by Jasmine Walt
"He would know his enemies in the dark and it was all because of this worm."
Alaysha looked down at the wriggling mess. "It has special powers?"
The girl nodded.
"It's said to be the only thing that could overtake Meroshi during his most vulnerable hour."
Number Nineteen was growing interested finally. He'd already shifted foot to foot, and now was squatting next to the pile of yellow grubs, his fingers in the middle of the mess, flicking them apart, inspecting them one at a time.
"We've eaten them in my tribe for decades."
The girl shot him a look of disbelief. "And you've not yet learned of their powers?"
He lifted one shoulder offhandedly. "They taste amazing roasted over a smoky flame. I'd say that's a pretty good power."
The girl gave him a wary glance. "You eat them?"
He nodded.
"Well. No wonder you've not witnessed its magics. Meroshi came from a long line of powerful shamans. He could call flame from the sky, make winds howl, and the earth shake."
"Oh." He snorted. "My tribe can do the same."
Alaysha stole a look at him. Was he lying? The girl slapped his hand away from the worms and he chuckled. "So what was this Meroshi's best power if I have shamans who can do the same?"
"Do your shamans have the power to become invisible?"
He scoffed. "In the dark, we are all invisible."
The girl shrugged and sat down next to the fire pit, adding dead leaves to the top. She went silent and absorbed in preparing for a rousing blaze. The tension grew unbearable. Alaysha could tell the girl wanted to be pressed for the remainder of the story, and as equally, Nineteen didn't want to ask. She let them alone, trying to quell her own curiosity by digging for her tinder bundle and setting the fire, but after a few long moments, the curiosity got the best of her.
"Tell us more."
The girl reached for a grub and pinched it between her fingers. The skin of it broke and let loose an oozing mass of white innards. Not yellow as expected, or even green. Just plain white worm meat.
"It was known by our people that the only way to defeat Meroshi was to come at him just before dawn, when it was the darkest and when he was at his most vulnerable."
The girl scraped the carcass on the grass. "This grub would allow the assassin extra sight, far better than any warrior's vision." She looked pointedly at Nineteen. "Mash these down—five or six of them—and paint three stripes of their fluid beneath each eye and you are granted special sight."
"That's ridiculous."
The girl grinned. "Go right ahead and eat them, but save us some just in case we need them." She reached for Alaysha's tinder bundle and added moss to it, blowing on it to get the smoke moving. She spoke to Alaysha. "Would you help me gather the honey? I need a boost into the tree."
Alaysha nodded and uncurled her legs. She stood and reached for the girl's hand. "I can't imagine those peaches and berries without a honey drizzle now I've decided to have it."
The tree wasn't terribly high, but the way the girl made several attempts to climb with no avail set suspicion into Alaysha's spine. She wove her fingers together and bid the girl step into the cup they made. They were well away from hearing, but Alaysha whispered anyway.
"Could your shamans bring rain too?" She had to know. Were these powers more common than she thought; were there others like her?
The girl giggled as she placed her foot into Alaysha's hands. "Meroshi was lucky if he could put food into his own mouth."
"But—"
The girl's eyes caught Alaysha's conspiratorially. "He was a madman in my village. We had no shaman. Only warriors. Cunning warriors." She peered over Alaysha's shoulders. "Don't look, but another Meroshi trap has just been set." She sprang up and clambered into the tree then waved the tinder moss over the hole. Smoke curled in and around and a few bees seeped drowsily from the entrance.
"What will happen then?" Alaysha asked.
The girl cupped her palm and reached slowly into the crevice. "You'll see come nightfall."
"Tell me about your warriors."
"They're fierce. They fear nothing. Care for nothing. They move in the dark and in the light with equal prowess."
The pride in her voice was almost painful to hear, knowing that she was right now running from her captor. Alaysha thought back to battle sixteen. It hadn't seemed particularly fierce. In fact, except that she had to send the power out over and over again to meet the waves of new fighters, it had seemed very easy.
"Then how did Yuri capture such grand warriors?"
The girl looked at her, no emotion in her face. "He didn't capture them. You killed them."
Alaysha found she couldn't keep the girl's gaze. She thought back to that battle and the warriors she'd murdered at her father's behest. She wondered just how much this girl knew of her power—how much she'd seen or heard. It would explain her complacency back at Yuri's camp, when she'd seen the result of the power on that poor babe, when the power had drained the ready water from the pots and skins. And if this girl had some inkling of the power, then how many others?
8
It was a long wait ’til nightfall, but an enjoyable one. Number Nineteen had somehow gotten the fire to a perfect blaze to roast the frog legs and cattail-wrapped worms. With peaches and berries bubbling happily in a syrupy bowl of honey at the edge of the fire, and sliced cattail roots frying on flat rocks, all they had to do was stretch before the flames and relax.
The feast was as grand as anything she'd eaten, and she wasn't sure if it was the food or the chatter and laughter of the other two that put a perpetual smile on her face. It could have been the way her leg touched Number Nineteen every now and then, and the way he made small, but frequent attempts to touch her. All she knew was she was happy, and she'd not felt happy since her nohma died.
