by Megan Bannen
Her prison has been opened, but She is not yet free.
She looks on the world with Her burning fire, bright with heat, glowing in the night. The Sword before Her has eyes the color of life, but he scrabbles away from Her, terrified of his own Mother.
She moves within Her Vessel, sitting up, leaning into the Sword to place Her new hand over his heart. Her light flows into him, pierces his being, fills him to overflowing, makes every muscle go rigid, an ecstasy so sharp it sears him.
He believes that he is only a little boy in a well, but She sings inside him. He tries to close himself against it, but the song pushes its way into his nose, his mouth, his ears, his eyes, insistent, needling its way into the pores of his skin.
She will be heard.
She will be known.
You must keep the Vessel safe and whole.
He shakes his head.
A mortal Vessel cannot contain something as infinite as the Mother’s soul for long.
Already, the Vessel begins to crack, and the Mother’s light seeps out of a fissure no bigger than a hair. The Sword thrashes in the water. Time is running out. She pushes him toward the surface, but She leaves him with one word, so clear and pressing he can see it blazing on the insides of his eyelids.
Hurry.
The Vessel is cracked.
The Vessel is breaking.
The Vessel is my body.
Me.
I heave the lid over the cauldron that is Elath and press down on Her boiling poison until it stops steaming out from underneath. Then I grab hold of my own body with a talon-like will and tear my hand from Tavik’s heart, glaring at him with a fire that is all my own. The blade of truth is sharp and heavy on my tongue.
“I’m dying. She’s killing me.”
Tavik blinks hard. His silence is louder than cannon fire.
“And you’ve known from the beginning.” I am breathing flames and speaking fire.
He buries his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he says into his palms.
I pull his hands from his face. He doesn’t get to hide from me. “I don’t want your apologies.”
His nostrils flare and redden. A tear streaks down his cheek.
“Don’t you waste your water on me,” I spit before clawing my way up the side of the tree, its bark rough beneath my fingernails. Tavik springs to his feet, his hands out to steady me, but I push him away.
“You lied to me, every day and all the time. You lied to me over and over and over.” With each over I pound his chest with fists made weak by the thing that is slowly devouring me. “All you’ve ever done is lie to me!”
I shove myself off the tree and stagger past him.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, my voice cold and dead.
Dying.
He scurries in front of me. “I’m sorry. Mother and Father, I’m so sorry. You’ll never know how sorry I am. I should have told you.”
“Yes, you should have told me,” I agree as I shoulder past him.
“Where are you going?”
“I need to be alone right now.”
“I can’t protect you when you’re alone,” he pleads.
“You can’t protect me at all, not from this.” My words hit their mark. Two more tears fall from his eyes.
Good.
He lets me go.
I stumble to the river, where I drop to my knees beside the water’s edge, letting the snow soak my woolen clothes all the way through to my skin. I splash the brutally cold water on my face to clean off the blood before sinking the canteen’s mouth into the river and drinking down a few icy gulps. The frigid water does nothing to revive me, and now my hand is painfully cold. I tuck my aching fingers into my armpit and sit there like a lump, converting my ignorance and my stupidity and my naivete into a fiery anger. Anger at Tavik. Anger at the Goodson. Anger at the Father. Anger at the Mother who took up residence in my body as if it belonged to Her and not to me. But most of all, anger at myself. My stupid, childish self.
I knew. On some level, I knew all along. I simply chose not to see it, and now it can’t be unseen.
It isn’t much farther now, a familiar voice comes from the opposite bank.
I raise my head. Zofia-who-is-not-Zofia watches me from across the river.
Who’s to say I’m not Zofia? Or that Zofia is not Me?
“Get out of my head.”
I think you know by now that I’m in every part of you.
“Get out!” The words scrape my throat, and my cry sends birds panicking from their branches into the safety of the sky.
Soulswifts.
Dozens of them.
Will I still become one of these birds when I die? Or is that another future Elath has stolen from me? I control nothing, not my fate, not even my own self. My shoulders slump, pressed down by the crushing weight of who and what I am.
