A DAY AND A NIGHT and a day passed, Brann and the children learning the rules of their new unity. A day, a night and a day, gathering the lives of small beasts and large, joining hands to share that feeding. Brann shunting aside grief, rage, impatience, fear-except in dreamtime when memory turned to nightmare. The children scavenging for gear and food, tending the stock when Brann remembered the need. “The cows will dry up,” she said. “Can’t you do something?”
“Bramlet,” they said, “We’re only two. At least the beasts will be alive.” A day and a night and a day drifted past, and then another night. When the sun rose clear of the horizon, she started after her folk.
BRANN RODE a wild black werehorse down the mountain, black mane stinging her face, brother and sister melded into one, carrying her and the gear they’d salvaged from the gutted houses. Down the mountainside, going like the wind, Brann as wild and exhilarated as the great beast under her. Down the mountainside through the bright cool morning, lovely lustrous morning though Arth Slya was dead and lost. Day ought to weep, sun ought to lurk behind a thick weight of cloud, trees ought to droop and sigh, river to gloom and gray, but it was not so. And no more than day and mountain and sky could she mourn. She thrilled at the driving power of the great muscles between her legs, muscles fed as she was with the lives of wolves and coynos. She laughed aloud and laughed again when the werehorse bugled its delight.
Late that afternoon they came to the first of many cataracts. The werehorse stopped beside a storm-felled ash slowly rotting back into the earth, collapsed into brindle boarhounds after Brann swung groaning down, sore muscles protesting, chafed thighs burning. The hounds walked out of saddle and gear and trotted away. Brann stretched and groaned some more, then went through the gear, found the hatchet and went about collecting downwood for a fire, wobbling on legs that felt like wet noodles, splaying her knees to keep her thighs apart. When she had the fire going and the kettle dangling from an improvised tripod, she stripped off her clothing and found an eddy by the ash tree’s roots where she wouldn’t be swept away. She sat on a water-polished root, dabbling her feet in the river, watching the roughened redness inside her thighs fade to pink, the pink to the matte white of healthy skin. She’d burned her finger getting the kettle to hang properly from the tripod. The burn blister had dried and, as she watched, the dry skin cracked and peeled away leaving no sign at all of the burn. Some change, she thought. She slipped off the root, dunked herself all the way under, crawled out of the water, stretched her dripping body along the hard white wood of the ash tree’s trunk, the sun warm and welcome on her back and legs, dozing there until a hiss from the fire told her the tea water was boiling. She pulled her clothes back on, feeling a mild curiosity about when the children would return, a curiosity that faded as she made the tea.
She sat with the hot drinking bowl hugged between her hands, her face bent to the fragrant steam rising from the tea. Her father’s work, that bowl, with the goodness her father put in everything he made. She sipped at the tea, listening to the cries of the hunting hounds, wishing her father were there sitting beside her on the ash trunk. Sipped again, trying to wash away the lump in her throat, dismissing the horrors, thinking instead of the good times. When her father took his impling to his workshop with its smells of dry clay and wet clay, of powders and glaze mixes, cedar cabinets and oak tables, the whirring of wheels, thuds of the kicks that kept the wheels going, Immer’s humming, another apprentice’s sweet whistling, jokes tossed about, laughter, shouts-sounds and smells set as deeply into her as the thumps and clacking of her mother’s loom, her mother’s tuneless burring songs. Good times. When she shared her birthdays with ancient Uncle Eornis and he fed her cake and cider and told her the exciting scary stories she loved. Tough old man, should have lasted a dozen more years. Everyone in the Valley was making something special for him, she’d done an ink drawing of moonfishers in a scream fight. Her father spent two years on his gift. A das’n vuor pot and a hundred das’n vuor drinking bowls, one for each year of the old man’s life. He broke pot after pot until he was satisfied, broke bowl after bowl. Most of them looked fine to Brann, but he pointed out their imperfections, made her see them as he did, feel them, patient with her until she finally understood what he was talking about. And when he took the last bowls from the firing, he broke three, but wiped the fourth carefully and set it in her hands. She looked deep and deep into the black luster that seemed to drink the light, rejoicing in the shape that had the rightness of the Galarad Oak, or the Yongala dancing when Slya filled her, a rightness that whispered deep within. As if a light was kindled inside her, she knew why her father could judge so quickly and surely the worth of his work. Shine and whisper filling her, she felt as if she should hook her toes under something or she might just float away. Her Choice was made. More than anything in all the world, she wanted one day to make a thing as right as the bowl cradled in her hands. She gave it back to her father and sighed. He put it carefully into its nest of silk, then caught her up, lifted her high, swung round and round and round with her, laughing and proud, his spirits suddenly released as his labor was finished at last, astonished and enraptured by what his hands had made, rejoicing at her Choice. He might never do anything quite as splendid again and it was somehow fitting that his daughter marked it with the gift of her life, yet more fitting that his greatest work was born of love and celebration and not done for gold.
