Hath No Fury

by Melanie R. Meadors

  Especially not when the presence of Chalmarais hunters had the suorinen wild as snow monkeys with mouths full of mushrooms.

  Tarji held his gaze, drawing one of her daggers from its sheath. She nicked the base of her thumb, letting a bead of blood rise up before scraping it off with the edge of the blade, flicking it to the dirt, an apology to the suorinen. The spirit clinging to her went still at the offering, even as the air shifted with the suggestion of more of its ilk, and only then did the man flush.

  “I only deliver the payment,” she said again, dropping the loops of iron and silver links onto the ground, enough to carry them through the coming freeze even if every other resource the Aalmeki could muster failed. The blood of the Speaker had to be provided for, she thought. At least until the suorinen made up their minds. Tarji cast a glance at the girl—Yrsa Valausiä—as she headed back out the gates.

  Jere raised an eyebrow, pierced with a silver ring, as Tarji took her yak’s reins back and heaved herself onto the snorting beast’s saddle.

  “Thought you might be settling in,” he said. “Any trouble?”

  “He had questions.”

  Jere made a face. “About what?”

  “Nothing important,” Tarji said. “Come on.”

  They were halfway to the next bastard’s tribe when Jere spotted the marks of the breach just before sunset—a muddle of disturbed snow and churned mud, at the edge of the forest. Tarji eyed the tracks, willing them to be nothing but the mark of predator and prey. Maybe cloud tiger taking down a runaway yak. Maybe—except for the swirling discomfort of the suori sharing space with her. Except for the lack of tracks leading to the disturbed spot.

  The hairs along her arms stood on end as she spotted the boot prints—beginning in the middle of the disturbed snow and heading into the forest. Beside her, Jere stiffened and the air around grew thick and heavy, as if the spirits in the threshold beyond were gathering, watching, to see what they would do.

  Wordlessly, Tarji nudged her yak toward the forest. She tied it to the first larch she found, eyes never leaving the path of boot prints. Six, maybe more—the number seemed to change as they walked, adding and losing men as if they couldn’t stop ripping breaches as they passed.

  She could hear them now, ahead, beyond the trees. Dimly a part of her thought she ought to be sure of Jere as well, but the spirit in her commanded all her attention, all her strength.

  Tarji drew the threshold flint sword, as the suori began to bleed into her veins, the powers of its liminal realm softening her steps, drawing her focus. A bent branch of wintergreen here, a broken edge of melting ice there. The sound of a small animal screaming—and Tarji broke into a run.

  A clearing. A glen. Lichen peeking through the snow and rust red moss racing up the trees—there. In the center. Three men—pale-skinned, chain-armored. One held an axe out. One held him back. A third held the back half of what looked like a marten, belly-up, limned in amber flames, its head vanished into the ether. A suori, forced into the world, into skin.

  A fourth, a fifth man stepped out of the amber flames and the suori broke free, screaming. The axeman shouted, something in the tongue of the Chalmarais, but his fellow pushed him away, drawing the crudely made dagger of threshold flint he wore at his belt. A matching blade flashed out of the belt of the hunter holding the suori, and before Tarji could reach him, he cut downward, into the beast’s belly.

  The suori in her heart exploded—

  —Tarji’s eyes sharpen, hands strengthen. That one becomes a marten but this one—this one—this is the eagle that rips grown snow monkeys from their perches, ignores their raking hands, and breaks their necks, rips their bellies open. Her hands grip the blade, but the blade might as well be her claws, it’s alive, humming with the same power that fills her to her fingernails. When it hits the hunter’s neck, just below his skull, the suori screams, too wild, too furious for an eagle alone.

  The others shout, blades up, blades out. Jere slams into the axeman—a bull, a bear, a blur of muscle. Another pair of men come out of the forest, a third, unarmored, limned in amber flames, appears in the breach—the skin of what looks like a hare, pelt the unblemished white of winter, plastered to his chest, peeking out of his shirt, and cradled against it, an amulet to some Chalmarais god, a mountain poppy in glinting gold and crimson enamel—a wound against the dying suori he’s forced into skin and stolen.

  His eyes widen as he spots Tarji. He clutches the pendant, presses a hand to the skin, and more suorinen surge out of the rift at his call, all of them screaming. They pile together, building into something new, something fearsome, something unwilling.