“I’m dying,” I tell Her. It’s so much easier to think of Her as Zofia, even if She isn’t.
Yes, She agrees.
“When?” I ask, the word bitter on my tongue. “How long do I have?”
She shrugs in her elegant Zofia way. I can’t answer that.
“You can’t, or you won’t?”
She raises an eyebrow in response, a gesture so completely and utterly Zofia that my resentment boils over. This thing who is not Zofia—who is responsible for her death—doesn’t have the right to use my memory of her like this. I swipe at the air as if I could banish the vision, like waving smoke away from my eyes. “I’m your Vessel! You chose me!”
She crosses her arms, as unflappable as ever. There are many Vessels. There are many Swords. I only needed one of each. Are you any more precious than the rest? Is your life worth more than anyone else’s?
Her words crush me, like Tavik’s arm wrapped tightly around me in that alley in Varos da Vinnica before I even knew his name, squeezing the air out of my lungs.
“So I’m nothing to you? And Tavik? Is he nothing?”
I think you ask the wrong questions sometimes.
“I just want to know how much time I have left. Is that such a ridiculous thing to ask?”
Would the answer change anything?
I hate that I don’t have a ready response, and I hate how easily She’s turned my anger into defeat.
You may have hours or days or weeks, just like anyone else. She crouches down so that She’s eye level with me, just as Zofia did when I was very small and she, herself, was still quite young. So let me ask you, Daughter: How will you spend the life you have left?
The river narrows. She’s so close that if I reach out far enough, I might be able to touch Her and feel the warmth of Zofia’s familiar hand against my fingertips once more. She gives me a sad smile and says, I can’t go where you are, so you must come to me where I am.
And then She’s gone, and winter stares back at me from across the river.
I get to my feet, feeling a little stronger. My footsteps are only footsteps as I return to the place where I left Tavik. When I walk into the strange, half-waking world of my creation, I find him sitting with his back against the oak’s thick trunk, hugging his knees to his chest, his misery writ large across his face as the snow I melted drips down on him. I go to stand at his feet, and he looks up at me with reddened eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, the words coming out in a tearless sob as I kneel beside him.
“I know.”
“I promise you, on my life, I will get you to the Mother’s body in time.”
I put a hand on his knee. He’s so warm when I am chilled to the bone. “Don’t make promises you may not be able to keep,” I tell him gently.
“I’ll get you there,” he insists.
When Tavik makes a promise, he has every intention of keeping it. If he says “on my life” or “to my dying breath,” it’s not hyperbole. He means it. I love him for that, but I also envy it. I’ll never have that kind of conviction, that level of hope. I’ll always question an
d doubt. His faith in me is the only thing I can really believe in.
I reach out for him just as I did in my dream, tracing the long, crooked line of his nose with my fingertips. I slide my fingers across his thick eyebrows, downward to his cheekbones, the sharp line of his jaw. I touch my fingers to his mouth, and he watches me, perfectly still, his eyes soft and scared and waiting.
I lean over the tops of his knees and kiss him.
His lips are warm and dry and a little chapped. He startles beneath me, and then his mouth responds, the softest hint of movement against mine. I pull away, putting a few inches between the tips of our noses. I’m shy of him and unsure of myself as he looks back at me with wide, lovely eyes.
“Did I do that right?” I ask him, my lips humming with the memory of his mouth against mine.
He nods. Then he reaches for me, tentatively, cupping my cheek in his palm. I put my hand over his as he brushes my cheekbone with his thumb. We stay like that for a minute, watching each other until we both see that there’s nothing—not one thing—standing between us now.
He gets to his knees, torso to torso with me. When he leans in, he stops right before he presses his lips to mine, and I wonder if he’s savoring this moment as I am, tucking it safely into the vault of memory, the excruciating want just before the having.
And then he kisses me, opening my mouth to his the way the sun unfurls the petals of a rose, not all at once, but slowly, inevitably.
