Daughter Of Blood: Deleted Scene 1 — Malian & Raven In Aralorn
Recently, I promised you deleted scenes and this is the first one — which was also my first cut at catching up with Malian and Raven after events at the end of The Gathering Of The Lost (The Wall Of Night Book Two.)
Some of you also asked me to explain why the featured scenes were deleted. As I replied at the time (it may have been on Twitter though, not the blog), usually the reason was some variant of the material not driving the story forward sufficiently, even if the content may have been fine in and of itself.
As you may see when you read this one, it’s very much a “round up” of backstory from the previous two books—which certainly helped get my head into the game, but on rereading felt far more like “scaffolding” than actual “story.” In the end, too, I decided the story didn’t need to immediately follow on from The Gathering Of The Lost events; it just seemed to work better picking up the Malian and Raven thread “post Aralorn.”
Note: All deleted scenes are at “first draft” level only—so very much raw material. Consider yourself duly warned.
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Deleted Scene 1:
Malian woke to bright sun streaming through the partly open door and the sound of voices outside the small chapel to Serru. At first she thought it might just be Raven, talking to the horses, but then she heard a man reply in the broad accent of Aralorn, the words rounded our slowly as was the way, here in the south. The lay priest, probably, come to see who had been occupying his shrine these past days. Still, it was a chapel to Serru, the god of journeys—or Seruth as they said it on the River; Serrut in Emer—and small or large, all his shrines were intended to house wayfarers in places where there were no inns.
They had been here three full days now though, while Malian recovered her full strength, which had been taxed again by the starburst of power when she had accepted the sword and the House of Fire as her own. Although Raven had told her, on the firelit evening that followed, while he built up the shrine’s brazier against the cold, that the word Fire mainly used for themselves was nation, not House. The nation of Fire; Malian rolled the phrase around her mind as she had several times since then, reflecting that it was apt for the Nine Houses of the Derai as well, that in many ways their alliance was one of nations, with each House made up of a number of clans linked by blood and history.
She sat up, because after three days the villagers might well be wanting their chapel back, and she felt well enough to begin her journey north: first to Emer and the River, then further north to the Wall of Night. “Home,” she murmured, testing the word to see whether it rang true: duty and fate had both a grimmer and a more accurate ring. Yet when, in that starburst of power, Nhenir had sung, she had seen her father’s face, and Nhairin’s, and known them for what they were, part of the foundations on which her life stood.
Just as she had understood, facing a solitary tower outside Butterworth, a few evenings before, that for all his stern unbending ways, her father had been trying to not just repair the Derai Alliance, but to exemplify a leadership that would restore the Nine Houses to what they had been, before the civil war and the Great Betrayal. Perhaps even before Haarth, Malian thought now, he words Raven had said burned into her like a brand: “…we have seen how far the Derai have fallen.”
And we have, she thought: blood feud, division and mistrust, House against House, warrior against priest, and—her mind flying to Kalan—parent against child. At least I never felt that my father had turned against me, the way Kalan said his father did against him. And my mother—the thought was a breath, almost as though someone else had asked it. Even though he was only seven years old, Kalan’s father had spoken the House of Blood’s rite of renunciation and expulsion as soon as his son’s powers manifested, then put him onto the street and locked the door of the house behind him.
But her own mother, if what her father and Sister Korriya had suspected was true, may have led the Swarm raiders that tried to kill her, six years before. Her grandfather, too, from the tale Nhairin and Kyr had revealed in Jaransor, had been prepared to kill her when she was a baby, for fear she had been tainted by her mother’s old powers.
Well, he was right about that, Malian thought, stretching like cat in the beam of sunlight despite the darkness of her thoughts. She recalled how the guard Kyr had defended her father to Nhairin that night, pointing out that he did not adhere to the law because he was passionless, but because he saw that it was what the Derai needed—even though part of the reason they were out there at all was because of her father’s adherence to the law, and Kyr must have known that it was unlikely he and Lira would survive that journey.
Or any of us, Malian added grimly—and in fact she had never known, until the vision seen through Nhenir’s song, that Nhairin had survived not only Jaransor and the madness that fell on her there, but her capture by the Swarm. Although probably, once they knew Malian had escaped and the steward was no more use to them, the Swarm warriors would have abandoned her to the blizzard.
As I abandoned her, Malian thought, feeling the turn of old guilt, even though her adult self agreed with what the heralds and Kalan had told her then, that she had not been in any position to help Nhairin.
Old griefs, she told herself, but thinking of the Wall and what waited there brought it all back as though it had been yesterday, not close on six years before. Outside, the Aralorni was still speaking with Raven, and it occurred to her that the man could simply be a villager come to sell them food, a thought that immediately reminded her that she was hungry.
She threw the blankets back and reached automatically for the sword, standing up in one swift movement and hooking the scabbard onto the belt—old, but new for her—that had come with the blade. The leather of both belt and scabbard were black and wellworn, and Malian still felt a flicker of awe that the last person to buckle the belt about her waist and bear the sword had been Yorindesarinen, ages and worlds ago. She found it even more disconcerting that Raven had actually been alive then, too, and then lived a thousand years more, here on Haarth, with the rest of his House, concealed behind the secret helms of the Patrol. Not just any Patroler though, she added, rebraiding her hair with quick fingers, the Lord Captain of the Patrol and a prince of the Darksworn.
Although from what he had told her, the brazier’s glow burnishing part of his face while the rest remained turned to mystery and shadow, he had only been a lesser prince once, of the third line of their Blood—which fitted with her vision of the cave, the three banners with biers set beneath them, of which two were empty. But a prince nonetheless and with the weight of holding a House together with the first two lines of its Blood gone, fallen onto his shoulders.
Aravenor. She repeated his name to herself as she untied Nhenir from her saddle, stowed with the rest of her ear just inside the chapel door—and smiled as she saw that the helm had already assumed the appearance of an archer’s leather cap. “You’re ready to leave as well, I see.’
“It’s time.” Nhenir was imperturbable, and she could feel the true shape of the moonbright helm of Yorindesarinen beneath her fingers as she fitted it onto her head and tucked her braid up beneath it.
“For the return journey.” she murmured, seeing the road she had travelled south unfold in her mind. “Home,” she added, testing the word again, this time against the morning’s brightness.
…
(c) Helen Lowe