Page 33 of Fate's Bane
“It’s where I was, Father.”
“For a thre’night?” Laudir said, her voice as hard as Solwin’s. Her trust had been the hardest of my father-sisters to earn. I thought I had won it with the gift of the wide belt she wore at her waist, but apparently that was not so. “What were you doing there? What did you eat?”
“I was looking for the fates-bane, as Bannos the Clever once did.” The lie came to my tongue after only a moment. “I thought I would see if the tales were true. If I could win it to our side in the fight to come.”
Laudir’s eyes narrowed. She looked to my father for his response. He studied me with dark eyes that mirrored my own, then he jerked his head at Laudir. Back toward the roundhouse. She frowned between the two of us but obeyed.
“You met that dog’s whelp at the moot. You spoke to her.”
I glanced to his side, expecting to see Onsgar, hangdog guilty. But Onsgar was gone to ash and spilled into the fens.
“What did you tell her of our plans, girl?”
“Nothing, Father, on my name and my clan, nothing!” I flinched, expecting the break-jaw crack of knuckles against my cheek that I’d not felt for years. Something in my father’s face changed. I couldn’t saysoftened, for his sharp jaw still clenched and his face still twisted in a half snarl, but change it did.
“Did you find it? The fates-bane.”
“I… didn’t think I did. But I didn’t know I’d been gone for so long. Maybe it found me.”
“Are you well?” He looked me up and down, especially my eyes.
I almost told him, then. I almost asked him if he would consider the death-oath paid if our fasting brought Hadhnri into Clan Fein. But the knife-edge glint in his eye reminded me too much of Aradoc-Father’s, right before the blow. I could imagine him asking me,Who would fast themselves to an enemy of Clan Fein?
No, the old, bitter lesson remained. Better, always, to keep my heart hidden.
I stared back, both eyes wide open. “I have them both,” I said, though I covered the eye without my clan mark.
My father smiled, like a bird’s shadow flying over the moon.
THEBATTLE
For the next month, I endured Laudir-father-sister’s sidelong scowls. She would not trust me again. But I took her plain leather jerkin and pressed in a new design. It was not as cleanly beautiful as it would have been if Hadhnri had done the cutting, but I clutched that twist of her hair in one fist as I worked and would have sworn to the luck-hound itself that I could feel her beside me, feel the warm glow of our Making.
“For luck,” I told Laudir, when I handed it back with a bow. “For Clan Fein.”
She eyed me with suspicion but ran her thumb along the work appreciatively. I say it was not so good as Hadhnri’s, but my skill was no little thing.
Laudir’s jerkin was not the only thing I worked in that month of preparation. I sank my wishes into resoled boots, carved them into the hafts of hammers and axes, pressed them into scabbards and belts, and sewed them into shirts and trousers and one unlucky pair of undergarments that hung on the line within my reach.
Wishes or curses or prayers, I still couldn’t say what they were, or whose work I did. I didn’t know how they would manifest. I thought too often of the herald’s man, imagining his purple, unbreathing face. I could only hope and whisper as I worked,This is not to harm. Give us peace. This is not to harm.I played the luck-hound’s game, and who knew how our luck would turn? I knew only that my dread grew and grew, and I couldn’t tell if it was for the coming battle or something of the fates-bane itself, stealing over me as I took of its power.
When I faltered, I thumbed the dry lock of Hadhnri’s hair and thought of her working too.
We marched the moon before second Ha’night, circling the Baneswood to the west and linking with Clans Hanarin and Pall. Fog rose, swirling about our boots, following us. The air was humid, but when the sun rose properly, it would burn the fog away. From there, we turned to the great island in the fens where Clan Aradoc had its sheep and its farms, its people who never hungered. Nothing gnawed my belly today but fear.
Clans Aradoc and Elyin waited atop the hill, and in the sunless gray dawn, I made out Pedhri Clan Aradoc with Hadhnri, a shorter figure with no-less-brilliant red hair. Gunni was beside him, too, and a host of other figures whose shapes I could easily guess at. Of course I could; they had been my clan, once.
I stood behind a line of shieldsmen, beside my father and my father-sisters. Biudir shifted anxiously at myside. I didn’t have to be there; my father said I could stay with the other craftsmen back in the village. But he was wrong. Hadhnri was here, and so I would be. The leather bracers were warm on my arms. When I left her in the Baneswood, she made me promise to wear them, no matter what. I didn’t know what to believe, only that she and I had trusted our fate and the fate of our clans to all our Makings. At the very least, I could have faith in Hadhnri’s bracers. In Hadhnri’s love.
As long as Hadhnri lives.
“When does it start?” Biudir whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Laudir-father-sister shushed us.
Across the way, Hadhnri gestured toward us in a goose-feather frenzy, then at her father. I could not see her face, only the shape, but they were not a family given to subtle gestures. Tall and broad as my love was, she was still smaller than her father, but she balked not, even when he cut her words in half with a firm slice of his hand.
