“We thought you were dead, you know,” he said, reluctantly releasing her.
“I ran into the unexpected,” was all she could think to say.
“Don’t you always?”
He bent to take one of the sled’s poles and help pull it. He glanced over his shoulder to examine the load.
“Are those…?” he began.
“Yes,” she replied wearily.
His grip tightened, but he said nothing.
They passed through the gate, and the guard stared at Kala like he’d seen a ghost, stepping back to give her an unnecessarily wide berth. Villagers came out to watch the procession and murmured prayers for their protection.
Superstitious fools, she thought.
“We’d better take this to the square,” her grandfather suggested. “There’ll be people there to bring the meat to the stores and the pelts to the tanners. Then you can go home and rest. You look like death.” He grimaced at his careless choice of words and said nothing more.
She nodded, and they turned toward the center of the village.
A shape exploded from an adjacent alley and collided with Kala, almost knocking her off her feet. Meadow hugged her so tightly it hurt.
“You’re not dead!” she declared but examined Kala from head to toe to verify the truth of it.
“No, not dead,” Kala confirmed.
“We thought for sure you were dead. Lily cried so much. She wanted to say prayers for you, but your grandfather wouldn’t permit it. She was so mad.” Meadow walked along, refusing to release Kala’s arm and filling her in about her would-have-been funeral. Calix peeked out from the smithy and locked eyes with her, but then just looked down and withdrew back inside. Kala was too fatigued to think about the oddness of it.
“You must come by, you must!” Meadow pleaded. “But maybe after you wash. You smell like a dog.” She wrinkled her nose but didn’t release Kala.
“Kala’s going to rest first, Meadow,” her grandfather said, “but she’ll come by first thing tomorrow, okay?”
Meadow didn’t seem the least bit okay with the delay, but she relented when she saw that Kala didn’t object to her grandfather’s plan.
“Fine,” she huffed.
They arrived at the village square and dropped the sled. Villagers who had been milling around transferred the cured meat into baskets and carried them off to the stores. Others rolled up the wolf pelts and carried them off to the tanners, whispering in low tones. Kala just stood by wearily.
“You have a tooth on a string around your neck,” Meadow observed.
“So I have,” Kala said and tucked it back in.
“That’s gross.”
Kala chuckled and patted Meadow on the shoulder. “Tomorrow?”
“Promise?” Meadow begged.
“I promise,” Kala replied, and with that, turned and headed home.
“I’ll heat some water and take your clothes to be washed,” her grandfather said.
Kala nodded without really hearing what he’d said.
She didn’t remember washing up or changing into sleep clothes, but she awoke to her grandfather shaking her shoulder gently.
“You’ll have a very angry Meadow if you sleep through the entire morning.”
“Is it morning already?” she asked groggily. He didn’t answer, just gestured to a cold breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and buttered bread sitting on a chair by her bed.
“Thank you for breakfast,” she told him, sat up to reach for it, and began devouring it.
“More like lunch,” he chuckled, mussed up her hair, and returned to the kitchen.
She panickedly wondered what she’d done with the stranger’s dagger that she had tucked in her belt the night before. There was no trace of it. Her grandfather hadn’t said anything, and if he had seen it, he surely would have asked her about its origin. It clearly wasn’t from the village, given its high-quality edge and unusual styling. She sat up higher to think and noticed a lump under her mattress. She surreptitiously reached beneath it and felt the dagger’s pommel. Relieved that she’d at least had the presence of mind to hide it before going to sleep, she pushed it a little farther under the mattress. She got up to straighten the covers to dissuade her grandfather from making her bed later in the day and discovering it. This earned her a raised eyebrow from him but no questions. She threw on some clothes, hugged him while he washed her dishes, and set off for Lily’s.
Kala took a roundabout route to buy herself time to think about what to say to Lily about her mother, if anything at all. On one hand, she had a right to know about her mother, but would the knowledge just hurt her more? Lily had already come to terms with her mother’s death, and Kala couldn’t see any point in forcing her to relive it. Plus, she’d have to reveal that she’d met a stranger, and the village wouldn’t take that well, fearful of the outside world as it was. They would assume that she was somehow ‘in league’ with people outside the village and probably banish her just to feel safer.
As if to underscore the point, a mother whisked her young daughter inside as Kala passed. A new level of crazy, Kala thought, but her thoughts were interrupted by Cera approaching. She looked her usual radiant self, but she had a glint in her eye.
“You don’t believe in straight lines, do you?” Cera accused her lightheartedly. “No wonder it took you so long to come home.”
Kala glanced around and noticed that she was nowhere near her home, or Lily’s, and certainly nowhere between the two. She felt a little guilty. “I needed a walk to clear my head.”
“No matter. Lily’s in the gardens. I’ll walk you over.”
“It’s good to see you, Cera,” Kala told her earnestly.
“It’s good to see you too,” Cera replied nonchalantly.
Kala stopped and grabbed Cera’s arm, turning her so that they faced each other. “I mean that,” she declared. “I know I come and go, and it seems like I don’t care, but you and Lily are my world.”
