The Wintering

THE WINTERING

C1.

Maren crouched high in the crook of an old oak tree, the branches split and fraying so strongly that she had to take care where she placed her hands so as not to cut herself. Shifting carefully, she stretched her aching leg along one of the branches. She hadn’t counted how long she’d been sitting, but the few hours of daylight they received was almost over, and she didn’t want to return to camp empty-handed.

She had roamed farther than usual, for multiple reasons. The few hunting patrols her mother had sent out that week had returned empty-handed. Maren didn’t know why the animals weren’t awakening now that the winter chill was lifting from the landscape. The second reason (which she would never admit to anyone, not even Frida), was that she hoped the white-antlered deer she had hunted for months might cross her path, if only she wished it hard enough.

Frida would have told Maren the goddess would send the deer her way only if the goddess wished it.

A rustling sounded from the snow-covered undergrowth, deeper into the trees. Maren reached into her quiver and drew out an arrow, nocking it quietly in her bow. 

She tuned into the rustles. Not nearly loud enough for a deer, but perhaps something bigger than a rabbit. A fox, maybe. Maren didn’t like the taste of fox—too metallic—but she liked the fur, and she supposed suffering through the meat would be better than any alternative.

Maren drew back the arrow. The snow pulsated again.

Voices. Definitely not an animal.

She recognized those voices. Sighing, Maren let her bow string fall slack as her mother and Brenna pushed around the melting pile. They both had bows slung across their backs. Maren wondered if they had been practicing or hunting, or if they had finally gotten to the point where practicing was hunting. Brenna had never had as much skill with the bow as Maren.

“This is ridiculous, Mother, we’re not going to find anything.” Brenna staked the end of her bow into the mud and leaned against it. “We should have headed north. That’s where the others had luck last week.”

“And that means that the animals will have surely learned and will have moved on, as is common sense!”

Maren smiled and shifted into a more comfortable position, with her feet resting on the branch below. She did enjoy the rare moments were her mother chastised Brenna without also chastising Maren.

“Perhaps we should try near the stream that feeds into the river near the bear rock or the frozen lake by—”

The Matriarch tightened her grip on her bow, bending it precariously to the point of breaking. “No! None of those will work! We’re staying here, and we’re going to find something, you just have to work harder.” She faced away from Brenna and Maren.

For the first time, Maren almost pitied Brenna. Her sister’s face crumpled, and she looked confused. Almost.

Another rustle from the berry bushes close to the Matriarch. Maren sucked in a breath and redrew her bow. Her mother hadn’t moved. Brenna still scanned the other side of the forest, as if an animal would approach simply because she willed it into existence.

Maren focused on the bushes. Loud enough to be a deer, she was sure of it. What a wonder it would be if she killed the white-antlered deer right in front of her mother.

Instead, a man leaped from the bushes, arms covered in mud and eyes bloodshot, cheeks gaunt and hallowed. He sailed toward the Matriarch, a sharp stick in his outstretched hand.

Maren fired her arrow without thinking.

It arced through the almost dark trees and struck the man in the neck, just above his collarbone. His scream resounded against the ancient tree bark.

The Matriarch whirled around. Her eyes glazed over the fallen roamer, across Brenna’s stunned face, and then up to the tree, where Maren crouched. “Get down here.”

Maren slung her bow over her back and leaped from the tree, landing neatly on the slick icy ground. She quirked a smile at Brenna as she passed. She knew her sister never would have made that shot, though, she supposed, Brenna could have done it with a dagger instead, a weapon Maren had never taken the time to learn, though she always carried both a dagger and a skinning knife with her, just in case.

Or maybe her mother had just never taken the time to properly teach her. 

Brenna skirted the blood pooling from the roamer’s neck and leaned to touch the ragged clothing that encased his body. It wasn’t like any furs Maren had ever seen—though she had never been this close to a roamer before.

“Get away from that thing.” The Matriarch grabbed Brenna’s shoulder and hauled her back. “He could give you the disease.”

“Frida said the disease the roamers have isn’t contagious. It’s just something the roamers are.” Maren almost expected her mother to hit her for speaking, but her mother only kicked at the roamer’s foot, as if checking to make sure Maren’s shot had done its job.

Maren’s hand started shaking. She moved it behind her back.

“What do we do with the—” Brenna glanced at Maren.

“No.” The Matriarch nocked an arrow onto her bowstring and turned to the west, away from camp. “No one does anything with the body. The two of you will head back to camp.”

“But—”

“Now!”

Maren grabbed Brenna’s wrist and pulled her away, but their mother had already disappeared into the trees, off to do stars knew what.

Brenna didn’t let go of Maren’s hand, so Maren knew her sister could tell that she was shaking, but she almost didn’t care, because her mother hadn’t yelled at her for eavesdropping. She had saved her mother’s life, and the feeling lifted her high above the trees.

“I’ve never seen a roamer that close to camp before. Have you?” Brenna tore herself away from Maren.

Maren shook her head. She could count on one hand the number of times she had actually seen roamers, but she had avoided them, no matter what Frida told her about their disease not being contagious. She found their bodies often enough, scattered about the landscape. The last thing she needed was to turn into that.

****

On their way home, Brenna stopped to pick red berries from a bush beside the river, which roared with fresh snowmelt. Maren climbed onto a large rock and let her feet dangle in the air. When she was little, she used to stare at the rock and think she would be able to see the whole world from the top, like the stories Frida had told her, where people lived in towering tents and could see all the way to the other side of the world. She could never picture it.

“When are you going to hunt for that deer again?” Brenna popped a few berries into her mouth. They stained her lips red.

Maren considered her question for a minute before answering. “I have to find it before it moves on.”

Brenna frowned and tossed Maren a few berries. Maren caught them and plucked the green stems from the tops. “Did you know that Ana is pregnant? I heard her talking to one of her giggling friends. I think the one who doesn’t like guts.”

“Well, I guess that’s her problem.” Ana was Maren’s age, though they hadn’t spoken much. When Maren wasn’t with her family, she ignored everyone else.

“Who, the gut girl or Ana?”

Maren chucked one of the berry pits into the river. She didn’t hear it splash, but assumed it found its mark. “I suppose both of them.” Maren couldn’t wait to ask Frida about the roamer.

“I don’t think you should do that.”

She sometimes wished she could ignore her family too. “Do what?” Maren stared at the red line on her sister’s cheek. Brenna kept touching it, but Maren didn’t think she realized she was doing it.

“Throw things into the river.”

Maren shrugged.

“It doesn’t feel right to me.”

“You feel like you have to argue with everything I do.” Maren’s body exploded with heat. She lay back on the rock and let the cold seep through her furs.

“You were following me and Mother.”

Maren squinted. The sun moved out from behind a cloud shaped like a deer head. “I thought we were talking about throwing things into the river.” She didn’t remember it ever being this warm so early in the spring season.

“You heard everything we said!”

Maren wished Brenna would shut up. She was enjoying the rock, with the soothing cold and the warm sun on her face, the sound of the river gently roaring in her ears. “Just go back to camp and leave me alone.”

A berry sailed over her face. “You’re just still upset that mother didn’t take you hunting with her.”

“I wonder what Mother would think if we ended up like Ana.”

A few seconds of silence. Maren breathed a deep breath, but it rattled painfully in her chest. 

 “You mean with child?” Brenna’s shadow moved in front of the river. A few rocks skittered onto the ice.

“Maybe it would get me out of Mother’s dinners. There’s one next week, for her birthday.”

Brenna appeared at the edge of Maren’s vision. She was frowning. “You mean you want to fake it? That wouldn’t last long.”

Maren shrugged. She’d thought talk of babies would drive her sister away quicker than arguing. Brenna loved to argue. “I guess.” Maren didn’t like babies anyway. She didn’t think her mother did either. Whenever the Matriarch conducted a new birth ceremony, she hurried back to her tent once the new babe started wailing. She sat up and retied her shoes, into knots as tight as she could manage.

“These berries taste funny.”

Maren glared at the berry bush. Maybe if Brenna ate them all, she would finally leave. “Then stop eating them.”

“Didn’t you think they tasted funny?”

“I didn’t think about. I need to get back to camp. I promised Frida I would help her with the skinning.”

Brenna’s cheeks puffed out with berries as she tried to keep her laughter inside. “Have fun with the cripple. Stars, I don’t know why Mother bothers to keep her around. Or, I guess, she’s good for cleaning and sewing. But why she gets to sit at the high table during dinners…I could have kicked her.”

Blood thundered through Maren’s head, making her forehead throb. She had thought the same thing about Frida many times, of course, but Brenna wasn’t allowed to say those things. She ran at her sister, tackling her to the ground before she could stop to think.

Brenna kneed Maren in the stomach, throwing her off. She leapt to her feet and shook her head. “Who knew you were so unstable?”

The river roared in Maren’s ears. A painting flashed in her mind, competing for attention with the wavering form of her sister. She started to grow dizzy with the images. The painting would be a waterfall reflecting the golden red sunset, a small, shadowed person in the valley below. She had seen the waterfall before on her travels, but never during that time of day. She had always wondered if someone would survive the plummet from the top.

Maren forced the thought away, focusing on Brenna, whose face had gone red and blotchy. “I told you those berries tasted funny,” Brenna said, her voice choked.

Maren raised a hand to her lips. They were a little puffy, but not nearly as swollen as Brenna’s face. She blinked again. “Poisonous,” she croaked out. “You stupid rat, you fed me poisonous berries.”

“I wish I was sorry.” Brenna collapsed on the snow, sprawled along the edge of the river.

Maren dropped to her knees and crawled over to her sister. “Brenna?” She put a hand to Brenna’s throat. Her pulse fluttered dimly. Panic started to grip her. The berries couldn’t have been that poisonous. Brenna just ate too many of them. She could try to drag her back to camp, but there was no way she would make it in time. Maren lurched to her feet and tottered around the giant rock, trying to keep her own breathing steady. She kicked clumps of snow aside in a frantic search, racing for the treeline. She was looking for a light green plant with small white flowers. Frida had told her about it once, when a toddler had wandered off and fallen into a hole in the ground that smelled tangy, but not like rotting animals. The toddler had vomited for two nights before Frida found the remedy.

A pine branch smacked Maren in the face. She spit out a needle and shoved the branch aside. Then she stopped walking. What if she never found the plant? What if Brenna didn’t survive the berries? She couldn’t imagine a life without her sister in it; not that she liked her sister all that much. Without Brenna…without Brenna, her mother would only have one daughter. Maren would be her mother’s only daughter.

She walked a little further into the woods, falling to her knees. She crawled through the snow, brushing it away with her hands and knees. She had always found the flowers growing in areas like this.

Where Maren removed the snow, only black plants greeted her. She fingered their decaying stems, her throat tightening. What had caused all these flowers to die, just when she needed them the most?

The Goddess does what she wants with her landscape, Frida would have told her.

Maren shook her head. The Matriarch had told her enough times to ignore Frida’s nonsensical ramblings. Most of the time, Maren obeyed, but now…

She needed to find the flower to save her sister.

Maren kicked away more snow. Finally—she saw one, hidden amongst the dead flowers. 

White flowers, with round yellow centers. She didn’t remember the centers glowing with the brightness of the noon-high sun, but she held them in a clenched fist anyway and raced back to the river. Brenna’s lips were blue by the time she arrived, like that time one of their only yearmates had fallen into the icy river.

Maren didn’t remember his name. They had left his body for the wolves on sunset that same day.  

She forced her fingers to shred the petals. Then she pried open her sister’s lips and shoved the poultice into her mouth.

Maren counted to five. She leaned her head against the cool rock and counted again, when Brenna still didn’t move.

