Wrapped Up In The Naga Commander

Chapter 1

Christina

The sky splits first, a seam of white fire tearing across the clouds, and then the screaming starts.

I'm halfway between the well and the Aldren house when the first bolt hits, not lightning, not really, because lightning doesn't crawl sideways through the air like something hunting. It strikes the granary roof and the thatch goes up orange, and I'm already running before I decide to run, my bare feet slapping mud, my heart slamming so hard I taste it.

I don't know if I'm causing this. I never know, not until afterward, not until I count the bodies and the wreckage and try to remember if I was angry, if I was scared, if I felt that old itch behind my sternum right before the world cracked open.

A woman is screaming inside the granary. I can hear her through the smoke, a high thin sound that doesn't even sound like words anymore.

I go to the door and it's barred from the outside, the bar swollen and stuck from last week's rain, and I claw at it until my fingers split, and then something in me just — gives. Heat floods down my arms and into my hands and the wood doesn't burn, it just falls apart, ash sliding through the gaps like sand. The woman stumbles out coughing, soot-streaked, and behind her two children, and I'm pulling them clear when the roof comes down where they'd been standing a breath ago.

She looks at me. Right at me. And I watch the gratitude curdle into something else before she even opens her mouth.

"It's her," she says, not to me, to everyone, to the street full of people stumbling out of their homes with washbasins and wet blankets, useless against fire that climbs sideways and burns blue at the edges. "It's her, she did this."

"I didn't—" The words die because another bolt forks down two houses over, and the ground itself seems to flinch, a low groan running through the earth like something underneath is turning over in its sleep.

I should run. I know I should run. Instead I'm crouched over Angela Pell's youngest, pulling a beam off his chest, feeling the wood splinter under my palms with that same terrible ease, the same heat pooling in me like I've swallowed a coal. He's breathing. He's breathing and his leg is wrong, bent somewhere it shouldn't bend, and I don't have time to be careful so I just lift, and the beam groans and rolls away, and somewhere behind me someone is shouting my name like a curse word.

"Christina May." Old Hask, the smith, his face black with soot, a hay fork held in front of him like it could do anything against what's happening above our heads. "You brought this down on us."

"I'm trying to help. Hask, I'm trying—"

"Every time." A woman I don't recognize, clutching a baby, backing away from me like I'm the storm myself. "Every time something burns, you're standing in the middle of it."

I want to scream that I didn't ask for this, that I have spent eleven years swallowing my own fear because fear is what wakes the thing inside me, that I have slept in the root cellar during storms since I was seven years old because thunder makes my skin crawl with a feeling like ants under the surface, and that feeling always, always comes before the disaster.

But explaining requires time, and the crowd is not interested in time. I am standing in the wreckage with my hands still glowing faint silver at the fingertips, and I am the only reason anyone needs.

Tomas pushes through the crowd, and for one stupid heartbeat I think he's coming to stand beside me, the way he used to when I was small and the other children threw stones at the witch-girl. My uncle. The closest thing I have to a father since mine died chasing a debt he couldn't pay.

"Christina." His voice is rough, his eyes won't quite meet mine. "You need to go."

"Tom—"

"Go now, girl, before they decide for you."

Behind him, someone is already shouting for rope. Someone else for the trackers, the men who hunt wolves and worse out past the tree line, men who know how to follow a trail through brush and bog. I hear Hask's voice rising above the rest, organizing, the way he organizes a barn-raising or a hog slaughter, except this time the thing to be slaughtered is me.

The granary roof finally collapses with a sound like a giant exhaling, and sparks roll up into the black sky, and somewhere a woman is sobbing over a body that didn't move fast enough, and I understand, all at once and completely, that whatever I do next, however many people I save, it will never be enough to outweigh the fact of what I am.

I run.

I don't look back at the village, though I can feel it behind me, the heat of it pressing against my spine like a hand. I run past the fence line, past Old Mill Creek swollen black with reflected fire, into the tree line where the trackers' dogs will pick up my scent within the hour, maybe less. My lungs burn. My legs burn. The itch under my sternum hasn't faded; if anything it's worse, a low building pressure like a held breath, and I am terrified that if I stop, even for a moment, even to catch my breath against a tree, something else will happen. Something worse.

So I don't stop.

Branches claw at my arms, my hair catches and tears free, and somewhere behind me I hear the first dog bay, a long mournful note that means they're already moving, already certain.

I think of Angela Pell's son, his leg bent wrong, his chest rising and falling under my hands, and I think: I did that right, at least. Whatever else I am, whatever else they decide I am, I pulled him out alive.

It isn't enough to stop running. It never is.

The forest swallows me whole, and somewhere behind the black trunks, the glow of my village burning lights the underside of the clouds like a second, dying sunset.