  The marten spirit whimpers. Tarji feels her lip curl with the suori’s rage, her own rage, as she stalks toward the summoning hunter. Vàorem’s spirits will not be taken. All Chalmar deserves is vengeance.

  THE MARTEN SPIRIT WAS STILL whimpering when Tarji came back into herself—blood in her mouth, panting, weeping. Her shoulder screamed with pain and her belly pulsed with a bad wound. All eight Chalmarais hunters were dead, the breach still shivered amber amid them, and the suori Sakavian had coaxed into her was trying to flee her sorry form.

  “Jere?” she gasped.

  “Down here.” He crouched on his knees and knuckles, behind her and to the right, hovering over the dead summoner. Tears streaked his golden cheeks, glinting on his tattoos. “There’s four among them. All dead except the one they just pulled. Fucking heathens.”

  Tarji studied the edge of the hare-skin, peeled back now from where it had gripped the man’s chest, showing red, raw flesh. “Fuck. I’m about to lose mine and my shoulder’s wrenched. If I nurse the mount, can you reclaim the flint and get me back to the yaks?”

  Jere raised his pierced brow. “You got enough blood left?”

  “It’s coming out one way or the other.” Clenching her teeth against the pain and the pull of the suori still inside her trying to flee into the breach, Tarji hauled herself over to the little animal, who was still crying and thrashing in the snow. One of the Chalmarais had gotten past her with his flint blade and cut through her padded leather shirt, down to the flesh below. She pulled up the layers of cloth, wool, and leather. A cry escaped her gritted teeth as the cold air hit the wound and blood gushed from it. She cupped her hand under it, collecting a ruby pool as her vision started to crumble. She poured it over the marten’s face, splattering its snout.

  Numbness spread over the sides of her skull. Tarji held her breath without meaning to, trying to cling to consciousness a little longer, even as she forced more blood out of the wound, more blood onto the trapped suori, trying to remind it what it was. Not this form, this mount, but a piece of the liminal world. The suori inside her yanked fitfully against Tarji. Wait, she pleaded. Wait. Help this one back.

  She slipped onto the elbow of her injured arm, another cry breaking loose. The suori trapped in the shape of the marten stopped thrashing, blinking up at the sky as the blood drip, drip, dripped onto its snout. It licked the blood, calm now. Focused.

  It shuddered, then seemed to shift, to coil in ways a marten never should. The suori in Tarji tore itself free, just as the little animal collapsed into ashes and new snow, and Tarji’s vision went black.

  WHEN TARJI WOKE IN THE Speaker’s hold, bandaged and braced, her braids all dislodged, her mind haunted by flashes of the journey home, Sakavian was waiting for her, dressed for an audience in fine velvets, trimmed with more silver and cloud tiger fur.

  “So,” he said lightly. “How are the children?”

  “Chalmarais,” she said, flinching as her voice scraped her throat. “Harvesting suorinen. A day’s ride beyond the…Aalmeki—”

  “Yrsa?” he asked. He clucked his tongue and handed her a cup of needle-tea with yak butter from the sideboard. “That is far. Jere Hemmel tells me they won’t be going home, though.”

  “They came through a breach.” Tarji rubbed her face, the memory of the footprints from nowhere etched on her mind. “Tramping thr
ough like the threshold’s a Kurushane roadway. Four of them had…skins. We saved a fifth.” She shuddered. The Chalmarais, it was well known, had hunted their own spirits in such numbers that their lands were all but dead.

  Sakavian nodded, brow tight, jaw tense. “Jere told me. How are the children?”

  Tarji peered at him, Arvo Jormano Sakavian Tollatoani— Sakavian to his intimates, the heir to his vassals, and a disappointment to his mother—was rumored to be a lot of things. Wastrel, lecher, libertine, idiot—but Tarii knew better than to call him anything short of dedicated to Vàorem, to the suorinen who favored him. His eyes were shadowed with lack of sleep. The lines of black on his chin and cheekbones had been re-inked, the brown skin around them still flushed.

  “What happened?” she asked quietly.

  Sakavian’s lush mouth twisted in a wry smile. “If you ignore our children like you do my question, we’re going to have problems. Drink your tea, and let’s try again.”

  Tarji glowered and took an incautious gulp, swallowing the scalding liquid. She slammed the clay cup on the side table. “They’re all alive. They’re all irritating. Tell me what’s going on or I’ll twist your fucking berries off and put an end to all this mother talk once and for all.”