Brenna coughed, her body jerking up and falling back to the snow. She was breathing evenly, color returning to her face. She looked over at Maren and blinked slowly, as if awakening from a deep sleep.

Maren let her racing heart calm. Then she stood up and stepped over her sister, following the winding river back to camp.

C2.

                 

Maren ran away from her tent, weaving between others and hopping over a disused fire pit. She glanced over her shoulder to look for Brenna. She didn’t think her sister would have bothered to chase after her. Brenna would say that running like a child was something she had left behind years ago.

Maren couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten a caribou foot. There had been one winter, perhaps around her tenth year, when a blizzard had caught their camp in a vortex of wind and ice and no one had been able to leave. The caribou foot kept her alive, at least, but she had thrown some of it up that night in her tent.

“Your mother won’t be happy if you break something.”

Maren skidded to a stop. She hadn’t even noticed that Harald stood in front of her, his face hewn and rough like one of the granite cliffs, eyes blue but with filaments of a milky white swirling through them. She didn’t know his age, but she assumed he had to be one of the oldest members of their group. She also knew very little about him. She was surprised she even knew his name.

“My mother is never happy.”

He rubbed at something on his cheek, but Maren couldn’t tell what. “I heard you were the one who took down that roamer the other day.”

 Maren frowned. “Who did you hear that from?”

A firm hand wrapped around her upper arm, dragging her closer to the central fire. “We’re going to be late.

Maren didn’t protest and let Brenna drag her away, but she glanced back at Harald. He was gone.

“Mother is going to be angry if we don’t get seated before her.” Brenna tugged Maren faster.

 “I thought you didn’t care what Mother thought of you.”

Brenna’s only response was to let go of Maren’s arm. They reached the central fire, which roared with a heat that was sure to make Maren sweat through her furs. She rounded it, breathing deeply. The smell of woodsmoke reminded her of one summer night, many years back, when the Matriarch had taken Brenna on a hunting trip, and Maren had cried for hours. She couldn’t remember now whether she had cried because she was jealous, or because she missed playing with Brenna. Regardless, Frida had built a small fire for Maren in one of the clearings nearest camp and they had charred sticks black and then drew pictures on the bark of a cedar tree.

“I’m surprised she’s bothering with a birthday dinner this year.” Brenna sat down with a deep sigh on her cushion. A ring of low tables surrounded the fire, though most people still mingled about or were on their way to the seats. “I always thought Mother hated them.”

Maren shrugged. “Well, it is her birthday.” Although Maren wished her mother had decided to skip it this year. She could think of a host of things she would rather be doing. Like carving, or sleeping, or…tracking the white-antlered deer. 

“Fabulous. You’re here.” Their mother settled herself onto the empty cushion between Brenna and Maren, folding her hands across her lap. She stared at the fire.

 A thought crossed Maren’s mind. Had it been her mother who told Harald that she was the one who killed the roamer? She couldn’t imagine it had been Brenna, and Maren had only mentioned the incidence to Frida in passing. She shifted slightly on her cushion, tinglings of excitement and pride swirling in her stomach.

Her mother leaned toward Brenna and brushed a smear of mud from her cheek. Her sleeve rolled back to reveal a leather bracelet, entwined with three wooden beads. Frida had told Maren once that each bead represented someone close to the Matriarch who had died, but she didn’t know who they belonged to.

The table creaked as Frida leaned against it, lowering herself slowly to her cushion next to Maren.

Their mother’s eyes passed over Maren and settled on Frida. A pang of sympathy shot through Maren when she saw that ice coat her mother’s eyes. Frida seemed to be doing her best, and from the way her shoulders heaved, she had run all the way across camp to keep up with Maren and Brenna. Maren tried to push the feeling down. She knew her mother wouldn’t approve. “The usual time tonight,” the Matriarch said to Frida.

Frida bowed her head.

“I’m starving. Are we ready to eat?” Brenna ran her hand over the table.

 Maren didn’t know whether Brenna asked to distract their mother from Frida, or because she wanted food, but either way, it served the same purpose.

  “Let’s get on with it before I freeze my ass to this cushion,” Brenna added.

  “Goddess, you really are impatient.” Maren meant it as a joke, but her words were colder than she’d intended.

  A breeze rustled Maren’s hair, then a sharp pain flared across her cheek. She raised her hand to the pain, rubbing her face. She glanced to the side. Her mother’s hand was lowering back to the table. She hadn’t felt a breeze at all, but her mother’s arm, rushing past her face.

  Maren look at Frida, who stared at the table, her hands rustling together under the table.

  “Don’t say that again,” her mother said.

  Maren joined Frida in staring at the table. She just wished the food would come quickly. Had her mother forgotten that she had been the one to fell the roamer?

 “Are you still planning a trip to the waters next week?” Brenna asked. Maren looked up, meeting her sister’s eyes. She swore there was warmth in them.

Her mother’s shoulders tightened, and she moved her focus to Brenna. Maren rubbed the raw spot on her cheek and tried to think only of the spoon she had started carving the night before.

“You can’t come.”

 “I didn’t say I would want to. Now where is the food?” Brenna asked again.

 Frida laid a warm hand on Maren’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “When are you leaving next?”

 “I’m so close to finding it, I can feel it.” The white-antlered deer would be hers.

 “No,” her mother said loudly. “You won’t be searching for that deer again.”

 Maren’s heart thudded into her chest. “What do you mean?”

 “No.”

  “But it’s special, I can feel it, I just need to—” From around her mother’s shoulder, she saw Brenna shake her head, warning Maren to stop.

“The Matriarch said no. Best to listen to her this time.” Frida said, her fingers slipping from Maren’s arm.

 A few women appeared at the end Maren’s of their table with platters lofted above their heads. Frida rose, wincing, and went to help them, pouring a pitcher of pine tea into each of their wooden cups.

The pins that Frida had put in Maren’s hair dug into her skin. She wanted to rip them out and stab them through the wooden table slats. Or perhaps into her mother’s hands. Not hard enough to pierce all the way through, but hard enough to hurt. She forced herself to face forward, her face a stone slate, and celebrate. 


 

C3.

“She almost died, and she doesn’t even seem to care!” Maren rolled a ball of snow tightly in her hands.

Frida was holding a skinned piece of caribou in her lap, threading a needle with thick black string. She stopped, let her shoulders sag, and watched Maren roll her ball bigger. “How do you know that she doesn’t care?”

It had been a week since Brenna ate the poisoned berries, and they still hadn’t spoken of it. Maren doubted their mother even knew.

Maren gestured toward the other side of camp. They were sheltered by a large pine tree, so she knew Frida couldn’t see where she pointed, but she didn’t think it mattered. “She’s over there eating more berries.” Maren wondered how others felt, seeing Brenna hoarding the first of the spring fruit all to herself. Especially the year prior, when she had first heard mumblings that they would not have enough food to survive the winter. She hoped this year wouldn’t be the same.

“The Matriarch would expect her to get over her fears. You know that, dear.”

Maren finished rolling her ball of snow. She put it down on a rock and tilted her head, trying to decide whether she should make the smallest piece first or second. She tried to tell herself that she didn’t care what Brenna did. Since her sister was older, all her mother’s attention would be on her. And Maren preferred it that way. “Then why don’t you get over yours.” The words came out of her mouth before she’d even stopped to consider their implications.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.” But the needle had stopped moving, the black thread falling slack in Frida’s lap.

Maren wished she could take her words back. Almost.

“I don’t understand what you’re implying.”

The pine branches parted, and Brenna appeared, looking self-important. “Ask her a question, go on.”

“Ask who a question?”

Brenna chuckled and spit a berry pit out into her palm. “These berries are disgusting. They were better when we were younger.”

“Ask who a question?”

“Sometimes I forget that you can be denser than the thickest trunk. Ask Frida a question. If it’s phrased like that, she has to answer it.”

Maren looked at the pants that had started to take shape on Frida’s lap. Unfortunately, Frida still hadn’t returned to her sewing, the hands that gripped the needle and back thread tense. “Why does she have to answer it?”

Brenna stepped between Maren and Frida and crossed her arms over her chest. “Because she has to. Why do you think she’s been with us our whole lives?”

“Because she likes to be around us.”

“Stars, you really are stupid. It’s because she has to. Mother can’t look after us all the time, you know. So, ask Frida what she’s really afraid of.”

Maren hadn’t considered why Frida was always looking after her. She felt stupid. “Why don’t you just leave me alone, Mother is good enough at it? I don’t even think you know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m just looking out for you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

Both sisters seemed to pause, as if waiting for Frida to interrupt their conversation, as she always did when their fighting got out of hand. Frida had always claimed that raised voices made her queasy and interrupted her solace, especially when they wandered the winter woods. Maren had never believed that winter woods were silent. Crackling snow, rustling animals, branches bending almost to the point of snapping. . . Maren looked to where Frida had been sitting. Only an indent in the snow and a few tracks gave any indication that she had been there.

“You’re just jealous that Frida doesn’t help you at all.” Maren didn’t want to be the first to leave her sheltered cove. “I think I heard Mother calling you.

“And you’re jealous that Mother doesn’t care about you.” Brenna swept her hair over her shoulder and ducked behind the branches. Probably off to find their mother, as she always did when she was upset. Maren wondered what comfort the Matriarch could possibly provide. She had certainly received none of it.

Maren thought about searching for Frida, but Brenna’s words had slithered under her skin, and all she wanted was to get away.  

***

When Maren was six-years-old, her mother took her on a trip. She’d watched Brenna leave with their mother on many such outings, but her mother had always looked at Maren and said she was too young, even though Frida said Brenna had started leaving camp when she was five months old.

Maren walked through camp proudly, clutching her mother’s hand tightly and wearing a new rabbit fur coat she had gotten for her birthday. Her mother had handed it to her quickly and then gotten called away, but Maren thought she had seen Frida sewing it a few weeks prior.

They stopped on their way to pluck luscious berries from beside the river. Maren marveled at the rushing waters. She knew from Frida’s stories that people used to drift down the currents on floating pieces of wood—like a massive wooden spoon in the water. She wondered how it didn’t sink.

Her mother showed Maren deer tracks and taught her which plants to avoid. Maren sometimes struggled through the shoulder-high snow, and her mother had to lift her up on her shoulders or re-secure her snowshoes[AK1] . Maren wondered if Brenna learned the same things, and if at sometime in the future they would get to go together.

Close to sunset, her mother guided her back toward camp. They stopped in a grove of stunted cedar trees. In the center of the clearing was a gravestone, carved with crude symbols that Maren couldn’t read, weathered by the ice and sleet. 

“This is your grandmother,” her mother said. “Without her, you wouldn’t be here. I still see her sometimes.”

“In your dreams?”

The Matriarch turned her head to the mountains. “I don’t remember my dreams.”

Maren had heard Frida speak of her grandmother a few times, but never in much detail. Maren squeezed her mother’s hand tighter. The wind that brushed across her cheeks was bitterly cold. Maren didn’t remember feeling as cold as she had that day in the years since.

“I’m happy that I’m here.”

She was too small to see her mother’s face, but she liked to imagine that she might have smiled.

__

By the time Maren returned from her wander around the river, the clouds had cleared, and the full moon took its place at the throne of the sky. As she did every full moon, Maren found her mother’s tent, but rather than walk inside, she traced the perimeter and settled her body against one of the large wooden stakes that bordered the tree line. Only a few occasions in the hundreds of times she had sat in this place did someone find her, but no one ever said anything to the Matriarch. Maren wondered if it was a small piece of disobedience—all they could manage.

She remembered this one woman—Lena, Maren thought was her name. She had left the camp when Maren was seven, to find another group. Lena insisted there had to be more out there. More people like them who survived whatever disease gripped the roamers.