Cera softened and quipped, “I guess we’ll need a bigger bed.”
“Shut up.” Kala punched her shoulder and hauled her in for a hug. Finished with being so ‘un-Kala-like’ for the moment, they resumed their walk.
Cera restarted the conversation. “You’ve added to your mystique by the way, but probably not in a good way.”
“I may have noticed,” Kala replied, remembering the little girl in the doorway.
“Those were dire wolf pelts you brought back, Kala. Dire wolves! Three of them!”
“I remember. I was there.”
“Okay, never mind the impossibility of walking away from a single dire wolf – but three?!”
“There were five, actually,” Kala said without thinking and immediately regretted it.
“I wouldn’t say that too widely,” Cera advised her. “You know how many of our hunters would soil themselves if they faced even one dire wolf?” Cera paused to let that sink in. “It gets better – the tanners poured over those pelts for clues. The working theory was that the wolves treed you, and with some lucky shots, you killed them from above.”
Kala didn’t say anything and kicked herself for not having concocted a plausible story during her return.
“Know what they found? Of course you do. No arrow wounds from above, only a couple from the side. You were on the ground, Kala!” Cera held her by both arms and stared at her wide-eyed. “Still not done… one wolf had wounds that wouldn’t have pierced any major organs, the second wolf had no wounds at all, and the third wolf was hacked to death. They’re saying that you killed them with dark magic.”
“Hardly. One wolf went down with an arrow through its eye, another with an arrow in the throat. I don’t remember what happened with the third. It was a blur.”
Cera glanced down at Kala’s sheathed knife. “Hacked to death. That’s what happened.”
“I just got sloppy skinning it, that’s all,” Kala suggested.
“You? Sloppy? Sure,” Cera said skeptically. “And there were two more?”<
br />
“They had somewhere better to be, I suppose,” Kala replied weakly.
“Okay. So, let’s recap. Five wolves surrounded you. Wait, scratch that... five dire wolves surrounded you. You killed three like some kind of death-dealing goddess and scared the other two off. YOU scared the wolves. THEY… were scared… of YOU?!”
Kala sighed, “I’m not saying I shouldn’t be dead. I just got supremely lucky, that’s all. And I was terrified.”
“That shooting says otherwise.”
“I can’t explain it, Cera, and you’re scaring me just reminding me about it.”
“Sorry,” she said, noticing that Kala was on the verge of tears. “You know they don’t know what to do about the meat.”
“What the hell?!” Kala exclaimed, exasperated. Her muscles still ached from dragging it for days and lugging up into a tree every night.
“First of all, the jury is out on whether dire wolves are poisonous and therefore whether their meat must be as well. And seeing how there’s not a scratch on you, we still can’t put that debate to rest. Second, because ‘clearly’ the wolves were killed with dark magic, might the magic have tainted the meat?”
Kala was exasperated. “I ate that meat for days!”
“Right. The unkillable killing-machine says she’s fine, so the meat must be fine!”
“They’d better not Gods-damn throw out that meat. I’ll eat it in the winter while they go hungry.”
“If they don’t run you out of the village first for being a witch. Guess what the only thing saving your hide is currently?”
“I’ll bite. What?”
“They’re scared of you. Well, maybe not Torin. He’s an idiot and too manly to be scared. In fact, I think he might be spoiling to mix it up with you just to prove that he’s a big, strong man, and you’re a small, weak girl.”
“I AM a small, weak girl.”
“If you say so, unkillable killing-machine. I like the sound of that, although I guess ‘Kala’ is simpler to engrave on a birthday present.”
“Like you’ve ever gotten me a birthday present.”
“Just my undying love.”
Kala put an arm around her and gave her another hug.
“You’re scary, girl,” Cera concluded.
Kala pushed her away playfully.
Cera sobered up. “Brace yourself. You’re not going to be happy when you see Lily.”
“Of course, I’m going to be happy to see her. Is she mad at me for being gone so long?”
“Of course she is, but that’s not it. She was overcome with joy when Meadow told her you were back.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“Better to see for yourself. Just prepare yourself, okay?”
Kala bristled at being kept in the dark but went along with it. They walked through the gate to the fields where the gardens lay. Kala noticed the guard tighten his grip on his spear as she passed him. The world has gone truly mad, she thought.
Kala and Cera spotted Lily before she noticed them. She was bent over picking peas and jumped up when she saw them, spilling her basket. She squealed and rushed to envelop Kala in a long hug.
“I’m getting jealous over here,” Cera finally said.
Lily released Kala and looked her in the eye. “I so want to hug you and hit you at the same time.”
“I guess I’m lucky you can’t do both at the same time,” Kala said.
“I could always kick you.”
“True, but that’d be awkward.”
“I’m so happy you're not dead.”
“Thanks. Me too. Happy I’m not dead, I mean.” Kala noticed bruising around Lily’s eye and froze. “What happened to your eye?”
“Oh, that? Nothing,” Lily said and looked down shyly.
“That’s not nothing.”
“Don’t be mad.”
“Why in the world would I be mad?”
