Whispers of Heaven

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Verse

  Map of Valery

  Part One

  Desperation map

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Part Two

  Camp of the Darkling Prince map

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Part Three

  Fallor map

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Cast

  Glossary of Terms

  Genealogy

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Preview

  This book is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WHISPERS OF HEAVEN

  Copyright © 2015 by Krista S. Rose

  All rights reserved, including the rights to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Cover by Amygdala Design.

  ISBN: 978-0-9964189-0-4

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For you

  KRYSSA

  559A.F. - 565A.F.

  Before the darkness descended upon us, we knew that there was love.

  My mother and father were from Fallor, which, while not a very large town by the Empire’s standards, still qualified for a place on its maps. It lies in the fertile, farmland plains of west Valory, about a week’s hard ride from the great Siriun Forest.

  My mother’s family were healers, and my father’s, farmers. They insisted that it was Destiny that brought them together, but I am inclined to be more skeptical. Fallor is not that large of a town, and accidents and injuries are common enough on a farm. Who else but a healer would be called for to tend to the wounded?

  Regardless of divine design or simple circumstance, Malachi Rose, my father, fell in love with Adelie Moonsdaughter, whom he claimed was the most beautiful girl for fifty miles in any direction. He wooed her, though she was scarcely sixteen and he barely twenty- like all romantic fools, they believed their love fated, calling it a blessing of the Gods.

  They surely made for an odd pairing: Malachi, with his mercurial tempers and dark brooding eyes, and Adelie, vivid, golden, and carelessly kind, prone to dramatics and elaborate fantasies. She called him her ‘Rava’eth’, the king of her soul, and she was his ‘Estaur’, his eastern star that guided him home.

  But yet, when they told their families of their burning passion, of how it threatened to ignite the world and leave everything in ashes before it, they were somehow met with much less than the enthusiasm that they had expected. Wiser, certainly cooler heads bid them to caution, pointing out their youth and lack of a proper marriage bed, and urged them to wait a few more years.

  Instead, they eloped, marrying in a little-visited Temple of Vanae near the Siriun Forest, where they consummated their vows eagerly, though perhaps not for the first time- I have long suspected that my mother had been hiding a swelling belly, and it was this that prompted their hasty departure from Fallor before it was noticed. My mother may not be in possession of brothers, as she is an only child, but her father was a formidable man with a renowned temper, and he would have been only too happy to defend his daughter’s honor to the death.

  It was perhaps due to this that Malachi and Adelie did not return to Fallor, and instead travelled north along the edges of the Siriun Forest until they reached a tiny, unnamed village set into the outskirts of the mighty trees, right where the dark green of the land begins to be broken by the heavy, ugly stones that line the coasts. My mother jokingly named the village Desperation, for anyone who chose to live there certainly had to be so.

  My mother by this time was heavily swollen with child, and so she and Malachi sought out a room for let, finally staying with the Goodwife Janis, who cheerfully allowed them to stay for the naught more than company. She was a wide, tree trunk-shaped woman filled with a vast loneliness, since her taciturn husband spent most of his time at the lumber yards, three days’ travel away. Adelie could sense her need, and filled it, so that the two women were fast friends within days.

  In the way of things, my mother soon went into labor, and my wild-eyed father was sent to fetch the midwife. She was a wizened, elderly hedge witch who lived apart from the village in a ramshackle house tucked away amidst the older trees of the Forest.

  In all my life and memory, she has had no other name but the Crone.

  The birthing was an easy one, and so it was that I was born on the fourth of Narens, 559A.F., the Age After the Faith, while the roses bloomed fair and wild across that northernmost stretch of forgotten earth, their petals as deep a red as my downy hair, and my eyes as unearthly green as their leaves. As with most things, my mother declared this to be a sign from the Gods, and named me Kryssa, which means ‘Wild Rose’ in the Eld Tongue.

  Though they called me their blessing and their joy, and bathed me in their love, Father longed for a son to carry on his name, and so it was mere months before my mother began to grow again with child.

  It was then that Malachi started to talk of returning to Fallor.

  I believe it had always been his plan to return, to use me and my unborn sibling to garner sympathy and avert the wrath of their families. I think that he had hoped for a small piece of his father’s land, to farm himself and raise his new family upon. What he did not plan for was my mother.

  She flatly refused to leave Desperation.

  Adelie Rose was not a large woman; in fact, she was small and delicate, still slender with youth despite the rigors of childbirth. Malachi easily weighed twice what she did, so why he did not simply throw her bodily across his shoulders and carry her back to Fallor, I may never understand. Instead, he listened to her fantastical reasoning: the Gods, she claimed, had led them to this village for a purpose, and so it was here that they had to stay.

