by Camilla Monk
Roasting my catch took longer than I imagined; my little fire of dried grass and twigs didn’t compare to the stone oven we had in the courtyard back at the farm. By the time I took the first exquisitely smoky bite, the moons glowed high above my head. I started with the legs and saddle because I could never have those at home: my mother and I always ate after the men, and we only got the head and tripe. I’d been told the reason was that men needed the fleshiest parts to grow bigger and stronger. It was but one of the many rules I obeyed without question until the day I caught my own hare and sunk my teeth into all that juicy forbidden meat.
I was sucking each bone clean when I felt the first drops of moisture on my forearm. Moment later, a light drizzle spotted the flat rock I liked to think of as my only piece of furniture. The downpour would come later, in the middle of the night. The sigillaria’s thick foliage would stop at least part of it; I curled against its trunk. Stormy nights were almost entirely dark. The clouds would hide the moons, and crusamantes never open when it rains—they drink the water that seeps inside the ground through their roots. For a very long time, I just thought flowers drank the raindrops that touched their petals. Turned out not.
My belly was full, but I couldn’t sleep, not with the raindrops pattering in the leaves, dripping on my knees, my hands. I was cold, and now that the sun was gone, my fear had returned. I kept staring at the black mouth of the cave, the ripples marring the pool’s surface. Thinking. I’d never really worried about the future before. Back at the farm, we tended to simply tackle whatever came our way. Future was the next meal, or even the next winter. Anything beyond that were dreams—or nightmares. I wanted to stay here, in my sanctuary, but there was a tiny part of me who understood it couldn’t be—who already knew.
I don’t remember if I truly slept, or if my eyes only fluttered close for the briefest moment. I know though, that I when opened them, a furtive yellow glow gilded the walls of the corridor connecting the pool to the lake. I went perfectly still. Servilius, the soldier’s treasure, and the hare: it all inevitably led to this moment when I glimpsed the light of a lantern in the cave. Then I heard voices, and somewhere in the woods, barking.
There was a steady pulse in my temples, a tension in my muscles that should have petrified my body. Yet in that moment I recognized that something had started to shift inside me. Fear was no longer an obstacle; it was a heated rush in my veins that made every scent and every sound sharper, every fleck of light in the dark brighter. I sprang to my feet, flung the precious satchel around my shoulder, and secured the sword belt tight around my waist. All I had in the world. All I was.
I started the climb out of the sanctuary at the sounds of water splashing and men swearing in the corridor. I recognized Mamarcius and Servilius’s voices. I hoped that fat pig Mamarcius stayed stuck in there as the lake rose and that Servilius drowned with him. I didn’t bother listening to the night before hauling myself atop the last rock—there was simply no time to bother about wolves. With the continuous murmur of the light rain in the trees, I wouldn’t have heard much anyway.
I ran through the woods, probably east, but most of all away from Tia’s barking. Branches clawed at me and caught in my hair in the dark, and my boots kept slipping into the rain-soaked ground, but I would push through, jump over any obstacle: I’d do anything, risk everything to escape. I didn’t see the flash of black fur bursting from a thicket. I registered the growl, the claws scraping my arms. Pain flared in my shoulder as Tia bit through my tunic, but it was the satchel’s strap that thankfully took most of the damage.
We rolled together to the ground and hit a dead stump. Like me, she was now drenched, her fur covered in pine needles and leaves. She let go with a snarl and immediately lunged back at me. I had no time to think. I saw her glistening shape barreling toward me, a flash of white—her fangs. I kicked blindly, as hard as I could, and I felt her body fly away and hit a rock with a satisfying thud. I had known her since childhood, fed her, petted her, but now she was a beast, and I had become one too. I heard her wail of pain, saw her struggle in vain to get up, and a shiver of relief and pleasure ran through my body. She was like the hare. Prey.
“I’ll fucking kill you, witch!”
My head snapped up. I squinted at the pair of shadows standing farther down the trail, the golden glint of an oil lantern and the raindrops running down its iron and glass body. They moved closer. One of them held a spade, and a patchy brown beard grew on his chin. His hair was the same color, matted to his neck by the rain. Arun. He’d always scared me more than Lar, who stood at his brother’s side, his younger features taut with horror.
