Requies Dawn

by J L Forrest

  He laughed. “Seems your choice is made.”

  “I will return to them, will I not?”

  Again, he laughed.

  “And what about love?” she asked.

  “Lust, you mean?”

  She punched his arm. “Love.”

  “What do you know about love, little sister? You never fell in love with anyone.”

  “There was Itrwra.”

  “Lust!” Erhde tussled her hair. “That lasted all of a month.”

  “I suppose.” Nyahri shrugged. “But now yw Sabi and Dhaos?”

  “Who could have guessed that, in a single cycle of the moon, you would pass from condemning your best friend to death, for want of loving him, to having your head turned by a goddess and an Oudwn boy?”

  “Did you not fall in love with Mycah as readily?”

  Erhde’s wife died a month after he did, an accident on the hunt. She never finished grieving her husband’s death, and Nyahri still mourned them both.

  Her brother gave a conceding nod. “Yea, less than a month and I knew I wanted her forever, and she wanted me. Crazy Inwn woman.”

  “Do you have her?”

  “Eh?” His eyebrows knitted.

  “Forever?”

  He only winked, ignoring her question. “Listen, your choice is not really between Dhaos or the Atreiani, or between the Atreiani and our people.”

  “What is it then?” Nyahri squeezed Erhde’s hand, as if his solidity might fade.

  “You never wanted to be Ahtras. You barely wanted to stay at camp. Hunting before you should have, raiding before you should have. You always wanted to ride farther, faster, and harder than men twice your age. Nay, your choice is not between her or him or them.”

  Brother and sister walked a few more steps along the riverbank. He smiled to himself, enjoying a private amusement.

  “Tell me,” Nyahri said, “stop teasing.”

  “Your choice is between everything which is out there—” His hand swept toward the horizon, all the plains and mountains and forests of the world, the heavens and the earth. “—and staying right here—” The grass and dirt beneath her feet. “—stuck on what you have already lost.”

  She blinked, squinting in the sunlight, her focus on the distance. Erhde hugged her, kissing her forehead, and his expression darkened.

  “Stop your worry!” he said.

  Erhde dove into the river, emerging a heartbeat after, shaking the water from his head. Nyahri laughed at him.

  He beckoned her. “Come, sister, the water is warm.”

  She jumped in after him, laughing as he splashed at her.

  A moment later he disappeared beneath the currents, never to emerge. Blood swirled in the waters which murdered him.

  “Erhde!”

  Nyahri woke with his name on her lips, her heart straining for him. A shudder passed through her, and she took a deep breath. As if in response, a pain clenched her abdomen, and a smear of wetness puddled against her inner thigh.

  “Gods,” she whispered, a quiet complaint.

  From her bags she unpacked a clout of fine wool and lambskin, traded from the households of the Eastern Rangers, whose family herded sheep. She had jammed a dozen into her gear, hoping she’d need no more before she could return to the E’cwnii. The water in the lean-to’s washbowl was cold, but not frozen, and she wetted a cloth to wipe away the blood. Nyahri tied the clout to herself, settled back into the furs beside yw Sabi, and frowned.

  “The goddesses honor you,” the priestesses had said to Nyahri, some years ago, on the day of her menarche.

  Now, Nyahri grumbled. The goddesses can keep their honor, she thought, one hand on her belly, trying to will the cramps away.

  As she breathed, in that briefest moment, the soft silence of the snow and the pines lent her some comfort. So did the black-haired and inhuman woman slumbering beside her.

  {16}

  The snow-covered shelter bowed under the weight of snowpack, and the scents of conifer and pine sap thickened as the sunrise brightening by degrees. From outside the camp, a noise flittered to Nyahri’s ears, and she dismissed all thoughts of bad dreams and menses.

  The horses snorted at another whispering movement, a tumble of snow close by—an archer taking position, nocking an arrow. Nyahri drew her longknife.

  “Mistress,” she said.

  “Yes, lovely one,” yw Sabi replied, already awake, “I hear them.”

  “Who?”

  “Men afoot, all around us.”

  Nyahri prayed to the spider goddess, lady of ambush, then to the cottontail god. She rolled from her bedding and stooped, pulling back the reflective blanket to peek beyond the shelter. Drifts blocked her view.

