When the fires of the camp had died and the crows settled in the boughs of the forest, she could hear everything her husband said.
“And the child?” Rokuda had asked her. He spoke in the moment the water struck the flame. His words were in the steam: as airy, as empty.
They only spoke at night. They only spoke when the fires were doused.
“She’s asleep,” Kalindris had replied. Her words were heavier in the darkness.
“Good. She will need her rest.” There had never been a darkness deep enough to smother the glimmer of his green eyes. “You should, too. I want you bright and attentive.”
She had not looked up from sharpening her knife. Just as she had decided not to stab him with it for talking to her in such a way. Fair trade, she had reasoned. She ran her finger along the edge, felt it bite cleanly. She slid it into a scabbard before reaching for her boots, just where she had always left them.
“She can rest. She can stay resting. I’ll leave before dawn. I’ll be back before dusk. She never has to know.”
“No.”
For want of hackles, her ears rose up, sharp and pointed like her knife. They folded flat against her head. Rokuda had not seen it. Even if he had, she had reasoned, he wouldn’t care. He was like that.
“I asked no question,” she had replied.
“What am I to tell her, then?” Rokuda had asked.
“Whatever you wish. I left without her. The beast was too close. The tribe was in danger. I could not to wait for her.” She had pulled on her boots. “I don’t need your words. You can give them to her.”
“No.”
“Do not say that word to me.”
“She has to learn. She has to learn to hunt the beast, to hate the beast, to kill it.”
“Why?”
“Because we are shicts. Our tribes came to this world from the Dark Forest. Before humans, before tulwars, before any monkey learned to walk on two legs, we were here. And we will be here long after them. Because to protect this land, they all must die.”
His speeches no longer inflamed her. She felt only chill in his words now.
“She has to learn to be like a shict,” Rokuda had said. “She has to learn our legacy.”
“Yours.”
Kalindris felt him in the darkness as he settled beside her. She felt his hand even before he had touched her. In the prickle of gooseflesh upon her skin, in the cold weight in the pit of her belly. Her body froze, tensing for a tender blow. She felt each knucklebone of each finger as he pressed his hand against the skin of her flank.
Like it belonged there.
“Be reasonable about this …” Honey sliding down bark, his voice had come.
“Don’t touch me.”
“The other tribesmen won’t look at her. They won’t listen to her. They look at her and wonder what kind of creatures she came from. What her parents were to raise … her. You must take her to the forest. You will show her how it’s done.”
“I must do nothing. And you can’t change everything you don’t like.”
“Yes I can.”
Bark peeling off in strips, his voice came. He tightened his fingers. She felt every hair of every trace of skin rising up. She felt the knife at her belt. She heard it in its sheath. She heard her own voice.
Steam in darkness. Airy. Empty.
“Don’t touch me.”
Between the sunlight seeping through the branches overhead, she could hear the forest.
A deer’s hoof scratching at the moss of a fallen log. A tree branch shaking as a bird took off into the sky. A line of ants so thick as to forget they were ever individuals marching across a dead root.
Sounds of life. Too far. Her ears rose. Kalindris listened closer.
A moth trying hard to remain motionless as a badger snuffed around the fallen branch it sat upon. A tree groaning as it waited for the rot creeping down its trunk to reach its roots. The crunch of dead leaves beneath a body as a boar, snout thick with disease and phlegm, settled down to die.
Closer. She drew in a breath, let it fill her, exhaled.
Air leaving dry mouths. Drops of salt falling on hard earth. A whining, noisy plea without words.
And she heard it.
The Howling told Kalindris who needed to die.
“This is taking forever.”
Her ears lowered. Her brows furrowed. Her frown deepened.
The child.
Talking.
Again.
“You already found the tracks,” the child complained. “Two hours ago. We could have found the beast by now. Instead I’ve spent half an hour waiting, half an hour searching for more tracks, half an hour shooting arrows through the gap between those branches over there and half an hour wondering how best to shoot myself with my own bow so I can deny boredom the pleasure of killing me.”
