Saebrya

Saebrya hesitated over the bejeweled cradle and glanced at the door to make sure she was alone. After several moments with no sound in the hall of the inn, she hastily returned her attention to the blonde baby within. It panted up at her, its ice-blue Vethyle eyes unmistakable even at its tender age, its face sweaty and trembling.

Like the rest of the royal Vethyle family that had arrived in the village earlier that week, the baby’s skin oozed a glowing golden liquid that welled up within its cradle and dribbled down the sides, spattering the wooden floor.

It was the sipper that bothered Saebrya, however.

Unlike the smallish ones that congregated under the cradle, feeding at the amber droplets coalescing on the floor, a giant sipper shared the child’s cradle with it, the sipper’s size and shape unlike anything Saebrya had seen before. Its faceted black eyes stared back at her from its perch on the child’s chest, its fangs buried deep within its belly. The rest of the creature’s segmented body was wrapped around the child in a stranglehold, almost seven feet of snakelike length.

Beneath it, the baby was struggling to breathe.

Saebrya took another look at the door. She had spent her life avoiding the sippers, but this one was killing the child.

She heard laughter from the inn’s great room, where the Vethyle hunting party was sharing after-dinner stories over drink. All the footsteps seemed to belong to servers rushing back and forth to refill the royals’ wine, none in the adjacent hall outside.

Satisfied no one was close enough to see her touch a royal child, Saebrya reached into the cradle and grabbed the sipper’s prickly tail, wincing at the way the spines drew blood when it tried to jerk away. Holding tight against its thrashing, Saebrya began the struggle of unwrapping its hard, prickly length from around the baby’s body.

A shadow in the doorway interrupted her.

Preceding it came a trickle of ether, coating the floor in molten yellow rivulets.

Saebrya froze, the sipper only half unwrapped from the baby, its fangs still solidly sunk into its abdomen. She met Auldin Cyriaca’s startled white-blue eyes and her heart began to hammer. Hurriedly, Saebrya pinned down the baby’s feet with her own and she tried to unravel the rest of the snakelike sipper anyway.

A pulsing golden vein shot from the Auldin’s stomach and coalesced into an ethereal hand that grabbed Saebrya by the throat. Before Saebrya could finish removing the sipper from the child’s chest, Cyriaca threw her into the wall behind the cradle.

“How dare you?!” the Auldin screamed, rushing into the room to pluck the baby girl from her gemmed cradle. The baby gasped and coughed as the sipper re-wrapped itself around the baby’s torso under the mother’s oblivious care.

Once Auldin Cyriaca ascertained that her baby was not harmed, the woman’s eyes returned to where Saebrya choked against the wall. “So you want to touch royalty, you filthy cur?”

Saebrya saw a second golden artery shoot outward and mingle with the flood of ether on the floor. In desperation, Saebrya knifed her hand down through the ether that held her, cutting the pulsing vein cleanly in half. The ghostly golden hand shattered into a thousand glowing droplets, spattering the floor and her clothes. As Cyriaca’s eyes went wide, Saebrya twisted, threw open the window, and crawled outside.

Hitting the ground outside the inn on her hands and knees, Saebrya leapt up and bolted for the forest. “Help!” Auldin Cyriaca screamed out the window behind her. “That cur attacked my baby!” Then Saebrya was hurtling through the woods, splashing glowing turquoise droplets from the leaves and trees across her chest and legs as she fled through the underbrush.

She stopped near the river and bent over, gasping. What had she been thinking? A royal auldling? Was she insane?

Then she remembered the black faceted eyes of the sipper as it sucked the golden flow from the baby’s body in pulses of its segmented core, taking away the baby’s life-energies as it grew ever-larger. Saebrya shuddered.

“Gotcha!” Adult hands wrenched her shoulder as a big man in riding leather spun her around. “So, what did you steal from my pretty niece? A necklace?”

