by D. P. Prior
Tey willed the welling moisture to stay at the corners of her eyes, refused to let it spill down her cheeks. She rolled herself away from the heat of the hearth-fire and forced herself to face her father. He’d fallen asleep in his armchair, a contented look on his pockmarked face.
If not for the blur of unshed tears, her glare would have burned holes in him. She thought of the cleaver she kept hidden beneath the cot in her bedroom, imagined her fingers wrapping around the handle.
One hack, and he’d wake yelling.
Two, and he’d squeal like a hog.
Three, four, five—hack, hack, hack. Cut him into strips and ribbons and feed him to the crows.
The Shedim’s voice crept and crawled beneath her skin. [I am with you…]
Tey’s imagined grip on the cleaver slackened.
[Closer than you are to yourself.]
She flexed her fingers, sucked in a breath of smoke-laced air.
[You have plucked power from darkness.]
She could feel the Shedim’s touch again, and this time her scars answered with the burn of acid. For one terrible lucid moment, she saw herself the lost queen of oblivion, and at her feet, curled up beneath her throne of mottled bones, lay Snaith Harrow, the man who dreamed of marrying her. She knew she was responsible for his livid flesh, his rolled up eyes, and the smoldering hole where his heart should have been.
The vision snapped shut, leaving her shaking. It was a phantom, nothing more. Imagined fear. She was weak. So weak and tired from her father’s leeching of her essence. It had to stop. Before she ended up like her mother, it had to stop.
She could almost hear the Shedim’s cackling glee, the excited clap of taloned hands.
Next time Khunt Moonshine stole the life from her she’d spring her trap. She’d latch onto him with the patterns of her scars…
[Now you’ve got it,] the Shedim said. [Now you understand.]
… then, when her father was bursting with her essence…
[Free us, Tey Moonshine. Return us to the light of day.]
… she’d slit his throat.
EVE OF THE PROVING
The fight circles were all in use when Snaith arrived on the Green. That was the downside of working with his Uncle Tubal, felling trees; he was always the last to arrive and the last to leave. “You need a trade,” his mother never tired of telling him. “In case the Proving doesn’t work out for you.” It made him sneer, hearing her voice in his head. In case it doesn’t work out for you! That’s just another way of saying I might lose. No chance. Not happening. You’ll see.
Most of Malogoi’s twenty-one-year-olds were there, cramming in some last-minute sparring before tomorrow’s Festival of Proving, the first the village had hosted in his lifetime. Practice weapons—blunted swords, spears, and axes lay scattered across the sand, and not in the oak chests they were supposed to be stored in.
Are you incapable of tidying up after yourselves? Were you waiting for me to do it, as usual?
Their selfishness never failed to get under Snaith’s skin.
Not worth worrying about, he told himself. And even if they had put the weapons away, Snaith would only have gotten them all out again. He’d use every single one of them before his practice was over. At the Proving, you didn’t get to pick and choose what you fought with. You used what you were given, if you were lucky enough to be given a weapon at all. The idea was to make do with what you had to hand, same as in a battle. Same as in life. The others never tired of complaining about the unfairness of it all, but for Snaith it was invigorating: the thought that his opponent might be given an axe and he might be left weaponless against it. The greater the challenge, the more he got to show his skills. He could hardly wait for the Proving to begin.
This was it: the moment when those that mattered, those who were really important, took the opportunity to make a name as a warrior. At least, that’s how he saw it. Everyone sound of limb and strong of heart had a duty, he’d always thought, to give their lives to the protection of the clan, to fight, to vanquish, and to live on in legends. Those who couldn’t fight, worked, and those who couldn’t work were dragged kicking and screaming to Coldman’s Copse. Unless they were deemed suitable for service to the Weyd. And that didn’t happen often. Theurig had been the Malogoi sorcerer since Snaith’s father was a boy. In all that time he’d never taken on an apprentice. Yet he’d gone after Snaith like a vulture on carrion. It made no sense. A sorcerer was supposed to have some flaw, like the kink in Theurig’s spine.