The Howling left her, swift and easy as it had come. The shicts asked for nothing for their goddess, Riffid. To invite her attention was to invite her ire. She had given them nothing but life and the Howling and then left to the Dark Forest. They had spent generations honing it, the sense above all others, the voice of life and of death.
And somehow, the child’s whining could send it away in an instant.
“When do we get to the hunt?”
It didn’t matter. The Howling had shown Kalindris enough. The other noises of life and death weren’t important. She held on only to that final one, that which teetered between the two. The sound of uncertainty. The sound that waited for her to tip the balance toward darkness.
Kalindris rose. The leaves fell from her hunting leathers as she slung the bow and quiver over her shoulder. The leather settled into a familiar furrow upon the bare skin of her neck’s crook, the only other presence she had ever allowed that close to her throat. And the only one she ever would again, she thought as she rubbed a scar across her collarbone. She could still feel as she ran her hands across the scarred flesh. Every knucklebone of every finger, sinking into her skin.
Without a glance behind her, Kalindris hopped off the rock and set off after the noise. The forest rose up around her in aloof pillars, not like the familial closeness of the inner woods that left no room for sunlight. Too much light here on the border of the sea of trees; too much seeing, not enough listening. The Howling didn’t speak clearly here. She had to keep her ears up and open.
They rose up like spears and she listened. Leaves crunching, an offended cry, hurried breath.
The child.
Following.
Still.
“Hey! Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot!” the child protested, hurrying after her. “If you’re going to try to abandon me, at least be a little less obvious about it. It might give me the opportunity to track you and get something done today.”
Abandonment needed more than she had to give. That needed malice, anger, and she could spare none for the child. That was for someone else, along with her arrows, her knife and this day.
“Why won’t you talk to me?” the child asked. “I did everything right. I followed the tracks like you showed me. I’ve done everything you told me to. What did I do wrong?”
The child spoke too much. That was why Kalindris didn’t speak; the child used all the words. That was what she did wrong. She shouldn’t need nearly as much as she used. She shouldn’t need any. The Howling was the shict language, that which came with breath and wailing as they were born.
And the child couldn’t hear it. The child couldn’t use it. She could only breathe. She could only wail.
It hurt Kalindris’ ears.
“Are we at least going the right way?” the child asked. “I can’t come back until the beast is dead. If I do, I don’t get my feathers. I won’t be accepted.” The child’s voice dropped. “Father said.”
She stopped and cringed.
Rokuda said. Rokuda said lots of things. Rokuda said things like they were fact, like his word was all that mattered. Anyone that disagreed saw those bright green eyes and wide, sharp smile and heard his honey when he told them they were wrong.
Before Kalindris knew it, her back hurt. Her spine was rigid like a spear and visible beneath her skin. She turned around, ears flat against the side of her head, teeth bared.
The child stood there. Her hair was too bright, cut like some golden shrubbery and the feathers in her locks stuck out at all strange angles. The bow around skinny shoulders was strung and strung wrong, the skinny arms were too small to pull back the arrow. And her ears stuck out awkwardly, one up and one down, long and smooth and without notches in them. They were always trying to listen for something they couldn’t hear.
Her eyes were far too green.
“Your father,” she said, “is not always right.”
“If that were true, everyone wouldn’t listen to him when he speaks,” the child protested. She swelled with a rehearsed kind of pride, the kind she clearly felt she should have, rather than actually possessed. “When Father speaks, people listen. When he tells them to do something, they do it.”
Words. Heavy words coming from the child. Like she believed them.
An agonizing moment of concentration was needed for Kalindris to unclench every knucklebone of every finger from her fist. She had to turn away and tear her eyes and shut her ears to the child. She hefted her quiver, continued to follow the noise through the trees.
“We shouldn’t have come here. We should have listened to it.”
“We had no choice. Just keep moving. Keep moving.”
Mother and Father were fighting again.
“It got Eadne. That thing got my Eadne. And we left her. And we ran. From our own land!”
“Gods, will you just shut up and let me think?”
Mother and Father were not scared because they were fighting. And so neither was Senny.
