Chapter Thirty-Three: Reavers

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There is an imperceptible, secret world around us to which we are blind and deaf, yet we know it exists because the beasts perceive it. They see and hear and smell what we cannot, alerting us to a world just beyond our reach. What lies beyond their reach? What other senses must we lack, and what other realms must exist beyond it all? There are some among us, who, like the beasts, are permitted to glimpse this hidden world, the way horses sense an approaching storm, or take flight at hidden dangers, or a dog hears creatures a man cannot, or follows the trail of things long vanished in the wind. I could feel the vibrations coming up through the earth, along my nerves, through my bones, inside my skull. The ground shook. My whole body quivered with tremors as the burnt smell of fear rose into my awareness. This was no ordinary spell.

“Something draws near,” I said to Aric, who stood guard over me as he always did when the spells came.

He peered through the flap of the cannabis tent where we were concealed and scanned the moonless night, straining in the silence of the sleeping camp. Then he paused, holding his breath. All was stillness for that moment. I stared, the outline of his face blurred in the faint glow of the brazier and the veil of incense. Then he turned to me and whispered, “I think I hear it, too.”

Sheathing his dagger and handing me mine, he tucked his amulet back into his belt, drew his cloak around his shoulders, and thrust a hand toward me, which I grasped as he yanked me through the tent flap and to my feet. Giving a slight nod, he drew a sharp breath and turned to run, shouting an alarm. 

The men staggered from their tents beneath a clear, star-filled sky, strapping on weapons. Ducking inside our tent, I gathered our spears and tack. 

I emerged just as a rider approached the camp, his horse in a lather and panting hard. He rushed past me, pulled up before Aric’s upraised hand, and dismounted to stand at the fore of a gathering crowd. The rider spoke heatedly, gesturing wildly with his arms, pointing northwest. 

From a distance, I watched as Aric turned to the men behind him. Suddenly they scattered like a flock of birds taking flight, all rushing for their bridles. I ran to him.  

“A raiding party. About three hundred strong. Coming for the horses and gear.”

“Three hundred? The fuck?”

“Exactly. Get… everything.”

“Should I pony my spare horses so they can’t be driven off?” Perhaps if we led them by their halters from horseback instead of driving them before us, there would be less chance of losing them to rustlers in the confusion. 

He thought for a moment. “It could work. Can’t hurt to try.”

The Raven wasn’t lying. When the reavers came into view, they descended the valley like a swarm of flies, black and angry. We assembled nearly all one hundred of the remaining karik from our camp, though some of our scouts remained in the fields. Aric ordered each rider to do as I suggested and lead his remounts from horseback so they couldn’t be swept up in the chaos. It would make it harder to fire a bow but make the easily-panicked beasts more manageable in the dark.

From the rise, the raiders swarmed over the valley’s rim toward us. We remained on course and rode straight on to meet them. 

Suddenly, they changed direction, circled around, and rode back over the hill just as quickly as they came.

We all eyed one another and shrugged. Then pulled up and waited. Perhaps it was a trick? Maybe they had reinforcements. We waited some more. Then another Raven, dressed in grey, galloped up and said they had retreated and were riding straight for home.

Baffled, we slowly dismounted and untacked our horses, still leery of deception, waiting for the second wave to hit us. Something had to be wrong. I was anxious about releasing my horses. What would make a band of reavers do something so mad?

“You know what I think?” said Bornon, pulling off his wolfskin cap. “From a distance, it looked like we had double or triple the riders. They thought they were defeated before they fired a shot.”

“You may be right,” Olgas agreed, throwing his greaves onto a pile with his saddle blanket. “Or perhaps when they saw the horses all bound up in our possession, they realized it would be a much more difficult fight to get them and gave up.”

“In any case,” said Stormai, carefully resting his long spear against the side of the nearest felt-house, “it was quick thinking on Aric’s part. Now we can go enjoy some wine.”

“Thank Anaiti,” Aric said. “It was her idea.”

Everyone turned to face me. I smiled humbly, uncomfortable with their eyes upon me. Then a rush of panic swept over me, and everything went black.

I opened my eyes to see a ring of men standing over me where I lay, my head throbbing where I struck it on the hard earth. Aric and Olgas half-grappled to my left, falling to the ground in one another’s grip. 

