SWNOVELS Chapter History
“Perhaps out of a sense of duty to her dead sister, my aunt raised me, but she hated me with every fiber of her being.
“Although she never allowed a day to pass without a reminder that if it weren’t for me, my mother would have lived.
“It never occurred to her smallminded heart to blame her sister for allowing herself to conceive and not ending the pregnancy,” Rowan admitted, hurt and bitter, as she finally said the thing that she had never allowed herself even to think.
Marcus returned and sat some distance from them to give them privacy.
“I grew faster than the other children I saw from a distance. She didn’t allow me near them, and neither did their parents. The villagers shunned her for raising me, but I had a sneaking suspicion they used my presence as an excuse to avoid her.
“Her unhappy bitterness, nasty temper, and holier-than-thou attitude had alienated even the priest long before I came along.
“She was one of those people with a list of grievances against the world and just about everyone in it,” Rowan told them.
This Alena could read her face and learned only one thing from Rowan’s reaction; that despite everything, she had loved her aunt. The only parent she ever knew.
“My mother and aunt were half-sisters, and judging from snatches of conversation I overheard, my aunt’s mother wasn’t much better than her.
“She turned everything into an argument in which she always saw herself as the injured party.”
A frown creased Rowan’s brow, and Alena knew a few similar specimens.
“Dahlia watched me grow stronger and faster and made me work from the moment I walked on my own to ‘keep me from doing evil.’ The stronger I became, the more she disliked me, and it never occurred to me that she feared me.”
Rowan drew her knees to her chest and folded her arms around them while Marcus tended the fire.
“Since I could remember, she beat me every morning and every night; said she would ‘knock the badness’ from me,” she shrugged.
“Right from the start, I didn’t understand her hatred. It wasn’t the way other people treated their children, not even those that were not theirs by blood.
“But I learned the hard way why she feared me when I turned eleven,” Rowan struggled to control her emotions even after all these years.
Were the memories in her head still too vivid? Alena’s pity was instinctive.
“The day you came of age,” she realized, and Rowan nodded.
Until then, Rowan never considered that Alena must have suffered through something similar.
“Although it was just a chicken, but my aunt caught me in the act of drinking its blood, and I will never forget the horror or disgust on her face.
“Frozen in place by her hatred and fear, I stood like a lamb to the slaughter until she grabbed me,” Rowan shook her head as if she wanted to dislodge the memory from her mind.
“I would never have hurt her. Dahlia was all I had, and despite her treatment of me, she was my parent, and I loved her.” Tears welled up in her eyes as she admitted those last three words, as much to them as to herself.
She had to steel herself for what happened next, and a glance at her sister revealed her sympathy for eleven-year-old Rowan.
“Dahlia pulled me over a bale of hay and tied my hands to my feet with the rope going under the bale, and I was face down.
“I was so stunned and disgusted at myself that I allowed it,” Rowan rocked back and forth, lost in the past and unaware of her surroundings.
Marcus moved closer to them and listened intently to their conversation. He had eavesdropped on her story and did not leave after realizing the pain and pathos the child must have suffered.
“I never thought she would do me serious harm; too innocent to understand she suffered from mental instability and that my actions, combined with her fear, pushed her over the edge.”
Rowan shivered, an involuntary reaction to the images in her mind.
“I was young. My wounds didn’t heal as fast as they do now, and until then, I never suffered a serious injury. Bruises, bumps, scrapes, cuts, and welts healed within hours, but what Dahlia did, my body did not heal.”
Rowan became quiet, and he was almost afraid to breathe in case she remembered their presence and chose not to share the watershed which reshaped her life.
“She retrieved the skinning knife from the cutting block where she slaughtered the chickens and cut me across my back, edging the blade beneath the skin like you would flay a fish.
“I’d seen her cut dead animals like that, but I was unprepared for her to do the same to me, and with the same lack of feeling or sympathy, she displayed toward a cut of meat.
“She fetched ground rock salt from the floor of the animal pen and stuffed the wound with it like I was a roast, and it burned like fire.
“She didn’t care that my blood poured dripped on the ground, ignoring my pathetic screams and pointless pleas for help.”
For the briefest moment, she closed her eyes and took deep breaths to calm herself.
Tension coiled her muscles, and her fisted hands turned white-knuckled.
“And it was almost as if Dahlia had grown deaf to my voice.
“Her eyes seemed glazed, and her breathing uneven while her heart hammered in her chest, and she muttered the entire time.
“The words were in a language I’d never encountered before, and they made little sense. She retrieved a blunt needle from the leatherworking kit and sowed the wound shut as if my skin were sacking, not living flesh.”
Rowan stared at nothing. Her eyes blazed with the memory of those moments, her breathing ragged with repressed panic.
“When she eventually directed her words toward me and called me an ‘ungrateful animal, a vicious monster, an abomination, a hideous creature from the darkness of hell, a blight,’ I cried.
“Dahlia turned my head, looked into my eyes, and she told me she should have thrown me in the river the day I was born day, but someone spotted her before she found the right spot.
“A shiver ran down my spine when she cackled with laughter and told me not to worry; she would burn the madness from me. Rowan glanced at them, less unaware of her surroundings than before, but her expression would haunt him for a long time.
“Dahlia took the horsewhip down from the tack rack and beat me until her strength failed before storming into the night, still cursing the day I was born.”