Voices reached us across the woods, like distant croaks. I couldn’t see their lamps yet, but I knew they were coming. Who would listen to my prayers this time? Picumnus? Bullshit. He was nowhere. There had been no one to listen to our pleas when my father’s leg had turned purple, no one to stop Servilius when he’d decided I was something he had a right to fuck. There was no one for the wolves when men caught them.
And no one for men when the wolf got to them first.
It started with the tension in my legs, like lighting in my blood. But this time it was different. In the dark, the warm summer rain, my hand rested on the hilt of the soldier’s sword. The blade I’d cleaned meticulously in the pool the day before, and whose sharp edge had nicked my palm when doing so.
Arun raised his spade. I saw him like I’d seen the hare, a single shiny dot around which everything else was a blur. Before I knew it, I leaped and the sword was out of its scabbard, too heavy in my hand. I swung it clumsily. There was a beat of stunned silence, and then a broken howl. The oil lantern had fallen to the ground, next to the spade. I caught the scent of blood. Red, staining Arun’s hand, his tunic.
Everything seemed to come to me in flashes. Lar’s panicked pants, the trees, and far away, the roar of thunder, vibrating through my rib cage. Then I saw the fingers, oddly white against the dark forest ground. My stomach rose at the back of my throat; around me the trees were spinning. I sheathed the sword and exploded forward, shoving Arun to the ground as I jumped over him. He wouldn’t stop screaming, and the noise drilled in my skull, even as I sprinted away.
I hadn’t meant to do this; I only wanted to be alone and free and safe. No. As I raced past trees, up a hill whose top I couldn’t see, I knew that prayer of mine was a lie. There was a monster inside me that needed to be fed. Of course, I hadn’t meant to wound Arun: in truth, I would have wanted to kill him, to look into his eyes and feel powerful as he died. Behind me, the voices grew weaker, swallowed by the forest and the storm that poured down and washed everything away. But I couldn’t escape the storm in my head and the sight of Arun’s fingers, his never-ending wails of agony.
I ran until there was nowhere left to run. Through the water drops blurring my vision, I saw the end of the woods, an abrupt cliff plunging down the other side of Bride’s Lake. I was where the likes of me didn’t go, where the boats that sold spices came from, and where home ended for good. I couldn’t even see the water below, only the fog, devouring everything as if the sky had collapsed onto the earth. Shouts tore through the woods. Servilius and the others were closing on me. I took a step toward the edge, blocking their voices, their hate. I looked down at the void where all light had died.
There might be rocks underneath, a gritty shore where I’d shatter every bone in my body and die like my father. But the dark mist called to me, whispering that the other side of the lake, there’d be more water than I’d ever seen, and real cities where I could buy a vegetable cart and have a new life. The rain was harsh and cool on my face. Lightning struck, far away in the hills, and as the sky turned white, I jumped.
5
I fell through the clouds into the unknown, and for an all too brief moment, I was weightless. Tethering on the edge between life and death, I had never felt so free. But it was life that fate chose for me, and I crashed into icy water. Cold instantly seeped through my t
unic and trousers, crushing my lungs. Weighted down by my sword and satchel, I kicked and clawed, fought to find my way back to the surface. I gulped murky water, then, at last, air. Rain hammered Bride’s Lake as far as my eyes could see—a dark horizon I prayed might be the shore.
A flash of lighting illuminated trees and coated their rain-soaked leaves with silver. Gasping for breath, I paddled with one arm, while the other kept the satchel and sword firmly tucked to my side—I’d cling to them even if they were to ballast me down to the bottom of the lake. I couldn’t tell how far I was from the shore with the rain whipping my face, but my toes eventually met rocks and soon dug into blessed silt. My body grew heavy as I emerged out of the water and the weight of the night set on my shoulders, doubled by that of my drenched clothes and weary soul.
