LEONA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leona plucked a leaf from the mint plant on the windowsill, popped it in her mouth, and sprinted to the bedroom. Standing at her clothes chest, she began to brush her hair, her face feeling flushed as memories surfaced of the countless times she’d similarly prepared to meet with Tallos as a young girl.

Her life with her parents had consisted each day of toiling to eek out a meager existence and battling the never-relenting foes of thirst, hunger, and the cold—a thing made evermore difficult by her father’s love of mead. Leona had resigned herself, as per her mother’s instruction, to be content with what little they had, to take refuge in the fact that Northmen had not yet come to kill them, and to find a husband, preferably an old and established dog breeder or distiller who would better support her. Then Tallos had come, upending all her mother’s best-laid plans.

Tallos, it seemed, knew no fear. He traveled to areas that no other men dared and more often than not came back with skins, meat, and stories of vistas of great beauty. What other boys bragged of planning, Tallos was busy doing, and doing far from poorly. The cozy home in which she and Tallos now lived was built by his hands and hers. He had shown her they could accomplish through will, trial, and his endless pool of resourcefulness, whatever it was they sought.

Leona looked at her reflection in the palm-sized square of silvered glass, the only such piece they owned, and traced the lines on her face with a finger. Damn you for making me smile so deeply, she cursed her husband, sending an unpleasant twinge up her back at the thought that the gods may have heard her and mistaken her intent.

She had taken his gods, the Mighty Three. Tallos did not know his father, but he knew the man did not follow the Faith, the predominant religion of the Fourpaw villagers. Tallos’s mother had told him of his father’s gods: the River, the Mountain, and the Dawnstar. Knowing little more than their names, Tallos worshipped them in his own way. Leona believed that his worship was not out of true belief but rather in reverence to his father, who was—by his mother’s account, at least—a good man, and Leona was happy to worship them in kind.

Prosperous though they were in their own way, Leona’s thoughts slipped to years past, during an unrelenting string of harsh winters. Many villagers had succumbed to starvation or cold. Tallos had been faced with the burden of not only supporting their own family of three bodies and eight legs but that of helping his friend Erik and his wife and new son. All of them grew gaunt, but none so much as Tallos. She’d begged him to save more for himself, but he insisted that she and Lia remain as well fed as he could manage. Erik, Megan, and their child were taken in by Megan’s parents in a neighboring village, dog breeders with plenty of wealth and provisions saved for such times. Leona did not know whether Tallos would have survived otherwise. Toward the end, he and Lia grew scarily thin, and with Tallos fearing for Lia’s safety he had begun to make her, with great difficulty, remain home when he went to hunt. During one such outing, Lia escaped while Leona had fought gusts of wind at the door. She cried as she confessed to Tallos upon his return how her stupidity had cost Lia her life. “Lia is wild in her heart, and with so little to eat she was like to leave at some point,” Tallos had said. “Though it is cold, she may be better off on her own. Do not fear for her. She will find food and shelter,” he promised.

Two days later Lia returned to them, skinny as ever, with a well and dead fox in her mouth. She dropped the fox on the floor, wagged her tail and licked at their faces. It was the only time Leona had seen Tallos cry. He wept quietly and embraced his companion. They made a stew of the fox, bones and all, of which Lia received the wolf’s share. Tallos never again went hunting without Lia and often gave her the freedom to roam distant and catch extra game on his longer trips.

Leona abandoned her brush and silvered glass, less interested now with the state of her appearance and more anxious about the state of her husband. She ran out her bedroom and through the front door. Beaming with energy, she scanned the faces of the men who’d just crested the nearest hill, eager to find her husband’s.

Numbness consumed her arms and legs. Her vision blurred and doubled as she lost the ability to focus. Sound was replaced with a gentle ringing, which bled into a blanket of silence. The fact that the faces of the tall men approaching were those of strangers was less concerning to her than the reality that Tallos was not among them. A faraway voice from another time spoke to her, reminding her of what she knew to do in such an instance. They had planned for it together when building their home, she and Tallos. “If a raiding party should crest the ridge, or even a group of men you simply do not recognize, regardless of their dress, weaponry, or potential intentions, regardless of whether I am among them, you are to run. Run into the house as if to hide, then straight out of the rear door which we have built for this purpose and bar it from the outside. Do not hesitate, do not think, just run. Run south beyond the point at which we met Lia. Run and do not stop until you can no longer lift a foot. Follow the river as far as you can travel. I will find you.”

She tried to twirl the ring on her finger, but the motion was impossible without the feeling in her limbs. She was paralyzed, unable to move except at perhaps an implausibly slow rate of speed as if in a nightmare. He is dead.