  An arrow shot—

  Men running, shouting, charging from upslope—

  From their flank the attack began.

  “Ay!” Dhaos yelled to his men, “They come!”

  Boots clambered in the snow.

  “Volley!”

  Bowstrings chorused with the whistles of fletching through the frosted air. An archer shouted, “They rejoin!”

  “Aim!”

  Turo whinnied. Kwlko stomped, kicked, snorted.

  “The horses!” Nyahri cried, leaning forward, eager to leave the shelter. “The C’naädii will try for them!”

  Near her head a flint-tipped arrowed pierced the thatch. The horses neighed and she pushed toward the door.

  Yw Sabi grabbed Nyahri’s wrist.

  “No,” the Atreiani said, “let these fools kill each other first.”

  “Mistress!”

  “They’re only horses. You love them too much.”

  Nyahri turned on the Atreiani, glaring, wringing her hand in yw Sabi’s grasp, but she could not pull away. “Please, please.”

  Yw Sabi bared her fangs, cursing in no tongue Nyahri knew. She released her hold.

  “Get the damn horses,” she said.

  Nyahri burst from the shelter, ducking toward Kwlko and Turo, only a few long paces away. The Oudwnii shot arrow after arrow and, in answer, sling stones and bolts arced into camp. Leather-armored men with wild dark beards crouched behind trees, closing their distance with each attack. A C’naädin corpse bloodied the snow at the stallion’s hooves, felled by an Oudwn arrow. More men bled in the open, C’naädii and Oudwnii alike.

  Nyahri counted four-to-one against, foreign faces, frostbitten and sunken and starved. A rush of desperate men broke for the horses as more Oudwn arrows launched.

  We are too few.

  Three C’naädii reached the horses, the men’s filthy hands fumbling the tethers. Nyahri charged, shrieking, and the C’naädii turned. Their surprise became amusement.

  “A woman!” one bellowed.

  Their grins died as she drove her blade into the first man’s larynx, through his spine, severing his hammer-shaped necklace. His blood spattered her face, blinding her as she went down with his corpse. Another C’naädi fell with an Oudwn arrow in his leg. The last raised his axe to cleave her and she kicked his knee, breaking it.

  He fell onto her, axe tumbling from his hand as he gripped her throat. She pulled her blade from the first man and thrust it through her attacker, wrenching it beneath his sternum. Blood bathed her hands and chest.

  Shoving him, she stood, bracing herself. Two C’naädii charged Dhaos. One took an arrow to the skull, then Dhaos drew his blade, opening the other from bladder to kidney.

  Four more men surrounded Nyahri, one leveling his axe and shouting, berserk and furious. He swung the weapon over his head, stepping forward to drive it through her. She sidestepped but the haft glanced her arm, even as she rolled forward and buried her knife in his thigh.

  Three men remained, moving to finish her.

  Sound! Furious sound, as at Abswyn but far worse. Like a river-flood it crashed over Nyahri, chaining her intestines, coiling within her lungs. She lay like a straw doll, her eyes wide, her limbs like sand. All the C’naädii dropped like brained cattle. The Oudwnii fell
like sacks.

  No one fought anymore. No one ran. In all the forest, nothing moved save the breeze and the horses.

  Unable to budge, Nyahri wondered for a moment if she’d died. But snow chilled her skin and crows called among the trees. The axe-wielder fell against her side, her longknife hilt still in her bloodied hand, the blade still in him. The horses swished their tails.

  Slow footfalls approached through the snow. Sultah yw Sabi slipped the longknife from Nyahri’s hand, pulling it from the man’s leg. His blood darkened the ice, steaming where it spread into the cold white powder. Yw Sabi hoisted Nyahri’s limp body, carried her clear of the battleground, and set her gently against one of the shelters. The Atreiani knelt, caressing Nyahri’s cheek, looking into her eyes.

  “Let yourself go,” yw Sabi said, “don’t fight it, lovely one. Relax. Let the waves take you and the pain will go.”

  Yw Sabi kissed Nyahri’s brow. She held the gore-plastered blade in one hand and the scepter in the other, its distorted symbols scoring its surface and witch-fire pulsing from it, like heat rising from a metalsmith’s furnace.