Whenever she would get scared, she would look to Mother and Father. Mother would look at Father and get mad. Father would look at Mother and start yelling. And they would fight too much to be scared. So she would hold onto the little knife tucked away in her belt and she would be ready to fight and she wouldn’t be scared, either.
No matter how fast they were running. No matter how hard Mother was pulling on her arm.
“It killed her. It left her in a tree and painted the bark red with her. We should have stayed. We should have buried her. We shouldn’t have run.”
“We didn’t have a choice, you idiot. It was going to come for us next. It’s coming for us now. Think of her.”
Senny knew who they were talking about. Father called them monsters. They had come to their little house and told him to leave. They said it was their forest. He told them he wouldn’t. So they took Eadne.
Their name sounded like an angry word.
Father reached down and took Senny’s other hand. He pulled on it, too. Maybe to show Mother he could pull harder, so he wasn’t as scared. She pulled her hand back so she could grab the little knife and show Father she wasn’t scared, either.
But he didn’t notice.
He was looking forward. Mother was looking back. They said Eadne was back there, but Eadne wasn’t coming with them. They weren’t talking about Eadne. Maybe they didn’t want her to feel scared. She already knew, though. She had seen Eadne up in the tree with the branches and the leaves and her legs all blowing the same way in the wind.
Mother wanted to go back, but she kept moving forward with Father. Through the trees, back to their little house by the brook.
It was a good house. She knew that even if Father hadn’t said so when he told Mother they were going to live there. Bushes full of berries that were good to eat grew by the brook. And there were snares to set and rabbits to catch and Mother had showed her how to make stew. The forest was scary, but Father had given her the little knife. They told her never to go in there.
She looked past Mother’s arm at the trees. When they had come here, they looked dark and scary. But she had gone in there with the little knife. She knew there were places there they could hide from the beast, from that thing that got Eadne.
“Father,” she said.
“Keep moving,” Father said.
“But, Father, the forest—”
“I know, I know, I know.”
Senny held up the little knife. “There are places, and there are berries and we could go there and I’m not—”
“Gods damn it, not now, you little shit!”
He didn’t say that word around her a lot. Because he thought she didn’t know what it meant. But he said it before, when he told them they were coming to the forest, when he built the house, when the people with the feathers in their hair came and told him to go away. His name for them was that word. She knew what it meant.
And he used it a lot more when he was scared. It was what the monsters were named. What their name sounded like.
“I don’t care if the shit’s upset because we’re in a lot more shit than we need to be because you won’t shut the shit up about all the shit!”
Mother wasn’t talking anymore.
Maybe Mother was scared, too.
She held on to her little knife. And she held on to Mother’s hand.
When the moon began to sink over the sea of trees and the starving owls went to their holes hungry, she tried not to hear him.
“One more thing.”
Only in darkness did Rokuda speak to her. Only when he could not see her trying to ignore him, when she could not go busy herself with some other task and pretend, for a while, he wasn’t hers. Only when he couldn’t see her run her fingers along the scar on her collarbone.
“I want you to bring back proof,” he had said.
“Proof,” Kalindris had echoed.
“A trophy. Something to show the tribe she has done it. I want you to make sure she had blood on her hands.”
“You want me to bring it back to you.”
“Yes. Take it and shove it in her hands, if you must. Tell her that it will make me proud. She will do it then.”
“She can’t shoot,” Kalindris had said. “She can’t draw the bow back far enough and she can’t stalk prey. She’s loud. Like you.” Kalindris continued lacing up her boots. “She can’t do it.”
“She has to.”
Kalindris froze as Rokuda sat on the furs next to her. The furs that had remained cold for years. She never slept in them unless the winter was too cold. But when she lay beside him, she didn’t feel the biting chill of winter. She felt sweaty, cold, clammy. Sick.
As she did now.
“They look at her like she’s not one of them. I can’t have that. And so she has to know what it is to be shict.”
He spoke that name too easily. Like it was a word. Shict was more than that. It should not have been uttered in the darkness, Kalindris had thought.
