Minu, page 41
Roots burst forth like black snakes to snarl over him and the woman. They crouch in the middle of the writhing, woody tangle—Taniel holding the woman tight, his skin smoking, his teeth bared at you in unyielding defiance—then the wood closes above them in a sheltering dome.
“Nakirah, have you not done enough?” The bloody ribbons of Asherah’s mortal body dissolve into mist.
“Have you not taken enough from me?” you ask.
“I only fix what you destroy. You imprisoned me for it, yet the souls you break still find their way to me.”
The trees groan. Branches splinter. The forest is unused to their mistress’s true form.
“No more of your games. What did you do to my daughter?”
Asherah’s sigh is a spring storm, flaying leaves and toppling the weakest trees. “You refuse to see how far you’ve fallen, to lose sight of even her.”
It’s only then you hear the screaming of a frightened infant coming from the squalid hut. The wailing is one you know instantly as Kharinah’s—a sound you have loved and hated since she first came into the world broken and malformed. It’s a cry you heard echoed by your later children in their last, terror-stricken moments before they were sacrificed on unhallowed altars beneath Asherah’s idol.
The gods forbade their messengers from interfering with another’s calling—there was to be no war or strife among the Seraphs, the first of their creations. Yet, just as the mortals who came after, we are allowed defiance, the chance to err, to fall, and rise above the ruin we wreak.
“Come out, Asherah.”
She does, no longer pretending at a mortal guise. Mist plumes under her steps, wind howls with her every breath, and the dark creature that steps from the forest is a knotted nightmare of black limbs and eyes white as death beneath a crown of a thousand twisted branches. Your wings unfurl in smoke, your skin crackles into fiery scales. You lunge with centuries of fury as for the first time in over a millennia, two Seraphs fall to war with the other.
30
What Comes from the Woods
Shirin was certain she had not woken, and only moved from one dream to another. The crimson pall bleeding across the morning sky was the recurring nightmare that had afflicted her since the Reaping. Her throat went dry when she realized it was no dream. The eastern horizon burned red in terrible imitation of the Demon Witch’s plague.
She ran barefoot down the hall, calling for Maqlu.
“Out here,” he answered from the back porch. Dua had found him a mile north of Antarr on the forest’s edge, weak from exposure. She had unraveled the ill-magic holding him captive there to bring him home, but there was nothing she could do to restore his sight. He’d shared little about what had happened to him, ending inquiries with a dismissive hand and saying, “It is done, and this is far more merciful than I deserve.”
He sat with hands clasped in his lap, his milk-white gaze fixed to the east. Although he could not see the red dawn, Shirin knew he sensed it.
“What is that?” she asked.
“A meeting that will decide our fates. One we have no say in.”
A distant roar shook the ground. A gust of wind, sharp and warm like a dragon’s breath, ripped branches off the trembling trees. Master Maqlu offered his hand. Shirin readily accepted the small comfort.
“Don’t bother, Dua,” he said as the young mage dashed out, blue light rippling like water over her skin. “This is beyond us. If you must act, go to the temple and reassure those who seek refuge there.”
“And you?” she asked.
“They’ll come here as well, and I’ll be here for them when they do.”
“Will you be alright?” Dua’s devotion to her master had become a daughter’s ferocity in protecting her aging father.
“The people need your attention more than I. Tend to them.”
Maqlu’s calm façade slipped when Dua departed. His hands shook as he signed against evil, murmuring prayers beneath his breath. Where Dua went, Yael was never far behind, and less than a minute later Shirin heard him coming down the hall.
“Where’s Dua?” he asked.
“She’s waiting for us at the temple.” Shirin shaped her face into a soothing smile. “Let’s get dressed to join her.”
“Is it the Reaping?” Dread shrank Yael’s voice to a shaky whisper.
“No, and there’s no cause for fear, only gratitude for the Grey Lady’s protection.” Shirin’s stomach writhed at how terrible her lie was. She prayed Yael never discover how little truth it held.
