Ghost Fields - Book One of The Fields of Mendhavai Trilogy

Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

The ground shook violently, nearly knocking me off my feet as smoke and the stench of burning flesh and hair choked my belabored breath. In a stumbling run, I tried my best not to tread on the scorched, fallen men, women and beasts, their bodies sinking slowly into the churned up muck of the southeast meadows. Mud sucked at my every step, threatening to pull the filthy boots from my cold feet and the cries of the wounded pierced my ears.

I couldn't focus, couldn't pause. These were my people, and they were being slaughtered before my very eyes. Even young as I was, my heart felt as though it might tear asunder knowing there was so little I could do to help them. If I didn't save myself it would be the end of Raldia. So I ran. I ran with terror nipping at my heals, searing my back with fiery fingers as it tried to stop me.

Flames fell from the sky as if the stars themselves were falling to the earth. Flames of nightmares, conjured by the Navoran Mages. The heavy rains of the monsoon season did nothing to extinguish the spot fires that flared wherever this horrid magic touched the earth.

My sopping wet hair clung to my neck and face, mud dripping into my eyes nearly rendering me blind, else I might have avoided the charred and bloody hand that appeared to reach up from the agitated ground to trip me. I looked down as I flew forward and saw a face blackened beyond recognition, but eyes I knew. "Rinda...," it choked hoarsely as my momentum carried me several footsteps further, and I landed sprawling face first in the blood-soaked mud. Bright red spots danced before my eyes, blocking the pleading face as I forced my tired legs under me. That fiery terror was closing in on me; I was so frightened that my mind refused to recognize the face of the young man that lay dying in the quagmire.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!" I gasped. I couldn't stop, couldn't die. I would not let the flames take me. I gritted my teeth; I wouldn't. The mages had to pay for what they'd done here this night and I had to survive to see to it. Anger surged through me and I felt it create a new energy, a spurring motivation to go on. But before I'd stumbled forward another six steps, gritting my teeth with determination, I heard the whistle of another fireball overhead. I glanced up to find it streaking toward the stand of pines before me, the same trees I had been heading toward for shelter and escape. I stopped in my tracks, wrapped my mud covered arms around the back of my head and dropped to my knees. The stand of trees exploded and everything went black.

I sat up gasping for breath, clutching my damp silk bedclothes to my chest, heart pounding beneath my white-knuckle fists. A bead of sweat trickled down my spine and I shivered. Flopping back to my pillow, I took a deep breath of the clean, crisp air.

"My lady."

If it hadn't been for the urgency in that familiar feminine voice, I doubt it would have pierced the veil of troubled dreams and unhappy memories, a fog that always seemed to take far too long to dissipate. The knowledge of the young man who'd died at my feet that night wrapped itself tightly round my chest. I closed my eyes and sent him yet another thank you, which always seemed to help convince his shade to release its grip so I could breathe again. If he hadn't caught my foot as I'd made my desperate dash for the trees, I'd certainly have died in the conflagration.

"My lady?" Though a question, there was no mistaking the desperation in the whisper that was putting me even more on edge than the dreams had.

A touch on my arm, gentle as it was, had me fully awake in an instant and reaching for the dagger under my pillow. But Corina new better than to make another move, lest the blade slide into her neck before I was aware enough to know who - or what - disturbed my sleep. If she hadn't attempted to wake me verbally first, she might even now be bleeding to death on the thick sheepskin rug beside my bed. It was a sign of how badly I was needed that she'd risked touching me at all, knowing I'd just been in the throes of the nightmare-memories of the night that had left both of us orphaned.