“She should know that already,” Kalindris had replied, securing the laces tightly.
“No one taught her.” Rokuda had edged closer.
“No one should have to. We are born knowing who we are. The Howling tells us.”
“She wasn’t. You have to teach her.”
Kalindris had said nothing as she rose up and moved to her bow. It was never far from her, save those times when he moved it. In the darkness, she preferred to keep it close.
But when she rose, he reached out. He took her by her wrist and she felt herself freeze. It grew cold again, cold as their bed.
“You have to show her,” Rokuda had insisted.
“I don’t have to do anything,” she had tried to speak. But her words were smothered in the darkness.
He tightened his fingers around her wrist and she felt cold all over. She felt every point he had ever touched her, a bead of cold sweat forming everywhere his fingerprint lingered on her skin. She grew silent, rigid. And when he spoke, his voice was an icicle snapping on a winter’s day.
“You will.”
She stared across the clearing and spoke softly, as to not stir the leaves before her.
“Do you know why?”
Kalindris’ own voice.
Strange and uncomfortable in her own mouth.
But the child was looking up at her. The child had her bow in her hands, an arrow in the string.
Kalindris pointed out to the log. The deer scratched at the moss with a hoof, pulled green scraps from the wood, and slurped them up from the ground. It wasted many sounds as it ate: grinding its teeth, grunting in satisfaction, slurping the greenery down noisily. It couldn’t hear her whispering to the child from the underbrush.
“Why it has to die?” Kalindris reiterated.
The child stared at the deer, squinting hard. She could almost hear the child’s thoughts, imagined them as noisy, jumbled things. The Howling was not there to give them clarity and focus.
“Food?” the child asked.
“No.”
“I don’t know. Competition? We kill it or we are killed?”
“By a deer?”
“It has horns!” the child protested.
The deer looked up at the sudden noise. Kalindris and the child were still and quiet. The deer was too hungry to leave. It continued to gnaw and to make noise.
“Why does it have to die?” Kalindris asked.
The child thought carefully. She winced with the realization.
“Because we can only know who we are by who everyone else is. We can only know what it means to be us if we know that we are not the others. And so we kill them, to know that, to know who we are and why we are here and why Riffid gave us life and nothing else. We kill. And because we are the killers, we are who we are.”
She felt her ears flatten against the side of her head. Her father’s words. Her father’s words repeated to a thousand people who would never speak against him, never tell him no. She hadn’t told him no, either. Not when she first heard it. Not until it was too late.
“No,” she said.
“But Father said—”
“No.” She spoke more forcefully. “Look at it. Why does it have to die?”
And the child looked at the deer. And then the child looked at her.
“Does it have to?” she asked.
The sound of ears rising. The sound of eyelids opening wide. The sound of a breath going short. Realization. Acknowledgment. Resignation. Sorrow.
The child.
Listening.
Wordless.
“Why does it have to die?” she asked again.
“Because,” the child said, “I have to kill it.”
Kalindris nodded. No smiles. No approval. No sounds.
The child raised her bow, drew the arrow back and held it. She trusted only her eyes. She checked her aim once, then twice, then a third time. On the fourth, when her hands had started to quiver from the strain, she shot.
The arrow struck the deer in the tender part between the leg and the nethers. It quivered there, severing something that the deer needed. The beast let out a groan, its breath mist. It staggered on its hooves, turned to flee. But its legs didn’t remember anything before the arrow. It shambled, bleeding, toward the forest.
The child drew an arrow and shot again. She trusted only her heart now. The arrow flew too wide. She shrieked, her voice panicked, and shot again. Words befouled the air and the arrow sank into the earth, heavy with her fear.
The deer took another step before it fell. The arrow stood quivering in the deer’s neck and the beast lay on its side, breathing heavily, spilling breath and blood onto the earth.
Kalindris approached it, the child behind her. She reached behind and grabbed the child, shoving her forward. The child stared at the deer’s eyes, at herself reflected in the great brown mirror of its gaze.
The child looked to her.
