“No, we couldn’t.”
“No. You couldn’t.”
“We both swore the same oath, Xhreka.”
“Girl, if I were asked, I would say you’re keeping that oath because you don’t know nothing else. Same can’t be said of your man.”
The halfling was only echoing Fetch’s own fears, but inner worry and voiced wisdom were a different breed of pain. “Reckon it’s a good thing I didn’t ask you, then.”
Xhreka gave a little smile. “Reckon so.”
“Besides, you’re the same breed of fool.” Fetch pointed west. “Strava is less than four days’ ride that way. And yet here you are, daring Zirko to come find you. Last I heard, ships can still bear the weight of a halfling.”
Xhreka grew intensely still, save for one finger giving her eye patch a single tap. “You have any notion how far away I was when I found this? You never heard the name of that land, Lot-born pup. It was the Master Slave that brought us back here after I liberated him from centuries of dark decay. And believe me, he pitches a tantrum to wake all the hells if I try to leave. When I try to leave. I’d be suffering the cold of Calmaris or the demon warlords of the Dragonfly Islands this very moment rather than hide in the worst holes in Ul-wundulas if I could. But Belico won’t allow it. So don’t speak to something that reveals you for an ignorant.”
It was Fetch’s turn to employ a twinkling stare. “Who’s angry now?”
“Belico’s Cock!” Xhreka blew out an astounded breath. “Idris told me you like your petty reckonings.”
“Guilty,” Fetch admitted. “Came by them honest, coming up with him and Jack.”
“I heard plenty enough of the stories to know that’s true.”
“Seems he kept no secrets. Shame you had to.”
Xhreka sobered. “Well, I don’t speak of it. But if I did…it’d have been a waste. Rather have heard him talk than till the muck of my life.”
“You love him.” It wasn’t a question.
There was a pause, but the halfling was considering her words rather than stalling.
“I do,” she said, at last. “But it’s not like what you got with your man. And it ain’t how I want that pale mongrel to just let me do whatever I’d like. With Idris…”
“What?” Fetch coaxed, curious.
“I’ve never seen someone so equipped to survive these lands. Big as a thick, near as strong. I’ve seen him fight. Seen him kill. Washed him when he was covered in the blood he spilled more times than is healthy to count. He’s more orc than man; savagery is his birthright. But he never reveled in it, never got drunk on the death or lusted for more. He would talk of you or Jackal. Both, most times. Tell me stories of your youth. Of raising Ugfuck from a runt. He would tell me of his mother. Here he was, slaying giants with his bare hands in a pit while hundreds of ravening men bellowed his glory. And after? He would speak to me of the joy of playing games with a simple-minded stableboy or a mongrel orphan riddled with plague sores. I’ve seen all manner of men in this life, but I’d never seen that. I don’t even have a name for it. And every time I cleaned the gore from his face I was terrified whatever it was would be wiped away too. I love him because it never did. Because he never let it. I love him because he gives me hope that these badlands don’t turn us all into beasts gnashing and clawing to survive.”
“Reckon you hate me for putting him in that pit.”
Xhreka dismissed that with a hum. “Maybe I would have. But that’s the other thing about Idris. It’s damn near impossible not to love what he does. Though Ugfuck tests that a bit.”
Fetch smiled an agreement, allowed the wind and fire to argue for a span.
“Do you want to know the real reason I didn’t drag Jackal into a shadowy spot and strip him to the skin?”
Xhreka’s face lit with interest.
“Because right now, I can smell my own crotch.”
Standing, Fetch put some distance between her nostrils and the offense that was between her legs as Xhreka burst into laughter.
“That’s what swearing an oath to live in the saddle will get you,” the halfling guffawed.
Fetch added her own laughter, shook her head ruefully.
Hobbled a few strides away, Womb Broom looked at their mirth and snorted with annoyance.
Soon, having cowed the fire, the wind’s voice was all that remained.
Xhreka surveyed the badlands spread in every direction. She gave a sniff. “You certain this is where you want to be?”
