Sweetblade Read online

  Sweetblade

  A stand-alone Heretic Gods novel

  Carol A. Park

  Shattered Soul Books

  Pennsylvania

  Copyright © 2018 by Carol A. Park

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Shattered Soul Books

  2600 Willow Street Pike North

  PMB 259

  Willow Street, PA 17584

  www.carolapark.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cover art/design © 2018 Brit K. Caley

  Interior illustrations © 2018 Andrew Park

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Sweetblade/ Carol A. Park. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN 978-1-7321491-2-0 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-7321491-3-7 (e-book)

  FOR MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS

  Who have suffered or still suffer

  with physical, mental, or emotional pain,

  no matter how “big” or “small,”

  whether I know about it or not.

  You are loved.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Outsider

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Irresponsible

  Chapter Five

  Foolish

  Chapter Six

  Naive

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Imprudent

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Disgraced

  Chapter Eleven

  Unwanted

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Alone

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Culpable

  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

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  I never actually meant to write this book.

  It came out of my struggles with refining the character of Ivana from Banebringer: I ended up having to write part of her backstory to get the character right.

  Once I had gone that far, I figured I might as well flesh it out and turn it into a spin-off novella. 90,000 words later, Sweetblade was a full-length novel. So much for a novella!

  That being said, I’m grateful for those who were part of this process. Without my “production team,” this book would lack polish and visual flourish, so I’m grateful to my editor, Amy McNulty, my cover artist, Brit K. Caley, and my interior illustrator, Andrew Park. I’m blown away, once again, by the atmospheric covers Brit creates, and I’m still giddy about the seventeen (!) progressive chapter icons in Part One.

  My stalwart beta reader, Tam Case, must have read and critiqued three different versions of the manuscript, which is no small order. I’ll also thank Wes Allen for trying, even though life circumstances prevented him from giving detailed feedback this time. He’s the reason that I know some people might find this book just too darn depressing.

  Of course, my husband, Calvin, reads my drafts so many times that he occasionally argues with me about something I changed in a previous draft, forgetting that he advised me to change it last time. He deserves an alpha/beta reading medal of honor!

  I’ll be honest: this was not an easy book for me to write. It’s dark in a way that Banebringer, which has also been called dark, isn’t. Sweetblade might even be called a tragedy when read on its own—which it certainly can be. There is also material that some might find disturbing: most notably, an emotionally abusive relationship and references to/depictions of self-harm.

  The story beyond what I originally wrote gave me fits, yet for some reason I felt compelled to persevere. My final thanks go to all of you who pick up this book and likewise persevere!

  Part One:

  Ivana

  Chapter One

  Ivana huddled against the side of the building, but all it offered was shelter from the wind. The stone wall was cold, shadowed in a narrow alley and thus prevented from soaking in what little warmth it might have gained from the sun.

  Ivana blew into her hands and, from her own place in the shadows, watched the fur-cloaked passersby on the thoroughfare before her. Their heads were tucked down and their hands were shoved into pockets or gathered beneath the warmth of their cloaks as they hurried toward their destinations at the end of a long day—for most, a warm hearth, a hot meal, and a cozy bed.

  Her stomach clenched and she flexed her fingers. She had never expected it to be so cold so early on in the season.

  In retrospect, she should have. Her father had included Setanan geography in her lessons, after all. She knew the cold came sooner than it did at home here in Carradon, the capital of Cadmyr.

  Yet another bad decision in her long line of recent failures. She would have been better off heading south.

  But the thought of staying longer than necessary in Ferehar, the place where everyone she loved had died because of her…

  She shivered and pulled her threadbare cloak around herself, determined to try again. There had to be someone who needed a copyist.

  She tossed up a brief prayer to Temoth, the Conclave’s god of luck—what could it hurt?—and stepped out of the alley onto the main street. A woman with three children trailing behind stopped to read a notice on a community board. Ivana approached her, trying to look as pitiful as possible. She was sure that wasn’t hard; she looked pretty pitiful without even trying.

  “Please, Da,” Ivana said. “I’m looking for work. Do you have any need for a tutor—or even a copyist?”

  The woman spun toward her. “Oh!” she said. Her eyes flicked down over Ivana. “I…No, I’m so sorry.” She averted her eyes and drew her children closer, as if they would be contaminated, and started to move away.

  Ivana bit her lip and swallowed her pride, as she had many times in the weeks prior. “A coin, then?” She held out her hand.

  She didn’t need to work to make it tremble. She had watched how the street urchins squeezed pity out of otherwise unconcerned people—and learned. “It’s so cold, Da.” In silent agreement, her breath puffed out frozen clouds with each word.

