The Vixen Trials

Scum Beneath Your Feet

"If you want to live,
you must take charge."

Keliah

Dakkoul knocked her sword away with his forearm, slashing his skin. Blood leaked onto the floor as he went and knelt beside her mother's bed. "I didn't know it was you they wanted me to kill."

Keilah scrambled to sit beside him, glowering and watching his hands, her blood smeared sword still ready. Her mother started to reply, choked and then stilled. Her face went limp.

"She's dead," Dakkoul shouted to the soldiers who were jammed into the front room of the cottage. Keilah reached out to hold her mother, but Dakkoul pushed her behind the curtain that sectioned off her room from her mother's. He stood in front of it, still carrying his dagger with a firm grip, and her eyes were drawn to it. The Dakkoul she'd known had refused to squash a hairy, thin-limbed camo spider he'd found crawling on his leg. This was not him.

A voice called out, "Heave up," and she went straight to the slit between the wall and the curtain to see the soldiers carrying out her mother, flat and high at shoulder height. She was draped with white cloth, embroidered with her family's fire snake crest. The men started to chant, a low sound at first, but it swelled and grew in volume, a catchy rhythm despite its mournful edge. Keilah realized with a shock that they were honoring her, even though she was a renegade Wayvolkan Lady whom they had come to dispatch.

The cottage emptied. Dakkoul turned to her. Keilah tightened her grip on her sword, and raised her eyes to his, afraid of what she might see. His hazel eyes bored into hers. She widened her gaze to take in the rest of his face. There was a lingering trace of boyishness in the curve of his cheek, but the dark clipped bristles on his chin were those of a man.

"Those eyes, Keilah. I never realized...they're going to save you now."

She fought her usual instinct to shield them. One eye was the brilliant blue of the morpho butterfly, the other a lighter blue that matched the tourmaline necklace her mother hid in her wooden chest along with all the other trappings of her former life. She secretly thought they were both pretty but no one else did. "Save me? Ma said I should hide them."

"She was wrong," Dakkoul said, standing so close to her, a warmth rose in her cheeks. "Do you have anything to put on to make you look like a Lady?"

He sounded so urgent, she bent straight down to open the wooden chest that contained her mother's cloak with its cape of arctic fox fur and hood of golden silk. As the final touch, she added the tourmaline necklace.

Dakkoul nodded his approval, then said, "Your hair, Keilah, I must fix it." He pulled the ribbon out of her low ponytail then ran his fingers through her white-blonde hair to smooth it, before dexterously taking strands of hair and weaving them into a pattern she could not follow in the fog of her grief. His fingers touching her hair made her head tingle.

In her confusion, she blurted out, "You're a hairdresser now?"

"I always did my Ma's hair, remember?"

"No," she said, picturing his Ma's charcoal-black tresses that went all the way to her hips, often worn in complicated braids. "You laced all those pretty ribbons, and you didn't tell me?"

"I was a bit shy about it, back then." He pulled her hair tight into a top knot. "I liked matching the colors."

"Is that why the ribbons were often orange? I did wonder about that." She stilled. "Someone's coming."

Dakkoul hissed into her ear. "Remember how you always used to imagine you were a queen? If you want to live, you must take charge. You must demand to be taken to your grandmother, or failing that, the Prince himself. You are a Wayvolkan Lady and Fox-blessed. We soldiers and slaves are scum beneath your feet."