  Obeying, Nyahri abandoned the struggle to regain her body, and an intoxicating warmth washed over her. She wanted to cry, though even her tear ducts resisted her.

  Yw Sabi walked to the nearest C’naädi. She grabbed a fistful of his hair, lifted him like a bag of feathers, and cut his throat from his windpipe to his spine. His heart, while it still beat, sprayed the snow with blood. She walked to the next man and did the same, and Nyahri knew:

  Each man is as I am, each can feel, each knows what is coming.

  The Atreiani’s face remained calm while she went about her work, as if threshing grain or shearing sheep. She slaughtered the next man and the next. Yw Sabi raised a naked-faced boy from the snow, no more than twelve, his rusty longknife useless. Yw Sabi slit his throat too, frowning and watching his life ebb, then she dropped him.

  The Atreiani slaughtered the C’naädi, every single one. Blood-wet spatters stained a field of snow. Bloody gurgles, one after the other, announced the dying. The land turned from white to crimson.

  Nyahri wanted to scream.

  ◆◆◆

  The Atreiani walked among the dead. The witch-song still pulsed from her scepter, but at last she held it aloft, caressing it, and all its magics ended.

  Nyahri jolted forward, coughed, and blinked. She tried to stand, the world tilted, and she fell again. Again she sat, rubbing her temples to clear her head. Pale-faced Oudwn men shook their limbs and gathered their weapons.

  None approached the Atreiani.

  Everywhere, gore darkened the snow and corpses littered the forest. The horses found grass tufts above the snow pack and went on being horses, save a little shy at the reek of blood.

  As the archers recovered, they tended their wounded and stopped the bleeding as best they could. Yw Sabi ceded to them some of her own ointments. Only one archer had died, and the men laid him by a new flame, built by yw Sabi from wet wood with tools of ghost-fire.

  Dhaos knelt on the darkened slush at yw Sabi’s feet, his face harrowed. “If I had doubted what you are,” he said to her, “I doubt no longer.”

  Her expressionless voice returned, “You’ll do well to remember.” She cleaned Nyahri’s longknife, along with her hand and forearm, using a snow-wetted cloth from the Oudwn supplies.

  “You could have killed me, all my men, the moment we met.”

  “Yet I chose not to. Think on that, Oudwni.”

  Nyahri sat on her heels beside the fire, adding broken tree limbs to it. Wet fir needles burned white, spewing smoke, and Nyahri’s absent gaze followed the plumes upward where the smoke darkened the hue of the clouds.

  “What do you do with your deceased?” yw Sabi asked Dhaos.

  “For our honored archers,” he said, “cremation.”

  She nodded toward the fallen archer. “He was—?”

  “Erwln, my cousin.”

  “His death is on your conscience, Dhaos, and more would’ve been had I not intervened. We’re lucky these northerners, these famished northerners, weren’t stealthier.”

  He cast his eyes down.

  Yw Sabi laid her hand on Nyahri’s shoulder.

  “Build up the pyre,” she said to Dhaos, “burn your cousin. Don’t worry about any smoke. I doubt there’re many left in this valley to see it.”

  “Yea, Atreiani.”

  “The rest of you, help him. Pack our gear. Look! The snow has stopped. We’ve blue skies. We’ll force on today.”

  “Atreiani?” Dhaos ventured.

  “What?”

  “Did you need to kill them all?”

  “You killed a man last night without cause,” she said, “and failed to kill the second. I killed sixty-three this morning, with cause, and I killed them all. Would the feather of judgment find you innocent and me guilty?” She cocked her head, her voice softening, “Attend your cousin’s remains.”

  Nyahri shuddered at yw Sabi’s touch. The Atreiani crouched behind her, slipping the longknife back into its scabbard.

  “You took a blow,” yw Sabi said. “You all right, Nyahri?”

  “Yea.” Nyahri sniffled back tears, determined to hide them, certainly in front of the Oudwnii. “Did you have to? We could have taken prisoners—”

  “Kill one, kill sixty-three, it’s much the same. I couldn’t risk such obstacles, or the complications of prisoners.” The Atreiani knelt in the snow, speaking more quietly. “Survivors could’ve troubled us all the way to Cohltos, or rallied others to their cause. More importantly I couldn’t risk you. It’s been a long time since I felt so frightened.”