The ground shook as she and Yael made their way through Antarr’s streets. Loose roof tiles smashed onto cobblestones, old wooden homes groaned, and dogs howled. There was barely room for them at the temple crowded with frightened souls seeking sanctuary. Dua stood beside the priest at the altar, swaying to calm her squirming infant as she spoke reassurances to the villagers. Most of the temple’s supplicants knelt in front of candle offerings and icons, their heads bowed and hands clenched in trembling prayer. Children cried as shrieking gales rattled the windows. Women screamed when a distant roar shook the stone walls and toppled candles. Men cursed, seeing it was not an agitated mist that swirled outside the temple, but the silver spirits of the forest stalking the village streets.
“Have they ever left the woods before?” Shirin asked the white-haired woman standing beside her.
“Yes,” she said. “But it is rare, and I’ve never seen them in such numbers.”
A terrible keening screeched like nails dragged over glass. The people screamed, clapping their hands over their ears, and the deer skull on the altar to the Grey Lady cracked in two. The silence that followed the bone’s breaking was more horrifying than the shriek. The people held their breath, all of them waiting, none of them knowing for what.
A river watchman was the first to leave, duty compelling him into the mists. A mother followed, her three children hungry and asking for home. One by one, the villagers departed the sacred ground, returning to fields, hearths, and lives, understanding there was little else to do.
“Shall we head home?” Shirin asked Yael.
“Do you think this has to do with Taniel?” He followed close at her heels across the temple’s threshold. The noon sun barely penetrated the mist blanketing the square. Lanterns lighting the streets rescued the village from disappearing entirely into the grey gloom, tinged red by the sky’s eerie burn.
“I don’t know,” she lied.
One of the spirits with a deer skull head stepped across their path. It paused, turning its face to Shirin and Yael. Silver glowed behind the eye sockets, one of them partially collapsed from a fissure running through the bone as if it had been violently struck. Shirin was sure she heard it speak her name. She nodded before realizing what she was doing, but the spirit only stared a moment longer before disappearing into the mist.
She wanted to run the rest of the way to Maqlu’s home, but false courage was the only protection she had to offer Yael, so she kept her steps steady to mask her mounting fears.
She found Master Maqlu as she’d left him, sitting on the back porch staring east. He held out his hand for her to take and she sat beside him, watching the crimson sky darken to an unnaturally early night. The village lanterns and hearths were kept lit into the midnight hours, and Shirin stayed with Maqlu through his blind vigil, unable to sleep and unwilling to leave him to endure the night alone.
A natural dawn, cold and grey, greeted them. The sky had cooled from its burning, but the eerie silence that had followed the breaking of the temple’s skull refused to lift. No birds sang, no deer grazed along the forest’s edge, and the people of Antarr sought Maqlu’s counsel in hushed tones. He had no answers to give, only words of wisdom and solace. On the second day of mist and silence, people from nearby villages arrived to seek his guidance. They reported similar experiences of red skies, howling winds, and strange spirits coming from the trees. Again, the mage could only offer consolation, and Shirin saw how severely their distress affected him.
“The people came to me as well during the Reaping. They begged my intercession,” he told her that second night. “I was powerless to offer them more than empty words, and once again, that’s all I have to give.”
Twice a day, an hour after sunrise and two before sunset, Shirin braved the fog, wary of the silver eyes that glowed in the grey watching her pass. No one else in Antarr ventured so near the trees, and Shirin thought it more foolish than daring for her to visit the shrine where she’d seen Nesrin and Taniel off. Fractures running from antlers to teeth scarred the deer skull at the border shrine. Shirin lit stalks of incense, praying that this not be a second Reaping and that the mists not take anything more from a world of impoverished souls.
