He, in turn, must have seen a bedraggled young woman in tunic and loose trousers, holding a knife as if it were an empty bucket.
“Come, I won’t hurt you,” he said. His voice was warm and only mildly accented. “Or you may run. You might even get away.”
I blinked sweat and smoke from my eyes. Run? He didn’t know I was an Eangi – not in this state, not without my collar. He thought I was just a girl. The offer was a fair gesture on his part, perhaps some acknowledgement that what his people had done here was far beyond heinous, far beyond honorable. Maybe I could even get away, like he’d said.
But the sound of his voice ignited something else in my gut. It was hot. Alive. And it grew.
I made myself look at the bodies strewn across the floor. I named them one by one, forcing the memories into my reluctant, grief-stricken mind to feed the heat – my deadly Eangi Fire.
Yske. There she was, cast over a fallen beam. We had been sent to the Hall together as children, holding hands on the cart for the entire journey. We’d become women together, bled and grown. Trained together. Fought together.
Eidr. His red hair a mass of fraying braids and blood. I’d been twelve when I kissed him and suggested we marry. He’d laughed at me then. But last autumn he had not, and the High Priestess joined our hands at the head of this very Hall.
“I pledged myself to you,” my husband’s words from the night before echoed through the disjointed hum of my mind. “Yske is your blood. You may have been cast out of the Hall of Smoke, but you cannot be cast out from us.”
My eyes flicked away. I saw Sixnit, one of my dearest friends, near the central hearth. Sweet and full-breasted, she’d come to the Hall two years ago when she married an Eangi priest. Now her husband lay dead in the hearth itself, and she curled around the silent form of their infant son.
Their son. My dazed eyes fixed on him. The baby was tiny, mere days old – I’d attended his birth, the day before my banishment. Now, the baby’s hand twitched on his mother’s chest – a chest that, as I watched, rose and fell. She was alive. They were both alive.
The heat finally filled my mouth and burst out in a hiss. The ritual cuts on my fingertips healed, my exhaustion fled, and my mind cleared, clean and sharp as a winter wind.
My fingers slipped into position on the hilt of the knife.
The Algatt barely registered my movement in time. My knife embedded in his forearm, an inch from his face. He turned his cry of pain into an enraged bellow that shook me to the bones. In an instant, his sword was in hand and he charged.
I broke into a forward crouch and screamed. It was low, the undulating, unearthly sound every Eangi was taught. When we lined for battle, when we prepared to leave the forest on a fog-choked morning, we each had our notes. They would clash and blend and rise, sending goosebumps up our own arms, let alone our enemies’.
My cry was alone, but it only made me more furious. I plunged forward, stooping to rip a broken spear from a corpse as I passed.
He never saw the blow. I ducked his sword and drove the spear through his padded tunic, into his gut, with the force only an Eangi could muster. Then I dropped, hauling the shaft down like a lever and opening his intestines with a squelching, sickening crack.
Relief trickled through my fevered thoughts as he toppled. I wiped tears from my eyes with the back of one hand and looked at Sixnit and her barely breathing child, but I didn’t try to rouse them yet.
“Eangi?” the Algatt choked from the ember-strewn floor.
I took up his sword and squatted just outside his reach, ignoring the growing stink of his open belly. With every breath I pushed out of my nose, I gathered my grief in tighter and forced my careening heart to steady. I could not look at Eidr.
“Your collar?” He blinked languidly.
“Cut off.” I rested the point of his sword in the ash, keeping my eyes fixed on him. “Did the traveler bring you here? Omaskat?”
He stared at me, clutching his welling insides. “Omaskat?”
I rocked my weight into my toes. “The traveler, with the eyes – one gold, one blue. He was here a week ago.”
The Algatt said something, but his voice was too low. I leant forward. “Did he bring you here?”
He gave no answer.
I felt a tear bead on my upper lip and swiped it away. “Why are you here so late in the season?”
Even on the edge of death, his fear of the Eangi – and the goddess we called on – was enough to make him speak. “Arpa.” His words ended in an agonized croak. “Legionaries. In our mountains. They drove us out… We took the rivers south. Nowhere… nowhere else to go.”
Arpa legionaries. Savage, unyielding soldiers of that great empire to the south, on whose rim the Eangen carved out an existence.
“Why would Arpa be so far north?” I slapped his cheek, but he was too far gone. His eyes rolled back and his legs bucked.
Still not looking at Eidr or Yske, I retrieved my knife from the raider’s arm and slit his throat in one grim movement. Then I moved to Sixnit’s side.
“Six,” my voice softened, cajoling and tense with hope. “Six, wake up, please.”
She didn’t stir, though her chest continued to rise and fall. I couldn’t carry her, so I numbly began to disentangle the infant from her arms, trying not to think past that simple step. The child’s stillness terrified me more than a thousand Algatt and I checked three times to make sure he was, truly, alive. But breath passed between his tiny parted lips, and his heart fluttered beneath my palm.
Steeling myself, I held him close and began to search the room for something, anything that might help me rouse or carry Sixnit.
But my thoughts refused to stay on task. As soon as the Algatt died, I was left alone again – alone with the corpses of my husband, my people, Sixnit’s helplessness and that looming, crippling grief. My eyes darted, faster now, and my breath shallowed. I saw Yske’s own, lifeless eyes. The blood in Eidr’s hair.
Eidr’s hair. Eidr, unmoving, unbreathing. Gone.
My chest threatened to cave in and black sparked across my vision. At the same time, feebleness, a side effect of using Eangi Fire, swept over my limbs. Only a wheezing gasp from the baby in my arms kept me from crumpling. I pushed the knuckle of a trembling hand against one eye and locked my knees. Focus. Just a moment longer.
If the Arpa had gone into the mountains, driving the Algatt into the Eangen lowlands… I had to get us to East Meade, the village of my birth. They had to be warned. I could leave Sixnit and the baby with my sisters—
Warm, slick steel met my throat. “On your knees.”
I froze, every muscle still and my breath lodged in my throat. Calculating, hoping, my eyes flew from the infant in my arms to the charred doors of the Hall of Smoke. There, misty daylight fell uninterrupted across the bodies of my people, but the way was clear. I could run with the baby. But not with Sixnit.
More silhouettes appeared in the doorway. More raiders, stalking and spreading out, muttering and eyeing me.
The child let out another fragile, crackling breath. My eyes fell from him to Six, still motionless at my feet, and what little hope I had died. I would risk my own life in a last, desperate play for freedom. But I could not risk theirs.
My throat swelled against the blade as I said, “We surrender.”