Opening scene

The raid began in the cold blue light that preceded dawn. We jolted from dreams of noise and light, to then realize that the noise and light had pierced our night journeys and ripped us from our own reveries. This was the first stealing of us, from our dreams and then from our beds and then from our families and from our childhoods. 

Our captors appeared as shapes standing over us, etched in a void. We knew who they were, who they had to be. We knew the stories of how in their distant land they had mastered the darkest arts, and wielded great and terrifying powers. We, in our settlement called Cadmere, knew no such magic. That made us fear the Insaloreans, and to live at the edges of their shadowlands. We had for centuries. But now they had come for us. They had come for we who were the children.

We never saw our parents. They never rose up from the dark to save us, to claw and to thrash. Later, we came to presume their deaths, killed before the invaders rounded us up and bound us with cord. But as the sun rose over the mountains and our last day of innocence slowly set with the moon over the distant mountains, we were still crying for them, calling for them, expecting them to burst through and save us.

My father’s last words to me were, “Be strong in all you do.” 

Our captors hid their magic well. They relied only on their muscle and our fear. Or perhaps that was part of the illusion. They were large, these men, but something was wrong, too. They looked sick. Even though I’d never seen them, I could see—we all could see—that they were diminished versions of who they once had been. But they had sharp weapons, and heavy clubs. As they bound our wrists in cord, then bound us together with the cord into a long line, we knew better than to fight back, unless we had chosen to die.

They spoke to each other but we did not know the language. We could only judge tone. I will maintain always that they sounded sad.

An hour into daylight, the dew glistened in the meadows. The sky was stunningly blue and held not even one cloud. We were children who had hardly noticed such beauty until we saw now we might now lose it. We were growing up moment by moment, like sunflower stalks reaching toward the sun. It was too beautiful a day to lose everything. Some of us shrieked and tried to will the world to return to what it was. But we now knew that wasn’t how it worked. 

Our captors grunted and did their work, seeming unenthused and untriumphant. Stealing children may not have been what they had ever imagined themselves doing. They might have been unhappy with the mission. But that did not compel them to show us mercy or sympathy. They would not even look us in the eyes. But we realized that was our own magic power: to make them see what they were doing.

Many of us cried. I cried very hard, and felt no shame. I was twelve and had been telling myself I was done with all that. My life to this point had been simple, as lives wrapped in love have the tendency to be. My family and our animals and the small house with its good warm fire. I wanted for nothing, but I had imagined great things for myself. I had dreamed of the world without ever ranging more than a few miles from our small village. But the world had forced itself in, and it was not the outcome I had imagined.

The man binding my wrists coughed as he worked and said nothing. I wondered if he had children of his own. I wondered if they were anything like me. And I wondered if he loved his children as I knew my father had loved me.