“Are you mad?” Aric roared, gripping Olgas by the front of his caftan and shaking him like a wet rag, hoisting him off the ground. “You never speak the names of seeresses or shapeshifters when they’re in the trance! Her spirit could be wandering far from here, and if you wake her, it might never return!”

“How the fuck should I know that?” Olgas barked at him.

I called Aric’s name, and he froze and looked back. 

“She returns.” Antisthenes stood beside me, stonefaced, his hand raised to signal the others to cease their quarrel. 

Aric released poor Olgas, and they both, bloody and dirty, fell to their knees at my side. 

“Are you all right?” Aric asked, leaning over me. 

“What’s happening?” I asked. I lay on my back under a clear night sky, the dry autumn grass tickling my ears.  

“He said your name while you were… away. I thought you’d surely die.”

“But what happened?” I strained to lift my head.

“You gave us a good scare,” said Stormai. He held a wineskin out to me as I gingerly propped myself on my elbows. “One minute you were standing there, and the next… well, you weren’t.”

I looked past Aric and Stormai, and nearly all the camp was gathered around. Over his shoulder, Mourdag scowled down upon me, arms crossed tight over his chest. Rathagos stood beside him, whispering something in his ear. Bradak had a bewildered look on his face. Ghostly Galati stepped back and slipped away from the crowd—to where I didn’t wish to know. 

I sat up, aching all over, and took the wineskin. 

“You just fell limp to the ground,” Aric said, his face scrunched with unease. “Has this ever happened before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We should get her inside,” Gohar said, eyeing the crowd. “She probably wants some rest.”

Inside the tent, Aric stood, shaking his head with his hands on his hips. If they had suspected or heard rumors before, now the whole camp knew about the spells—saw with their own eyes. And of all the attacks to witness, they had to see the worst.

“Where did you go?” Aric asked quietly once we were safely inside.

“North, perhaps? But it couldn’t be. Just now I vaguely recall the streets of a gloomy city. But there are no cities in the north.” I puzzled over this bewildering recollection, but Aric slowly nodded as if recognizing some obvious truth. 

“Why now?” he whispered to himself. 

“What about them? Maybe I can explain,” I said.

“This is a blow. Many will not accept it,” he muttered, unfamiliar distress distorting his features.

“It takes more than that to shake me loose,” Gohar said, and Olgas and Bornon nodded their assent. “You said yourself; her advice spared us today. Besides, she sits a horse better than any man, and she bends a bow well as most,” he jutted his strong chin in my general direction. 

“You know I think you’re a brave fighter and an honorable woman,” Stormai said. “But, if I’m honest, I don’t approve of sorcery.” He glanced nervously at Aric, like he was waiting to be scolded.

I understood their fears. I was like them before I began to speak with Erman about the nature of my spells and the secrets of divination. Now I became defensive, not only of my own skin but of the sacred knowledge I had been entrusted with.

“It is not sorcery,” I said. “You practice little divinations every day when reading the weather or judging the ripening of fruit on the tree. When watching the skies for storms. For the turn of seasons. When to sow or reap. When the mares are in season or the calving begins. Nature shows us signs of what is to come. Some can see them more clearly than others. That’s all.”

“That’s all?” Stormai frowned, disappointed. 

“To some, spirits might reveal other signs—of the past, the dead, distant places, the causes of sickness. The real danger is not their existence, but that they’re never enough.”

Antisthenes had moved to stand beside Aric, whose eye had begun to swell from his scuffle with Olgas, and glanced worriedly at him now. “In my homeland, they have another name for it,” Antisthenes said stiffly. “They call it ‘the sacred disease.’ Many say that the father of King Kurush the Great, called Kambujiya by the Skythai but Cambyses by the Hellenes, also had since his birth this sacred affliction, and yet he was a great king and the ruler of a great empire.”

Aric gripped Antisthenes warmly by the shoulder and nodded solemnly. “Thank you, my friend. I will go and try to reassure them,” he said and slipped through the door.

“It’s not your conjuring that worries me,” Olgas leaned in and said quietly to me, his lip cut and swollen. “It’s what the men think it does to Aric.”

“Oh? And what do they think it does to him?”

“They think it makes him soft.”

Stormai was left behind with me while the others resumed watches in case the reavers returned. I studied his face in the warm hearthlight as we sat in silence, wondering how two cousins who looked so similar could be so different. I wouldn’t have thought of it on my own, but once Antisthenes had mentioned it, his resemblance to Aric couldn’t be unseen.

