The Vagra closed her eyes, seemed to hold her breath. She shook her head and gave a shudder.
“I didn’t stay to see what they’d do with me—I ran. I escaped into the prairie and went to the meeting place with the Forsaken. I lit a fire and waited for them to arrive. The leader of the Forsaken in those days was a man named Tevek. A bad man, it turned out—though I didn’t know it at the time. Or maybe I did know it but simply didn’t have any other choice than to ask for his help. Anyway, Tevek gathered his men and we rode back to the village. The Forsaken killed most of the marauders and drove the rest away into the prairie. I thought that would be the end of it. But it wasn’t.”
“What happened?” Kiva asked.
“Tevek didn’t want to go back to the wilderness. He wanted what the marauders wanted. He wanted to rule the village. He wanted to make the Vagri his slaves—to make the Sisters follow him instead of me, and to force the men and children to work for him.”
A sick feeling clenched at Kiva’s gut. “Slaves,” she said. The word tasted foul on her tongue—it was unfamiliar, though she could guess at its meaning. “I don’t understand. How could Tevek take power away from the Vagra? How could he force a man to work who doesn’t want to?”
“This is what I’ve been trying to tell you,” the Vagra said. “The Forsaken may be from us, but they’re different than us. Something happens to a man when he picks up a weapon—he begins to see the world as something that can belong to him, if he wants it. He begins to see the world as a thing to be taken by force.”
Kiva shuddered. “So what did you do?”
The Vagra hesitated before going on. Kiva’s pulse quickened—she sensed that the Vagra was coming to the part of the story that she’d wanted to keep secret, the part of the story that she wanted to die with her.
“Xendr Chathe,” she said. “He was only a boy at the time, younger even than you are now—fourteen, maybe fifteen. But he’d distinguished himself in the battle against the marauders, killed twice as many of them as some of the most experienced Forsaken warriors. Stories of his bravery spread throughout the village, and I could tell that the Forsaken admired him. The boy warrior. As soon as I learned of Tevek’s plans to take over the village and rule it as his own, I met secretly with Xendr. We struck a deal—if I could get rid of Tevek and make Xendr the new leader of the Forsaken, he’d take his men away from the village and never come back unless I summoned him.”
“Get rid of Tevek? What do you mean?” Kiva asked, a droplet of unease falling into her stomach and spreading out like ice.
The Vagra gave Kiva a grim look. “I’ve never told anyone about this. No one in the village can ever know. You have to promise.”
“Of course,” Kiva said, giving the assurance the Vagra needed to continue with her story—even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear what the old woman would say next.
“Tevek wanted to be mated to me,” she said. “That was to be the first step in his plan to take over the village—a symbol to the Vagri and the Forsaken that he was now the ruler of the village, that I’d given all my power to him. That night, after my secret meeting with Xendr Chathe, I pretended to agree to Tevek’s demand. I took him into my hut. Then, as soon as he followed me through the door, I whirled around and put a dagger in his chest.”
Kiva sucked in a breath. Covering her mouth in shock, she looked around the hut. It had happened here. In this very room. Her eyes followed the Vagra’s to a table that sat next to the cot, with a dagger sitting on top. It was the blade that the old woman used to conduct blood ceremonies on girls who’d heard the voice of the Ancestors. Was it the same one she’d used to kill Tevek? Kiva didn’t know, and she wasn’t about to ask.
“But what did you do with the body?” Kiva asked, still not meeting the Vagra’s eyes. “What did you tell the Sisters?”
“I told them that he’d simply dropped dead while we’d been talking,” she said. “I said that he must have been injured in the battle and didn’t tell anybody. And they believed it. No one suspected me of killing him myself. No one knew. Except Xendr Chathe.”
“But he left,” Kiva said. “He held up his part of the deal.”
