Morrighan (3 page)

“In the basin past the mudflats,” I answered.

“Hmm,” she said suspiciously.

“I didn't steal it,” I added. “I hunted it.” Though in the end, it made no difference—food was food—Laurida seemed to enjoy the hunted kind more. “I'll go rinse these.” I grabbed the intestines to wash in the creek.

“Walk wide around Steffan this day,” she called after me. “He's in a surly temper.”

I shrugged as I walked away. When was Steffan
not
in a surly temper? At least tonight he couldn't box my ears or punch my ribs. He'd be shamed by Piers and Fergus for my catch. They both loved hare, and all Steffan had brought home lately were bony hole weasels.

It wasn't until I was halfway home that I realized I had forgotten to ask Morrighan why Harik knew her name. It was the first thing I was going to say, but then she threw me off with all of her talk.
Do I bathe?
I swished the intestines beneath the water. What difference did it make? But then I thought about her skin, how it seemed to glow with the color of a smoky sunset. I had wanted to touch it and see what it felt like. Was it that color because she bathed? We had no girls in our camp—only boys, men, and three women like Laurida—their faces tough and lined with years. Morrighan's cheeks were as smooth as a spring leaf.

I heard commotion and the whickering of horses. And then Steffan's loud call that the others were back, as if it weren't obvious. I shook out the intestines and trudged back up the slope to camp. My steps faltered when I saw Harik with the elders of the clan. He didn't come by our camp as often these days, instead staying in his massive fortress on the other side of the river—the one he had named Venda after his bride, the Siarrah. But the water was rising and the bridge was leaning. It might not be long before his fortress was cut off from the rest of us, and he couldn't come at all. Fergus said the river would swallow the bridge soon. Harik balked and said he would build another, which seemed an impossible task, but he was larger in power and hunger than most, and it was rumored that his father had been one of the mightiest Ancients. Maybe he had ways we didn't know of.

“You remember the boy, don't you?” Fergus said pointing at me.

“Steffan,” Harik said, clamping his massive hand down on my shoulder.

“That's my brother. I'm Jafir,” I said, but he had already turned away and was settling near the fire with Piers.

The evening went as others—food, squabbles, and news of far-off kin. Fergus said our kin in the north mused again about what lay beyond the western mountains. They were considering venturing forth to search for better fortune than what the scrabble offered here and had asked Fergus to join them. I rolled my eyes. They were always “considering,” but nothing came of it. The mountains held the sickness. Nothing grew there. To go through them was to die. Even the mighty clans kept fear close to their hearts. There were still a few among us, like Piers, who had been around when the cloud of death rolled across the land. He was only six at the time, but he recalled the terror.

After dinner Harik passed around a bottle he had brought with him. While food might be scarce, on his side of the river, they still managed to brew the foul liquid. Even though I sat at the ring with everyone else, none was offered to me. Piers reached past me to hand the bottle to Reeve, who sat on my other side. I tried to act like I hadn't noticed when Harik passed the bottle on to Steffan. He drank and choked on the spirits, and everyone laughed. I did too, but Steffan plucked my laughter out from the rest. He turned and glared at me, the kind of glare that said I would pay later.

Then the talk turned to the tribes. Harik wondered, as he had on past visits, where one tribe in particular had gone. They hadn't been seen in four years. The tribe of Gaudrel. When he said her name, I heard anger in his voice. “And that brat she drags with her,” he added. “Morrighan.”

I saw the hunger in his eyes. He wanted her. The most powerful man in the land—more powerful than Fergus—wanted Morrighan.

And I was the only one who knew where she was.

Chapter Seven

Morrighan

He didn't hide in the bushes this time. He strode up the wide marble steps in a frightening way. As if he owned them. Why was this scavenger so hard to understand? His chest was bare, and his face gleamed. He had bathed. With the dirt washed away, his skin was now a golden hue, and his long ropes of hair, brighter. The broadening of his shoulders made his meatless ribs look more pathetic. But the look in his eyes was fierce.