Snaith took a studied interest in the bouts taking place in the outer circles. Tol Brandig and his sister Leah grappling on the ground. In any other context, they’d have been stoned for what it looked like. Fat Balik holding the center of his circle, signposting every punch; Grisel Vret, prancing around him like a startled deer—So intimidating. Should have followed Tey’s example and given the Proving a miss, because the only thing Grisel’s going to prove is that she’s good for just one thing, and it isn’t fighting or farming.
Snaith winced for even having such a thought. The Weyd was all-knowing, all-seeing. People had been cursed for less. He tried to convince himself he’d meant she was good for the Copse, good to be left for the Shedim said to feed there, but he knew he’d crossed a line. The Weyd wouldn’t buy it, and he was already on thin ice for cursing Theurig after the inking.
Fighting back the lashing threads of worry, Snaith let his eyes roam over the other four outer circles, but the action was already drying up as the combatants toweled down and began to notice him. Only the center circle was still active, and that didn’t look as though it would last too long.
Lars Tabot could certainly fight, but he lacked skill. He had a headlock on Hram Harknyk, holding the choke a good three or four seconds after Hram had tapped. Lars was a bully, and he was built to back it up. But all his brawn made him slow and plodding, and his wild looping punches left too much space down the middle—space Snaith had once exploited with a kick to the jaw that dropped Lars like a felled tree. Of course, Lars claimed it was a fluke, that he’d been distracted by a fly or the sun or his loincloth snagging in the crack of his muscular arse. He went so far as to label Snaith a cheat, but the judges didn’t see it that way.
Snaith set down his knapsack beneath the awning slung between two trees to keep the rain off. Last thing he needed was for his change of clothes to get wet, and though the drizzle was light, it was constant enough to drench them through. He scowled at the granite skies, willing the clouds to scatter, but like everything else on Branikdür, they mocked him with their indifference. No wonder the Hélum Empire had abandoned its conquest all those centuries ago. The imperial historian Visovius had described the isle as the canker sore of the Empire, and he’d not been wrong.
As Snaith began to limber up, he scanned the trees bordering the Green for Tey. It was odd she’d not been there to greet him. Maybe something had come up. Likely she was getting ready for the festival. It was going to be a big day for them both, in more ways than one.
The grunts and thumps from the center circle gave way to mutters as the lads watched him going through his stretches. It was the same every day: the taunts, the bravado, the calling him out to fight. He’d already beaten half of them in organized competition, but it seemed they were all intent on revenge when there were no judges and no rules to rein them in.
He did his best to screen them out, moving from static to dynamic stretches. Rain continued to fall in dribs and drabs. The sky looked lower than normal, on account of the jostling clouds. In the scant light that filtered through the Green was nothing but grey, the huts beyond the turnstile to the village blisters on the earth, no better than termite mounds.
And still no sign of Tey.
Snaith moved into a sequence of punches and kicks. Some of the lads jeered and chuckled, but he went on putting together his combinations, building blow upon blow, countering, striking, bobbing, weaving. He skipped and lunged, crouched and bounded, throwing knees at an unseen oppon
ent, spinning with an elbow. A backflip, a wheel kick, and the onlookers quietened. He caught a few grudging nods of respect. They couldn’t do what he could do, and they knew it.
They thought him ridiculous, going through the same sequences day in day out, but they were starting to catch on. Some things only came with practice, and mastery only with relentless repetitions. Then there was the lore gleaned from his father’s pig-skin book, copied by hand from his grandfather’s, and his father’s before him: ancient wisdom on the art of fighting that their ancestors had stolen from a sorcerer, so Bas Harrow liked to claim, always with an admonishment to say nothing to Theurig.
Snaith’s peers should have learned from their clashes with him in the circle. Should have realized their black eyes and broken noses were the result of skill. But that wasn’t the Malogoi way. The clansfolk were stupidly proud. Rather than seeing defeat as an opportunity to learn, they made excuses and plotted revenge. Chief Crav Bellosh was no better. Snaith only hoped someone deposed him before he went and got them all killed in some ill-judged skirmish.
He stopped to take a sip of water from his costrel. Even in the chill air, he was hot, and the drenching of his shirt wasn’t just from the rain.