Kalindris reached into her belt and pulled the knife free. She held it out to the child. The child looked at it like it was something that shouldn’t be there, something that she would only ever see hung upon the wall of her father’s tent.
She thrust the handle toward the child.
“Why?” Kalindris asked the child.
The child looked up at her. The sight of eyes wide and pleading. The sight of resentment. The sight of fear and hate and betrayal for making the child do this.
But no words.
The child took the knife and knelt beside the deer. She pressed it to its throat. She winced and she cut through the fur and the hide and the sinew to the root of the beast’s neck.
She opened it up and it spilled upon her. It spilled over her hands and onto her arms. And the child kept cutting silently.
As the brook babbled alongside them, she tried to keep up with her parents.
“Are you scared, darling?”
Senny wasn’t. She was trying hard not to be, anyway. She shook her head and held up the little knife. Father didn’t seem to notice.
“You don’t need to be scared,” he said. “Not when I’m here. We’re going to get through this, all right?”
She nodded. She wasn’t scared.
“I’m sorry for what I said earlier, darling. I was just irritated. Your mother was screaming so loud.”
Mother didn’t seem to notice that they were talking about her. Mother held on to her hand and kept pulling her toward the cottage. The brook was nearby, churning away. Vines of berries grew nearby, ripe and bright in the sunlight.
They could go to the forest to avoid the beast, maybe. They could run there and live together there. The cottage was nice and she would miss it and she would miss Eadne and she tried very hard not to think about Eadne because whenever she did she felt like she was going to throw up and then Mother would cry.
“Darling, everything’s going to be all right,” Father said. He wasn’t looking at her, though. “Everything will be fine, don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried, Father,” she said. “I’m not scared. I still have the knife you gave me. Look.”
“It’ll be all right, darling.”
“Father, we could go deeper into the forest. We could escape the beast there and come back when it’s gone. I’ve been there, Father. It’s not as dark as it looks. There are berries and food and we could go there instead of the cottage.”
“Yes, darling. The forest.”
“Father, Mother is scared. She’s holding on to my hand so hard that it hurts. Father?”
Father said the same thing again. Over and over. All “darling” and “mm-hm” and “fine, fine, all right.” She soon stopped talking. Father wasn’t listening. Because if Father listened, he would hear her voice starting to sound like it always did whenever her throat felt funny and she wanted to cry.
And then he’d be scared. And then Mother would be more scared.
He needed to say his words so he couldn’t hear her. And she needed to stay quiet. And Mother needed to hold her hand until it hurt. And she needed not to throw up or cry or do any of those things that a scared little child would do.
Maybe when Eadne was around, she could do that.
Eadne was dead.
When the sun began to scowl over their tent and the first wolves rose to the hunt, she hated herself like she hated him.
“I want to ask you something,” Rokuda had said.
“No.” Kalindris had replied.
It was a noise Rokuda only heard from her. He had no idea what it meant. “Why aren’t you bothered by this?” he had asked, undeterred.
“By what?”
“By how they see her, by the fact that they think she’s not one of us. Not a shict.” He forced difficult words through a snarl. “Not mine.”
“I don’t pay attention to what she does.”
“Why not? Haven’t you seen what they think of her? How they look at her?”
“No.”
“They look at her like … like she’s … like she isn’t …”
His words had failed him and he had begun to snarl. He hated it when words would not work for him, because when his words would not work, neither would the Howling speak for him. And when he couldn’t speak, he started snarling, because people couldn’t agree with him. People could tell him “no.”
And that was when he started making scars.
“She reaches out to try to hold on to your hand when she’s scared. She … she asks them things, instead of knowing what the Howling tells her.” She heard his nails rake the fur and find that insufficient for his rage. She heard strands of his hair snap from his scalp as he pulled it. “She cries when she gets hurt. She snarls when she gets angry.”
“Children do that.”
“Not my heir.”
“Your heir is a child.”
“Not one of our children. Not one of our people. We don’t … do that.”
“She does.”
“And you don’t even care! You don’t even look at her. Don’t you know what they’re saying about us? How they look at us?”
