Deathless Read online

  Table of Contents

  Legal Page

  Title Page

  Book Description

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  New Excerpt

  About the Author

  Publisher Page

  Deathless

  ISBN # 978-1-78651-393-9

  ©Copyright Belinda Burke 2016

  Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright March 2016

  Edited by Jennifer Douglas

  Pride Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Pride Publishing.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Pride Publishing. Unauthorised or restricted acts in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2016 by Pride Publishing, Newland House, The Point, Weaver Road, Lincoln, LN6 3QN

  Pride Publishing is a subsidiary of Totally Entwined Group Limited.

  DEATHLESS

  Belinda Burke

  Sweeter than strawberry, darker than blackberry, better than please.

  Son of the Wood God, son of a mortal woman, Myrddin has lived a carefree life for sixty years. Now, with his mother dead, the wilderness that has sustained him is an overflowing well of powers he can no longer control. Sent by his father to seek someone who can help him, the one Myrddin finds is a nameless stranger, whom he calls Kas.

  Kas, so named, is still what his nature demands he be. He is Death—its essence and its king…its master, and its open gate. Since the first death that came into this world, he has been alone, essential and solitary—until Myrddin. For his sake, Kas aids in building the Rite of Spring, and in the process learns love…and loneliness.

  Between life and death, want and need, there is just enough space for a new beginning. The question is how it continues—and whether it ends.

  Dedication

  For Stella

  “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”

  – Edgar Allan Poe

  Chapter One

  The nights were growing chill, but the change of the autumn foliage had turned the river valley into a sea of flames. Leaves fell like sparks, browned the underbrush and bared the branches of the wood, but not only the canopy was failing. On a bier in the open, breathing slowly and quietly, Myrddin’s mother, the old chief’s daughter, lay dying.

  “Mother, you can’t go!”

  “Oh, it’s time. It’s past time, Myrddin. Look at you, my little shoot. You don’t change any more, but you’ve grown, and your mother is old and only a woman. Now is my time.”

  Myrddin gripped her fingers tightly. The lines of her face were smooth, but worn, and her hand was limp in his grasp. The only brightness left in her was in the green shimmer of her gaze. Already he could feel her slipping away.

  He supposed he should be grateful it was happening now, at the end of autumn, and not when he’d already begun his winter sleep. But how could he be? Grateful. He could have hated it—her dying—if she didn’t look so much like she was letting go of something heavy that she’d carried for far too long.

  It was still agonizing to watch.

  Why did death have to come so gently? Like a fall of rain—like falling asleep after making love. Myrddin could have hated it, except that she welcomed its coming.

  “You’re going where I can’t follow, Mother. I won’t have anyone if you…when you die.”

  She laughed, or at least she made a sound that was something like it, and he winced. “You have to learn to let go. Let it be. We’re all mortal, aren’t we? Yes, all of us but you. And you…my son, if you can’t learn to let us go, you’ll have no companion but pain, and that’s…not…what I wanted for you.”

  “Mother…”

  Red leaves fell onto the furs that covered her, then mingled with her hair as she tried to lift her head. One descended lightly into the spread-open fingers of her unclasped hand, and she smiled. “You’ll have to learn. You will, won’t you? Promise me you will.”

  “I…promise.”

  “Good boy. Now, let them bring me where I want to go.”

  Myrddin lifted his gaze. Her bearers were already waiting around them, their eyes averted from the final parting of mother and son. “Mother. You don’t have to do this. What good is it to just—”

  “I want to die where it began. That’s all. For you, and for me. Won’t you come with me? I won’t make a journey in this world again.”

  He stared at her, almost shook his head, then squeezed her fingers and let go. “I’ll be watching. I can’t… I’ll just…be watching.”

  She sighed, reached up and patted his cheek with her free hand, and the bearers came forward and took up her bier with careful hands. His mother’s fingers slipped out of Myrddin’s grip, and he stepped back, and back, watched her go into the forest then turned and fled up the side of the valley. The sun was setting, and the evening came full of swallowing shadows that he followed along the ridge above the crest of the valley.

  He couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear it, but he was equally incapable of avoiding it, of denying her or leaving her behind. Even at a distance, even in darkness, he could see the cortege accompanying his mother’s body, heard the wails of the tribe’s women as they fell in line behind. He wanted to go to her, stand with her, wait until the end, but he couldn’t do it. Not this.

  As he thought it, the wind moved, a sudden hush of gusts that nearly blew him over. It was only then, forced out of his grief, that Myrddin felt the oncoming tide. Power was flowing around him, the green whispering. The wildlife was growing awake, aware, and the blood of his father inside him, the immortal link that connected Myrddin to the growing and greening of the world, pulsed alive.