I staggered along the shore, toward the woods. My fumbling palms met bark; I leaned on a trunk to catch my breath. After that, I kept going for a while through the woods along a sinuous trail. I was long past exhaustion, soaked to the bones, and as good as blind, but I kept telling myself that if I stopped and knelt, I would never rise again. So, I trudged on, aimless.
The first thing I noticed was the rain growing sparser, weaker. Like mine, the sky’s rage was spent, and I could see more clearly through the dying drizzle. Scattered on the forest ground as if an unseen hand had tossed them from above, the rocks I treaded on were too flat and too square to be the design of nature. They paved the way to darkened ruins—broken columns and collapsed walls—some outlined by a faint green glow. Divine water?
I wiped the water off my eyes and took a quick look around, half-expecting to witness some sort of apparition guarding this long-forsaken shrine. It was just me though; not even the beasts would care to risk a paw out of their burrow in that weather. Summoning the last shreds of strength in my body, I hurried down the slippery path to this unexpected shelter.
There was nothing left of the porch and portico, just rubble buried under the earth forming mounds on top of which patches of crusamantes buds awaited the end of the rain to unfurl and bathe the ruins in their glow. A few complete columns still stood, supporting part of the roof, to shield the only treasure left in these walls: a small pool, guarded by moss-coated clay spirits and filled with a green luminescent liquid. I took a few cautious steps and went to sat by the edge, reduced to a shivering sack of bones and dirty clothes. I reached for the pool and trailed trembling fingers across the surface. Shimmering emerald tendrils spiraled around the ripples, only to scatter again like glittering dust.
Divine water. We had some, too, in a stream not far from my village’s temple, water that would glow green—a sign that Meditrina herself had bathed there. Priests said it could heal anything, and they collected it in fine glass bottles. The water only worked if applied with the right kind of spell though, and few villagers had enough money to pay for that, so people just went to the stream and washed their swollen foot or bad tooth with the water—but like most free remedies, it didn’t do much.
My mother had tried that, too, on my father’s leg—a few drops in the poultice after offering locks of her hair to Meditrina, like an old neighbor had recommended. Was it because my mother’s hair wasn’t good enough that the goddess had refused to help my father? I swallowed a bitter lump in my throat. Maybe the truth was that Meditrina’s powers had left the divine water long ago and we all crawled in darkness without even knowing it.
I scrambled to my feet, a surge of renewed anger heating my skin despite my damp tunic. The pool’s green mirror held no answers, only a shivering reflection of my gaunt features. The twine binding holding my braids in place had come loose at some point during my escape and freed a tangled mess of curls and leaves that now fell on my shoulders. How strange to think that a mere fortnight ago, my mother had helped me comb all that hair and braided it tight until my skull hurt. She always said a poor woman’s hair was her only treasure. What would she say if she saw me know? Would she cry when she learned I had turned into a feral beast and maimed Arun’s hand?
I dragged a weary gaze up at the ceiling, where a piece of mosaic still clung. The benevolent face of Meditrina. I knew there was no one to listen, least of all her, but I held up a strand of my mud-matted hair and shouted, “Are they good enough?”
My cry ended in a whistling breath as my throat tightened. Meditrina’s flowing blonde curls and soft smile were getting blurry, curtained by tears I could no longer back. But the goddess wouldn’t answer, so I fumbled for the knife tucked under my belt. I took it from its leather scabbard and grabbed a knotted lock with my free hand. I sliced it off without thinking. The moment after, I looked down at the clump of wet curls in my hand and my grip faltered around the wooden handle.
Even now, lost at the end of my world—at the end of myself—I couldn’t shake that stupid fear of being shorn, like some unfaithful wife, or a defiant whore who forwent her red veil to pass as an honest woman. A woman’s hair mattered so much to everyone—to my mother, the men who looked at it… My stomach heaved at the thought. I didn’t need any hair for men to desire. And if I couldn’t escape the skin Servilius had touched, at least, I could shed that small part of myself.