A hunting party had discovered her body a few months later, after the snowdrift she had ended up in started melting.

Tonight, Maren had arrived late, and her mother was already in the middle of a story. For a few years after the outing with her mother, she had held out hope that she would also be invited to the full moon ritual her mother and Brenna had, where her mother told Brenna stories. All kinds of stories, about her travels, her childhood, old tales passed down to her, wild bands of roamers and wolves she had taken out with only a single dagger—the list went on.

Maren felt a certain sort of vindictive pleasure to listen in, knowing that she would never be invited, but also that she would hear all the stories just the same.

She thought she had heard this story before. She wracked her brain, trying to remember exactly when, but then she realized that Frida had told it to her, years and years ago.

“Hundreds of years ago, our people were little better than the roamers. They traveled the ice plains and traversed mountain passes, following the caribou on their routes across the tundra. Their only competitors were wolves, weather, and other humans. One of our ancestors—you have her blood—was the fiercest hunter of them all. She drew others to her. They wanted a better life, one with support and security, and she promised them that.” The first time Maren had heard the story, she’d envied that woman. Now she almost pitied her.

“Remnants of the old world could be seen everywhere, from rusted pieces of metal to bones, which many collected and wore around their necks as a symbol of their ancestors’ demise.” Maren knew none of those relics had survived the brutal winters that followed—at least not that she had seen.

The candlelight inside the tent flickered, casting her mother and sister’s shadows across the hide. “They followed her wherever she went—five at first, then tens, then hundreds, until finding prey in a desolate world was becoming challenging. There was one man who doubted her leadership. He gathered his own followers and promised a better life. And when people in our ancestor’s camp started dying, more fled to his promises.”

“He probably killed them on purpose,” Brenna said.

“Those poor people,” Maren had said.

Her mother’s shadow shifted. “Summer returned, and hunting game was easy once more. People stopped falling ill, and everything was as it had once been. But when winter roars, it does so loud enough to shake a mountain. Our ancestor struggled to find enough food for our people. One day, she was out roaming the hills and was attacked by a man claiming to be from the rival camp. Caught by surprise, our ancestor stood little chance, but out of the shadows emerged a legendary mountain cat, whose eyes were said to glow golden, more magnificent than a thousand sunsets, its fur entwined with liquid silver.”

“The cat saved her?” Brenna asked, sounding more eager for this tale than Maren had heard in months.

“Of course the cat saved her.” Her mother laughed. Maren had never made her mother laugh. “And when the battle between the two groups finally came, she rode the beast into the thick of it and defeated the man who tried to steal power from her, and either killed or adopted his followers.”

The shadow swirled, the sound of steel thudding into wood. Maren could see her mother’s hand holding something out to the table—like a dagger. “And that is what our line has been given. The strength of that cat.”

“The first, the last, the eternal,” Maren whispered under her breath, in time to her mother.

“And that, child, is all I have for you this night. May you have a blessed sleep and remember all that I have taught you.” Her mother reached out to cup Brenna’s cheek. Brenna stood, bowed her head, and exited the tent, heading for her own.

Maren held her breath until her sister was out of earshot. Then she released it, slow and steady. There was more to the story, at least the version Frida had told. Maren had learned that their ancestor might have killed her first challenger, but she fell in love with the second and bore his children, creating an everlasting peace between the two peoples. She wondered which one was correct. She wondered if it even mattered.

 

A few days into the new moon, Maren figured out what might convince her mother to let her hunt the deer. Maren cornered her near the latrines, where she knew her mother would be trapped with a dense thicket on one side and a sheer, rocky cliff on the other.

“Have you ever seen a deer with pure white antlers?” Maren asked her mother.

The Matriarch sighed. “You’re still on about this deer, are you? I thought I made it very clear that your presence is more needed in the camp?”

Maren had to stop herself from saying then why haven’t you paid any attention to me? “I thought you might like to come with me. It would be a nice break after a harsh winter. You were just telling Brenna the other night how much you missed roaming the wilderness, as you did in your youth.” She had spent the previous evening thinking up the perfect words to convince her mother, even asking Frida for her opinion.

“The world is not the same as it was when I was a child. And you are most certainly not me.”

“Imagine how the others will react when you come back to camp with such a prize. Their fearless leader, with food for the rest of spring.” Maren didn’t even realize she had taken inspiration from the full moon story until the words were out of her mouth. Hopefully her mother would think it a coincidence.

“I came out here to relieve myself, not to keep discussing this asinine deer.”

“It’s been so long since we hunted together. I thought it might remind us of my childhood, when we journeyed to the plains and hunted caribou when Brenna was sick with—”

Her mother’s eyes blazed. “Brenna was sick with a fever because you fed her that spoiled meat.”

“I was only eight, I didn’t know that it was—”

“Even as a three-year-old, Brenna knew good meat from spoiled. You have always been leagues behind her skill. Perhaps it’s my fault for not taking more time to teach you our ways, but I assumed you would be bright enough to teach yourself, but you are still lacking.”

Each word stung Maren, as a swarm of bees once had when she rooted around for honey in the summer months. She had hidden in the trees and waited for the welts to subside, then kept all the honey she’d managed to gather for herself. But Brenna had smelled it on her breath when she returned and demanded Maren show her the hive.

“Please, Mother. If not the deer, then something else. Anything else.”

“Is Frida’s company not enough for you? You must insist on stealing my valuable time too?”

Brenna’s words from earlier sounded through Maren’s head. She had said that Frida only interacted with them because the Matriarch wished it. “You force Frida to speak with us, how could I enjoy the company of a cripple? How could I possibly want to spend time with someone who barely knows one end of a stick from another?” She didn’t really feel that way about Frida, or at least she didn’t think so, but she desperately wanted to spend time with her mother before the summer months drew her away.

The thick berry bushes along the latrine rustled. Maren whipped around, but she saw only the retreating form of a limping woman that reminded Maren of Frida. A figment of her imagination? Or had Frida overheard her?

Her mother laughed, the sound echoing off the rock. “Who really doesn’t know one end of a stick from another?” She laid a cold hand on Maren’s shoulder and leaned in close, her hot breath tickling Maren’s ear. “If you ever speak to me about the deer, I will never let you leave this camp ever again. Now please, go help your sister with the skinning.” Her mother swept down the dirt path leading out of the latrine.

Once she was gone, Maren realized how badly the dirt under her feet reeked. She shook mud from her boots and trailed after her mother, feeling more numb than the chunks of ice breaking from the river banks. She wondered, not for the first time in her life, but for the first time in a long time, what it would be like to follow Lena into the wilderness. Hopefully, she wouldn’t end up dead, or a roamer, but she liked to imagine what her life would look like outside of camp, outside of it all.

C4.

            “Ana is having her baby.” Frida approached Maren where she sat with a pair of frayed leather pants in her lap. She had wanted to do something fun, like paint another rock to weigh down the sides of her tent, but then her pants had split, and she was tired of feeling the wind around her knees.

            “Already? That seems early.”

            Frida shrugged and patted Maren’s shoulder. “The Matriarch is sitting with her family.”

            “I thought you normally did that.” Maren frowned and set down her needle. Perhaps she wasn’t remembering correctly. It had been so long since someone had gone through childbirth. She didn’t even remember when the last time had been.

            “Your mother decided that she would be best suited for this birth. I must go back now, I just wanted to let you know. Perhaps you can tell Brenna?”

            Maren set down her sewing and watched Frida amble out of the clearing and along the river toward camp. Why couldn’t Frida also tell Brenna, if she had bothered to wander this far out of her way to tell Maren?

            Slinging the pants over her shoulder, Maren stood up, shook snow from her coat, and wandered in search of her sister.

            She found Brenna along the river, near her favorite fishing spot. She held a rod in her hand and was yelling something incoherent at the hole she had sawed in the ice.

            “That’s not a very nice circle.” Maren seated herself next to Brenna and rested her feet on the ice. She had always known her sister to carve a perfect fishing hole—something Maren had never been able to emulate.

            Brenna flicked snow off the top of her rod. “It was already like this when I got here. Do you really think I would commit such a grievous error?”

            “No wonder you haven’t caught anything.” Maren nodded to Brenna’s empty basket.

            “It was a roamer. The diseased ones probably don’t know how to cut a proper hole.” Brenna wriggled in the snow and jerked back her rod, making a clucking sound when she realized she had caught nothing. “Anyway, did you come all the way out here just to bother me? I wouldn’t be surprised.”

            Maren shivered, drawing her knees close to her chest. The pants she wore in place of the ones she had started sewing were old and threadbare. “Ana is having her baby.”

            “Already? Isn’t that a little early?”

            “Me neither. But it seems early. That’s what I told Frida.”

            Brenna snorted. “I’m sure the cripple had a lot to say.”

            Maren ignored the jest. She didn’t have the energy to defend Frida. “Not really. She seemed worried.”

            “Maybe we should go back to camp and see what’s happening. Stars know I could use some excitement.”

            Maren followed Brenna along the river and through the barren berry bushes that separated the forest from their camp. There was something about the mood that she didn’t like. People stared at the two of them as they passed, and the central fire had been stoked down to hot amber coals.

            Before they could approach the Matriarch’s tent—women normally went there to have their babies—Frida crossed their path and grabbed Maren’s wrist, dragging her into the shadows cast by two tents. “Don’t go near there. You don’t want to see it.”

            “What don’t we want to see?” Brenna hovered over Maren’s elbow. She looked more interested in what Frida had to say than ever before.

            Frida rubbed her thumb over Maren’s wrist. “Be careful.”

            “Of what?”

            “Look!” Brenna pointed to the Matriarch’s tent. Their mother stood in the circle of mud that separated her tent from the snow, a bundle clutched tightly to her chest.

            Frida tried to drag Maren deeper into the shadows. “I told you not to look.”

            The Matriarch spotted them. She beckoned them forward, her face void of expression. Brenna rushed to meet her. The Matriarch peeled back the blanket.

            Brenna gasped.

            Frida’s grip around Maren’s wrist tightened, but Maren jerked herself away. She needed to see. She needed to know what had caused Brenna’s reaction.

            The baby—if it could be called that—seemed malformed, though Maren didn’t have much experience with babies. The left side of the head was indented, the foot that stuck out of the bottom of the blanket twisted almost in half. Maren thought she heard Brenna retching in the bushes, but she couldn’t tear herself away from the babe’s face, which was almost translucent, the cheeks filled with a garish green glow.

            “I don’t know what’s happening,” the Matriarch said.

            Maren covered her mouth with her hand.

            “Mother always said—”

            “Enough,” the Matriarch said.

            Maren blinked. She had thought the word ‘mother’ would come from Brenna, but it had come from Frida.

            The Matriarch re-covered the baby with the blanket. Others were starting to gather in the vicinity, though they seemed wary about getting too close. The Matriarch waved for Brenna to follow her, and Brenna wiped her mouth clean with her sleeve. The two of them disappeared into the trees.

            Frida laid a hand on Maren’s shoulder. “Where are they going?” Maren asked.

            “To dispose of the thing, I’d imagine.”

            Maren bit down on her lip.

            “Maybe a roamer will find it.”

            Maren hoped so. She hoped she would never have to see anything of the sort again.

 

“I realized I was quite unfair with you the other day, I thought we might do something together.”

Maren looked up from her carving. She hated to set down her knife when she was almost finished detailing the branches of a pine tree on her spoon, but she thought she might be imagining her mother’s words and didn’t want to lose the dream figment. “The other day?”

“In the latrine,” her mother said, with a hint of impatience. “I have been ignoring you in recent months, and I don’t think that’s fair.”