  The whisper rose through the wood until it was a roar among the leaves, a howl in the throats of wolves. The sudden baying of stags mingled with a thousand fluted melodies as the birds scattered from the trees, and the trees bowed, bent, rolled their shoulders and tossed their heads with no need for the wind.

  Still, the wind was rising, carrying whispers and roars, howls and birds. Awake! Wild spirits of the spring sped past Myrddin, not focused on him, not paying him any attention, and he closed his eyes but couldn’t close his mind to the message. Awake! He comes, He comes.

  Myrddin didn’t need to wonder who. There was only one reason for this much excitement in the wild. My father is coming and why? Now? When it’s too late for him to do anything. A flush of rage replaced his grief, but it was rage tempered by truth and sense. His mother had been an offering since before he was born. That had been the reason why he was born. She had belonged to his father from the moment she had chosen to give herself as a gift to the God.

  I was just the result, not the fulfillment. My mother, but she belongs to Father as she has always done.

  There had never been any doubt about his father. His mother had been taken, and given a child, and returned…and he was that child, bound to the spring as much as to the mortal world—or more, maybe.

  Immo
rtal powers were stronger. Immortal purposes were more demanding than anything but death, and Myrddin remembered his birth—remembered his first year as well as yesterday.

  By the end of his first summer, dressed in a loincloth of leather and painted with the brown mud of the forest, he had toddled behind the hunting men. By the end of his first autumn, he’d been strong and straight enough of limb to walk with them. He’d had the look of a boy of ten years, though he couldn’t yet count even one, but he had carried no weapon and only clung to the edges of their sight.

  It hadn’t been their prey that he was after, only the wilderness that ran before their footsteps…until autumn had ended, and the first snow had begun to fall.

  Snow. Timeless and endless and white, it had fascinated him, then made him irresistibly drowsy. He’d gone to his mother and spoken his first words.

  “Mother, I’m tired.”

  “Then sleep, dear one. Sleep…”

  And then, and every year since, her lullaby had gentled him into the dark. He had slept through the winter and its whiteness, the long, cold months. Only his mother had never been surprised. Like the spring shoots, he had grown and blossomed with the passing of the seasons. She had thought it only natural that winter was time for him to sleep.

  “But there won’t be anyone to sing me to sleep this year.”

  The flush of anger at his father gave way to grief again, and Myrddin looked up and saw that his mother and the villagers who followed her had almost passed out of sight. He caught up quickly, with the feeling he was stepping in his father’s footsteps as he crossed the ridge line back down toward the floor of the valley.

  The procession wound through the trees, bringing his mother one final time through the wood she loved. Myrddin stopped when it stopped, and stood still, arrested in place for no reason he could explain. It felt wrong to move forward, though he could sense his mother’s death coming for her, walking toward her. It was here, in the wood! On the path—in the clearing—right in front of him…

  A silence the likes of which Myrddin had never experienced came crashing down.

  He tried to take another step forward, but the air was heavy, liquid and too thick to move through. In the same instant, Myrddin saw a shadow dart from the forest with the speed of a fleeing beast, the speed of a predator following. He saw a moment in which darkness lay itself like a shroud of shadow over his mother, a shadow the shade of the forest canopy at night.

  Then, color flowed into the dark. His father. The God was green, green and growing as the vivid earth, green as the forest leaves, and He was brown, as the eyes of the stag and the pelt of the stag, and His eyes were black as the rich, turned earth of spring.

  “Father… What…are you doing?”

  The words fell heavy as stones from Myrddin’s mouth and disturbed the silence, but not the frozen moment. He took a breath and held it as his father bent and lifted his mother in his arms.

  “And now it is time for you to come with me.” His father’s voice did not disturb anything, nor his mother’s, as it came just after.

  “Is this what dying is?”

  Myrddin heard his father laughing.

  “Yes. No.”

  The world snapped open and shut.

  * * * *

  The tribe was in a furor, shouting and crying, confused over what had happened to the vanished body they had been carrying. Listening carefully, Myrddin learned that the reunion he’d witnessed had been nothing more than a single moment of stillness for them, just a flicker in time. Once, he would have laughed at their confusion, but tonight it only accented his own difference.

  He retreated alone to the round, thatched silence of his mother’s empty hut. It was the last night of autumn, and as he’d done every year on this night for sixty years, Myrddin readied himself for his long sleep. This time, as he did so, he wondered. What was he meant to be, or do, remaining as he did, alone now, unchanged in a changing world?

  Sixty years more, and no one living would remember who he was or where he had come from. Another sixty after that and his name would gain less notice than a ghost.

  Even if I choose to stay with them and be with them, they’ll die too, all these mortals. Still. Where else could he go? He had never bothered with building his own place outside the tribe. He had always returned here, to his mother’s place. The world and its silences were friendly to him, and in spring he could never keep himself from the wild, the heart of the wood, but what of every other time? What about the winters? What about his hibernation?

