by H. M. Long
Arpa legionaries. Savage, unyielding soldiers of that great empire to the south, on whose rim the Eangen carved out an existence.
“Why would Arpa be so far north?” I slapped his cheek, but he was too far gone. His eyes rolled back and his legs bucked.
Still not looking at Eidr or Yske, I retrieved my knife from the raider’s arm and slit his throat in one grim movement. Then I moved to Sixnit’s side.
“Six,” my voice softened, cajoling and tense with hope. “Six, wake up, please.”
She didn’t stir, though her chest continued to rise and fall. I couldn’t carry her, so I numbly began to disentangle the infant from her arms, trying not to think past that simple step. The child’s stillness terrified me more than a thousand Algatt and I checked three times to make sure he was, truly, alive. But breath passed between his tiny parted lips, and his heart fluttered beneath my palm.
Steeling myself, I held him close and began to search the room for something, anything that might help me rouse or carry Sixnit.
But my thoughts refused to stay on task. As soon as the Algatt died, I was left alone again – alone with the corpses of my husband, my people, Sixnit’s helplessness and that looming, crippling grief. My eyes darted, faster now, and my breath shallowed. I saw Yske’s own, lifeless eyes. The blood in Eidr’s hair.
Eidr’s hair. Eidr, unmoving, unbreathing. Gone.
My chest threatened to cave in and black sparked across my vision. At the same time, feebleness, a side effect of using Eangi Fire, swept over my limbs. Only a wheezing gasp from the baby in my arms kept me from crumpling. I pushed the knuckle of a trembling hand against one eye and locked my knees. Focus. Just a moment longer.
If the Arpa had gone into the mountains, driving the Algatt into the Eangen lowlands… I had to get us to East Meade, the village of my birth. They had to be warned. I could leave Sixnit and the baby with my sisters—
Warm, slick steel met my throat. “On your knees.”
I froze, every muscle still and my breath lodged in my throat. Calculating, hoping, my eyes flew from the infant in my arms to the charred doors of the Hall of Smoke. There, misty daylight fell uninterrupted across the bodies of my people, but the way was clear. I could run with the baby. But not with Sixnit.
More silhouettes appeared in the doorway. More raiders, stalking and spreading out, muttering and eyeing me.
The child let out another fragile, crackling breath. My eyes fell from him to Six, still motionless at my feet, and what little hope I had died. I would risk my own life in a last, desperate play for freedom. But I could not risk theirs.
My throat swelled against the blade as I said, “We surrender.”
THREE
Years earlier, under a starry autumn sky, Svala the High Priestess moved through the camp towards me. In the firelight, surrounded by revelers, she might have been our warrior-goddess herself, robed in violence and armored with divine purpose.
There was blood in her crown of braids, spattered where black hair met tawny skin, and a slim ring of bronze glistened above her bloodied tunic. Its runes had worn smooth long ago, but I knew they were clear on my own, only a year old. The Brave. The Vengeful. The Watchful. The Swift. All that Eang was, and all that we must endeavor to be.
Yske and I sat against a boulder on the edge of the celebration, between our comrades and their fires, and the quiet of a far northern night. The trees were sparse here, gnarled and windblown. The expanse of open rock was still warm from the sun and pocketed with shivering clusters of seeding flowers and moss, while above the sky arched toward the distant, shadowed hulk of the Algatt’s high mountains.
This was Orthskar, in northern Eangen, where we’d spent the last three weeks hunting down a group of Algatt raiders. Raiders that, today, we’d finally routed and driven back into the mountains under the leadership of the woman who beckoned me now.
“Hessa,” the High Priestess held out her hand. “Come with me.”
Yske looked up, a cup of honey wine halfway to her lips. When we were children, I might have seen a flash of jealousy in her eyes at the High Priestess coming for me instead of her, but there was none of that now. We were old enough to know that the interest of our leaders was not always a good thing.
I nodded obediently, though the day’s battle had left me sore and exhausted. I eased myself onto my feet and slipped my plain, unadorned axe through its leather loop at my belt.