  The woman paused. Her gaze darted around the street, and then she plucked a coin from inside her sleeve. She pressed it into Ivana’s hand and hurried off, children in tow, without another glance.

  Ivana touched the coin. A single selma. A sixth of what used to be her monthly allowance. At the tavern back home, it would have bought a mug of steaming cider and a thick slice of warm, buttered bread; here, in the city, she might be able to buy a hot bun from a street vendor in the poorer districts.

  Would it be wiser to save it for a better cloak, or boots, or gloves?

  Her stomach grumbled.

  But that could take weeks, and she was hungry now. Death by starvation now, or death by frostbite later.

  The choices before her weren’t promising.

  “Hey, rat!”

  She spun around. A city guardsman was headed h
er direction. Begging was illegal.

  She curled stiff fingers around the selma and ran—like she always did.

  Ivana may have had no luck obtaining work, but that didn’t mean the day had been without value. She found a street vendor who was trying, at the end of the working day, to get rid of the remainder of the buns he had made, and she purchased two for the cost of one. She began devouring the first one as she headed back to the space she had claimed in one of the slums, in an abandoned alley that no one seemed to want.

  The stone wall she slept against must have had a furnace on the other side because the wall was always warm rather than cold to the touch. As a bonus, the house at the end of the alley kept a lantern hanging outside most nights, providing enough light to keep her sane.

  It had been hard to find that spot. The others guarded their spaces like they had bought and paid for them, and they didn’t trust her yet. Every once in a while a beggar would be willing to share their garbage fire for a night.

  All that being true, she could hardly believe she was the first one to stumble across such an ideal location, which could only mean there was something else wrong with it she was too inexperienced to know about—or perhaps that her mind was too numb with cold to work out.

  So she had managed to claim it—at least until someone stronger than her ousted her.

  It wouldn’t take long for that to happen.

  Sure enough, when she arrived at her stretch of wall, she was disappointed to see a human-shaped shadow disappearing into the dark end of the alley. It seemed her spot had been found. She waited to be challenged, but no one stepped forward.

  Instead, a voice spoke from behind her—from the lit end of the alley. “Whatcha got there, girl?”

  Damn. She shoved the rest of the half-eaten bun in her mouth and clutched the other to her chest before turning to face the newcomer. “Moffin,” she mumbled around the bread.

  The man leered at her. “Sneaky lil’ sprite,” he drawled. “How about you hand over the other, and I’ll let you alone?”

  She eyed him. His cloak was tattered around the edges but intact, and his gloves had holes, but, burning skies, at least he had gloves. If he wanted that bun, he’d have to pry it out from between her teeth.

  “Go to the abyss.” She swallowed the remnants of the first bun and stuffed the second, whole, in her mouth.

  Anger flashed across his face, and all at once the gravity of miscalculation hit her. This wasn’t another beggar trying to pinch her food. He was drunk, and he was itching for the excuse she had just given him to expend his pent-up aggression.

  She hadn’t known it was possible for her to feel colder than she already did. But it was.

  He lurched toward her, and she lunged out of his reach, but he caught the edge of her thin cloak. He yanked her down to the ground, and she scrabbled against the hard stone to push herself upright as he dragged her back to himself. She strained against the strangling hold of the cloak around her throat, fumbling with cold-numbed fingers to release the simple pin that held the cloak together.

  Never had she hoped that the cloak would rip, but she did then.

  It didn’t.

  She struggled in vain as he turned her around and yanked her to her feet so he could breathe his hot, liquor-drenched breath into her face. “You think you’re better than me, eh? You deserve that more than me?” She opened her mouth to scream, but he backhanded her cheek, and the sound died as a sob wrenched from her throat. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. No one would come to her aid even if they heard her.

  She flailed in time to her racing heart, hoping for a stroke of the luck that had abandoned her.

  He fought to wrest her thrashing body under his control, bruising her arms and wrists in the process, and he was winning.

  So finally, in a last-ditch effort to at least gain enough distance and control to be able to ram her knee into his groin, she dug her heels into the ground and pitched all her weight back against his grasp, forcing him to try to yank her back with all his own strength—and then went limp.

  The sudden release of the tension caused him to stumble backward.

  And then, it happened: Temoth looked upon her with favor once more.

  The man’s heel caught on something. He tripped, and as he lost his balance, he let go of her—and fell backward.

  She staggered away, regaining her own balance, and prepared to run…

  Until she noticed that he wasn’t moving.

  She froze. What…?

