Then was the hill's keeper,

After the battle-blow, fierce in his mood,

Threw with death-fire – far and wide spread

The flame of the battle.

PROLOGUE

Her very first memory was of a man she didn’t know grabbing her by her hair and yanking her off her feet.

She was the town scapegoat, long after her mother had died. So, her mother was a witch. So what? Those small-minded people had hated her mother with a burning passion, and they’d hated Nauma, even when she was a little toddling child. They hated her when she became an awkward, cringing girl, and their hatred had only intensified when her mother died when she was eleven years old. Everybody blamed Nauma for her mother’s death, even though they’d despised her mother when she was still alive and looked the other way when people would trip her in the streets. But once her mother was dead, somehow she was magically transformed into a saint. After her death, more people glared at Nauma, or hissed at her, or spit on her, or worse. 

They claimed that Nauma had killed the woman, because she stood at her mother’s bedside when she had died.

That’s small-town logic for you.

Of course, Nauma didn’t think that what she was doing at her mother’s bedside was any of their business. It was just a little potion she’d made her drink to ease her pain. Maybe it had not been mixed right. It still wasn’t any of their business.

But the people of the town had made it their business.

They knew Nauma had a fiery temper. They loved to mock her in the street. The men would grab her in dark corners of the town and force her to endure their slimy kisses, and then call her a slut. 

And so she did small acts of revenge. She started rumors that set families against families. She’d steal valued possessions, heirlooms, and fling them into the ocean. She would quietly and slowly poison people by feeding their chickens and goats certain herbs that the animals could tolerate, but the poison would pass into their milk and eggs. Then people, like that man who caught her unawares and tried to force her, would grow thin and lose all their hair and fall so sick they couldn’t leave the house. The woman who’d pinched her and called her a slut in the marketplace would wake up one morning and realize that her bed was full of vermin, crawling with lice and fleas.

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Small things gave her satisfaction.

At long last, she’d had to flee the village. They blamed her for every bad thing that had happened, and they’d come for her. They wanted to capture her and burn her alive.

So she’d run. And Nauma bided her time.

The big revenge… that was all she wanted.

She’d stopped feeling indignation over that hair-pulling memory a long time ago. 

Because about eighteen years after that memory had taken place—she couldn’t remember if she had been two years old or three—she’d killed the hair-pulling man. She’d killed his family, and then followed that up with many of the children in that town. 

It had been easy. There’d come news of an invasion. While the men of the town ran out to defend their families, Nauma went to each of their hiding places and killed the families as they cowered in the dark. 

As if she’d been directed by fate, the first person she’d found had been the hair-pulling man. She reminded him, pointedly, of the first memory that had been imprinted in her brain. She’d told him, in detail, how his hair-pulling stunt had made her feel (ugh, emotion) as she’d watched the blood run from his body and the light drain out of his eyes.

Then she’d gone to work on the rest of the town, moving from hiding place to hiding place.

After that, she’d shaken the blood of that place from her boots and she had left the dead behind. Moved on to bigger and better things. 

That night had shown her that she had a particular gift for bloodshed.

It made her want to repeat the experience.