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Prologue
In shattered time, great loss we mourn,
Nothing but dark where light was torn.
The great oak sways beneath the frost,
A champion comes, though his path lost,
To mend the night at his heart's cost.
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So much can be learned from silence. In its warm embrace, you hear the life within yourself. The pulsing of your blood, your beating heart.
Silence, too, has a sound.
It sounds like absence.
She hadn’t heard silence in so long, even as she lay on the cool linen sheets, freshly washed and dried in the sun. Inside her head was water dripping from a well spout.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
It could drive one mad. And she knew it had not been water wearing away some stone it fell upon. It has not been a willow branch swaying in the breeze, hitting the glass window of a home.
The clinking now, for months, came from afar - too far for anyone else to hear. It came from deep beneath the earth, where the ground had eaten up the sound. And only she, only Val, could hear it still.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
She’d close her eyes, and she could hear the distinctive ring. Three notes, almost indistinguishable from one another, but she had heard their nuanced song for too long not to know.
Clink, it was silver against cold sandstone.
Clink. Gold.
Clink. Iron.
Chainlinks, clinking and clanking against a prison cell, so small that if a man were to be trapped there, he could not even stretch out on the floor. Clink-clink-clinkping against Val’s skull for months on end.
Her eyes opened slowly. A dance of little bits of dust, flakes of skin, and ash risen from the stove. They swirled in the early morning rays of light as if they had no care in the world. Not too long ago, snow had done the same outside her window. Streams of it ebbed and flowed and fell to the ground - just to be kicked up by a sudden gust of wind.
She blinked, banishing the sleep from her eyes.
It’d been nine months. Nine months since, forces beyond had promised her a son. Nine months since she had first felt the warmth at her fingertips and the peace of her heart.
Nine months.
She had not known if it was even there, to begin with. There was no bump, no racing the dawn to double over in the snow and retch like she had before. No hunger would send her digging through the cupboards with the urgency of a starved dog.
But she had felt it. She felt the hunger, just not her own. This hunger raged and screamed until it could not any longer, and then it just simmered like poison, like a snake too tired to lunge at its prey but biding its time, waiting for something to walk just near enough for it to strike. She felt the Hag’s hunger.
But, she had not felt him.
She did not know when he had gone because she’d also been absent. For so many months, she was not there, not her own, a body moving down the road. A bit of flesh and bone, flesh and bone that dragged along a broken spirit trapped within - one begging for the flesh to let it go. So that it may disappear and find that which made it whole.
And in that time, she lost not only herself but him as well.
There’d been no blood, no thrashing in the night. It was as if he never was. And, she began to question if she’d made it up. If the sickly sweet taste of fig wine had been the taste of a poison that swirled within her mind and tricked her into thinking…
That she would bear a god.
For nothing. It had been all for nothing. Her life was worth no more than anyone else’s. Worthless now because another had paid the price for her to live, and now she would eternally be in debt she could not repay.
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For nothing.
When she came home, leading her horse on foot into the gates of a familiar place. It was as if she walked into a painting - so much she knew and remembered, but it did not feel real.
There were the wooden homes, the cherry trees and apples falling off the branches in the yards. The roofs of straw, metal and wood.
The people.
She recognized each one - although the names of some had been too far to reach.
They’d gathered, and she heard a scream and cry somewhere not too far.
The crowd parted for her mother, tears rolling down her cheeks and clouding her eyes. Inna had thrown her arms around her daughter and did not let go for so long that some who stood and watched them in the crowd began to leave.
Val did not cry.
But, she had spoken kind words to her mother, calming and reassuring her that she was home - alive and well. The lies came easily to her, seeing her mother’s face. There’d been nothing in the world she wished to say that would extinguish the joy the older woman had felt holding her hand.
The people came and went that night, bringing food and gifts to their door. All wished her and her mother well, although their eyes had lingered on Val too long. Their hands and arms had been pulled too close to their bodies - protectively - as they spoke to her. They’d turned to leave too quickly and glanced back one too many times.
That night, she lay awake, eyes scanning the familiar ceiling above her cot. How many times as a child had she traced the irregularities in the plaster, made up stories of the shapes, and looked for pictures in them like clouds?
She saw nothing there now.
And as she lay awake, she heard the clinks.
Clink. Clink. Clink.
A voice spoke in her mind, like nails pressed and dragged across a jagged rock - it hissed as it spoke.