Maren wondered if Frida had said something to her. She hadn’t spoken with the woman since that day in the latrine, when she suspected Frida might have overheard her harsh words, but she hadn’t found the courage to go and confirm it. She had seen Frida talking to her mother last night, though it had seemed like they were arguing. “Okay.”

Her mother crouched down and motioned for Maren’s carving. “Can I?”

Maren nodded and passed it over. The tree was inspired by one she had seen on one of her trips. She was planning on adding a deer beneath its boughs, but she didn’t want to mention that to her mother.

“It’s beautiful.”

Maren didn’t want to say thank you because she didn’t think she’d ever heard her mother say anything like that to her. “What did you want to do?”

Her mother leaned back against the pine tree. “We could take a hunting trip, or climb to the top of the tallest mountain for sunset and watch the last of the aurora.”

Maren knew where her mother had gotten those ideas from. “Perhaps you should ask Brenna instead, I’m sure she would love to go with you again.”

“I’m trying to make an effort here, Bren—Maren.”

Maren picked up the spoon from where her mother had discarded it in the snow. She began to whittle away the rough edges, more harshly than she would have done otherwise. “It’s like I said before—perhaps you should ask Brenna.”

“Ask me what?” Brenna appeared over Maren’s shoulder.

Maren could see her mother’s patience wearing thin. She was amused by it. While her mother tried to reconnect their relationship for unknown reasons, she didn’t think she would get in trouble for her poor attitude. “Mother wants to take you to the tallest mountain to watch the sunset. She was asking me for ideas, and I just knew how much you would love that.” Now that she thought more about the plan, Maren liked it. Almost a full day of missing both her mother and her sister. The deer might have roamed close enough to camp for her to hunt it down in that amount of time. She wished she had never wanted to spend more time with her mother. What had come over her?

Brenna still loomed behind Maren. “Aren’t the passes still snowed in?”

“You could take the cliff route.”

“We could, but then the –”

“Would you two let me speak!” Their mother exploded.

Maren smirked. She knew the niceties wouldn’t last.

“I think both of you should come.”

Maren hadn’t expected that. She couldn’t imagine a worse scenario than having to spend concentrated time with both her sister and her mother. She said nothing and continued to darken the roots of the tree on her spoon.

“Maren?”

 “I see you’ve remembered my name? Forgot that you had a second child all these years, did you?”

Brenna stumbled over a stick, the snap splitting the air.

Icy filaments returned to her mother’s eyes. “Do you perhaps want to rethink those words?”

“I want Frida to come.”

Her mother gave Maren a long look. “Why? You still think she’s a part of the family?”

 “Hauling a cripple up a mountain should be fun,” Brenna said.

“You will tell Frida of the plan,” her mother said. “You will carry her things and if needed, carry her. I will not slow my pace for anyone.”

Maren bowed her head, hand wrapped tightly around her carving. It seemed a small price to pay for any hint of relief from her mother and her sister. She had pushed her mother far, that day by the latrines. And if anything, she wished she could go back and undo it.

 

Maren hadn’t given Frida much choice about the trip, not at all, really. She had expected some form of protest. Frida rarely left the direct boundary around the camp, and she certainly never seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the trips Maren took. Excited because Maren was excited, but never because Frida wondered what her life might have been like had she been able to walk better.

If anything, Frida had seemed eager to leave. Asking how soon they would go, how long they would be gone.

Maren figured it was better than disappointment. She figured that Frida just welcomed a chance to get out.

She hadn’t counted on how exhausting it would be to carry her pack and Frida’s up the side of a mountain. They left just before sunrise, and by the time they stopped for lunch on a rocky cliff overlooking the dense pine forests and winding rivers that reflected the hazy sun, her legs burned and her back ached.

Maren paused to catch her breath. She hadn’t traveled this way in a long time, but the last time she had wondered how roamers made any progress through the pass without snowshoes. Now, she thought she might be able to make it without them, though still not easily.

“Do you want me to carry that for a little while?” Brenna asked, dropping back to walk with Maren. They had walked in the same formation since the first latrine break. The Matriarch in the front, Brenna always a single step behind. Then Maren, struggling with double the packs, and Frida, panting and red-faced, but uncomplaining.

Maren couldn’t tell whether Brenna was serious, so she shook her head. With a shrug, Brenna returned to their mother.

Maren had to stop on the crest of the next rise to wait for Frida.

“That was nice of her,” Frida said, panting.

Maren shrugged. “I guess.”

“She can be nice sometimes, you know. Maybe it was a genuine offer.”

“How did you know that’s what I was thinking.”

Frida tapped her nose. 

Their path took them through the rest of the mountain pass, the snow clearing to reveal mounds of rock fragments and boulders that they spent the rest of the day and into the evening scrambling over. Soon, it grew too dark for them to safely continue, though Maren could see the way her mother looked up at the mountain they still had to climb and knew that she would spend the rest of the night trying to find ways to bring the sun back. Maren huddled by the fire they had built, smoke pluming straight into her face. She coughed but didn’t bother to move away.

In the morning, when she finally cracked her crusty eyes open, Brenna wordlessly handed her a strip of dried salmon that Maren chewed on during the rest of their climb. By mid-afternoon, Frida could barely walk, and Maren had to drop back to support her lame side.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Frida asked.

Maren watched the dark shapes of her mother and Brenna disappear around a curve in the mountain. “No.”

“Then you should go. Come back for me when you know the way.” Frida gasped in pain and clutched her hip.

“What happened to you?” Maren blurted out. She had posed the question once to Frida when she was a child and Frida had almost slapped her. Almost. She had always suspected an accident when Frida was young, but that didn’t seem right.

“I wonder if we’ll make it there by the time the sun sets.”

Maren was half-tempted to stop giving Frida support. To see if the older woman ever managed to make it to the peak. Before she could talk herself out of such a cruel idea, they emerged over another rise. Brenna and the Matriarch stood just ten feet away from them, staring at a grove of black, wilted trees that seemed to have collapsed from within. From the way Brenna and her mother were looking, Maren guessed that the forest had not always looked like this.

“Perhaps lightning,” Brenna suggested to her mother, glancing sidelong at Maren and Frida as they walked up.

The Matriarch shook her head. “I was just up here in the fall. We only get storms like that in the summer.”

“An insect?” Maren suggested. “Some sort of rot?” She stepped closer to the trees, intent on one of the fallen branches. If she could study it, she might know more.

A hand wrapped around her wrist, yanking her back. Sharp nails dug into the tender skin on the underside of her arm. “Don’t you dare go into those cursed woods.” Frida’s dark eyes gleamed with malice. “Especially if you are too naïve to know what has occurred here.”

“Don’t infect my daughters with any more of that nonsense,” the Matriarch scoffed. “I heard enough of it during our childhood.”

“And you chose not to teach it to them! The Goddess is angry, and it’s all your fault!”

The Matriarch narrowed her eyes. “There is no goddess, there never has been. I thought I taught you well enough not to speak back to me, especially in front of my daughters.”

Frida’s cheeks flushed. “You will regret that.”

Maren backed away. She didn’t know whose side to take. She barely understood what they were trying to say to each other.

“There was no storm, there was no disease!” Frida swept her arm out to the trees. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for months.”

“And I’ve told you that your voice doesn’t matter to me.”

Brenna stomped her foot on the ground. “Stop it! Would you stop it! What does it matter how the forest got destroyed?”

Frida turned to the two sisters with unease in her eyes. “Because the Goddess is angry with us. Livanna thinks that we have forsaken Her. She is poisoning our water and killing our plants. This patch of trees is just the beginning. What animal would want to make its home near ours if their home is gone? We will have nothing.”

Maren clutched her cold hands to her chest. She still didn’t understand what Frida was trying to say.

A swish of steel. The Matriarch had drawn her dagger and pointed it to Frida, the tip glistening under the pale pink sky above. “Don’t listen to a word she says,” she said to Brenna and Maren. Her eyes returned to Frida, who stood resolute on the barren rock. “Your threats mean nothing to us. And if you don’t remember your place, I’ll cut out your tongue.” As if to add emphasis to her statement, the Matriarch bent down in front of the fallen tree and snipped off a twig, rubbing it between her fingers until it crumbled to dust. “If your ‘Goddess’ is truly angry with us, she will kill me where I stand.” She looked up at the sky, spreading her arms wide. “I dare you, Livanna. I dare you.”

Maren held her breath, but nothing happened save a brief pickup in the wind.

“She’s crazy,” Brenna whispered.

Maren nodded. Her mother seemed ready to murder Frida over nothing. Unless history had predicted this moment.

 “Of course there’s no goddess poisoning us,” Brenna continued. Her sister had meant Frida, not their mother. Maren still nodded mutely. Her mother still held her dagger out to Frida.

“We should make camp before it gets too dark,” Maren said.

Both women turned to her. She swallowed. The Matriarch leveled her weapon to Maren, the same icy frost in her eyes as when she looked at Frida. Maren squeezed her frozen fists together. She hadn’t chosen those words carefully, as Frida had always told her to do.

Suddenly, Brenna turned and ran through the grove of blackened trees. Frida’s agonized wail carried on the wind, heightening the echoing pitch. Maren gaped at her sister. Did she want to trifle with this place, real curse from a goddess or not?

“Brenna! What are you doing?” The Matriarch stared into the deadened woods. She swiveled her dagger back to Maren. “Go after her.”

Maren hesitated. She had already saved her sister’s life once, when she had eaten the poisoned berries. Wasn’t one enough for one life? Hadn’t she paid whatever debt she owed to the universe? And besides, did she really think the forest would do any harm to Brenna?

“Don’t do it, Maren.” Frida said.

“Go,” the Matriarch said.

The Matriarch’s dagger whirled to face Frida. Without stopping to think, Maren dashed into the dead forest, following Brenna’s footprints through the snow.

“Neither of them will come back alive!” Frida yelled.

Twigs snapped at Maren’s face, the smell of decay hanging heavy in the air. Maren’s lungs burned. The sensation reminded her of the time Brenna had fed her poisoned berries, but that hadn’t lasted long. The more she ran, the tighter her chest grew and the dizzier she became, but she didn’t know if it was because of Frida’s cursed forest or because of her activity.

At least, according to Frida the forest was cursed. And Maren had never been led astray by Frida’s words. It was like some of the stories she had heard the Matriarch tell Brenna. The hero in the story always had some sort of wise council guiding their steps. Perhaps Maren could be the hero. If Maren saved Brenna in front of their mother, the Matriarch would surely thank her.

Maren increased her speed, her muscles quivering. She laughed as her hair blew out of its bindings, whipping around her face. The wind howled in her ears, so loudly that she could hardly hear anything that happened in the forest around. She smiled, the cold nipping at her gums. She hadn’t run like this in weeks.

“Maren, stop!”

Frida’s voice carried on the wind, but it was still far behind her.

Brenna’s footsteps grew fresher, the deadened trees thinning. Maren was almost there. She just needed to take a few more steps…

Brenna kneeled in a clearing at the base of a jagged, rocky cliff. She was bent over something large, perhaps a dead animal.

“What—” Maren started. She slowed down and arced around her sister, so she could see the animal. Her eyes widened. The deer. The deer with the antlers so pure and white that they blended into the snow. It lay dead at her sister’s feet, blood pooling from a slash wound across its neck, its black eyes glassy and blank. “What did you do?” A thundering wave filled Maren’s ears. She could hear her pulse beating, still racing from her run. A fog slid through her mind, distorting her thoughts. The deer was here. So close to their camp the entire time, and she hadn’t been the one to kill it. “What did you do!”

Brenna stood up and turned to Maren. Her eyes were almost apologetic.