Saebrya looked up at her attacker and gasped. It was the only Auld in the Vethyle party with silver essence, the one they called Rhydderch. And, close up for the first time, she saw that he had two faces. The outer one, the one that her physical eyes could see, had the tanned skin, blue eyes, and blond hair of a Vethyle. The inner one, the one wrapped from sight by a veil of silver ether, had pale white skin, freckles, green eyes, and curly black hair.

Surrounding the man was an ethereal blanket, one that strained and dripped with the silver energy ballooning inside. Beside him, a lanky brown dog sat on the ground, watching her. From the sheer amount of silver ether smeared over it, it took Saebrya a moment to decide if it was a sipper or a real dog. Its eyes weren’t glowing, so she decided it was real.

“You can’t be more than seven,” Rhydderch said, crossing his arms to glare down at her. “A little young to be going to the hangman’s noose, aren’t you?”

Saebrya bit her lip, but didn’t try to explain herself—that always ended in beatings and getting thrown in the river. She glanced at her feet, hoping if she played dumb, he would leave her alone. She knew better than to run from a royal man’s dog.

“I can make you talk, child.” The man’s dual faces looked amused. As he spoke, he raised a hand and a silver artery snaked out from his stomach to wrap around her throat. Eyes widening in panic, Saebrya chopped her hand through it as she had with the Auldin’s.

As his silver energy melted away, the Auld flinched and grabbed his head, looking stunned. Saebrya stumbled backwards, knees trembling in terror. Never before had she come close to an Auld, and tonight, she had assaulted two of them.

The royal Auld remained where he stood, the strange bag of energy around him dripping silver ether onto the forest floor like a water-logged blanket. “Do you know what you just did?” the Auld asked softly.

Saebrya’s heart pounded so hard she didn’t hear him. “Why do you have two faces?” she whispered.

The Auld’s breath caught. “What?”

As they stood there, neither moving, neither speaking, shouting voices warned of the villagers’ approach. Terror taking hold, Saebrya fled.

Behind her, the Auld called back his dog.

#

The villagers had given up the chase. Saebrya could hear their voices, fading into the distance. She collapsed against the trunk of the tree that held her, finally allowing herself to breathe.

Still, the silence made Saebrya feel no better. Eventually, she would have to return to beg more food from the village goodwives, and she could imagine the beating she would receive for being caught with the Auldin’s babe.

Glancing up at the verdant cathedral around her, she pretended that the wrenching hunger pains were cramps from being too full. She imagined a great feast, her father seated with her mother and brothers, everyone telling jokes and laughing as they ate.

It only made her cry.

Saebrya climbed higher in the tree, reveling in the brilliant green light dripping from the leaf-tips around her. It was almost enough to distract her from thoughts of food.

She reached out to collect a glowing emerald droplet upon her fingertip. It had just started to soak into the grooves and whorls of her fingerprint when an arm-length sipper suddenly slipped from the branch above her, dropped onto her shoulder and crawled down her shirt. Saebrya screamed and flailed, feeling the hundreds of tiny ethereal feet marching upon her stomach and feathery feelers brushing her abdomen.

As she was pulling her shirt off in a panic, she lost her footing on the branch.

Saebrya’s last thought as she slid from the canopy arrived upon a wave of fear and depression.

Once again, no one was going to believe her.

#

A child’s hand, slightly larger than her own, was prodding her arm.

Saebrya groaned and tried to sit up. As soon as she moved, however, her leg burst into a searing heat that threatened to thrust her back into darkness. She cried out and froze, terror taking hold that she couldn’t flee.

Before, she’d always been able to run. It was the only reason Eurig and his friends hadn’t managed to throw her down the well outside the inn only days ago—she was fast.

Cringing, she turned to look at her attacker.

Upon seeing his face, Saebrya had to hold back a scream of dismay. It wasn’t Eurig or his cronies. It was something much worse. Ryan. The one the sippers liked to eat. The whole reason the creatures congregated in such numbers in the village.

