Page 3 of The Wild Prince's Favorite
After a while, when no more growls had been heard, she relaxed a little. She waited some more, still nervous, yet nothing but the wind was to be heard outside. Alezya let out a faint sigh. That was the most dreadful sound of all, the one that came from the sky, like thunder ready to strike the flanks of their mountains at any given moment. Except that it wasn’t thunder, nor as rare. It was a much more terrifying creature that freely roamed the sky, frightening them on an almost weekly basis.
It was a dragon.
Alezya had seen that dragon with her own eyes more than once.
It was an enormous, ghastly, and dark creature that appeared in their sky, first looking no bigger than a bird of prey, until it got closer and grew much larger than anything she’d seen. And she didn’t want to see it from any closer.
The creature was already horrifying enough to witness in person, but the stories she had heard about the monster it served made it even more fearsome. The clans had been at war for centuries with the Dragon Tyrant that lived down there, long enough for them to fear, loathe, and envy their enemy’s homeland. The same vast continent she loved to look upon and contemplate was in the hands of blood-thirsty men, who only answered their leader: a monstrous creature, half-human and half-dragon.
Even worse, that monster could summon and command an actual dragon, sending the mythical beast to strike their mountains, to rain fire, death, and destruction upon them. The stories were all about the same, told over and over so that every child knew them by heart. Tales of centuries of humiliation, but bravery and resilience. How the different clans had been forced to always hide deeper and higher in the mountains to stay safe from the flying monster, a flesh-eating creature that could come from the sky or the land. Dozens of men had been sent to the border to try and fight back, to win some land for their own, but they had never won. The clans only grew larger with the hope of one day winning against the enemy, while fewer and fewer returned.
The fight was generations old and desperate, but nevertheless endless. The clans scattered across the mountains were many, but they were getting along with each other less and less, fighting over resources and backstabbing one another for survival. And yet, at each gathering, most always stubbornlyagreed to keep the fight going in the lower lands. Despite the many, many years of defeat, it was their intimate and deepest belief that one day, victory would come.
A young woman like Alezya had never been allowed to get close to the battlefront, but she had seen it from afar once or twice; it wasn’t a sight she wanted to witness again.
The men from the ground were so many, she even wondered how the clans hadn’t all been wiped out already. Like the others, she knew there was a fearsome man-dragon leading them, with inhuman strength and cruelty, but she hadn’t even spotted his shadow; if he was worse than his men, she was glad she hadn’t. She only wondered why her people were still alive when they were faced with such imperishable monsters; the only reason she could find was that the people from the ground had no interest in conquering the mountains... and they had already conquered everything else. At least, as far as her eyes could see on clear sky days, the land was either deserted, used for farming, or occupied by their villages.
Alezya had often contemplated those villages, squinting her eyes as hard as she could to try and get a glimpse of the other side. If she had been able to live down there, with everything she needed for a peaceful life, perhaps she would have never cared about climbing up some tortuous mountain either...
“Ma...”
She turned her eyes back to Lumie, who suddenly seemed a bit bored and impatient.
Her mother smiled and grabbed the little toy she had made, handing it to the baby to hold and play with. Lumie was already fifteen months old, but luckily, she was a bright baby and growing up just fine. Alezya was quite proud of herself for having managed to raise a baby by herself for so long... All her sistershad a community helping them in the clans they had married into, while she was left to manage all on her own.
The first nights, she had cried along with Lumie, not knowing how to calm her baby. When she was sick, she’d had to beg the Healer for help, again and again, until the old hag agreed to give her some advice before sending her off to find and try every natural remedy she could. Several times, she’d tried to ask one of her cousins for advice, but most avoided her and her white-skinned child like the plague.
By now, Alezya had learned two things: one, she could only rely on herself, and two, her daughter was much more resilient than she thought. Lumie had survived every fever, learned to cry to alert her mother when she was hungry, and could stay on her own for longer and longer.