  Even then I think that Malachi still intended to return to Fallor, though he would never have admitted to my mother that his promise to stay in that forsaken place was meant only to placate her. He had taken odd jobs as a man-of-all-work in the village, but he was not so skilled
nor the village in such need that it was profitable, for most made do on their own. My father struggled to make pennies a day stretch to feed his growing family, and we survived more on pity in those days, I think, than any will of the fickle Gods.

  I believe in Destiny- how could I not, with all I have seen? I also think that far too many are willing to mistake chance and coincidence for divine interference, much to their later dismay.

  But even I am forced to agree that everything suddenly fell into place a little too easily.

  Malachi, desperate for work, inquired again at the general goods store, just as old man Longmire walked in, ready to pass on the news of his retirement. He was selling the farm, he announced, and moving to Ullyn to live with his daughter and grandchildren. The Longmire farm was small, only ten acres square, but it was the only one for at least twenty miles, and lay less than a mile from the outskirts of the village, making it nigh invaluable.

  My father inquired after it, though I doubt he thought he could afford it. But Longmire, for all his sun-hardened features, was more tenderhearted than a sleeping kitten, and all but gave Malachi the farm. He insisted he would rest easier in his retirement knowing the land was cared for by a family man, rather than being turned into a tax shelter for wealthy nobles, or a transport depot for slaves.

  We thus found ourselves living on the old Longmire farm, which came in time to be called the Rose farm. The land was divided neatly between the fields, where Father grew wheat and corn; the outbuildings, where the animals and tools necessary for a farm are kept; and the hill. The hill was truthfully only a slight rise in the land, but it was where our house was, and where Mother kept her garden of roses, near the ancient Teminar tree growing wild and gnarled behind it. The house itself had only two bedrooms, but the great room and kitchen were large and spacious. My mother said that it felt like a palace, after a year of the three of us living together in one cramped room at Janis’.

  It was in that house that my brother was born, in the month of Davael, while Father’s corn fields grew tall and green and reached toward the summer sky. He looked like our father, dark-haired and amber-eyed, with the unmistakable perfection of my mother stamped upon his features, especially when he smiled. They named him Brannyn, ‘Of the Blood’- son of the Rava’eth.

  They were young, and in love, and the farm quickly prospered under Malachi’s practiced hands. He hired two lads from the village to help with the harvest, even as my mother blossomed yet again with their third child. Adelie had always dreamed of a large family, and, love-struck as he was, Father was helpless to deny her aught.

  In Emberes, 561A.F., we gained my sister Lanya, ‘the Golden One’, as Brannyn and I played in the roses that rioted beneath my mother’s window. She was a near-perfect replica of our mother in miniature, from her honey-colored hair to her sapphire eyes, and she smiled and laughed at all the world with impossible sweetness.

  I think my parents would have stopped then, for three small children are a trial to any mother, and we were no exception. The walls of our house rang with shouts and laughter, and were nigh to bursting with love and happiness.

  But then my mother had her vision.

  It is perhaps my earliest true memory, though it is dim and unfocused, as dreams often are when one first wakes. I recall the softness of her hands as she stroked my hair, her skin smelling of honeysuckle. Her voice was quiet and rapturous as she spoke to me of being touched by the Gods.

  “They showed me the Grand Design, Kryssa, woven in the Eternal Flame.” Her eyes glowed, and her cheeks were flushed; I thought her to be the most beautiful woman in the world. “It was as if heaven whispered to me, as if Destiny itself spoke in my ear. It is only a small part of the Design, mind you- just my place in it. I’m to be the mother of the Gods’ Chosen. Six children, they showed me, each greater than the last, so beautiful and brilliant I scarcely dared to look at you all.” She hummed a little, her eyes turning soft and dreamy as her hands drifted to her stomach. “So beautiful.”

  Father never could deny her, and so she again swelled into the awkward grace of pregnancy, and gave birth to the twins in Veyshin, during Longest Night of my fourth winter. It was the greatest gift I could receive, or so I was told, and I peered into their baskets with fascinated curiosity, looking first at Kylee, or ‘Skylily’, with her dark, serious eyes, and then at Alyxen, ‘the Iron King’, who smiled up at me with a face made for mischief.

  I was too young to understand the complications of pregnancy, to comprehend the meaning behind words like ‘blood loss’ and ‘seizure’. But as the night dragged on, and my father’s face grew more drawn and pale every time he emerged from the room where my mother was attended by the grim-faced Crone, I at last learned the meaning of fear.

  My mother lived, though the Crone warned her that there would not be a second miracle. Adelie, always stubborn, refused to listen, insisting that her vision and her Faith would protect her where the Crone could not. I watched them argue from my hiding place behind the door, the shadows of the darkened room cloaking my presence.

