ONE
Sixteen years after the Upheaval
Ismell iron, dank fur, and carrion breath. Dirt, too, damp with blood.
I try to lift my arm, but it won’t move. I start to stand, but I falter. I end up crouched, my good hand braced in the frost and cooling blood—the same blood that coats my face, my arm, and clothes.
Across the creek, against a stark backdrop of trunks and dying undergrowth, a second beast prowls. She’s massive, a creature between a bear and a dog that emerged after the Upheaval, when so many strange beasts escaped the High Halls. A savn. Her mate lies at my feet, two arrows in his barrel chest and my bow snapped beneath him. Not that I could draw the weapon anymore, even if it had been whole.
Courage, I urge myself, but my head feels light and my senses dim. Late autumn branches clack overhead and the afternoon sky beyond is a thick, snowy gray. It can’t kill you. This is why you’re here. Fight.
I rise, every muscle complaining as I unfold to my full height. I’m tall for a woman, even taller for an Eangen, and I’ve complained a thousand times that I look all but the largest men in the eye. But now I appreciate it. Now I value the breadth of my shoulders and the strength of my arms, here in the wild, in the dirt and the blood.
The beast shuffles. She’s wary of me, but she still sees food—and vengeance.
She drops her head and stalks closer. Seven black claws punch through the thin ice and water rushes around her paw, washing my blood from matted gray fur.
I pull my bone-handled knife from its sheath at my hip. Mud and grit grinds between my fingers as I turn it, angling the weapon out to one side. At a push of my will, it lengthens into a short spear, birch white with a handspan of deadly tip.
The beast growls, low and deep. I feel it in my chest, even though we’re half a dozen paces apart. Doubt claws up my spine and I start to tremble, deep in my core.
Perhaps she can kill me. Perhaps my father’s blood spared me and, in moments, I’ll follow my mother into death.
I want that, I tell myself. The answer, the closure, the end to my uncertainty. But my body wants to run. It wants to push the sun back across the sky and talk myself out of my own recklessness. My village would have tried to dissuade me, if they’d known my plans when I left. But I’d been too quick and too foolish, and all of them too trusting.
I want more than to turn back time. I want to scrape the memory of my mother’s pyre from my mind, and claw out the fear that I will never follow her into death. That I’ll live on, while age and sickness, beasts and axes claim everyone around me.
I’m terrified and trapped. If I turn and run, the savn’s jaws will find the back of my neck. I’m not sure I want to live, but I am sure I don’t want to be eaten alive. Would I be aware of each moment? When the beast tired of me, would my fleshless limbs grow back? Would my consciousness live on in a pile of bones?
My mind spins, jittery and edged with hysteria. But another part of me whispers, calm and calloused, This is what you came for.
The beast stalks closer, splashing through the cold water and into the mud on my side of the creek.
I’ve no choice. I brace, settling my weight into my shaking legs, and raise the spear in a firm grip.
The beast roars. Her mate’s body lies between us, but I feel the heat of her breath and the force of her rage.
I lower my chin and hurl the spear in one fluid movement. It slams into her chest, right beneath the taught muscles of her throat and the fang-rimmed abyss of her jaws.
Her cry cracks into an agonized whine, but she still flies toward me. I grab the end of the spear as I roll aside and it slips from the wound, re-forming into a curved sword.
I snap the blade back out just as my feet hit the ground again. My boots slide, my muscles shriek, but the blade bites deep. Blood bursts over my face.
The next thing I’m aware of is lying on my side. The sword has re-formed into a small knife and lies in the muddy leaves beyond my fingertips. I squint at it, noticing fresh snowflakes on its blood-splattered grip. There are blood and grit on my lips, too, iron and earth.
I look up, past the bulk of two felled beasts, to the gray sky. More snow drifts down, placid and patient. The breeze is colder, rustling the dead beasts’ fur, but I’m burning hot. My ears roar like the sea and my thoughts clatter in my skull, increasingly distant and muffled.
Is this it? The moment when my question will be answered? Will my soul slip from my flesh and settle in the earth, or will I live on, in agony, until immortal blood binds me back together?
