know I will have no choice but to kill you, too. Thus is the will of the Rexi.” The synapses in my brain responded slowly to that comment, not understanding. My eyes darted around the room, but from my angle, I couldn’t see anything other than what the slight crack between floorboards revealed directly above me.

“Why?” she said, some strength coming back to her words. “We did everything you asked of us, everything! I raised her asmy own daughter, I loved her as my kin. We all did. She hasn’t been discovered. How is death the reward?”

I froze. My world spun like I was a globe on an axis, carelessly slapped by a child. She spoke as if she knew the man, as if she owed deference to him. My mind reeled, and I almost didn’t notice the dripping from a few panels to my left.

Blood, a steady drip of it. I pressed my hand into my mouth hard and bit, stifling a scream. Was it Papa? Javis? Danson? The tears were coming freely now, and it took every bit of strength I had not to cry out. I swallowed the bile building at the back of my throat. I resolved to act. I needed to get Mama out, fast.

It was like the blue-eyed man heard my thoughts. One crack and she fell to his feet. Her auburn hair slipped through the floorboard cracks and ticked my forehead.

One of her eyes, already glazing over, met mine. It widened slightly. And then blinked three times.

Mom. I mouthed the word.

Another crack, and she was gone.

Everything stopped. No.No, this cannot be happening. I squeezed my eyes shut. I lived in a small, peaceful mining town. Every bit of what I just saw was nothing more than a horrible nightmare. I would open my eyes and wake with a sense of dread, in my own bed, ready to live another day of my boring, safe life. But when I opened my eyes, I only saw Mama’s lifeless face. Bile rose up my throat.

The tears came steadily then, rushing out and down my face and pooling on the ground around me.Was it my desire for freedom that brought on this hell?The foreigner Fayzien shouted commands I didn’t register. He stomped around the cottage, ripped doors off cabinets and overturned furniture. He even murmured some strange sounding words that clattered in my head, throbbing in a way I’d never experienced. But he didn’t move my mother’s body and look down through the floorboards.It was as if her final act of dying was to save me, whether she planned it or not.

I don’t know how long the blue-eyed man and his companions were there. It was clear he killed my entire family. I contemplated showing myself so he could kill me, too. But, I was terrified. Mostly that he would do something worse than only ending my life.

So I stayed frozen. I stayed frozen for so long, I felt I had always been still. Exhaustion came over me, exhaustion from the day, from running, from crawling, from holding in my tears, cries, and vomit. When I woke, quiet darkness commanded the house, and he’d gone. I tried to move, but I couldn’t, as if my limbs were wrapped tightly against my body. A strange round shape cocooned me, fibrous to the touch.Tree roots?I felt around myself. They had sprouted up from the ground. I was readied for burial, dressed in dirt and laid in a birch tomb. But why? And how? Those questions dissolved the moment I remembered. My family was dead. And I had done nothing to stop it.

If anyone came to check on us, I didn’t hear them. I was no longer thinking. I was wrapped in root, moss, and all the Earth’s matter. I didn’t attempt to move or understand how the Earth had come to wrap itself around me. I waited for what I believed—and maybe even hoped—would be my eventual death. I prayed I would wake up to see my family again, smiling at me with open arms.

Reality struckme awake with the sting of a slap.

My eyes flashed open to the sound of footsteps and hushed voices above my head. For a moment, I forgot where I was.When I looked up, Mama’s body was gone, and I wondered if I had imagined the whole horrible ordeal. But through the gaps in my make-shift pine bough cocoon, the blood stains on piñon told a different story.

All at once, my protective shield felt like a cage.Out, out, out.The voices in my home were new, different to the ones that had wreaked havoc however many hours before. I didn’t know if I could trust the new voices, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Only instinct controlled me as I released something guttural, something between a cry and a grunt. I raised my arms from my sides, expecting a struggle, but the sharp branches parted away from my hands, as if in deference to me.

The people in my house shuffled around looking for the source of the noise. The walls of my birch tomb were tight, too tight, and I couldn’t breathe. I slammed the heel of my palm above my head and into one of the floorboards. It broke easily and one more hit brought me to standing, half in the crawl space, half in the main room. The intruders’ eyes were wide and jaws loose, staring at a girl caked in several layers of mud, blood, and filth. I must have been quite the sight.

As my pupils adjusted to the daylight, I nearly laughed at the absurdity of my impulsive move, but the flicker of humor died as quickly as it surfaced. Fayzien did not stand among them, nor did the black cloaked men who’d been at Spring Day. I was careful to be quiet, placing my palms on the floor and hoisting myself up, one foot at a time. I counted six of them, three men, three women. They were not Argenti, and I saw no familiar faces. I exhaled, an instinctual calm I didn’t recognize washing over me.

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