Dangerous Women (83 page)

The Howling left her, swift and easy as it had come. The shicts asked for nothing for their goddess, Riffid. To invite her attention was to invite her ire. She had given them nothing but life and the Howling and then left to the Dark Forest. They had spent generations honing it, the sense above all others, the voice of life and of death.

And somehow, the child’s whining could send it away in an instant.

“When do we get to the
hunt
?”

It didn’t matter. The Howling had shown Kalindris enough. The other noises of life and death weren’t important. She held on only to that final one, that which teetered between the two. The sound of uncertainty. The sound that waited for her to tip the balance toward darkness.

Kalindris rose. The leaves fell from her hunting leathers as she slung the bow and quiver over her shoulder. The leather settled into a familiar furrow upon the bare skin of her neck’s crook, the only other presence she had ever allowed that close to her throat. And the only one she ever would again, she thought as she rubbed a scar across her collarbone. She could still feel as she ran her hands across the scarred flesh. Every knucklebone of every finger, sinking into her skin.

Without a glance behind her, Kalindris hopped off the rock and set off after the noise. The forest rose up around her in aloof pillars, not like the familial closeness of the inner woods that left no room for sunlight. Too much light here on the border of the sea of trees; too much seeing, not enough listening. The Howling didn’t speak clearly here. She had to keep her ears up and open.

They rose up like spears and she listened. Leaves crunching, an offended cry, hurried breath.

The child.

Following.

Still.

“
Hey!
Don’t treat me like I’m an idiot!” the child protested, hurrying after her. “If you’re going to try to abandon me, at least be a little less obvious about it. It might give me the opportunity to track you and get
something
done today.”

Abandonment needed more than she had to give. That needed malice, anger, and she could spare none for the child. That was for someone else, along with her arrows, her knife and this day.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” the child asked. “I did everything right. I followed the tracks like you showed me. I’ve done everything you told me to. What did I do wrong?”

The child spoke too much. That was why Kalindris didn’t speak; the child used all the words. That was what she did wrong. She shouldn’t need nearly as much as she used. She shouldn’t need
any.
The Howling was the shict language, that which came with breath and wailing as they were born.

And the child couldn’t hear it. The child couldn’t use it. She could only breathe. She could only wail.

It hurt Kalindris’ ears.

“Are we at least going the right way?” the child asked. “I can’t come back until the beast is dead. If I do, I don’t get my feathers. I won’t be accepted.” The child’s voice dropped. “Father said.”

She stopped and cringed.

Rokuda said. Rokuda said lots of things. Rokuda said things like they were fact, like his word was all that mattered. Anyone that disagreed saw those bright green eyes and wide, sharp smile and heard his honey when he told them they were wrong.

Before Kalindris knew it, her back hurt. Her spine was rigid like a spear and visible beneath her skin. She turned around, ears flat against the side of her head, teeth bared.

The child stood there. Her hair was too bright, cut like some golden shrubbery and the feathers in her locks stuck out at all strange angles. The bow around skinny shoulders was strung and strung wrong, the skinny arms were too small to pull back the arrow. And her ears stuck out awkwardly, one up and one down, long and smooth and without notches in them. They were always trying to listen for something they couldn’t hear.

Her eyes were far too green.

“Your father,” she said, “is not always right.”

“If that were true, everyone wouldn’t listen to him when he speaks,” the child protested. She swelled with a rehearsed kind of pride, the kind she clearly felt she should have, rather than actually possessed. “When Father speaks, people listen. When he tells them to do something, they
do it
.”

Words. Heavy words coming from the child. Like she believed them.

An agonizing moment of concentration was needed for Kalindris to unclench every knucklebone of every finger from her fist. She had to turn away and tear her eyes and shut her ears to the child. She hefted her quiver, continued to follow the noise through the trees.

“We shouldn’t have come here. We should have listened to it.”

“We had no choice. Just keep moving.
Keep
moving.”

