Dedicated to independent souls
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AUTHOR BIO
In this world there are powers and empowerment. Deliverance had never known power, the ceded gift bestowed upon a soul, but she knew empowerment—that hard won, delicious sliver of self-given skill. Here in the winter-softened wood, in the trundles of billowing snow, was the seat of her empowerment. Her silent kingdom.
Her falcon eyes zeroed in on her quarry, barely discernable to the unschooled eye. A quivering tuft of fur just out of balance with the still line of the white pines. She slowed her breathing, willing her pulse to quiet as well. This was the hard part. She never liked what came after, the taking of a life to feed another life. It would stick in her gullet for hours to come, that irrepressible guilt unavoidable when life demands the death of another. She blew out one more breath. With a resounding thwack the arrow sung through the air, into the snowshoe hare’s stilling heart.
Deliverance paced her breathing as she struggled through the thigh-high drifts of snow toward her quarry.
On the other side of the island, another woman’s breathing was just as ragged, in the same pursuit of life. She screamed, clutching the hands of her village sisters. A new soul was poured in a sluice of blood and terror at the unknown into this world. The new mother caught her harried breath as she rested back on the birthing bed, veins receding over dappled, glistening skin.
“It’s a girl!”
Cries of the new infant breached the thick warmth in the midwife’s quarters. She took her first breaths of this foreign stuff called air.
The village women gathered around the new mother and placed the protesting, writhing bundle into eager arms. They joined hands, invoked the gods, and began the sacred naming.
“Those who came before us, and those who will follow,
Heed the calling of this new sister,
Though she is young, she will grow.
Let her grow to glorify the gods
And to please the village.”
The new mother waited anxiously, silently with bated breath.
“We invoke the Naming God to place upon this daughter,
her Gift. Mother, what shall she be named?”
A pause. Then very carefully, as to not disrupt the powerful magic humming through the room, the mother announced: “Wisdom.”
The village ladies clasped eyes with one another, nodding, appreciating the gift this daughter would bear. With hands intertwined they raised their arms, a crown of limbs around mother and new daughter and spoke, “Let her be named Wisdom.”
The humming took a crescendo and then, with a breath, faded into the ambient atmosphere. It was done. The girl was named. She would be Wisdom. For this life she would bear the almost supernatural gift of wisdom. When choices were difficult, she would have uncanny discernment. When the way was unclear, she would be able to see the path. When others lacked judgment, she would supply the answers. Wisdom was her name, and it was now her innate gift.
On the far side of the island, another girl, nearing womanhood, trudged through the drifts with her glassy-eyed hare dangling over her shoulder. Her name was Deliverance, but no one knew her gift.
CHAPTER 1
Deliverance
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Deliverance tossed open the oak door to the sleepy cottage. Swirls of frothy snow trickled at the edges of her fur-lined parka, sneaking into the warmth of the firelight. She removed her rabbit-skin cap and discarded it on the rickety reed woven chair next to the door, allowing her dark waves of hair to spill out over her snow-coated shoulders.
“Ah, you’ve returned, daughter. You had good sport,” the woman crouching at the fireside commented, nodding at the dangling prey.
“It’s not sport. Bringing down this hare was hardly diverting,” Deliverance replied, kicking off her calfskin snow boots and trudging over to the large, knotty table. There, she plopped her prize onto the section reserved for meat preparation.
“And yet, daughter, you are secretly enthralled with the skill it takes to accomplish such a feat.” Her mother stood and set the spoon she had been using to stir her pot on a rest on the sooty hearth. Cat, short for Catalyst, was a willowy, older version of her daughter, with rich, thick hair and haunting green eyes. Those eyes were adept at assessing situations, including her daughter’s various moods.
Cat was right. Deliverance did feel a certain thrill at her capacity to make her mark, yards away, accomplishing shots that most men on the island could only dream of and perhaps boast falsely. It was not the kill that enticed her, but the precision of it and the independence it provided her and her mother. They needed very little from the villagers on the island. This was opportune, as their little homestead was settled far on the other side of the island from the main village. Cat and Deliverance preferred to keep to themselves.
Today would not be one of those days they could bide by themselves, though.
“’Tis good you were able to make your mark, daughter. The hare’s blood is the last ingredient I need for the Fishmonger’s wife’s tonic,” Cat remarked, reaching out to procure the dangling prey from her daughter. She adeptly slit the hare’s neck vein over her cauldron already bubbling with a noxious brew. A gelatinous river sprung from the hour-dead neck and splashed into the concoction below.