“Time passed oddly. At some point, I must have passed out during that endless night, and I woke when someone untied me. I thought Dahlia had returned to hurt me again and became so terrified I wet myself.”
Her voice mocked what she saw as a weakness.
“I was too far gone to understand the hands touching me were not rough or ungentle. I tried to fight but could barely move, and my rescuer made soothing noises as if to a baby.
“Dahlia never soothed when a good slap shut me up the same.”
Rowan returned from the distant places of her mind.
Her eyes were dark and haunted, and her unexpectedly heart-wrenching vulnerability turned into a cold, fiery hardness before his eyes.
“Perhaps I was inside the barn for more than one night. Enough time had passed for the wounds to fester. Rats ate at my flesh, maggots infested the open wounds, and my aunt never returned to find out if I lived.”
The words lacked inflection, but the shadows in her eyes spoke volumes.
“Morian wrapped me in a blanket, stole Dahlia’s handcart, and took me to her home.” She became quiet for a while, and Alena offered her water, which she took and drank thirstily.
“When she cut open the wound Dahlia made, I screamed, wailing as she scrubbed out all the dirt and unclean things. Tears ran down her cheeks as she kept begging me to forgive her, but it was necessary. She stitched my wounds afterward and took care of me like a mother,” for the first time since they met her, Rowan’s expression softened into something resembling love.
“For a while, I got to be a kid. A year passed after that night, and by then, I looked like a grown woman, not a twelve-year-old.
“Morian taught me to read and write, showing me all the little things that my aunt neglected to teach me. She did not fear me, and I tasted happiness for a brief moment,” Rowan grew still; her muscles tensed again, and she clearly didn’t want to continue.
Marcus needed no interpreter to tell them what happened next was much worse.
“Did she die?” Alena asked, prompting Rowan when she remained silent for too long.
“If I were never born or even if my aunt dumped me in that river, it would have been so much better,” Rowan murmured, the guilt and remorse in her demeanor speaking of terrible things.
Alena knew Rowan existed from the first moment she was conceived and heard a few rumors about the woman who gave birth to this impossible child.
But the concept of a woman who gave birth, and chose death over becoming a vampire, leaving that infant both motherless and fatherless in the care of an unfit guardian, hadn’t occurred to her.
Victor could never claim a Dhampir, even though he facilitated her birth when he should have prevented it.
In what world did one leave a dhampir baby in the care of a human? A mere mortal that would watch it grow faster and stronger until it came of age when the monster in its blood would awake.
Rowan grew up alone in a world into which she didn’t fit, that didn’t understand her, and which shunned her, while she grew up in a loving home. She was a happy child that became a contented woman until her father cast her mother aside for a human.
Despite being twice as old as her sibling and with all of her life experience garnered from being a warrior at her father’s side, the woman who ran his household, and the daughter who adored her father despite his faults, Rowan was shockingly more mature.
Victor exposed her to both sides of life, one step at a time. He did not throw her into a cruel world that hated her and made her loathe herself.
If she acknowledged her pity, she accepted Rowan and had to admit her father was not only cruel in battle.
Her gut-wrenching sympathy was as undeniable as her growing respect.
Victor loved Rowan’s mother yet killed her to ensure his child lived.
For reasons of his own, Victor wanted Rowan birthed but cast her aside, and she couldn’t understand his actions.
Carla was at Victor’s side for the best part of two hundred years, yet she failed to give him a son.
Although he never said he wanted a son, but he was not a man who wore his heart on his sleeve, and she inherited that from him.
She saw Victor in Rowan and sitting this close to dhampir; his genes were superior in both of them, no matter what their opinions on the subject were.
Rowan did not tell her this story to garner either sympathy or pity—it was her sibling’s way of saying she had no right to anger.
Never mistreated by her guardians or beaten as a child, she had received love.
Even though her parents spoiled her, Victor never allowed her to become a brat.
Once she came of age, he taught her to be tough like he would have done for a son, but once they got home, she had to understand her place.
He tolerated no disrespect, and she wasn’t naïve. At times, Victor was an unforgiving taskmaster, and she did things at his bidding; she would rather not have.
Matters to which a man would have given no second thought nor a warrior in these troubled times.
She didn’t rationalize her guilt away with the same ease. Nightmares still plagued her at the horrors her hands wrought at Victor’s command, but she was a grown woman by then, not a child.
Sometimes Alena had trouble balancing her emotions. Just because she was still a single unattached female and likely to remain so for a while longer didn’t mean she was vulnerable or dense. And more than one man of her acquaintance thought her a harsh, cold, and unforgiving bitch after disrespecting her boundaries.
In a man, these things were admirable but unacceptable in a woman.
Despite not caring most of the time, it made it harder to react the way she should.
And she wasn’t blind to how people viewed her when she exhibited the wrong emotional response to a situation.
The expression in their eyes didn’t go unnoticed, and she understood what they expected of her, but she could not make herself feel what they expected nor make herself pretend.
Despite her normal childhood, she had issues, while Rowan had learned the lessons Victor taught her as a grown woman when she was a child, barely able to understand.
All due credit to this dhampir for being this normal after such suffering, but it disconnected something inside her.
Their lives created a distance that lived inside them and kept them apart despite their bond.
They struggled to express their hurt and fear because there were more terrible secrets to reveal, but if the door opened any further, they would be defenseless.