Six Scorched Roses （Crowns of Nyaxia, #1.5）
Carissa Broadbent
CHAPTER ONE
The first time I met death, it was in my first breaths—or rather, the first breaths I didn’t take. I was born too small, too sickly, too quiet. My father used to say that he’d never heard such a silence as when I was born—several terrible minutes in which no one said a word—and that when I finally started to wail, he’d never been so grateful to hear a scream.
Death never left, though. That became clear quickly, even before anyone wanted to acknowledge it.
The truth came the second time I met death, eight years later, when my sister was born. She, unlike me, screamed from the moment she came into the world. My mother, on the other hand, went forever silent.
My father had been right. There was nothing worse than that kind of silence.
And it was in that horrible soundlessness, as I stifled my coughs and my tears with the back of my hand, that the healer gave me a strange look. Later, after my mother’s funeral, he would pull me aside.
“How long has your breathing been that way?” he would ask.
Death always followed me, you see.
It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t have long to live. In the beginning, they tried to hide this from me. But I’d always liked knowing things. I was bad at reading people, but I was good at understanding science. I knew death even before I could name it.
But the third time I met death, it hadn’t come for me.
It was given to the town of Adcova like a silk blanket, settling slowly over our lives, placed there by one of the gods themselves.
Here’s the thing about the God of Abundance. Abundance wears many faces. The god of plenty is also the god of decay. There can be no life without death, no feast without famine.
Like all the other gods, Vitarus is a fickle and emotional being. The difference between excess and absence a mere whim of his moods. Entire lives—entire towns—made or unmade by a thoughtless wave of his hand.
For a long time, Vitarus smiled upon Adcova. We were a flourishing farm town, nestled in a fertile patch of land. We worshipped all the gods of the White Pantheon, but Vitarus was the god of the farmer, and so he was our favored deity. For a long time, he treated us well.
That changed slowly, in the beginning. One spoiled crop, then two. Weeks and then months of nothing. Then, one day, it changed all at once.
You can feel it in the air when a god is nearby. I felt it that day. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling and could have sworn I smelled the smoke of funeral pyres.
I went outside. It was cold, my breath coming in little puffs of white. I was fifteen, but looked younger. My body shook. I was very thin, no matter how much I ate. Death stole every mouthful, you see, and it had been especially hungry lately.
To this day, I’m not sure why I went to the door. I was confused at first by what I was looking at. I thought my father was working in the fields, his form hunched and crouched in the dirt. But instead of the sea of greenery around him, there was only withered brown, coated with the wet, deadly sheen of frost.
I had never been good at seeing the things that people didn’t say. But even then, as a child, I knew that my father was broken. He clutched fistfuls of dead crops in his hands, sagging over them like lost hope.
“Fa?” I called out.
He looked over his shoulder at me. I pulled my shawl tighter around myself and shivered, despite the beads of sweat on my forehead. I couldn’t stop the shaking.
He looked at me the same way that he looked at those dead crops. Like I was the corpse of a dream, buried in everything he couldn’t save.
“Go back inside,” he said.
I almost didn’t.
For years, I would wish that I hadn’t.
But how was I supposed to know that my father was about to curse a god that would curse us back?
That’s when the plague came. My father was the first to go. The rest, slower. Years passed, and Adcova withered like the crops in the field that morning my father had damned us all.
It’s strange to watch the world wither around you. I had always put such stock in knowing things. Even the things that can’t be known—the power of a god, the actions of a cruel unfair fate—have a defined edge to them, a pattern that I could pull apart.
I learned everything about the illness. I learned how it stole breath from lungs and blood from veins, how it reduced skin to layers and layers of fine dust until there was nothing left but rotting muscle. Yet, there was always something more there, something I couldn’t ever really understand. Not truly.
So much lived in that gap—the gap between the things I knew and the things I didn’t. So much died there. No matter how many medicines I brewed or remedies I tested.
The gap had teeth like the vampires across the sea. Teeth sharp enough to eat us all alive.
Five years passed, ten, fifteen. More people grew sick.
The disease came for all of us in the end.
CHAPTER TWO
I always kept my workspace clean, but I took care to make it extra organized that evening. Beneath the waning light of sunset, which splashed bloody pink over my desk, I carefully sorted my notes and instruments. Everything was in its perfect place when I was done. Even a stranger could have sat down at my table and resumed my work. I figured this was practical, just in case I didn’t come back. I was expendable, but the work wasn’t.
I surveyed my handiwork with a critical eye, then went out to the greenhouse. It wasn’t a very pretty place—full not with colorful flowers but instead spiny leaves and vines stuffed into glass jars. Not much wanted to grow here these days. Only one little piece of beauty glinted in the back, beyond the door that led to the fields. Once, when I was very young, these fields were full of crops. Now, only one patch of dirt flourished—a cluster of rosebushes, black flowers perched upon emerald leaves, each petal outlined in a shock of red.
I carefully clipped a single flower, tucked it into my bag with special care, then went to the yard.
Mina was sitting in the sun. It was warm, but she kept a blanket over her lap anyway. She turned to me and squinted into the waning light, looking at my bag. “Where are you going?”
“Errands,” I said.
She frowned. She saw through the lie.
I paused beside her for a moment—observing the darkness under her delicate fingernails, the heaviness of her breathing. Observing most of all the fine coating of flesh-colored dust that settled over the chair and her blanket. Her very skin abandoning her, as death crept closer.
I put my hand on my sister’s shoulder, and for a moment I considered telling her that I loved her.
I didn’t say it, of course.
If I did that, she would know where I was going and try to stop me. Besides, a word was useless compared to what I was about to do. I could show my love in medicine and math and science. I couldn’t show it to her in an embrace—and what good would a thing like that do, anyway?
Besides, if I hugged her, maybe I wouldn’t be able to let her go.
“Lilith—” she started.
“I’ll be back soon,” I said.
By the time I reached the doors, I was panting and sweating. I paused at the doorstep, taking a moment to collect myself. I didn’t want whatever was about to greet me to see me looking like a mangy dog. I glanced over my shoulder, down the dozens of marble steps I had just scaled, and into the forest beyond. My town was not visible from here. It had been a long, long walk.