The rain had stopped, and my tears were dry. I resumed hacking steadily at the locks until what little was left of my hair stood almost straight on my head like the quills of a spikehog. My treasure now lay at my feet, a dead thing rotting like everything else in these ruins. Never in my life had I felt so empty. New and old. Peaceful and sad. I glanced at the pool of divine water and startled when I caught the reflection of a boy my age in the pool. A certain softness to the oval of his face that could have been feminine, if it hadn’t been for his tunic. High cheekbones too—had I ever noticed them before?
He looked away when I did; neither of us wanted to sleep here in that useless temple, under Meditrina’s mocking gaze. He took his satchel, walked away, and when his legs grew too tired to even muster another step in the dark, he found a good sigillaria and lay under its boughs.
6
“Woohoo, look at that! Officer shit for sure!”
“Where the hell did he get that?”
The voices were a distant rumble, but it was a tinkling sound that roused me from sleep. I squinted my eyes at the blurry shapes shifting at the edge of my vision, haloed by morning light. Strangers. My legs jerked in a primal reflex to sit up, only to twitch uselessly. Raw panic thundered in my veins when I realized I couldn’t move. My throat was dry, too, my shoulders ached… and my hands were tied in my back. This time my eyes popped wide open, and the first thing I saw was the tip of a sword—my sword—hovering so close to my nose I had to cross my eyes to see it.
“Easy, birdshit…” A young male voice warned.
My gaze trailed up the blade, past the hilt to a boy with short brown hair. He must have been around Arun’s age, with a lean and grimy face and angry gray eyes. My toes curled when I noticed he too carried a sword—one I feared he knew how to use. Two other men stood behind him, but the breeze carried the laugh of others, somewhere in the surrounding woods. The ones before me carried daggers and thick leather arm guards, and the gray-eyed boy even had a full iron gauntlet protecting his sword hand. Definitively not farmers… Bandits, then?
The tinkle I’d registered earlier was that of my five sigli being dropped in the leather pouch of a fiend of at least thirty, with a bald pate and razor-sharp cheekbones that looked like he’d had never fully recovered from some terrible deprivation. My gaze lingered in on their third companion: I’d seen a few such travelers at fairs and markets; dark-skinned men born a thousand leagues south across the Subea sea. He seemed about the same age as the boy threatening me, but he was bigger and taller than anyone I’d ever seen. Even so, there was an odd softness to his face—the mark of a boy who’d grown too fast.
A thousand thoughts collided in my head like the shattered pieces of a clay pot. I lay on a bed of humus, in the middle of a forest trail, in the very place I’d fall
en asleep. They’d roped me up. Stolen my money. And now…? My legs squeezed together instinctively; I didn’t want any of these men to touch me. I stared up at them, still as the hare I’d killed. It was my turn to cling in despair to every frantic beat of my heart in my throat. They were the predators now.
The bald one eyed me with a lopsided frown. “He’s skinny; I don’t think he’ll do.”
He? I held my breath; they didn’t know. I wore my makeshift tunic and a soldier’s dark trousers, after all. The mess of short locks on my head could be mistaken for a boy’s, especially since my face itched under a layer of dirt and dried mud. The giant boy looked at me, too, but said nothing. He scratched dense black coils on his head and averted his eyes.
The gray-eyed one lifted the sword away from me. “What’s your name?”
My mouth opened, but I caught my tongue before it could betray me and replied, “Constanter.” The first name that came to my mind. My father’s name.
“We take him,” he told the others.
The bald one, who I now noticed smelled faintly of fish, frowned. “You sure, Victrix?”
Victrix. Now at least I had a name to go with those gray eyes. Victrix nodded, prompting his bald accomplice to kneel and pull a dagger from his belt. I recoiled in fear, before he grabbed my legs none too gently and sliced the worn rope securing my ankles. “Get up,” he growled.
My eyes darted to each of them in turn. Could I outrun them once I was back on my feet? Probably… but they had weapons, and there were more men not far away. One of them had just yelled to another that he was a cunt licker. My captors chuckled at my hesitation, anticipating a fruitless struggle. I wouldn’t give them the pleasure. I clambered to my feet with as much dignity as my bound hands would allow.
Victrix sneered. “Thanks for the blade.”
