The familiar Song of Taking falls from my mouth almost unheeded, its tune first rising, then cascading down. A minor key. Wistful. Full of loss. Behind me the men give forth soft harmonies that fill the room with gentle regret. Learned in childhood. Passed on from generation to generation, along with a belief that the souls are carried on cadence and rhythms and melody from one body to the next.
Reinforcing the Council’s grip on the world.
I hold the scissors in a trembling hand. There has to be another method. Why is it a life for a life, a soul given and taken? Surely it hasn’t always been this way?
Maya’s faded gaze catches mine. Her mouth twists into a wry, understanding smile. “Come, Breaker. You brought baby Dek, next door, into the world without help or singers last week, I hear. He is hale. Now it’s my great-grandchild’s turn.”
With fingers of paper and bird bone, she grasps my wrist. I swallow and steel myself to match the metal.
Maya’s hand is wrapped around mine, and mine around the scissor handles. Together we slip the sleek blue blades between her ribs. Her rheumy eyes fix on the babe then on Allody. Tears stream down the new mother’s face and she whispers “Thank you” to her grandmother.
Maya’s body tenses. A gasp flutters from her lips. Her blood stains the sheets and the child’s swaddling.
My fingers and blades glisten red as I cut her soul free of the small organ just below her heart. The pale, shining mirror of who she was falls into my waiting hand. A flat plane, like glass. A sharp reflection off water on a clean summer’s day.
Soul colors vary. Hers is the clearest, brightest I’ve seen in a while. Not a smudge of darkness to be seen. A good soul. The child will grow up kind and thoughtful.
If you believe the Council’s teachings.
I hesitate. No. I must follow through this time. I break a small shard off and hold it tight in one hand. It is cold, yet hot at once. Pains tingle up my arm but I cannot release it to freedom, or the binding won’t hold.
Allody unwraps her child. The baby girl’s legs kick feebly. Her little, perfect fingers grab at nothing. Dark hair lies plastered to her scalp.
With delicate care, I insert the largest part of her great-grandmother’s soul between brittle little ribs. She squalls and Allody stares at me, wide-eyed.
“It’s alright,” I reassure her. “That’s normal. It hurts and it won’t bind until I also put the broken piece where it belongs. But then it will heal without a scar and I’ll sing her to sleep.”
Next, I open my hand and catch the final splinter of Maya’s life between the scissor blades. A glittering fragment that will soon be part of me. Sucking a slow breath, I sing the soul-breaker’s song, trying to control the quaver in my voice. Major scale this time. A steady, unchanging tempo. A song of yearning. Of hope for the future, even when I can’t see any.
The blades cut neatly through the thick, pink scar tissue over my ribs. I barely feel the sting anymore. With my eyes closed, I find my soul’s holding place easily enough. The scissors drive further, in amongst the myriad of tiny fragments that are my broken, borrowed bits of soul.
That, I always feel. The pain of sliced flesh followed by the sharper, deeper, darker pain of carrying more and more pieces of other peoples’ lives.
How many can I hold? My mentor on the Council of soul-masters never mentioned such pain.
I withdraw the scissors.
I feel no different.
Not this time, then.
My jaw aches with tension. My shoulders, too.
Surely, I’ve taken enough? Broken enough. Absorbed enough. Killed enough grandparents. Bound enough squalling infants to goodness.
When will these endless exchanges end and leave me enlightened; wise; a soul-master? Able to change the Council’s old ways for new.
My throat closes but I continue to sing. The men’s voices swell into joy and brilliance, filling the tiny room, clearing a way through the thunder now raging outside.
I dab my blood onto the babe’s closed wound, and murmur her new name, Maya. And it is done. She ceases to cry. Her blue eyes open and stare straight at me with her great-grandmother’s look of wisdom already showing.
Beside the child, old Maya’s eyes blank and her final breath slips free on a soft sigh.
I am drenched when I reach my sister’s cottage, one village away. The storm has softened to a drizzle of tears, but another chases after and will roll over the house soon. Lightning claws at the low clouds. Thunder growls a second later.
My soul-breaker’s blue cloak is soaked through, the wool darkened to midnight. It weighs on my shoulders as heavily as old Maya’s death weighs on my mind. Things shouldn’t be this way.
I open our little house’s thick wooden door and hang my cloak to dry. My boots go neatly beside my sister’s… and another two pairs.
One I recognize. They belonged to my brother-in-law, but Freya can’t yet bear to give them away. Redil died six months ago. The unsouled’s city crushed him as he searched for salvage materials to fix a neighbor’s roof.
He was a good man. Kind. Intelligent. Now, he is lost. A human that cannot be replaced under the Council’s current laws. Just because his soul could not be retrieved in time and no new soul-takers were born.
I pause, staring at the other pair of boots. They are soul-master green. The color of the old forests, of algae, of envy. Veloni is here. My Council mentor and supervisor. The one who disagrees most with my ideas for how to move our people onto a more certain path to survival.
In the narrow entryway of neatly laid stone and thickly plastered walls, I rest my head against the wall and close my eyes. My body hurts. It always takes me a day or so to recover from a soul-break and absorption. But this is worse than usual. All of me aches and blood still seeps through the cut between my ribs. Have I done something wrong?
Or is it a sign that I’m close to transforming into a soul-master? Is that why Veloni is here?
The thought gives me strength. I transfer the blue-metal scissors to my skirt pocket and head for the warmth of the living space where the smell of rabbit stew lingers and my sister awaits my return.
“Jena!” Freya rises awkwardly from her seat before the fire. One hand presses into the small of her back, another helps push her from the chair. A grimace crosses her delicate, pale features. She is thinner than she should be at this late stage of pregnancy. The loss of Redil stole her appetite and her smile at once. I hurry to her side and help her stand. Her breath comes in quick little gasps. One hand strokes her swollen belly.
But she clasps my cold fingers with her warm ones. “You’re back safe. I was beginning to worry.” Her dark-shadowed eyes search my face and flick an uneasy look toward Veloni, seated in the second chair. If Freya is trying to give me a message, I cannot read it. I kiss her cheek and turn toward my mentor.
“Master Veloni.” I touch two fingers to the still-tender spot on my ribs in the traditional salute between soul-breakers and soul-masters.
She rises from the cracked-leather chair and returns the greeting. Her long, graying hair is tied in an intricate knot, decorated with simple wooden beads. Over a plain gray linen shift, she still wears her emerald cloak. So… she arrived before the storm broke and didn’t expect to stay long. I repress a smile for having kept her waiting.
There is an awkward silence as she looks me over, with one brow arched, dark eyes cool, narrow face a mask. My pale blue tunic is still spattered with blood. My hair damp and flat. I try not to fidget. I have helped as many children into the world as she ever did before becoming a master. More, in fact.