Maren looked at the deer again. She knew that her sister couldn’t have inflicted such a wound—not even with her daggers, but she didn’t care. “It’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Maren’s chest heaved. “I was supposed to be the one who killed it.”

“You know, there’s a lot of things I wanted to do that I never got to. The deer doesn’t matter. Have you seen this forest?”

“Please, Brenna, enlighten me on what you’ve ever been restricted from doing. Mother would serve my face to you on a platter if you asked.”

A howl sounded, carried by the gusting wind. Maren jerked around, searching for the source of the sound.

“It’s nothing,” Brenna said, waving her hand. “You know how the wind can get up here.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“You’re right, by the way. Mother would serve your face to me on a platter if I asked. But I haven’t. Shouldn’t that make you feel special? I know how you like to feel special.”

Maren tackled Brenna to the ground. They rolled away from the dead deer and toward the cliff, Maren’s back jamming into a sharp rock. She gasped and yanked out a clump of Brenna’s hair. Brenna snarled, kicking Maren’s stomach. With a sharp release of breath, she rolled off her sister and reached for her dagger, only to find the slot empty. It must have fallen out during her frantic dash through the trees. Maybe this was why Maren had come here. Not to save Brenna, but to kill her.

Another howl, closer this time, close enough to reverberate off the cliff face. Maren ignored the sound.

She leaped again, just as a dark shadow passed over her head. A blur of fur landed on Brenna, pushing her against the cliff wall.

Maren ducked and ran a few feet, her snowshoes catching on the ground. She tripped and fell and pushed herself back up, hands on her knees. The moonlight caught on the blur of fur. Maren stood frozen, hardly believing what stood in front of her. A giant cat—a mountain lion, with creamy brown fur. She hadn’t seen any tracks. That didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Brenna screamed but managed to avoid the raging cat’s claws. “Brenna!” Maren yelled, petrified.

“Do something!” Brenna hollered. The cat dug its claws into Brenna’s thick hide coat. She shrieked and bucked her hips, slamming her fists into the cat’s muzzle.

Maren combed her belt with shaking hands. Her dagger. It wasn’t there. She had no bow, no other weapon. Frantic, she scanned the forest, but the shadows all blurred together, creating a milky soup of images. A heavy branch, maybe. If she could find a heavy branch she could knock the cat unconscious. That might be enough. Maren dropped to her hands and knees and started pawing the ground.

 Brenna’s screams grew strangled. Maren’s hands wrapped around a thick piece of wood, pine needles tickling her palms.

A dagger whistled past her head, embedding itself in the cat’s stomach. The beast howled and lurched away from Brenna. Maren jerked forward and ripped the dagger from the cat, dancing away from its claws. She stabbed down, steel puncturing flesh and muscle before meeting bone. She wondered how many strikes it would take to fell a legend such as this. Not nearly enough, she answered herself as she thrust the dagger down again. The cat shuddered and moaned under her feet.

“One more for good measure, I think.”

Maren’s mother stood behind her, another dagger in her hand. Maren twisted the dagger that was already jammed into the cat’s neck, silencing the last of its cries. She looked down at the dagger. A shaky ‘F’ was carved into the reddish wood handle.

Maren’s mother wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Good. I’m proud of you.”

Maren’s chest grew tight. She closed her eyes, basking in the cool silence of the winter woods, of her mother’s strong arms around her shoulder, and of the moonlight bathing her face. Frida was a fool, she realized. Of course, her mother was right. There was no goddess poisoning their lands. The forest probably burned down earlier that winter, perhaps roamers playing with fire they didn’t know how to control. Maren turned to face her mother, a smile teasing her lips. Her mother was proud of her.

Their eyes met. The Matriarch’s eyes widened. She opened and closed her mouth. Her hand slipped from Maren’s shoulder. She took a step back.

A heaving breath from nearer to the cliff. The Matriarch dropped to Brenna’s side, ignoring Maren’s presence. Brenna lifted a shaking arm up, her chest rattling. Her hand dropped back to her side, and then Brenna’s dark eyes focused on a single point in the sky. They didn’t move again.

C5.

The Matriarch pressed her hands over the giant gash in Brenna’s chest, her hands soaking with blood, though it still pooled from Brenna’s body and stained the snow.

Maren took a deep breath, the sound of air rushing through her nostrils almost louder than the slight crunch of melting snow. What did she say, if she bothered to speak at all?

Her sister was dead.

Everything had happened so fast. What if Maren hadn’t lost her dagger? Would she have been able to kill the cat sooner? She had loved the feeling of that dagger ripping through the cat’s flesh. One more for good measure.

 “You killed my daughter,” her mother said.

Maren swallowed. The way her mother had said daughter. “My sister died.”

“You didn’t protect her. I told you to protect her!” The Matriarch whirled, the veins in her eyes popping.

“I killed the cat. I did protect her.” Maren took a step back, eyes narrowing on the way her mother’s fists clenched at her side. Her foot landed on a twig. It snapped.

The Matriarch unclenched her fists, eyes flying to Maren’s boots. Maren knew they were covered in dried blood. “I have to punish you, you should know that, Maren. I have to punish you for what you have taken from this world. Two lives lost tonight, two precious lives. I think two fingers ought to be payment enough, yes, certainly only two fingers. More than that and people might talk, that wouldn’t be good, we don’t need people talking any more than they already are.”

Maren’s hand went numb. She flexed her fingers inside of her glove, her frazzled brain struggling to comprehend whether she couldn’t move them because of the cold or because they were already missing. She tried to find words to argue, but her mouth moved without sound. Three lives had been lost. She squeezed her eyes tightly, trying to banish Brenna’s face from her mind, but it floated there, as if permanently entrenched.  

“You manipulated me into bringing you here and then killed my daughter. My daughter!”

Maren frowned. Her memories were fuzzy. But of course, her mother would tell her the truth. She always told the truth.

“Come here,” her mother said.

Maren took a step. Her mother was right. She had killed her sister. Why had she ever thought otherwise? If she hadn’t forgotten her dagger, Brenna wouldn’t have died. And if Maren hadn’t originally confronted her mother about this trip, Brenna wouldn’t have died.

Her mother extended a hand to Maren’s face, stroking her fingers down Maren’s cheek. “Your nose has always looked like mine. But those eyes…”

Like the raging summer river, not like ice that never thawed.

“Are you going to finish my punishment?” Maren asked. She could still hold a paintbrush with her other hand. If she was lucky, she could still carve. If not, then perhaps that was her punishment for killing her sister.

“Hold out your hand.”

Maren squeezed the tip of her glove with her other hand. There was blood on the fur.

A sound from the bushes. Maren slid her glove back on. Frida emerged, hair askew and face red and patchy. “The Goddess has spoken,” Frida said. “We have offended Her, and she has shown us what happens when we don’t listen to Her wise words. Brenna’s death is our punishment.” Frida stepped behind Maren and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, drawing her away from the Matriarch.

“There is no Goddess!” The Matriarch snarled. “My daughter is dead because of her.” She pointed her dagger at Maren’s throat. Maren had to cross her eyes to see the end, dangling precariously in front of the big vein in her neck.

“She’s going to take my fingers. As a punishment,” Maren said. It made sense when her mother had explained it to her, but as she spoke, she wondered what had happened. She had tried to save Brenna that day with the berries. Why would she now choose to kill her? It didn’t make any sense.

Frida moved closer to them. She seemed to move without as much of a limp, but her spine remained locked in a hunched position. Perhaps Maren just wasn’t seeing clearly. She blinked, but Frida’s steps remained sure. “Do not do this to Maren, Helke. She doesn’t deserve this.”

Helke. Maren had never heard her mother’s name before.

“Silence!” The Matriarch yelled, her dagger drifting between Maren and Frida. Sweat shone on her brow, but her hand was steady. “You and your Goddess have no right to speak here. Not in front of my daughter.”

“We must bless her,” Frida said. She spoke so calmly, and Maren wondered whether she should listen to her. Every time the Matriarch spoke, Maren wanted to cover her ears and run from the mountain. “Before she passes into the realm of darkness, we must shroud her in blessings, so the Goddess will accept her despite any wrongdoing on our part.”

The Matriarch’s chest heaved up and down.

“The fingers can be part of the blessing,” Frida said. “By giving our own blood to the earth, it will signal to the Goddess that we mean well and that she should accept Brenna as one of Her own.”

Frida turned to Maren, her eyes wide. “It wasn’t you, Maren, you have to believe that. You didn’t kill Brenna, she would have died regardless of what happened here tonight.”

Maren flexed her fingers. She could almost feel them again, and the more Frida spoke, the more she started to remember. She hadn’t killed her sister. She had killed the cat, she remembered driving the dagger into its heart, over and over. “I didn’t kill my sister,” she said, not caring that the Matriarch had started speaking again.

“I must punish you for what happened,” her mother said, leveling the dagger back to Maren’s throat.

“Take my fingers instead, if you must spill more blood.” Frida stepped in front of Maren and extended her hand toward the Matriarch. “I don’t really need them.”

Maren didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand why Frida would take Maren’s punishment away, even though she thought Frida deserved it. Frida was the one who had said not to venture into the forest. Frida knew that Brenna always did whatever someone told her not to, and that Brenna might encounter something dangerous.

Thankfully, the Matriarch didn’t look at Maren again. She grabbed Frida’s hand and pushed back her sleeve. Maren realized that Frida wore a black leather bracelet with two round wooden beads. It reminded her of the bracelet her mother wore, though she thought their similarity had to be too much of a coincidence.

Maren thought she should look away. Months ago, she might have looked away, but she couldn’t stop watching the dagger lower itself to Frida’s two smallest fingers, the steel edge laying flat against the joints. Frida started screaming, the sound echoing off the stone cliff wall. Blood gushed to the ground. Maren watched the dark stain spread, until the color reached her boots and slid under her feet to slink further into the forest.

Eventually, the screaming stopped. The Matriarch drew back, her breathing ragged. She wiped her dagger clean on her sleeve and sheathed it. Maren didn’t know what happened to Frida’s fingers. She didn’t think she wanted to see them again. Quietly, Maren handed Frida a cloth to stop the bleeding, though she didn’t know how else to help her. She had never treated wounds like that before.

“I must bless Brenna now,” Frida said, staggering over to Brenna’s body.

“Stop,” the Matriarch said quietly. “Take another step and I’ll take another one of your fingers.”

Frida took another step and drew back the cloth, letting her blood drip onto Brenna’s stomach. She started mumbling words that Maren couldn’t make out.

The Matriarch looked to Maren, her icy blue eyes duller than Maren had ever seen. “Watch out for Frida. It’s important that the two of us stick together now.”

Maren nodded. She didn’t think Brenna’s death should make her happy, but in that moment, she was elated, the feeling rising through her chest and consuming her thoughts. Perhaps in a few months her mother would start inviting Maren into the tent to hear her stories, and she wouldn’t have to sit outside in the cold snow with Frida to learn about their ancestors. She watched Frida rewrap her wound.

They would have to return to camp and leave Brenna to the wolves. Bodies were not buried. Frida had always taught Maren that a person’s soul could become trapped by the earth, and that if they gave nourishment to another creature, they would roam on in the herds of mythic animals that fled across the ice.

            But now Maren didn’t know if that was Frida’s goddess speaking or a real tradition.

            The Matriarch turned from Brenna’s body, arms clutched tightly to her chest. She started walking away from the cliff. Maren watched her body jerk forward and then stumble, but Frida lunged and caught her. The Matriarch growled and threw Frida off, regaining her balance.

