Chapter 5
Atarah
Atarah noticed the cut on her arm when she felt a slight pain when she moved it. She entered to the room that she and her sister shared while she observed the two separate beds with a dresser in the middle and a vanity close to the window. When she passed in front of their full body mirror, she saw another pink line that stood out on her golden-brown skin, in the middle of her cheek that didn’t seem to quickly heal. It was peculiar how with a drop of her blood, she could heal another living creature, but she couldn’t use it on herself. A well-kept secret guarded among their kind.
Her hair was still as wet as her clothes. She loved her raven-black hair and how it strangely lightened a little under the sun while her mothers was brown as wood. Her gaze reminded her of hers, only that her mother had beautiful silver eyes. Atarah couldn’t help but sigh at that memory since she could only see her in her dreams or in a few memories she had of her. She never knew where she’d gone, only that they’d been walking where they used to collect flowers close to the lakeside and dance in the moonlight, and in the blink of an eye, she was no longer there next to her. She remembered calling her a couple of times, but she hadn’t answered. She was alone in the middle of the forest, lying in the wet grass, hugging her knees while she was cold and felt scared. She didn’t even dare to move and waited for her mother to return. The darker it got, the more she hugged her knees, trying to feel warm again. She remembered the warmth of Galad’s mane, who was next to her to protect her from any danger.
Atarah didn’t dare to look at herself in the mirror again to avoid going back to those dark memories. She opened one of the drawers to take out of them clean clothes and she felt like using her favorite green dress that had bishop sleeves when it reached the wrists and with a long fall that almost touched the floor. Being daughter of the General had its advantages and more if she had good taste in clothes that inherited to her adoptive daughters.
As soon as she left the room and went downstairs, she saw an empty table. When she took a step forward, she felt the edge of a dagger brushing her neck. It was not just any dagger, but the one she had recovered from the messenger in the river. The stranger she saved was right next to her, as if nothing had happened to him. Being so close to him made her realized how tall he was that her head reached his shoulder.
“Where am I?” he demanded to know in a gravelly voice with his warm breath on her skin.
She didn’t dare move.
“At my house in Khrysaor,” she replied, trying not to think of the edge of the dagger that almost kissed her skin. “I saved your life,” she added in a calm voice while she tried to look him in the eyes so he could see she wasn’t a threat. He stared at her for a moment, doubting her answer, and without taking his eyes off her, he released her. Then he let the dagger fall to the wooden floor, and immediately she kicked it away from them. The stranger leaned against the wall with his hand covering the wound. He closed his eyes tightly while he was breathing heavily. She immediately tried to lift his shirt to see the wound, which made him take a step back from her.
“Darling, you would have noticed if I wanted to hurt you. I need to check the wound,” she told him before she approached him again.
“It’s still open.”
“Well, if you haven’t moved, you wouldn’t have opened your stitches, and the salve would have done its job, but now I’ll have to stitch this again,” she informed him as she pointed to one of the chairs close to the table, but he chose the couch instead.
“No, I can sew it myself. I only need thread and needle.”
“As you wish,” she muttered when she walked to the kitchen, pulling a small basket from one of the shelves. “So, who should I thank for saving my life?”
“You have nothing to thank,” he replied without saying his name. He was a man of few words that definitely did not trust her, in spite of saving his life.
When she inserted the thread into the needle, she passed it to him along with a damp cloth so he could remove the salve, but she saw him making too much effort and possibly thinking too much about it.
“Are you sure you don’t need help?”
For a moment, he thought about it and then handed it to her. “Do you want anything to help with the pain?” she offered, but he shook his head. She stuck the needle into his skin, trying to be as careful as possible. Doing the exact thing her sister did.
At that moment, she heard a loud slam of the door that made her look in that direction. Rhiannon Silverclaw, the warrior—leader of the coven—had her silver armor, which looked like metal feathers that protected her shoulders, covered in crimson color. In her emerald eyes, she could only see a calm fury, which was confirmed by the way she tightened her hand on the handle of her sword. She seemed to be beyond reason, and ready to attack the stranger. Atarah knew well what she was about to do. Rhiannon moved her lips, conjuring a spell as she moved her hand, throwing the stranger across the room, causing him to collide with the furniture. She used a spell in the old tongue, so she could use the wind with only a movement of her hand as if it was part of her.
“No,” Atarah raised her voice as she stood up to stop her. It was the only thing she could say to her, but she didn’t listen. As if she wasn’t in the room, she continued to ignore her, slowly walking toward the stranger who was trying to get up from the wooden floor with a wound still open. She tried to stop her, but Rhiannon took her hand and spoke in the old tongue again, making a small cut in the palm of her hand without having to cut her skin with a blade. Atarah’s blood began to move into the stranger’s wound, who was still lying on the floor but had managed to sit while he was covering his wound with his hand. The spell made the stranger scream. “Please let him go,” she begged.
“He’s healing,” Rhiannon answered when she glanced at her irritated.
Atarah looked at the wound of the stranger that had begun to close. He glanced at Atarah and then to Rhiannon and quickly took the ax from the ground that was near a small pile of wood they had for the fireplace, but in an equal effortless movement Rhiannon, the leader of the coven at her side and not the one who had raised her for twenty years, held her by the arm and placed the sword close to her neck. The stranger’s face showed confusion as Atarah’s face should have been, but no one moved or said anything. She tried to understand what was going on while the confused stranger gazed at Rhiannon as if he was challenging her to do it. And without thinking, Rhiannon brought the sword even closer to her, letting a drop of blood slip from her neck. The stranger fixed his gaze on Atarah and lowered the ax. Then, Rhiannon relaxed, lowering her sword, and letting her go, but never losing her out of her sight.
“What do you want?” he demanded to know.
Rhiannon ignored his question. “Who sent you?”
“No one sent me. The hunter and his men caught me in the Eirian, and I escaped with her,” he replied, pointing his gaze at her.
Rhiannon didn’t take her eyes off him as if she expected to catch him lying. “Aeron,” she called her second-in-command, who entered to the house, taking off his helmet, with a hand on the pommel of his katana. “Keep an eye on him,” she ordered, and Aeron only nodded with his head. “And.” She stopped at the door, giving her back to everyone, and only tilted her head without looking back. “If he tries something, kill him,” she finished saying with a cold tone and a slightly closed-lip smile. Then she left the house without saying another word.
Atarah touched her neck and looked at the warm blood on her fingertips. She felt both men in the room observing her, but she could only stare at her blood, debating on what to think or how to feel about it.
“You’d better go with her before she comes back for you and regrets leaving him alive,” Aeron said, as if the stranger were not present.
Aeron was the closest thing to a father figure Atarah had. He appeared to be in his early forties, the same age as Rhiannon, but even if they looked young, they were more than a century old.
Atarah stared at Rhiannon, who was waiting for her with her back facing the cottage, and for the first time in many years, she was afraid.
“Atarah,” Aeron called, pulling her out of her thoughts. He gave her a worried look with his kind chestnut eyes, moving his head towards Rhiannon’s direction as if he was telling her to get out, although she wasn’t sure she wanted to leave that room.