Seeing her awake, Ryan moved back to give her space. The motion caused a wave of silver ether to spill out of his body, spattering her head and chest, the substance soaking into her skin and clothes like rain upon dry wood. She could feel it there, an itching, too-warm sensation that made her think of toes regaining feeling after going white with cold. Saebrya frantically swiped the stuff away from her, cleaning herself of all that she could, casting it to the forest floor in spatters.

Ryan watched this, saying nothing. Silver ether continued to trickle out of his every curve and corner, running in rivulets from his chin, his hands, his elbows, his knees, several magnitudes more intensely than the Vethyle Auldin. It was coming so fast that it was beginning to build up on the ground, pooling in the undergrowth around him, making food for sippers.

“Please,” Saebrya said, terrified of him, terrified of the sippers. “Please go away.”

Ryan frowned at her. His look said, I knew you were weird, but now I know you’re crazy. All he said was, “Your leg is broken.”

“I know,” Saebrya said. “Please go away.”

“I’ll carry you back to the village.”

“No!” Saebrya gasped. Her eyes were fixed on Ryan’s face, where a segmented, many-legged sipper was crawling across his ear while he watched her, unaware. Other sippers were gathering around the silver ether puddling around his feet, pulling it into their bodies with insect-like mandibles.

As the smaller sippers fed, bigger sippers moved in and snatched them away, crunching their bodies between nightmarish jaws. One of the bigger ones perched only inches from Ryan’s left hand, its long, snaggletooth mouth rending and tearing one of the centipede sippers apart as it devoured it.

Ryan continued to look at her, unaware of the monster only inches from his fingers.

“I don’t need help,” Saebrya whispered, seeing that the centipede sipper had wandered across Ryan’s eye and stayed there, blocking the crystal green iris from her sight as it bowed and swayed, drinking in the silver ether that poured from Ryan’s body with every breath. “Please just go.”

But Ryan didn’t leave. Instead, more silver ether poured from him as he leaned forward, grabbed her arm, and hefted her over his shoulder. “I’m taking you back,” he said. “Hold on.”

Saebrya blacked out.

A splash of goosebumps spattered her skin. Saebrya groaned and opened her eyes. She let out a startled cry when she saw who was leaning over her bed.

“My mom put your leg in a splint and had me carry you home,” Ryan said. “She didn’t want anyone to see you at the inn. Auldin Cyriaca’s still angry.” He watched her for a long time. “Why were you with her baby? They say you were trying to kill it.”

Saebrya looked around. She was in her own room, with her own bed and her own door, still scarred by the fire. Above, the roof was an open black maw, charcoal timbers gnawing at the sky. She saw no one lurking in the corners, no golden trickles of ether flowing through the cracks from the outside as Vethyles listened to her confession. Just Ryan, his waves of silver, and his entourage of sippers.

“I don’t think you were trying to hurt it,” Ryan offered.

She looked back at him with a frown. “Of course I wasn’t.”

“So what were you doing?” Ryan insisted. “I saw you crawl out the window with your hands all bloody.”

Saebrya said nothing. The very first lesson she had learned about the sippers had been to never mention them.

“How did you know where I live?”

Ryan winced. “I’ve followed you. Uh. Before.” He looked down, blushing, before returning his gaze tentatively to her face. Saebrya felt her body prickle with goosebumps under that green stare, and quickly looked away. She’d learned long ago that the villagers didn’t like it when the little ‘forest freak’ looked them in the eyes.

All around him, a flood of molten silver liquid swirled in little eddies on the floor. It had built up around them almost a foot deep, and when she looked closer, spatters of silver speckled the walls and bed, with a concentration around the splint on her leg.

He’s been watching me awhile, Saebrya realized, unnerved. Still, she did not allow him to pressure her into speaking. She waited, staring at the sippers crawling across her floor, silent. As the silence drew on, she wondered what he wanted. She willed him to get up and leave her there. This close to Ryan—and correspondingly, all of the sippers that congregated around him—she’d never been so nervous in her life.

