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Night had fallen, and Aric hadn’t returned. I had reason to believe he might not, and both longed and feared to see him, wondering if he would steal in like a thief as we slept. Before preparing for sleep, I ventured out to make check on the horses. My strength had returned, and I needed to see them with my own eyes. They appeared sound and healthy, and Sakha came and rubbed his face affectionately on the front of my coat, covering it with white hair. I wrapped my arms around his neck and buried my face in his mane, relieved to have my oldest friend safe and near.
From the pasture, I saw a small fire burning on the rise north of camp. In the light of the fire, a silhouette of a man sat hunched, draped in a thick hide.
Snow fell through the night and into the morning. The recluse remained at his vigil. I stayed safely indoors, and Antisthenes returned with more fuel for the fire. He greeted me briefly and set about his work.
“Do you have news? Did something happen?” I asked, wondering if perhaps he had spoken with Aric.
He set down his basket of dung bricks and looked at me gravely. My heart seized. “Perhaps you should sit.”
“Just tell me!”
He nodded and seemed to gather his thoughts. “Siran has died in the night of his fever.”
“Siran?” Fuck. My momentary relief gave way to a fresh flood of panic. In the tumult of the last days, I’d forgotten about Siran. Galati had been treating his thigh wound with his best spells and tonics to no avail. And now the fool had gone and died, and for what? To be buried too soon in a ridiculous coat. “I suppose they will blame me.”
“Many will.”
“What was a plowman even doing in the Fields? He was not meant to be a warrior.”
“Nor was I when I arrived. Who among us really is? True, Siran might have tilled a field back west somewhere. But he asked to join the kara so he might one day avenge his father killed in an Agathyrsi raid. He wore his slain father’s bloodstained coat as a daily reminder of his vow.”
Angry as I was with him, I wished Aric was here now. “What’s to be done?”
“I do not know there is anything to do. I just thought you should know. And be ready.”
“I don’t know why I’m here anymore,” I mused aloud. I could find nothing hopeful about this morning. “How will I know when it’s time for me to go?”
“Well, of course, you must go when you take a scalp,” he said with a knowing twitch of his eyebrow. “Surely, the gods direct these matters. Are you not supposed to be an oracle?”
“That’s what they keep telling me. But I can’t see what road I’m meant to be on.”
“Maybe oracles are not allowed to see their own road? But I believe signs point to such things if one is willing to see them. Where I come from, we have a story about a sea captain and his crew who finds himself lost when returning home from a long war, and much of his trouble comes because he ignores the portents out of ignorance and arrogance.”
“Does he ever find his way?”
He scraped the bottom of the cauldron and handed me a bowl of lentil, onion, and mutton stew that had lain simmering in the bottom all night. When one was hungry, nothing tasted better than a well-simmered stew.
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got all day.”
With a bowl in his lap, he sat to tell me stories from his homeland all morning as we ate. We spoke of the sea, his family, his childhood in Athenai, and finally, how he came to be in Skythia.
“When I was a boy of about eight or nine winters, my father, an educated man but not a citizen of Athenai, decided he would move our family to the colonies. They offer great opportunities for people like my parents. I had a wealthy uncle who had made his fortune in Nikonion, and he persuaded my parents they should venture there and do the same. He offered to foster me, and with what little money they had saved, my parents sent me on ahead to stay with him until they could follow. I was in my uncle’s household for less than a year when my parents set sail for the port of Nikonion. But the Skythian Sea is known for its storms. Their ship was lost at sea.” He said it in the same manner as one who’d accidentally dropped a coin in the river, watched it disappear beyond reach, shrugged, and thought on it no more.
“That’s awful. What did you do?”
“I was a child. What could I do? My uncle, realizing there’d be no further payment coming his way and, not wishing to be stuck with me, sold me as a slave.”
This, too, he related simply and without sentiment as if he were reporting the weather outside. He tossed a frozen fuel brick on the fire, and it crackled and hissed for a moment before beginning to burn.
“But you’re a free man? Did you escape... or slay your master?”
“Slay him? No. My master paid honestly for me. He provided me a warm place to sleep and fed me well. He had a shipping company, and because I had some schooling, I came to manage his warehouses and the loading and unloading of his ships. It was respectable work. I harbored him no ill will. And I found, um, ways to earn here and there. When I had saved enough, I bought my freedom. Once free, I went in search of my faithless uncle. Now,” he shrugged, “I have no kin. And I cannot return to that world again. So, I sought the court of Ariapaithi to see if he had use of me. I can read and spell Greek words. I know their ways and laws. But, as fate determined, Aric saw a purpose for me. The gods saw a purpose for me. They led me here, and here I have been ever since. Likewise, they will reveal their purpose for you when the moment is right.”
