by V. K. Ludwig
“Where are their women?” I breathed, my voice barely loud enough for myself to hear.
No answer came, and the big roundhouse towered more and more with each step I took toward it. Rowan picked up my hand and placed a gentle kiss on it, then pushed the hide curtain to the side and stepped into the building.
Inside, a man sat on a stone-carved throne, its creases covered in dormant ghost moss. His dark eyes snaked across my skin, evaluating every square inch of my body. Covered in leathers and furs, it was hard to tell how much of him was muscle and how much was insulation from the cold. His sharp-edged face, however, made me guess he was all sleek strength underneath.
A couple of men surrounded him in a half-moon, each of them taking turns whispering into the ears of the chieftain. The closer we stepped, the more their smell convinced me that death had long forgotten about them. With each turn of a whisper, the belt cords they wore wrapped around their waist hit against their chieftain’s sides.
Nobody paid attention to the boy who pulled himself up against a solid wooden bench and took a few shaky steps. Uncoordinated and unsteady, he threw one foot in front of the other, fell, crawled back to the bench and tried anew.
“I expected you hours ago,” the chieftain said, pushing himself up and onto his feet.
“Troubles with one of the snow flaps,” Oriel said. “Couldn’t cool down the engine, so we had to stop now and then and do it manually.”
Xavier walked toward me, placed one hand behind his back, and reached the other out for mine. Before he took it, he gave Rowan a questioning look.
Rowan gave a grunt. “Go ahead.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Xavier said, grabbed my hand and placed the breath of a kiss onto the back of it. “I’ve heard… so many things about you, Darya. And your daughter.”
From the corner of my eyes, I could tell Rowan pouted his mouth and sucked in his cheeks. My lips turned numb. Rumors traveled fast out here, especially if they could cost a chieftain his life. The hair along my arms lifted. Just what exactly did he hear? The potential consequences of what I had done clasped my neck and stole my words.
“It’s an honor to meet your family, Rowan.” Xavier planted his legs wide and put his hands onto his hips. “And I see you brought Oriel. Torben told me it didn’t take you long to figure out Brandy’s quirks.”
Oriel’s eyes darted to Rowan, who pressed his lips firmly together. He gave a one-shoulder shrug, lazy enough to mask the jitter in his limbs. “She’s like any other woman. Just gotta learn which buttons to push, and which ones to avoid if you enjoy living.”
Xavier smacked his lips. “Spoken like a wise man. It’s a shame you parked her trailer underneath the biggest fucking oak of the village, though.”
Rowan and Oriel exchanged a bewildered look, their shoulders tense and the confusion visible in their faces.
“You thought I didn’t know.” Xavier circled our entire group with slow steps, but his dark eyes lay solely on me. They studied every inch of my breasts and slithered down my spine, stopping in the most inappropriate of places. My heart thumped against my throat.
“I am not the strongest man in this village,” he continued. “I’m not the fastest, either. So what do you think allowed me to make myself a chieftain?” He stopped to look at us, slow-tapping his finger against his temple. “My strength lies right here inside my skull. Most of my men spend their days sparring. But I spend my days listening. There’s truth in every word of gossip. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Rowan let out a sharp scoff, walked up to Xavier and placed an overly strong and belittling pat on his back. “Gossip’s for women. I’d rather stick to facts and a full set of rounds.”
He stared Rowan straight in the eyes, then quickly turned around and sat back on his throne. “You trashed my helicopter.”
“Last time I checked she was my helicopter,” Rowan said. “She was a gift, remember? But I promised you something in exchange, so we climbed all the way up this fucking mountain of yours to bring you the good news.”
“And what would that be?” Xavier asked. “You certainly didn’t bring me a wife, unless you’re trying to dump yours on me.”
Rowan gave a low grunt. “You’ll meet your wife soon enough. One of our women volunteered.”
“Volunteered?” Xavier’s stubbled jawline turned hard, and he raised one of his brows.
