“You were gone all day, and you only have a bag of weeds to show for it?” he shouted.
Piers puffed on his pipe, gloating over Steffan’s display. “It is more than I see dangling from your hand.”
The others laughed, hoping the insult would escalate Steffan’s wrath into a brawl, but he only waved away Piers’s remark with disgust. “I can’t bring home a suckling pig every day. We must all contribute things of worth.”
“You stole the pig. Five minutes of effort,” Piers countered.
“What is your point, old man? It filled your stomach, didn’t it?”
Liam snorted. “It didn’t fill mine. You should have stolen two.”
Fergus threw a rock, telling them all to shut up. He was hungry.
So it went every night, our camp always on the edge of hot words and fists, but our strength came from each other too. We were strong. No one crossed us for fear of consequence. We had horses. We had weapons. We had earned the right to cut others down.
Laurida waved me over, and I dumped out my bag. We both began cutting off the tender corms, then peeling the tougher stalks. I had known she would be pleased. She favored the green shoots, frying them up in pig fat, and ground the larger stalks into flour. Bread was a rarity for us—unless it was stolen too.
“Where did you find them?” Laurida asked.
I looked at her, startled. “Find what?”
“These,” she said, holding up a handful of the cut stalks. “What’s the matter with you? Did the sun fry your brain?”
The stalks. Of course. That was all she meant. “A pond. What difference does it make?” I snapped back.
She hit me on the side of the head, then leaned closer, examining my bloodied nose. “He’ll break it one of these days,” she growled. “For the better. You’re too pretty anyway.”
The pond was already forgotten. I could not tell them that the girl had found me at the pond today, stalked me, fallen upon me without warning, rather than the other way around. I would suffer more than a bloody nose. It was shameful to be taken by surprise, especially by one of them. Their kind was stupid. Slow. Weak. The girl had even revealed her stupidity when she showed me how to take her food.
The next day I went back to the pond, but this time I hid behind some rocks, waiting for her to come. After an hour, I waded into the rushes to harvest the stalks, thinking that might lure her out. It didn’t. Maybe she wasn’t as stupid as the rest. Maybe she had actually listened to my warning. Yes, Jafir had frightened her. It was my pond now. Jafir’s pond, forever and always.
I loaded my sack and rode farther south, looking for her camp. They had no horses—we made sure of that. She couldn’t be staying far from the pond, but there was no sign of her.
“Morrighan,” I whispered, testing the feel of it on my tongue. “Mor-uh-gon.”
Harik didn’t even know my name, called me something different each time he visited. But he knew hers. Why would the greatest warrior of the land know the name of a thin, weak girl? Especially one of them.
When I found her, I would make her tell me. And then I would hold my knife to her throat until she cried and begged for me to let her go. Just like Fergus and Steffan did with the tribespeople who hid food from us.
From a hilltop, I looked across the valleys, empty except for the wind waving a few grasses.
The girl hid well. I did not find her again for four more years.
Chapter Four
Morrighan
“Here,” Pata said. “This is a good place.”
A twisted path had brought us there, one not easily followed, a path that I had helped find, the knowing taking root in me and growing stronger.
Ama eyed the thicket of trees. She eyed the jumble of potential shelters. She eyed the hills and stony bluffs that hid us from view. But mostly I saw her eyeing the tribe. They were tired. They were hungry. They mourned. Rhiann had died at the hands of a scavenger when she refused to let go of a baby goat in her arms.
Ama looked back at the small vale and nodded. I could hear the tribe’s heartbeat as well as she could. Its rhythm was weak. It ached.
“Here,” Ama agreed, and the tribe laid down their packs.
I surveyed our new home, if you could call it that. The structures were dangerous, mostly made of wood and in ruin from neglect, the passage of decades, and of course from the great storm. They would collapse at any time—most already had—but we could make our own lean-tos from the scraps. We could make a place to stay that might last more than a few days. Moving on was all I had ever known, but I knew there had been a time when people stayed, a time when you could belong to one place forever. Ama had told me so, and sometimes I dreamed myself there. I dreamed myself to places I had never seen, to glass towers crowned by clouds, to sprawling orchards heavy with red fruit, to warm, soft beds surrounded by curtained windows.