CHAPTER SEVENTY
I brushed my hair. Today was the day we would enter Venda. I wouldn’t arrive looking like an animal. It still seemed important. For Walther. For a whole patrol. I wasn’t one of them. I never would be. I pulled at the tangles, sometimes ripping at my hair, until it lay smooth.
Surrounded by hundreds of soldiers, I knew there was little chance of escape. Maybe there never had been one, unless the gods themselves decided to plunge another star to earth and destroy them all. How were these who sat proud upon their horses beside me any better than the Ancients, whom the gods had destroyed long ago? What held the gods back now?
We rode behind wagons piled high with swords, saddles, and even the boots of the fallen. The bounty of death. When I buried my brother, I hadn’t even noticed that his sword and the finely tooled leather baldrick that he wore across his chest were already gone. Now they jostled somewhere in the wagon ahead.
I listened to the jingle of the booty, the jingle, jingle, and the rattle within me.
Kaden rode on one side of me, Eben on the other, with Malich and the others just behind us. Eben’s horse stumbled, but managed to correct itself. Eben jumped from his back and whispered to him. He led him along with his hand clutched in the horse’s mane. We had only gone a few more paces when the horse stumbled again, this time staggering twenty yards off the road, with Eben chasing after him. The horse fell onto his side, his front legs no longer able to support him. Eben desperately tried to talk him upright again.
“Take care of it,” Kaden called to Eben. “It’s time.”
Malich came up alongside me. “Do it now!” he ordered. “You’re holding everyone up.” Malich unclasped the leather sheath that held his long trench knife from his belt and threw it to Eben. It fell to the ground at Eben’s feet. Eben froze, his eyes wide as he looked from it back to the rest of us. Kaden nodded to him, and Eben slowly bent over and retrieved it from the ground.
“Can’t someone else do it?” I asked.
Kaden looked at me, surprised. It was the most I had said in three days. “It’s his horse. It’s his job,” he answered.
“He has to learn,” I heard Finch say behind me.
Griz mumbled agreement. “Ja tiak.”
I stared at Eben’s terrified face. “But he raised him from a foal,” I reminded them. They didn’t respond. I turned around to Finch and Griz. “He’s only a child. He’s already learned far too much, thanks to all of you. Aren’t any of you willing to do this for him?”
They remained silent. I swung down from my horse and walked into the field. Kaden yelled at me to get back on my horse.
I whipped around and spat. “Ena fikatande spindo keechas! Fikat ena shu! Ena mizak teevas ba betaro! Jabavé!” I turned back to Eben, and he inhaled a sharp breath when I snatched the sheathed knife from him and pulled the blade free. A dozen bows were raised and arrows drawn by onlooking soldiers, all aimed at me. “Have you said good-bye to Spirit yet?” I asked Eben.
He looked at me, his eyes glassy. “You know his name?”
“I heard you whisper it in camp. They were wrong, Eben,” I said, tossing my head in the direction of the others. “There is no shame in naming a horse.”
He bit his lower lip and nodded. “I said my good-byes.”
“Then turn around,” I ordered. “You don’t have to do this.” He was shaken and did as I told him.
I stepped over to the horse. His back legs shuddered, spent from the effort of trying to do the work of his front legs too. He had worn himself out but was still as wide-eyed as Eben.
“Shhh,” I whispered. “Shhh.” I knelt beside him and whispered of meadows and hay and a little boy who would always love him, even if he didn’t know the words for it. My hand caressed his soft muzzle, and he calmed under my touch. Then, doing what I had seen Walther do on the trail, I plunged the knife into the soft tissue of his throat and gave him rest.
I wiped the blade on the meadow grass, pulled the saddlebag from the dead horse, and returned to Eben. “It’s done,” I said. He turned around, and I handed him his bag. “He feels no more pain.” I touched Eben’s shoulder. He looked at my hand resting there and then back at me, confused, and for a brief moment, he was an uncertain child again. “You can take my horse,” I said. “I’ll walk. I’ve had enough of my present company.”
