Sentinelspire - Mark Sehestedt [81]
Lewan grabbed her wrist and tried again. Still she didn't move. Her skin felt chilled, but the room was growing hotter with each breath. Lewan coughed. His eyes were starting to sting and well with tears as smoke filled the room.
"Burn his mother croaked. "Lew! No… burrrr-!"
A large hunk of thatch, blackened and filled with tongues of flame, hit the floor at the bottom of the ladder. The fire began to lick at the wooden ladder, blackening it. More cinders followed, and the sound of the fire overhead became deafening.
Covered in bloody grime, tears running down his cheeks, Lewan stood and stumbled over to the hearth. The black kettle his mother used to prepare their meals still hung over the gray coals. Lewan grabbed the handle and lifted it off the hook. It was heavy. Twelve years old, he was small for his age, and the kettle was made of thick iron. It probably weighed almost a third of what he did.
A fit of coughing grabbed him, and his vision clouded over. The tears flooding his eyes were as much from the smoke in the air as his fear and grief.
Dragging the kettle behind him, he stumbled to where his mother lay in her own blood. She was still trying to speak. One hand reached out for him-and again failed.
Crying like a little baby, Lewan stood over his mother and gripped the iron kettle. Her eyes followed him. She was too weak and in too much pain to smile, but he thought he saw something like relief in her eyes.
Straining, he lifted the heavy iron over his head. His sobbing increased, and he inhaled a great deal of smoke. His lungs constricted and he coughed, almost dropping the kettle. Instead, he used the momentum and threw his strength into it, bringing the heavy iron down on his mother's head.
Over the roar of the flames, over the crackling and popping of the fire catching the timber, even over the screams from outside, Lewan heard the crack of his mother's skull, felt the shock of it go up his arms. The cough and the force of his blow caused him to lose his balance, and he fell. He fell over his mother and felt her limbs give a final spasm. His cheek hit her blood-slick shoulder, and he was close enough to hear her last breath leave her lungs.
Sickened, he pushed himself away, scrabbling through the mud. Still, he hadn't been able to look away.
His mother's forehead caved in-
–the skin broken and bloody-
–bits of bone showing.
Her eyes stared sightless at the ceiling, that last look of relief-the last look his mother had given him-was utterly gone. Her eyes were cold and lifeless as stones.
But then she sat up. Not with the sickening, desperate motions of a woman bleeding to death, but quickly and with purpose, like a sleeper wakened by the knocking of someone at the door. Blood ran down her face, one trickle running through her left eye. But she did not blink, and the eyes that she turned to him were still empty, the only light in them that of reflected flame.
"Lewan," she said, but it was not his mother's voice. Lower, more solemn, and with an underlying timbre that was beyond human.
Lewan tried to step back, to find the door and run. But his feet would not move. His legs were heavy and slow in the way of nightmares.
"You must listen, my son," the voice said through his mother. "Death comes. When death comes for you, you must see clearly. You must not run. You must find your courage."
Lewan looked down. He was not the little boy anymore. He was seventeen, grown tall and with a lean strength from a life in the wild. He stood in the burning house naked, and the muddy symbols of the Oak Father he'd painted on his skin were still wet. They steamed in the hot air.
When he looked up, his mother was standing, her throat still savaged, the crown of her head a ruined mess, mud and worse caking her hair. "I will show you," she said.
She reached with both her hands-hands that had become claws-and grabbed the skin between her bare breasts. The claws dug into the skin