Dangerous Women Part 61

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-"

"G.o.ds d.a.m.n it, not now, you little s.h.i.+t!"

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 s.h.i.+t's upset because we're in a lot more s.h.i.+t than we need to be because you won't shut the s.h.i.+t up about all the s.h.i.+t!"

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 s.h.i.+ct."

He spoke that name too easily. Like it was a word. s.h.i.+ct 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 sc.r.a.ps 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. Compet.i.tion? 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.

The child drew an arrow and shot again. She trusted only her heart now. The arrow flew too wide. She shrieked, her voice panicked, and shot again. Words befouled the air and the arrow sank into the earth, heavy with her fear.

The deer took another step before it fell. The arrow stood quivering in the deer's neck and the beast lay on its side, breathing heavily, spilling breath and blood onto the earth.

Kalindris approached it, the child behind her. She reached behind and grabbed the child, shoving her forward. The child stared at the deer's eyes, at herself reflected in the great brown mirror of its gaze.

The child looked to her.

Kalindris reached into her belt and pulled the knife free. She held it out to the child. The child looked at it like it was something that shouldn't be there, something that she would only ever see hung upon the wall of her father's tent.

She thrust the handle toward the child.

"Why?" Kalindris asked the child.

The child looked up at her. The sight of eyes wide and pleading. The sight of resentment. The sight of fear and hate and betrayal for making the child do this.

But no words.

The child took the knife and knelt beside the deer. She pressed it to its throat. She winced and she cut through the fur and the hide and the sinew to the root of the beast's neck.

She opened it up and it spilled upon her. It spilled over her hands and onto her arms. And the child kept cutting silently.

As the brook babbled alongside them, she tried to keep up with her parents.

"Are you scared, darling?"

Senny wasn't. She was trying hard not to be, anyway. She shook her head and held up the little knife. Father didn't seem to notice.

"You don't need to be scared," he said. "Not when I'm here. We're going to get through this, all right?"

She nodded. She wasn't scared.

"I'm sorry for what I said earlier, darling. I was just irritated. Your mother was screaming so loud."

Mother didn't seem to notice that they were talking about her. Mother held on to her hand and kept pulling her toward the cottage. The brook was nearby, churning away. Vines of berries grew nearby, ripe and bright in the sunlight.

They could go to the forest to avoid the beast, maybe. They could run there and live together there. The cottage was nice and she would miss it and she would miss Eadne and she tried very hard not to think about Eadne because whenever she did she felt like she was going to throw up and then Mother would cry.