Page 24 of Fate’s Bane

T HE B ATTLE

For the next month, I endured Laudir-father-sister’s sidelong scowls.

She would not trust me again. But I took her plain leather jerkin and pressed in a new design.

It was not as cleanly beautiful as it would have been if Hadhnri had done the cutting, but I clutched that twist of her hair in one fist as I worked and would have sworn to the luck-hound itself that I could feel her beside me, feel the warm glow of our Making.

“For luck,” I told Laudir, when I handed it back with a bow. “For Clan Fein.”

She eyed me with suspicion but ran her thumb along the work appreciatively. I say it was not so good as Hadhnri’s, but my skill was no little thing.

Laudir’s jerkin was not the only thing I worked in that month of preparation.

I sank my wishes into resoled boots, carved them into the hafts of hammers and axes, pressed them into scabbards and belts, and sewed them into shirts and trousers and one unlucky pair of undergarments that hung on the line within my reach.

Wishes or curses or prayers, I still couldn’t say what they were, or whose work I did.

I didn’t know how they would manifest. I thought too often of the herald’s man, imagining his purple, unbreathing face.

I could only hope and whisper as I worked, This is not to harm.

Give us peace. This is not to harm. I played the luck-hound’s game, and who knew how our luck would turn?

I knew only that my dread grew and grew, and I couldn’t tell if it was for the coming battle or something of the fates-bane itself, stealing over me as I took of its power.

When I faltered, I thumbed the dry lock of Hadhnri’s hair and thought of her working too.

We marched the moon before second Ha’night, circling the Baneswood to the west and linking with Clans Hanarin and Pall.

Fog rose, swirling about our boots, following us.

The air was humid, but when the sun rose properly, it would burn the fog away.

From there, we turned to the great island in the fens where Clan Aradoc had its sheep and its farms, its people who never hungered. Nothing gnawed my belly today but fear.

Clans Aradoc and Elyin waited atop the hill, and in the sunless gray dawn, I made out Pedhri Clan Aradoc with Hadhnri, a shorter figure with no-less-brilliant red hair.

Gunni was beside him, too, and a host of other figures whose shapes I could easily guess at.

Of course I could; they had been my clan, once.

I stood behind a line of shieldsmen, beside my father and my father-sisters.

Biudir shifted anxiously at my side. I didn’t have to be there; my father said I could stay with the other craftsmen back in the village.

But he was wrong. Hadhnri was here, and so I would be.

The leather bracers were warm on my arms. When I left her in the Baneswood, she made me promise to wear them, no matter what.

I didn’t know what to believe, only that she and I had trusted our fate and the fate of our clans to all our Makings.

At the very least, I could have faith in Hadhnri’s bracers. In Hadhnri’s love.

As long as Hadhnri lives.

“When does it start?” Biudir whispered.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Laudir-father-sister shushed us.

Across the way, Hadhnri gestured toward us in a goose-feather frenzy, then at her father.

I could not see her face, only the shape, but they were not a family given to subtle gestures.

Tall and broad as my love was, she was still smaller than her father, but she balked not, even when he cut her words in half with a firm slice of his hand.

“Ready yourselves.” Garadin Clan Fein held an arm cocked in the air, two fingers up. The shield line before us braced.

As Pedhri Clan Aradoc raised his horn to his lips, Hadhnri leapt between him and us, dragging his arm down.

Pedhri shook his daughter off, but she pushed him back, shouting.

Whatever she said made him pause and stare at our line, the horn in his hand forgotten.

Hadhnri went to her knees, and I knew every word of her confession, though I couldn’t hear it.

Oh Hadhnri, brave Hadhnri.

Pedhri raised his horn again, and this time, Gunni held Hadhnri back, offering her his own rough words as she struggled.

Pedhri Clan Aradoc blew his war horn and no sound came out.

He looked down at it, baffled, as every dog in the village began to bark and howl.

Again, he blew; the dogs increased their madness.

The Aradoc archers lowered their bows in confusion and looked to their leader.

Hadhnri looked toward me, and I knew it for a second confession.

Or, I thought I did. It might have been the warning for what she did next.

Oh Hadhnri, foolish Hadhnri.

She broke free of Gunni’s grasp and sprinted straight for me.

“Now!” cried Garadin Clan Fein. “For Clan Fein! For the true heirs of Bannos!”

He charged, and with him my father-sisters and my youngest brother. With my stone-fruit throat, I followed, praying to reach Hadhnri first.

Pedhri threw the horn to the ground and cried to his archers, but his voice barely carried. In uncoordinated waves, they pulled and they aimed and they loosed. The shieldsmen ahead of us braced and we clammed up tight behind their wall.

An arrow flew true for Laudir-father-sister’s breast, and I cried out as I watched it hit the jerkin I’d tooled.

Her face contorted with pain and that regret that comes with knowing you’ve died sooner than you wanted.

But the arrow did not sink into her chest. It caromed into the arm of my father beside her.

He grunted and yanked the arrow from its shallow hold in the swell of his muscle.

He moved his axe to his other hand and glanced, bewildered, at Laudir.

Laudir, however, looked behind my father to me.