No one mentioned or even glanced at the gourd outside the edge of the fire, purposefully hidden between small stones and branches, but Alaysha knew it was filled with a soup of wriggling yellow bodies.
"So, what of your tribe," she asked him. He had licked the last of his fingers clean of honey and lay stretched sideways to the fire, his black hair loose and hanging in his eyes. From where Alaysha sat, those eyes looked like lit honey. She reached out to wipe a bit of peach from his chin.
"Your tribe, you mean," he said.
She shrugged. "So you say."
He rubbed his stomach. "Our tribe is made of four major clans. I am Fire Clan. You are Water. Didn't your nohma tell you this?" He sounded as though he couldn't believe she'd not been taught such a simple thing. She felt stung at the tone, much as she would if a bee had bit her.
When he noticed she wasn't answering, he rolled onto his back.
"You think you have secrets from me," he said to the growing dark.
"It's all I have," she murmured. She and the girl were huddled close together, bracing against the chill at their backs.
"You have less than you think, then. Don't you want to know where you came from?"
"I know enough," she lied.
His low chuckle rumbled with the fire. "Your enough makes you hunger for more, but you're afraid to ask."
"I was trained not to fear."
"Then what was that you felt the night I came to you?"
She couldn't answer. It hadn't been the first time she'd accidentally let loose her power, but it had been the first time in many years. It unnerved her to think her power was getting the better of her, that she couldn't control it.
"I'll tell you what it is, Alaysha," he said. "It's the power growing in you; it's coming to its peak as you mature and it will soon overwhelm you." He craned his neck to look at her across the flame, and as the light danced on his features, she thought she saw fire within him. "You need me," he said.
She looked away, out into the shadows of the trees, and listened for Barruch's breathing in the dark to ground her, to remind her who she was and why she was here. The conversation had gone f
ar too deep into the pits of those things she'd always longed for and been afraid of. He'd touched too far into the hollow spaces she'd spent years trying to fill with her collections.
"I always thought I needed no one," she said. It was true, wasn't it? She'd spent so many years alone, despite the companionship of this fire, she had survived without affection for so long, she knew she could manage without it again if she had to.
As if realizing he'd gone too far, he pointed to the first star winking in the sky, the one high above them, already brighter than the pale moon. "I was named after that light."
Alaysha's attention piqued. She knew what her nohma called that first light of the evening—that brightest purplish light that lasted far into the early morning. It was the Eye of Yenic, she'd said, peering to watch over his beloved Yen, the soft belly of the earth below him, until the sun could care for her properly.
"And here I was calling you nineteen," she said, forcing a laugh.
"Nineteen?"
She hung her head and felt a curtain of hair mercifully cover her face. "Yes. The one that got away."
He thought for a moment. "Nineteen," he said after a time. "After the eighteen you killed."
"Yes," was all she could say.
He shifted to sit cross-legged. "You counted wrong," he murmured. "There were twenty."
She squirmed when she thought about it. "Yes. One woman was pregnant."
"My sister," he said.
Alaysha fell silent, the sense of shame covering her like a fur. It had been war, so she thought. She'd not known the village was filled with citizens. Not until she'd sent the power out, thirsting for whatever water it could find. She'd let it go and traveled the paths with the energy—down to the ground, along the grasses, up bare feet and legs, through tear ducts. When the power got to the unborn, it was already too late.
Its eyes would have been amber, she realized. Were amber.
"I remember her," she whispered.
"My sister?"
"No. Your niece."
Yenic said nothing at that, but he rose from his spot at the fire and kicked the place where the worms rested in their gourd. He reached down with his elegant, but callused fingers and lifted the bowl from its spot and trudged into the underbrush. He disappeared in the cascade of leaves and branches.
The girl beside her shifted. "I feel bad for what's about to happen to him now," she said.
"I feel nothing," Alaysha responded, seeing his reaction. She hadn't wanted to hurt him and now she had, she wanted to take it back. She wanted to return to the sense that those things didn't matter. She couldn't afford to feel anything. It wasn't a warrior's place to question or feel guilt about killing on command. If one did, then a whole life would be spent recovering from a single deed.
"Is he telling the truth about his tribe and yours being the same?"
Alaysha nodded. "I think so. My father told me much the same."
"Is that why we're here?"
Alaysha sighed. She wasn't sure anymore. She'd wanted to know the connection at first, but now she thought all she really wanted was to get away. What did it matter that she belonged to a nearly extinct tribe.
"We're here because we needed a place to rest," she said and pulled the girl closer.
"Did you really kill his people?"
"I did."
"How could you?"
"How could I not?" Alaysha shrugged. "I was not my own. Much as you aren't."
"I ran away, and I am my own now."
Alaysha squeezed her tightly, enjoying the feeling that for once she had the comfort of another body next to hers. Scrawny though it might be, it was a great consolation.
"As I am my own, now, too."
"Maybe I should go stop him."
Alaysha held the girl back when she started to pull away.
"I doubt he wants anyone around at the moment. Whatever it is you've done to him with those worms, it'll keep for a while."