Ryan cleared his throat—nervously?—and twisted behind him to lift a silver-smeared handkerchief from the floor at his back. In the process, waves of ether sloshed around him, disturbing an army of sippers, forcing them to retreat to the walls. “Hungry?” he asked.

Saebrya’s gaze locked on the handkerchief and she nodded, despite herself.

“Me too.” He gave her a tentative grin. “Ma packed enough food for both of us. I figure we could have dinner together?” He set the handkerchief on his knee—out of reach, yet in a place where she could see it. Silver rivulets ran down his elbow and speckled the mass of beetle-like sippers that once more clustered around him as he stilled.

Saebrya glared at him, wondering where the trick was hidden. There was always a trick. Even the goodwives, when they gave her scraps, smacked her upside the head when she reached for their offerings too quickly.

Ryan adjusted his seat on the leaf-strewn floor, splashing the bed with silver. Once he was comfortable, he began unwrapping the package of food balanced on his knee. It was roast beef and cheese, and it made her stomach growl.

He stopped and lowered his hands once the food was clearly visible. Saebrya stiffened. Here comes the trick.

“What’s wrong with you?” Ryan asked.

He asked it matter-of-factly, and Saebrya knew he wasn’t talking about her leg. Under his curious look, Saebrya began to get uncomfortable. The sippers on the floor were beginning to take refuge on her bed in order to get a better angle at the ether below. She inched away from them, as far away as her splinted leg would allow.

When she did not respond, Ryan decided to try a different tack. “Why do you always look at me funny?”

“I look at everyone funny,” Saebrya said, eying the food.

“I know. But me especially. Every time I try to say hi, you run away.”

Because you’re crawling with sippers, she wanted to yell, and you brought them to my home. She even started to sit up, to scream it at him in frustration, but the tiny movement jostled her leg and she bit her lip.

Ryan lowered his elbows to her bed, getting too close for her comfort. As she strained to get away from the dribbles of molten silver, Ryan rested his head in his hands, watching her. “So what’s wrong with you?”

The centipede sipper had moved away from his face and had burrowed into his hair, its little feathered antennae swaying in a rhythm matching his breathing. Saebrya stared at it, terrified it would jump onto her.

“Like right now.” Ryan leaned forward and molten silver began to dribble from his nose, spattering her hand. “What are you looking at?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” she muttered.

Yet, to her amazement, Saebrya found she wanted to tell him. More than anything, she wanted to tell him what she saw.

“Go on.” He said it so gently, like she was a wild wolf he was trying to befriend. The idea made her stomach twist. She was nobody’s wolf. She had nobody she could trust. Every offering was poisoned. She thought about telling him to leave.

But her insides were at war. She hated being alone. She hated not having anyone to tell of the things she saw.

Saebrya turned her head to the side. In doing so, she found her eyes level with the big sipper that had torn apart the centipede back in the forest, when she had fallen from her tree. It had followed Ryan and now it watched her from atop her soot-stained quilt, its green eyes burning like small fires within its skull as it tried to determine if she was edible. Its toothy jaws were only inches from her ear, and they could tear her face apart just as easily as they could tear apart the sippers. She froze, waiting for it to nip at her, to test her.

The snaggletooth sipper skittered back to the floor, looking for smaller prey. Saebrya let out a shuddering breath of relief. The ones with the glowing eyes were…different…than the insect ones. Scarier. More dangerous. Then she realized Ryan was still watching her and glanced up, unnerved. The centipede was back, this time crawling over his other cheekbone.

“I see things,” she whispered, her eyes fixed to his face.

“Like...?” He seemed genuinely interested. Still, Saebrya was wary. She had been tricked before. Poisoned before.

“Like bugs...but not.” She hesitated, judging his reaction.

“You see one right now?” he asked.

She nodded. The centipede was crawling toward his mouth.

“Where?”