He kisses me, and I kiss him back, and I never knew just how many ways two mouths could join together in so many iterations of one gesture. Why did it take so long for us to do this? How much time and life have we wasted focusing on all the wrong things when we could have been doing this one right thing?
His lips skim across my cheek, all the way to my tender earlobe. They follow the line of my jaw, dipping lower, brushing along the skin of my long neck.
And I am no longer cold.
His fingers hold me at the nape of my neck, spreading into the rough thicket of my hair. His thumb brushes the indentation of my chin, and he kisses that, too. His hands travel down my shoulders and arms, all the way to my waist.
“I’m covered in freckles,” I breathe in apology.
“Entire constellations of them,” he agrees, utterly unapologetic. When he kisses my mouth this time, he communicates very, very clearly that being covered in freckles is an excellent thing to be. But just in case I missed the message, he pulls away and says, “I’ll kiss each and every one of those freckles, if you let me.” His lips touch mine again, lightly. “Water of my thirst.” He kisses me again, not so lightly. “Blood of my body.”
And then the kissing is not at all light. There’s just us, me and Tavik, and I don’t think about the Mother, and I don’t worry about the cost. There is only the sensation of his lips pressed to mine, the salty taste of his skin, my hands warming themselves against his body.
He finally pulls away, still kneeling on the ground, the snow long since melted beneath him, and he grins stupidly at me.
“It would take a lifetime to kiss them all,” I tell him, flushed and deliriously contented.
His grin goes from stupid to rapacious. “Good.”
An arrow hits the ground near Tavik’s knee, sending up a cloud of snow on impact. Tavik leaps to his feet and places himself between me and eight men, standing shoulder to shoulder about five yards ahead of us, closing off our northern route along the river.
Hedenski.
Forty-Eight
The Hedenski men are bundled in colorful quilted jackets with fur collars, and some of them wear bright knitted caps embellished with twigs or antlers. While some are shorter than others, they are all tall. Most of them carry a battle-axe, but a couple are armed with longbows.
“That was a warning shot,” Tavik tells me, keeping his eyes on the men. He doesn’t unsheathe his blades, but he doesn’t hold his hands up in surrender either.
“Hedenski! I’m Hedenski!” I call from behind him. The words are old and rusty, but I manage to pull them out of some long-closed drawer in my mind, the sounds strangely familiar.
The tallest of the men, hatless and redheaded, pushes his neighbor’s arrow downward with one hand as he steps forward, closing the distance by a third. His companions glance at each other, unnerved. Tavik, equally on edge, draws his weapons, ready to defend us both. The Hedenski respond in kind, grasping their axes. The archers, their arrows already nocked, pull back their bowstrings.
The man stops halfway between the two sides.
“Tavik, stop! Put down your swords!” I hurl myself in front of him and call out to the redheaded man, “Please! I’m one of you!”
He stares at me for one long, nerve-racking moment, before he says, “Oh, my soul. Kristorna?”
Kristorna, the Hedenski word for gelya.
Bright and alive and lovely.
My heart hurts, and my breath hitches. This has always been my name.
I take a step toward him.
“Gelya,” Tavik hisses behind me.
“It’s all right,” I tell him, and he doesn’t try to stop me as I take another cautious step, then another, bringing the Hedenski man into sharper focus: red hair, freckled skin, deep-set brown eyes, just like mine.
“Kristorna!”
He runs the last few feet to me, taking me in his arms and weeping into my cap. He’s so tall I can fit snugly under his chin. I have no idea who he is, but my heart bounds in my chest.
I think I’ve come home.
“You’re sure they’re not going to kill me?” Tavik asks for the third time, speaking so low he’s not even moving his lips.
“They’re not going to kill you,” I assure him.
“Because the guy with the green-and-blue hat and the guy with the extra-big axe definitely want to kill me. Probably that lady to your left, too, and, frankly, I think she could take me.”