  “Your body cannot handle another birthing, Adelie,” the Crone rasped, dark eyes frustrated as she pressed a copper medallion into my mother’s hands.

  Adelie gripped it, her knuckles turning white on the symbol of Vanae. “The Gods commanded me to have six children.” Her face was set and angry, and she tossed the medallion aside defiantly, so that it skidded across the floor toward where I was lurking. “I will not deny my Faith.”

  “Be reasonable, Adelie! Another child will kill you. Whatever the Gods intend for your children, I doubt it is to be raised motherless.”

  But it did not matter what the Crone said, for my mother refused to wear the medallion, and the old woman was forced at last to throw her hands up in defeat, and took her medallion with her when she left.

  My father, at least, heeded the Crone’s warning, and ignored my mother’s tears and pleas for one last child. She finally withdrew into herself, silent and sullen, uncaring of the world around her. It nearly drove Father to madness worrying over her- though in truth it was only a tantrum, and would have eventually passed. But he gave in to her, and she once again grew with child.

  Janis, recently widowed by an accident at the lumber yards, came to live with us, to care for our mother during her confinement. She brought with her nearly a dozen boxes of books, and would read them to us before we would go to sleep by the light of a single candle. Though her presence meant that we children were forced from our large, shared bed in the second bedroom to straw-stuffed pallets in the great room, we didn’t mind, considering it to be like an adventure told in one of her stories. We adored her, and she doted on us like a slightly bewildered aunt.

  Summer drew slowly closer, and with it my sixth birthday. My mother let me press my ear to her vastly swollen belly, listening with delight to the movements of my unborn sibling. I whispered to him or her, loving with the unconditional innocence of a child. Adelie all but glowed with health, and it seemed the Crone’s warning had been little more than an irrational worry. My mother still spoke to me of heaven’s whispers and wonders, and it seemed for a brief time that our lives were perfect.

  13 Llares 565A.F.

  My mother’s screams woke me in the dead of night, and my mouth flooded with the taste of fear: bile and copper, which no amount of water could wash away. Father fled the house in moments, taking off at a dead run for the barn, and several minutes later I heard the thundering of hooves as he forced our plow horse Renic into a reluctant gallop toward the village.

  Mother’s agonized screaming went on and on; no matter how hard I tried to cover my ears, I could not escape it. The twins, too young to understand, howled in fear, red-faced and inconsolable, though Lanya tried her best to comfort them through her own tears. Brannyn sat beside me, deathly pale and still, and we held a silent vigil before our mother’s door.

  Janis opened it after what seemed an eternity, and crooked a finger at me. Her arms looked strange, and I t
hought at first that she was wearing gloves. As I got closer, I saw that it was blood, dried rust-brown and flaking from her skin.

  The bed was worse, the sheets black and wet-looking in the flickering light. I thought then that the Crone had spoken truth: my mother surely couldn't survive this birthing. There was simply too much blood.

  Oddly, this knowledge calmed me rather than frightening me, allowing me to follow Janis' frantic instructions as we tried to save my mother's life. Janis muttered under her breath that the task was hopeless, that even a real healer could not save Adelie's life. I imagined I could see the mark of Sirius upon her, claiming her, and with each passing moment I could feel the approach of the God of the Dead, preparing to collect her soul and lead her to the peace of Ca'erlyssa. I stood, frozen and fascinated, watching the pain flicker over my mother's face.

  "We might not be able to save your mother," Janis muttered in my ear, breaking me from the spell, "but we damn well can save her child."

  After that, we worked side-by-side in a silence that was broken only by my mother’s hoarse screams and Janis’ terse orders. I was too young for the work, there is no doubt of that- but really, what child is ever old enough to watch their mother die in childbirth?

  Father arrived with the Crone at last. She looked more frail and brittle than usual, her eyes appearing sunken, but she took in the room at a glance, and I could see that she knew my mother was doomed.

  Father was blinded by love and terror, and so could not see that his Adelie had lost too much blood, that she was already beginning to fade. He could not see it, did not want to see it- and so the Crone sent him from the room to care for his other children.

  I was allowed to stay, though I was pushed away from the bed as the women worked, and it made me feel both older and somehow much too young, to be an observer in this room of life and death and the terrifying struggle between them.

  “Push, Adelie,” the Crone commanded, as her hands made a motion I could not see. “Push.”

  My mother pushed, one last, horrendous cry ripping from her. The Crone lifted something, something still and small, and turned, her eyes gleaming in the shadows of her face. A baby boy lay in her arms, smeared with the blood of birthing, his face slack.