Hesitantly, Saebrya reached up and plucked the sipper from his face. As it was curling to bite her, she flung it aside, where it landed in the swirling silver ether that was rolling off of Ryan and flowing out the door of her room. The ether rose in puffy splash around the centipede, then swallowed it.

When Saebrya glanced back, Ryan’s look was torn. “There was something on my face?”

She nodded, slowly.

He frowned at her. “Is that why you’re so scared of me?”

Immediately, Saebrya stiffened. “I’m not scared of you.”

“Really?” He reached for her, his hand crawling with sippers. Saebrya yanked her arm away. Ryan gave her a smug look.

“I’m scared of the sippers,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “Not you.”

“Sippers?” His smugness dissipated, now that he had made his point. “The bugs?”

She nodded. “You’ve got them all over you.” Her voice was quiet, and she automatically glanced around to make sure no one had heard, even though she knew there was no one for miles. Her survival instincts were warring with her desire to tell someone of her secret world, and her human-starved side was winning. “You carry them around with you.”

This seemed to get under Ryan’s skin. “You see things on me?”

She nodded again. “Eating you.”

He paled. Then he went red. Then he paled again. “Really?”

Saebrya nodded.

“I don’t feel anything,” he said, his voice a nervous whisper as he brushed his skin with his palms. The sippers remained firmly in place, his hands passing right through them as he flung ether across the room with his motions.

“They don’t eat you,” Saebrya admitted. “They eat what’s coming out of you.”

Ryan shifted, then analyzed the way she shied away from the silver ether dripping from his face and chest. “So what’s coming out of me?” he asked.

Saebrya didn’t know. “Water.”

“Water?”

Again, she had so few words with which to explain. Helplessly, she said, “There’s a lot more of it coming out of you than anyone else in the village.”

“More than my mom?” Ryan seemed dubious. Lost.

Even more than the Vethyles, Saebrya thought, but she didn’t say it. She had been observing the lot of them from afar ever since the first day their gold-dripping hunters had arrived in the village. Aside from the silver-dripping Auld who led the hunts with his dogs, all the other Vethyles dribbled gold. Compared to Ryan, their ether dripped in muted flow—a golden trickle as compared to a silver flood. Whereas it had taken all the Vethyles several days to fill the inn with their ether, Ryan filled it in a couple hours each night, as he slept with his mother in the proprietor’s loft upstairs.

Often, Saebrya would come to the village at night just to watch it overflow his window and ripple down the wooden siding of the inn in a glowing, silvery flood. As she sat there under the moon and stars, she would watch the silvery fluid pool in the horse trough beneath the window and then patter the ground below. Saebrya imagined herself to be seated in a fancy mansion, watching a rich man’s fountain.

She was drawn to Ryan’s fountain on these nights because it was the only thing that could distract her from the hunger. Sometimes, in desperation, she would even catch and eat the sippers that gathered at its base to feed, crunching their shells with her teeth, their sharp edges making her gums bleed. Then, her hunger satiated by that miserable meal, she would flee at dawn, before the villagers could see her.

“You make a lot more of it than your mom,” Saebrya said again. Then, emboldened by his rapt attention, Saebrya continued, “Your mom’s drips are blue, and she’ll maybe release a dozen drops in a day, like a tree. You have buckets of silver slopping out of you every minute. The sippers follow you everywhere.”

Even now, her skin was crawling as his entourage spread throughout her room. Hundreds of them had climbed a few feet up her walls and were using their newfound vantage points to sip up the ether flowing from Ryan’s body, pooling on the floor below.

Ryan said nothing for some time, measuring her with impossibly green eyes. “Can you show me a sipper?”

Saebrya considered. Reluctantly, after a moment’s deliberation, she reached out and plucked one of the sippers from his arm. It had a sharp, three-inch-long dorsal spine. She held it up between them, its jointed legs kicking feebly at her fingers. “See this?”

“No.”