“Don’t care.”
“You used to.”
“Don’t anymore.”
And she had heard it. Silence before a crack of thunder. Grains of earth falling after a drop of rain kicks them up. Moan of wind over hillsides. The moment before he drew a breath, before he spoke with the intent of being heard.
“You used to stand with me in front of them, remember? You and your bow, the proud huntress next to me, so strong and brave. They looked up to us as I spoke. They listened to me and I cared only if you heard me.”
Honey fermenting in a skein. Dandelions flying on the breeze. Steam after the fire had been doused. The words he spoke that had made her listen, the words he spoke that made him powerful, the words he spoke when he had been Rokuda and she had been Kalindris and they had no need for words.
“You used to listen to my words, you used to nod when they nodded and cheer when they cheered. And when I was done and I looked out over all of them smiling, I looked beside me and yours was always the biggest smile and the best.”
The words he spoke when she thought those were all she ever needed.
“You had a lot of words,” Kalindris had said.
“I still do. I still have everything. Everything except that proud huntress that stood beside me. Where did she go?”
Kalindris had waited at the flap of the tent. When she opened it to the cold dawn light, the world was silent. She looked briefly over her shoulder and saw his eyes, so vast and green. And out the corner of her eye, she saw only a glimpse of it. But the scar on her collarbone, the one he had given her, was still there.
“She fell in love with someone silent and gentle. They ran away and died somewhere far in the woods and left you and I behind.”
She had spoken briefly. And then she had left.
“You’re not doing it right. You’re not doing it right.” Teeth coming in through a cub’s mouth. “You’re supposed to talk to me. You’re supposed to be able to do this.” Claws digging for something in the earth that wasn’t there. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it and do it already.” A leg in a snare, being gnawed off.
The child.
Talking to the earth.
Still.
She watched, arms folded, impassive as the child crawled through the riverbank, following a flayed line through the mud. The child followed it over the bank, through the ebb, around the trees, back to where it began. The child cursed at it, made demands of it, whined at it and now simply spewed words, to the tracks, to the earth, to herself.
The child’s hands were thick with mud, belly smeared with it, face painted brown where she had clutched her head in frustration. And she crawled with her hands upon the ground, as though she could strangle answers out of the earth.
The earth wouldn’t talk to her.
The child wanted everything. The child wanted the tracks to tell her without listening to them. The child wanted the land to yield to her because she wanted it to that badly. The child wanted. The child spoke. The child whined and demanded and she never listened.
Like her father.
Kalindris was surprised to find her hands clenched into fists at her side.
“He said it was supposed to be easy,” the child whined. “It’s supposed to be easy. Why didn’t he—” She slammed the heel of her palm against her forehead. A muddy bruise was left behind. “No, no. It’s you, not him. You’re doing something wrong. It’s you, you’re the failure, that’s why they hate you.”
His legacy. In the mud. Striking herself in the head.
In some wordless part of herself, Kalindris tried to convince herself that the child deserved this. The child who couldn’t listen, the child who always spoke, his child belonged in the mud.
Kalindris was surprised to hear her own voice.
“It’s metaphor. The earth doesn’t actually talk to you.” The child continued to paw at it and plead to it. “Look. You’ve ruined the tracks. We can start—”
“Shut up!”
The child.
Baring teeth.
Snarling.
“I don’t want to hear it or you or anything, I just want to find the beast and kill it and bring it back and show it to him and then he’ll talk to me and I don’t need you or anyone else to talk to me if Father will so I never have to see you again!”
The child was liquid. White flecks of spittle gathered at her mouth. Tears brimmed in the corners of her eyes. Viscous mucus dripped from her nostrils. The child was melting, trembling herself to death. The child turned away, looked back into the silent earth.
“I wasn’t asleep.”
And Kalindris had no words for the child. The child who had just spoken to her like it was her fault the child’s ears couldn’t hear. The child who presumed to dismiss her. The child who acted like it was her fault, her problem, her flaw that made this moment of mud and tears and spit.