Mother and Father were fighting again.

“It got Eadne. That
thing
got my Eadne. And we left her. And we ran. From our own land!”

“Gods, will you just
shut up
and let me think?”

Mother and Father were not scared because they were fighting. And so neither was Senny.

Whenever she would get scared, she would look to Mother and Father. Mother would look at Father and get mad. Father would look at Mother and start yelling. And they would fight too much to be scared. So she would hold onto the little knife tucked away in her belt and she would be ready to fight and she wouldn’t be scared, either.

No matter how fast they were running. No matter how hard Mother was pulling on her arm.

“It
killed
her. It left her in a tree and painted the bark red with her. We should have stayed. We should have buried her. We shouldn’t have run.”

“We didn’t have a choice, you
idiot
. It was going to come for us next. It’s coming for us
now
. Think of her.”

Senny knew who they were talking about. Father called them monsters. They had come to their little house and told him to leave. They said it was their forest. He told them he wouldn’t. So they took Eadne.

Their name sounded like an angry word.

Father reached down and took Senny’s other hand. He pulled on it, too. Maybe to show Mother he could pull harder, so he wasn’t as scared. She pulled her hand back so she could grab the little knife and show Father she wasn’t scared, either.

But he didn’t notice.

He was looking forward. Mother was looking back. They said Eadne was back there, but Eadne wasn’t coming with them. They weren’t talking about Eadne. Maybe they didn’t want her to feel scared. She already knew, though. She had seen Eadne up in the tree with the branches and the leaves and her legs all blowing the same way in the wind.

Mother wanted to go back, but she kept moving forward with Father. Through the trees, back to their little house by the brook.

It was a good house. She knew that even if Father hadn’t said so when he told Mother they were going to live there. Bushes full of berries that were good to eat grew by the brook. And there were snares to set and rabbits to catch and Mother had showed her how to make stew. The forest was scary, but Father had given her the little knife. They told her never to go in there.

She looked past Mother’s arm at the trees. When they had come here, they looked dark and scary. But she had gone in there with the little knife. She knew there were places there they could hide from the beast, from that
thing
that got Eadne.

“Father,” she said.

“Keep moving,” Father said.

“But, Father, the forest—”

“I know, I know, I know.”

Senny held up the little knife. “There are places, and there are berries and we could go there and I’m not—”

“Gods damn it, not
now,
you little shit!”

He didn’t say that word around her a lot. Because he thought she didn’t know what it meant. But he said it before, when he told them they were coming to the forest, when he built the house, when the people with the feathers in their hair came and told him to go away. His name for them was that word. She knew what it meant.

And he used it a lot more when he was scared. It was what the monsters were named. What their name sounded like.

“I don’t care if the shit’s upset because we’re in a lot more shit than we need to be because you won’t shut the shit up about all the
shit
!”

Mother wasn’t talking anymore.

Maybe Mother was scared, too.

She held on to her little knife. And she held on to Mother’s hand.

When the moon began to sink over the sea of trees and the starving owls went to their holes hungry, she tried not to hear him.

“One more thing.”

Only in darkness did Rokuda speak to her. Only when he could not see her trying to ignore him, when she could not go busy herself with some other task and pretend, for a while, he wasn’t hers. Only when he couldn’t see her run her fingers along the scar on her collarbone.

“
I want you to bring back proof,
” he had said.

“
Proof,
” Kalindris had echoed.

“A trophy. Something to show the tribe she has done it. I want you to make sure she had blood on her hands.”

“You want me to bring it back to you.”

“Yes. Take it and shove it in her hands, if you must. Tell her that it will make me proud. She will do it then.”

“
She can’t shoot,
” Kalindris had said.
“She can’t draw the bow back far enough and she can’t stalk prey. She’s loud. Like you.”
Kalindris continued lacing up her boots.
“She can’t do it.”

“She has to.”