  “Frightened? You?”

  “Anyone who bars my way is counter to my purpose but, more and more, anyone who threatens you is counter to me. I will not have it.” The Atreiani coursed Nyahri’s hair with her fingers, a touch both horrifying and soothing.

  This Atreiani is no devil, Nyahri thought, she is the same who held me while I sobbed—and yet what she did today! Nyahri closed her eyes, tilting her head against yw Sabi’s shoulder.

  “Come,” yw Sabi said, “first let me look at your arm, and I’ll help you brush the horses.”

  They gave the stallion and gelding feed, while the archers sent one of their brothers heavenward. Before midmorning the company trudged west again through knee-deep powder, leaving the bodies of C’naädin men and boys for the feasts of wolves and crows.

  {17}

  After three days, Dhaos led them above the timberline, trying the pass. Nyahri disliked the tundra, a place loveless and empty to her. Her cramps lessened, but her blood still flowed, and this made for uncomfortable riding. More so, she remained somber, her heart heavy with yw Sabi’s ruthlessness.

  Also awed by yw Sabi’s resolve.

  Beyond the highest saddle of the peaks, the company rested and ate. To the west, snow-draped mountain ranges went on and on. Yet Nyahri knew from trade legends that, in the far west, extended a vast desert and beyond it an endless sea. To the east stretched many of the valleys they’d traversed, then the barest hint of an unbroken yellow line shone at the horizon: the now-distant plains upon which Nyahri’s people lived.

  She swallowed a long draught of water, washing down her meal, then looked around her. The Atreiani had scaled above the men, picking her way among higher rocks, closer to the heights.

  Yw Sabi climbed like a child of the gods of earth and sky, not skill but sheer power and endurance carrying her up, up. Nyahri set aside her water and removed her cloak. She raced across the tundra, drawing the eyes of the men, and leapt onto the rock where yw Sabi had ascended. Looking up, Nyahri guessed the Atreiani over a hundred hands above. The thin alpine air burned Nyahri’s lungs, each breath biting like smoke, and the granite scraped her palms. Hand over hand, she took care with each new purchase. She put a dozen handspans beneath her, a dozen more, then three, and she looked down.

  Nyahri hugged the rock, shutting her eyes. Her heart raced like a hummi
ngbird’s, like it might explode.

  Upward, upward. She sent loose stones and lichen skittering down to the tundra. Below, many of the Oudwnii rose to their feet, gazing up at her. In a high dale underneath them, an eagle circled.

  Higher than the gods of the sky, she thought.

  Above, yw Sabi vanished from Nyahri’s line of sight, having climbed over a precipice. Her voice carried down, but the wind snatched the words. Nyahri climbed after her, two score hands and more, until she reached the edge, pulled herself over it, and found herself on a stone ledge overlooking endless valleys. Farther along the ledge, the Atreiani balanced with her arms spread, her hair wild in the gusts.

  Nyahri caught her breath.

  “That’d be quite a fall,” said yw Sabi.

  “Yea,” Nyahri sucked down another breath, “it would kill us.”

  The Atreiani glanced back. “Us?”

  The Oudwnii appeared tiny below. Dhaos laughed, pointing up, saying something to his men which Nyahri couldn’t quite hear.

  “Why the climb, yw Sabi?”

  “Why’d you follow?”

  “You think because I come from the plains I cannot climb?”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Nyahri shrugged.

  Yw Sabi flashed a smile. “Beautiful land, isn’t it?”

  “I have never seen anything like it.”

  “Someday I’d like to show you sights even more breathtaking, more wondrous than this.”

  “I cannot imagine, Atreiani.”

  “I didn’t climb for the view, though.” She lifted her hands aside her mouth and shouted: “Borea!”

  Nyahri stepped farther from the edge, to yw Sabi’s side. “Who is Borea?”

  “A vastly distributed artificial intelligence. Her realm is everywhere between the depths of the oceans and the stratosphere.”

  “She is a spirit?”

  “In your terms, a powerful one. She should’ve survived the so-called Eventide, and she should be answering me.”

  “The spirits do not always answer us, yw Sabi.”

  “Well this one should fucking well be answering me. It was programmed to.”