“You were gone. I thought you were dead. I cried all the time.”
Kala reached out to rub her shoulder.
“It kind of made him mad. He told me to stop being such a child.”
Kala felt anger rising from the pit of her stomach. “He hit you? Your father?” She unconsciously reached for her knife.
“No, not really… well kind of, yes… but I was a mess. He told me to stop scaring Meadow, and he was right that I shouldn’t scare her,” Lily stammered.
Kala seethed.
Cera interrupted, “Don’t make it worse, Kala.”
Kala wheeled on her. “Worse?! What could be worse than that monster?”
“Being sent away.”
“What the hell are you saying?”
“You’re barely fifteen, right? And Lily not yet quite sixteen?”
“Yes,” Kala replied, finally understanding what Cera was suggesting.
“You do something rash while you’re still young enough to be sent away, and you will be, or that vindictive bastard will send Lily away just to watch it destroy you.”
“His own daughter?” Kala was incredulous.
“He’s an asshole of the highest order. No offense, Lily,” Cera said.
Lily just scuffed the dirt with her toe.
“You roar into town accusing the head of the Council, and I promise you that your life will end. While I get that you don’t value it that highly, I can’t let you put Lily in jeopardy.”
Kala noticed that Cera had moved to block Kala’s path back to the village and let out the breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “No, I suppose not... but we have to do something.”
“I wrestle with that every day,” Cera sighed and walked over to hug Lily gently.
Kala sighed and started picking up the spilled peas. “He’s an asshole,” she muttered.
“Welcome home,” Cera replied.
5
Kala
Kala’s life settled back into routine. The villagers more or less stayed out of her way, and she stayed out of theirs. She was saddened that the camaraderie she’d shared with the hunters had been strained by her inexplicable survival from the dire wolves. They no longer regarded her as one of them.
Calix avoided her too, which bothered her more than she cared to admit. She’d catch glimpses of him here and there, but he’d always duck away before she was sure enough that it was him to call out to him.
One day she asked Lily, “What’s with Calix?”
“He’s still mad at you, but he’ll come around.”
“What reason does he have to be mad at me?”
“He took it hard when you disappeared. You do that a lot, so it didn’t faze anyone at first, but then the days stretched on, and you still hadn’t returned. He volunteered for gate duty just to keep an eye out for you, and you know how he hates just standing around. I saw him out by the tree line several times, peering into the trees. Cera tells me that he harangued his hunter friends to organize a search party, but they refused. Not that they didn’t care about you, mind you, just that it was a pointless endeavor, they claimed. The woods are vast and either you were alive, or you were dead, either way not requiring their help. He went mad with worry in his bottled-up way.”
Kala mulled this over, trying to come up with some type of overture she could make that would smooth things over between them and bring things back to the way they were before. Not capable of subtlety, she abandoned this pursuit and simply marched up to him the next day.
“Cera, Lily, and I miss you,” she told him.
“I miss them too,” he replied, feeling cornered. “And you too, not just them,” he stammered. He reddened and grew frustrated.
“So, come by.”
“I will.”
“Great. When?”
“When I can.”
“You know you can anytime,” she retorted, then softened, not wanting to fight. She reached out and touched his arm.
He relaxed a bit, staring at her hand on his arm. “We worry, Kala. You come, and you go, and you just leave us here in the dark. How lo
ng will you be gone? Will you come back? Are you okay?”
“I don’t go out into the woods for the fun of it.”
“Are you sure?”
Kala ignored the implication. “You know that pretty well my only value to the village is as a hunter, but they won’t let me be a hunter, so I just hunt. Besides, it’s stupid the way they go out in groups. When it’s a long winter, and there’s still food to eat, what I do will have mattered.”
“I know that. Hell, everyone knows that, even though they’ll never admit it to your face that they appreciate you. But you could let us know you’re okay. You could send up smoke signals. The other hunters do it sometimes.”
Kala laughed despite herself. Calix bristled. “I’m sorry,” she recovered. “It’s not a game out there. Every moment is dangerous, and you’d have me stop, gather wood and grass, tend a fire to send signals, and then extinguish it so that it doesn’t spread and burn the village to the ground.”
“Yes. That’d be nice.”
“I’d be risking my life every moment I wasn’t concentrating on staying alive. The hunting parties only signal for help moving large game because they can set up a perimeter. They can guard themselves. I can’t. I assume your preference is for me to come back alive?”
“Of course, that’s what I want,” he replied, staring into her eyes with uncharacteristic boldness. “What I want is…” he began, but his courage failed him, and he never finished his thought. They both looked down awkwardly.
“So, you’ll come by tonight to Lily’s?” Kala said to re-assert normalcy. “There’s a Council meeting, so we’ll have the place to ourselves.”
“I will, yes.”
“Thank you,” Kala exhaled, and pulled him into a hug that he accepted stiffly.
Things gradually fell further into routine. Kala was more conscientious about letting her friends know when she headed out to hunt. She couldn’t predict how long she’d be gone as the success or failure of the hunt would dictate that, but they gradually came to worry less.
Raven's Wings Page 4
