Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman

[marianne]

Blood Ties
written by Pamela Freeman
published by Hachette Livre

This extract is copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission from the author.


Pamela Freeman is an award-winning writer for children and young adults and recently released Blood Ties, Book 1 of the Castings Trilogy, an epic fantasy for adults. Pamela has worked as an organisational communications consultant, technical writer, scriptwriter and writer for the Internet. As a consultant, she worked widely with law enforcement organisations to improve the treatment of officers who came forward to report corruption. She has worked also as a scriptwriter for the ABC and the PowerHouse Museum, and taught communications and creative writing at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales. She is a Doctor of Creative Arts (UTS).

Pamela was born in Parramatta, NSW, and grew up in Rydalmere, in Sydney’s western suburbs. She now lives in an inner-city suburb of Sydney with her husband and young son.

[marianne]

The Stonecaster’s Story



THE DESIRE TO KNOW the future gnaws at our bones. That is
where it started, and might have ended, years ago.

I had cast the stones, seeing their faces flick over and fall: Death,
Love, Murder, Treachery, Hope. We are a treacherous people – half of
our stones show betrayal and violence and death from those close, death
from those far away. It is not so with other peoples. I have seen other
sets of stones that show only natural disasters: death from sickness, from
age, the pain of a broken heart, loss in childbirth. And those stones are
more than half full with pleasure and joy and plain, solid warnings like
‘You reap what you sow’ and ‘Victory is not the same as satisfaction’.
Of course, we live in a land taken by force, by battle and murder and
invasion. It is not so surprising, perhaps, that our stones reflect our history.
So. I cast the stones again, wondering. How much of our future
do we call to ourselves through this scrying? How much of it do we
make happen because the stones give us a pattern to fulfil?
I have seen the stones cast too many times to doubt them. When
I see Murder in the stones, I know someone will die. But would they
have died without my foretelling? Perhaps merely saying the word,
even in a whisper, brings the thought to the surface of a mind, allows
the mind to shape it, give it substance, when otherwise it might have
remained nothing more than vague murmurings, easily ignored.
Death recurred again and again in my castings that night. I did not
ask whose. Perhaps it was mine, perhaps not. I had no one left to lose,
and therefore did not fear to lose myself.

There was someone at the door, breathing heavily outside, afraid
to come in. But he did, as they always do, driven by love or fear or
greed or pain, or simple curiosity, a desire to giggle with friends.
This one came in shyly: young, eighteen or nineteen, brown hair,
green trousers and blue boots. He squatted across the cloth from me
with the ease of near-childhood. I held out my left hand, searching his
face. He had hazel eyes, but the shape of his face showed he had old
blood, from the people who lived in this land before the landtaken,
the invasion. There was old pain, too, old anger stoked up high.
He knew what to do. He spat in his own palm, a palm criss-crossed
by scars, as though it had been cut many times, and clapped it to mine.
I held him tightly and reached for the pouch with my right hand. He
was strong enough to stay silent as I dug in the pouch for five stones
and threw them across the cloth between us. He was even strong
enough not to follow their fall with his eyes, to hold my gaze until I
nodded at him and looked down.
He saw it in my face.
‘Bad?’
I nodded. One by one I touched the stones lying face-up. ‘Death.
Bereavement. Chaos. This is the surface. This is what all will see.’
Delicately I turned the other two stones over. ‘Revenge and Rejoicing.
This is what is hidden.’ An odd mixture, one I had never before seen.
He brooded over them, not asking anything more. The stones did
not speak to me as they often do; all I could tell him were their names.
It seemed to be enough for him.
‘You know what this refers to?’ I asked.
He nodded, absently, staring at Rejoicing. He let go of my hand
and slid smoothly to his feet, then tugged some coins out of a pocket
and let them fall on the rug.
‘My thanks, stonecaster.’ Then he was gone.
Who was I to set Death on the march? I know my stones by their
feel, even in the darkness of the pouch. I could have fumbled and selected
him a happy dream: Love Requited, Troubles Over, Patience. I could
have soothed the anger in his eyes, the pain in his heart.
But who am I to cheat the stones?
After he left, I cast them again. This time, Death did not appear.
She had gone out the door with the young one and his scars.

[marianne]

Saker



SAKER REMEMBERED the first time he had tried to raise the dead. It was the night after Freite, the enchanter, had finally died. By then he had been her apprentice for thirteen long years, but only in the last two had she shared any real secrets with him, and only then because he had threatened to leave her if she withheld.
Freite had wept for her great age and his refusal to any longer give his power for her extended life. She had no more to offer him. He had learnt everything she had to teach of her Wind City magic, and it had not included pity, or generosity. So he refused to touch her in her extremity, knowing she would drain the power out of him to give herself another day, another week, a month if she were lucky ...She had died cursing him, but he was cursed already, so he disregarded it.
After she was buried, the Voice of Whitehaven had pronounced Freite’s bequests and he had found that her house had passed into his hands, along with her savings, which were much greater than he had imagined. So there he was, rich but without a plan. He had gone to the stonecaster to find out what the gods wanted him to do next. And the stonecaster had sent him out the door with Revenge and Rejoicing awaiting him.
That first time, he hadn’t even known he needed the actual bones for the spell to work. The enchanter had told him half-truths, half-spells, trying to hoard her knowledge as though it could ward off death. Saker knew, certain sure, nothing kept Death away for good. That Lady tapped everyone on the shoulder, sooner or later. But sometimes, just sometimes, she could be tricked.
He raised the black stone knife level with his palm, forcing his hand not to shake. This must work. Now, finally, he had the means, seven years since the stonecaster had set him on his path . . .
‘I am Saker, son of Alder and Linnet of the village of Cliffhaven. I seek justice.’
He began to shake with memory, with yearning, sorrow, righteous rage. There lay the strength of his spell. He touched the never-closing wound in his mind, drew on the pain and set it to work. The rest of the spell wasn’t in words, but in memories, complex and distressing: colours, phrases of music, a particular scent, the sound of a scream . . .
When he had gathered them all he looked down at his father’s bones on the table, his father’s skull staring emptily. He pressed the knife to his palm then drew it down hard. The blood surged out in time with his heart and splashed in gouts on the chalk-white bones.
‘Alder,’ he said. ‘Arise.’