I gulped down my frustration, a knot forming in my chest at the impossible decision. On the training field there was only myself and the sword.
But this was what Baba meant when he said that battle was different.
He was right—it wasn’t about skill, it was about what happened when instinct took over, about what direction your feet took.
It’s about heart.
I rushed at the raider, hoping to catch him by surprise. Our swords crossed and I pushed against him, throwing him off balance into the dirt. He raised his sword again but I brought my own down with such force it was knocked out of his hands. He gaped up at me.
“You’re just a girl,” he said, his eyes as old as mine. “You don’t have it in you to kill.”
I looked at his bloodied knife in the dirt, then to the house he’d set aflame.
“Being a girl never stopped me from stabbing someone who deserved it. You picked the wrong village to raid today.”
He tried to roll away but I was already plunging my sword down, piercing his gut, driving my blade into his skin and feeling my own stomach churn when I felt his innards give way beneath my blade. He collapsed into the dirt, the life draining out of him.
The urge to vomit was so strong, I nearly emptied my insides over his twitching corpse.
But I didn’t have time to dwell on what I had done.
“Maz!” I shouted, gesturing to the house.
“Go,” he called back. “I’ll find the other raiders.”
His raider was on the ground, bleeding out from his wounds. Maz looked toward the rest of the village, as I ran inside the burning house.
The roof was on fire, causing it to collapse on itself, the flames catching the furniture and walls. I coughed at the overwhelming pillows of smoke gushing toward me, following the sounds of crying to the back of the small house.
A child was on the ground, clutching his mother, her body the source of the bloodied sword I’d seen.
“Amma!” He looked up at me, desperate to wake his mother.
“Your mother is dead.” I moved to grab him. But he clutched her body harder.
“You don’t have time for this,” I muttered, and pulled him harder.
“Not without my amma.”
This time I didn’t reason with the boy, I yanked him away from her body and dragged him screaming from the house.
“Other people need help. You’ll die if you stay with her. She’s already gone.”
I knew I was cold. The child needed more comfort than I was able to give him. But it was me carrying him from this house, and not someone else, not someone warmer or kinder. And yet, becauseof me, he would live. If he hated me for tearing him away from her, at least he would live.
The child reared back and kicked me in the shin, then ran from the burning house and into the mountainside. I watched him, his cries filling the afternoon air.
But a shout of pain wrenched through me and I turned back to the village with panic in my heart.
I knew that cry.
I ran, hefting my bloodied sword beside me. I stopped short when I made it to the village square. Maz was on his knees and two men circled him. His scimitar was nowhere to be seen. Blood ran down his arms and face, and a raider’s unmoving body lay in the dirt beside him. At least he’d managed to take another one out before they got him.
They got him.
But not for long.
Confiscated weapons were piled beside the water well, and next to that a group of village women stood together, holding each other. They were women I’d known my whole life, aunties who had fed me, doted on me, pinched my cheeks and exclaimed to my father how much I looked like my mother. Just the sight of their distress made my fingers tighten on my hilt, the anger rising in my chest like a black cloud, like the smoke of burning mud-packed walls.