Three days of silence held as if the world was in funereal mourning. The mist was a widow’s veil. The quiet a reverent grief. On the third day as Shirin made her afternoon trek to the shrine, she saw a sparrow take flight from the wild fields. The songbird sang, a second answered, and sound sighed free like the release of a long-held breath. The birds’ melody was sweet, wind rustled the fire-painted leaves; and it was to that gentle tune of a world restored that the creature came from the forest. It wore a deer’s splintered skull and its body was the vaguely cervine shape of the other spirits, though more defined than the ones Shirin had seen before, having the appearance of phantom veins and bones within its silvery form. Leaves crunched beneath its solid step and a small blanketed bundle hung from the skull in a makeshift sling.
Shirin stood as if in a trance. She wasn’t frightened by the creature’s appearance, nor was she surprised when it stopped an arm’s length from her at the trees’ edge.
“Shirin.” Its voice was a duet of woman and child. “You are called.”
The bundle shifted and cried. Shirin reached for the infant without a second thought. Carefully untying the sling, she shushed the child struggling to get free of the swaddling, her little pink mouth open wide in an indignant shriek. By her size and appearance, Shirin guessed the baby to be no more than a week old. Her copper skin was cool, and Shirin held her close to guard her from autumn’s chill. She cradled her as the spirit revealed the child’s nature, who she had been, who had created her, and all the evils Minu’s demon daughter had committed before finding her way to the Grey Lady’s realm. It told Shirin what she was asked to do.
“Will you?” the spirit asked.
The infant, calmed from her temper, gazed up at Shirin. Her eyes were the same gold on black as the woman who had followed Taniel to The Red Dove Inn. That was the only similarity found in this pathetic, demanding creature squirming feebly in the cloth. There was none of the menace that had chilled Shirin’s blood, nor a trace of the malice that had rolled from the woman like thunder over the sea. The infant wriggled one small hand free. Shirin held out her finger for the child to grip. Her tiny nails were black—but so were Taniel’s.
“Second chances are never given to the deserving, are they?” She ran her thumb along the infant’s cheek, earning a smile.
“The deserving are rarely in need of second chances,” the spirit said. “Will you?”
Shirin tucked Kharinah’s small hand into the blankets. “I will.”
The skull was unmoving bone, yet she was sure the creature smiled. “He said you would. He said you take in broken souls. You walk my lady’s way and will be blessed.”
Shirin’s heart leapt. “Do you mean Taniel said that? Did he find the Grey Lady?”
The spirit turned back to the trees. Shirin followed. Need for answers compelled her to cross into the forest.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked.
The spirit’s form unspooled into the mist.
“Is he alive?”
The skull fell to the ground, empty and unspeaking.
The last of autumn’s leaves fell quickly as if the hastened change in seasons was part of a wanted cleansing. Winter arrived early from the mountains, dusting the village and trees in blue frosts, then burying the roofs in heavy snow. The days were far colder than Shirin had learned to endure in her northern village where the season was tempered by salted southern winds. She no longer yearned for that home or felt the specter of regret haunting the memory of those younger years. The ache in her chest was ever-present, but it was a healed scar, not the gaping wound it had been.
She left Kharinah in Dua’s care when she went to pay her respects at the border shrine, the winter too cold to take an infant. Kharina’s howls at being left behind were fiercer than a mountain storm. Strange tracks dinted the snow beneath the trees. Their creators were more visible at night when silhouetted against winter’s white. They were not the silver spirits that spoke through bone; these were dark beings best ignored as they prowled the snowy forest. A few times she saw them in the trees when she visited the shrine. They watched her as she prayed, and she felt the hunger in their gaze.
“They won’t harm you,” Master Maqlu had promised. “They stay in the trees. The Grey Lady forbids their leaving.”
He melted the snow along the path to allow her easier passage to the shrine. Every day she lit fresh incense, laid evergreen branches before the stone, and prayed that wherever Taniel and Nesrin had been taken, it be to where they were called to go. For all the strange shapes she saw wandering the forest and the odd tracks in the snow, none belonged to Taniel or his wife.
