The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) by Emily June Street Read Free Book Online Page A

center. The crackling wood punctuated the low voices of the people Esteriaq had collected to hear me. My head spun with the memory of my mother’s inebriated storytellings that I had dreamed of so often. I had to pull myself together.
    “Why have you have come here?” Esteriaq faced me.
    “The Cedna is selected from the Ikniqs; traditionally she lives amongst you. That was the way of it for generation upon generation. I shall live again with you. I have decided.”
    The sea of Ikniq gazes flashed with wariness or disbelief.
    “The Kaluqs would not have sent you to us,” Esteriaq said flatly.
    “It is not for them to decide. I am the Cedna. They killed my mother.” This final sentence slipped out of my mouth inadvertently.
    A startled hiss ran through the audience.
    “What do you mean?” Esteriaq’s eyes were like blackstone shards.
    “I saw,” I whispered. “They drowned her.”
    A dead silence followed. The Ikniqs understood the significance of what I said. If the killing had been a proper ritual, if it had been tunixajiq, a Cedna would be killed via bloodletting. Drowning my mother was a profane act.
    “They drowned her,” Esteriaq said.
    I met her gaze, and a flash of memory, not my own, rippled through my mind. Esteriaq had been my mother’s friend. They had stood together to watch Ronin Entila step down from his metal-hulled ship and take his first step onto Gantean ice.
    Esteriaq’s youthful voice whispered through my mind: You must not go, Miseliq. Wait for the others.
    And my mother’s stubborn reply: I will go to him now. Look, he does not know how to cross the ice safely. He needs help.
    My mother had raced across the floe to take Ronin Entila’s hand, to guide him to land, sealing her own fate when his warm hand enclosed hers. Ganteans viewed matters of the heart differently than sayantaq southerners. We were not a passionate people; we were raised to make choices reasoned through the logic of need and practicality. The Elders selected the Cedna’s mate, and she mated for life like all Ganteans. We permitted none of the emotional turmoil the southerners courted with their many lovers, their divorces, their flirtations. Only sayantaq believed that love could fall out of the sky like rain.
    The unexpected rain of love had fallen on my mother when she had laughed at Ronin Entila as he scrambled across the treacherous ice.
    “I do not understand.” Esteriaq brought me back to the present.
    “My mother’s death was not tunixajiq,” I bit out. “It was murder.”
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    I wanted the Ikniq people to rally around me; I had returned to win their support. In the end, they gave it to me not because of my mother’s murder, but because they feared sayantaq raiders. News about the deadly raid on the Kaluq camp had spread, and it left the Ikniqs worried.
    The Entilan raids hit hard on the west side of the island in spring and summer when the Gantean sea was passable. Though the Kaluqs had seen only the one raid whose aftermath I had witnessed, the other clans lived in constant fear of Entilan raiders during the warm season.
    At Ikniq nightfires, the fear spread. As summer lengthened the days, news of more raids in the Shringar and Tuq territories traveled to us.
    “News from Umaq,” Atanurat whispered to me as we lounged after a nightfire. Some of the Ikniq fisher-fathers had journeyed south in pursuit of a pod of whales, and they had just returned.
    “What news?” I did not bother to quiet my voice.
    “Another raid on the Shringars. Seven children taken. Five men killed. The Shringars might move their entire clan north and inland.”
    “But those are Tuq lands.” Clans did not encroach on each other’s territory. Those boundaries were as fixed as the paths of the stars.
    “They are desperate; they have nowhere else to go. Shringars live on the shore, exposed everywhere to the raiders,” Atanurat said.
    I shook my head. “We must do more to protect the shores, no matter what Ikselian thinks.