The High Priestess headed off into the darkness. I, it seemed, was expected to follow.
Yske grabbed my hand. She and I still shared our fathers’ curling dark hair, dense brush of freckles and brown eyes. But by now our progression into womanhood had begun to accent our differences; where Yske had her mother’s lithe form, every muscle calculated, every curve measured, I had my mother’s compact power.
“What does she want?” Yske asked, low enough to nearly be drowned by a thunder of drums. We both flinched as the warriors of the camp roared with approval and someone began a familiar song in a deep, rolling voice. “What did you do wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I hissed back.
“Hessa,” Svala called.
Yske’s hand dropped away. We exchanged one last uncertain glance, then I hastened off into the night.
The songs of the warriors followed us as we left the camp behind. They told the history of the gods, taught to us by Eang herself, of how the Gods of the Old World – their names lost over the millennia – had woven themselves from the darkness of the heavens, borne children, and created mankind from the dirt and divine birth-blood. Eang had been among their offspring, and the Gods of the Old World had quickly learned to fear their most violent daughter.
Svala and I walked until the older woman halted under the shadow of a tree. The firelight could not reach us here, but the stars gave enough illumination for me to make out the planes and shadows of her face – and the runes carved into every inch of the leafless, barren tree at her back.
Svala followed my gaze. “It’s a binding tree, Hessa. Have you seen one before?”
Distantly, I heard Yske’s voice join the chorus in the camp, vibrant and sweet.
“No…” Cautiously, I circled the tree, squinting at runes for protection and suppression, warning and foreboding. My nerves, already worn, began to fray, but I resisted the urge to draw back. Svala was watching me, and she would not overlook any weakness. “What is bound inside this?”
“What? Or who? It matters little.” The High Priestess nodded back towards the camp. Our comrades’ song continued to wash out towards us, now recounting how Eang had gathered her cousins and siblings, the so-called Gods of the New World, to overthrow the Gods of the Old. “Eang’s power will keep them asleep until the Unmaking of the World, along with the Gods of the Old World and a hundred other enemies besides. But the tree is not why I brought you out here.”
I retraced my steps, settling before her at a respectful distance – and letting her remain between me and the hushed, rune-laden tree.
“You killed today.”
Tears surged into my eyes, ready and eager. Horrified, I blinked hard and kept my back straight, but I had no doubt Svala saw how the act had shaken me.
She offered me no comfort. Instead she scrutinized me, crowned by the binding tree’s stark, wind-blown branches. “I had a vision of you, in the eyes of a dying man. It is not uncommon… Today was your first raid as full Eangi. Your first kill, since you came to us. So Eang showed me your future – a vision from Fate herself.”
I remained quiet, squinting away my tears. Fate was the most mysterious of divine beings, elevated and withdrawn from Eang and the New Gods, or any other assembly of gods for that matter. She had no physical form, but there were corners of the High Halls, the high priesthood said, where one could hear the clack of her loom on a starry night, as she wove the destinies of us all.
That Fate had showed Eang a vision of me was both awe-inspiring and troubling.
“I saw a man,” Svala said.
/> “A man?” I could not help myself. I was fifteen and, despite living in close quarters with men of all ages, her words made my cheeks flush. My eyes darted away from her and the lording tree to the chanting masses back in the camp, a hundred warriors releasing weeks of tension. Leather. Muscle. Nerves and grief, clawing for release. Eidr was there, somewhere, singing and laughing.
I shuffled on my feet. “Was he mine? The man in the vision?”
“I don’t know.” If she saw my embarrassment, she didn’t comment. I sometimes wondered if Svala had ever passed through those painful, formative years, or if she had spawned in all her mature, feminine glory. “But he stood with you in the Hall of Smoke, with a hound at his heel and a golden eye.”
A few tears escaped my blockade and trickled onto my upper lip. I licked them away. “What does it mean?”