Deliverance attempted to ignore the odor emanating from the pot and plopped down by the fire to warm her tingling limbs.
“Do not get too comfortable, daughter,” Cat said, stoppering a little cobalt glass bottle with the odious
substance meant for the Fishmonger’s wife. It would help ease her gout, especially with the small, luminescent puff of magic swirling in the midst of the hare’s blood, St. John the Conqueror’s root, willow bark, and the slew of other herbs Deliverance did not have the patience nor the proclivity to name.
“Yes, I know. We must away to market today.” Deliverance grumbled, laboriously pulling herself from her comfortable chair by the hearth. Secretly she thought perhaps the ninnies in the village could wait a day or two for their precious remedies, especially considering their ungrateful, snide treatment of Deliverance and her mother, whose skill as a healer and chemist they all had to thank in some way or another. But her mother was an indomitable force, and so she went to saddle the ponies.
***
“A whole sixpence! Really, I do not know what your mother is thinking charging such for a simple tonic!” The cartwright’s wife, who was the Fishmonger’s wife’s sister, sniffed, eyeing Deliverance with barely disguised disdain.
“I had to spend the entire morning hunting for a hare to complete the spell. That is time I wasna spending mending the broken fence in our corral or chopping wood, or doing any of the other tasks it takes for us to survive,” Deliverance replied pointedly, not letting the woman’s refusal to meet her eyes bother her.
“Yes, well, I suppose this time. My sister does need her tonic.” The cartwright’s wife relented, picking the six pence coin from her satchel and placing it on the makeshift wooden table Cat and Deliverance had set up for their market stand.
Deliverance was accustomed to the women not handing her monies directly. They treated her like her strangeness might be contagious. That was the due for someone whose name was so obscure as Deliverance. They always thought their whispers went unheard. They did not. Odd little thing. Pretty but weird, just like her mother. I mean, what does her name even mean?
When she was younger, and the girls in the village, as girls are apt to do, were rude to her, Deliverance would fervently wish her mother named her something like Fire or Hex. Even Karma would have been useful. To be fair, almost all the women in the village possessed impotent names themselves, their mothers choosing gifts such as beauty or piety. Names such as Bella, Prudence, and Patience abounded. The Abbot’s wife selected names for her girls such as Chastity or Temperance.
The only other girl whose name gift was a rarity chose this moment to appear beside Deliverance’s stall. There was no missing Effie in her fiery brilliance and brightly colored stockings. She was a splash of color in the dullness of village life.
“Are ye not going to hand the lady her payment?” Effie’s musical voice came hard as a dagger. The cartwright’s wife hesitated. “Because it twould be rude and we both know ye would not want to be un-neighborly, Constance. Your husband is always saying how friendly you are. I havna seen him in a while…perhaps I shall make it a point to catch up with him?”
The threat in Effie’s words was plain. Sputtering, the cartwright’s wife picked up the six pence coin lying on the scarred wooden stand and plopped it into Deliverance’s waiting palm. With that, the woman snatched the blue bottle from the stand and scurried off before any further insinuations could be leveled.
“Ye didna have to do that, Effie. I would have gotten paid all the same,” Deliverance remarked but softened it with a smile, as she knew her friend had her best interests at heart.
Effie spat. “Ye canna give those heifers an inch. Otherwise they twould walk all over ye. Ye would think it would be the men that try to trounce ye, but the women be just as bad. Maybe worse.” She shook her head in disgust. She’d endured as much ridicule from the folk of this island as Deliverance—if not more—that was certain.
Name gifts were meant to be prudent and a blessing. While Deliverance’s name was a bafflement and enough to label her an outcast, Effie’s was a downright curse. Her mother had died in her childbed. She had not been lucid enough to understand the village women were performing the naming rite because when prompted for a name; instead, the woman had uttered a crass curse word and then fallen dead. The village women, staring in shock at one another, could not undo the naming ritual once the mother had spoken, and she could not be roused to right the wrong. Only a mother could reword the name in the ritual. And so, everyone called the girl Effie…and Effie, growing up motherless and in need of love, had become seductively skilled in the physical arts. The names were prophecies of what would come.
