Page 29 of Fate's Bane
The work, however, no longer soothed me. Some days, I worked my craft in desperation, certain that my leatherwork would be the difference between a clan member’s life and their death: protection from the pierce of an arrow, the surety of a blade at the hip.
Other days, I worked in bitterness. I did not choose this war for myself, and yet it had caught me in its grip, torn between the things I most wanted in the world. I remembered the way everyone looked at me at the moot. I was branded by their gaze. In becoming Garadin Clan Fein’s symbol, I lost my own will.
And yet, symbol as I was, I was powerless.
At that thought, my hands froze on the leather on the table. I heard her voice:Think of what we could do.
Needle to leather, I tried to lose myself in the meditative action.
What if it’s a gift?
I yelped and brought my bleeding thumb to mymouth and sucked it clean. I watched it well up again, gleaming and red, a bright, fat bead. The cord tying me to the Baneswood thickened, grew tighter between one throbbing heartbeat and the next. A rising tide within me—No.
It was a dark gift. I did not want it.
The tide went out, leaving me with a disappointment not unlike an aborted climax. I shuddered and wiped the blood away on my trousers and finished sewing the beaten metal round onto the jerkin.
I told myself, I would never find the spring.
I told myself, I would not betray my clan. My blood clan. My true clan, true as it was tattooed upon my cheek.
I told myself, I would face her on the battlefield and not before.
I told myself, I did not care where she was or who she wed.
I told myself lie upon lie upon lie until the moon was near bursting, when I snuck out of Clan Fein’s roundhouse with my bracers on and the screaming dagger at my hip.
The Baneswood separated the small parcel of dry land that belonged to Clan Fein from the bigger island of Clan Aradoc. East of the wood and north some were Clans Pall and Hanarin, each only a bit bigger than Clan Fein. North and west a bit, Clan Elyin, and they were alone on the other side of Aradoc, so it made sense that they would hide behind the Aradoc shield rather thanfight them alone. My father had sent someone to sway them; it would have been good to grip Aradoc between two fingers and squeeze. The messenger never returned.
I hovered at the edge of the trees, the pale birch bark glowing in the night, the fog swirling at my bare shins. The shadows between the trees were impenetrable. The call was a shriek in my soul and to stand there unmoving took all my strength. My jaw ached with the clenching of it.
How had I ever been brave enough to step into the fates-bane’s wood?
Oh, but that answer came easily. Brave Hadhnri. I would follow her anywhere.
With one step, I surrendered to that rising tide.
The wood was dark and silent at times. At others, the sound of night insects and rustling leaves deafened me until I spun myself around, trying to see through the thickness of the foliage. My only compass was the binding around my heart that pulled me ever deeper.
“Hadhnri?” I called more than once, and more than once I was met with the flurry of something underbrush or overhead. Only once I heard a distorted cry that I thought was my name. I followed that sound and almost fell into a dark chasm.
Backing away from the edge, I caught my breath from panic. I gripped my hands around my forearms, holding my bracers as if they were a talisman. Would they protect me against the fates-bane itself?
Or, came the worse thought,what if the Baneswood has already taken Hadhnri?
“Hadhnri?” I whispered, this time a prayer. I had no idea how long I had been walking; the trees knit themselves tight overhead to shield the round-bellied moon from view. So I repeated her name under my breath, clutching the bracers and thinking of that sun-speckled spring and our first cold-water kiss. I followed the leash of the luck-hound.
“Agnir.”
I heard my name again, faint, and turned hesitantly. I stepped toward the voice, warier for my earlier missteps.
“Hadhnri?”
“Agnir?” It came again, and I swore it was her voice, rippling with the undercurrent of water. My fear of the fates-bane was too strong for me to rush toward it, even though the pull was almost unbearable.
“Hadhnri?”
“Agnir!” Hadhnri crashed from the trees to my right and stopped, bracing herself on her knees as she heaved breath. She squinted at me skeptically from her hunched position. “Agnir? Is that you?”