The Vagra nodded solemnly. “Yes, he did. The next morning I called a ceremony with all the Sisters, all the Vagri, all the Forsaken. We gave Tevek a hero’s funeral—put his body on a pyre and burned it. Then, in front of everyone, I honored Xendr Chathe for his bravery in battle. Afterward, Xendr gave a speech to the Forsaken. He called them to follow him into the plains, where they’d continue pursuing the marauders until all the enemies of the Vagri had been wiped off the face of Gle’ah. He whipped them into a frenzy, promised they’d all be heroes, that they wouldn’t stop until each of them, every Forsaken warrior, had a thousand kills to his name. Then he left the village and they marched out after him, shouting and whooping and waving their weapons in the air all the way. And that was that. Life in the village went on as it had before. No one ever knew what I did. No one ever knew how close they were to being enslaved by Tevek.”
“And the Forsaken?” Kiva asked. “What have they been doing all this time?”
“The Forsaken spent the next forty seasons following Xendr Chathe deeper and deeper into the plains, looking for new enemies to fight, new people to kill.” The Vagra closed her eyes again, drew a long breath through her nostrils. “I saw it in my visions, sometimes. The people they slaughtered. The violence that was the price of peace in this village. And every time he and his men returned from one of their murderous excursions, I held my breath. Wondered if this would be the time that Xendr would grow tired of our deal. If he’d come back to this village, wanting what his predecessor wanted. But he never did.”
The Vagra let her eyes come open. She blinked. Her eyes seemed to clear. She fixed Kiva with a hard gaze.
“For fifty seasons Xendr Chathe has kept his part of the bargain. He’s kept the Forsaken’s attention focused outward, away from this village. But if you bring them into this village, I’m not sure how long that will last. Xendr is an old man now—not as old as me, but still, he may have grown tired of living in the wilderness. That’s why you have to be sure before you go to him for help. Sure that letting the Strangers come will be worse than bringing the Forsaken back into the village.”
Kiva stood and paced across the room. The dilemma the Vagra was giving to her seemed to be an impossible one. If she went to the Forsaken for protection, they might take over the village and destroy the Vagri’s way of life; if she didn’t, they might be destroyed by the Strangers. And if she did nothing …
At the far end of the hut Kiva turned back to face the Vagra once more.
“I need more time,” she said.
But the old woman shook her head.
“More time is the one thing you don’t have,” she said. “You saw what happened in the council meeting. The Sisters are growing restless. They’re beginning to doubt your leadership. If you don’t come up with a plan to deal with the Strangers, and soon, they’ll find someone else to lead them. Someone like …”
The old woman trailed off. She didn’t have to say the name. Kiva knew who the Vagra meant.
Kiva walked to the door and peered through the slit in the doorhang. The Sisters still lingered outside, milling about and murmuring to each other. Kiva’s eyes darted back and forth until she found the person she was looking for, who was at that moment smiling a good-bye at the woman she’d been talking to and turning to walk to her hut.
Kyne.
Kyne’s face darkened as she walked away from the Sisters, and Kiva’s heart thrummed deep in her chest.
Someone like Kyne.
18
kyne
Kyne seethed as she walked back to her hut from the Sisters’ council meeting. A darkness spread inside her like night bleeding black across the evening sky. It began in her chest and curled its inky tentacles into her brain, her stomach, her limbs, all the way to the tips of her fingers and toes.
She’
d felt this darkness before. As a girl, she’d felt it whenever she overheard one of the fathers gossiping about her in sorrowful tones, whenever she saw one of the other children give her a furtive look of pity, or fascination, or disgust. Anything that reminded her of the way she feared the Vagri saw her—as the girl who had no mother, the girl who’d killed her mother—made the darkness inside her grow.
Kyne couldn’t remember a single moment of her life when she’d been without this darkness. It had been with her ever since the day her mother had died after giving birth to her and her twin brother, Po. Sometimes the darkness grew so large it seemed to be bigger than her entire body; other times it shrank to the size of a small dot just underneath her breastbone—but no matter its size, the darkness was always there.
