* * *
Milla ran as hard and as fast as she could, leaving a faint trail of blood behind her. She sprinted through the woods, ignoring her wounded side. She had to get back to the trade road. That was her only hope. Sorcha would meet her there. Eventually. Milla refused to think about her Companion losing the fight with demon.
But, even as she denied the thought she would not think, she felt Sorcha reach out to her with love and regret. :I’m sorry Chosen, this is the only way. It’s . . . too strong.: With that, there was tremendous noise behind her that made her stumble against a tree. She clung to its trunk, the bark digging in, as the forest grew silent around her.
The silence was also in her mind. Where once Orun had once been . . . and then Sorcha . . . that comforting presence of another, there was nothing. Nothing at all. Milla was completely alone for the first time in her life. Tears streamed down her face. She made no sound except to gasp for air. For a long time, Milla stayed like that, not moving or seeing.
Then she ran.
The only thing that kept her moving through the pain and the grief was her unspoken promise to Sorcha to live long enough to tell the people at the Palace what she knew. It was her last duty in this unforgiving world. Then she would join her brother and Companion in death. For now, she would keep moving until she could move no more.
Hours later, she was back on the trade route, walking and holding her injured side. She didn’t look where she was going. Just put one foot in front of the other in time to the beating of her heart and the throbbing of her wound. Milla didn’t realize when her steps faltered, then stopped. She swayed for a moment, already unconscious as she crumpled to the ground.
* * *
“By the Gods, girl! What happened?”
The voice was far away, above Milla. Then she was scooped up in strong arms and moved to someplace inside. Vaguely aware that she was lying on something more comfortable than the ground, she opened her eyes.
Above her, a concerned face with dark eyes hovered. The man had long black hair, a short dark beard, and a small nose. Above him was the canvas roof of a wagon. “Girl?”
Milla didn’t respond. She just looked around. The wagon appeared to belong to a minstrel who played a lute but also did some tinker’s work. There were small tools and pots hanging up and a lute case in one corner. The wagon was big enough to have a small stool and workbench in the back. She guessed she was lying on his pallet.
A sudden flare of pain brought her attention back to the stranger. He had peeled back her bloodsoaked, partly dried shirt to reveal the two long gashes in her side. He sat back on his heels with a whistle. “What happened, girl?”
Without waiting for an answer, he turned and rummaged in a bag, pulling out needle and thread. Looked at her again, put them back, and pulled out strip of white cloth. “I’m not much of a healer. Maybe I can get you to one so’s you don’t scar too bad.” He began bandaging her with gentle hands.
The pain was welcome. It meant she was still alive enough to complete her duty. “. . . Milla.”
“Hmm?”
“My name is Milla.”
“Garth.” His fingers worked quickly to bind her. “Where you headed?”
“The Palace. Haven.”
One shaggy eyebrow raised in surprised query. “’Cause of this?” He touched the bandage.
The grief of loss overwhelmed her in an instant and tears sprang to her eyes. Suddenly, she was sobbing as Orun and Sorcha’s deaths hit her again with renewed strength. Then Garth’s arms were around her, holding her to him. He rocked her back and forth, murmuring nonsense words into her hair.
“They killed my brother. They tore him apart. I felt it.” Milla sobbed all the more into the man’s shoulder, and the story poured out of her in fits and leaps. The birthday party. Being Chosen. The darkness hunting them. Orun and Torin’s sacrifice to no avail. Then, finally, Sorcha’s sacrifice as she ran.
The whole while, Garth held and rocked her as if he were her father. “Twins,” he marveled, his voice soft and triumphant. “Chosen twins. That explains it. I didn’t understand before.”
Something about the tone of his voice frightened Milla, and she reached out to touch his mind. She recoiled from the touch. His mind was shielded in a way she had never felt before. They were blood-fed shields, feeling very much like the wyrsa had felt when they attacked. Milla’s stomach roiled as ice flowed through her veins.
“I wonder if the Death Bell tolled for him.”
Milla began to struggle, understanding too late that the darkness had come for her after all. Garth’s grip tightened, trapping her against him. She never saw the magical dagger that flashed in the wagon’s scant light before he plunged it into her back. He held her, tilting her back to watch her face as the life drained from it.
“I wonder if it will toll for you.”
Nwah
Ron Collins
All Nwah knew was that she was alone, so very alone, and that her pain felt like fire; that she was lying under a thicket she had crawled into long ago, a thicket that smelled of green wood and mint and the overpowering stench of her wounds; and that more than anything else, she wanted all her suffering to be over.
In other words, Nwah knew only that she wanted to die.
Then she saw the boy.
He was maybe ten years old, and barefoot. He waved a crooked tree branch in front of him like a sword, and he wore a tunic and green trousers that were dirty and thin.
She growled and showed him her teeth.
:Go away,: she said.
But once the boy saw Nwah was no danger, he bent closer instead.
“Who do we have in there?” he asked.
The point of his branch smelled of her blood, and Nwah decided he must have poked her, probably to see if she was still alive. She tried to get up, but her hip was a blood-clotted mass of agony. What had happened? What had she done?