“Yeah, I can’t believe it myself,” Rowan snarled. “She’s a doctor. Our only doctor. You’ll have to give her a few months to train her replacement.”
“What?” My screech echoed through the roundhouse, making every man in the room look at me from raised brows. I pressed both my hands onto my mouth, just in case something else wanted to blurt out.
“You okay?” Rowan asked, his wrinkled forehead proof that he had no notion of my shame. My cheeks turned burning hot as if someone had stripped me off my clothes.
All these days, I feared I might not only lose my husband but lose him to Hazel. In reality, she must have volunteered as Xavier’s future bride. He had made her happy. But not in the way I accused him of.
Xavier crossed his hands behind his back, one hand holding to the wrist of the other, and began pacing in front of us. Hushed voices swept through the group of elders like waves of disdain. One of them hurried to his chieftain, covering his whispers behind his palm.
Xavier silenced him with a gesture of his hand, releasing a long, tired breath. “It doesn’t satisfy my elders. You have asked me to wait for a bride once before. Now she’s pregnant with another man’s child.”
Rowan closed his eyes for a moment, rubbing his palm across his face. “A word between us? Xavier?” His gaze wandered across the age-wrinkled faces of the men in slate-gray robes. “Conversations move along faster if they involve fewer mouths.”
Xavier nodded and his elders set into motion, except for one who straightened his spine.
“What good is it if we leave,” he said in a confident voice, “if the chieftain can’t decide without consulting the elders first? I served on this council for more moons than you have been alive and never have I been asked to leave.” He jutted his box-shaped chin toward us. “These people can’t be trusted. They traded with the Districts. Whispers told me this one isn’t received well among her own Clan.”
His spindly finger pointed right at me, pulling the ground out from underneath my feet. The more truth a rumor held, the quicker it seemed to travel. Nausea swept into my mouth. The political consequences of my actions never wore heavier on my shoulders.
“Enough!” Xavier’s voice echoed like a war-drum from the cold, lime-washed bricks, making everyone startle and turn to look at him. Even the little boy pushed two fingers into his mouth and began sucking and chewing on them.
“Elder Lael,” he continued, “this is the wife of chieftain Rowan you are insulting. Is this the way the Clan of the Mountain treats their honored guests? If there’s no difference in you leaving, then how about you show both chieftains in this room some respect and remove yourself along with the others?”
Elder Lael glanced around uneasily. “But chieftain Xavier —”
“That’ll be all for now,” Xavier said short and to the point. “I will call for my honorable elders once decisions are to be made.”
Everyone stared at Elder Lael, who eventually gave a stoic nod. He left the roundhouse, and the others followed behind him like loyal dogs. Xavier waited until they closed the door behind them. The little boy remained in the room, his indifference about all this telling me he was used to being ignored. My heart ached for him.
“See what I mean?” Xavier asked and threw his hands up. “I can’t even take a shit without their blessing. You tell me, Rowan, how am I supposed to rule with these bastards surrounding me. They cling to the past like a kitten to its mother’s teat. Bunch of backward-thinking inbreds.”
He pressed his arms against his chest and placed his forehead into his palm as if he was weary of having a head.
“We haven’t had a doctor in two years,” he said in a tired voice, “so I’d say it’s worth the wait. But I hope you also came to make good on the rest of our deal because, if you don’t, there’s no way I could swing them to agree to it.”
“What other agreement?” I asked.
Rowan’s shoulders tensed. He gave Xavier a firm stare, trying to shake his head ever so slightly, hoping it would go unnoticed by no one but me. But I noticed, and the awareness that there was more to it all drove the chill of the mountains deep into my bones. Whatever else Xavier had requested of Rowan, it was enough to trigger lies.
“Riiight,” Xavier said in a long, drawn-out tone.
