Chapter 4

“It’s time! It’s time!” Llanio shouted. She was an energetic orphaned eight-year-old who’d become attached at the hip to Alyanna during their time spent among the Lumo. Her eyes were filled with excitement as she ran to the fields where Cearth labored.

“Cearth! Cearth! Cearth! The baby is coming! Hurry up!” she said with a beaming smile.

“Now?” he asked.

“Yes now!” Llanio responded.

“Like right now?!”

Llanio rolled her eyes and nodded. Men.

“She’s delivering now?!”

“I just said that! Are you gonna follow me or what?”

Cearth nodded and smiled like an idiot. He took the young girl’s hand and followed the excited child to the birthing hut.

*****

“Breathe and push! Breathe and push!” The middle-aged healer, Mboka, said softly.

Alyanna laid on her back, her features twisting in pain with each breath.

“I’m here!” Cearth shouted as he barreled into the room. His eyes were filled with terror and wonder as he took in the scene.

“Come here!” Alyanna cried to him.

Cearth crossed the room and dropped to his knees beside her. He grasped her hands and grimaced as she squeezed tightly with each agonizing contraction.

“Can I talk to you?” the healer asked quietly, placing a hand on Cearth’s shoulder.

“It’s nothing, the healer just wants a quick talk. She probably just wants to advise me how to best help you,” Cearth said, answering the question in Alyanna’s eyes.

Letting go of her hands, he strode into one of the three rooms in the hut and immediately asked what the healer wanted of him.

“I need you to let your wife die,” the healer told him bluntly.

“You want me to WHAT?!” he hissed, barely restraining his building rage.

“Be quiet and listen to me Cearth!” the healer commanded him, eyes as hard as granite. “The chief and the elders of our tribe want you and your wife dead! They’ve commanded me to poison both of you. They want your child for their own. They want to use him—yes, it’s a boy—as a tool. They want you two dead so they can own the power that your child carries. They’ve been blinded by power and that’s why I need you and your wife to die.”

Cearth leaned in, waiting on her explanation.

Mboka laid out the situation, explaining how she’d sworn to carry out the heinous act but found that she couldn’t.

“I’ll need you and your wife to drink this poison. It slows your heart rates down enough to make it nearly undetectable,” she said. She carefully handed the small clay vial of poison to Cearth. “Mix it in with the water and drink it. I can assure you we’re being watched and I need you to do this.”

Alyanna let out an agonized cry “Cearth! Where are you?”

“No, I still need you to listen to me,” the older healer said, blocking him with an outstretched hand as he tried to step past her. “You two will take the poison, but you are to take it after your wife so you can watch her die. Then you’ll try and fight your way free of the hut. In the struggle you’ll knock over the table of candles and burn this place down,” the healer commanded Cearth.

He nodded.

“What about other totems?” Cearth asked.

“That’s what the poison is for. It won’t be much, but it’ll fool them for the few minutes that’s needed to allow me and my assistant to set up the rest of your escape…” Mboka explained the rest of the plan to him.

*****

“He’s beautiful!” Alyanna said in wonder, holding her infant for the first time.

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“He’s got your hair,” Cearth replied, tears in his eyes.

“Yes, but look at his eyes! They’re pure green. Just like yours!” Alyanna laughed. “What’s his name?” She asked her husband.

“We’ll call him Kai’Lacth,” Cearth said. “You already know Kai means love in your language, and Lacth means “unites” in Abrax.” The red headed man took the infant in his hands and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Your father loves you and will do anything to keep you safe,” he whispered into his child’s ear.

“Here,” he said, handing Kai’Lacth to the healer.

He turned to Alyanna “Do you trust me?” he asked her.

“Of course I do, I’ve already trusted my life to you,” she replied.

“Then drink this,” he said, handing her the small clay water vessel.

She quickly emptied it into her parched mouth. “What’s happening? I can’t see anything!” She cried out moments later.

“You’ll be okay. Darling, please trust me,” Cearth whispered. He stood up he and brushed her cheek before swallowing his own portion of the poison.

“What have you done!?” Alyanna heard him shout, his voice far away.

Was she dying?

Cearth lashed out and knocked over a table full of candles as he tried to hit the healer’s assistant, yelling curses as before he fell to the ground, comatose.

*****

“We must move quickly,” Mboka commanded her young assistant. “Help me with his feet!” she cried as loud as she dared too, straining to be heard over the cackling of the fire. Armlia grabbed Cearth’s feet and helped drag him out.