“You’re very quiet,” I prodded Stormai. “You don’t have to be afraid of me. The hamazon don’t eat men—only boys,” I joked. He didn’t even crack a smile. Either my jokes were worse than I thought, or something was troubling him. Likely both. “Come on, what’s wrong with you?” I asked bluntly. I wasn’t prepared for a night of sitting with a sullen lump.

He made a nervous pretense of retying the thongs on his boots.

“What do the men say?” I tried again. Olgas’s revelation confused me. Sorcery and divination were effeminate arts, but why should they think my use of them unmanned Aric?

He looked away into the shadows of approaching evening. Even as my frustration with him grew, his obvious discomfort and pathetic attempts at avoidance amused me. I was sure he would burst the thongs on his boots from so much twisting. 

“It’s that bad?”

Knotting and twining his fingers before him, he drew a deep breath. “You would not like it.”

“The men want rid of me,” I said. “I know. But I’ll hear it from Aric. If he wants me gone, he’ll have to tell me so himself.”

He shook his head slowly and spoke to his boots. “You know he won’t. He swore an oath.” 

“That’s what the men fear? That his obligation to me endangers him?”

“Something like that.”

“But I’ve safeguarded him how many times? What more must I prove?”

“It’s not your skill with arms or cures the men worry about.”

“Then what?”

He gave a half-smirk and shrugged. 

“It’s not like that, and you know it.”

“I didn’t say I believed it. But they think it’s why we don’t raid like we should. Why he keeps you close to himself and away from fights. To protect you—and himself from failing his oath. And because—”

“Enough. Perhaps you’re right. I won’t be the reason Aric’s men turn on him.” Had the men seen it, too? Of course they had. They couldn’t fail to take notice. Aric seldom took a piss these days without first asking me to divine which direction the wind would blow.

“Pardon, my lady. Truly. But you spoke of divination? Well, most men fear a white crow as an ill omen. I believe it’s the right thing for you to go now.”

“You’re Aric’s cousin?” I prodded, the curiosity gnawing at me for too long. I tried not to stare.

“Wh—who told you that?” he stuttered and scrunched his face like I’d just scolded him.

“People talk. I’ve noticed you cover your tattoos around the men. Why?” I asked gently, “you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Why do you cover yourself?” 

I nodded. Fair enough. “You’re a long way from home, though. What strange fortune brought you here?”

“I ask myself that all the time.” He chuckled half-heartedly. “I was just a boy when I joined with Aric…” he sighed and lay back, propped against the blankets tucked along the walls. “The day my father took Aric’s eye, I was there. We’d never met, but I knew he was my kin. And I—I was so ashamed of what my father did. It offended honor. Offended the gods. It was cowardly and cruel. And there was this boy not much older than me, behaving the way the brazman had taught me I should. He was my true blood that day. And I thought: I want to go to a place that makes men like that. Where people live the way they speak. Where I didn’t have to be ashamed. So I followed Aric home. And here I am.” 

“I understand more than you know. You ever miss them? Miss your home?”

He leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “Of course. Sometimes. The food was better.” He smiled. “And I miss my mother.” He seemed to regret saying so as if I might think him unmanly. “I—I just mean she didn’t understand. I think it must have broken her heart.” His voice tightened and became tremulous with the memory. “I wish I could have told her that I…” he pulled at his beard with his fingers and shook his head but didn’t finish. 

“She’s your mother. She knows.” I squeezed his hand, and he smiled. “Mothers love their sons no matter what.” 

He swallowed hard, and tears simmered in his eyes. “It’s been hard.” He wiped his nose. 

“I know. But look at all you’ve achieved.”

“The others didn’t trust me at first. Some still don’t.” He met my gaze for the first time all night.

“Why do you stay? You’re kind and, if I may say so, quite handsome… you’d have no trouble finding a good wife for yourself. You could ask Aric to release you from your bond….”

His cheeks reddened boyishly at my compliment, but I suspected it was nothing he didn’t already know. He would have been popular among the women back at court who clawed for a chance to bed a member of the sacred Warband—and a vazarka was a prize of the highest status. They no doubt slavered over a clean, fit young man with all his teeth intact. I could easily see him making his way on some choice range of steppeland like any one of the householders with a nice well-born girl, a train of wagons, and some good stock. His burden of gifts and share of the spoils must have been substantial by now.