Fetch nodded, rotating slowly in place. “I want to see him coming.”
“And then?”
“Then it ends. No matter what, it ends.”
And so they waited, watchful, the day tense and tedious as it drew on. Night fell and still Fetch stood watch, moon and stars providing enough for her vision. The heavens made their slow progress across the sky. Xhreka dozed. Fetch refused. But it was not Ruin that finally appeared on a horizon purpling with the coming dawn. Nor his dogs. Fetching roused Xhreka with a short, sharp whistle.
The halfling rose, her single eye narrowing. “Is that…?”
“Yes,” Fetch replied, raising her loaded thrum.
It was a harrow stag, and the elf upon its back was familiar.
N’keesos.
The young warrior’s broken arm remained slung, causing him to ride with no weapon in hand. Still, Fetch took aim.
“That’s far enough!”
She didn’t know if he spoke Hisparthan, didn’t care. A bolt in his mount’s neck would be her translator if he didn’t heed.
N’keesos pulled the stag to a halt, half turned the animal, and pointed back the way he’d come. His painted face was etched with the haunting glow of his stag’s antlers.
“Kakío Wa’supá.”
Fetch no longer possessed the mystical gift of the Tine language, but she recognized the name of the elf that bestowed it to her.
Woeful Starling.
N’keesos spoke again.
“You get that?” Fetch asked Xhreka without taking her eyes, or her aim, from the stag.
“Not me, but Belico did. He’s telling me the rustskin wants us to follow him. That his father has Starling.”
“Shit.”
“Doesn’t have to be our problem,” the halfling offered.
“She helped me. More than once. So, yes, it does.”
By the time she and Xhreka were mounted, N’keesos was riding away. They followed him to the southwest. The ride was not long. Starling had been on foot. She hadn’t made it far. And there had been nowhere to hide.
Ahead, the plain was interrupted only by folds of blanched dust and lonely, stubborn stands of scrub. Starling stood in the ghostly, parched vastness screaming at Ghost Last Sung. He sat his stag above her, silent and pitiless. Spying Fetch’s approach, Starling tried to come to her, but Ghost Last Sung’s war lance thrust out to block her path. Yet he could not hinder her cries.
“Leave here!” Starling entreated. “You must go!”
Once again in the she-elf’s presence, the Tine tongue blossomed in Fetch’s mind.
“Let her go,” she told Ghost Last Sung, pulling Womb to a halt. The older elf was a javelin toss distant, his son half that distance off to the right. “Keep your eye on N’keesos,” Fetch whispered to Xhreka sitting before her in the saddle.
“This hog twixt our legs won’t take kindly to Belico shouting this close,” the halfling muttered back. “Neither will that pregnant elf.”
Fuck.
Fetch turned her stockbow on N’keesos, but kept her words trained on his father. “I won’t play this game with you, elf. Release Starling. Let her walk to me. Or I will put this bolt through your son’s eye.”
Neither warrior reacted to the threat. Their faces were stone. Ghost Last Sung’s response was ice.
�
�You cannot cause me further pain. You cannot harm Blood Crow more than he has suffered.”
“A broken arm isn’t death,” Fetch replied.
“Death is better than shame,” Ghost Last Sung declared. “Death is better than banishment and dishonor.”
“You chose that path,” Starling said.
“For you fear to walk upon it!” The older Tine’s outburst caused his stag to shy, but he mastered the animal with no effort and returned his gaze to Fetching. “This aberration must not continue to curse my family.”
Starling continued her pleas. “Ride away, Fetching!”
“I can’t do that.” Fetch signaled for Xhreka to dismount with a nudge, helped the halfling from the saddle before climbing down from the hog’s back herself. No doubt Womb would bolt at the sound of Belico, but at least he wouldn’t be harmed. Or harm them. That was one impediment gone. Now Fetch just needed to get Starling clear. Na’hak and N’keesos had left Dog Fall before Jackal arrived, leaving them unaware of Xhreka’s power. They were only wary of Fetching, so she kept their attention fixed by walking forward, stockbow lowered.