Kalindris froze as Rokuda sat on the furs next to her. The furs that had remained cold for years. She never slept in them unless the winter was too cold. But when she lay beside him, she didn’t feel the biting chill of winter. She felt sweaty, cold, clammy. Sick.

As she did now.

“They look at her like she’s not one of them. I can’t have that. And so she has to know what it is to be shict.”

He spoke that name too easily. Like it was a word. Shict was more than that. It should not have been uttered in the darkness, Kalindris had thought.

“She should know that already,”
Kalindris had replied, securing the laces tightly.

“No one taught her.”
Rokuda had edged closer.

“No one should have to. We are born knowing who we are. The Howling tells us.”

“She wasn’t. You have to teach her.”

Kalindris had said nothing as she rose up and moved to her bow. It was never far from her, save those times when he moved it. In the darkness, she preferred to keep it close.

But when she rose, he reached out. He took her by her wrist and she felt herself freeze. It grew cold again, cold as their bed.

“You have to show her,”
Rokuda had insisted.

“I don’t have to do anything,”
she had tried to speak. But her words were smothered in the darkness.

He tightened his fingers around her wrist and she felt cold all over. She felt every point he had ever touched her, a bead of cold sweat forming everywhere his fingerprint lingered on her skin. She grew silent, rigid. And when he spoke, his voice was an icicle snapping on a winter’s day.

“You will.”

She stared across the clearing and spoke softly, as to not stir the leaves before her.

“Do you know why?”

Kalindris’ own voice.

Strange and uncomfortable in her own mouth.

But the child was looking up at her. The child had her bow in her hands, an arrow in the string.

Kalindris pointed out to the log. The deer scratched at the moss with a hoof, pulled green scraps from the wood, and slurped them up from the ground. It wasted many sounds as it ate: grinding its teeth, grunting in satisfaction, slurping the greenery down noisily. It couldn’t hear her whispering to the child from the underbrush.

“Why it has to die?” Kalindris reiterated.

The child stared at the deer, squinting hard. She could almost hear the child’s thoughts, imagined them as noisy, jumbled things. The Howling was not there to give them clarity and focus.

“Food?” the child asked.

“No.”

“I don’t know. Competition? We kill it or we are killed?”

“By a deer?”

“It has horns!” the child protested.

The deer looked up at the sudden noise. Kalindris and the child were still and quiet. The deer was too hungry to leave. It continued to gnaw and to make noise.

“Why does it have to die?” Kalindris asked.

The child thought carefully. She winced with the realization.

“Because we can only know who we are by who everyone else is. We can only know what it means to be us if we know that we are not the others. And so we kill them, to know that, to know who we are and why we are here and why Riffid gave us life and nothing else. We kill. And because we are the killers, we are who we are.”

She felt her ears flatten against the side of her head. Her father’s words. Her father’s words repeated to a thousand people who would never speak against him, never tell him no. She hadn’t told him no, either. Not when she first heard it. Not until it was too late.

“No,” she said.

“But Father said—”

“No.” She spoke more forcefully. “Look at it. Why does it have to die?”

And the child looked at the deer. And then the child looked at her.

“Does it have to?” she asked.

The sound of ears rising. The sound of eyelids opening wide. The sound of a breath going short. Realization. Acknowledgment. Resignation. Sorrow.

The child.

Listening.

Wordless.

“Why does it have to die?” she asked again.

“Because,” the child said, “I have to kill it.”

Kalindris nodded. No smiles. No approval. No sounds.

The child raised her bow, drew the arrow back and held it. She trusted only her eyes. She checked her aim once, then twice, then a third time. On the fourth, when her hands had started to quiver from the strain, she shot.

The arrow struck the deer in the tender part between the leg and the nethers. It quivered there, severing something that the deer needed. The beast let out a groan, its breath mist. It staggered on its hooves, turned to flee. But its legs didn’t remember anything before the arrow. It shambled, bleeding, toward the forest.