The others were stripped to the waist, baring their new tattoos. First time they’d shown them since the inkings last week. Leah’s was a serpent that wound its way between her tiny breasts. Her brother Tol was still red from the tattooing, his design a docile boar, which kind of fit. Grisel’s was only half visible, the body of a ferret, its head covered by the cloth that constrained her more sizable bosom. Some of the others had warrior’s designs: boldly inked badgers and wolves, hawks and hogs in various shades of blue, green, and red.
“What you got?” Lars Tabot asked, puffing his chest out to show off his bear. It was sloppily inked in bluish green that already seemed to have faded. Theurig only had one pair of hands; he couldn’t tattoo everyone.
“You do that yourself?” Snaith asked. “Or did your baby sister do it for you?”
“Fuck you.”
“His ma did it,” Coln Marik said. His was no better: a sparrow made up of dots.
“Fuck you, too,” Lars said.
Coln dropped his eyes to the ground and shrank back.
Worm.
“Yours is so great, why’d you hide it?” Lars said, poking a finger at Snaith’s sternum.
Snaith glared, but Lars never took well to warnings. He grabbed a fistful of Snaith’s shirt and ripped it open. Revealed the aberration on his chest.
Hands flew to mouths. Eyes widened. Someone gasped.
At first, Lars was too stunned to say anything, but when he opened his mouth, lips twisted with spite, Snaith cracked him a punch on the cheek, then quickly pulled back, fists raised.
Grisel and Tol instantly stepped between them, calling for calm, but Lars barreled straight through them, swinging for Snaith, trying to take his head off. Snaith slipped the punch and threw one of his own up the middle, rocking Lars’s head back, then he circled away to the right, avoiding the power side. Lars might have lacked skill, but his right hand could have dropped a horse.
Lars roared, tried to close Snaith down in the circle the others were quickly forming around them. Snaith ducked beneath a wild overhand, hit Lars in the ribs, then spun away behind him. Lars turned, straight into a head kick. He got his arm in the way just in time, winced at the pain. He cursed, lunged, tried to grapple, but Snaith kept him off with a kick to the knee.
Lars switched his stance, threw a tentative jab. Snaith swayed, came up inside it, and slung an uppercut into his jaw. Lars grunted, and his knees buckled. He shook his head, staggered, came charging in for a takedown, but Snaith clinched the back of his head and powered a knee into his face. Lars fell onto his back, legs raised defensively. Snaith slipped between them, knelt on one arm to immobilize it, punched around the other Lars was trying to protect his face with. Loose blows. Relaxed. All in the timing, the precision.
When Lars’s eyes rolled up into his head, Snaith stopped pounding him.
He stood and moved away to the center circle to practice against opponents he constructed with his mind, as clear as his image of Tey, and far more fluid and deadly than anyone his clan could pit against him.
He shrugged out of his ripped shirt as he recommenced the sequences. Lars had interrupted them, and he’d gotten what he deserved. But one thing good had come out of it: the others had seen Snaith’s tattoo, and no one had mocked him. Quite the opposite. They’d all been horrified. It was a reaction that had given him an added advantage over Lars, allowed him to get off the first strike.
Not that he needed any help. Snaith knew he could have beaten Lars with a hand tied behind his back, hopping on one leg, and drunk from too much grog.
Maybe they’d start to see it now: his wins in the tournaments were nothing to do with luck. He was the most skillful fighter Malogoi had ever seen, and tomorrow, at the festival, he intended to prove it.
A GATHERING OF CLANS
Snaith hated being wet from the tub. It took three towels to dry off and one to stand on before he was satisfied not a rivulet, not a drop, not a taint remained on his skin. If anyone knew the sacrifice his daily ablutions cost him! Nine trips to the lake and back with pails of water yoked across his shoulders. It kept him lean, he told himself. It kept him clean. And it was necessary. Not just to remove the grime from his skin; not just because he couldn’t stand the idea of smelling like an animal; but to ease his sore muscles after hours spent cutting up the trees he and his Uncle Tubal had felled this morning, then loading the wood onto a cart so it could be taken for storage. Not the best way to prepare for the Proving, but he’d made a commitment and he needed to honor it.