            The Matriarch pushed through the bushes, a slight limp in her step, Frida walking close to her heels, leaving Maren in the clearing.  Maren studied the ground where her mother had tripped. A gleaming white bone, illuminated by the moonlight, staked into the dirt. Maren didn’t bother to uncover it before she followed her mother and Frida back to camp.

C6.

Maren approached her mother slowly, settling herself on the opposite side of a low table. She crisscrossed her legs and then straightened her spine—but not too much—and then let her eyes settle on her the Matriarch’s face. She settled on the nose. Close enough to the eyes to read her expression, but not close enough to experience that locking sensation that she so hated. 

            Her mother said nothing, gripping the ceramic mug so tightly in her hand that her fingers turned white. She swirled the contents around twice and then stopped, her own eyes fixated on the table. 

            Three weeks. Three weeks since they had lost Brenna to the mythic cat.

            From over her mother’s ear, Maren caught a shadow moving at the back of the tent. She hadn’t seen much of Frida since that day—well—Maren should amend, she hadn’t spoken much with Frida or seen her, but Frida seemed to always be there, lingering, watching, waiting. Maren didn’t know if Frida followed her to the latrines, or if Maren had simply grown so used to having a shadow that she couldn’t tell the difference. She both hated it and felt comforted by it at the same time.  

            She waited for the Matriarch to speak first. How did Maren begin to form words? Frida stepped into the light. She carried a vase of water across the tent, setting it on the back table. Her stunted hand dragged at her side.

            “Drink the rest of this if you want.” The Matriarch set her tea on the table and pushed it toward Maren. “I don’t find I have the taste for it.”

            “How is your leg, Mother?” Maren ignored the tea.

            The Matriarch stopped massaging her arm. Maren almost smiled. “I saw you trip over something on our hunting trip. I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”

            Frida carried the vase of water toward them. The smell of her made Maren want to shirk again. She had the same earthy smell as Brenna.

            “Matriarch,” Frida bowed over the table and offered the water.

            The Matriarch moved while Maren was mid-blink. A thud. One of the Matriarch’s daggers was embedded in the wall, a thumbs-width from Frida’s head. “Shut up.”

            Maren swallowed, though she could still hear the dagger vibrating. “That was pleasant.”

            Maren was curious, how far she could push her mother. She didn’t know how to handle this new dynamic—without Brenna, Maren was heir. Without Brenna, Maren would become the next Matriarch, which was never something she had wanted. She still didn’t want it.

            Frida slipped back to her table near the tent rear.

            The Matriarch, seemingly unfazed by Maren’s words, unrolled a set of daggers on the table separating her from Maren. “Which one should we use?”

            “For what?”

            “Skinning?”

            Maren selected her favorite from her mother’s collection. A long thin dagger with a reddish-brown wooden handle. “What are we skinning?”

            “What do we always skin?” Her mother extracted the dagger from its case and set it in the center of the table, discarding the rest.

            Perhaps the dynamic between the three of them would remain unchanged.

            “Frida, bring the platter here.”

            Frida appeared almost instantly at their side, a silver platter lofted above her shoulder. She bent crookedly and placed it on the table, her deformed hand lingering for more than a few seconds in front of the Matriarch’s face. She stepped away, her body revealing the carcass of a dead squirrel atop the platter.

            Maren poked at its cold flesh. A part of her had almost hoped that her mother would want to tell her a story or talk to her about Brenna. Not that Maren necessarily wanted to talk about her dead sister, but she would rather have had that conversation with her mother than stare at another dead animal. She had seen enough dead animals recently.

            Only once had Maren left camp since they’d returned without Brenna. She had thought she could handle it, facing prey with her bow and arrow, but she couldn’t.

            And not because she couldn’t kill, but because she hadn’t found anything alive. A few rotted out rabbits and one deer with its decaying carcass cut clean by roamers, but nothing for her.  

            “I thought this was an activity we could do together.”

            Maren breathed deeply.

            “Are those packed bags? Are you going somewhere?”

            The Matriarch frowned at the squirrel. The cold black eyes seemed to stare straight at Maren. She had never liked looking at the faces of dead animals when she had to skin them. Much like how she looked at her mother. Her mother snatched the mug of tea from the ground and took a few more small sips. “Do you want to start, or do you want me to start?”

            “I want to know why you’re packing.” It wasn’t like her mother to get up and leave without announcing it to everyone.

            The Matriarch’s eyes sharpened. “Why?”

            “It’s just that now that Brenna is—”

            The Matriarch raised her hand. Maren blinked, prepared to dodge her mother’s slap, but it never came. Something strange and urgent flashed through the Matriarch’s eyes, and her arm seemed to stop in midair, as if someone had taken it and yanked it back. 

            Maren didn’t understand. She grabbed the skinning knife and slid the tip under the squirrel’s fur, just over its spine. She continued sliding it along the length of the animal, splitting the fur in half. “I probably deserved that hit,” she said, but Frida didn’t seem inclined to move from her perch above the table.

            “Frida, let us be,” her mother said, voice dangerously low.

            Thankfully, Frida obeyed the Matriarch and retreated to the shadows. Maren would hold her tongue. But only so Frida didn’t feel the need to intervene to protect her, as she seemed apt to do of late. 

            “Does that knife need to be sharpened?” her mother asked. “I thought it might.”

            Maren shook her head.

            “Shall we go through the first rib, or the second?”

            Maren stopped moving the knife.

            “First. Or second?”

            Maren lofted the knife and stabbed down at the squirrel, but then suddenly, the squirrel wasn’t an animal but Frida’s hand. The knife pierced through bones and flesh. Blood welled slowly. Dead a while. “Second rib.” She looked up.

            Her mother held out a hand, asking for the knife. Maren debated handing it to her, then passed it sideways, so the metal wouldn’t be facing her. The Matriarch dragged the platter toward her. The metal screeched across the wood, like a bird shot with an arrow, squawking in surprise. Her mother sliced the dagger through the rest of the squirrel and pried it open.

            Maren almost vomited. The smell emanating from the squirrel was like nothing she had experienced before. Like rotted flesh, but…worse. Like when she uncovered a half-decayed roamer deep in the woods, but worse…

            “What…”

            The squirrel’s veins shone fluorescent green, like fresh summer grass. Sludge bubbled in the decayed and ash-charred muscles, organs practically mush.

            “I told you it would happen.” Frida’s voice echoed from the back of the tent. 

            Maren wanted to laugh. She knew Brenna would have. But she could only see what was right in front of her, and what sat in front of her was not something she could explain. She had never seen a color so bright, and had never been so close to believing in Frida’s strange Goddess.

            But her mother just chuckled and reached down, scooping some of the goo onto her finger. “This poor squirrel must have eaten a piece of rancid prey.”

            “If you touch that, you will be poisoned, and there is nothing I can do to help,” Frida said. 

            Maren didn’t need any convincing not to touch the squirrel, but she was fascinated by the color. How vibrant a shade for her to paint with? Her grass might finally look like how she imagined in her head, for those few days of summer when the sun shone with a brutal intensity and she could finally shed her furs and lay back on the soft ground, miraculously free of snow.

The Matriarch stared at the substance on her finger. Then she left her hand to her mouth and sucked it off. 

Maren blinked. She didn’t necessarily believe that the goo was as poisonous as Frida claimed, but she still didn’t think she would have eaten it. 

            “I can’t do this right now.” Maren stood up and rubbed her forehead, not caring what happened between her mother and Frida. She pushed through the tent flaps and into the snow, racing for the tree-line. People parted for her, though she didn’t know whether it was the expression on her face or because they knew her face and knew she was now heir and knew that they had to get out of her way or she could have them punished. Nobody wished for the Matriarch’s punishments.

            Maren reached the trees and knelt before an old oak, vomiting her breakfast over the roots. She watched the contents of her stomach sink into the earth and wondered what other creatures roaming the forest around her had decided to glow.

 

Maren pulled the deer-hide cover from a boulder wider than the length of her body. She set down the piece of bark with berry-stained paints and chewed on the end of her paintbrush. Mountains and pine trees lined the bottom of the boulder, but she thought it needed something else. She couldn’t think of anything.

“You’re doing this again? Last I looked, that rock was covered in flowers.”

Maren didn’t turn at the sound of Frida’s voice. She knew what the older woman would say next, and she didn’t need to see her face to know what her expression would be. Blank, with slightly quirked lips, as if she was ready to smile if Maren gave any indication that she wanted to smile. “Last I checked, it wasn’t your sister who just died.”

“I understand why you’re angry.”

Maren bit into the wooden handle of her paintbrush. Frida moved into view on the near side of the rock. “It’s been a month since that too, and I bet your arm still thinks it has two extra fingers.” She nodded to Frida’s hand, which twitched as if in response. Three fingers. Frida was missing two fingers on her left hand. One for dead Brenna, and one for the dead Matriarch, who wasn’t dead, but might as well have been.

“The Goddess has given me strength to face my struggles.”

Maren contemplated throwing her paintbrush at Frida, but she knew it wouldn’t do nearly enough damage to satisfy her. If Frida hadn’t tried to stop them from entering that forest with stupid tales of her imaginary goddess, then Brenna wouldn’t have run off, and she wouldn’t have died. And she wouldn’t have left Maren alone with their Mother.

“She’s coming for me again, isn’t she?” Maren swirled her paintbrush in a blob of white paint and poked at the rock, a light trickle of snowflakes popping up amidst the trees.

“Not this time. She wants to talk to you alone.”

Maren tried not to imagine what Brenna would have said. What Brenna would have told her or done wouldn’t help her anymore. The Matriarch didn’t care if Maren acted like Brenna. “Like I told my mother the last time she came searching for me. I don’t care for anything she has to say. She can kill me if she wants.”

Frida’s hand shot out and gripped Maren’s wrist, smearing the white paint into the fresh green trees. Her painting was ruined. She would have to start all over again, which meant she would need more black paint. Black, for the night sky behind the trees. “Do not throw your life away to her. Do not throw away everything I have ever given you.”

Maren stared straight ahead, but Frida moved in front of her. “If that’s what you want to continue to believe.”

Brenna’s face swam in Maren’s mind. She leaned back against the rock, not caring if she smeared her painting or ruined her clothes. “My sister is dead.”

“Yes.”

“She’s not ever coming back.”

Frida furrowed her brows. “No, she’s not.”

“And neither are any of us, according to you.”

Frida rolled her lips. “I didn’t say that. I never said that.”

“That day in the woods—you said that neither of us would come out of those woods alive. But I did. I’m still here. Did you mean me? Or did you mean us—all of us?”

Frida reached out and grabbed a strand of Maren’s hair, twirling it around her fingertip. “Your mother wouldn’t be pleased that I’m speaking with you about this.”

Maren had forgotten what it felt like to have Frida’s hands in her hair. She hadn’t needed it done since her mother’s birthday, weeks before. Maren leaned into the comforting touch, as if she could salvage pieces of something she couldn’t identify from the contact. “I want to know that you believe. But I can’t. I know I can’t. I believe my mother. I follow my mother. That’s final. That’s her word, and I must do what she says.” She tore herself away from Frida’s outstretched hand.

Hurt might have flashed across Frida’s face, but Maren didn’t let herself spend enough time studying Frida’s face to know for sure. “The Matriarch can’t find us alone together again. I wish you would leave me be.”

Frida stared at her. “I’ll always be here.”

Maren shrugged and threw her paintbrush into the mud. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” She walked away, knowing that her mother waited for her. And that spending more time with Frida would only lead to misery, though she couldn’t say exactly why or how.  

