Flash Fiction Challenge: No Secret Safe

This week, we had to randomly roll a conflict and centre our story around it. I rolled 'dark secret revealed' and this is what came out. Once again, I had no idea what to write when I sat down to write this, but once the first sentence had arrived, the story followed.

No Secret Safe

The first secret was revealed at dawn. Sigrun sweated, hearing her littlest sister deliver it to her father’s fiercest friend and most deadly foe, felt her stomach grow cold. Now Valgerd had what he needed.

Sigrun stood a jug of mead on the tray. She did not know when her father and Valgerd’s friendship had soured; she only knew it had. She could mark the day Heldar started keeping secrets from his friend. They had hoped, but not known Ieitha would find her gift so soon, or that she would be alone when she revealed the vital thread. Sigrun shivered as Ieitha’s piping tones filled the hall.

“The one you seek. She hides in shadow, but revels in the light. She will put a torch to the darkest parts of your soul and reveal all.”

Valgerd had betrayed them, but only father knew. He had explained to Sigrun when he’d rejected Valgerd’s bid for her hand.

“No daughter of mine will give him the power.”

Sigrun had been hard put to hide her relief. She’d heard stories of Valgerd’s lovemaking, and long-suspected the cruelty rotting at his core. Valgerd and her father had taken their rite of passage in the mountains, journeying there together, but only her father had returned whole, and he had not suspected Valgerd could be touched. Not by something he had shaken off with a mere shrug of the heart.

Heldar had not known that Valgerd had no heart, that Valgerd had not grown into the man his boyhood had promised—that the salamander had swept the boy away in a night beyond Valgerd’s wildest fantasies, bringing him to manhood and consummating her success by leaving him in an agony for more.

And she’d done something else as well. Salamanders—slimy by nature, subtle infectors of the mind and will… and other parts. Sigrun had heard rumours, and they were not pretty.

Sigrun laid bread and cheese beside the jug. She knew the salamanders well. She’d been fighting them all her childhood dreams. For her the gift of sight had manifested as early as Ieitha’s, but not as something to reveal what others needed to know. No, Sigrun waged war in her sleep, slipping beneath the dream shadow to follow the trails left by their enemies, directing her father and his men to their prey. In her own way, Sigrun had more blood on their hands than they.

Ieitha could not have known the one Valgerd sought, that the salamanders suspected her existence, or the existence of one like her and raged to unveil them. As she listened to her little sister’s first prophesy, she sweated and she smiled. Ieitha’s sight was strong—Sigrun indeed hid in shadow, and she loved the light more fiercely than life itself, or she would not do what she did so well. Her father knew it, and her mother knew it—but the warriors did not, and therein lay a portion of the bitterness feeding Valgerd’s treacherous heart.

Valgerd felt he had been Heldar’s friend long enough that the chieftain should keep nothing from him. Heldar had not become chieftain by giving away more trust than he had to, and his secrecy had kept Sigrun safe, giving his tribe the edge against their hereditary foe.

Valgerd would feed them all to the salamanders, but only if he caught Ieitha’s thread. For their survival, the tribe needed him to notice it, and he did. The big man crouched in front of the three-year-old, placing a hand on either shoulder.

“It will do you no good to harm me,” Ieitha said, still in the grip of her gift, terror in her eyes, but serenity in her face and voice.

Sigrun knew, as she tucked the knife behind the loaf and hefted the tray, that Ieitha’s gift would eclipse her own. The thought made her fear for her sister’s life in spite of Valgerd’s next words

“I will not harm you, little one.”

“Liar! You would harm us all if you knew how.” Ieitha’s voice was losing its serenity, but sounded much older than her three years. Abruptly, the child stilled, and her voice became calm once more. “She will kill you, you know.”

Valgerd glanced nervously around the hall, but the few warriors eating there appeared to be deep in conversation, and Sigrun had held herself just inside the kitchen door. The warrior glared at the child.

“I think you should still be abed,” he snarled, and Ieitha stared at him wide-eyed.

“She will sear your soul.”

“Who?” Valgerd shouted, as Sigrun stepped into the room.

“Uncle Valgerd,” she said, but he ignored her, ignored the warriors shifting carefully in their seats, preparing their weapons.

“Who?” he roared, shaking Ieitha so hard her head snapped back and forth, shaking her so hard she fell out of the trance and began to wail.

“Mama!”

Valgerd relaxed.

“Your mama’s no threat to me,” he said, and seemed to recognise that Ieitha was no longer a seer.

“Mama!” Ieitha shrieked again, beside herself in the way that only toddlers can be.

Sigrun caught a whiff of heat in the air.

“Your mama’s long gone, little one,” Valgerd said. “She died abirthing you.”

With a twist of vindictive acid, he added, “You killed your mama, and now she can’t answer.”

It was a lie, and Sigrun breathed easier that Ieitha was no longer entranced. The second secret was safe a little while longer.

“Mama!” Ieitha screamed, and Sigrun tossed the tray to one side.

The disrespect Valgerd showed for Heldar’s long-departed wife and the child she had been forced to abandon revealed the rot. A frisson of power flew across Sigrun’s skin and the long-house doors slammed opened, sheared from their hinges.

Sigrun swept Ieitha from Valgerd’s grasp and kept running. She had learnt to hide in shadow and revel in light at her mama’s knee, back when Valgerd had been her father’s friend, but what mama could ignore her child?

Valgerd’s scream revealed all.

“Dragon!”