Like her father. Every bit.
She was surprised to find tears in her eyes.
And she, too, turned. The earth spoke to her, though. Told her where the beast had gone. Told her how to deny the child and how that made sense that she should be angry and vengeful against a child.
The child.
Weeping.
And she shut her ears and walked away.
Mother was scared. And Father was scared.
Senny knew this because no one was yelling anymore.
Mother wrapped her hands tightly around her and held her close in the corner of their cottage. Father stood with his hatchet in his hand, peering through the windows. Mother had her. Father had his hatchet. And they were both still scared.
She wasn’t, though. She had her little knife. Father had given it to her so she wouldn’t be scared. She couldn’t be scared with the little knife, even if Father was.
She thought about giving it to Father, to see if it would help. But she pulled it back when she heard a voice, even if it was Father’s.
“I’m going out there.”
“What? Why would you do that?”
“To look for that thing. It might not even be around. We didn’t see it when we found—”
“No. Don’t go out there,” Mother said. “It already got Eadne. You can’t let it get your daughter and me, you have to stay here, you have to, you have to.”
“I have to protect you,” Father said. “I have to keep you safe. We can’t live like this. We can’t let that beast chase us away. We have to …”
To not be scared, Senny wanted to say. We have to be brave.
“I’m going,” Father said. “Not far. Not long. Just stay here. I’ll be back.”
Senny nodded. She held her little knife tightly. Mother held her tightly. So tightly it hurt. She leaned into it, though, let Mother hold on to her because Mother didn’t have a little knife.
Father pushed the door open. Birds were singing outside. The sun was shining that orange way it got when it started going beneath the trees. The brook was babbling outside, talking loud and wondering where the little girl was that talked back to it. Father walked out two steps from the doorway and looked around with his hatchet in his hand.
The birds kept singing. The brook kept talking. The sun kept shining.
And Father was dead.
She knew it. She saw the arrow in his shoulder, pinning him to the cottage door. She saw another fly out and hit him in the wrist. He dropped his hatchet. Mother screamed. Father screamed. Father bled all over the door. And Senny held on to the little knife.
The beast came up. The beast was a lady. Her hair was long and wild and she wore dirty clothes and her ears were huge and she had big teeth and a scar on her neck. Her knife was big. Her knife was shiny. And she brought it up and against Father’s neck and opened him up and his blood spilled all over her.
And the birds just kept on singing, even though Father was dead.
When the birds kept singing and the woman would not stop weeping, she looked at the Beast.
There were many names for them: intruder, human, monkey, kou’ru. It was Rokuda that had began calling them Beasts, to make them a threat instead of a people, a word instead of a thing that had children. It had made the tribe nod in approval and mutter how they were Beasts, these creatures that came and threatened the shict lands.
She had killed one already, left the body swinging in a tree as warning to these two. But she had known, even then, that she would have to kill them, too. She had killed many.
Even before Rokuda gave them a new name, she had killed them. They were the enemy, they were the disease. Killing defined a shict. And these kills were meant for the child. The blood that poured down Kalindris’ hands should have been on the child’s. She was supposed to have come back to the tribe with her hands red and her eyes shut and the tribe would know she was one of them and her father would be proud of his heir.
The child’s kill. Rokuda’s glory. Kalindris denied one through the other.
The little human girl stood in front of her cowering mother, holding up a little knife like it was a match for the broad red blade in Kalindris’ hands. She looked up at Kalindris, trying her hardest not to show fear. Kalindris looked down at her, trying to decide how best to end this quickly. A clean blow through one, then the other, she thought, in the heart to end it quickly.
Clean and quick.
Just as soon as the child stopped staring at her.
Like she owed her an explanation.
“Do you know why?” Heavy, choked, weak. Kalindris’ words.
The human child did not say a thing. Her mother wrapped her arms around the child’s tiny form, tried to hold her back. The child would not lower her knife.
“Why I have to kill you?” she asked again.
The child said nothing. Kalindris opened her mouth to tell her. No words came.