  Sleep.

  If he closed his eyes, he thought he should be able to taste it already, coming for him with the moonrise, but he lay alone in the dark and remembered instead. Sleep wouldn’t come—as if it were spring instead of autumn’s last night, spring instead of awakening winter.

  “Your mortal roots have left this world. Do you miss your winter sleep as well as your mother, my son?”

  As if his thoughts had summoned it, the voice came through the window, the sound mossy, shaded, overgrown, as was the aura of power in Myrddin’s soul. Father. His father’s presence woke more of the spring inside him than was already moving untimely, but Myrddin remained motionless despite those summoning words.

  It wasn’t grief that restrained him but the instability of his being. He was the son of a mortal woman, now departed from this world, but he was also the son of this immortal and unearthly power, this wild God whose words echoed still inside him. Mortal roots? Sleep…my winter sleep.

  Once, twice, Myrddin blinked, then sat up and met his father’s eyes. He was outside the window, then by Myrddin’s bedside with no sign of motion, no transition, presenting not even the illusion of flesh.

  “Father…” He heard his own voice faintly, as if it too crossed some border of reality previously untouched. “Mother’s gone. You took her away, and now something’s happening to me. Or—not happening.”

  “Consequences.”

  Consequences. Again, there was an echo. Myrddin closed his eyes once more and thought his whole being was ripe with consequences, ripe as the end of the spring, the flowers falling into fruit. He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, but there was no silence inside him. No winter hibernation, no slumber falling over him like the first flakes of snow.

  Since he’d been born, that was the way of it, the way the balance was kept within him. Sleep through the winter, wake with the first touch of spring, run wild in the joy of the growing earth. Explore his power as the green turned summer gold, explore a thousand shapes and shades of being while autumn wore down his endless energy into winter sleep. But now…

  Sleep.

  No more. Run. Wild. Grow. Green, greengreengreeen.

  Sleep?

  No more. No more! Wild run, wild grow, out, outoutout.

  Sleep!

  The inner argument was over before it had even begun. Myrddin sucked in air, realized he hadn’t been breathing, opened his eyes and looked up into the graven glow of his father’s face. “I don’t. I don’t sleep. Am I broken?”

  “Not yet, not yet, but soon… Yes, soon, you must be.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Your mortal roots have left this world. Now, from the tree of your mortal life, the leaves fall. The branches crumble. What has withered will vanish, and in its place too much of what you already possess will spread outward. The wild, immortal, wants you. It will have you, my son. Unless…”

  “Unless? You mean—because my mother is gone the power I got from you is going to consume me? No!”

  “You need a rite. The Rite of Spring.”

  “Really. And was this your purpose, the reason you fathered me? You’re here. You’re talking to me. You don’t do that without a reason, you never have. Are you finally going to tell me—?”

  “No.” He laughed. Myrddin scowled and glared at him. “I have come to tell you to go, my son. You must leave this little grove, this little people. You must find that which can take from you the flood th
at overwhelms your mortal soul. You will know it when you find it, just as you know that you will never sleep that sleep again, never know the still of winter, the way the cold creeps clinging to the bud.” There was a strangeness in the words, in their arrangement, but his father was smiling and that had never meant anything bad. “Go.”

  “But—”

  “Go.”

  “But what am I looking for?” His frustration panicked his voice, sharpened the tone more than he’d ever dared with his father before, but he got only more laughter in return.

  “What? No. Who.”

  “Who? Who am I looking for, then?”

  The light of the sunset and the rising moon were caught together in the glow of his father’s eyes as he turned—star-black, nut-brown, greens pale as corn-silk and dark as pine. There was a substantial pause, perhaps a hesitation, before he answered Myrddin again.

  “The end of it all, my son. The one who will kill you to heal you, kill you to bring you to life.”

  It made no sense, no sense at all, but that was nothing but expected in any encounter with his father.

  “Which way should I go, then?”

  “Over the land bridge. South of the glacier and east into the darkest wood. Now. Go!”

  It was no longer a suggestion, but an imperative command. Myrddin was startled to his feet by the strength in the words, the sting of them, and stood swaying while the impenetrable aura of his father’s power receded. In its wake, the quiet of his lodge gained resonance with that final instruction. He took a breath, stepped out through the door and into the village.

  He didn’t want to encounter anyone, didn’t want to deal with or alleviate the inevitable results of his own strangeness, but there wasn’t a single figure in sight. The world was quiet, softened by the drifting silence that came over everything mortal when winter woke. His footsteps rustled the last of autumn’s leaves beneath a dusting of snow, cracked the frost between them, and his passage out of the village and into the wood was the only noise other than the crackling of ice in the tree branches.