He clapped his hand two times, making a figure appear from a small door behind his throne. A scheme dressed in wide linen walked into the room, the shoulders and chest wrapped in a gray and white-speckled shawl of hide. Dainty feet poking out from underneath the hem gave her away as a woman, though nothing else would have.
She wore a veil of sticks and spindly bones, strung like dozens of chains around her head. They clanked and jangled with each of her steps, softly whipping her chin and riding against her shoulders. She had no hair, and the veil hid her face.
Xavier paid no attention to how we all stared at her and only pointed at the boy who had returned to practicing his first steps. “Take him.”
The woman gave a clanking nod and hurried toward the boy with no word spoken. She picked up the child, pressed him against her, and hurried to stand beside me, her eyes planted to the ground.
“Nefja here will take you and your daughter to the hut we prepared you.” He walked over to me and took my hands into his, holding them gently but with a certain persuasive strength to them. “You have nothing to fear while you are here. Nefja will bring you the meals the women have prepared for you, and I will join you once your husband and I have discussed the boring matters that come with chieftainhood.”
“But…”
Rowan plopped Rose onto my arms and gave me a stern nod. “Take her with you so she can move around. I will come to you once this is done.”
Chapter 19
Darya
Powdered in knee-high snow, it was a quick guess this Clan didn’t receive too many visitors. After Nefja had given the boy to an old woman, she led me along the trail, picking up her dainty feet only to let them come down again in a stomp a few inches closer to our destination: the guest hut.
She had slipped a fur-lined hood over her head, hiding the strawberry-blonde stubbles which emerged from her otherwise bald scalp. I walked right behind her, stepping into her tracks and growing them by at least three sizes.
A closer look at her would have likely revealed a girl, perhaps at the edge of her bloom. But the way she moved about the village in tiny yet certain steps made me fear she, too, had to grow up quicker than was good for the salvation of her soul. A burden all girls carried from birth.
“Chieftain Xavier will join us soon,” she said in such a soft voice, her steamy breath rising into the evening was almost the only proof to me that she had said anything at all. After that: silence. Silence and the sound of cold, spindly bones clanking against each other. Then against her face.
Once at the hut, Nefja slipped her shoulder through the heavy leather curtain and led me inside. Built of bricks, field stones, and smaller rocks, the hut stood somewhat unlevel but roomy. It didn’t take me long to figure out why.
“No fireplace?” I asked, letting my eyes wander about the neatly arranged furniture. A simple table with benches and chairs stood in the middle, well provided with painted plates, wine-filled carafes and clay pots with still simmering meals inside.
“No, ma’am,” she said and placed her flat palm against one of the red bricks. “Most huts have double-layered walls with a hollow core between. Underground pipes go inside those gaps and fill them with the hot steam from the springs.”
I took a step toward the wall and placed my hand next to hers, letting my cold-brittle skin soak in the burning heat. “Hot springs? Is that the steam I saw all around the village?”
“Yes, ma’am. We reserve fire for the dead. Trees are holy to us, and it would be a sin to cut them down for heat.”
Rose wiggled on my hip, the only thing keeping her from leaping away from me the arm I kept tight around her waist. Nefja, without looking, pointed at a bear hide in front of an old, saggy couch. I walked over and placed Rose down, who immediately grabbed a handful of the shaggy mane and let out an excited coo.
“Your daughter seems happy to be able to move around,” came from the direction of the leather curtain. Xavier’s voice startled me. Not so much because it came unexpected, but because it came from him. Manly but not rough, his choice of words always seemed articulate and smooth-spoken. A rare combination nowadays, with a certain degree of danger dangling at the edge of each remark.
I didn’t turn but gave a stiff shrug. “It took us two days to get here, and I can tell you she wasn’t too happy about being wrapped up in a bunch of blankets.”
“That’ll be all Nefja.”
The girl lowered her head even more and bowed her legs in some sort of old-fashioned curtsy, shuffling her feet around us and out into what had turned to night. Breath burst in and out of me more rapidly, a jarring voice inside my head pointing out the obvious: I was alone with him now.