He looked wistful for a moment, then shook his head. “Even if Aric would release me, what honorable girl’s father would have the son of Spargapaithi?” he asked dolefully. 

“If I of all people can wed the great Ariapaithi, you can have anyone your heart desires.” 

“Begging your pardon, my lady, but you haven’t wed him yet.” 

“Well, you have a point there.” It had crossed my mind that there was another reason he had sent me out here. What better place to dispose of an unwanted obligation than a lawless wilderness like this?

“I don’t mind,” he assured me. “This is my home now. We’re karik—brothers and bastards alike,” he said with the dash of defiant pride I’d often heard from the others.

“So be it, then,” I said. “But don’t let them get to you,” I pulled up his sleeve to peek at the bands on his skin. “Some men are witless enough to care more about the vessel than its contents. I know something about that, too.”

“It is so. They slander you same as me,” Stormai said, seeming embarrassed to have even heard such things, though I knew someone in his tenuous position would never speak up for me. I understood. And I forgave him.

“But Aric trusts you,” I reminded him. 

“And I him.” 

“You’ve been a good friend to me, Stormai. I’m glad to have known you.” 

“Likewise, Lady Anaiti.” He sniffled and wiped his cheeks. “You know something?” he said with renewed vigor, his blue eyes pulsing with feral intensity as he met my gaze again. “Fuck them. I take it all back. You can’t go. Let them talk. Aric trusts you, and so do I. Your place is here, with us. If they don’t like it, fuck them.” 

The reavers did not return, and eventually, the routine around camp resumed its usual pattern, though a tense calm had settled over the band. As we prepared a porridge in our tent for dinner, I related Stormai’s warning to Aric and Antisthenes. Aric waved it off as nonsense and seemed unconcerned, saying passions always ran high after raids, and in a day or two, it would all be forgotten. Stormai was right; I should ignore it. I nodded in relief, unsurprised by Aric’s disdain for mob rule. 

“It is Rathagos who instigates it,” Antisthenes said as he busied himself, placing handfuls of ground wheat into the warm cauldron. It would be difficult to ruin a porridge, but I was confident he could find a way.

“Why is Rathagos so filled with this spite?” I asked. He had been my sternest critic since the day I’d arrived in Skythia, though I’d done nothing to provoke him. “Is it the product of a deformed spirit, or has some injury been done to him to make him act this way?”

“Rathagos didn’t want this life,” Aric answered. “His father, Akasas, was a warrior and chief, but he lost his wits one day and slew a more powerful chief. To avoid a deadly feud, he gave up everything he owned, but it covered only a portion of the blood-fees. His clan is in debt. In such contracts, an equal pledge is wagered until the debt is fulfilled. Children prove little use in acquiring riches, so a father may elect his son to serve as debt-slave in his stead; Akasas pledged Rathagos to serve as his surety. He joined the kara instead, leaving his younger brother to bondage, where he remains. Without sons, the household was left destitute and disbanded until the remaining debt is repaid—its honor restored. And Rathagos remains unable to inherit his title.”

“He must have earned many fortunes in cattle and gold by now. Why has he not made his clan whole again?” I asked.

“Who can say?” Antisthenes replied. “Whatever he earns, he spends on women and weapons.”

“Even while his kin counts on him?” I asked. Then I remembered my own reluctance to leave the kara. Perhaps I had judged Rathagos too harshly. “He must love this life dearly to shirk his other duties.”

“Oh, no,” Antisthenes said, smirking as he stirred his pot. “He finds the kara beneath him.”

“When Akasas lost his fortune,” Aric said, “he dedicated himself to the service of Mother Apia. I’m not sure what Rathagos found more shameful: slavery or his father’s submission to the goddess.”

“Where’s the shame in that? Don’t all Skythai revere Apia?”

“The rites—or should I say vices—of fertility belong to the cattle-breeders and plowmen, not warriors and chiefs. Rathagos is proud; he could never forgive his father.”  

“Can you not force him to retire, then?” I asked. “If you pay the bond, he will be indebted to you—as will his young brother. Let him return to his clan, but let him—and all of Skythia—never forget his debt to you. Let it hang forever over his head like a thundercloud.” 