Yenic was gone a long time; Alaysha was startled to find she had fallen asleep and was cushioning the girl's head as she also slept. At times, though she'd felt herself nodding off next to the heat, she hadn't thought she'd actually succumbed to the night. She hadn't remembered feeding the fire either and yet it roared merrily on.
She heard him coming long before she saw him, and Barruch whickered noisily when the bushes rustled.
At first, she wasn't sure what she was seeing, but it looked like fireflies hovering in six straight lines behind the lacy cover of leaves. They lifted and moved together left and right, bobbing up and down, all in unison. Then they shot towards the ground and the stomping racket of feet in too much a hurry to care about making noise rattled across the air.
"Something's wrong," Yenic was saying, his voice a hoarse, pained noise. "What have you done to me?"
Alarmed now, Alaysha pushed the girl's head from her lap and jumped to her feet, taking the strides she needed to grab her sword from her bundle. Yenic broke through the tree cover, the six stripes on his cheeks more obvious now, not fireflies as she'd thought, but the phosphorescent yellow color of the grub's skin. His hands were aloft as he looked at them, the yellow shining brightly in the dark on the tips of his fingers and smeared on his palm.
A low chuckle came from behind her, stopping Alaysha in her tracks. She turned to the girl to see her moving towards Yenic with her hand over her mouth, trying to keep the laughter in.
"Can you still see, Yenic? Can you see in the dark?"
"No better than I did before." He didn't sound impressed.
"Does it burn yet?"
"You mean it's going to burn?"
"And steal your vision once your eyes swell shut."
Yenic made a noise between a groan and a scream, then stumbled about, feeling his way around as though he was already blind. "Shouldn't you at least help me?"
"I can take you to the water. That should prevent the burning."
"And the swelling?"
"Oh, yes. Of course, the swelling." The girl snickered and Alaysha sent her a reproachful look that sent the black eyes downcast so quick it was obvious she realized she'd played a poor game.
"You did this to him; you should help."
"I didn't do anything," came the protest, but the girl minced toward him and reached out for his hand when she was close enough. "Here, I'll help rinse it all off. But we'd better hurry before you start seeing things."
His shouts rose an octave and mixed with words Alaysha had never heard even in her rides with the most swarthy of warriors. The only intelligible thing she could make out were his last, frantic ones.
"Seeing things?"
The dry response was nearly lost in the bushes as the girl answered. "Where do you think Meroshi's power came from? Magic?"
"I believed you," Yenic's tone turned pouting.
"Of course you did. It's a story we tell every outsider, knowing they'll try it. So we can see them coming should they decide to attack, and if they do attack, they fight the shadows of their night terrors rather than any one of us." She guided him away from the fire toward the waterfall and Alaysha could hear Yenic's plaintive protest that he wasn't an outsider.
The girl's matter-of-fact reply came right on its heels. "Maybe not, but how often do you think I get a chance to tell that story? Why even the youngest of us knows better than to play with the dreamer's worm."
Alaysha watched them go and settled back down near the fire. If the girl knew such a use for a grub that Yenic's kind did nothing but eat, then her tribe must know things most didn't. Alaysha had never seen the repugnant thing before, let alone know to eat it.
It was one more thing that reminded her of how ignorant she was. All she'd ever known was battle and loneliness, duty and despair.
She resolved again to find out as much as she could—and to get as far away from her father as she could. Now she'd tasted freedom without the burden of duty, she rather enjoyed it.
As it turned out, Yenic's eyes were sore enough that he lay curled next
to the fire when they returned. The girl tried her best to coax conversation with him, but he only grunted at her and rubbed at his eyes.
"Don't worry," she said. "It'll only hurt for a little while. We got it all off in plenty of time."
He said nothing.
"And even if we hadn't, the effects are only temporary. A day or so of hallucinations and swelling, and it's all gone again."
He blinked. "But you got it all off in time," he said blandly.
She smiled brightly. "Right."
"Right," he said and curled farther into an indignant ball and went to sleep without a further word.
She'd made a cozy spot next to the fire with her thatched mat and fur and let the girl crawl into the crook she made with the curve of her body. She heard a small sigh and thought it might have been her own. She might have shared her blanket with Yenic had things gone differently.
"He's angry," Alaysha whispered so not to disturb him.
"Yes, he's angry, but not half so angry as he'll be tomorrow night."
"Why, what happens tomorrow?" Alaysha was almost afraid to ask.
"The sun will gather on his cheeks where the stripes are and store there ’til nighttime."
"And…?"
"And he will glow as brightly tomorrow night as he does tonight."
Alaysha moaned softly. "For how long?"
"It wears off after a couple of days. The longer it stays painted on, the longer it lasts. He should stop glowing in a couple of nights."
"Does he know this?"
The girl shook her head.
Come morning, Alaysha woke to a smoky, dampened fire. She shivered beneath her fur and realized the girl was gone. She lifted her head to peer across the smoke and saw Yenic sitting on a rock, knees up, feet that were filthy from rummaging planted solidly against the stone. He was munching on a handful of what she presumed were nuts, popping one after the other into his mouth and chewing thoroughly.
He was staring straight at her and her heart made an almost audible thunk in her chest.
"Where is the girl?" she asked him.
He shrugged.