Aric did not cease his vigil for three days, and no one approached or disturbed him while he sat beside his fire. Slowly, I resumed my duties, sometimes looking to the rise where he sat huddled and hungry in the cold. At night it glowed like a beacon above the camp as we dined and went to our beds. The men were strangely silent about the absence of their karadar, but they cast anxious glances toward the North, as did I. What he did there, I didn’t know. But why he did it, I could guess. I alone, perhaps.
It was late after dark on the third day when Aric finally returned. Crusted with snow, he smelt of campfire, artemisia, and the cannabis tent. Antisthenes and I were already in our beds. With my face turned toward the fire, soaking every last bit of its warmth, and my back already turned to him, I pretended to sleep as he stripped off his wet clothes and lay down beside me without a word. But my mind flooded with questions, with worries, with designs. For days, the words had dammed up in me.
I lay still a long while, watching the bricks of the fire burn. When I closed my eyes, the ghosts of the flames remained behind my eyelids, seared into my vision. I turned onto my back and stared at the empty shadows on the ceiling to try to wash them away in darkness, but the flames still shimmered in front of my eyes. When I closed my lids, all I heard was his soft breathing beside me. Beneath the blankets, I slid my hand toward his. Between our beds, my fingertips found not warm flesh but cold iron. The sword lay between us once more.
The following day, the sun was a shadow in the sky as the air filled with fleecy snow, cloaking the whole of the earth in thick, barren white. The streams had frozen, leaving us to hack at the ice with our axes to make spaces for the horses to drink. We spent the morning fighting the ice as it rushed to freeze again over the surface. The horses licked and pawed relentlessly at the snow, trying to find a stingy blade of grass to nibble. We packed the snow into the cauldrons to save us from carrying water from the river for ourselves.
Watches resumed after the storm broke, our eyes always sharp for quarry to fill our cauldrons. Standing on a knoll above a creek that fed the river, I searched the shadows of a covert, looking for tracks in the snow. A small stand of wood grew at the juncture of creek and river, and around its edges formed a tangle of bramble and a long expanse of brittle, thigh-high grass, dun-colored and coarse. A small trail of trampled grass pushed its way into a break in the underbrush. It was the perfect place for animals to seek shelter, for deer to bed down in the day, unseen.
Into my mind, unbidden, crept the image of the two of us hidden there crouched upon our knees. His weight pressed against me—his ragged breath in my ear. My skin warmed beneath my heavy wool and leather coat as the icy wind tore at my face.
“Everything all right?” Aric broke my ignoble reverie.
Hearing his voice for the first time stung me like the bitter wind.
“I was taken with a vision,” I said, keeping my eyes forward so as not to meet his.
“Of the future?” He asked warily.
“The past. It’s of no consequence. We should keep riding.” I kicked on past the covert and past him. I couldn’t allow myself to become distracted. There was still work to be done.
Rumors had already begun to fly, though not the ones I feared. These were perhaps worse. Why, some wondered, was I not dead? What kind of woman freezes and returns to life? Word had spread through the camp that Aric had pulled my corpse from the river. And somehow, the hamazon witch had risen from the dead—just as poor Siran had expired from the cruel wound she dealt him. Aric certainly did nothing to allay their suspicions with his strange behavior on the hill by his fire. Following Antisthenes’ lead, I tried to resume my duties and avoid joining the ranks of madness.
I awoke to a full moon on the western horizon, still visible at dawn, hanging above the ridge like a giant’s silver coin tossed into the air and frozen in the blue haze of early morning. The daybreak was crisp and the sky clear, but the gloom didn’t seem to lift.
Whenever I needed a confidant’s trusted ear, I sought out the only friends who never betrayed, judged, or chastised. I tacked Sakha and headed to the edge of the forest, where I had found the herd that night. Much of the storm’s destruction lay under new snowfall, but the fallen and cracked trees were stark reminders of its fury.
I thought I’d begun to know this place, but I could still lose my way and stumble into harm. It would not change for me; it would change me. I had made an unbreakable oath. I wore it as armor, as promises cover doubts, as night covers secrets, as soil covers the seed, as dust covers the dead. I was marked, and now I feared it.
