The knife was smooth and cool to the touch: simple, plain, but terribly sharp. Light glinted off the blade as my mother settled my small fingers around the hilt. When I tried to let go, her callused hand held mine in place.
“Do not come out until I call for you,” she told me.
The wind picked up around us, heady with pending rain and violence. My gaze flicked past the arc of the shield on my mother’s back, through the swaying trees and rustling undergrowth to the empty trail.
“Hessa!” a voice roared through the trees.
My mother clamped a hand over my mouth before I could whimper in fear. She hovered, perfectly still between the boughs of pale green needles.
They were looking for my mother. Whoever was out there in the forest was looking for her, and there was no gentleness, no forgiveness in their voice.
“Those are the Iskiri,” my mother murmured, low and warning. “If they catch you, if they realize you’re my daughter, they will kill you. Tell them you’re Algatt, and pretend not to know me, even if I’m hurt. No matter what they do. Do you understand? Yske?”
I couldn’t nod with her hand so firmly over my mouth, but I blinked a frantic, fluttering acknowledgment. Slowly, she let me go. I lifted the knife, clutching it with all the strength of my terror, and nodded.
Noting my clumsy grip, she grimaced and touched my cheek with a gentle hand. “I will teach you how to use that when we get home. Stay here. Stay silent.”
I nodded again and she vanished into the forest.
Quiet settled around me. Nothing moved in the fir grove save the wind tugging the boughs and a few stray needles falling into my hair. Tentatively, I shifted to all fours and stared in the direction my mother had gone, but otherwise I did not move. I would be like a rabbit in the garden, I told myself, holding so still the dogs couldn’t see me.
I heard a scream. It was a shocked sound, full of pain, but it belonged to a man. I bit my bottom lip and screwed my eyes shut.
Running. An outbreak of shouts and a husky, growling war-cry, fringed with bloodlust and ending in a cracking canine yip. My eyes flashed open as footsteps flitted past my fir grove, light and leaping. Their owner howled, then loosed a manic laugh.
I realized I was shaking, and that made the tremors worse. I sat down hard, dropped the knife, and covered my face. I prayed silently, a clumsy imitation of my mother’s prayers—one prayer to Thvynder, god of my people, and another to Aita, the Great Healer, who made all things whole and well. When my prayers ran out I held myself tightly, wishing I was anywhere but here, and at the same time longing to be at my mother’s side. At least if I could see her, I’d know she was alive.
It began to rain, hard and swift and cold. The trees swayed and the sky darkened, leaving me in a bewitching twilight. I squinted against the droplets and bowed my head, my misery and fear reaching a breaking point.
I didn’t make a conscious decision to leave the grove, but my next clear memory was of hovering at its edge, watching a warrior with a blood-streaked face throw my mother against a tree. Her head cracked off a root. She rolled and tried to push up onto her hands and knees, but her whole body shuddered. Her head lolled, eyes blinking, squinting. Fluttering shut. Her axe lay on the forest floor, glistening in the rain, and a long knife toppled from her fumbling hand.
The rain did nothing to wash the blood from her attacker’s face— multiple gashes bled freely, and as he snarled at my mother, I saw his teeth were filed to vicious points.
An Iskiri Devoted. I’d heard the stories many times in my eight years. Though the adults tried to protect us from the worst of those tales, other children gleefully whispered the details between themselves. Iskiri Devoted still served Eang, the Goddess of War, even though she was dead and hadn’t really been a goddess at all but a Miri—a powerful being, almost immortal.
The Iskiri Devoted reveled in killing the priests and priestesses of new gods in the most brutal, bloody, and painful ways. But my mother wasn’t just a priestess. She was the High Priestess.
She had killed Eang.
The Iskiri tore a hatchet embedded in a nearby tree and threw himself at my mother. My mother, already on the ground. My mother, who protected others, protected me. Loved me.
My fear flickered like a candle in the wind. That wind was a battering, righteous indignation, a refusal to accept the reality of the moment and the truth of what was to come. Then there was no thought in me, only rage that burst through my veins—hot, blinding and feral.
I shrieked. I threw myself from the trees and onto the Iskiri’s back. My fingers clawed his face, his throat. They pried into his eyes.
He threw me to the earth and spun on me, spitting blood and roaring like a wounded bear. I rolled right back onto my hands and knees and weathered the force of his fury.
My mother’s knife was in my hands. I darted forward and stabbed at his calf, down to the bone. The man stumbled and I went after him, still unthinking, carried on a wave of hate and the need to destroy the cause of my fear and my mother’s pain. Another stab, this one to the thigh. He tried to grab me by the hair; I dodged and hacked at his ankle.
But rage couldn’t change the fact that I was a child, and particularly small for my age. Another lunge—the Iskiri plucked me from the ground and threw me like a doll. I smashed back into the stand of firs, branches cracking and bending, tufts of needles painting blood across my skin.
I hit the ground and did not move again. I couldn’t. The anger that had fueled me sputtered with the erratic beat of my heart. All I could do was stare through tear-filled eyes as the Iskiri picked up my mother’s axe and advanced on her again.
I opened my mouth to scream, to try and save her with my tiny, torn voice. But Hessa moved. Wielding a fallen branch like a spear she staggered to her feet, smashed the axe aside and snapped the other end into the man’s face. His head cracked back and she pressed—beating him again and again in the head, face and shoulders until he collapsed, choking on blood and shattered teeth.
