Page 3 of Humans Don't Have Horns
But I can still feel the boy’s warm blood on my hands. “He was so young,” I croak at him.
Dayach snorts. “It’s not our fault the grown ones are so hard to kill. If we get a Kozari lasso, then we’ll be in the big league. Then we can take down grown ones,” he says. The Cursed Ones’ power is unnatural. That female who led them cracked the bones of our hunting partner, Drian, like they were twigs. And she’s not even the Butcher. He would have probably drank Drian’s blood in front of us before he killed us all. We were lucky he wasn’t there. The Cursed Ones are monsters. They are the stuff of nightmares. And now they are after us.
“Besides, it doesn’t matter. They breed so much that they don’t even notice when one of their younglings goes missing. It’s one less mouth to feed, and you know how poor they are. You did them all a favor,” Dayach says deridingly.
He’s right. Why should the Cursed Ones’ child have lived instead of Nima? I don’t have twelve children, just the one. What kind offather wouldn’t do anything to save his daughter? When the healers said the disease in her blood wouldn’t let her see past the age of five, I knew what I had to do. I saw her cheeks go hollow, her skin wane, and her mouth form cries of pain. “Papa, help me,” she said.
For Nima, it is worth it.
When Bina tried to stop me, saying it was against the Goddess’s will, I was furious with her. Would she say the same if it was her daughter? If the Goddess doesn’t want this, then why give the Cursed Ones their horns? Why give Renyans the knowledge to develop an extract from these horns that provides immortality? Bina had no good answers, only righteous lectures about morals and purist shit. The purity of Renya, my ass. Better a living daughter than a pure dead one. Hunting is more moral than a parent letting his child die at the age of five.
I don’t take it for myself. Never. I don’t seek immortality like the royals. My Nima deserves to live, to grow up. “Until when?” Bina asked. “Once you start, you can never stop. The extract works only while taken frequently. She will never be old enough.” I think of Nima’s smile. Those precious dimples. Until I die. I’ll stop when I die. She will die only when I die.
***
Just as the sun begins to rise the next morning, one of the Goddess’s servants leads Dayach and I out of the monastery. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t even look at us. We are sinners, only helped for the blood they share with me. “Forever, we are children of the moon,” I tell her in Renyan as we walk out the door. She darts a wary look at Dayach. If the Aldonian church finds out it is the Goddess they worship and not Sun, they will all be burned to death. But Dayach won’t tell anyone. He’s a deserter from the Aldonian army. Who can he tell? She nods to me grimly and shuts the door firmly behind us.
We start the walk to Milasurey. The morning air is still cool. The sky is still quite dark.
After a hour’s walk, the Cursed Ones catch up to us. They weren’tanywhere to be seen, and then they appeared. I start to run, not bothering to look at how Dayach is faring. Unlike me, he has battle training and a sword. And honestly, I don’t really care. He’s scum. I only endure him because I need him for the hunting.
I run as fast as I can, but a burning pain explodes in my shin. An ax is plunged into it, thrown by one of the Cursed Ones. I fall to the ground and start to crawl. The Cursed One grabs my ankles and drags me back to where Dayach is fighting another Cursed One. A third Cursed One stands and watches them, hands at her waist.
The Cursed One who grabbed me ties me to a tree nearby. She removes the ax from my shin and a horrible, fresh wave of pain hits me. I try to break free of the ties and reach my knife, but I only gain more agony at my fruitless efforts. She doesn’t even spare me a look as she goes to watch Dayach fighting the other Cursed One.
Dayach holds his sword and moves it deftly as a well-trained Aldonian soldier. He is a big guy, taller than the Cursed One fighting him. She has an ax in each hand and keeps dodging him. The Cursed Ones usually use axes, but it is a disadvantaging weapon in a sword battle. The sword allows for an attack from a relative distance. The Cursed One ducks and avoids him. She doesn’t try to throw the axes at him but instead uses them to respond to the strikes of his sword.
The two Cursed Ones watch the battle closely, barking orders in their animalistic language to the one fighting Dayach. That’s when I realize why only one of them is fighting him. They’re training her. She’s young and can’t be more than sixteen.
I watch Dayach with the sword. He’s fighting for his life, but he is nothing more than a training target for them. Finally, she succeeds in throwing his sword with her axes, and they cheer for her. The one who threw her ax at me now throws it at Dayach, and it pins his hand to the tree trunk close to him. Training is over.
Dayach cries in pain and tries to fight them off. But it’s pointless. She beats him viciously and then ties him to the tree. The young Cursed One goes through our bags and finds the two horns we last harvested and didn’t have time to grind to an extract yet. She showsthe horns to the others, and they look aghast. I know they can tell how young he was by the horns. They’re so small and still soft.
The Cursed One who hadn’t fought us and only watched until now takes out a knife and approaches Dayach. She has two horns like all the Cursed Ones, but her colors are Aldonian. Her hair and eyes are red, a sign of interracial intercourse. There aren’t any Cursed Ones with Renyan coloring. Never. To force a female is a sin toward the Goddess. Why any Puresoul would want to even touch a Cursed One to begin with is beyond me.
Still, it’s not often one sees Cursed Ones with Aldonian or Kozari coloring. They say the Cursed Ones kill the babies born with those colors. But here she is, and it seems she is the commander of the other two, despite their black eyes and hair — the usual coloring of the Cursed Ones.
She even wears blood red lip paint that highlights her colors. It probably belonged to a Renyan she killed or robbed. She sure didn’t buy it. No one in Amada would dare sell anything to a Cursed One. And even if they would, she wouldn’t be able to afford it.
She doesn’t kill Dayach immediately. She makes cuts at his main arteries: two deep slices at the neck, two at the armpits, and two at the thighs. They’re going to bleed us to death, slowly. It’s their preferred method of killing.
She approaches me with the knife, smiling like a cat that caught a mouse. She’s enjoying this. I’ve killed, but I never took pleasure in it. I always tried to make it as quick as possible. I’m not a monster like her.
There is a sinking feeling in my stomach as I realize I can do nothing to stop her. Yet I beg. I know it won’t help me, but I don’t want to die. “Please, I only hunt so my child can live. She’s sick, please,” I say.
She loses the smile, and a pensive look crosses her face. She nods and then, to my shock, speaks to me in Aldonian. I had never imagined they could learn any other language. Theirs sounds so beastly, with all those guttural sounds.
Her accent is heavy. “How many of my people’s lives for your child’s life?”
I don’t answer. Whatever the number, she’s made her point. I’m going to bleed to death, and Nima will not live to see her ninth birthday.
She cuts me the same way she cut Dayach. Then she takes out the red apples from our satchel and hands them to the other two. She sits on the ground, leaning on one of the oak tree trunks. She looks at me and takes a bite. They’ll stay for hours and watch until we are both dead. Like the monsters I always knew they were.
Chapter Three
Lian
I wake with a start, not knowing where I am or how long I’ve been there. I’m lying on a leathery pallet inside a small tent. I’m clean and no longer in my bridal dress. I’m wearing some kind of rough fabric in a brownish color, but I have no memory of washing or changing. The stench of rotten eggs burns my nostrils. My throat is bone dry and gritty, as if it’s filled with sand. I try to lift my head to see my surroundings, but I can’t. My arms and legs are also immovable. My organs feel heavy.