Then she felt the raw, gnawing scrub of loss deep inside her, like a hole where her heart and her innards and her mind had been torn away. It felt as though she were missing an organ, missing a color inside, a piece of herself that she could not touch.
She whimpered.
:Please,: she begged the boy, thinking that perhaps he would kill her now. :Please.:
The stick ruffled her shoulder, but Nwah just lay there, her head pressed hard to the ground. She heard a pack mouse as it pushed its nose through dry peat in search of fungus or maybe a beetle or a worm. The scent of the mouse was like a dagger to the gut. She imagined the taste of blood. She gave a slow blink. Tired. So tired. Ants crawled through her fur and dug into her wound. The ground wavered, the edges of her sight faded to a tunnel.
The boy seemed to take off his tunic—a dirty bit of cloth it was, too—but Nwah couldn’t concentrate hard enough to follow him.
:Taking his shirt off,: she thought. Boys were so silly. Not like Rayn.
She closed her eyes. The strongest part of her, the part she thought of as her intuition (but was so much more than that), rose up beyond herself, watching as the boy pulled her from the brambles and slid her onto his tunic. The sight scared her. The sensation made her wobbly. Her senses became fully engaged, but she felt nothing as she watched him work. She was nearly his size, she thought, as he dragged the corner of his tunic to slide her along the ground.
Then a dark tint came from the edge of her vision, and she felt more tired than she had ever felt before. She had two last thoughts before the darkness fell completely over her.
Who, she wondered, is Rayn?
And why did the mere thought of her make Nwah’s entire body throb with anguish?
* * *
Upon coming to consciousness, Nwah’s first thought was that she would give her first litter for a single tongue of cool water. She was burning up from the inside, and the light of the sun was in her eyes. She heard a heavy sc
raping. Felt ground slip below her. Voices blurred, conversation came from nowhere. Her body bumped on something, the pain was white hot.
Then:
“That there’s a kyree, Kade. See the wolf head? See how it’s like a cat at the back?”
“I know what a kyree is, Pa.”
“This one’s gettin’ ta be a biggun, too. Maybe fifteen, far as I kin tell. Maybe more. Where was it?”
“On over past the trail on the hill.”
“Pretty far clip.”
“Can I keep her, Pa? You won’t have ta do a thing. I’ll take care of her.”
“Not up ta me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kyree choose their own, son.”
“How’s that?”
“Got no clue. I jus’ tend ground, you know? Maybe you go ask that teacher your mum’s so fond a. Maybe she kin tell ya. Surprised this one’s not already matched.” Nwah felt a boot move her paw. “Course, it looks ’bout dead to me.”
“I’ll take care of her, Pa. She’ll be fine. First thing I say, though, is ta stop calling her ‘it.’ I figure a kyree wants ta be called right as well as anyone.”
“You’re right, boy. I’m sure you’re right.”
In the quiet that followed, despair fell over Nwah again. The fire in her hip was fierce, but the pain inside hurt even worse. It was a deep gash that echoed from places she couldn’t imagine. It felt hotter than the sun beating down, like a roasting oven, like an oven in a smithy shop. What had she done to deserve this? Why was she still here?
The man’s voice came again. “Take her on back, then. Find a place in the shack. Clean that leg up good, or she’s gonna lose it.”
“Thanks, Pa.”
Then ground slipped under her and the world faded away once again.
* * *
Nwah could tell the boy’s mum didn’t like her.
“That thing’s got the mange,” the mum said as she peered down.
Nwah gave a low growl, but the boy rested his hand on her head to calm her. Kade. Nwah remembered the boy’s name was Kade. How did she know that? She couldn’t say.
He knelt beside her and twisted water from a cloth to flow it gently over her wound. He had no shirt on and was again barefoot. She smelled animals—a mule, chickens, and some pigs. They seemed to be in a shelter made of rough lumber. The ground was dirt, but Nwah was lying on a ramshackle nest made of cloth and straw. The water burned at first, but eventually it soothed, and the boy’s touch helped settle her down. His touch brought her a new image, too—a young woman. It made her cringe, though she didn’t know why.
Nwah peered at him through the corner of her bloated eyes.
Who was this boy?
“She’ll be fine,” Kade said. “I’m givin’ her a bath with the tender leaves every hour.”
“Giving,” his mum said. “There’s a ‘g’ there at the end. ‘Giving.’ Just because your father’s stubborn streak has us living in the middle of nowhere doesn’t give you cause to speak without a civilized tongue.”
“Sorry, mum.”
“I swear you waste more time with those critters than’s good for you.”
“I like critters,” the boy said as he rubbed Nwah’s back.
“A kyree’s different from others, though,” the mum said. “You need to fix it up soon as you can. We don’t need Hawkbrothers or other such folks sniffing around here.”
The woman leaned in.
Nwah sensed there was friction here, something almost adversarial between the mum and her son that she intuitively didn’t feel existed with the boy and his father.
“Wonder what someone would give for her?” the mum said.
“I’m not selling Nwah,” Kade said. He put his body between her and his mum. “Pa said I could keep her.”