Saebrya held out her hand, palm-up. “It’s got a big spine on its back. Watch my palm.”

When Ryan’s eyes dropped to her outstretched hand, she pressed the sipper’s dorsal spine into the meat of her palm. Ryan frowned, leaning forward as the indentation appeared in her hand. Saebrya pushed the spine into her palm until blood welled up around it, then tossed the sipper aside and clenched her fist.

Ryan stared at the blood squeezing between her fingers. He said nothing for some time, watching the scarlet substance bead and slowly drip onto the covers, mingling with the silver ether that was accumulating there. “How do I know you didn’t prick yourself with a needle?”

Saebrya’s face hardened. “Did you see a needle?” she demanded.

“No,” Ryan said.

She frowned at him a moment, then grudgingly pried another sipper from his skin and held it up between them as it wriggled, trying to bite her with jagged mandibles.

“Squeeze my fingers with yours, like you’re pinching them together,” she ordered.

Ryan frowned, but reached out and complied.

He squeezed—and together their fingers crunched through the sipper’s exoskeleton. Ryan felt the sudden give and he recoiled. “What was that?”

“A sipper,” she said.

His eyes widened until she could see the whites all around. “And it was on me?”

“They’re always on you,” she said. “You’re food to them.”

Saebrya knew this was the point where he laughed in her face and went off to tell the villagers of the crazy little girl squatting in the burned-out woodcutter’s hut.

Instead, Ryan shifted, then laughed when she shied away from the silver spatters that followed. “I just splashed you, didn’t I?”

She stared at him, stunned that his tone wasn’t laced with ridicule. She nodded, wiping it from her arm.

Ryan eyed her reaction. “Do the splashes hurt?”

“They prickle,” Saebrya said. “Like when your foot falls asleep.”

“But it doesn’t hurt,” he insisted.

“No,” she said.

“Huh.” Ryan grinned at her, then flicked his hand and laughed when she lurched back, startled by the silver droplets that hit her face.

Mixed emotions clashed within her as Saebrya stared at Ryan. No one had played with her since her brothers had died. The other children’s parents always chased her off. Like she was infected and it was contagious. She found she could only stare back stupidly in reply.

“Tell you what, Saeby,” Ryan said, leaning close again. “You keep the bugs away from me and I’ll keep the other kids away from you.”

Saebrya’s breath caught and her eyes burned as she considered the last time the village kids had captured her near the river. They were going to drown her until Ryan had chased them off.

“Deal,” she whispered.

“Can you hurry? I think I can feel them now.”

Saebrya knew he couldn’t, but she complied. Ryan squished the interlopers with her, reveling in the way her fingers sometimes wouldn’t give at all. Those sippers were usually the beetle types, and she flicked them across the room, hoping they didn’t find their way back.

When at last she had picked him clean, Ryan retrieved the handkerchief from where it sat on his leg and offered it to her. Saebrya broke off a piece of beef before handing the package back. They ate together in silence, sealing the pact.

“So what were you doing with the Vethyle baby?” Ryan asked, after they had eaten.

Instantly, Saebrya’s guard went back up. “I saw a big sipper on it,” she said. “I was trying to get it off.”

Ryan stared at her for a moment before he softly said, “They think the little girl is going to die. Cyriaca Vethyle is blaming you.”

“But she was sick before I ever saw her!”

“I know,” Ryan said. “But the Vethyles can say what they want. They had hunters out looking for you, when I left.”

Saebrya looked away, biting her lip. Accused of killing an Auldin’s child? If she could walk, she would have left right then, and wouldn’t have stopped until she was deep inside the green sanctuary of the Idorion. Hampered by her leg, however, she knew she wouldn’t get out the front door, let alone far enough to evade their horses.

“You said they think it’ll die?” she asked quietly.

“If it isn’t dead already,” Ryan said. “Saebrya, you need to get away from here. I can carry you to the river—”

“No,” Saebrya interrupted. “Take me back to the village.”