Page 17 of Fate’s Bane

T HE C LAN M OOT

Sunstead next brought the clan moot, and I spent the months in between Ha’night and Sunstead giddy with the possibility of seeing Hadhnri and terrified of the foot-snag currents flowing between the clans.

Members of the other clans who I had first met as Ward Pedhri Clan Aradoc came to visit Garadin Clan Fein’s roundhouse.

They ate at his fire, drank his mead, and departed in the night.

They looked hard at me before they left.

They’d all sat kitten-meek under Pedhri Clan Aradoc after he defeated Clan Fein, but now their discontent shifted like silt underfoot.

With the Sunstead sun hanging at its zenith, we gathered in the land of Clan Pall to discuss the fate of the Fens.

I arrived with my father and Onsgar and our elder and middle father-sisters.

We of Clan Fein were a rangy lot. My father had been right; the Aradoc bounty did soften them.

I looked for a glimpse of that softness in the crowd of other clans, but I could find Hadhnri nowhere—just once the back of a head, broad, cloaked shoulders, and a particular walk.

“You’re not looking for an Aradoc girl, are you?” Onsgar said, catching my glances. He had a sharp eye and sharper elbows.

I nudged him in his own ribs. In the last few years, he’d grown taller than me, and I’d grown fond of him. It was a different thing, to have younger brothers. It lessened the sting of losing Hadhnri and Gunni and sharpened it in the same bite.

“Mind your own beard,” I muttered as we found our places in the center round outside the roundhouse. Onsgar scratched his pitiful chin hairs protectively.

Beneath the bright sun, surrounded by their picked men and women, the clan leaders bickered back and forth over what was to be done with the Fens, and who was closest in the lineage to Bannos the Clever, Bannos the Bold, and thus had claim to what land.

My father sat quiet on the wooden bench until he did not. When he stood, the other clan chiefs stepped back as if this were a signal long awaited. All save Pedhri Clan Aradoc, but he, too, looked as if he’d expected this moment.

“I am Garadin Clan Fein. By my name and my clan, I pledge myself to the keeping of the Fens and their people.” My father’s voice was deep and clear, and it carried above the round where we all of us sat, silent.

“To their fish and their fowl. To their beasts and their burdens. That is the oath that I made when I became chieftain of Clan Fein. It’s the oath we expect of our leaders.

Is this not so?” The chieftains near him nodded, but that was not enough for my father.

He spun to us on the benches, his braids swinging, his arms held out like a tale-teller.

“Is this not the oath Bannos the Bold himself spoke when he became chief of all the Fens?”

This time, the agreement was loud and it came from all quarters. Pedhri Clan Aradoc looked ready to speak, but my father spoke smoothly into the space he’d left himself.

“These are the oaths anyone calling themselves the chief of chiefs should hold true above all, and yet.” My father turned a cold, dark eye, disappointed and grim, on my foster father.

“Pedhri Clan Aradoc plots to give away our land and our peace to a woman who calls herself queen. A woman who would take our land and have us kneel to her, while her god’s heralds take our gold and their soldiers take our youths for bed slaves.

Is that how we keep the Fens and their people? ”

The heavy pit in my stomach grew large as a stone and just as solid. This was what I had given my father. I had done this, had helped sow this rift between the clans. I could only wish that the words would be enough.

“What would you know of peace, truce-breaker?” Pedhri Clan Aradoc turned against my father. His voice was a deep, threatening rumble that seemed to come from the earth below. “You broke the peace on a Ha’night! My own child’s wedding. Does that honor the Fens?”

What will happen to me, if Clan Fein attacks Clan Aradoc? I had asked Hadhnri in the halcyon beauty of the Baneswood spring. I had scented the blood in the air even then, sure as a hound.

I could smell it now.

“No one was hurt in that raid, and nothing was taken but what belonged already to me.”

The eyes of every chieftain turned toward me.

Even Pedhri Clan Aradoc’s. I tried to imagine what he saw.

I was different now. Taller, my hair in the numerous Fein braids though cut close to the scalp at my temples.

The blue-black triangle below my right eye.

The scar-like line about my throat that had not faded.

He looked at me as he never had when I was his ward. I was less than his charge, less even than a slave, and yet I felt as if he truly saw me for the first time. He saw an enemy.

My face heated, but I knew I could not look away. Beside me, Onsgar sat straight-backed and proud, and his presence gave me strength.

As Garadin Clan Fein’s inked, bare chest swelled proud against Pedhri Clan Aradoc in the high sun, I saw her.

Hadhnri Second-Born Pedhri Clan Aradoc. In the sunlight, her curls sparked more red than brown.

She was taller than I remembered, her shoulders thicker with muscle in her sleeveless tunic and leather jerkin, silver rings around the meat of her arm.

She stared at me with all the rest, truer than an arrow and cold as iron. She turned away.

No matter how I begged in my heart, she did not look again.

The attention of the clans returned to the chiefs, and when Hadhnri left the close pack of Clan Aradoc, I rose to follow. Onsgar raised one dark eyebrow.

“Father will not like to know you’ve met Second-Born Pedhri Clan Aradoc in secret, sister.”

“Then you will not tell him, brother. Besides”—I jerked my head at the busy round and the busy village beyond, where the rest of Clan Pall was readying the evening’s feast and games—“no meeting here can be a secret.”

That was the point of a clan moot, after all; all secrets came to light at a moot.

He caught my arm. “Is she the reason you never gave Solwin a love-lock?”

My mouth flattened to a tight line. So did Onsgar’s. He released me without a word.

I caught up to Hadhnri at the piss ditches.

“Hadhnri!” I called, trying and failing to restrain my eagerness. “It’s me, Agnir.” As if she could not recognize me, the way I had recognized her—in an instant.

Hadhnri turned to me and I stopped short. She had lost some of the softness in her cheeks—only some—but it made the hard clench of her jaw stand out. The Aradoc mark, Fate’s Crossroads, stood starkly pale in thick, cross-hatched scars beneath her right eye.

“You dare speak to me, Agnir First-Born Garadin Clan Fein?”

The first time I heard my name from her lips in years, and she spat it so hatefully that it burned. She could not have wounded me more with the seax at her hip.

She marched at me and yet I stood, frozen. “My father took you in and treated you as his own. He honored you with a place at his table and trusted you with the words spoken there, instead of banishing you like a dog outside. You repaid him by telling those secrets to Garadin Clan Fein?”

My outstretched hands hung like broken reeds.

Hadhnri shut her eyes briefly, then muttered, “I never believed him when he said all of Clan Fein were cunning as adders. Not you, I said. Never you. I should have listened.”

“I didn’t know this is what he wanted,” I lied.

“Then you are a fool, Agnir. Is there no loyalty in you at all? To me, if not to my clan?”

But even as she glared at me, even as my heart ached, my own fury built.

“You still don’t understand, do you, Hadhnri?” I hissed. “You’ve never wanted for a thing in your life. The love of your father is certain, your place in the clan fast. You can afford to throw that away. I could not. I can not. Not even for love.”

It was like the days she begged me to run away with her as children, our love-locks a tight-clutched secret.

Hadhnri bit her lower lip and inhaled sharply. The silence grew until I did not know what could fill the chasm between us. Finally, she took a shuddering breath. “I couldn’t wait to see you today.”

My breath caught but I held back my tears. I couldn’t say which disgusted her more—my betrayal or her own naivety. She turned her back to me.

“Hadhnri, wait!” I called. Hadhnri looked over her shoulder and I held up the bracers she had Made for me. “I still wear them.”

Her gaze softened like wax and hardened again just as quick.

“You are not the girl I made them for.”