My mother did not stop. She kicked him onto his back and straddled him, branch braced across his throat. He clawed and beat at her, but she was impervious—she didn’t break his gaze until his hands fell limp and his fingers, creased with mud and blood, twitched on the sodden bed of needles.
Hessa unfolded slowly and stepped away from the corpse. Chest heaving, she spat blood and retrieved her axe, holding it loosely in both hands.
A new kind of dread gripped me then, twining through remnants of my ferocity and an incomprehension of what I’d done. That dread wasn’t directed toward the blood on my lips, or worry that my mother was badly injured. It wasn’t even because of the body, lying face-up in the rain. No, this new alarm came from the expression on my mother’s face—cold, remorseless, and weary.
If my rage had been a fire, hers was a deep, drowning sea.
She saw me and her expression faltered. I didn’t know if she’d seen everything I’d done, but I saw regret flicker through her eyes, the promise of a difficult truth. Then she brushed a tired hand over her face, slicking away blood and rain and black hair caked with dirt.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, composed now, her expression guarded.
I looked down at myself. I ached and was covered with cuts, but those pains were distant. “No,” I said simply.
“Then stay there. Wait for me.” She vanished into the trees again.
I stayed this time. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to, for as I sat beneath the fir boughs and watched rain drip on the face of the dead Iskiri, something within me fractured.
* * *
The days passed and we completed our journey to the northern settlement of Orthskar, but nothing my mother said or did could mend me. When I looked at her, I saw the cold weariness in her eyes, bloody rain on her cheeks, and how she’d held the Iskiri’s gaze as she killed him. I remembered the heat in my blood, how I’d thrown myself on her attacker, and how I’d wanted to cause him pain.
It was my first true understanding of myself—of the potential for violence inside me, the nature of survival, and the fear that girded it on all sides.
My father and brother met us in Orthskar’s great hall, full of light and warmth and laughter. I recalled little of the meeting, after—only that my father held me for a very long time, and my brother pestered me with questions about the attack. I didn’t answer.
When the four of us retreated into a curtained chamber off the main hall, I noticed my mother limping. My brother fell asleep swiftly. My parents spoke for some time, then my father, too, grew still. From my pallet, I watched my mother massage her leg, wincing with each movement.
“Does it hurt?” I whispered.
Startled, she looked over at me and smiled consolingly. “Yes, but this one is an old wound, my love. It will stop hurting again, with rest.”
“I wish I could make you better,” I murmured.
Her face softened. “I wish that, too.”
“Aita could heal you,” I suggested with a child’s innocent practicality.
Mother’s smile slipped into the corner of her mouth. “Yes, I suppose she could. But Aita is a Miri, and I’ve no wish to owe her any more favors than I already do.”
Miri. Eang had been a Miri too, before my mother killed her.
Memories of blood and violence swelled toward me again and I felt my muscles tighten, my tongue thicken in my mouth. Would I kill people someday? Would I hold their eyes as I choked the life from them, like my mother had?
My mother saw the change in me. She shifted closer, breaking me from my spiral, and brushed my blonde hair behind my ears—blonde like my Algatt father, not like her Eangen forebears. My mother and I looked little alike. “You did well, Yske. You’re brave. So brave. I’ll teach you how to properly protect yourself, and until you can, I’ll always be there to guard you. What happened with the Iskiri will not happen again.”
“No,” I croaked.
My mother’s brows drew together. “I will be there,” she assured me, misunderstanding my protest.
“No,” I repeated, more forcefully. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Want means nothing.” She pulled back, her expression grave.
“I don’t want to fight.” I could feel myself starting to shake again and I tried to whisper, but I saw my father stir.
“That doesn’t matter. Every child must learn how to protect themselves. Especially mine—you know that.” She spoke firmly, but not unkindly. “You’ll learn to do what you have to, just like I did.”
“I don’t want to be like you.”
Silence dropped between us like a boulder into a stream. My mother’s face blanked, but not before I saw a shot of hurt and indignation pass behind her dark eyes.
“I want to make people better,” I said in a rush. “I want to be like Aita. Or Liv, who healed the Great Bear.”
My mother eased back onto her pallet without a word.
“Mama,” I leaned after her, desperate for her to understand. “I—”
“Go to sleep, child,” she told me, her voice level and devoid of emotion. “Just… go to sleep.”
Quiet regained its hold over our small chamber, but I could not rest. I tossed and turned, tugged my blankets, and covered my head.
A long time passed before I heard movement again. My father lay down beside me. He pulled me against his chest, sheltering me in the strength of his arms, and murmured into my hair.
“If you want to be like Aita, I’m sure she will be flattered,” he said. “I’ll speak to her.”
I twisted to look up at his face, but all I found was scratchy beard. I wriggled away and peered at him through the darkness. “About me?”
“Yes,” my father said decisively. “I know her very well. Would you like that? To learn from her?”
I felt a shock of hope and pure, childish excitement. But then I remembered my mother and how my words had hurt her, and my face fell. “Mama will be angry.”
“Your mother wants you to be safe and happy,” he told me, tugging me back into his chest. “She lives to protect you and everyone around her. She expects the same of you. But there is more than one way to protect. Berin will be a warrior. When he’s injured, who will heal him? When he’s being silly and reckless, who will protect him from himself?”
“I will,” I said immediately, because this had always been my task. Now, though, the idea took new life in my mind, etching out a future not soaked in blood, but marked with solace and making broken things whole.
“Then tomorrow, I will speak to your mother,” Father promised. “And after that, I will take you to the High Halls to meet the Great Healer.”