Stone and String by Stephanie Flint

Author:Stephanie Flint
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Infinitas Publishing
Published: 2016-09-02T04:00:00+00:00

Bright light burned Edyli’s eyes. Hard rock beneath her—

Air! She gasped for breath, any breath, and stretched her fingers to the sky, flailing, trying to grab what she could not touch. Someone shrieked and there was movement in the corner of her eye. Edyli rolled to her side, crashing through a thick of branches. Wood splintered around her. She collapsed on the stone floor, writhing. Her heart thudded in her chest, irregular, harsh. She blinked tears from her eyes. Then finally—

Precious, sweet air. The fragrance of rosewood and jasmine. She inhaled a deep breath. In. Out. Chest heaving, cold sweat pooling on the back of her neck. The air chilled her bare skin. Something stretched taut inside her. She pressed her hand to her collarbone, then paused.

She no longer wore her choli, but a thin silk wrap that covered her chest and waist. She reached her fingers to the back of her ears and found her hair prickly and short. She turned to face her bed.

Not a bed—a pyre. The stone altar from which she had tumbled, with dry tinder scattered around the floor and beneath her. Bronze sconces hung suspended from the ceiling, wisps of oily smoke rising from the incense. A large round hole opened above her, an escape for the smoke of a funeral pyre.

Her pyre.

She gasped, half-laughing, hysterical. She had almost burned, and then would she have still returned to the mortal realm?

But she was alive!

A bronze-skinned woman in long, silver and black robes of a Madian priestess held her hands palms-forward, as if to ward Edyli away. She narrowed her thin eyebrows into angry arches. “Be la kagiméan vegornis duhan so ma moctra drat la be.”

Make the monster before me speak only truth.

Monster? Edyli blinked. “I am no—” Her voice froze and she choked on her words. Her tongue stuck in her mouth. She stared at the smooth tiles beneath her fingers. She was not a monster, was she?

“Speak your name,” the priestess commanded.

“Edyli Llambaro Inlleku,” she whispered, stunned. She was not being forced to speak, but the words she said… she could not lie, even if she desired to. The woman had used word magic, and as Edyli was only an acolyte in the ways of the practice, she did not have the strength to resist the woman’s focus. She bowed her head. “I am returned from the realm of Madia.”

The priestess took a hesitant step back and called to a man standing behind her. He wore a black sarong and a loose, dark purple shirt that opened at the front, revealing his lean torso. “Bring me a vial of tethvios,” the priestess ordered. The acolyte bowed at the waist, his hands clasped before his head, then hurried under the archway.

“Where is my vera? Where is my sister?” Edyli tried to catch the priestess’s eyes, but the woman refused her gaze. Edyli’s chest tightened, forcing an aching pain to surge, and she flinched.

“What hurts you?” the priestess asked.

“My chest. Something is missing.”

The priestess dipped her head as if that confirmed what she suspected.

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