17

After Kiva helped the Vagra back into the hut, the old woman turned toward her, eyes blazing with sudden urgency.

“You should have spoken up in the meeting,” she said. “The Sisters won’t respect you if you’re always so timid.”

Kiva bit her lower lip, chastened. “But it’s not my time yet. You’re Vagra still.”

“That’s true,” the Vagra said as she lowered herself carefully to sit on the cot, the wood creaking as the stretched fabric strained to hold the old woman’s weight. “But you will be Vagra after I’m gone. You need to start acting like it now. Being Vagra isn’t just about communing with the Ancestors. You actually have to lead.”

Kiva’s eyes stung. She blinked, willed herself not to cry under the Vagra’s scolding.

“I know I should have said something to put Kyne in her place,” she said. “But I didn’t know what to say. She’s right. I don’t know what to do about the Strangers. No more than I knew four seasons ago. The Ancestors show me the same vision every time: the blinding flash of light, the stone bird flying between the stars, the three figures on the horizon. That’s it. I don’t know. Maybe …” She trailed off, shook her head. “Maybe Kyne is right. Maybe we should go to the Forsaken for protection.”

“No,” the Vagra said, her voice firm. “We can’t. Not unless you’re sure.”

“Sure of what?” Kiva asked.

“Sure that letting the Strangers come would be worse.”

Kiva studied the Vagra’s face closely. The old woman had taught her much—taught her how to push away the constant din of the Vagri’s thoughts in her mind and listen to one voice at a time, taught her how to lead, when the time came—but Kiva couldn’t shake the sense that there were things she still kept secret. Things the Vagra would rather take to her grave than talk about. Things Kiva needed to know.

“What happened?” she asked, finally. “The last time you went to the Forsaken for help.”

The Vagra shook her head. “It didn’t end well.”

“I need to know,” Kiva said. “If I’m going to lead the Vagri, then I need to know everything.”

The Vagra was silent for a few moments. Then she sighed. A hardness in her seemed to break as she let out her breath.

“Sit,” she said, nodding at the ground in front of her.

Kiva lowered herself to the ground, crossed her legs beneath her, and looked up at the Vagra’s face.

“How much do you already know?” the Vagra asked.

Kiva hesitated to admit what she’d heard. The hatred of violence was so deeply ingrained in the village that the Sisters forbade the children from even telling stories that featured it.

“Come, child,” the Vagra said. “Don’t play dumb. I’m no fool. I know the men still talk about it, late at night when their women aren’t around.”

The Vagra was right. Kiva’d heard the tale as a girl from Grath, when Liana was away in the Sisters’ camp.

“Marauders came and captured the village,” Kiva said. “They tried to kill you so they could rule the village in your place. But you escaped. Went to the Forsaken. Together, you came back and took the village back from the marauders. The leader of the Forsaken died in battle, but there was a boy—a brave boy named Xendr Chathe, who killed many enemy fighters. He became the new leader of the Forsaken, and led them into the prairie to get rid of our enemies as far as the foot of the mountains.”

The Vagra nodded. “That’s right, as far as it goes—but it’s only half the story.”

The old woman’s eyes drifted up toward the ceiling of the hut. A silence drew out, but Kiva didn’t prod the Vagra to go on. She sensed that the old woman was only trying to decide where to begin.

“It was almost fifty seasons ago,” she said. “I was a younger woman then—around the age your mother is now. We hadn’t seen a single enemy in all the time I’d been Vagra. I thought that maybe they’d decided to leave us alone. But I was wrong. They were only gathering their strength. When they came for us, it was with greater numbers than ever before. I can still see them thundering into the village, killing the men and children. The blood of my people running black in the lanes between the huts.”

The Vagra closed her eyes, seemed to hold her breath. She shook her head and gave a shudder.

“I didn’t stay to see what they’d do with me—I ran. I escaped into the prairie and went to the meeting place with the Forsaken. I lit a fire and waited for them to arrive. The leader of the Forsaken in those days was a man named Tevek. A bad man, it turned out—though I didn’t know it at the time. Or maybe I did know it but simply didn’t have any other choice than to ask for his help. Anyway, Tevek gathered his men and we rode back to the village. The Forsaken killed most of the marauders and drove the rest away into the prairie. I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.”

“What happened?” Kiva asked.

“Tevek didn’t want to go back to the wilderness. He wanted what the marauders wanted. He wanted to rule the village. He wanted to make the Vagri his slaves—to make the Sisters follow him instead of me, and to force the men and children to work for him.”

A sick feeling clenched at Kiva’s gut. “Slaves,” she said. The word tasted foul on her tongue—it was unfamiliar, though she could guess at its meaning. “I don’t understand. How could Tevek take power away from the Vagra? How could he force a man to work who doesn’t want to?”

“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” the Vagra said. “The Forsaken may be from us, but they’re different than us. Something happens to a man when he picks up a weapon—he begins to see the world as something that can belong to him, if he wants it. He begins to see the world as a thing to be taken by force.”

Kiva shuddered. “So what did you do?”

The Vagra hesitated before going on. Kiva’s pulse quickened—she sensed that the Vagra was coming to the part of the story that she’d wanted to keep secret, the part of the story that she wanted to die with her.

