My Second Chance Mate is a Barbarian (Sera and Fenris) novel Chapter 223

Irina

I had been raised to believe a queen does not think about her mother after a certain hour.

The reasoning had been domestic and circular, the way the reasoning of women raised in small pack houses tends to be. A queen has obligations in the morning. A queen who lies in the dark thinking of her mother does not sleep. A queen who does not sleep is no good to her household. I had carried the rule for forty-six years and broken it twice on harmless occasions, both of them at the bedside of a sick daughter. The third time I broke it was tonight, and it was not for any reason a woman in any pack house would have understood. I broke it for the smell.

I was eight years old when they killed my mother.

She had been screaming before they lit the wood. Screaming about my father, about her sister, about me. Begging, and pulling against the rope at the pole — twisting at the wrists, twisting at the ankles, twisting until the rope had taken the skin from both wrists clean enough that I could see the white meat under the red, and she had still been twisting. I did not remember the words she had used because the words were not what my brain decided to keep. What my brain kept was the moment the fire reached her. The scream changed. It was not a scream anymore. It was the sound a person made when there was no air left to scream with and the body was still trying. Wet. Choked. Gnashing, with a thin whine underneath. She had made that sound for what I had been told, since, was less than a minute. To me at eight it had been the rest of my life.

She did not die quickly. The fire took her skin first. The fat under the skin took longer. I had been at the front of the crowd because my aunt had put me there. I had watched my mother go from a woman tied to a pole to a thing in the shape of a woman tied to a pole to a black charred thing that had stopped moving. My aunt did not let go of my neck until the gnashing had ended. My aunt had a strong hand. She had been a midwife. She had hands that knew the right pressure for a job.

I think now my aunt had not even been angry at my mother. I think now my aunt had been performing for the people around her, demonstrating her loyalty to my father's house by being the one who held the witch's daughter still while the witch burned. I think now my aunt had believed, in her own dim arithmetic, that holding me there was a kindness. That I would understand sooner than other girls what happened to women who did certain things in the wrong order.

I have hated my aunt for forty-six years.

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