She refilled the bowl and gulped at the tea, burning her tongue with it, squeezing her eyes shut to hold back tears, “He can’t have it, I won’t let him, can’t have them,” remembering with helpless fury soldiers carrying things from her home, the chest with the das’n vuor pot, the chest with the hundred bowls, the Temueng pimush in the gilded helmet hovering over them with a hungry look, putting his hands on them, claiming them. “No!”
The hounds’ bellowing grew louder, closer. Brann put the bowl down, stood crouched, waiting.
A yowling, spitting black beast ran from the trees, swerved when he saw her, a malouch with claws that could strip the flesh from a tough old boar. He yowled again and switched ends, but the hound bitch was too fast for him, dodging the claw strike with a speed that blurred her shape into a brindle streak. She tore at his hind leg, sprang away again. As soon as Yaril distracted him, Brann leaped, slapped a hand against the side of his head. The malouch writhed around, his claws raking her arm, then he froze as she started the pull, a black statue of hate unable to move, unable to make a sound. Ignoring the blood and pain from her torn arm, Brann set her other hand on him. His life flooded into her, hot and raw, terrible and terrifying, waking in her that queasy pleasure that she hated but was starting to need. At last the malouch was a scrap of fur and flesh melting from between her hands.
Children again, Jaril and Yaril took Brann’s hands and the fire passed from her. She began to feel clean again though some of it remained with her; the malouch had clung to life with a fury that saddened and sickened her and she wanted to rid herself of everything she’d taken from him; she tried to hold onto the children, tried to force all of that stolen life out of her, but they melted and flowed through her fingers and flitted away to shimmer over the scatter of gear, then they merged and the werehorse was snorting and stamping impatiently, the children eager to be on their way.
She drew her fingers down the torn arm. The wounds were already closed, ragged pink furrows visible through the• rents in her sleeve. With the knife from her belt sheath she cut away the bloody rags. She tossed the sleeve into the fire, thought a minute, cut the other sleeve to match. She knelt beside the river and washed away the dried blood. By the time she was finished the furrows had filled in, even the pink flush was gone. She looked at the arm a moment, then bent again, scooped up water, splashed it over her face, drank a little. The children melted apart and moved beside her, throwing questions, demands, pleas at her, as she walked about the glade, kicking leaves over the body of the malouch, smoothing out the rips in the sod he made with his claws, repacking the saddlebags with slow meticulous care, dismantling the tripod, dousing the fire, burying the blackened bits of wood. She said nothing to them, refused stubbornly to acknowledge their presence, walked heavily to the riverbank and sang the mourning song for the malouch and for the wood she burned, sang the praises of the living river, the living forest. A week ago she would have done all this-restored the land, sung the praises-because she’d done similar things a hundred times before, because she rested comfortably in the support of ancient custom. This time it was a way to shout at the murdering invaders that nothing was changed, that Arth Slya still lived as long as one of Slya’s children lived and followed Slya’s way.