Page 21 of Fate’s Bane

T HE B ANESWOOD

Preparations for war went quickly. So quickly that it became clear to me that they had been underway for much longer than I realized.

Visitors from Clans Pall and Hanarin came ever more frequently from the other side of the Baneswood, barricading themselves with my father in the roundhouse.

They spoke of supplies and alliances. They spoke of fear and defeat.

The bowyer braved the Baneswood to gather deadfall from its yews, and the geese were plucked for fletching.

Solwin’s anvil rang day and night and the grindstone rasped its harmony.

I began making armor.

All the while, I watched the moon wax in her sky.

She seemed closer to us every day, pus-swollen with a sickly yellow turn to her light.

The tales go that she and the sun were once lovers until a bitter feud divided them into day and night.

Only when she was weak and waning could the sun stomach sharing the same sky.

The tales made me think on Hadhnri—as if I’d been able to stop since I last saw her on the killing field.

I hated her for what her Making had driven us to.

I wished I had touched her in tenderness.

(She was to marry the Prince-Beyond-the-Fens.)

When I wasn’t caught by the moon, or my impossible longing, the Baneswood called to me.

No longer as delicate as spider silk, its insistent tug guided me by the chin.

Sucked at my heels. More than once, I tripped and startled from a daze only to find myself halfway out of the hamlet. Halfway to heeding that call.

To save myself, I worked.

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 my mouth 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 than fight 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?”

I stepped toward her, hand raised. “Hadhnri? You’re alive! Are you all right?”

She straightened and reached for the seax at her hip. “Agnir? Truly?”

I halted and held the hilt of my own dagger. “Hadhnri, it’s me.”

What had she seen in the darkness to make her doubt? Or was it always her plan to ambush me in the cursed dark?

“How did I get the scar on my lip?” she asked, advancing one careful step.

“I gave it to you,” I said, smug in the memory despite my wariness. “You have a slow guard from the left. Or at least, you did.”

“Agnir.” Hadhnri dropped her hand to her side and closed the space between us.

I didn’t know whether to run into her arms or keep her at a distance. I had forgotten neither the scalding of her anger nor my own.

Instead of choosing, I cocked my head. “Is that the spring?”

The gurgle of water was an easier thing to seize upon than the whip-tail of my feelings. With ginger, sidelong steps, I led the way down the tumble of forest litter to where the sound was loudest.

The small clearing let in the moon’s sick-yellow light, and I could see a pool of water, its slow trickle.

The spring was different now, and I struggled to recall how it looked when we were children.

I could only remember how it felt: the pleasant coolness in the hot weather, on our sweaty skin.

The sweetness of the clean water, more pure than anything I’d drunk before or since.

The call of the fates-bane was silent.

“It looks different,” Hadhnri said, stopping beside me. Her body was warm in the summer night. Sunstead was a month gone, and Ha’night seemed an age away. Still, the night was brisk and the pool frigid. Instead of refreshing, it put me in mind of the cold of a corpse.

“We shouldn’t be here.” I stepped back but bumped into her.

She steadied me even as I tried to pull away. Before I could march back the way I came, she tightened her hand on my arm and said, “Please, Agnir. Will you not stay a moment with me?”

In the moonlight, her face was carved in anguish.

“Please. I don’t want to go to war with you.”

The war had gone from my mind. It seemed a silly thing, in the clutches of the fates-bane, but now the anger of the past month boiled in me, even damped by the darkness.

“My brother would still be alive if you had kept your word to me, Hadhnri Clan Aradoc.”

“And my own brother would be dead, or my father.” Hadhnri glared down at me. I felt the surge of her rage in the rise and fall of her chest. “Or do you still claim that no one in Clan Fein snuck to our bedrolls in the night? A tryst gone wrong, was it?”

“Will you pretend your father isn’t planning to give our lands away to some woman who has never even seen them?” I growled into her face. “For what? What will he gain? Clan Fein, exterminated? Cleared out like vermin by her heralds and their soldiers?”

Hadhnri closed her eyes. She had not released my arm. We were so close that I could feel the cool breath of her resignation.

“I am sorry your brother is dead, Agnir,” Hadhnri said, her voice thick, “but I cannot—” She shook her head. “I cannot lie to you and say I wish it were otherwise. I— Gunni—Gunni has a daughter now—”

“Stop. Please, stop.” Salt laced my lips. How could I hate her when her truth was my own? I sagged into her chest and she caught me, held me in her strength while I wept.

“Agnir, sweet Agnir,” she whispered in my ear, over and over. “Sweet Agnir, my love.”

“Do not marry the prince,” I sobbed against her chest.

“Sit with me. Talk with me.”

Hadhnri slid her hand down my arm to my own hand, and when I didn’t pull away, she led me to the stones beside the spring.

There was the cold I remembered. I shivered in my sleeveless tunic.

Only then did I notice that Hadhnri carried a pack, and from it, she pulled a blanket and draped it over my shoulders.

She held the ends of it on either side of my shoulders and searched my face. Her eyes found my lips.

I turned away, as if I hadn’t craved that kiss these last long years.

“How do we stop this war?” I huddled deeper into the wool.

“We could ask our fathers to marry us off to each other. Unite the clans, at last.”

I snorted with disdain and Hadhnri flinched.

“You didn’t think it was so cursed an idea before,” she muttered.

“My entire clan has sworn a death-oath to take from your father what he took from mine.” The muddy ash had dried on our foreheads, where we left it until it fell away.

“ I swore a death-oath, may the—may the luck-hound turn my blade against me.” A shudder crossed my spine to even mention the fates-bane here, at the seat of its power.

Hadhnri gaped at me, stricken. “But Gunni is your brother too. And I’m—” She broke off abruptly.

“Is he my brother?” I spat into her hurt silence.

“He kept us apart as much as Pedhri Clan Aradoc. He never saw me worthy of you.” This old bitter kernel had grown roots since Sunstead.

“I’m not a child anymore, Hadhnri. I can see things for what they were.

” I sifted my hand through the detritus, chasing the break-joint crack of twigs. “What they are.”

“Am I childish then, Agnir Clan Fein, to have hope still?” Hadhnri said softly. “To remember the oath we made?” She turned to me, moonlight catching on her damp cheeks.

The love in her eyes dried the angry retort on my tongue.

It was honest and broken, held together with sheer will—how could I pretend I did not match it?

If only I could capture her love and hold it to my chest forever.

With gentle thumbs, I brushed away her tears and brought her face to mine.

She held me fast as I kissed her softly.

We pulled apart to ask the silent question.

The answer was music, a music I knew down to the marrow of me.

The moan of the bull deer. The bark of the fox.

How to mend what was broken? The drumming of the clans against Hadhnri’s ribs.

The pipes in my ear. We were a Made thing, as much as any leather wrought.

Steady fingers, the rise and fall of the needle.

Blood in the mouth. War was coming, but I was not alone anymore.

They could not take the fens from us—not the dragonflies, not the Baneswood; not the rush of the Ene or its floods.

Hadhnri, will you forgive me? We were a Making.

That warmth in my stomach. Wet flesh under the thumb.

The rightness of a stitch placed true. The needle piercing through.

Tightening around the throat. Here where we began, we could unmake it all: What if we told them how the luck-hound dogged us?

Would the truth mend what was broken? Will you still fly crow-sure to a cold-stone prince with nothing to offer but soft metal?

Our warmth rising in my stomach. Would the war still come?

Its hot breath on our necks, sharp steel in our backs.

I had always been alone. Will you go, Hadhnri?

A curse. Blinding warmth. The needle piercing through.