“You told the Sitting Young our lives were woven,” she said to Starling. “Can’t believe that and ask me to abandon you. And I’m not in the habit of leaving a woman and her unborn child to be killed.”
“That is no child,” Ghost Last Sung said. “You understand nothing.” Removing his lance from Starling’s path he gazed down at her. “Do what you must.”
Fetch had halved the distance between Womb Broom and the stag. She was close enough now to see the tears of Ghost Last Sung’s war paint. Starling walked forward and met her the rest of the way.
“You must go,” she hissed. “Now!”
“We’re leaving together.”
“No. That cannot be. Ride away! They will not hurt me. You must not stay! Please!”
Starling’s face was desperate, nearing panic.
Ghost Last Sung eclipsed her words with his commanding voice. “End this!”
Starling spun to face him. “I will not!”
“You have been given another chance and still you refuse to cleanse our shame!”
The fury in the aging warrior’s face caused Fetch to step in front of Starling. “The shame is yours, elf. You say I understand nothing, but I hear you speak of family. You think I can’t see a father renouncing his daughter. The shame is yours.”
Ghost Last Sung’s eyes widened, the hard set of his jaw going slack.
“Daughter?” he said, his glare moving to Starling. “You have hidden the truth.”
The accusation was edged, affronted.
Fetch felt Starling grasp her arm. “Ride away.”
“She is no more daughter to me than you,” Ghost Last Sung said.
The she-elf’s grip tightened. “Do not listen.”
“Woeful Starling lacks the courage, so I shall tell you.”
“Keep silent, Na’hak!”
Ghost Last Sung was deaf to Starling. “The woman you think to save is—”
“Do not heed him, Fetching!”
Releasing her, Starling snatched a handful of dirt from the ground, spat into her palm, and cast the earth to the wind.
“—m’hun nahi N’kees’elo da wiyela.”
Ghost Last Sung’s words no longer held meaning. Robbed of understanding, Fetch cast a look at Starling, but the elf would not meet her eyes, so she turned to Xhreka.
“The fuck did he say?”
The halfling stood bemused.
“Xhreka!”
“He…he said—”
She was cut off by Ghost Last Sung’s deep tones speaking Hisparthan. “I say. Starling”—he pointed at Blood Crow with his lance—“N’keesos’s mother. And”—the lance moved to Fetching—“yours.”
When his halting words faded, the night was silent.
Fetch would have chased the quiet off with her laughter, but Starling’s face strangled the mockery in her throat.
All desperation was gone. The she-elf’s mouth was drawn tight, a bulwark against an outcry of pain. Her eyes were bright, wet, incensed, brows above knit close. She shook. A few hissed words were flung at Ghost Last Sung. The Tine tongue was once again a mystery, but the ire was evident. It was a curse. And an admission.
Fetch felt the madness the world had tried to plant over the last months begin to sprout as Starling’s countenance added affirmation to the claim. The weight of pregnancy aside, she looked no older than Fetching. Hells, the rare times she smiled she appeared younger.
Seizing Starling by the shoulders, Fetch forced the elf to look at her. “She died. My mother died. She died! Beryl fucking buried her!”
Tears crawled down Starling’s cheeks, slow as the erosion of her composure.
“And that body remains under the dust,” she said, mouth thick with grief. “The one standing before you belonged to a poor daughter of my tribe taken by illness in Dog Fall.”
Fetch’s grip tightened, her hold all that kept her from falling as the world upended. “I don’t…I don’t understand.”
Starling nearly succumbed to grief, the silent tears threatening to break her. She buried them in a hole of deep regret, covered them with a mound of defeat. Slowly, she reached up and ran a trembling thumb gently across Fetch’s lips. When she spoke, the language of the Tines flowed from her tongue and it fell upon Fetch’s ears as if she’d been born to it.
“I am Returned. A rare happening among my people, even at our height, but a mystery my tribe yet honors.”