He rapped three times on the door jamb as he left the washroom, then three times more as he entered his bedroom.
His tunic and britches lay atop the bed, washed and wrung out by his mother but straightened and folded as only he could do it. His small clothes were arranged beside them, and on the floor at the foot of the bed, his boots, banged and scraped clean of a day’s worth of mud and sawdust.
He did a quick scan of the room, then did so again. His eyes lingered on the wood-carved warriors he’d made under his uncle’s tutelage, arranged in fighting lines atop their shelf. The figures had been his first project on the road to one day becoming an artisan. As if that was ever going to happen. His mother had insisted on him learning a trade, in case he didn’t make it through the Proving. Maybe if she bothered to watch him practice in the circles, she’d realize there was no need for a fallback plan.
He squinted at the ranks of warriors. Someone had upset them. Not maliciously—he could see from the ham-fisted efforts to put things back as they’d found them—but a shield wall was buckled, and a line of axemen had developed a kink.
Mother!
He was halfway to yelling for her to stay out of his room, that he could clean it himself, when he remembered she’d gone ahead with his father to beat the festival crowds. He would have gone with them, but he’d needed more time to bathe and fix his clothes right. Everything had to be just so for when he met Tey on the Green. When he would put the idea of their marriage to her father. When he would prove his worth in the fight circles.
A twinge of panic squirmed through his guts. If she turned up. If she was going through with it. Her absence yesterday was uncharacteristic. Maybe she was having second thoughts.
Snaith quelled the idea with a barrage of affirmations—the unseen armor of a warrior. In the circles, you couldn’t afford a shred of self-doubt, and in love, he guessed, it was every bit the same. He was fast, strong, more skilled than any man he’d seen. He knew how to talk with Tey, get her guard down, and he was the only one who could treat her right.
Second thoughts! Really? She’d have to be mad to turn me down. Really mad, not just odd. What else has she got? Who?
And she’d agreed, hadn’t she? Reluctantly at first, but that was on account of her shyness.
She had agreed, and agreements were binding, such was the will of the Weyd. No, she was coming. She would be there.
He would have asked for her hand sooner, only Tey had seemed hesitant the day after her twenty-first birthday. He’d screwed up his revulsion of touching, tried to kiss her. And she’d recoiled. Said it was for his own good. Just thinking about his embarrassment sent acid ripples through his veins, but Theurig’s methods instantly kicked in to quell it. The sorcerer had shared his secrets of self-control at the schoolhouse. Judging by the way the other students acted during the lessons, and the way they continued to act, Snaith must have been the only one listening. But that’s what he did: listen and learn, soaking up knowledge like a sponge. He salted facts and stored them along the neat avenues and pristine passages of the map in his mind.
A few deep breaths, the corralling of stampeding feelings with whiplashed phrases he’d assembled for the purpose, and calm was well on its way to being restored.
Rehearse, restate, reset, resolve. Rehearse, restate, reset… Beneath the threshing blades of Theurig’s teaching, Snaith’s thoughts returned to running straight and true.
Tey was just different, he told himself. It was no reflection on him. She’d never bathed in the stream with the others after school. And her father was an overbearing dung-wit who hadn’t worn the black garb of grieving a single day after his wife died. What kind of a man made his daughter pick up the chores her mother had left behind? Seven years old Tey had been. Seven, and already a slave. She needed out of there, and if not Snaith, then who was going to save her? She was too cowed to act by herself. Snaith knew he had to step up, stand up for what was right.
It wasn’t lost on him that what he couched in terms of honor was a smokescreen for what he couldn’t voice, even to himself. Was it love he was hiding from, or something altogether more base? Lust could drop a man’s mind lower than the beasts. Thought of where it led to turned Snaith’s stomach, but that didn’t mean he was immune to its touch. Theurig had warned about its power often enough. But lust? Lust for Tey? He could understand such feelings for Grisel. Something stirred in him when she bathed after practice. A woman desired by any red-blooded clansman. Just the right amount of plumpness. But Tey… She was willow-thin, brittle and pale. Riddled with imperfection. Yet she stirred him, too, though in a different way. Like an enemy attacking by stealth, or some otherworldly spirit cloaked in mystique.