Nwah’s ears perked at the sound of her name.
:How do you know my name?: she asked, but the boy gave no sign he heard her.
Mum straightened, then shook her head. “So you’ve gone and named her?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Well. I’ve got better things to worry about than a half-dead animal. We’ll speak of it later.”
She walked away, which was fine by Nwah.
* * *
Kade worked on her later that afternoon and again in the evening. Each time, he soaked her legs with a concoction that smelled of goldenseal and mint and of something else that was so unique but so slight that even Nwah’s sense of smell couldn’t place it. The boy hummed as he worked. The tune seemed to fill the entire space of the shack, and it filled another place, too—when the boy hummed, Nwah didn’t feel the pain inside as deeply as she had before.
:Are you a healer?: she asked him once, though in truth she didn’t know how she understood the word “healer.”
Kade didn’t answer, of course. And in some way Nwah found that his silence hurt her. He was comforting. He was warm. It just felt like she should be able to talk with him, but he did not respond.
And each time Kade left, Nwah found she could not quite remember the melody he had been humming, and each time he left, the deep ache returned to brand her with its fire.
Nwah did not know who (or what) Kade was, but she liked him. He fed her soft food. He made her feel better. He brushed her with strokes that made her think of her mother.
“Your coat is quite nice with all the burrs and brambles out of it,” he said to her once.
She tried to Mindspeak with him a few more times, and once he paused at a comment she made about his mum, but that was all there was to that.
His fingers were gentle as they worked her muscles. Gentle, yet firm. His treatments left her relaxed and dozing. It was as if he summoned a river of calmness, as if time stopped when he arrived and started again only when he left. And when he did leave, voices assaulted her, speaking in nightmarish whispers that echoed in places where no one else could ever be.
Useless . . . they said.
Got the mange . . .
Not good enough to make a coat . . .
And somehow, despite Kade’s reassuring touch, Nwah knew they were right. She deserved to be punished, deserved to be whipped.
She would never walk again.
She was Mind-mute.
She had this black acid inside her that reeked with thoughts of fear and death, of blood and the venomous ache of eternal loneliness.
She was broken.
She was a waste of the boy’s time.
Nwah could neither imagine a future nor remember the past. Perhaps that was best. Perhaps knowing her past would be too ghastly. But not knowing was a cancer. Not knowing left her free to imagine, and during the moments she lay alone in this nest of straw, Nwah’s mind concocted things that grew more horrible every hour. It was these times, when the pain was the worst and the voices their most sinister, that Nwah would put a foreleg into her mouth and bite down, bringing the grinding pain she knew she deserved to suffer.
She wished Kade had just left her to die.
:Yes,: she said to the voices at these times. :Yes, I am damaged,: she said to the vacuous pain. :Yes, I am waste.:
And the voices grew stronger still.
* * *
A few days later, Nwah was amazed to find she could walk again.
The sensation was remarkable, standing tenuously, awkwardly, afraid to step forward but unable to stop herself.
She was stiff, and she had a new pattern to her gait. She could not run. She was even appalled at the momentary lightheadedness she felt at merely making it across the floor and back. She was supposed to be injured, supposed to be in despair. But she had thought her legs were damaged beyond use, and now . . . now she looked at Kade with a deeply profound respect that she could not deny.
The next day, the mum came to the shack along with a man.
The man was tall and gangly, wearing riding clothes and the gnarly, black half-beard of one used to traveling. He smelled of having missed the wash rag for several days, and he struck Nwah as dangerous, though she could not say why. There was just something cold in his gaze, something sinister. Her ears turned toward him, and the fur on her back stood up. She looked for Kade, but the boy was out, probably helping his father.
:Who are you?: she said as she flicked her tail, bared her teeth, and gave a low growl of warning.
The man merely stood there, pulling his beard and assessing Nwah as though she were a sack of grain.
“Ugly, even for a kyree,” the man replied.
Nwah growled again. The voice seemed . . . familiar.
“I’m thinking she’s worth as much as the sword,” Kade’s mum replied.
“Don’t see it. Can’t hardly walk, right?”
“The boy says she’ll be fine in time.”
“Tell you what. Give me the kyree, and I’ll send Poythin and his boys your way. They’re always looking for someone who’ll pay gold for the things they pick up along the way. You pay for the blade in coin, and if you give me the animal I’ll tell ’em you pay well and you keep things on the quiet. Once your name spreads, you’ll have more business than you can bear. Not a bad deal for a half-dead animal.”
The mum pursed her lips. “Throw in a knife for the boy?”
The man smiled. “I see why you’re so good at this.”
She shrugged. “He’ll probably find another critter tomorrow.”
The man slammed the gate open and came for her.
Nwah stood, but her body responded too slowly.
Kade had fenced Nwah in so she wouldn’t get into trouble. She didn’t like it, but wasn’t recovered enough to see that it made much of a difference, nor was she recovered enough to want to leave—though that time was coming sooner than she had ever thought possible. Now, though, she wished she could have moved away earlier.
The man hefted her up by the scruff of her neck. Pain of the movement bit into her hind-parts, and she gave a wounded yelp.
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