Page 13 of Fate's Bane
It hurt me more than I could say to cut myself off from the sweetness of our connection, especially since I would never get a chance to be closer to Hadhnri than that. But I thought of Gunni’s hilt, of the countless things we’d made, the small jokes and petty vengeances we’d taken with our Makings. This was different. This was too far.
“I won’t do it again, Hadhnri.”
She looked at me as if I had slapped her, her wounded expression a gut slit that threatened to spill my insides.
I glanced around to make sure Aradoc-Father hadn’t returned and that the others in the roundhouse wereoccupied by their speculations, then I took Hadhnri’s hand. “Please. This power frightens me.”
After a moment, Hadhnri sighed and covered my hand with hers. She brought my hand furtively to her lips.
“No more. I promise.”
THEWEDDING
A year passed, and most of another. The Queen-Beyond-the-Fens sent more emissaries, and whatever dispute arose because of the dead warrior was smoothed over. Hadhnri’s and my aging day would come at the next Sunstead, but before that came second Ha’night. As the leaves of the Baneswood changed color, it was time for those who wished to marry to pledge their troth in the sight of the clan.
It would have been little more than another celebration to me, if not for Gunni counting among them. Not to the Queen-Beyond-the-Fens, as he’d sworn, but to Efrig, a woman as tall as he but more beautiful by far. He had dodged the luck-hound, we made certain to tell him at every opportunity. Hadhnri even threatened to steal her from him if he could not please her, and they had pup-tussled in the dirt, yipping and tickling until Hadhnri begged for mercy, tears of laughter in her eyes.
Now, Hadhnri and I sat on benches on opposite sides of the room while we watched three couples take their oaths in front of the chieftain’s chair. There had beendrumming, but it had stopped, the better to hear the words the couples spoke. Nocrin stared at his new husband with tears in his eyes. Efrig recited her oath with a fox’s smirk while Gunni grinned, guileless with joy. It stirred an acrid longing in my chest.
Though she’d been offered many, Hadhnri had taken no one’s love-lock. She couldn’t tell them that she kept my own in her pocket, and so people thought her vain, or silly, or childish. Too absorbed with her work. Pedhri Clan Aradoc would set his eye upon her soon, now that Gunni was wed and she to be grown in a few months’ time. He wouldn’t force her to wed, but he would suspect her reasons, and that would not bode well for me.
When the oaths were spoken and water from the fen was daubed across their heads by Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s hand, a loud cheer rose to the roof of the roundhouse. Then there was chaos and laughter as friends of the couples attacked them, unclasping cloaks and whisking away jackets and tugging at belts; as other couples, wed and unwed, found each other and kissed and teased at buttons and clasps; as those who were not participating in the wedding festivities made their laughing exits, chivvying the children out before them. I met Hadhnri’s eye across the room, and she nodded subtly. I left while she hung back to steal her brother’s cloak.
Outside, the air was apple-sweet and crisp with the Ha’night chill nibbling the edge of summer’s last heat. A bonfire kept it from seeping into the bones, and theseason’s first batch of cider flowed freely. Malgin, a girl a year younger than I, handed me a cup and smiled shyly from beneath thick, dark eyelashes. I took it without thinking, and then she laced her fingers between mine and spun me beneath her hand to the quick-whistle heartbeat of the night.
It might have been innocent. It might have been foolish and bold, as Hadhnri was, in defiance of the unspoken rule—no one had given me a love-lock but Hadhnri. No one but Hadhnri had ever dared show an interest in me. It was startling, and pleasant in its novelty, and I let her lead me around the fire once before I broke our dance with an awkward smile of my own.
I had somewhere to be.
I found Hadhnri standing outside of the roundhouse, wearing her brother’s heavy fur cloak jauntily off her shoulder. Her arms were crossed, her eyebrow cocked like her hip.
“Malgin? She never struck me as the kind you favor.”
I laughed and glanced back at Malgin, who was dancing someone else around the circle now, her shoulders broad and her steps as certain as Hadhnri’s. She was exactly the kind I favored.
“Are you jealous?” I danced around her, my fingers grazing her lower back.
Her stare devoured me. She said simply, in a low voice, “Yes.”
Heat rose up my neck to the tips of my ears. “Hurry.”
We crept away from the burning light of the fire and beyond our hamlet, into the wild fens. The silence was so sudden, the night so dark, that I thought my ears stopped with mud and my eyes as well. I glanced behind us to make sure no one had followed. Only then did I take Hadhnri’s hand in mine.
In the months that had passed since the winter Sunstead, Hadhnri and I had desperately sought a chance to be alone. For a chance to explore beyond the furtive kisses we pressed into each other when we had a moment unchaperoned. We waited for Pedhri Clan Aradoc to leave on clan business, but whenever he went, Gunni stayed, a shit-clod clinging to our boots. At the last Ha’night, as the leaves returned to the trees and fens swelled with rainwater again, we thought Gunni would stay in the roundhouse with Efrig; they’d already shown signs, then. But no. He’d joined us around the fire, goading us into games and drinking the last of the winter’s cider until we were all so drunk that Hadhnri and I hadn’t a hope of sneaking away.
But not tonight. It was Gunni’s wedding night, and Pedhri Clan Aradoc remained in the roundhouse with the rest of the celebrants. My stomach leapt with the thought of it. A lucky thing that Malgin had danced with me. Perhaps people would remember seeing me last with her, and not with Hadhnri.
“Are you sure you don’t want to stay in the roundhouse with the rest of them?” Hadhnri asked in the dark. Her voice hid a mischief.
I snorted and shoved her away. The same yearning I’d felt during the oath-making stole over me again, though. What would it be like to share in the tradition of the wedding night, the joyous and unburdened fervor, separate but spurred on by the communal? It would have been harder, much harder, for us to hide, even in the darkness of the roundhouse.
I said, “I want to find the spring again.”
She found my hand again in the dark. “Have you been to it since…”
I shook my head, realized she might not see it, and murmured, “No. I thought—maybe we would have to be together. Like we were then.”
“Do you remember the way?”