“Xendr Chathe,” she said. “He was only a boy at the time, younger even than you are now—fourteen, maybe fifteen. But he’d distinguished himself in the battle against the marauders, killed twice as many of them as some of the most experienced Forsaken warriors. Stories of his bravery spread throughout the village, and I could tell that the Forsaken admired him. The boy warrior. As soon as I learned of Tevek’s plans to take over the village and rule it as his own, I met secretly with Xendr. We struck a deal—if I could get rid of Tevek and make Xendr the new leader of the Forsaken, he’d take his men away from the village and never come back unless I summoned him.”

“Get rid of Tevek? What do you mean?” Kiva asked, a droplet of unease falling into her stomach and spreading out like ice.

The Vagra gave Kiva a grim look. “I’ve never told anyone about this. No one in the village can ever know. You have to promise.”

“Of course,” Kiva said, giving the assurance the Vagra needed to continue with her story—even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what the old woman would say next.

“Tevek wanted to be mated to me,” she said. “That was to be the first step in his plan to take over the village—a symbol to the Vagri and the Forsaken that he was now the ruler of the village, that I’d given all my power to him. That night, after my secret meeting with Xendr Chathe, I pretended to agree to Tevek’s demand. I took him into my hut. Then, as soon as he followed me through the door, I whirled around and put a dagger in his chest.”

Kiva sucked in a breath. Covering her mouth in shock, she looked around the hut. It had happened here. In this very room. Her eyes followed the Vagra’s to a table that sat next to the cot, with a dagger sitting on top. It was the blade that the old woman used to conduct blood ceremonies on girls who’d heard the voice of the Ancestors. Was it the same one she’d used to kill Tevek? Kiva didn’t know, and she wasn’t about to ask.

“But what did you do with the body?” Kiva asked, still not meeting the Vagra’s eyes. “What did you tell the Sisters?”

“I told them that he’d simply dropped dead while we’d been talking,” she said. “I said that he must have been injured in the battle and didn’t tell anybody. And they believed it. No one suspected me of killing him myself. No one knew. Except Xendr Chathe.”

“But he left,” Kiva said. “He held up his part of the deal.”

The Vagra nodded solemnly. “Yes, he did. The next morning I called a ceremony with all the Sisters, all the Vagri, all the Forsaken. We gave Tevek a hero’s funeral—put his body on a pyre and burned it. Then, in front of everyone, I honored Xendr Chathe for his bravery in battle. Afterward, Xendr gave a speech to the Forsaken. He called them to follow him into the plains, where they’d continue pursuing the marauders until all the enemies of the Vagri had been wiped off the face of Gle’ah. He whipped them into a frenzy, promised they’d all be heroes, that they wouldn’t stop until each of them, every Forsaken warrior, had a thousand kills to his name. Then he left the village and they marched out after him, shouting and whooping and waving their weapons in the air all the way. And that was that. Life in the village went on as it had before. No one ever knew what I did. No one ever knew how close they were to being enslaved by Tevek.”

“And the Forsaken?” Kiva asked. “What have they been doing all this time?”

“The Forsaken spent the next forty seasons following Xendr Chathe deeper and deeper into the plains, looking for new enemies to fight, new people to kill.” The Vagra closed her eyes again, drew a long breath through her nostrils. “I saw it in my visions, sometimes. The people they slaughtered. The violence that was the price of peace in this village. And every time he and his men returned from one of their murderous excursions, I held my breath. Wondered if this would be the time that Xendr would grow tired of our deal. If he’d come back to this village, wanting what his predecessor wanted. But he never did.”

The Vagra let her eyes come open. She blinked. Her eyes seemed to clear. She fixed Kiva with a hard gaze.

“For fifty seasons Xendr Chathe has kept his part of the bargain. He’s kept the Forsaken’s attention focused outward, away from this village. But if you bring them into this village, I’m not sure how long that will last. Xendr is an old man now—not as old as me, but still, he may have grown tired of living in the wilderness. That’s why you have to be sure before you go to him for help. Sure that letting the Strangers come will be worse than bringing the Forsaken back into the village.”

Kiva stood and paced across the room. The dilemma the Vagra was giving to her seemed to be an impossible one. If she went to the Forsaken for protection, they might take over the village and destroy the Vagri’s way of life; if she didn’t, they might be destroyed by the Strangers. And if she did nothing …

At the far end of the hut Kiva turned back to face the Vagra once more.

“I need more time,” she said.

But the old woman shook her head.

“More time is the one thing you don’t have,” she said. “You saw what happened in the council meeting. The Sisters are growing restless. They’re beginning to doubt your leadership. If you don’t come up with a plan to deal with the Strangers, and soon, they’ll find someone else to lead them. Someone like …”

The old woman trailed off. She didn’t have to say the name. Kiva knew who the Vagra meant.

Kiva walked to the door and peered through the slit in the doorhang. The Sisters still lingered outside, milling about and murmuring to each other. Kiva’s eyes darted back and forth until she found the person she was looking for, who was at that moment smiling a good-bye at the woman she’d been talking to and turning to walk to her hut.

Kyne.

Kyne’s face darkened as she walked away from the Sisters, and Kiva’s heart thrummed deep in her chest.

Someone like Kyne.