Fetch had heard the council call Starling such, but did not recognize they spoke a title of reverence. Honored. And feared.
“How?”
“I cannot say. In the beginning I could not discern the visions ever in my mind from the terror of the world before my eyes. There was life and memory of life, currents in the same stream, both cold and inescapable. I lived a forced reflection, my new steps tracing the path of the old. I wandered from the land of my tribe as before, but my journey was impeded for I was taken by cavaleros, sold, and imprisoned in a broken tower by the man Corigari. And there, again, I survived the violations of orcs.”
Fetch felt ill at the thought of such suffering twice endured. And ill at the realizations born from the elf’s recounting. The first time she’d seen this girl, she was filthy, lying unconscious upon the bog. Jackal and Crafty had saved her from the Sludge Man’s hut, all three about to be food for a rokh when Fetch and Oats finally caught up. They’d all had to flee the Sludge Man. Starling awoke during the chase when Crafty had tried to pass her from his mount to…Fetch’s.
“You’ve known,” she said, fighting to look the elf in the eye. “You’ve known since that first day.”
“I knew nothing,” Starling replied, the denial a plea for absolution. “Nothing of speech, nothing of myself. Nothing of you. It was a birth and I was a babe.”
“When then?” Fetch nearly screamed the question, uncertain why it mattered, but driven to know.
“It was not until Jackal bore me from the fortress and Warbler set me free that I began to sift the truth of my existence. Even then, I thought myself mad.”
“But the Tines didn’t,” Fetch declared. “They obeyed when you asked them to ride to the Grey Bastards’ aid. And again with the Sitting Young.”
“The path of the Returned is one of redress. The Seamless Memory has long believed we live again to mend the grievous wrongs from before the grave. The family of the dead woman knew I was not her, though I wore her face and burial blanket. Yet it is not they who are honor-bound to aid the Returned, but the family from the life once lived.” Starling raised her reddened eyes to Ghost Last Sung. “My husband. And our son.”
Fetch found Blood Crow’s face averted.
“Both were slow to accept,” Starling said. “And so I wandered from Dog Fal
l alone, ignorant and near witless, guided by nothing but fate’s hand.”
“We searched for you,” Ghost Last Sung said.
Blood Crow’s head snapped up. “I searched.”
His father shot him a look that sent his eyes back to the dirt. Looking upon the chastened warrior now, Fetch recalled Roundth’s report of a lone Tine stag rider on the Grey Bastards’ lot shortly after Starling came to the Kiln.
“I rode to war at your insistence,” Ghost Last Sung told Starling. “I sent my brave-sworn against the orcs to save your aberration and her tribe. You claim I was slow to my duty when you continue to refuse yours. You have hidden and fled and schemed to avoid the path you must take.”
“Tell me, my lost love,” Starling replied. “Can you recount the reasons for your creation? Did you scheme prior to your birth? Awareness of life came to me a second time the same as it did the first, in a prolonged instant. I did not choose this. I do not know how it was done. And I do not know why.”
Ghost Last Sung pointed at Fetching with a fury. “To mend the mistake of her! The orcs despoiled you with their Filth and you shamed us by fleeing Akis’naqam.”
“For I sought a better way!” Starling declared. “I journeyed and suffered, alone, to find a way to prevent a Ruin Made Flesh and to live. I…thought I succeeded. The Selfless Devourer spared me when I finally placed myself before her. The Sitting Young judged I could remain if my blood kin would accept me. You refused, husband! You cast me out to deliver and die in the care of a half-orc tribe.”
“A mistake,” Ghost Last Sung said. “Yours. You are Returned to set it right. Cease running, my wayward wife. End this.”
The older warrior’s disdainful eyes drifted to Starling’s belly.
Starling encircled her middle in protective arms. “I will not.”
“What is it?” Fetch demanded.
“It is…you,” Starling replied. “An echo of you. As with all in this second life, it runs in conjunction to the first. When I awoke in this body, a part of you returned to me. Both of you.”
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