I went back to the others and held Malich’s sheathed knife out to him. He cautiously reached down and took it from me. The soldiers lowered their bows in unison.
“So you know the choice words of Venda,” Malich said.
“How could I not? Your limited filth is all I’ve heard for weeks.” I began untying the saddlebag from my horse.
“What are you doing?” Kaden asked. I looked at him long and hard, the first time my eyes had met his with purpose in days. I let the moment draw out, long enough to see him blink, know. This wasn’t the end of it.
“I’m walking the rest of the way,” I said. “The air is fresher down here.”
“You didn’t do the boy any favors,” he said.
I turned and looked at the others, Griz, Finch, Malich. Slowly surveyed the hundreds of soldiers who surrounded us, still waiting for the caravan to continue, and circled around until my gaze landed back on Kaden, slow and condemning. “He’s a child. Maybe someone showing him compassion is the only real favor he’s ever known.”
I pulled my saddlebag from my horse, and the procession moved forward. Once again, I followed the clatter, clank, and jingle of the wagon ahead, and the loose rattle within me grew louder.
* * *
Steps and miles blurred. The wind gusted. It tore at my skirts, whipped at my hair, and then a strange stillness blanketed the landscape. Only the memory of Eben’s horse and its last shuddering breaths ruffled the air, the horse’s hot gusts receding, quieter, weaker. A last gust. A last shudder. Dead. And then the eyes of a dozen soldiers ready to kill me.
When the arrows were drawn and aimed, for a moment, I had prayed the soldiers would shoot. It wasn’t pain I feared, but no longer feeling it—no longer feeling anything.
I had never killed a horse before, only seen it done. Killing is different from thinking about killing. It takes something from you, even when it’s a suffering animal. I didn’t do it only to relieve Eben of a burden. I did it for myself as much as for him. I wasn’t ready to give up every last scrap of who I used to be. I wouldn’t stand by and watch a child butcher his own horse.
I was heading into a different world now, a world where the rules were different, a world of babbling women pushed from walls, children trained as killers, and skulls dangling from belts. The peace of Terravin was a distant memory. I was no longer the carefree tavern maid Rafe had kissed in a sleepy seaside village. That girl was forever gone. That dream stolen. Now I was only a prisoner. Only a—
My steps faltered.
You’ll always be you, Lia. You can’t run from that. The voice was so clear it seemed that Walther was walking at my side, speaking his words again in greater earnest. You’re strong, Lia. You were always the strongest of us.… Rabbits make good eating, you know?
Yes. They do.
I wasn’t a carefree tavern maid. I was Princess Arabella Celestine Idris Jezelia, First Daughter of the House of Morrighan.
The one named in secret.
And then I heard something.
Silence.
The loose chip inside me that I’d thought would never be still, tumbled, caught, its sharp edge finding purchase in my flesh, a hot fierce stab in my gut. The pain was welcome.
The last verses of the Song of Venda resounded in my head. From the loins of Morrighan …
How could my mother have known? I had wrestled with that question since I had read the verses, and the only answer was she didn’t know. The gift guided her. It needled into her, whispered. Jezelia. But as with me, the gift didn’t speak clearly. You were always the strongest of us. That’s what worried Mother. She didn’t know what it meant, only that it made her fear her own daughter.
Until one comes who is mightier …
The one sprung from misery,
The one who was weak,
The one who was hunted,
The one marked with claw and vine,
I looked down at my shoulder, the torn fabric revealing the claw and the vine, now blooming in color just the way Natiya had described. We’re all part of a greater story too … one that transcends wind, time … even our own tears. Greater stories will have their way.
Jezelia. It was the only name that ever felt true to who I was—and the one everyone refused to call me, except for my brothers. Maybe they were only the babblings of a madwoman from a long-ago world, but babble or not, with my last dying breath, I would make the words true.
For Walther. For Greta. For all the dreams that were gone. The stealer of dreams would steal no more, even if it meant killing the Komizar myself. My own mother may have betrayed me by suppressing my gift, but she was right about one thing. I am a soldier in my father’s army.
I glanced up at Kaden riding beside me.
Maybe now it was I who would become the assassin.