This was the hardest part for Alezya: not having anyone who could watch over Lumie when she had to go out. She had taken the baby out with her a few times, but Lumie cried every time she was outside of the cave and exposed to the daylight.
After a while, Alezya had come to believe her baby was a child of the moonlight, who could only come out when the sun was gone and the night was peaceful. Sadly, the nights in the mountains were rarely peaceful; the dragon wasn’t always around, but the snow cats were good at climbing and attacking both the unattended herds and imprudent climbers. Alezya didn’t fear the snow cats, but she couldn’t risk exposing Lumie to their claws and fangs.
Thus, she only took her child out sometimes in the evening, or held her on her lap while they both looked out of the opening of their little cave, their home, and into the wide, wide landscape of the continent. At least now that Lumie was older, she could leave for longer periods of time. When her baby was a newborn, she’d exhaust herself going back and forth to watch her child, try to find food and then run back whenever she heard Lumie cryfrom afar. Alezya sometimes wondered if her baby was calmer than most toddlers her age to quietly support her mom. At least to her, it felt like this part of motherhood was getting a bit easier, thankfully.
Once she had eaten a bit more, including a piece of dried meat from her food supply, Alezya decided to curl up next to her baby and catch some sleep.
She had woken up early to sneak out before Lumie woke up and escape her father’s surveillance. It was getting a bit harder every time, with their clan sentinels watching out for her. More than once, she had been caught and beaten up for disobeying the Clan Chief’s orders. Her father had a hard time hitting her himself in public, but he had no issue letting his minions do it. She had to be even more cunning each time she went out to gather food for Lumie and herself; the baskets her father frequently knocked over were both decoys and ways to try and bribe her place back into the clan.
Alezya knew the real reason he hadn’t banished her to some remote, deserted, and inhospitable mountain like their traitors was that she was still bringing in significant amounts of food. She was sure every single berry spilled earlier was already washed and carefully stored away. She only needed that much for the clan to ignore the rest of it hidden in her pockets and the bags around her belt. The small amounts she managed to smuggle to her space were not only feeding them on the daily but also slowly piling up to be an emergency supply for Lumie and herself.
Alezya was always preparing herself to leave.
She had seen people banished for less than this, and she was constantly gauging the situation, trying to evaluate how close her father was to simply getting rid of her. She was both curious and worried that it hadn’t happened yet. Even if her father hadmissed his chance to kick her out as soon as the baby was born, she had given him plenty of occasions by disobeying him. He was a bit more furious each time, so she couldn’t understand why she was still allowed to come back... Something was going to happen.
One day, one way or another, her father was surely going to do something about this situation. His pride as the clan’s Chief was hanging in the balance, and he certainly couldn’t afford to lose face in front of the other clans. The shame of disappointing the Exkiu Clan was already bad enough, but with another gathering of the clans coming up, Alezya just knew something was going to happen to her. She could feel it like the treacherous wind getting calmer before a snowstorm.
For now, she was still fine and safe, and she managed to fall asleep next to her child.
As usual, she slept until late in the day and woke up to Lumie’s voice right before sunset. Yawning, Alezya sat up, glancing at her little daughter in her basket, who immediately smiled at her mom.
“Hi again, my snowflake,” she whispered.
She left a little kiss on the baby’s forehead, who responded happily to it.
Then, Alezya took her out of her basket, changed her diaper, and threw the nasty contents away through the opening. She always loved to imagine it would land on someone’s head somewhere below... perhaps one of the sentinels if she was lucky. Although, in reality, it was more likely to just hit a hare in some inhospitable flank of the mountain. After that, she washed the cloth, hung it in one corner of her cave, and grabbed Lumie to sit her on thick bear fur, laying the baby’s toys in front of her.
Every single one of them she’d made herself, from a little stuffed ball to the little pieces of carved wood. It wasn’t much, but the baby was once again understanding of her mom’s limitedmeans. Lumie could entertain herself for hours with those simple things, sitting up on her own and making sounds as if she spoke some secret language.