“For luck,” I mouthed. She frowned and rubbed her chest.

By then, instead of burning away with the morning, the fog swirled densely at our hips, rising quickly. We ran again. Arrows again. Shields again. And then we were too close for arrows, and the clans mingled in a way only battle and clan moots would allow.

I had to get to Hadhnri.

I shouted for her as I had in the Baneswood, but my voice was drowned by the crash of fighting around me. I was loath to hurt anyone—I’d lived with our enemy almost my whole life. They’d taught me everything I knew, the good and the ill.

The same feeling did not stay their blades.

I ducked around an axe that came swinging out of the fog that obscured everything but the person in front of me.

I recognized him. Gurdhri, who had sung the songs of Bannos to me and Hadhnri and the other Aradoc children while he turned meat over the fire.

Gurdhri, who had never tweaked my ear because I never stole meat from the spit like the other children, who would cut me off a small piece and shoo me away with a smile.

“Gurdhri, please!” I held my hands up, my seax dangling slack.

Gurdhri’s eyebrows rose. He looked older now, but the years had been kind. They’d given him a soft belly and deep lines of laughter. The laugh-lines turned as he recognized me too.

“I’ll make it quick, girl. A knock on the head and you’ll sleep until it’s over. I’m sorry.” And certain, he looked it.

He reached for me and I jumped back, but the ground beneath my feet was marsh-soft where it should have been solid. I knew the Aradoc land as well as any, but not today. Not with the fates-bane at its work. On faun-legs, I fell.

I found my nose at his boots. Boots I recognized. Boots with a raven-knot I had drawn and watched Hadhnri chase with her awl. They spun a tight little round as Gurdhri searched for me, but I was blanketed by the fog.

“Gurdhri!”

Gurdhri stopped and I grasped his boot. Gurdhri, who was too shy to dance with Theitri no matter how she winked at him, until Hadhnri and I had made him boots to wing his feet.

I held his boot and felt the warmth of the Making we had done, and called to it.

The boot jerked out of my hand, almost kicking me in the face. I rolled to my own feet and saw his fear-wide eyes as his legs spasmed against his will.

“By the left eye, what have you done to me, girl?”

“Please, Gurdhri. I need to find Hadhnri.” Only together could we beg our fathers to stop this.

Who would fast themselves to an enemy of Clan Fein?

I would, Father. I would.

I left Gurdhri dancing in the fog behind me and shouted for Hadhnri again.

The fog was so thick now that I knew it for the fates-bane’s doing.

The full weight of its ill-balanced hand lay upon us.

All around me, fighters struggled against our Makings.

A man with Clan Elyin’s split-moon beneath his eye sat on the ground, his face long with despair, his axes forgotten at his side.

A woman of Clan Pall knelt in the mud, clutching her hand to her ears and begging someone to be quiet, please, please .

Another woman swatted at the bite-flies that swarmed to her leather helm.

Our Makings were working, but our plan had not succeeded. Not yet.

“Hadhnri!” I called again, willing the fog to part for me, as Gurdhri’s shoes had danced at my command, but I had not Made the fog, and it was not mine to command.

“Agnir!”

Gunni First-Born Pedhri Clan Aradoc emerged from the fog before me. Blood speckled his face and smeared his hands. His face was twisted in a rabid-dog sneer.

My knees went soft.

He swung at me and I fell to the side, narrowly missing a blow meant to cleave me from shoulder to hip.

Gunni has a daughter now.

“Brother! Please.” Please, please, please. How often I had said that word today, and how often it had been ignored. “You once called me sister. Will you listen to me? Where is Hadhnri?”

The fury in Gunni’s face faltered, and his sword slammed to the ground.

Hope skipped in my chest. The hilt grip I had Made still wrapped his age-day gift.

He snarled in frustration and yanked the sword up to point at me again, but I could see the effort it took to hold it in the strain of his forearms. The luck-hound was with me.

“‘Sister?’ You betrayed us. We fight today because of you .”

“You killed Onsgar at the clan moot,” I growled. “You knew what this would do to the clans!” I felt the crack of the dried ashes on my forehead as if it were only yesterday I had made my death-oath against Pedhri Clan Aradoc. Against Gunni Clan Aradoc.

A glimpse of anguish turned Gunni into the boy I’d seen at the dueling ground. His sword slammed back to the ground. He yanked in vain to raise it. “I asked him to yield,” he whispered.

“He was my brother. He was an heir of Clan Fein. Please, Gunni, tell me where she is.”

He shook his head. “You do not deserve her, Agnir Clan Fein. She is too brave, too loyal for a Fein snake like you. She will do her duty to our clan and unite us in peace with the Queen-Beyond-the-Fens.” His muscles bunched as he ripped his sword up again.

It seemed lighter this time, and he brought it high.

His words cut. They would not have, if some part of me did not agree. I spoke anyway, through my sudden tears.

“Against her will? Though she is already wed to me?”

He hesitated, straining beneath the blade’s desire to plummet. “You should have known your place, Agnir.”

As Gunni’s blade swung down toward my head, I reached for the luck-hound’s cord, the cord binding me to Hadhnri.

I shut my eyes. I whispered her name.