Page 22 of Fate’s Bane

T HE C HOICE

“Take me,” Hadhnri said quietly into my braids.

“Again?” I startled from the languid haze of our after. “You’re not finished?”

She stroked a thumb along my bare neck. No collar stopped her kissing me there, long and lingering. The spring bubbled at our heads.

“Steal me from my father. We’ll run away.”

I considered it only a moment longer than I had the last time she asked me, so long ago.

“Your father would still blame me, and my father yours. Unless he knows I went willing, and he will not believe it unless he sees it.”

“Then I’ll go back with you, tonight.”

I let myself entertain that too: escorting Hadhnri back to Clan Fein, telling my father we were wedded—that we had been for years, though there’d been no one to witness our oath but the trees and the fens and the fates-bane itself.

No matter how I twisted the vision in my mind, I could see nothing but the hatred in his eyes and the smudge across his forehead.

He would not have Hadhnri in his clan, no matter how it wounded Pedhri Clan Aradoc or ruined his plans for the Fens.

“I have been thinking. I came because—” With great effort, I let the words rush out. “We should use it. The Makings. You were right. If this is the only way I can touch the world, then—then I will. I’ll grab it by the throat if I must. I want to be my own, for once.”

Hadhnri stared at me, resting on one elbow, mouth open in surprise. My cheeks warmed, embarrassed by my fervor. I waited for her to speak, to say anything at all. Instead, she stroked the bracers at my forearms and looked to the dagger on the belt I had discarded.

I dug into the cool, soft earth with my fingers.

The moon above was no longer sick-yellow but bright as the silver torc round Hadhnri’s neck.

The chirp and buzz and rustle of the insects and animals who dwelt here had gone faint, as if their domain stopped at the edge of the clearing, which was ours and ours alone. Only I did not think it was.

I pushed myself up, slithered to the edge of the spring, and plunged my hand inside. It was colder than I remembered. I closed my eyes and let it run between my fingers.

“Are we cursed?” I asked through clenched teeth, trying not to shiver.

Hadhnri joined me in the water, twining her hand in mine. I shivered anyway.

“It doesn’t feel like a curse.” She squeezed my hand beneath the water and I opened my eyes to see her staring at me.

The luck-hound wasn’t known for giving gifts.

Not in any of the tales I’d heard told. And yet…

everything we’d ever Made together had an element of ill-luck.

And I couldn’t deny that she had some point—nothing ill had happened to us .

I pulled our hands out of the water and kissed her chill knuckles.

I licked the water from my lips. It tasted of apples.

It tasted of Hadhnri, the salt of her sweat, her pleasure.

“What if we are a Making?” I murmured.

I did not realize I’d spoken aloud until Hadhnri hummed a question.

“What if it was the spring that brought us together,” I continued, “you for me, and me for you?”

Hadhnri brought my own knuckles to her lips, her tongue flicking against them, teasing, tickling like a fish. There were no fish in the spring. She smirked, and I wondered what she tasted. But her voice was serious when she turned my face up to hers.

“I’ve made one true choice in my life, Agnir—do not take it away from me.” She kissed me slowly. “I loved you the moment I saw you in the dark, with the slaves—before I even knew what love was. And when I learned, I loved you all the more.”

Far from reassuring me, her words rang even more sharply of fate.

She described something out of our hands, moving us without our knowing better.

Without the fates-bane’s own luck, her father would not have raided mine when he did, and I would not have been taken ward.

I would not have known her as anything more than Hadhnri Second-Born Pedhri Clan Aradoc, child of my father’s enemy. Not simply as Hadhnri, my Hadhnri.

I said none of that. I would not take that choice from her, because I wanted it just as badly.

“Then what will we do?” I asked, turning the subject back. “We build a workshop in the Baneswood?”

“We can Make what we need on our own. If you remember me. I—I think of you, when I work. Sometimes it is enough.”

She sat up and reached for my dagger before reconsidering. She took up her own instead and cut off a new lock of hair, wrapped it around her finger, and then pushed it into my hand. Then she ran her fingers through my braids.

“May I?” she asked.

I nodded, and she cut the end of one. “And then?”

“And then…” Hadhnri hesitated, as if only now realizing how we tempted fate. “We arm our clans with the luck-hound’s gifts.”