In spring, there was commotion in the fields, the grass aflutter with the mating dance of insects and the lovesongs of birds. A riot of innocence and joy all beneath my feet. I bent my ear to listen, envious of its ease. Why was our life not like this? Why was everything so fraught? I wanted to be like the insects humming in the sward, unaware of the boot descending. But this was winter. Life in the meadow was in arrest. If there were signs, I was blind to them. I would have to choose.
I’d fulfilled my duty. Now I’d become a burden—a liability. That was the last thing I ever wanted. I knew I’d make enemies here, but he must never become one of them. It was finally time to take my scalp and go. I would tell him in the morning.
I’d turned toward home when I noticed a black speck moving on the horizon. A rider on a dark horse approached from the West. Alone. The sun’s glare on the snow made it impossible to identify him from this distance. I withdrew my bow, uncertain whether I should fly for home, wait for a glimpse of the approaching rider, or something more direct. He nudged his horse into a canter and rode straight for me. Now, I might not outrun an arrow even if I turned and ran.
Shit. I withdrew a handful of arrows from my quiver and fitted one to my string but did not draw. As the hooded rider came closer into view, his hands appeared empty. He let his hood fall back, unshading his face from the noon sun and revealing a worn red felt cap with long earflaps and, jutting from beneath it, sun-colored hair and flame-colored beard. A dark shadow filled his left eye. Breathing deep, I lowered my bow and stuffed my arrows back into their quiver. Footsteps crunched through the newly fallen snow as his horse drew closer, and he broke to a trot. He dismounted his horse before me. Maybe I wouldn’t have to wait to tell him.
“You’ve traveled far to find me here.”
“You shouldn’t be out here alone. The ice could be thin,” he smiled but did not meet my eye, his cheeks red with the cold, which turned his eye a brilliant crystal blue.
I dismounted, too, and stood with my back against Sakha’s shoulder, not wanting to speak.
He rushed forward and took my face in his hands, putting his lips to mine in a long, hungry kiss. And then, he pressed his brow to mine, his eye closed, and whispered, “I’ve been waiting so long to do that, now nobody’s watching.” Pulling away, he brushed my hair from my forehead, all while I just stood dumbfounded. His face darkened. “Is something wrong?”
“No, I—I’m only surprised.”
“Why?” he frowned.
“I guess I just thought you were—” A lump welled in my throat.
“Being overly cautious? Maybe I am.”
“I was going to say ‘ashamed.’” Now I couldn’t look him in the face.
He took my face in his hands again and lifted it so I would have to look him in the eye. “Never,” he said with such vehemence I almost believed him. His tone softened, and he looked down at his boots and spoke into my cloak. “It may not have been right,” he said, “but I don’t regret it,” though his voice trembled.
“But what about your father?”
He drew back, hooking his thumbs in his warbelt. “What about him?” he said flippantly, his jaw set defiantly as he spoke. “Does he ever think of us? We live our lives for him. We serve, we sacrifice. What do we get in return?”
I shook my head. It disturbed me to hear him speak this way, even as I struggled to imagine what benefit any of us gained from blindly doing the king’s bidding—especially Aric.
“What are you saying?” I asked with apprehension.
“I’m saying you were right: our first loyalty is to one another and the kara. If you wish it, I will speak to my father—speak to yours. I would take your hand in good faith. You would be our satanaya.”
I found myself with fists full of his coat as I pulled him close again. Was such a thing even possible? My barren winter began to thaw, and the sun broke through my sky of grey.
“Do you really think we can?” My heart raced. “Should I bring my scalp?” My thoughts came faster than my mouth could form questions, and none of them made much sense. But for the first time in a long while, real hope had dared to awaken in me. I didn’t even try to conceal my excitement.
“Then you would?” He sounded more shocked than I.
“I would.” My words sounded distant and strange, as if someone else was speaking them. “Of course I would.”
“I won’t be a king,” he warned, raising his brows, his voice grave. “You won’t be a queen.”
“I never wanted that anyway. I want this,” I raised my eyes to the clear sky over our heads.
A wide grin broke across his face, dimpling his cheeks and wrinkling his eyes. He grew so giddy he looked like he might burst out with laughter. “Then I’ll petition the king at Rathadin,” his eye ignited. “We’ll speak more when we can be alone. Until then…” Furtively, he glanced about and stole another kiss before pulling away and swinging up onto his horse.
A bitter wind tore at me, but it was like the sun on my flushed face as I watched him go.
Chapter Thirty-Eight: Wheel
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Wish
👏 very good chapter