“Come on, now, love,” said Effie, clapping her hands together. “It’s cold as the Horizon’s twat out here. Let’s go to the tavern and get some mulled wine!”
“Alright. I’m done for the day here. I’ll just close up and leave a note on the stall for my mum. She’s visiting the new babe, Wisdom, to check on her health,” Deliverance allowed, pulling down the canvas to cover the stall and tying it off against the bitter wind.
The tavern was a moldy building, which started out as a modest plank structure, then grew, like a cankerous blight in additions. Now it spilled in mismatched sections throughout the mucky street on which it was built. Inside was as dark and musty as one would expect from such a place, but the hot wine was decent and the food was naught to complain about. Besides, there were many nooks and crannies one could squirrel away in for some privacy. It just so happened Deliverance’s and Effie’s favorite spot by one of the many hearths tucked in a corner was occupied by some of the village boys. But with a flick of Effie’s wrist, the boys willingly relinquished the corner.
“Oh, and Darren, bring us some mulled wine from the bar, would you, Love?” Effie commanded one of the retreating youths, who happily obliged her whim. Although Deliverance noticed the barmaid, Industry shoot them a scathing look of jealousy and suspicion as she filled the order for the young man. Darren hastily returned with two steaming mugs of mulled wine, thick with cinnamon and nutmeg. With a word of praise from Effie, the boy’s ego was duly caressed.
“Now, Deliverance, love, let’s talk about how those daft village women are treating ye. Ye canna just let them walk all over ye like ye do,” Effie started in on her, and Deliverance took a generous sip of her sweet concoction. “Take it from me. If ye let them an inch they will drag ye a mile.”
Deliverance thought Effie was powerful, the way she held sway over men. Men dictated much of the life in the village, hence Cat and Deliverance’s preference to abide far away from their prying eyes and commanding edicts. But Effie held court and they attended eagerly. Sometimes when she and Deliverance would steal away for a quiet lunch on market days, Effie would bid the baker to impart on them loaves free of charge, or whatever group of workers to surrender the best spots under the shade trees so she and Deliverance could sup there. A glance from Effie was enough to silence a protest from any man in the village. While it was not outright power through authority, it was power all the same. There was power in a name.
Deliverance found herself drowning out Effie’s chatter as the warm fire and low lighting lulled her into a semi-stupor. Outside the small mullioned window a magpie pecked at the worm-rotted windowsill, sending Deliverance into a daydream of days past.
Deliverance
Sixteen years ago
The bird master who maintained the aviary had always reminded Deliverance of a hoot owl, with wavy eyebrows and eyes enlarged by the too-big glasses perched upon his generous beak. Once, when Deliverance was a li
ttle girl, she wandered away to spy on him, entranced by his secret sept of messengers. As she crouched in a corner, unconcerned with the bird droppings and dust of the aviary—as children often are—she spied on the old man shuffling about his business. He measured careful scoops of seed for each of the birds, a red-tailed hawk, a large clucking brood of pigeons, and a visiting albatross from a faraway land called Icasus. As he was huffing about, sending up little puffs of dust from the floor, a sleek black and white bird landed on the windowsill.
“Ah!” The old man cackled, reaching over for the bird hopping at the beam of the large window opening. Rivulets of particles danced in the waning slant of light. Deliverance realized she had been playing spy far too long and would soon be missed by her mother. But the arrival of the new bird riveted her attention. She let out a small gasp, as excited by the prospect of news as the bird master.
“Ye can come out now, ye there,” the old man croaked, not turning in her direction, but obviously meaning Deliverance. “Ye have been spying on me for a while. Must be stiff from sitting so still.” The old man was right—her knobby knees were aching from remaining in a crouch so long. Reluctantly, she stood and wandered over to the bird master, expecting a rebuke for trespassing.
Instead he cackled. “Ah, it seems the King and Queen of Torrendia have welcomed a baby girl into the world.” Deliverance nodded solemnly, not wanting to draw the old man’s wrath. She wondered what the baby girl would be named, what her gift would be.
“You like birds, little girl?” the bird master inquired, finally focusing his bespectacled attention on her. His eyes were magnified like bugs beneath a looking glass.
Deliverance nodded, drawing a little circle in the dust with her toe, as bashful children are wont to do. She did not want to gaze too long at the curling hairs emanating from the bird master’s nostrils. She wondered if all old people grew longer nose hair or if just men did.
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