A form materializes in the snow—of the snow—on the other side of the savn. A man, with flesh and hair and muscle and warm, richly embroidered clothing of gray and white. His hair is pale like mine and his eyes blackish blue, like the underbelly of an iceberg in a spring sea.
I try to push to my feet, but my head spins.
The sound of the wind, my ragged breath and the man’s footsteps fade to a distant roar as he crouches beside me. His features are the jagged edges of ice and the contours of wind-smoothed snowbanks. He smells like winter, true winter—sharper and crisper than the late autumn around us. The flakes continue to fall and as they do, the scent of him—his presence—intensifies.
Despite my pain, relief seeps through me. I manage a weak smile and don’t bother trying to rise. I don’t reach for my knife. This man has led me through enough storms to prove he’s safe. Not human, not gentle, but safe.
“Granddaughter,” he says. His voice and expression are impassive except for the narrowing of his eyes. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to die,” I whisper. The admission makes my heart f
lutter and I twist to look at my arm. My tunic is black with blood, but its welling has slowed. If I had more energy, I might have started to panic again, realizing what that meant.
But I’m past that point. Fear fades, and I have the presence of mind for one whisper before blackness washes over me.
“Please take me home.”
* * *
I awaken to the crackle of a fire and the insipid cold of dusk. I lie close to the flames on a bed of cedar boughs and moss, and the snow falls everywhere except my bed.
I’m not home, however much I wish I were. Most of the trees around me are birch with barren branches, rasping, curling bark and dead undergrowth, shriveled ferns, and blanched grasses burdened with white. There’s no birch grove near Albor.
I sit up slowly. As I do, I catch the thread of voices off in the forest, but the shadows beyond my orb of firelight are thick enough I can’t see the speakers. I recognize one voice, though: my grandfather’s, low and deep.
I wear no bandages and my torn tunic is gone. Instead, I wear a new shift of soft linen and a pale blue kaftan I’ve never seen before. It smells of lavender and pine, as does my skin, and it’s beautifully embroidered with geometric patterns, lined with gray fox fur at the collar and cuffs. Strangest of all, my wounds no longer hurt. When I lift my arm, there’s no pain.
The Great Healer has been here—her lavender and pine scent, as much as her work, betrays her. Goosebumps prickle down my neck. She might still be close by, if one of those voices belongs to her. One is certainly female.
I’m awed and sickened by the realization. My test is nullified. Am I alive because of her, or my own inability to die?
The last voice is another male, and I spy his broad figure through the snow. His beard is braided with horsehair and he wears a heavy cloak, but his head is bare. Gadr. Not a human, but a Miri, a higher being. Like the Healer.
Two former gods and Winter himself have visited me in the forest, tonight.
My nerves prickle, but I force myself to ignore it. Instead, I sit straighter and check for my belt. It’s intact, along with the bone-handled knife. I draw it, expecting the weapon to still be covered in blood, but my grandfather has cleaned it.
I stare at the blade, at its keen edge near the calloused skin of my hands. The moment stretches too long, and forcibly, I s
heathe the weapon again. That route to answers is not an option. I promised my mother it would never be. Now she’s dead, and I’m trapped in my word.
The voices in the forest go quiet and my grandfather returns alone. He strides into the firelight and surveys me with his usual impassive expression. He’s carrying a new bow, I notice, and a set of arrows. They’re all as bone-white and unnatural as my knife.
“For you,” Winter says, setting the bow and quiver within reach. The arrows clatter softly in a quiver of dark leather and intricate stitching, its darkness a contrast to pale shafts and fletching. “The quiver will never run out of arrows, and the bow will never break.”
No ordinary weapons, then. Miri creations, like the knife at my belt.
“I don’t deserve them,” I murmur wretchedly, looking from him to the weapons without truly lifting my eyes. He barely looks like a grandfather; other than the white hair knotted at the back of his head, he has no wrinkles or other visible signs of age on his snow-pale skin. But he’s older than mountains and seas, and no one who looks into his eyes could forget that.
