The words made my Fire burn, low and sickening, in my gut. It did not help that the Algatt loved to add slow wails and high yips to their songs – better for echoing down mountain ravines, Yske had once said. The sound was beautiful and eerie. It made my skin crawl.
Later, in the cold of the night, Sixnit shifted closer to my side. She and I huddled together, lending warmth and comfort to one another and the sleeping child.
“We need to dedicate him,” I murmured to my friend, eyeing the guards to make sure they didn’t overhear. “In case… in case they separate us. I can’t give the dead their rites now, but I can do this. Do you have a name?”
Sixnit shifted again, not quite looking at me. “But the High Priestess should do the dedication.”
My throat tightened. She was right. The High Priestess – or an elder priest, in remote villages – led all rituals, including the dedication of babies. I wasn’t one of them. I was just another Eangi, one of dozens. I was a servant, and an errant one at that.
But I’d seen dedications a hundred times. And this matter, like releasing the souls of the dead, was too important. Even exiled, I belonged to Eang and was bound to fulfill her will.
“Either the Algatt will dedicate him to Gadr, or he’ll grow up dedicated to no god. Lost.” It was hard to speak those words – the fate of a lost person was eerily close to my own. “If that happens, the gods won’t protect him. No one will hear his prayers, and when he dies, he’ll never be allowed in the High Halls. He’ll be trapped here in the Waking World forever.”
Sixnit hesitated another moment. Some of the other captives watched us now, mute and dull-eyed.
“But Vist isn’t here.” This second protest fell harder than the first. Vist was her husband, dead back in the embers of the Hall of Smoke with Eidr. “Two, for the pledge.”
Silence yawned between us.
“I’ll… I’ll stand in,” I offered, as weak and guilt-ridden as the words were. If I’d killed the traveler Omaskat as I’d been meant to, would we even be in this situation?
But Sixnit relented, expression bleak, and placed the child in my lap. “His name is Vistic.”
I took this with a nod. I no longer had my ritual knife, but the hairpin I’d picked from the ashes remained buried in the tangled mess of my braids. I pried it loose and set one prong against a newly healed fingertip. It was messy and painful, but I knew the pain would be short-lived. My Fire couldn’t heal grievous wounds, but as soon as I burned again this cut would knit, joining dozens of other, finer marks.
Careful to conceal my actions from the guards, I touched the blood to the boy’s forehead and lips and loosened the folds of his swaddle to draw a scarlet rune in the center of his chest.
The Eangen around me now watched in vigilant, reverent hush. Each recognized the magnitude of my actions, both in the ritual of the dedication and the drawing of the rune that enabled it.
A rune of blood was the most powerful of all. Blood was magic. Blood maintained life in every living thing. Its loss brought death. Blood carried Eangi power from one generation to the next, wove life in a woman’s womb, was spilled once a month and at birth. So it followed that an Eangi’s blood, and better a woman’s blood, should be sacrificed in the dedication of a new life to a god.
“Eang, hear me,” I whispered as the Algatt’s songs continued in the background. “Hear my voice on behalf of this child. Bind his soul to the smoke of your Halls and take a drop of his blood in your cup. Prepare a seat beside your hearth for he whom we call Vistic, and when his last day comes, welcome him to his rest.”
Then, placing my palm on the child’s chest, I let my Fire flow. My bloody finger healed, but this was not a flash of deadly rage or blazing violence like I had unleashed on the raider in the Hall of Smoke. This was a blessing, a baptism, binding the child to Eang and bringing him under her eternal protection. And mine.
Exhaustion came hard and fast, and I took a second to steady myself before I looked up at Sixnit. She accepted the infant back into her arms with a fragile, melancholy smile. I saw tears in her eyes – tears for her husband, I was sure – as I began to sing the blessing song that sealed the dedication.
The backs of the Eangen around us straightened. Even Ama watched us with something less than disdain in her eyes. Then, cautiously, they all joined in. Ama was last, but her voice was strongest.
My voice was not sweet, my throat raspy from cold and sorrow; still, I sang every note. The Algatt’s own songs sheltered us, distracting the guards and leaving us in our huddle of warmth and familiarity. Twenty captive Eangen, the last of our town, in the heart of an Algatt horde.
When the song faded, Sixnit held up her son and studied the blood drying on his face. He still slept, exhausted and frail. She cupped the back of his limp head and leant close, so that her breath touched his cheeks.
“Vistic,” she said, “I am your mother, and this is Hessa. We bind our lives to yours. We will protect you, however and whenever we can, so long as Eang permits.”
So long as Eang permits. I stroked Vistic’s cheek, wondering just how long that would be.
I could not stay here. I may have dedicated this child and bound him to myself, but the Algatt would likely separate us.
I withdrew my hand and forced my eyes away from the two of them, hiding my hairpin back in the tangles of my hair. Perhaps separation was for the best. Sixnit’s presence consoled me and I hated the thought of being apart, but my duty was to Eang, wasn’t it? To the vow that I had failed to keep and my own, uncertain eternity? I didn’t need any more obligations.
Whether or not the goddess had responded, whether or not the massacre was my punishment, there was only one way forward that I could see, one way to salvage any hope of redemption and reunion with Eidr in the High Halls of the Gods.
I had to find the traveler, Omaskat. And then I had to kill him.
FIVE
As a child, I watched Yske’s mother, my aunt, bind my cousin’s dark curls into a spiral of braids. Yske sat patiently on a stool, clad in her finest forest-green dress. The patterns of lynxes and ice blossoms on my aunt’s bone comb caught the light as her fingers methodically hooked and brushed.
I hovered nearby. My own mother had long finished my hair, gathering my crop up into a braided tuft before she bade me wait quietly, and went outside.
“Svala is coming?” My father’s voice drifted through the open door, on a shaft of golden light that cut across worn floorboards, fresh reed mats and up the far wall, where my parents’ shields hung side by side under the beams of the sleeping loft. They were both dark blue, round with glinting bosses, and painted with the lynx heads of our village: East Meade.
I inched closer to the door, my bare feet scuffing on the reed beneath the hem of my grey dress. The mats smelled of summer, warm and dry, and the breeze that came with the light was laden with the scent of the flowers that fringed the overgrown roof.
“You told me the girls would go to Iskir, not the Hall of Smoke,” my father protested, still out of sight.
“No, I told you to send her to Albor, but you didn’t listen,” the headman replied. His tone was soft, far more measured than my father’s booming bray. “Svala herself has taken an interest in the girls.”