Page 23 of Fate’s Bane

T HE W ARNING

We parted, eventually, after loving each other again and drinking from the spring in great, thirsty gulps.

The journey home was oddly easy—or perhaps I was too drunk with the feel of Hadhnri on my skin to notice the tangles the trail led me down until it spat me out on familiar ground.

I picked my way through the wetland at the borders of Clan Fein, feeling Hadhnri’s absence, and at the same time, full of her warmth.

What did the fates-bane know of love, I wondered? We told no tales of that.

I froze in the dark at the sound of a buzzard call. A warning. I responded with the hoot of a marsh owl, and the sentries on guard made themselves visible.

“Agnir?” said one. It was Solwin. How beautiful she was, with arms thicker than Hadhnri’s and a chin as hard as her anvil. And yet.

“Solwin,” I hailed her and continued toward home.

“Where have you been?” she asked, cutting a zagged path to intercept me. The coolness of her voice surprised me.

I gave the lie I’d planned: “I wanted to walk in the woods. It calms me. I didn’t go far, don’t worry.”

Her scowl deepened. How well did she remember the night she had to finish my watch, or that ill-luck journey home from Clan Hanarin?

“You were gone a thre’night,” Solwin growled.

My mouth dropped open, all pretense gone. I jerked around to find the moon, and yes, fine slivers had been shaved off her coin. I stared dumbly at Solwin and she took my arm roughly.

“I’m to take you to Garadin Chief.”

Solwin marched me to the roundhouse, where the fires were still burning. Garadin Clan Fein stood from his great chair when Solwin brought me in.

“Agnir?” He came hesitantly toward me, flanked by all three of my father-sisters.

“Father.” I freed my arm from Solwin’s and knelt before my father.

“My own dear one.” He knelt to meet me and whispered, “Where were you, Agnir First-Born Garadin Clan Fein?”

The keen, dangerous edge of his voice slid against my ear.

“I was in the Baneswood, Father,” I said. Those in the roundhouse gasped.

Garadin Fein looked around us, nostrils flaring.

He got up and left the roundhouse, and I followed back into the night.

Insects buzzed above the water and frogs plopped in and out.

We heard the tinny squeaks of bats and even the odd bark of a fox.

And of course, the noise of the clan’s evening: the food, the laughter, the grumbling complaints, the last of the chores.

When we were alone—almost alone; I heard Laudir-father-sister’s deliberate footsteps behind me—he said, “We sent a search party into the Baneswood. They didn’t find you.”

I thought of the way the paths twisted and turned. If the fates-bane did not wish me found, no one would have found me.

“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 say softened , 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.