There was only one thing to do when the darkness got big enough that it took over every part of her: lash out at whoever was unfortunate enough to be nearby. The darkness inside Kyne isolated her; she knew this, but she didn’t care. In the moment, all that mattered was making others hurt the way she hurt. And she proved to be skilled at hurting others with her words, at spotting the one thing that made her target vulnerable: a limp, a scar, a stutter, a family embarrassment. Whatever it was, Kyne would pick at it and pick at it until her victim broke down into tears and the other children looked at Kyne no longer with pity, but with fear—fear that if they weren’t careful, they’d be next.
It felt good, lashing out. But the good feeling never lasted long.
Now, as Kyne ducked to step inside her small hut in the Sisters’ camp, she looked around the close room and felt her rage grow from a simmer to a boil. Kyne usually found her living quarters cozy, but now the smallness of the space was simply a reminder of where she didn’t live: the Vagra’s hut in the center of the village. It was a reminder that the Ancestors hadn’t chosen her.
A roar of fury rose up inside her chest, but she didn’t want to let it loose for fear that one of the other Sisters would hear. Instead, Kyne’s eyes fell on a lamp sitting by her bedside, a lit wick angled out of a clay pot filled with oil. She crossed the room to the lamp in a single step and extinguished the flame between her thumb and forefinger. In the brief moment before the flame was smothered, she felt a small but sharp pain on her fingertips and thought of her humiliation at the council meeting—the Vagra called me a fool, Kyne thought, she said I was afraid, and in front of everyone, all the Sisters. Then, the wick snuffed, she cupped her palm on the side of the clay basin and flung it across the room. It shattered in an explosion of clay shards and splashing oil.
Kyne stood for a moment facing the place where the lamp had struck the wall, her hands curled into fists at her sides. She felt better, a little. But not enough. The darkness was still there, roiling just underneath her skin.
“Kyne?” came a voice behind her.
“What?” Kyne snapped as she whirled around to face the doorway.
It was Thruss and Rehal, Kiva’s friends. Kyne had played with all three of them when they were girls, but they’d never been her friends. Kiva, Thruss, and Rehal had never wanted to play with Kyne—she knew this. But they had tolerated Kyne’s presence because they were afraid of her.
There was fear in their eyes now, too, but Kyne sensed it wasn’t her they were afraid of this time. At least, not just her.
“Well?” Kyne demanded. “Go on, don’t just stand there. What is it?”
“We’re sorry, Sister,” Thruss said.
Kyne’s anger began to dissolve. It pleased her to hear Thruss address her with respect, as “Sister” rather than “Kyne.” She felt a smile creep to her lips, but she quickly suppressed it. Let Thruss and Rehal squirm a while longer.
“We wanted to ask you about what happened at the council meeting. We didn’t understand everything that was said.”
Kyne sniffed. Why had Thruss and Rehal come to Kyne with their questions rather than to Kiva? Maybe now they were more afraid of Kiva than they’d ever been of Kyne.
“Sit,” Kyne said, nodding toward two wooden footstools. Thruss and Rehal sat, but Kyne kept her feet, towering over the other two girls. “What is it you want to know?”
Rehal cleared her throat.
“The Strangers,” she said. “You and the Vagra kept talking about someone called the Strangers.”
Kiva nodded. “The Strangers are … creatures, beings—no one knows—that Kiva saw in her first vision. The one she had four seasons ago, the one that put her next in line to be Vagra after the old woman is dead. Kiva told us about the vision at the first council meeting she attended, just like you had to tell us about your visitation from the Ancestors.”
“But why doesn’t anyone in the village know about this?” Rehal asked. “The men, the children? Why wasn’t anyone told?”
“The Sisters often talk about things that they don’t share with the men and children,” Kyne said. “You’ll have to get used to it. The things we discuss in council—you can’t tell your father, your brothers. Not even your mate, if the day ever comes when you decide to take one.”
“These Strangers,” Thruss said, leaning forward. “Kiva knows they’re coming, but she doesn’t know why, or whether they’re a threat. But you think they are. And that’s why you want to go to the Forsaken.”