  His eyes were frozen in wide-eyed astonishment, and no breath formed in the air in front of his parted lips. Her heart still hammering, she crept closer.

  A jagged stone stuck out from the side of the wall near where he lay, and the end of the stone was smeared with a dark substance. After a moment of hesitation, she rolled the man over. His hair was wet and matted. She touched the back of his head with a trembling hand and turned her fingers in the light.

  Blood.

  Burning skies, I killed him! Her recently devoured hot buns rose in her throat on a tide of acid.

  She swallowed hard, determined to keep the little food she had where it belonged.

  Her mind raced, and the thought flipped over into a new light. I killed him!

  She hadn’t done it on purpose, of course, but no one would care that it had been an accident, or that she had acted in self-defense. If they found her here with a body, the consequence would be worse than being hustled off to a workhouse for begging.

  She frantically wiped the blood off her fingers onto the man’s own clothes and ran.

  A week later, huddled against a less friendly wall, she was cursing herself. Why hadn’t she stolen his gloves, his cloak—his shirt even? It wasn’t as if the march of guards had been imminent. For that matter, he might have had coins in his pocket.

  She still wasn’t thinking enough like one of them. That was why she was barely surviving.

  It was a bitter irony that her exceptional education was apparently useless to her now.

  She dragged a finger through the grit on the ground, starting to trace the Xambrian word for cold, and then thought better of it and drew her hand back under her cloak.

  The weather had turned even more bitter this week. Her fingers and toes were growing numb as the temperature had fallen along with the night. The cold seeped into her so thoroughly that she could even forget the hollow ache in her stomach for a time.

  How did the others manage it? If she didn’t find somewhere warmer to sleep, she would die out here, for sure, sooner or later.

  She touched the pocket of her trousers, where her sister’s necklace had traveled with her all these months. It might buy her gloves and food for a week. And she would still be shivering on the streets.

  She clenched her fist together and pulled the necklace into her lap. A last resort.

  When she thought she couldn’t bear it anymore—were the workhouses so bad, really?—light flooded her corner of the world.

  She blinked, eyes watering against the suddenness of it.

  “Are you cold?” a male voice said from above her—presumably the person holding the lantern. She couldn’t see any more than that blinding light.

  She shrank back against the wall, the memory of what had happened the last time a man had spoken to her still too fresh in her mind, and then she sprang to the side and half-ran, half-stumbled down the alley. She put as much distance between him and her as fast as her frozen body would allow before realizing that he wasn’t following her.

  She turned a corner, stopped, and pressed herself back against the wall. She didn’t hear any footsteps. Indeed, he hadn’t even made an attempt to grab at her.

  Another few moments passed with no sign of pursuit, so she peered around the corner.

  The alley was dark.

  She closed her eyes and breathed out in relief.

  She heard nothing. No scrape of a boot against the stones. No rustle of fabric. Not even the soft whisper of breath.

  Bu
t the darkness within her eyelids lessened. She opened her eyes. Light spilled forward, casting her own shadow and that of someone else on the ground in front of her.

  Her heart thudded double-time as she dared to turn. The same man stood behind her, this time closer.

  Where in the abyss had he come from?

  He made no move toward her, spoke no other words. Just stared at her, holding that same blinding light. She crept backward, as if there were some insane chance he hadn’t noticed her, until she was out of his reach. Then she turned and fled again. This time, she ran for longer.

  She finally stumbled to a halt, hands on her knees, breath coming in short, misty gasps in the cold night air. She sank back against another wall to wait for her heart to slow but kept her eyes wide open this time. She strained her eyes to catch any sliver of the yellow light, but only the half-lidded moon in the sky above illuminated the alley.

  At last, she was convinced that she had lost him. She straightened up again, turned—

  And ran right into the man, who had snuck up behind her in the darkness, his lantern now shielded.

  She recoiled, but he grabbed her arm and held her fast—though he made no further move to thwart another escape attempt.

  Instead, he flipped over her arm and forced her frozen fingers open. He ran his gloved thumb over the fingertips.

  The burst of energy that fear had given her drained away and immobilized her instead. She was now unable to do anything else but watch him as he caressed her fingers as though they—her fingers—were a long-lost lover.

  Finally, he dropped her hand. He unshielded the lantern and she flinched back from the light once more.

  She squinted at him. “Who are you?” she managed to squeeze through her chattering jaw, though her lips were so cold it came out more like, “Huahyu?”

  “Are you cold?” he asked once again.

  What in the abyss? Was he mocking her? “Of course I’m cold,” she answered at last.