“I will lose the allegiance of Rathagos if I humiliate him,” Aric said. 

As if you ever had it. “That horse has bolted,” I said. “You can try to win back his loyalty like a man wooing a woman who has cuckolded you. But how much is that kind of fidelity worth? He cannot be reined in gently. So, hobble him and cut him loose; see how far he gets then.”

Antisthenes stopped his cooking and looked up at Aric, who pulled his fingers through his copper beard in silence. “Might it not be best to spare his pride? Quietly pay the outstanding debts in his name. Allow him to claim publicly that he has earned enough to settle his family obligations and—with your generous permission—wishes to do the honorable thing for his clan. Everyone saves face; meanwhile, you are rid of him.”

“Antisthenes is not wrong. But Rathagos has gone unfettered too long. Turn him loose without restraints, and there is no telling what mischief he might make. I say present him publicly with this generous gift. In refusing, he loses face. In his inability to reciprocate, he concedes his inferiority. In accepting, he’ll have no choice but to honor Aric and place himself under a new debt. Force his voice in either challenge or praise of you, and then we will see where his heart lies. Every gift is a test.” 

Antisthenes gave a slight, curt nod. “It might work. He will rage, but in silence.”

Aric stared into the cauldron, which was beginning to boil. He hadn’t rejected either idea outright, which meant he was already working out the details in his thoughts.

I nodded. Good. Let Rathagos rage. Just let it be far away from us. 

Antisthenes spooned in some butter and a pinch of salt, and we ate our porridge, which was surprisingly tasty. Covered and hoisted up on the cauldron chain high above the hearth’s flames, there was enough left for the morning. With the lowest rank, washing up duties usually fell to me, and I took the dishes to the river to scrub while the men prepared for bed and likely continued to mull over the Rathagos problem.

With my belly full and my mood improved, I took back all the unkind things I’d ever thought about Antisthenes as a cook. By the time I returned, the steward was already asleep, and Aric had nearly finished undressing for bed. 

“Tell me: what is it like?” Aric whispered as I removed my goryt and hung it on the peg beside his.

“I don’t want to talk about it just now,” I answered. “Ask me another time.” Things were too uncertain around the camp just now. If even some of Stormai’s fears were justified, some things might best be left unsaid, even between friends. 

“You said that the last time I asked,” he reminded. “I wish to protect you.”

His insistence on looking after me was honorable and usually heartening. But in this matter, he had no authority. It irked me that he thought he had some kind of jurisdiction here. That his strength and command—virtually unchallenged in this world—extended to whatever realm I fought in. That he could come to grips with forces I’d been battling my whole life unsuccessfully and somehow prevail. I didn’t know what upset me more: his presumption or his weakness. 

“How can you protect me when I don’t even know what it is that threatens me? When what I fear is a shadow, formless and nameless. Can you protect me from that?” I asked, letting my distress break through. 

“I can try,” he said achingly, his brows knit together, his lips pressed tight.

I threw some more fuel bricks on the fire and sat before him—I on my bedding and he on his. Antisthenes was already snoring away on his pallet. The man could sleep through a battle and wake refreshed in the morning. 

Maybe Aric couldn’t help me any more tangibly than I could divine the future or speak with the dead. But he wanted to try. Sitting cross-legged before him on my pallet, my back to the warmth of the fire, I was at a loss for a beginning. I couldn’t look up into his face. 

“Tell me first how you send your spirit forth from your flesh.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t think I send it forth. I have no control over it. It leaves me of its own will. Or else, as I fear most, perhaps something comes and takes it.”

“Something?” his eye grew wide, and his brow furrowed deeply as he reached into the pouch at his belt for his amulet and wrapped it snug in his fingers. “But… what?”

“If only I knew. First, I feel ill in my stomach. I feel like I am spun in a whirlwind made of sparks, though my feet are rooted to the earth. I feel fright, though nothing is near me. I smell a peculiar scent, which is always the same—like burning, but kindled on no substance of this earth. Then, there’s a presence I sense. Just behind me. Hushed and unseen. Its approach—or my approach to it—is always familiar. It is always filled with dread.”

“Can you summon it?” he seemed to restrain an urgency as he spoke.

“It usually comes in time with the new moon, as you know. Or with great stress. And if I choose, I can bring it on if I abstain from food and drink or sleep.” 