“Your knife is too small,” Kalindris said. She held up her own blade, thick and choked with red. “You can’t do anything with it. You aren’t meant to hold it. Put it down.”
The child did not put it down. Kalindris raised her weapon, took a step forward, as if to step around the child. The child moved in front of her, thrust her little knife at Kalindris like it would do something. Like she could use it. Like she wasn’t scared.
Kalindris hesitated. She looked over her shoulder, as though she expected the child—her child—to be there.
“You don’t have to die here,” she said, without looking at the child—the human child. “Your … your father isn’t you. Your mother isn’t you. I’ll take them. You can run.”
She looked at the child and her little knife.
“Go. Run away.”
The child did not run. The child did not move.
“Why aren’t you running?”
“I can’t.” The child spoke in a terrified voice.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s my mother.”
The pages of a book fallen from a shelf, turning. Ashes in a long-dead fireplace settling beneath charred logs. A mother weeping. Birds singing. Blood pattering onto the floor from a hole in a soft throat, drop by drop.
Slow sounds.
Quiet sounds.
Full of nothing.
Kalindris could hear the whisper of leather as she slid the blade back into its sheath. Kalindris could hear the sound of her boots on the floor as she turned around and walked out of the cabin. Kalindris could hear the sound of the human child drop to the floor and weep.
She could hear it all the way back to the forest.
And her child.
A river running. Wind blowing through the leaves. A wolf howling.
And birds singing.
No matter how hard she tried, how she angled her ears, how she strained to hear something else, something full of meaning, this was all she could hear. These sounds, common and pointless, the sort of thing any ugly creature could hear.
The Howling wasn’t talking to her.
“Where were you?”
The child.
Asking.
Concerned.
She walked into the clearing with her bow on her back and her knife in her belt. The child was sitting down on her heels, looking up at her as she walked past.
“You washed,” the child noted, looking at her clean, bloodless hands. “When? What did you do?”
She did not look back at the child as she sat down beside her. She let her legs hang over a small ledge, dangling over a dying brook whose babble had turned to poetic muttering as it sputtered into a thin stream. She looked to her right and saw the child’s feet in their little boots, covered in mud, flecked with blood from the dead deer.
Only a few droplets of red. The rest mixed with the mud. It seemed like so much to look at it.
“Why do we kill, child?” she asked absently.
“You already asked me this.”
“I know. Tell me again.”
The child kicked her feet a little. A few flecks of mud came off. Not the blood.
“I guess I don’t know,” the child said.
She said nothing.
They stared, together, into the forest. Their ears pricked up, listening to the sounds. Birds kept singing, one more day they marked by noisy chatter. The wind kept blowing, same as it always had. Somewhere far away, one more deer loosed a long, guttural bugle into the sky.
“Did you kill the beast?” the child asked.
She said nothing.
“I was supposed to do it.”
“I didn’t.”
The child looked at her. “I’m not an idiot.”
“No.”
She reached over, wrapped an arm around the child and drew her close. A heart beating; excited. A breath drawn in sharply; quivering. A shudder through the body; terrified. She drew the child closer.
“But let me pretend you are for a little while.”
No more noises. No more sounds. No more distant cries and close Howling. Only words. Only the child’s voice.
“I was supposed to kill it. Father said.”
“Your father isn’t always right.”
“You are?”
“No.”
“Then why should I believe you?”
“Because.”
“That’s not a good reason.”
She looked down at the child and smiled. “I’ll think of one later, all right?”
The child looked back at her. Her smile came more slowly, more nervous, like she was afraid it would be slapped out of her mouth at any moment. Kalindris blamed herself for that look, for these words that came heavy and slowly. She would learn how to use them better.
There would be time for that. Without so much blood and cold nights. Without so many thoughts of Rokuda and his words. She would learn them on her own. She would tell them to the child.
Her child.
Her daughter.
Smiling.
There would be time enough to look into her daughter’s eyes, long from now, and know what it meant to need no words. There would be a time when she would look into her daughter’s eyes and simply know.
For now, she had only the sound of her daughter’s smile. And forever.