“I’m not sure. But you were a little older, perhaps by three or four years.” Svala looked at me askance and, back in the camp, the song entered a resounding, final verse. I thought I saw a rare smile in the corner of the priestess’s mouth, but before I could be sure, it vanished into a frown. “When that day comes, you must kill him.”
FOUR
I turned away from the baby in my arms and muffled a cough in my shoulder. The Algatt guard who paced around the huddle of prisoners shot me a glare and shifted his grip on his axe.
My captors had brought Sixnit, the baby and I to the horde just after dusk, thrusting me down in the middle of twenty other Eangen. Most of the captives were young women like me, though there were a handful of boys, a smattering of older women and two men. I was the only Eangi.
My body had given into cold and fatigue, the result of Eangi Fire and a night in the rain, but it helped excuse the steady trickle of tears from my eyes. It was a pitiful shield, but it was something; a lesser suffering to focus on while a chasm of loss festered beneath my skin.
Sixnit and her son were the only things that kept that chasm from swallowing me. Sixnit had regained consciousness on the road but had yet to speak, lying with her head in my lap and slipping in and out of consciousness. The infant had recovered, though his breath was still so thin that my heart wrenched every time he inhaled. I wished he would cry, because at least then I could hear the life in him. For all that he moved now, he might have been carved of pale, clammy stone.
I had to save them. They were my one victory, my one purpose in all of this. When I looked at them, I no longer saw Eidr’s bloodied, limp hand or Yske’s soulless eyes. I saw only a friend and a child who deserved a chance at life. I saw someone I could save.
I gathered moisture from the dewy grass and stroked it across the baby’s lips. He began a frail, wheezing lament.
“Let me feed him.”
Sixnit slowly sat up, her flat cheeks pale over narrow chin and cracked lips. My heart twisted at the sight of her, but I managed a smile and passed her her son.
The Algatt guard glanced over, but he did not stop her as she unlaced the front of her shift, took the baby in her arms and offered him a breast. He did not latch on, fumbling and flailing feebly, but her skin and the scent of milk soon soothed him.
“Thank you.” Sixnit’s voice was soft, toneless in a way that told me she was as raw and shocked as I was. She looked at the guards askance, but her eyes did not focus until her son began to feed. Then something of herself seemed to return; she turned her vacant gaze down and stroked his fine black hair.
I thought that she would say more, would at least ask about her husband, but she didn’t. She knew his fate, and she knew the reality of our situation as well as anyone else in the tent.
I looked down at my knees. “What did you call him? I… I wasn’t there for the naming.”
“There wasn’t one.” In response to my quizzical look, she clarified, “We were waiting for you to come back.”
Neither Eidr nor Yske had mentioned that, likely to spare me the burden. I opened my mouth to say something in return, but my words paled. I’d been at the child’s birth, so it was appropriate that I would be there at his dedication, but not necessary – especially considering the reason for my absence. It was a gesture of kindness and friendship that, in the end, had excluded the baby’s own father from the ceremony.
“Quiet,” one of the guards finally commanded, her hard-lined face framed by smears of blue paint – nearly black in the distant firelight – and the axe and short spear she wore across her back.
We lapsed into silence. The other captives glanced at us curiously, but no one else dared to speak. Finally, when the guards had changed and night closed in, an older man broke the stillness. He was Erd, Albor’s chief blacksmith and one of my father’s distant cousins, though little family resemblance or intimacy remained between us. His muscular arms were bound behind his back – the Algatt had only bound those they perceived as a threat – and the lines on his face permanently entrenched with grey.
“When they realize what you are, they’ll kill you, Eangi.”
The mention of my title made my skin crawl. My gaze flicked to the guards.
When I didn’t say anything, Erd rubbed his bearded chin against one shoulder. “I saw you head up the mountain.”
I weighed his words, trying to uncover what he wasn’t saying. He didn’t know my crime, no one but Sixnit did, but he was the one who cut my collar off. That meant he’d seen just how furious Svala had been with me.
Sixnit watched me quietly.