“Yes,” Kyne said. “But the Vagra doesn’t approve. As you saw.”
“But you’re right, aren’t you?” Thruss said. “Kiva and the Vagra, they don’t have a better plan, do they?”
“Thruss, don’t,” Rehal said, her voice soft but pleading. “Kiva’s our friend. If she thinks that there’s a better way—”
“But we don’t know what she thinks,” Thruss said. “She didn’t even talk during the meeting. And she’s not our friend anymore. We’ve barely seen her since she was named to be Vagra.”
Kyne watched Rehal and Thruss with a growing sense of amazement, not quite believing what she was hearing. If Kiva’s own friends doubted her, what must the rest of the Sisters think? When the girls turned their gazes back to Kyne, she felt dizzy.
The girls’ faces tugged at something in Kyne—something deep in her mind, something she’d buried there long ago, on the day she’d first come to the Sisters’ camp. She’d been young when she’d first heard the voice of the Ancestors: eleven seasons, the youngest girl to ever receive a vision from the beings who watched over and guided the Vagri. As she’d marched to the Vagra’s hut to undergo the blood ritual, she’d felt the Sisters’ eyes on her and heard in her mind the whisper of their thoughts.
Look at her.
So young.
The Ancestors must have a plan for her.
Perhaps she’ll be our next Vagra.
In that moment, Kyne had felt something grow from nothing inside her, larger and more insistent than the darkness had ever been: ambition, the dream of being the leader of the village, of seeing the faces of the Vagri looking toward her not with pity or fear—but with admiration, expectation, and deference. The way people look at a leader.
The way Thruss and Rehal were looking at her now.
Kyne had buried her ambition deep inside her on the day that Kiva, not Kyne, had been named the next Vagra—but now Kyne felt it growing again, coming to the surface. With effort, she pushed it back down, put the thought behind the barrier she’d built for herself in her mind.
Not here. Not where Kiva could hear her thoughts.
“Maybe … maybe Kiva needs our help,” Thruss said. “Maybe she wants to go to the Forsaken but she can’t because she’s scared of them, or scared of the Vagra. Maybe we need to—”
“Stop,” Kyne said. “The first thing you need to do is stop talking, right now. Don’t even think what you were about to say, not here. It’s not safe. Kiva could be listening.”
Thruss’s eyes widened; Rehal’s too.
“She can hear everything we’re thinking?” Rehal asked.
“Not everything,” Kyne said. “All at once, the voices of the men, children, and the Sisters are too much for her—
Kiva can only understand our thoughts by letting in one voice at a time. Still, she could be listening to any one of us. You have to learn how to guard your thoughts, Sisters.”
“But then how—,” Thruss began. Kyne cut her off by lifting her flattened palm into the air.
“Not here,” she said. “I can teach you. Until then we can’t talk about this unless we’re outside the village, safely away from the reach of Kiva’s powers.”
Thruss nodded. Rehal looked nervous, hesitant about what was happening, but she didn’t protest.
“And what about the Forsaken?” Thruss asked.
Kyne turned away. She didn’t agree with the Vagra’s hesitance to go to the Forsaken for protection against the Strangers, but the old woman had been right about one thing: making contact with the Forsaken would be no simple task. What Kyne needed was a man, someone who could be sent to live with the Forsaken as one of them but who would also be loyal to her and report back on what the Forsaken wanted, how they could be controlled.
Or not a man—a boy, maybe, someone unattached, with no hut or mate or children of his own.
Kyne smiled to herself.
“You leave the Forsaken to me. I have a plan.”
19
kiva
That evening, Kiva felt the Vagra’s eyes on her when she slipped out of the hut. Cheeks burning, she looped her hair behind her ears with a dart of her fingers and then left her hands there by her cheeks, hiding her face from the old woman’s disapproving stare as she ducked through the doorway. Kiva knew that she should be staying in tonight, meditating in the darkness with her eyes closed and reaching up to the Ancestors with her mind, summoning them to give her another vision of the Strangers.
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