He nodded, and his eye shone fiercely in the firelight as he leaned closer. “And what do you see?”

“Well, before it comes, there’s a great confusion; not a sense of traveling to past or future, but of being in two places at once—of two simultaneous lives. The world before me is fractured, divided in two, and I see... I see the world concealed inside this one. Something pulls back the doorflap between our realm and a secret other, which is not in the skies or the caverns below. It is spread over this earth, and men do not see it.”

He smiled tenderly at this and took my hands in his. “Men do not see it,” he echoed, his giddiness bubbling up slowly. “Is the past or future also revealed to you then?”

“It is. And is not. I can’t truly say. Sometimes I think it’s more like a memory I haven’t made yet comes too soon—rises to the surface before its time. As if all the memories, all the thoughts that I will ever have are present at once, past and future, but they are a tempest, and I can bring no order to them. I sense that I already know what will happen presently, but it is memory, not prophecy.” 

“But this is prophecy. You already know the future and are but remembering it,” he whispered more urgently.

“Possibly...” 

“Do you send free your spirit to travel then?” he asked. “Across the world? Or ascend the heavens? Descend beneath the earth?”

“I couldn’t say where. It becomes like a dark sea, and, as I stand on the shore, a great wave sweeps in and washes over me. When the wave comes and swallows me up, I’m dragged out to sea. All my solid footing is pulled from beneath me, and the shore disappears. And then… I’m gone, beneath the waves, far from sun and moon. I can’t see, or hear, or breathe. I feel nothing. I simply float in a darkness like the space between the stars. Then I become darkness, and I am no more.”

“That can’t be all there is,” he said. 

“But it is. I have no recollection once the darkness comes. I know nothing of what happens between the vanishing and my return. It’s an ambush. But it’s not like being taken captive, where, though your body is bound, your thoughts and will are still your own. It’s something else entirely to have your mind seized and carried off by… who knows what? Returned to a form you don’t even recognize. It’s a terror you can’t understand.”

He leaned in close, resting his forearms across his knees, and turned the amulet in his hands absently. His eye caught the glare of the fire. “But I want to understand it,” he whispered with earnestness. “I want you to take me with you.”

I hadn’t made myself plain enough. “That’s not possible. Besides, I would never inflict that upon you. You have no idea what you ask.”

“I have some idea.”

“How? Because you play at it with your potions, your incense? That’s all a game. It will subside, and you have the choice to never revisit it. You can’t know.” 

He held the amulet in his palm, tracing the lines cut into the worn face of the stone. “I had a deadly fever when I was a child. That is how the gods test their servants—with sickness, pain, or travail. It has always been a wonder to me that the so-called sages of the Hellenes are pampered men who have lived lives of ease and never dirtied their hands. They put their faith in those who claim the mantle of light but have never endured the shadows. 

“When my fever broke, it was much as you describe. The anarei and Master Ohromasad believed I had been gifted the two sights—that the gods showed me secret things. Sacred things. I shall never forget the things I saw. With the blissful visions, my heart flooded with unbearable joy. I would trade all my days for another such moment. But as I grew to manhood, the visions ceased entirely. They disdain me now. I still offer sacrifice. I fast for days when I am able. And sometimes, I think I catch a brief glimpse. Wine, the cannabis tents, tears of Arti offer only dim shadows in comparison. I gave up all hope. But when I’m watching over you in the spell, I recall some of what is lost to me. The gods have seen fit to withhold the visions from me. But they have also sent you here, and I have to believe this is no accident. You possess a rare gift, not to be disparaged.” 

Had he really heard the call of the Nameless and stood entranced at the altar where it speaks? More, if what he said was true—and why would he lie—it had released him from its bonds of service. Such a thing was possible after all.

“Tell me what you recall?” I asked, suddenly anxious to learn his secrets, should they contain some clue to the end of his torment—and mine. 

“It was so long ago. It’s more the small things that I recall best. I disregarded my own name, even as people spoke it to me. It was like a word in a foreign tongue, totally meaningless to me. I was freed of myself as a mist evaporates into day; I vanished into nothing. My limbs were not mine, yet I was calm, as though my spirit laughed at the absurdity of flesh. Unburdened, expansive, illuminated, I saw how glorious were the underpinnings of Nature and my place amid it, and wept. Then the vision ended, and I was nauseated at seeing this shadow-world devoid of all I had witnessed. When the visions withdrew, I tried daily to recreate them in my memory, though they grow faint with time.”