“I thought you weren't coming?” I said, taking a step back when he stopped in front of me.

He eyed me for a long while before answering. “I come and go, when and where I please. Why does Harik the Great know your name?”

I felt as if I'd been punched breathless. I'd heard whispers in camp between the
miadres
. Ama and the others hated him. His name was like poison, not to be touched. It alarmed me to think he might know my name. Jafir was wrong.

“He doesn't know my name,” I said. “He doesn't even know me. I've only seen him from a distance, when he raided our camp long ago.” I stepped away. “And for your information, scavenger, he is not great. He's a coward, like all—” I paused, measuring the words on the tip of my tongue, fearing it might send him sprinting away again—or worse.

“Like all of us?” he finished. “Is that what you were going to say?”

Why are we here?
I thought. We were ever at odds, and yet our paths kept crossing.
No, Morrighan, not crossing by chance. You invited him to come back here. You wanted this meeting to happen.
I didn't understand myself, nor all I had been taught to rely on. The scavengers were dangerous to our kind, but I was intensely curious about this one who had shown me mercy eight years ago when he was little more than a child himself.

“Jafir,” I replied, saying his name with respect, “would you like to read?” And then as a sign of truce, I added his own description. “A book of the
Ancients
?”

We read for an hour before he had to go. It wasn't our last meeting. The first few continued to be rocky and tentative. Scavengers and those they hunted had no common ground. But here, hidden away by long trails and box canyons, we learned to leave at least part of who we were behind us. Our trust ebbed and grew in turbulent starts, but it was always an unstated agreement that our meetings would remain a secret. If he told anyone, I could die. If I told anyone, I would be forbidden to return.

I never thought it would last. After all, our tribe never stayed anywhere for long. Moving on was our way. Soon we would leave the vale, go somewhere far, and these days would end. But the tribe didn't leave. There was no need to. The vale was well hidden, and we were able to gather and grow without worry. No one ventured there. Our days turned to seasons, and seasons turned to years.

I taught Jafir letters, and from there, words. Soon he was reading to me too. He practiced writing, his finger tracing letters in the dust. “How do you spell Morrighan?” he asked. Letter by letter, he repeated each one as he wrote it on the ground. I remember looking at the letters long after he had written them, admiring the curves and lines his finger had made and how my name looked different to me than it ever had before.

Over the course of weeks and months, we shared everything. His curiosity was as great as mine. He lived with eleven people. They were kin, but he wasn't sure how most of them were related. Fergus didn't explain such things to him. They weren't important. A woman named Laurida claimed him as her son but he knew it wasn't so. She was Fergus's wife, but she hadn't come to the clan until Jafir was seven years old—from where he wasn't sure. One day she simply rode in with Fergus and stayed. He had a hazy memory of a woman he thought might have been his mother, but it was only her voice he remembered, not her face.

He asked if Gaudrel was my mother. I explained that she was my grandmother, a term he didn't know. “My mother's mother,” I explained. “Ama raised me. My own mother died in childbirth.”

“And your father?”

“I never knew him. Ama says he is dead, too.”

Jafir's lips pulled tight. Perhaps he was wondering if my father had died at the hands of one of his own kin. He probably had. Ama would never say just how it happened, but her eyes always sparked with anger before she turned away from the subject.

I was curious about his brother. Jafir only shrugged when I asked about him. He pointed to a scar on his arm. “Steffan speaks more with his hands than his mouth.”

“Then I shouldn't like to meet him.”

“And I
shouldn't like
you to meet him,” Jafir said, poking fun at the way I said things differently from him, and we both laughed.

I didn't know that what we were forging was a friendship. It seemed impossible. But I discovered that the boy who had once kept me hidden from his fellow scavengers had other kindnesses in him as well—a bracelet woven from meadow grass, a chipped plate rimmed in gold that he had found in a ruin. One day he gave me a handful of sky when he saw me gazing up at the clouds, just to see me smile. I put it in my pocket. Other times we maddened each other beyond telling with our different ways, but we always came back, our squabble forgotten. We changed together, imperceptibly day by day, as slowly as a tree budding with spring.

