mama bird

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[[[MAMA BIRD->mb1]] A Solstice Hunters Tale By Erin Elise Christopher]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Three years before you are born, a [[plague->mb2]] blisters its way through the Kingdom of Aeverdam.]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Three years before you are born, a plague blisters its way through the Kingdom of Aeverdam. It comes in on the river--in a land walled by brick and iron and a yet unbreakable Curse, the river is the only thing that goes in and out. Still, there are whispers of a hex, of rancorous witches slinging curses from the shadows, casting death upon all who wander past. You will not know the plight of the witches. By the time you arrive in all your pudge and wrinkles, those few with magic will be sacred, revered. Nor will you know of the plague. You will take your first steps in a bright, healthy world, one where the promise of tomorrow is as sure as [[the earth beneath your tottering feet.->mb3]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Your father, Jon, is a scholar of land and sky. Your mother, Roma, is the only physician in your tiny border village of Vohlt. Her magic is the white sort, trained scalpel-fine in healing. Each day, she seals her face in a blackbird mask and sets out for a hospital-barn at the Kingdom's southern lip, where she eases the ill with magic and medicine and an astonishing sum of faith--the sort of faith oft-mistaken for foolishness. As she passes, the guards on the wall call her the Reaper.[[But they will think differently when she saves them, too.->mb4]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[For the large part, the plague spares the children, and yet it also spares the old; Roma’s patients are the field-taming sort, the fishermen, the blacksmiths, the fathers and mothers. There is one mother in particular—slight and dark-haired, barely twenty-five years—who requires frequent healing, her body prone to seizures from the pain. She has a son, Roma knows, but her breath has grown too thin for her to speak of him. Instead, when Roma tells her to be strong for this nameless boy, she offers blood-limned smiles, soft hums that quiver in her swollen throat. Roma calls her the ‘little mother,’ and in her evening prayers, [[she begs the Twelve Sisters to let her live.->mb4-1]] ]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[But when Roma arrives at the barn on the eve of the Summer Solstice, a day so troublingly hot the sky turns the color of a mustard seed, the little mother is on the verge of death. Fresh blisters mar the corners of her lips, sweat glinting like egg whites along her hairline. Even through the mask, Roma can smell her rotting. She lifts the little mother's chin, then pads her fingers down the swell of her glands. Fever scalds through her gloves. “Your locket," Roma whispers, touching the bare red skin beneath the mother's collar. "Did someone steal it?" The little mother raises a weakly clenched fist and unravels it, her locket spilling pendant over chain into Roma's palm. The charm is crooked open: inside, a small pencil sketch of a house with a sagging roof. A request without words. Roma cleans the locket with vinegar and lemon, [[then tucks it into her medicine bag.->mb6]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[By mid-afternoon, the little mother is [[dead--->mb7]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[By mid-afternoon, the little mother is dead-- --and by sunset, she is [[ashes.->mb8]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Roma reaches the locket-house at the last smoky curve of twilight. She raps thrice on the door, and a boy answers. He is no older than nine, no younger than seven, though it's hard to tell when there's a cloth draped across the bridge of his nose. He says his name is Verran, and he asks if his mother is dead. Roma freezes. She has words for many things, for rashes and stomachaches and twenty causes of fever, but none to tell a child he's lost his mother. So she nods, eyes closed, and [[prays the boy will forgive her->mb10]] for not being a better messenger.]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Verran does not cry. He sways a little on his birch-thin legs, then roots himself, his grief pushed like lead weights to the bottom of his feet. He is a strong boy, or at least, he is becoming one. "I was your mother's doctor," Roma explains. She pulls the locket from her medicine bag and drops it in Verran's palms. Dirt shadows the creases of his skin. "I stayed with her right until she died. She sent me here to find you." He runs a thumb over the locket. Cracks it ajar with his nail. Looks up at Roma, a sad shimmer in his eyes. [["Mother gave this to you?"->mb11]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")["Yes, Verran," Roma says. She holds out her hand, ungloved and brown--not a mother's hand, yet, but it will be. "I promised her I'd take care of you, as long as you needed me. And I'd like not to go back on that promise." Verran hesitates. For a moment, he studies her face, the red crescents left by the pressure of her goggles. Her eyes, dark like his own. He sees their sameness and difference, the shared roots that tangle between them and the shapes they make of the air. He takes her hand, and [[she leads him home.