Page 5 of Fate's Bane
I was young, but I was not a fool. I closed my eyes tight and thought of the gentle press her of lips on mine and the bird-wing flutter in my belly. My cheeks ached then like they did now, burning from blush and aching with grin.
When I opened my eyes again, Pedhri Clan Aradoc glared down at me like I was filth. He’d never looked at me like that before, not even the day I arrived as a slave.
The sweet truth of that moment in the spring would only hurt more if I spoke it here.
“No, Aradoc-Father.” I hung my head and pushed myself to one knee before him.
He grunted. After a moment, he raised me by one arm and then tilted my chin up to the light of the moon. I blinked to hold in my fresh tears.
“You will not touch my child ever, First-Born Garadin Fein. It is not your place. She is not for you. Understand me.” His voice was hard as stone, but it was not unkind. The warmth of a hearth-brick could make you feel steady and safe, and it could burn. It could crack your skull.
“Yes, Aradoc-Father.”
Pedhri scrubbed his hand affectionately over my head and patted my shoulder before returning to the roundhouse.
I followed him, hiding my face, already swollen as a plum. Though Clan Aradoc stared as we returned, no one gainsaid his treatment of me. I went straight to my furs and buried myself in them, turning my back to the rest of the roundhouse so that they would not see me cry. Though my stomach growled and then cramped, I refused to rise.
They whispered in reed-wind voices of the spring that Hadhnri and I couldn’t possibly have found and the fell provenance of it. They sang of Bannos the Clever and the fates-bane, and with every telling of the tale, I felt their eyes upon me.
With my own eyes shut, a shadow fell over me, darkening the red of my eyelids. I curled into myself. A hand upon my shoulder and I knew who it was. Pedhri’s warning throbbed in my head. I recoiled from Hadhnri’s touch.
“Agnir?” she whispered. “I brought you dinner.”
I wanted to turn to her. I wanted to read the concern in her voice writ across her face. I wanted her to put her hand on my shoulder again.
I hunched deeper into my furs and remained that way until her absence grew cold at my back.
THEATTRACTION
Years passed. Garadin Clan Fein—or “Garadin Fein!” as Clan Aradoc liked to curse his name—did not attack Clan Aradoc or encroach upon the allotment of its fens. I grew taller, though not much taller. I settled on the path of the craftsman; no warrior, I, though I was competent enough to split Hadhnri’s lip in the training yard. She taught me how to disarm Gunni, and Gunni humored me, laughing, when I tried. Near-grown, he began to court and be courted by young women and men—within Clan Aradoc and without. They brought him love-locks tucked within gifts of leather or wool to signal their interest. Never a suit from Clan Fein, though.
One year, a wave of bog fever took infant and elder and almost took Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s pregnant wife. She survived; the babe did not. Pedhri glowered in the roundhouse then, and more cursed Garadin Fein in my hearing, the continued existence of my clan a failure that brought ill-luck upon him.
It ceased to bother me, for I was distracted.
I had begun to notice Hadhnri in a new way. She’ddeveloped the same muscles I’d once admired so in Gunni; only, I had wanted to emulate Gunni, to see those muscles swell beneath my own skin, hard as stones beneath flexing flesh. And I had! I knew well the strength in my back and my legs. But with Hadhnri, I felt different.
I was finally able to name what I couldn’t as a child: IwantedHadhnri, not only because of the deep, ever-certain timbre of her voice or her quick laughter and quicker kindness. It wasn’t because she was skilled with axe and leather needle or deft in the dancing ring. I wanted her in the way of other adults, in the way of nights beneath furs. I wanted to run my thumbs along the swell of her arms and press my lips there. My tongue… I rarely allowed myself that thought unless I was alone; I had learned, as well, how to subtly ease the ache I felt after a long day at Hadhnri’s side.
Despite the glances I had caught from Hadhnri, as furtive as my own, I kept my feelings from her. I had not forgotten Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s knuckle-crack warning against my cheek. No doubt it would be worse now; I was no longer a child with innocence as excuse.
I sought other occupations for my hands, but Hadhnri had ever been braver than me. She could afford to be.
She found me one day as I carved the face of a dog into a block of wood. The snout wasn’t right—it was too fox-sharp, but to shave it down farther would dull definition I’d already cut.
“That looks like Ha’Blue.”
I startled at her voice and turned to where Hadhnriknelt beside me. In the clear sunlight of early lententide, her hair took on the red-brown of her father’s, and her hazel eyes turned like harvestide leaves from brown to ocher to mossy green and back again. Her smile showed a crooked eyetooth beneath her scarred lip.
Her smile fell and she took my hand, holding it to her. She rubbed away the upwelling blood. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I hadn’t noticed. My face was aflame, but I was too sunstruck to turn away, to take my hand back. “Do you really think it does?”
“Yes.” She pointed with one finger at the carving, but she didn’t release my hand. “The muzzle wrinkles just like hers.”
“Oh.” I looked back down at our hands and started to pull away. She held me fast.
“Come to the workshop with me?” At my hesitation, she added: “I’m working on something new. I could use your help.”