Stupid girl..!
But even then, it came as the yip of a small dog.
A small dog that would tear you to shreds given the chance, but a small dog nevertheless. Val pushed it off without so much as a change in her expression. This same voice was the worst thing that could ever happen to her once - now that the worst thing had, there was little left to fear.
The Hag’s Glade and her bony claw-like hands were not what Val’s nightmares held any longer.
When she closed her eyes, before her, only an inferno raged between two heavy wooden doors - their iron hooks that housed the lock so hot they had been glowing brighter than the evening sun.
And in her dreams, she stood before those doors and looked desperately inside - hoping to catch a final glimpse of him.
She dared not say his name. She dared not think it for fear of losing her mind.
It felt as if that night was her final real one - walking since then as if asleep. Perhaps she, too, had perished in the flames. Perhaps her spirit had returned to the village where she grew up, seeking peace and finding none.
But had she been dead, the Hag would not have spoken to her so adamantly. So angrily.
Had she been dead, her mother’s neighbors would not have turned and walked the other way when she stepped out of her home. They would not whisper ‘witch’ when they had thought her out of earshot.
They said the forest spirits had possessed her, and she ran into the woods.
They wanted her to leave again.
And what was worse, they’d blamed her mother that she stayed.
Val laid awake, still, watching the dust. Her eyes grew in and out of focus - almost lulling her back to sleep. But she could not. Not that day.
She waited until the ground thawed out.
Her heart had ached at the thought, but she had told her mother everything this time. Everything, but not his name. And not the Hag.
She’d talked of the Insipid Flatlands, of Semey Bridges, of the Midrade City and the desert South. She spoke of Typhonos and his beautiful wife.
She’d never forget the way her mother’s face had paled when she spoke of the River Cities.
Val made that brief and did not mention names. She’d told her that the River Cities were now gone.
And then, she told her mother that she could not stay.
Inna had not tried to dissuade her, to Val’s great surprise. Instead, she hugged her daughter.
“Where will you go?” She asked. But, here, Val would have to lie.
She lied that she felt safest among people. Among the crowded streets of the city. She could get a job - she’d gotten good with medicines. She could apprentice still.
Her mother nodded, and she took those lies - never letting on if she knew them for what they were.
When Val’s bags had been packed the night before, they sat awake long into the night by the blazing stove. They spoke of things and cried and laughed. And Val had told her that it would be easier if they would not say goodbye in the morning. She’d leave her horse with Inna because the mare had been named for freedom - and that was where she took Val.
But freedom was something that Aditi, too, deserved. Here, in the fields, kids would feed her ten apples a day just to see her reach for them with her long teeth and crunch.
Val would go alone.
Which is why she could not fall back asleep.
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A worn leather bag across her shoulders and a warm cloak buttoned closed, she wrapped a wool scarf across her face to hide it better. Not that anyone would stop her, but there was another reason she did not want her mother to wake up early and say goodbye. Had she done that, she would insist on walking Val to the main road - and out of town.
And Val was not going in that direction.
Instead, she’d crossed the bare wheat field and stood for a minute looking back, her eyes saying goodbye to the place she had so badly longed to find.
Her heart looked for somewhere different now.
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She thought, months ago, back when she first knew she would eventually leave, that she had the dream. In her dreams, the clinks of the chains had rung, and where they’d been attached, a nasty creature sat.
I see you, stupid girl. A mouse skittering through a house - don’t get trapped, little mouse, or I will come a-meowing and eat you in one gulp.
And just then, Val felt the thread. The thin, barely thicker than a hair, thread that bound her to the creature held in chains. The same thread she felt in the River Cities when…
The thread was strained, and she ran her fingers across it. She pulled on it ever so slightly. At that, the Hag had frowned, confused and angry at what happened.
I’ll eat you, worm! I’ll throw you in a stew! I know your blood, and even here, so far away, I see you!
Her hand on the thread, for the very first time, Val replied to her.
“I see you, too.”
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And now, standing at the threshold of the woods, holding the thread inside her mind - the binding that she had to the horrid creature, she meant to find the prison in which she lived for so long. For, if the Hag could control space and time there, then somewhere in the Glade was the path that would lead her back to him.
“Wherever you go, I’ll go.” She whispered as she stepped onto the damp foliage in the shade of the woods.
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