As soon as they had him out of sight, hidden besides his wife, Mboka sent her apprentice running for the chief’s large stone hut.

“It’s done my chieftain, but there’s been a complication!” she shouted, unceremoniously bursting through the doorway.

“What do you mean, there’s been a complication?” his voice was icy and his glare enough to cause the strongest to wither.

“The Abrax man, Cearth, discovered the poison and in his violent fit before death took him, he knocked over some of the healer’s light. The hut caught fire, we were only able to save the child. Nothing else,” she stated, just as she’d rehearsed hundreds of times, praying that the old man wouldn’t catch the quivering in her voice and his white eyes would miss the tremor in her legs.

“Guide me there young lady,” he said, stretching his arm out for assistance.

“Yes Chief,” Armlia responded.

They arrived at the burning birthing hut minutes later. The building was outside of the village. It was not a far walk, but they were hindered by the older man’s buckling gait. For that Armlia voiced a silent prayer of thanks. Every lost moment was a better chance for their plan to work.

“We’re here,” she said as they arrived at the smoking mess.

“And you say that they are dead inside there do you Mboka?” the chief asked, turning his unsettling eyes to the middle aged healer who’d appeared in front of their leader.

“Yes, he put up a fight, but it was useless. He’d already drank the poison,” she swore to her leader. “He is dead and the child is ours.”

“If only that were true,” the elder said. Venom dripped from his words. They were encircled by the group of warriors that’d been in hiding from the moment Alyanna had went into labor.

“I’ve had you watched since the day I gave you the order to kill them. I knew that you couldn’t do it, but the poison you’d give them to fake their deaths would make it possible for me to have them killed without a fight. It’s too bad thought. I wish I didn’t need to have you killed, but you made it unavoidable. Just tell me where the child is, and I’ll make sure yours is a swift death,” the chief said. His voice was soulless.

“You will never find him D’wana!” Mboka spat at his feet, shocking the guards by speaking his nearly forgotten name. It was the worst disrespect one could show a Lumo chief.

“Kill her.” the chief commanded. “We will find the child soon enough without her.”

The short bows were drawn and dozens of arrows pierced the healer. At the same time, the brood snakes she’d been sharing her mind with attacked the circle of warriors. One pierced the chief’s foot. It pumped him full of deadly toxins that caused him to fall to the ground, writhing as the venom coursed through his blood, making his muscles violently spasm.

Mboka smiled.

“The child will be safe. Now flee!” she whispered to Armlia as her spirit departed her body.

With tears in her eyes, the young assistant fled the field of writhing bodies, eventually finding her way to the panther’s den where the child Llanio hid with the infant.

A midnight black panther stood guard over the two.

“It’s okay. It’s me, Armlia,” she said as she approached the wary beast.

“Where is aunty Mboka?” Llanio’s voice trembled in fear.

“She is with the Great King of the Sky now,” Armlia replied. Silent tears fell from her eyes. “Come quickly, Cearth and Alyanna are waiting for us. They say we’ll be heading northwest to the great mountains of the Tong kingdom.” she whispered to the young child, forcing herself to keep her voice from breaking.

*****

“Here’s to Mboka.” Alyanna said. “To whose bravery and selflessness we owe our lives. If not for her and her plan, we would all be dead. We are forever in her debt.” Alyanna carved a beautiful Ashkani poem reserved only for the greatest fallen heroes into the beautiful oak tree that Cearth had made grow in the healer’s honor.

Mboka had sacrificed everything to save their small family. She was a true hero. Alyanna swore she’d never let Mboka’s name be forgotten.

“It was only because of you two and her that we’re alive now. You are the bravest people we’ve ever known,” Cearth said, taking the two Lumo girls into his arms. He hugged them tightly. “If you and Mboka hadn’t have told us of their plans and helped us, little Kai would never know his family,” he said said to Armlia. “And you, Llanio protected Kai with your life. You’re forever our family.”

“I know that you can never go back home, but know this. We didn’t only have a son, but we also gained two daughters.” Alyanna cried bittersweet tears, joining their embrace and kissing each of them on the forehead.

“We have a long and dangerous road ahead of us,” Cearth said. “We’ll be hunted and condemned, but love made us a family, and we’re bonded by more than blood. We are one in spirit. So I say come what may. We’ll have love and truth always by our sides guiding our steps. And though the dark will always fight against it, love and truth will always win, no matter the darkness that surrounds.”

The End.