“It may take months, years for them to return,” Master Maqlu said. She knew it was out of kindness he refrained from adding, “if they return at all.”
Spring was shy in her coming, a maiden reluctant to shed her white dress. When she at last colored the world it was in homage to the season past. Pale anemone bloomed in the wild fields shaded by the Grey Forest.
“Let the white winds guide you, the stars will light your way,” Shirin sang “Little Lost Child Found”as she headed to the border shrine.
Kharinah cooed. Music was one of the few ways to calm her squirming when she was tied to Shirin’s back. She was a small, spirited child; curious and quick to grow frustrated when she was unable to do things beyond an infant’s ability. She screamed when she was denied the solid food Shirin ate, protested the indignity of being swaddled, shrieked in fury when set in her cradle to sleep, but was easily soothed when Shirin sang.
“Wander and I will find you, no matter how far you stray.”
The white anemones grew abundantly around the border shrine. Shirin swept the stone clean before setting fresh incense beside the cracked deer skull. A dark shape moved deep in the trees, veiled by mist. Shirin ignored it. Nothing had come out of the forest since the spirit brought her Kharinah, and Shirin had learned to hold faith that the evils the Grey Lady took into her woods did not escape.
“Hear my lullaby, little one, and heed no dark-born fear.” She replaced the old flowers with fresh ones. “Little lost child, you are found, and I will hold you near.”
The shape in the forest grew distinct as it came closer through the spring leaves. Shirin placed a protective hand over Kharinah and took a cautious step from the trees. The creature was tall, and the horns curling from his dark hair added to his towering height. His skin had no consistent color, changing from a natural golden-tawny hue into a clay red, darkening to silt, and tinged by woody green. Shirin stared, thinking he was a forest god become incarnate until she saw the young woman beside him. Hers was the face she recognized.
Shirin pressed her hand to her mouth. “Taniel?”
He grinned. “It wasn’t what I expected either. I blame Nesrin, she took too many liberties.”
“It get you back for what you did to me,” Nesrin said, tapping her fingers on her swelling stomach.
“Oh gods!” Shirin pulled him into a breath-stealing embrace, tears warm on her cheeks.
“I promised I’d come back,” he said. A skin-tingling thrum pulsed off him, accompanied by the scent of old earth and new leaves. She held him tighter, uncaring for the strangeness. She’d grown used to strange things living in this village at the forest’s edge.
Kharinah screeched at being ignored. Shirin felt Taniel tense. Letting him go, she saw him staring at the infant, his expression unreadable.
“Is that … how is she?” he asked.
“A terror,” Shirin said. “She throws tantrums when I put her to bed, cannot decide if she prefers to be held or set down, and is forever wanting what she cannot have. Much the same as every other child. And I assume she behaves better than yours will if he has the indecency to take after you.”
“Ah, I know.” Nesrin shook her head. “That why I tell Taniel I hope this one daughter. She can have his horns so long as she have my sense.”
Shirin’s laugh faltered, seeing a third person waiting in the trees. The old woman in the peasant’s dress, her long dark hair braided down her back, inclined her head when she met Shirin’s eye.
“You will be blessed.”
The woman’s lips had not moved when she echoed what the spirit had told Shirin, and neither Taniel nor Nesrin showed sign they’d heard the promise. A tide of mist flowed through the forest and when the spring breeze swept it away, the woman was gone.
31
Asherah
You come to consciousness slowly. You have been broken so long, and now your physical state reflects what you allowed your spirit to become. You remember what has happened, are aware of where you are, and understand that it will be years, lifetimes, before you wake to where you can move. Earth and root will hold you until then, and I will wait with you. The world has suffered enough for our sins. Yours of passion, mine of negligence. We do not move through time as mortals, yet we both succumbed to its passing. You forgot your calling. I failed mine. The years made it harder, not easier for us to learn that we fought to preserve what was not ours to keep. I erred in growing indifferent. You, too intimate.