“I made the climb,” I affirmed.
“Why?” the man asked.
I hesitated. If any of the villagers found out that I had been banished for letting an Algatt traveler into the Hall of Smoke, a week before they razed the village, I was as good as dead.
Guilt welled up in my throat. I had offered Omaskat hospitality on sacred ground and blatantly ignored a charge from Eang to kill him. No wonder the goddess had let the town fall.
Gods below. Was all this really my fault?
“It’s an Eangi matter. Svala had a vision,” I evaded, battling to keep my voice even and that chasm of grief from devouring me. “An owl called me up the mountain.”
All Eangen were familiar with Eang’s owl messengers. They were not truly owls, at least not according to legend; they were constructs of feathers and divine magic, infused with the final breaths of one of Eang’s sisters, who had been executed for a grave betrayal.
“But you gave the dead their rites?” One of the other young women asked, her voice hoarse from crying. “When you came back?”
The guilt plunged back into my stomach, making me want to retch. “No.”
My people stared at me, anguish and horror written across their faces. Even Sixnit, already pallid, lost a little more of her color.
“There was no time,” I said, desperate to explain my failure to myself and to them. In truth, there was no excuse. I should have begun the rites as soon as I stepped into the village. I had been too focused on Eidr and Sixnit and the baby and escape, and now the souls of our loved ones were bound to the earth until I or an Eangi from another village could release them.
Release them to a High Hall where I could not follow, not until Eang forgave me. But what hope did I have for that, now?
“Eang spared her,” Sixnit asserted. “That’s why she was up the mountain.”
“The Algatt spared her and us, and only for slavery,” an older woman, Ama, scoffed. She, like Erd, was another of my distant relations. “Saw that babe in your arms, I say, and think you’ve got more in you, both of you. You’ll be whelping Algatt come mid-winter.”
I ground my teeth to stifle a stab of fear. The rest of the younger women looked equally perturbed, though we were aware of our destiny. We had been raised in its shadow as, year after year, women and girls vanished into the Algatt mountains. Most of them were never found.
“Eang spared her,” Sixnit reasserted, her voice growing tight.
“If Eang wanted to spare someone, it would not have been Hessa,” Ama snapped. “She would have given
us Svala or Ardam. But Ardam is dead in the Hall, and Svala’s likely just as dead in the woods.”
“The woods?” I repeated numbly. Why would the High Priestess of the Eangi be in the woods? Had she been who the riders were searching for, outside the burning town?
“Yes, last anyone saw her, that’s where she was. Praying and unarmed.” Ama’s eyes bored into me for another hateful moment. Then her attention snagged on a miserable little boy, who had begun to cry quietly in a corner of the tent. “So, with Hessa we will die. Don’t cry, child. Bravery, now.”
The possibility of Svala’s escape, and the terrifying hope that came with it, died in the pain of Ama’s insult. It burned, yet Sixnit’s defense of me burned still deeper. Yes, Eang had spared me – but only for punishment.
* * *
That night the rain resumed. The Algatt put us in a tent but permitted no fire and did not lower the flaps, leaving us exposed to the splatter of rain and the watchful eye of the guards. We were given food – rations of bread and hard cheeses, stolen from our own village. The older women organized and distributed it, feeding our bound companions by hand.
Outside the wall of heavy skins, fires flickered. Some of the Algatt sang, recalling the history of their alpine god Gadr, the battles of past years and anticipation of their future rest under Gadr’s Great Mountain in the High Halls. Some of their tales blended with ours; stories of how Gadr had been born of the Gods of the Old World and how he, together with Eang and a dozen others, had slain their forebears and claimed the High Halls for the Gods of the New World.
But that was where the similarities ended. Where Eangen songs went on to tell of how Eang came to rule over those Gods of the New World, the Algatt’s songs spoke of how Gadr had justly rebelled and come to dominate the mountains of the north. Unable to slay Eang, he set his worshipers, the Algatt, to raid and harry the Eangen until the end of days.