  Sakavian’s dark eyes glittered, and he chuckled. “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling better.” He hesitated. “There’s an echo. Probably an echo.”

  “An echo of what?”

  “I see an army,” Sakavian said, his voice slowing, his dark eyes glazing. “Coming up the eastern pass, along the flank of Yroma-Six-Winds, under a falcon-standard. Armored in bronze and wool, carrying swords, bringing horses up the riverside—”

  “The Kurushane incursion?”

  Sakavian blinked, the distant, dreamy expression suddenly gone. “Exactly. But I can hardly think of anything else.”

  Vàorem had never been conquered. Let Chalmar unify its swaths of tribes with their murderous magics, their shield-cracking axes. Let Zokarion claim every grain of salt and crumb of iron and bring cities begging for dominion to their gates. Let the distant Vincha ride their wind-swift horses down on every soul that strayed across their grasslands—none could claim what Vàorem could. Only the indomitable Empire of Kurush had ever come near to conquering Vàorem, and even it had failed.

  A hundred years ago, an army had marched west, through captive Vinchaland, past the client-kings of Zokarion, over the broken backs of the Chalmarais. All Kurush wanted was more, each emperor adding to his empire’s reach by force of pride. The army had chosen the eastern pass, no doubt, for its easy entrance, its proximity to the Speaker’s hold. They had marched when the snow at Yroma-Six-Winds’s feet had melted, not counting on its thickness at the mountain’s crown, not considering the rock loosened by the winter freeze. They climbed on regardless, driven by their emperor’s pride, not realizing the suorinen had already seen them coming, had already warned the Speaker of every possibility—every chance of Kurush’s success, every mistake that spelled failure.

  But the Speaker in those days had hesitated, had faltered. The suorinen, they said, had gone wild and fierce at the delay. The Kurushane army had nearly succeeded, but for the fact that the Speaker saw a rockslide, ready to be triggered at mouth of the pass.

  “Kurush is fallen,” Tarji said. “They can’t muster an army—they can hardly stop killing their own kings long enough to gather a tithe.” She wet her mouth with more tea, recalling the suori’s quick anger in a different light. “So, it’s an echo.”

  Sakavian’s smile grew pinched. “Probably. Except I can think of nothing else. I ask again, how are the children?”

  Tarji’s breath caught a moment. The suorinen’s gift of prophecy was Vàorem’s greatest shield and weapon, given to the favored scions of their favored bloodline. To the Speakers, and their successors, the suorinen would murmur all the possibilities of the future within Vàorem’s bounds. The unfolding of the present, the events of the past—to the spirits, everything was immediate. Everything was important. Only a lifetime of listening taught the Speaker to separate out the past from the possibilities, the certain from the unlikely. Heirs were often chosen swiftly, and always by the fickle suorinen.

  “The seven we saw to were fine,” Tarji said. “Hale, well-fed, none of them seemed to be…troubled.” She thought back to the little faces, Sakavian’s eyes, Sakavian’s nose, Sakavian’s chin. “Jere Hemmel saw the Moreteki child—”

  “Pavo Juhansiö.”

  “All right. Him and….ah, look I don’t know their names, the Helmiteki, the girl one. The baby, the other Aalmeki, I couldn’t tell you either. It was quiet but…Do they even choose babes?”

  Sakavian chuckled again, but instead of answering, he said. “Mother’s called a conclave. She thinks it’s just someone downslope—maybe Chalmar, maybe one of the tribes—doing something the Bright Ones don’t appreciate too close to the pass, too near to the date. No one likes to be reminded of the Kurushane incursion. She thinks we can settle it without resorting to rituals. Anything you recall might help.”

  Tarji shut her eyes, trying to recall the downslope villages, to pull up anything that had angered the suori that rode her or made Tarji think of foreign soldiers. But she kept returning to the Chalmarais hunters, the spirit trapped in the shape of a marten, dying in the snow.

  “I don’t remember,” Tarji said. “It’s not my job to spy for you. That’s not what I’m meant for. I’m meant to throw myself in front of danger for you.”

  “For Vàorem.” Sakavian smiled cheekily. “But a little for me.”

