4.

 

He was the only one that could see her, though the importance of that was not yet clear to him. In the cold morning he and the others agreed that it was a sign of Meihir’s power, though the haunt of the elderly witch did not agree. As the nineteen charmed men and women talked, Zaifyr watched her frown, shift and look at herself, the harsh cold light of the morning breaking her body apart.

“This is not what I wanted,” she said, though only he could hear her. “Who would ask not to be able to touch, to eat, to drink … and only to feel weariness, hunger and thirst?”

She followed Zaifyr into the house of his parents, where he lifted the fur-wrapped body of his mother first. She was a deadweight and he bore her body outside, his still-bare feet turning numb beneath the cold as he placed her in the pit. They had agreed to put all the dead there, to create a pyre so high that it would reach up through the mountains, a measure of their grief. Yet, as he eased his mother’s body into the pit, placing it next to Soeran, he was aware of Meihir telling him that she had not planned her survival, that she had not wished for what she was, now.

“Maybe Hienka cursed you?”

The witch flinched, as if struck.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“No,” she interrupted. “No, do not apologize. You are right. I turned away from Hienka and it knew when it called to me. It saw what I believed and it denied paradise in death. It punished me for my rebellion, cursed me.”

It would be years before he heard the word applied to himself, centuries even. The cool bottle pressed against his skin in a wet, welcome kiss of cold that Kakar never had. Cursed. Cursed. That was a new term, arising out of changes that had emerged as generations were born without the kind or indifferent stare of a god over them. Attitudes changed, words changed, that was the nature of the world. When he had learned of his “curse” he had been told he was special, different, that he was Chosen. The first Immortal, Jae’le, the Animal Lord, had told him to remember the morning in the village he had found his parents, to remember the smoke and the tart smell of burning flesh.

“How high did the fire burn?” Jae’le asked, the tall, brown-skinned man adorned in leather and a cloak of green feathers. “High enough to make the mountains weep?”

“Yes,” Zaifyr replied softly.

“And your anger?”

He shook his head.

“You should have been angry.” The man’s filed teeth showed in defiance. “It was the failure of the gods, a lesson to us, their children.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We have been shown their failure, my brother, and we must learn from it if we are to replace them.”