->mb13]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Come autumn, Verran has two adopted brothers: twins, Bael and Olean. They're younger, posing a rowdy counter to Verran's shyness, but it isn't long before they rope him into their horseplay. Whenever Roma goes to fetch them for supper, she lingers a while in the threshold of the back door, watching her three boys leapfrog and tussle, then hooks her fingers behind her bottom lip and whistles to call them in. They come towards her in a ruffle of grass and chicken feathers, and though the world is still limp with sickness, she decides [[she has never been happier.->mb14]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[A fierce and sudden frost brings the harvest to an early end. Under the glittering cold, the plague dwindles, only for a springtime drought to bring it back. It's spreading through the bugs, Roma discovers, when a bloodred welt on Jon's neck nearly kills him. She airs a cry to all the Kingdom: sheet your windows, drain your troughs, burn torches packed with marigold and lavender. She saves more lives, this time, but not enough. [[Never enough.->mb15]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Yet somewhere in the din of a Kingdom reawakened, the talk of witches (text-style: "expand")[fades to silence[[...->mb16]]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[...and Roma Corbel, the Reaper of Vohlt, is [[//consecrated.//->mb17]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Three boys come home in the second plague: loud and adventurous Tristan; delicate Siegfried, a survivor, whose dark skin is pockmarked in cream-white scars; Adam, who cannot speak, but crafts his voice in the movements of his hands. It is not until the next winter that your parents have a son of their own flesh. His name is Cyrus, for his father's father. He is blessed with Jon's strong heart and soft, ironbark curls--but his eyes, dark and perceptive, he gets from his mother. In his first months of life, he is entranced by the birds that gather outside his window, like he can hear the secrets in their every bleat and croon. All Roma's children are special, of course, but [[he is one to be watched.->mb18]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[And then, there is [[you.->mb19]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Your blood-mother floats in on a gale of strange autumn snow. Roma cannot see her face--a hood obscures all but the fine point of her chin, the sable curls that tumble over her shoulders--yet she knows by now the signs of a mother who must relinquish her child, the way her body curls like the canopy of a pram, aching to hold on just a little while longer. It is the wind’s baleful howl that makes your blood-mother relent. She holds you out as if you are an offering, a sacrifice for precious faith. There are markings on her fingers and jewels on her knuckles, Roma notices, and the nails that dig at your swaddling are black as pitch. Still, she reaches her arms beneath your blood-mother's, steadying them, and for one brief miracle of a moment, they hold you together, the past and the future, [[the seed and the roots--->mb21]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Your blood-mother floats in on a gale of strange autumn snow. Roma cannot see her face--a hood obscures all but the fine point of her chin, the sable curls that tumble over her shoulders--yet she knows by now the signs of a mother who must relinquish her child, the way her body curls like the canopy of a pram, aching to hold on just a little while longer. It is the wind’s baleful howl that makes her relent. She holds you out as if you are an offering, a sacrifice for precious faith. There are markings on her fingers and jewels on her knuckles, Roma notices, and the nails that dig at your swaddling are black as pitch. Still, she reaches her arms beneath your blood-mother's, steadying them, and for one brief miracle of a moment, they hold you together, the past and the future, the seed and the roots-- --then your blood-mother recedes, the night pooling around her, wrapping her in shadow, until there is only you and the Reaper and [[the waning cry of a raven above the wind.->mb22]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[THE SOLSTICE HUNTERS AN INTERACTIVE NOVEL BY ERIN ELISE CHRISTOPHER ACT ONE COMING DECEMBER 21ST, 2020 [[Read again?->MAMA BIRD]]]

(font: "Garamond") + (text-colour: "#ABD7F7")[Roma rushes you inside and places you beneath the light. Unravels your swaddling. You have no jewels on your fingers, no markings. She runs a thumb along your one swirl of black hair, smoothed to your scalp like a dampened wing. Her touch draws a wrinkle of your nose, a curious flutter of your eyes. They are dark, darker than your hair, darker than a night without stars. Roma sighs in relief. You look enough like Cyrus to pass for your mother's child--but [[she dreads the day you ever learn the truth.->mb-end]]]