But then one day, everything changed in one leap, permanently and forever.

He had stunned a squirrel that morning from ten paces with his slingshot, and was trying to instruct me how to do the same, but shot after shot, my stones went miserably off course. He was chiding me for my aim, and I was leveling frustrated glares at him.

“No, not like that,” he complained. He jumped up from where he lay in the meadow and marched over to me. “Like
this,
” he said, standing behind me and wrapping his arms around mine. He took my hands in his, his chest against my back, slowly pulling back the sling. Then he paused, a long uncomfortable pause that seemed to last forever, but neither of us moved. I tried to understand why it seemed so different. His warm breath fluttered against my ear, and I felt my heart racing, felt something between us that hadn't been there before. Something strong and wild and uncertain. He let go of my hands suddenly and stepped away. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “I have to leave.”

He got on his horse and left without a good-bye. I watched him ride until he was out of sight.

I didn't try to stop him. I wanted him to go.

*   *   *

The longhouse buzzed with chatter, but I didn't feel part of it. I stared at the poles and rushes and animal skins that made up the walls as I stacked the clean gourds.

“You've hardly said a word all night. What's wrong, child?”

I whirled. “I'm not a child, Ama!” I snapped. “Can't you see that?” I sucked in a breath, startled by my own outburst.

Ama took the gourds from my hands and set them aside. “Yes,” she said softly. “The child in you is gone, and a … young woman stands before me.” Her pale gray eyes glistened. “I just refused to see. I'm not sure how it happened so fast.”

I fell into her arms, holding her tight. “I'm sorry, Ama. I didn't mean to be short with you. I—”

But I had no more words to explain myself. My mind tossed and pitched, and my body no longer felt like my own. Instead hot fingers squeezed my gut with the memory of Jafir's warm breath on my skin.

“I'm all right,” I said. “The others wait.”

Ama pulled me to the center of the longhouse where everyone had settled around the fire. I sat down between Micah and Brynna. He was thirteen, and she, twelve, but they seemed so young to me now. The twins, Shay and Shantal, eight, sat across from me. To me, all of them were children.

“Tell us a story, Ama,” I said. “About Before.” I needed a story to soothe me, for my mind still jumped like a grasshopper of the fields.

The children called out their choices, the towers, the gods, the storm.

“No,” I said. “Tell us about when you met Papa.”

Ama looked at me uncertainly. “But that's not a story of Before. That is a story of After.”

I swallowed, trying to hide my misery. “Then tell us a story of After.” I had heard the story before, but it was a long time ago. I needed to hear it again.

“It was twelve years after the storm. I was only a girl of seventeen. By then I had traveled far with the Remnant who had survived, but only to a place that looked as desolate as the last. We lived by our wits and will, my mother showing me how to trust the language of knowing within me, for little else mattered. The maps and gadgets and inventions of man could not help us survive or find food. Each day I reached deeper, unlocking the skills the gods had given us since the beginning of time. I thought this was all my life would ever be, but then one day, I saw him.”

“Was he handsome?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Was he strong?”

“Very.”

“Was he—”

“Stop interrupting,” I told the children. “Let her finish!”

Ama looked at me. I saw the wondering in her eyes, but she continued.

“But the most important thing I noticed about him was that he was kind. Desperation ruled the world, and kindness was as rare as a clear blue sky. We had come upon one of the cellars from Before. There was still some food to be found in those days, pantry stockpiles that hadn't yet spoiled or been raided, but it was risky to venture into such places. The leader saw us coming and waved us away, but your papa intervened, pleading for us, and the leader relented. They allowed us in and shared what little food there was. It was the last time I ever tasted an olive, but that small taste was the beginning of something far more … satisfying.”

Pata rolled her eyes, and the other
miadres
laughed.
Far more.
The hidden meanings of Ama's stories no longer escaped me.