  NARAMINTA—HEART OF VÀOREM, SPEAKER of the Unspoken, Blood of the Suorinen—tapped a withered finger against the threshold flint of her throne, but said nothing. Pale and delicate as a new-hatched moth, her silver hair hung loose around her shoulders, the black lines of her office curling down her sallow cheeks, bleeding out of the tattoos that had been given to her when she’d been named her father’s heir so long ago. Her other children sat at her feet—vuhenki and bone witches, all stern as their mother, strong as their vuhenki father, blessed by the suorinen.

  But none so beloved as Sakavian. Some prophecies were blurred and uncertain, they said, but some needed no rituals to hear distinctly, no blood to wash clear. Whatever Naraminta thought of her third son, Sakavian was the only one the spirits wanted, once they couldn’t have Naraminta anymore.

  If the air around the Aalmeki girl had been thick, near the Speaker it was as stifling as if Tarji had shoved her face into her yak’s sweaty coat. She stood behind Sakavian upon the heir’s stool, searching the chieftains arrayed before Naraminta in the great hall for some sign, some secret, some explanation. But there was nothing in the mix of posturing and squabbling voices to reveal what had made the suorinen so upset.

  “Then it sounds as if we must get a clearer answer,” Sakavian said.

  Naraminta’s tapping finger stilled. “For an echo?” she said.

  “For a puzzle, Speaker,” Sakavian said with infinite politeness. “I doubt anyone wishes to repeat the mistakes of the Kurushane incursion.”

  Naraminta’s eyes narrowed. “We aren’t hearing ten thousand warnings.”

  “But you cannot deny, the suorinen are just as displeased. Just as insistent.” He smiled at his mother. “Would you like me to do it?”

  Naraminta turned away and beckoned to one of the dark-robed bone witches standing at the edge of the great hall. The man came to her side, carrying a threshold flint bowl in his good hand. In it lay three slices of a moon-pale mushroom cap, its flesh dotted with blood-red sap welling up in tiny pinpricks.

  The Heart of the Host, the key to the Threshold, the realm of the suorinen. With it the Speaker’s gift would be sharpened, turning the cacophony of the spirits’ voices into prophecy she could rule by. Naraminta considered the mushroom slices with an expert eye, selecting the center one with a trembling hand. She tucked it into her back teeth and bit down.

  One moment Naraminta winced—the mushrooms were
bitter, Tarji knew. Most every headstrong young thing had tried the Heart of the Host, to see if they had enough blood to see anything. Tarji got an amber-tinted nightmare and a headache for her efforts.

  The next moment, Naraminta’s eyes rolled back and she fell slack into the grooves of the Speaker’s seat, vuhenki springing forward to keep her positioned. Her breath rasped in her throat.

  “Up the mountain—hated Kurush—three across in bronze and wool. Falcon-standards, mountain poppy, Kurush, Chalmar, Vinchaland,” she murmured, her voice not her own. “Falls the fortress, down to rubble. Falls the army, doomed to end. Rise the line of Tollatoani. Foes surrounding, needles-stones.”

  Tarji frowned, trying to sift the answers from the sing-song speech that resulted when the suorinen and their Speaker blurred together. Those details and symbols were important. She looked at Sakavian, his eyes locked on his mother. Naraminta began to speak more quickly.

  “Up the Eastern Pass, the Inkateki fall before them. Up the Eastern Pass the Inkateki flee before them. Up the Eastern Pass, a soldier trips on a loose stone, falls, a landslide follows. Up the Eastern Pass, and the soldier steps quickly, realizes a landslide would crush the enemies before them.”

  On and on, Naraminta spoke for the suorinen, narrating the possible fall of Vàorem all over again. Tarji kept studying the chieftains, hoping to notice something she’d failed to find before. Tribes from the mountain slopes, tribes from the plateau, tribes from the high passlands—united by their veneration of Vàorem’s spirits and little else these days. The downslope tribes eyed Chalmar’s luxuries, now denied them by the Speaker’s edict, and were thought weak. The passlands sneered at the plateau’s softness, the downslope’s growing foreignness, and were thought primitive. The plateau considered its flocks and its crops and wondered why it supported its poorer cousins. None of them knew what to do with the suorinen’s choice of Sakavian.

  “In sight of the pass…” Naraminta’s voice wavered. “A soldier wipes the blood from his sword, kisses the mark of a mountain poppy. In sight of the pass, a soldier wipes the blood from his sword, thinks of those fallen before him. In sight of the pass…”