 

Before, Maren hadn’t thought much about speaking with the Matriarch. She was her mother, she never wanted to think the worst. Now, Maren considered only two things when visiting her mother: where to look, and where not to look. She knew the places not to look well. Her mother’s eyes, first and foremost, because Maren’s own eyes looked too much like Brenna’s, and then perhaps the lips, because they were too close to the eyes, and the ears were no good because then her mother would simply assume she was purposefully avoiding her. Though after her conversation with Frida, Maren didn’t know how much she cared. She wondered if the best way to avoid her Mother’s anger was to act more like her mother.

Maren reached a hand for the leather tassels of the Matriarch’s tent, which was by far the largest of them all. Numerous beads lined the deer-hide strips, a few of which she had carved herself. Back then, she had carved entire days away. If she held a knife now, she wanted to feel it slice through something softer than wood.

            “She’s not in the best mood today.” asked an old man behind her.

            Maren’s gaze shifted. It was an elder she recognized. He always conducted death ceremonies. People approached her more in the past four months than they ever had. She was growing tired of it. But also used to it, which made her less tired of it.

            Her hand went to her leather bracelet. It was tradition at each ceremony to carve one, to remember the dead. She hoped the motion didn’t draw his attention or make him think she didn’t simply have a nervous tick and was remembering the most recent addition to her bracelet, carved with the letter ‘B’. She hadn’t even thought about making one until she saw everyone else do it.

            “She never is,” Maren slid her rabbit-fur trimmed sleeve back over the bracelet, careful to move the rest of her body so it absorbed the motion. She couldn’t let the old man study her too closely—he was old enough to know her mother well. To care more about the desires of the current Matriarch than the Matriarch to be.

            Maren knew she should step toward the tent, for the man would never follow her, but she found herself staring at a piece of antler stuck in the snow. For a moment she had thought it was stark white. But no, that would have been impossible. She had only ever known one animal with antlers so pure.

            “I’ve already heard a few screams coming from there today.” The elder said.

            “Screams?” asked Maren.

The elder leaned down and picked up the piece of antler. He held it up to the light. “Never know when you’re going to need this.” He passed it into her palm and hobbled away.

Maren watched him until he disappeared behind another tent. Surely her mother would have sent him to watch her—to observe and make sure Maren didn’t break any of her “precious rules.”

            Wiping her face blank, Maren pushed through the caribou hide flaps of the Matriarch’s tent and paused. Her mother was sitting on a grass mat, holding a cup in her hand, staring at it.

            Hopefully not the same tea as last time. Maren still couldn’t banish the rancid scent from her nose. Not even after smelling so much blood.

            “Do you ever actually drink that, or do you just like to look at it?” It had been two months since Maren realized she could talk to her mother like Brenna used to without any punishment. “Are you going to speak with me today?” Maren asked.

            Maren would have preferred a slap. At least that was something she could understand. A slap meant that she had done something wrong, and that she could try to reframe next time or never speak that way again. Silence she couldn’t interpret. “I don’t really understand what’s happening.”

            Her mother reached behind her and placed a rectangular block of wood on the table between them. Maren knew what the wood was for. She used the same shape when she wanted to carve something, like a spoon or a…

            “I want you to make me a dagger.”

            Maren blinked. Her mother’s voice was scratchy, the purple circles under her eyes more like bruises than from lack of sleep. “You have plenty of daggers already. Remember, I had to sort them for you last week? Only you wouldn’t tell me whether you wanted it done by size or by lethality, so I had to do both. Took a long time.”

            “Make me a dagger. Out of whatever you want. I’ll watch.”

            Maren reached for the wood. It was soft and supple in her hands, but heavy. The perfect piece of wood for a dagger, though she had never made one before. She supposed it wasn’t all that different from an eating utensil. “All right.” At least if her mother insisted on Maren’s presence, she would have more to do than contemplate the merit of stabbing herself with her own fingernails just to make an escape.

            She drew her carving knife from her waist sheath and studied the wood, holding it up to the light. Her mother had prepared this block for her. She could see it in the length of the strokes. No one else had such consistency. No one else save for Maren, who had only learned by watching her mother carve by the fire, back when the Matriarch used to spend time outside of her tent.

            Maren tried to picture how curved she wanted the handle. She supposed it depended on what her mother wanted to use it for. Carving, she liked a simple round handle, easy to grip, not too much strain on her hands. For throwing, she wanted more weight. For skinning, she didn’t care.

            “What are you going to use this dagger for? What makes it so special that none of your others will suffice?”

            The Matriarch swirled her cup around. “It’s for something special.”

            “What else does your mother use her daggers for except drawing blood?” Frida asked.

            Maren’s finger caught on a sharp corner of the block and she winced, bringing her hand to her mouth to suck away the salty blood before it dripped on her mother’s floor mat.

            Frida emerged from the shadows in the back of the tent. Maren hadn’t even seen her, though she hadn’t looked either. Maren waited for her mother to lash out, but the Matriarch continued to stare at her cup. “Perhaps she’s changed in recent months.”

            “Of course, she’s changed.” Frida laid a hand on the Matriarch’s shoulder.

            Maren flinched.

            “She’s just lost her daughter,” Frida said. “I can only imagine how distraught I would feel, losing a daughter.”

            “The tea is for my pain. Some days it feels as if my limbs are attacking me. Frida has been brewing it for me.”

            Maren frowned. She had never known Frida to make healing teas. She always passed Maren on to someone else when she complained of headaches or stomach cramps. “How nice of her.”

            She tried to ignore the way Frida lingered over her mother’s shoulder and examined the wood piece. Why did her mother expect her to carve a dagger when she had never attempted anything of the sort before? Maren shucked a splinter of wood off experimentally, to test the quality.

            Some of the finest she had ever seen.

            “Do you want more tea?” Frida asked.

            Move the dagger faster. That was all Maren could do. She could already see the basic shape of the handle in her head, and her hands followed her mind without much additional effort from her. After she finished the wooden part, she only needed to find a suitable piece of metal for the blade.

            Frida rustled around in one of the baskets and pulled out a stack of clothes She joined Maren and her mother at the table, setting the stack on the floor in front of her.

            Maren continued to carve, but she watched the Matriarch, waiting. Her mother had never let Frida sit with them before. “Are you okay?” Her mother’s eyes drooped, and she kept starting awake.

            The Matriarch clutched her head. “I’m fine! I was up late last night.”

            “You don’t look fine.”

            “I said I’m fine, Maren, just leave me alone!”

            Maren didn’t bother to remind her mother that she was the one who had asked Maren to her tent in the first place, and who forced her into companionship when Maren knew her mother wanted Brenna instead.

Frida pried the cup from the Matriarch’s grasp, just as Maren’s mother slipped back against the mat and started breathing deeply.

            Maren threw the wood away and crawled over to her mother, feeling for a pulse.

            Frida’s warm hands cradled Maren’s face, drawing her away. “Let her sleep, child. She’s been through a lot these past few months and it’s perhaps best to let her have a few moments of dreamless comfort.”

            Maren pushed Frida’s hand away. “I’m not a child. And you put something in her tea, I know you did.”

            “That’s silly. I’m only trying to help your mother so that I can help you.”

            “Just leave me alone, I don’t want your help!” Maren stood up and stalked for the tent exist, swiping the piece of wood from the table as she went. 

 

“Can I come in?”

            The Matriarch poked her head through Maren’s tent flaps. Maren quickly covered her carving with her rabbit-fur blanket and nodded, not quite letting herself smile. She hadn’t seen her mother in her tent since she was delirious with sap fever six years ago.

            “How is it coming along?” The Matriarch winced as she settled herself on a stack of fox fur opposite Maren.

            Her limp was getting worse, despite Frida’s tea. Unless, Maren thought, it was Frida’s tea that made her mother’s limp worse. “How is what coming along?”

            “The dagger I asked you to make.”

‘          “Why do you need it?” Maren tried not to look at the bulging mound next to her. She was almost finished, she just needed a few more days.

            The Matriarch massaged her thigh muscle. “It’s part of your training. Even my mother had me make a dagger during my eighteenth winter. I know you’re not quite there yet, but given the recent circumstances…”

            Brenna would have turned eighteen at the end of this winter. Maren dipped her head. “Of course, Mother, I understand.”

            “I’m leaving on a trip in three sun rises. I was hoping you could have it completed by then.”

            “What kind of trip?”

            “Can you have it finished?”

            Maren picked at a scab on her finger. How fast did her mother expect her to work? “I can try.” A trickle of pus spilled from her popped callus.

            “It would really mean a lot to me, you know. I haven’t been on a long hunting trip in many years, and I thought it would be…fitting for me to use the dagger you’ve made me to make my kills. The closing of a circle, if you will.”

            Maren gave her mother a half-smile. “You haven’t started on with Frida’s goddess nonsense, have you?”

            Maren swore her mother almost smiled in return. The gesture made her feel good, it made her think about how her tent didn’t have Frida lurking, and how that fact alone let her connect with her mother on a deeper level than she ever had when Brenna was alive. “Of course not.”

            Maren patted the bundle at her side. “I’ll have it done by sunrise on the third day, Mother.”

            Her mother flinched and then started to rub her thigh again, as if it pained her.

            “Are you sure you’re going to be okay with a long hunting trip? Perhaps you should wait until your leg feels better.”

            “Getting away will be the best thing for me right now.” Her mother stared at Maren’s covered carving. “And of course, I can’t wait to use what you made for me.”

            Maren nodded. Now that her mother had informed her of her intentions with the dagger, she couldn’t wait to start carving again. Her fingers itched with the desire to feel the power of the knife under her palms, as if she really did have the power to become her mother’s favorite heir. She could become better than Brenna, if she really tried. If she stopping thinking about painting or about roaming and started focusing on what her mother wanted from her.

            “And of course, I want you to join me on the trip.” Her mother smiled. “I need a day or so by myself, so I’d ask that you meet me by that gully near Hawks Swoop at sunset on the second day after I’ve left you.”

            Maren quickly calculated the distance. She would have to leave early in the morning that same day if she didn’t want to cut her travel too tightly. She bowed her head, though adrenaline still pounded through her veins. A trip with her mother. She had never gone on a long hunting trip with her mother before. “Of course, Mother. I’m honored that you would think of me.”

            The Matriarch narrowed her eyes and then nodded her head slowly, picking herself off Maren’s floor without a hint of pain. “Don’t forget, I expect the dagger in three sun highs.” She pushed herself from Maren’s tent.

            Maren let out a long breath. She had lied to her mother—and to herself. She was much closer to finishing the dagger than she had originally thought, though now she wasn’t so sure her mother would be happy with her choices. Maren reached down and peeled back the fur from her work.

            The night her mother had made her request, Maren had trouble falling asleep. She realized it was because she had never taken the piece of bone the man had given her out of her furs. When she extracted it and held the shard up to the moonlight, it seemed to glow, and she thought of what miracles it might work in a dagger, though she didn’t believe it had to do with the goddess, as Frida would have.

            And so, the half-finished dagger handle that now sat in front of Maren had both. An intertwining of bone and wood. She had spent a few long nights chipping carefully away at the bone, and then a blessedly hot day near the river fusing them together.

            The weapon had to please her mother. She knew it had to.

----

            Maren stared at her bags. She had packed and unpacked them what felt like hundreds of times in the past two sun highs, but she thought she finally had everything. She had gifted the dagger to her mother, wrapped in oiled cloth, and made her promise not to unwrap it until Maren joined her at Hawks Swoop.

            Giddiness swarmed through her veins. She could almost feel herself bouncing for how fully the sensation filled her. In the moment the cat had sunk its claws into Brenna’s chest, Maren had thought her world would never be the same. She thought she would never find the urge to paint again, or that her sister’s death would open a gaping hole inside of her that she would never have the strength to repair. But instead, she had found this...this trip with her mother, this new dedication to becoming the best heir she could be. Maren would make her mother forget about Brenna, and forget that Brenna was ever supposed to become the next Matriarch.