He shows no emotion at my self-pity. “Your bow is broken, and these collect dust in Eang’s Hall.”
“I can get a new bow anywhere.”
Grandfather looks at me long and levelly, so I stay my tongue.
“I’ve sent an owl to Albor.” He changes the topic, practical as ever. “But you roamed far from home. There is another village a day’s walk south. The High Priestess will meet you there.”
I choose my first words carefully. I haven’t seen my grandfather in four years, though I’ve sensed him and heard his voice every winter since I was a child. He’s not doting, ever on the periphery of my life. So why bring me gifts?
“How did you know I was in danger?” I ask. “And why was Gadr here?”
He sets my new bow and quiver on a rock and crouches to stoke the fire. He doesn’t require the heat, but it doesn’t bother him, either. “You are my only blood south of the mountains. I am always aware of you. As to Gadr, he was curious. He’s oddly fond of you, given his history with your family.”
That makes me feel… warm, watched over, even if my grandfather’s expression is flat. It’s a feeling I don’t often have, not in a world that distrusts my blood and whispers of my brother’s strangeness, my father’s crimes, and my mother’s weakness for bedding him.
I feel something else too. Longing. It makes tears prick at my eyes and my throat thicken.
“Do you visit your other grandchildren, in the north?” I ask, eager both to know and to shift the conversation away from myself.
He finishes feeding the fire and sits back, forearms resting on his knees, fingers entwined between them. “No.”
“Why?”
“They’re too much like him.”
Him. My father. Ogam, Son of Winter, Son of Eang; the immortal, matricidal traitor who nearly burned our world to the ground during the Upheaval—the year I was conceived.
“Are they…” I look down at my bandages, hesitate, then press forward. “Immortal, like him?”
“Many are.”
I think of the blood pouring down my arm and the roar of the blackness before I passed out.
“Am I?” The question comes out hoarse. Guilt and grief and dread wash across my skin, and the fire does nothing to soothe me.
My grandfather looks up, expressionless as always. “We will not know that until the day you should have died.”
“That wasn’t today?” I press, though my lips feel numb.
He shrugs, a small, stiff gesture. “Your father’s children might be able to tell you more, but I cannot. I am myself. You, all
of his get, are something other.”
“Other,” I repeat bitterly. “That’s what the Eangen say. I’m not like you, not like them. Everyone like me is on the other side of the mountains.”
“Yes,” he agrees impassively. “And it’s best they remain there, and you here.”
“So I should stay here forever?” The words burn. Tears stream down my cheeks and I know I must look terrible, red-eyed and wet-nosed, a child rather than a near-woman, but Grandfather still shows no concern.
A log shifts in the fire and sparks dance up into the bare branches overhead. The sight and smell of it takes me back to my mother’s funeral pyre, and for an instant I feel the emotions of that night over again. The emptiness. The disbelief. Her death had been so sudden—drowned when a riverbank gave way and the current trapped her underwater. I feel the High Priestess’s arms around me, see the empathetic looks of distant relations, but they’re all droplets in the empty well of my heart.
And my mother’s other child, her son by her first husband? He didn’t reach for me that night. His black curls hid his handsome face on the far side of the pyre, but I still saw his tearless eyes.
He is duty personified. Stoic and steady.
I am conflict.
“Perhaps you will live a mortal life and die soon. Perhaps you will remain here forever. But when forever comes, I will be here too,” my grandfather tells me, and I can’t tell if he’s trying to comfort me or stating a fact. I want to believe the former. “We will stand together, you and I, at the turn of the age.”
“My father’s children will still live too,” I point out, my voice weak. My siblings, the ones who might be able to tell me if I’m immortal. Because short of finding another beast to bloody me, or an enemy I can’t best, I will not be finding out on my own. My courage is frail, my promise to a dead mother binding. The bone-handled knife remains at my belt, quiet and sated.
“Yes.” Winter’s eyes grow flinty, the first sign of emotion he’s shown. He murmurs again, in a voice so cold I shiver, “They will be there too.”
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