Free The Rose of Sarifal by Paulina Claiborne

the hunter and the hunted, the predator and prey. The sheep and goats and horses, brought along as draft animals or food—were left in the atrium with a single she-wolf to guard them. Marikke could sense her disappointment when Argon Bael stretched out his shining sword to indicate her, a brindled, powerful creature that along with only a few others had maintained her wolf’s shape throughout. Now she gnashed her great teeth as if trying to argue, until the angel raised his hand.
    The herbivores bolted out into the drizzle where they stood in dispirited groups while their guardian prowled around them. Over generations, she imagined, they had become used to wolves. But the angel kept behind another one of the wereboars, whom he slaughtered with his shining sword, and Marikke was horrified to see the creature at his most human withhis cloven hands outstretched, with his snout upraised, his bulbous face full of understanding. By contrast, the others were at their most bestial as they tore him apart, there on the porch.
    Marikke and Kip retreated to the side, where they climbed up onto some tumbled rocks. Marikke put her arm around the boy’s shoulder. His clothes were damp, and he shivered with cold. His hair was bone white in the torchlight, and as his head fell forward against her side, Marikke could feel on the surface of her skin a pleasant sort of pain, his mind probing into her for comfort. And so she tried to provide it as she had for all these years, ever since she had found him orphaned on Alaron when he was just a kitten, as you might say, his family’s isolated cottage in the high pastures broken into and destroyed by people who despised his kind, or mistook them for lycanthropes out of willful ignorance. All over the Moonshaes they’d been hunted down.
    But he was more than just a shapeshifter. He had another, more secret gift. Lady Ordalf had sensed it in Caer Corwell. As she watched the beast-men snarl and fight over their uncooked meat, Marikke prayed to Chauntea the Great Mother, whose servant she was. The rock walls impeded her, and her own dark mood. But the goddess was as merciful as always, and soon it was as if a small flower had pushed itself up through a bed of stones, and the boy found her hand and squeezed it.
    But the angel of vengeance, also, felt a change in the rock chamber. Putting his sword aside, he clambered up to stand over them. And because he was unarmed, andbecause of the small measure of peace in her heart, and because the boy had now closed his eyes in sleep, she was able to look up at him without fear. She could see that he also was weary and unquiet, his hair dirty and thin, and a rash over his cheeks.
    “Tell me,” he murmured, “is there anything else left there for me?”
    He reached down and seized her by the hair, hurting her a little bit. “Let me tell you why you’re here,” he said. “I want you to know, because when a woman and a child sacrifice their lives, it must be in the spirit of loving kindness, a gift rather than a coercion. Otherwise it is for nothing.”
    He tightened his grasp of her long hair, pulling her head back so she could look into his eyes, haunted and colorless and ringed with darkness. “You must think we are alone here on this island. All the others, boats travel back and forth between the busy harbors. But here also I have ways of getting news, and when I heard from the fey queen in Karador that she was sending a gift to me, a priestess of Chauntea and a shifter boy, I dispatched my servants to the beach to intercept you and bring you here. I saw the signal fires across the strait from Kork Head. A present from Lady Ordalf, who is otherwise a mangy vixen from the pits of the Nine Hells. The others, they don’t matter. Do you know why that is?”
    Marikke had already guessed, but she wanted him to say it: “Tonight it is the dark of the moon,” continued the angel. “For many years the tribes of the Black Blood have gathered here and prayed