“It’s an odd thing he brought you here,” he said, the heels of his boots clanking on the stone floor. “Most men would leave their wife and child back home. Where they are safe.”
“There’s no place safer than with Rowan,” I blurted, fixating my eyes on Rose so I wouldn’t have to turn and face him.
A chair or a bench screeched across the rock and gave a humph when he sat down. Pottery lids opened and closed, filling the room with scents of rosemary and garlic.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.
I spun around and pushed the lie across my lips. “Never!”
“That makes you either a fool…” He grabbed a small, silver ladle, dived it into one of the steaming clay pots and let a load of stew dribble onto a plate. Then he picked up the spoon beside it and pointed the handle right at me. “Or a liar. But I don’t think you’re a fool, considering you made it to this age. Not to mention how you got inside the Districts. And out again.”
I looked at him for a long moment, my eyes flicking back and forth between the spoon in his hand and the subtle smile on his face. After a while, I walked up to him, pulled it out of his hands, and sat down on the bench across.
“There are many dangerous men here,” he said and carefully pushed the loaded plate over to me, stopping and waiting each time the stew threatened to spill. “But you’re safe with me. Forcing myself on women is… not my style.”
“The girl…”
“Nefja?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, pushing the peas of the stew to the edge of the plate. “She’s got her head shaved.”
He sucked in his upper lip and gave a quick nod, well knowing there was a question hidden in my observation. “We require girls to shave off their hair from the age of twelve until we marry them. Makes them… less appealing to men. Less feminine. That’s the idea, at least. Granted it failed terribly because someone with balls so loaded they might burst at any moment, well, they care little about hair. But it’s a tradition now.”
He glanced at me as if to see what I thought, rubbing a fingernail across his thumb. Weird how potholed highways and difficult terrains had turned miles of land into oceans of cultural differences.
“Where is my husband?” I asked, dipping the tip of the spoon into the dark, brown gravy and making it disappear inside my mouth. The rich flavors of winter herbs made my tongue curl up against my gums, and I let the spoon dart for a mouthful.
“Your husband is standing by his word as anyone would expect him to. I helped him to get you out of the Districts unharmed, and he will help me to secure my position as chieftain here.”
The thought of this guy claiming a par
t in my rescue turned the potato chunks inside my mouth too hot, and the meat too chewy. I swallowed whatever knot had formed underneath my tongue.
“You didn’t help him,” I said, the sour taste of my words torturing my buds as if they understood very well what Xavier said was true.
“Isn’t this adorable,” he said in a school-girl tone. “To you, Rowan is the biggest, baddest motherfucker on earth, isn’t he? But I got news for you: even the alpha male needs a helping hand from time to time.”
I took another spoonful of shredded meat in gravy and swallowed it along with my pride. And Rowan’s pride. Two years ago we put a bullet in every mountain scum that made it down into our territory. Now, I owed their new chieftain a debt I could never repay — because Rowan was paying it for me.
“What did you ask him to do for you?”
Narrow-eyed and with a cocked head, a hint of confusion quickly spread across his five-days-old stubbles. Not sure what exactly drove nausea up my esophagus: the fact that I had no idea, or Xavier’s surprise over it.
He shook the confusion off his face and straightened up. “I admire his bravery,” came out his voice, loud and confident as if he meant it, but with a cunning aftertaste to it. “It takes guts to go against the people of his Clan and bring a traitor back. The runaway wife. Who caused so much despair among her own people. Tell me, how are you settling in, now that you’re back?”
“I’m not a traitor,” I hissed, the words scratching my lips like fresh shards.
“Yeah, I get that. Everyone with common sense will know the video and voice recordings are nothing but propaganda, used by the Districts to weaken us from the inside,” he said, making my limbs go bloodless within the fraction of a second.
Panic trembled my knees.
What video?
“But then again,” he continued, “common sense is not always common.”