He stared at me so intently that I had to look away. He had seen. He knew. Knew as well as any could. Nothing I said now could shock or frighten him. Nothing I said could deter him either. Some force did protect and watch over him; that was clear to me now. It had rescued him from the torment imposed by the spells when his sickness passed, and he grew into a man. Yet he refused to see this for the blessing it was.

“I know you don’t believe it,” I said, “but you are blessed. Your visions were kind and gentle, perhaps because you were just a boy. But not all revelations are so beautiful, so blissful. Many are horrific. They are a terrible burden, full of fear, not something to be craved.” 

“Whatever comes to us from the gods—”

“Who says they’re from the gods?” I snapped. “Do the gods also send the thief in the night? This thief steals name, will, and honor. Finds its victims unawares and ravishes their spirit. I have prayed, and the gods ignore my pleas. If the gods even exist, it is a petty game they play with our souls.”

“Don’t say such things. Don’t even think them.”

“If the gods torment and twist us for their sport, then they are vicious—or corrupt.” 

He shook his head in seeming dismay. “I think we glimpse only distortions and fragments, like trying to see a reflection in rippling water or reassembling shards of a painted vase with only a handful of pieces. The images may never make complete sense to us, but it doesn’t mean they’re incomplete. Perhaps we simply cannot see all things as the gods do?”

“Perhaps,” I conceded, though I remained skeptical. I’d not yet found anything to convince me of the existence—let alone benevolence—of the gods. I’d seen plenty to indicate the opposite. Then again, it was always possible these chaotic fragments he described were, in fact, not revelations but stolen glimpses of some forbidden kingdom we were never meant to see. “Maybe it’s all a mishap,” I mused, “and we are trespassers in the gods’ realms.” 

He bit his lip and took my hands in his, squeezing them tightly. “Is that what worries you so?” he whispered.

I shook my head and breathed a moment, ordering my scattered thoughts. He might think me mad, but where else had I to turn? “I am afraid that one day when I return to this form, something will have taken my place.” 

He frowned in consternation. “How?”

“Before I go, even strange people and places seem familiar—like some part of me knows them already. When I return, I’m lost.” I swallowed hard. It was more challenging to speak of than I thought. “As you said, I recognize nothing, not even my own flesh. What if my thoughts, my will, my senses, my skills, my memories, when they leave me, should be scattered and lost? What if they cannot find their way back to reclaim my form?” I could no longer hold back the tears. “I feel whole, but can I be sure? Each time is a little death, and I’m a little different. How do I know it is all of me that returns?” I sobbed and looked away, embarrassed to have revealed so much. 

With coarse fingers, he gently wiped the tears from my face. “Spirit or flesh, I would recognize you.” He clasped my face warmly in his hands and pressed his brow to mine. “If you were anyone but Anaiti, I would be the first to know.” 

How many years had I lived in secrecy, hiding my darkest fears from all those I knew, kin and outsiders alike? Imagining what they might do to me and what this thing might do to them turned my heart to lead. Speaking that dread aloud would have meant destruction. Yet now, I had done just that. And the nagging voice inside, the gnawing in the guts that usually warned of danger, was quiet and still, replaced by the warmth of something unfamiliar—something like trust. The Skythai had a particular understanding of freedom. It was not, for them, the same as liberty. A free person had a hearth to sit beside and faithful companions who shared in the bearing of life’s burdens. Speaking those words to Aric, I—hamazon and daughter to the Bastarnai king—was finally free. 

“From this day forward,” I said, my voice still choked with tears, “I promise to hold nothing back. I will tell you all I see and share all that is revealed to me. Every feature, however small. You shall know all that I do if that is your wish.”

With his rough hands resting softly on my cheeks, he kissed my brow. “I could not ask more of the gods.”

“But you must promise me something,” I said, closing my fingers tight around his wrists.

“What is your wish?” 

“If ever what returns is not all of me—is not myself… you mustn’t let it have this form.” 

He scowled, then nodded. 

“Say it. Swear you will do it.” 

He hesitated and swallowed hard. “I will. I swear it.” He pulled his wrists free of my grip. “Come. It has been a trying day. Rest now.”

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Chapter Thirty-Four: Ruthless

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