Bird of Chaos: Book One of the Harpy's Curse Read Free

somewhere further off.
    A rustling in the bushes made us turn and straighten. I gripped the hem of my mother’s peplos and stuck it into my mouth. The war-wits drew their swords. A pointed head appeared from beneath the bushes, followed by two powerful limbs jutting out of an equally powerful squat body covered in thick armour. Spikes ran from the creature’s head to its tail. The serpent scuttled hesitantly towards the boulder and I squealed. The thing climbed the boulder, stood over the piece of meat and looked around. Its tongue probed the air before it snatched the morsel into its mouth and scurried back down the rock.
    My mother picked me up under the arms and placed me on the pebbly ground. “That’s not a serpent.”
    “But your Majesty—” the caretaker started.
    “No, no,” my mother said, raising her hand. “I would know a serpent when I saw one. That…that is a lizard. A water dragon. Nothing more.” She struggled to hide her frustration. She thanked the caretaker in a stiff, formal tone. The war-wits sheathed their weapons and looked disparagingly at the old man who could only shrug. Yanking me towards the path, my mother did her best to hide her frustration. But despite her attempts, I could sense it seething beneath the surface. “Drayk was right,” she mumbled under her breath. “They are extinct.”
    We never spoke of the serpent again. To do so would imply she was capable of folly and I learnt early on that it was far better to exist in denial, in an alternative reality, than it was to draw attention to her faults. Rather, we went about our business as if the incident had never occurred, as if she were perfect, choosing to immerse ourselves in the mundane, never speaking of the wonderful opportunity of eternity or the prospect of a collective conscience, never speaking of her disappointment.
     
    You see, in the beginning my mother was not a cruel woman but simply a tightly coiled spring. They said it was the result of taking the throne so young. She was sixteen and still living on the island when Queen Ligeia died at forty, leaving Tibuta to her. Some said she was unprepared for her elevation. Others said it made her more determined. Others blamed Kratos.
    The queen’s younger brother Kratos was thrown from a ship on his return from Caspius after Gregaria invaded our ally in 2978 AB. It was a war that brought an end to the Third Age and almost a thousand years of peace in Longfield. It was my mother’s eighth year on the throne, four years before I was born. She was young and inexperienced.
    During his recovery Kratos spoke of how he had survived at sea though the waves had been like a heaving blanket with white pill, how he had fought off a bull shark and seen faces in the storm. He warned my mother that Typhon’s last tempest was coming and urged her to build an army. But she would not listen. She believed he was a vulture intent on tearing down her eyrie.
    Rather than put him to death she sent him to a sanatorium on a minor island to have his “mental impurities” removed. He survived his treatment though the healers drilled into his skull and many of the queen’s subjects heralded his triumph as the work of the gods. Support for him grew.
    Around the time of my birth the gerousia caught wind that people were migrating to the island they now called Kratos’s Haven to listen to my uncle preach. Fearing social breakdown, the elder women encouraged my mother to invite her brother back to the palace and into the council to negotiate peace, which she did despite her foreboding. For a time there was calm. My uncle appeared to be compliant. Not a breath of wind shook my mother’s nest and she was happy. And then everything changed.
     
    My skin was like blotting paper. Sentences ran backwards across my under-thighs from sitting on the edge of my mother’s desk sucking the edge of my peplos while she wrote with quill and ink. I knew better than to interrupt her. She bit her bottom lip in