The enormous blond woman in question makes me feel small by comparison. Personally, I find it comforting to blend in rather than stand out for a change, but Tavik sticks out like a sore thumb here. I’ve decided not to tell him that there was some debate over his fate, although it was hard to follow. I have only a child’s understanding of the language at best.
I think the entire village has crowded into the longhouse to get a look at the lost girl, Kristorna. Me.
The redheaded man makes sure we’re seated closest to the fire, which I think is a place of honor. Well, actually, he makes sure I am seated close to the fire. I had to beg them to let Tavik stay beside me, which probably didn’t help his ratcheted nerves. The man leans over and lays a giant hand on mine. “Do you remember me, Kristorna?”
Despite his size, he looks at me with the eagerness of a child, and I feel ashamed of myself for having to admit, “No. I’m sorry. Are you my . . . ?” I can’t remember the word for father. I’m not entirely sure there is a word for father in Hedenski.
“I’m Sevlos. Your mother’s brother.”
“Sevlos,” I repeat, and he smiles at the sound of his name from my mouth. He’s missing a couple of teeth, but the ones that remain are strong and white.
“Is my mother . . . ?” Again, I’m at a loss for words. How do I finish that question? Here? Nearby?
Alive?
But I don’t need to finish it, as it turns out. Sevlos’s face falls, and he shakes his head.
“She died when Ovin’s men came. They killed so many.”
I expected as much, but grief twists my heart anyway. I mourn the loss of what she might have been to me if the Goodson hadn’t taken me away. I put my other hand over Sevlos’s and tell him, “I don’t remember. Can you tell me what happened?”
He speaks slowly so that I can understand him. “Ovin’s men sailed into South Harbor, thousands of them, and they brought us their thunder. It was as if lightning had struck the town again and again.”
“Yilish gunpowder?” Tavik guesses when I translate for him. “Those Ovinist dogs.”
“They w
ent from town to town, slaughtering their way north along the coast, searching for the Great Goddess. But there is no life without Her, so the people refused to tell Ovin’s men where to find Her. By the time the murderers reached our village at the mouth of the Western Path, our warriors had assembled, and we taught Ovin’s men what we do to those who threaten what we hold most dear. The few who survived our wrath fled south into the Land of the Dead.” He presses his hand more firmly against mine. “We thought you must have died, but here you are. Where did you go, and how did you get here?”
“One of Ovin’s men took me far away. I have traveled a long time to come home.”
Sevlos lifts my hand and presses a fatherly kiss to my wrist, making my eyes water with affection for this man who is both a complete stranger and my uncle.
“Does the Western Path lead to the goddess? Can you take us there?” I ask him.
“Yes, but . . .” He glances suspiciously at Tavik, while my mind latches onto the word yes. Yes, he will take us to the Mother’s body. Yes, after everything we’ve been through, we made it to our goal. I’m not sure if I should dance for joy or cower in fear of whatever awaits us when we unite body and soul at last.
“That man is looking at me like he could bore a hole through my torso with his eyeballs,” Tavik murmurs, recalling me to the conversation where Sevlos’s but still hovers in the air.
“But what?” I ask my uncle, praying that he’s not about to throw up another obstacle for us to circumvent.
“The Hedenski may only be in the goddess’s presence at the solstice festivals, when we wake Her in the spring or bid Her farewell in autumn. Ever since Ovin’s men came, She has awoken later and later each year and has returned to her slumber sooner and sooner. This spring, She did not wake at all when we offered Her the yearly stag. You must not offend Her.”
I remember my nightmare, when Tavik wore a crown of antlers and my mother drew her blade across his throat at the foot of Elath’s body. The memory of that dream makes me sick to my stomach and adds to my sense of foreboding. I’ve wanted to get Elath out of me for weeks, but now that we’re so close, now that everything seems to be happening so quickly, so inevitably, I’m getting cold feet. It’s like that moment I stood at the exit of the parlertorium’s escape tunnel, when it seemed easier to hide than to face the unknown.