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But she did not think the priest desired her in that way. There was something broken in his study of her, something too weak to be calculating. Still, a part of him circled her in the camp, and again and again a glance would find their eyes meeting.
When he rose in the depth of night, with the air cold enough to bite the lungs, and walked out beyond the clearing, to stand beneath skeletal trees blackened with soot, Lahanis edged out from under her furs, her knives in her hands.
Priests did not belong in war. They had a way of reminding killers that their livi
ng was a crime, an abomination, that the world created by blood and fury was itself an act of madness. And though the priest might bless, though the priest might proclaim for his or her own side a certain righteousness beneath the eyes of their god, surely such claims crumbled to war’s incessant blows. Before the flickering knife, every face was the same, and every death delivered was another knot on the tally string. Knotted strings that grew into ropes and ropes into chains. Every tally a crime, every crime yet one more step away from any god.
Slipping past sleeping forms, the hunters huddled beneath furs, fast breaths riding unpleasant dreams, limbs twitching, or faces upturned in the promise of death’s simple semblance, she was silent as she crept up behind the man, drawing to within a few quick steps, her blades ready.
Then he spoke. ‘It wasn’t long ago, Lahanis, when someone cut away my mask.’ He turned slightly, only enough to make out her form on the edge of his vision. ‘He used fists to make his point. What point was he making, you wonder? I have long pondered that question. Night after night.’
She said nothing, lowering her knives to hide them as best she could.
After a moment, he resumed. ‘I was misusing a boy, because he was highborn. Mocking his innocence, in tones that promised some cruel future. Orfantal – that was the boy’s name. He deserved none of it. So, when I’d gone too far, the man entrusted with the care of the boy beat me unconscious.’
Still she made no response, wondering why he was telling her such things. The faces of those she killed were just a jumble of features meaning nothing, each one a thing of surfaces. The mask he dared speak of, and claim as his own, was the only one that mattered to her. What could he know of her mind?
Narad then continued. ‘But wouldn’t a single punch have been enough? Even a kick to my head, across that gap between us. The man was a veteran of the wars. He knew all about explosive violence, and he knew just how thin was that thread of civility holding him back, him and his kind. A few careless words from me, to a five-year-old boy, and the thread snapped.’
She could not move now, not even had she desired to finish what had been in her mind, here beneath the crooked branches and strewn stars. Narad’s words had reached through to something inside, tearing it free and shaking it so that it rattled. And before she could reconsider, she said, ‘That’s why, Yedan Narad.’
She saw him tilt his head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘A five-year-old child.’
‘What of it? I knew I was being cruel—’
‘It’s not what children are for,’ she said, a weakness coming upon her. She suddenly felt ill. ‘The boy,’ she continued, ‘was still in his summer. Not even seeing the mysteries. He was just alive, Yedan Narad, simple as a dog.’
‘I never laid a hand on the boy.’
‘Yes. And he was too young to understand your words. But that veteran wasn’t, was he?’
There was silence, until Narad sighed haltingly, and his voice was thick as he said, ‘Do such children still dwell within us, Lahanis? Do they simply wait, finally wise, finally smart enough to comprehend their old wounds? Until some witless fool jabs it all awake, and the boy inside fills the man he became, and one punch isn’t enough, isn’t even close to being enough.’
The boy inside. The girl inside, with her laughter and her summer.
Lahanis had thought the girl dead, countless versions of her huddled in all those broken baskets littering the past. The girl inside fills the woman she has become.
I saw them murder my mother, my aunts, my brothers and cousins. There, at summer’s end.
But that laughing girl, she has knives now, and tally strings, and she runs anew, through another forest, leafless and burned.
‘I doubt it gave him much comfort,’ Narad said.
You would be wrong.
He finally swung fully round to face her, and saw the knives in her hands. His brows lifted and he looked up to meet her eyes, before offering up an apologetic smile. ‘I was about to tell you something.’
‘Speak, then.’
‘The Legion will not ignore what we have done. They will come for us, and there will be a battle.’
‘Only one?’
‘If we are unlucky.’
‘And if we’re not? Not … unlucky?’