            Maren hauled her leather packs over her shoulder and twined the beads cords of her tent closed. In a few weeks she would sleep under those warm furs again.

            The sun wouldn’t rise for some time, but Maren knew these parts of the landscape well, even with only a sliver of moonlight to guide her. She trudged through the snow, wound her way across hills and plateaus, always following the winding curve of the river as it meandered west.

            A few hours into her trek, the sun finally peaked above the eastern mountains, illuminating her path in the golden glow of morning. The snow sparkled beneath her bootprints, and Maren’s giddy sensation roared its return.

            Eventually, the landscape grew too curvy for her to walk easily along the river banks. Cautiously, Maren pressed her toes onto the ice to make sure it could support her weight. She had never known the ice to melt so early in the season, but she had also never seen a squirrel with glowing insides, or the giant cat that had killed Brenna, or the deer with the pure white antlers, or the forest that Frida claimed was the work of her goddess. Either way, Maren didn’t want to spend the end of her life chained to the bottom of an icy river.

            Her worry was unfounded. The ice was firm and thick beneath her feet and she walked down the center of the river as the sun chased her, warming her back even through her thick pack.

            Soon, a shape began to manifest further down the river. At first Maren thought it was an errant deer or caribou, but the faster she walked and the more she squinted, the figure came into focus as something that decidedly walked on two legs. A fellow human. She had seen random roamers around before, when she traveled many hours from camp, but she normally took care to avoid them. Cliffs lined the river on either side of her. If she wanted to make it to her mother before the deadline, she would have to stay on this path and risk whomever she encountered.

            Fiddling with the straps of her belt, Maren extracted her dagger and clutched it tightly in her palm. Stab first, think later, her mother had always told Brenna when her sister started her own wanderings. Maren had no doubt she could face that roamer. They were normally weak and underfed—not that Maren had eaten well that winter either.

            Maren walked faster, her breath escaping in foggy puffs.

            She was close enough now to realize the figure had a slight limp and dark hair. Maren could hardly believe what she saw. She blinked fast enough to draw tears. Maren’s shoe crunched packed snow, the sound echoing down the river corridor.

            The person turned, though Maren already knew what face she would see before it happened.

            Frida. What was Frida doing almost five hours from camp, following the same line as Maren did to reach Hawks Swoop.

            Frida was going to Hawks Swoop.

            Maren didn’t put away her dagger. “What are you doing here?”

            Frida blinked slowly at Maren, as if she were coming out of a daze. “I’m going to meet the Matriarch.”

            “Does my mother know that you’re coming? She never said anything to me.” And why hadn’t Frida simply asked to travel with Maren if they intended on the same destination?

            “Your mother knows that I am coming.”

            “Okay,” Maren said slowly, her grip on the dagger increasing. She didn’t like the way Frida was looking at her. Or the way Frida spoke about the Matriarch, or the way Frida had spoken of the Matriarch for the past few months. “Why is my mother’s limp not getting better?”

            “Brenna is dead.”

            Maren’s face twitched and she scratched it. “Right. She is. What has that got to do with my mother’s limp?”

            “Doesn’t Brenna’s death have to do with everything?”

            Maren remembered when she was younger and Frida used to braid her hair before important ceremonies, and cut it when it grew too long for her to manage herself. Frida would whisper soft words of encouragement into her ear, and Maren remembered wondering at the time why she never did Brenna’s hair the same way. When asked about it, Frida simply said that the Matriarch did Brenna’s hair. So why hadn’t the Matriarch done Maren’s hair too? Because Brenna was heir, not Maren. And now, Maren was heir. Her mother treated her with the same level of reverence she had reserved for Brenna. The level of heir. In that way, she supposed she could agree with Frida. Brenna’s death did have to do with everything.

            “I don’t think you should keep walking,” Maren said. “I think you should turn around and head back to camp before you get lost and before it gets too dark.”

            Frida laughed. “Do you think I don’t know where I am right now, child?”

            “You almost never leave camp. You were so uncomfortable on our way up the mountain.”

            “Was I?”

            Was she? Maren couldn’t remember the instance clearly now.

            “You are lost in the clouds if you think I’ve never been further than the perimeter of our camp. Who was the one who gave you advice on the best caribou hunting grounds? Who talked you through your first solo trek and warned you against heading into the Forlorn Mountains to the north during storm season? Did you think I picked all those details up just by listening to the Matriarch? I used to be just like you—no wonder you are the way you are.”

            Maren frowned. Because Frida had taught her all those things? That’s why she was the way she was. It seemed so clear now. Frida had always encouraged her to roam whenever she got the chance. To get away from her mother and to see the world for herself, since the Matriarch refused to take her anywhere.

            “So no,” Frida readjusted the pack on her back, but she didn’t wince. “I don’t think I’m going to head back to camp. I think I’m going to go with you to meet the Matriarch.” A flash of something passed through her eyes.

            “You’re not going to,” Maren said, surprised by the harsh reality of her own words. She didn’t exactly know why, but it was like a force pressed down on her. A force that told her she couldn’t let Frida near her mother, whatever happened.

            Frida adjusted her pack again. The sun flashed overhead, emerging from behind a cloud.

            And then Maren saw it, a glint of steel hidden beneath Frida’s furs. The blinding reflection of a dagger.

            Frida had never before carried a dagger, only a skinning knife.

            “What are you doing with that?”

            “Your mother gave it to me.”

            Maren knew her mother better than anyone, at least anyone who was alive. Her mother never would have trusted Frida with a knife. She barely trusted Maren with a knife. “Give that to me!” Maren shot forward, intent on tackling Frida to the ground before she could draw the weapon. Blood thundered through Maren’s neck. She thought the adrenaline would help her do what needed to be done to protect her mother. She would do anything to protect her mother.

            But Frida moved faster than Maren had ever seen her, sidestepping Maren’s frantic lunge. She kept her hands twined behind her back, as far from the dagger as possible.

            “Please don’t do this, Maren,” Frida said softly. “You must trust me, just as you used to.”

            “I never trusted you!” She had been stupid to think more highly of Frida than of her own mother. Once Frida started spewing nonsense about her goddess, she had seen the truth and realized that everything her mother and Brenna had ever said about Frida was correct. “I’m going to see my mother now, but I need you to give me that weapon and go back to camp.”

            Frida dodged another of Maren’s lunges. “Did you give the Matriarch that dagger you promised her?”

            Surprised by the question, Maren blinked, the sun flashing behind her lids. “Of course. I carved it from bone and wood myself. If only I had bled on it too. That surely would have pleased your goddess, right? It’s special. She told me so.”

            “Stop acting like a child, Maren, you’re smarter than this!”

            Maren drew her dagger, though she realized with dismay that her hand shook. She hadn’t thought this far ahead. She hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to drive her dagger through Frida’s heart, to feel her bones and flesh shattering. Nothing at all like any of the animals she had killed.

            “And what do you think your mother is planning on doing with that dagger? Do you think she’s going to take the life of a simple deer or rabbit? Do you think she’s going to use it to skin something, when any of her other weapons would do? Or do you think the Matriarch wanted it for something special?” Frida stepped closer, but Maren no longer felt like using her dagger. After all, Frida hadn’t made any move toward her own.

            Maren grappled with Frida’s words. She didn’t understand what the older woman was implying about her mother. It was Frida who intended on doing something special to her mother, not the Matriarch. All the signs had pointed Maren that way, like the universe itself wanted her to believe. So she had believed.

            Frida blinked slowly. “You foolish girl. You foolish, foolish girl. All this time.” Her hand reached out and wrapped around Maren’s. Maren could feel her warmth radiating through her deer-hide glove.

            Maren started to understand, but she still felt like the pieces swarmed in her head, slipping through her fingers.

            The dagger in her hand suddenly felt much heavier than it had before. She didn’t think she wanted to kill Frida. 

            “Do you remember that one summer? Where it was so hot that we thought our tents would boil in the high sun?”

            Maren filtered through her memories. After a while, all the summers of her childhood blended together. After a while, she didn’t know if she could separate which activities she did with Brenna, which ones with her mother, or which ones with…Frida. The name sounded wrong in her head now, but so did mother. The word mother no longer fit with anyone Maren knew. But despite not knowing who she had spent the time with, she didn’t think she could ever forget that summer. “There were a lot of deaths that season. More so than usual. That’s what stuck with me most.”

            “Of course it was. You were young. You probably hardly remember how harsh those winters before were.”

            Maren thought of the meager offerings the hunt had brought back the past few months. “Worse than this winter?”

            Something shadowed passed over Frida’s face, the warmth in her eyes fading. “Different. I can’t think of any other way to explain it.”

            Maren ground her teeth together. She didn’t understand why Frida would bring up that one summer. She glanced past Frida, to the rapidly setting sun. She would need to run for quite a distance if she wanted to make it to her meeting with the Matriarch. Maren started to take a step. Then she paused, remembering what Frida had said about the Matriarch. Did Maren even want to bother heading there anymore? Did she want to go back to camp and await her mother there? Neither seemed like a worthy option.

            “That summer was the first time I realized you would be different than Brenna,” Frida continued. “I took the two of you to the warm waters for the first time, while the Matriarch was away on a hunt. She didn’t want the two of you to go, but I thought you deserved to experience it so I took you anyway.”

            The feeling of hot water steaming across her bare skin, her furs shed for the first time in recent memory. Brenna’s sharp laughter as she splashed across the slick rocks, and Frida’s soothing hands in Maren’s hair. She hadn’t even been old enough to realize what Frida had risked by taking them against the Matriarch’s will. “Brenna broke her wrist. I remember her crying, and her hand hanging at that strange angle.”

            “I told the Matriarch that Brenna slipped and fell near the river trying to catch a fish. I don’t know if she believed me.”

            Screaming. The sound of something harsh slapping against flesh. The shrillness against the silence of the night had woken Maren up, but she didn’t know if the time periods or even the instances were connected, of if it had been Frida screaming at all. Though she thought she had felt the truth of it that night, she had been too young to really understand anything. “It was worth it.” Maren smiled slightly. “If only to see Brenna pout for missing the summer months while her wrist healed.”

            Frida returned the smile, and Maren felt something warm in her chest. She could hardly believe that she had stepped onto the river and drawn her dagger with the intention of ending Frida’s life. Frida had done so much for her—more than just the warm waters. She had comforted her after the Matriarch’s punishments, had smuggled her the freshest venison, had given her more than her own mother ever…

            Than the Matriarch ever had. Because Frida had, of course, given her as much as a mother should, especially given her circumstances.

Maren rotated the dagger, gripping the steel handle between two gloved fingers.

She stretched it into the space between them. Frida’s eyes widened.

A soft breeze tickled the back of Maren’s neck and she breathed in deeply. If she thought hard enough, she thought she could smell spring flowers, the fields of them to the south that Frida had taken her to visit every year since she could remember--every year, save this one. 

            Frida reached out to take the dagger, the veins on her hand flexing. Her fingers had grazed the leather handle that Maren...no, Frida had given Maren that handle for her birthday, after the Matriarch had forgotten. 

A crack split the air. Maren felt herself start to fall, her ankles giving way beneath her. She saw Frida’s face, as if frozen in the sky above her. Frida’s hands were extended for her, and Maren reached, forgetting that she held the dagger in her hand. It flew forward, but Maren kept falling, and she didn’t get to see what became of it, she saw only Frida’s frightened face. The woman who had done what the Matriarch could not. Who was what the Matriarch was not, and Maren felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner. 

Flecks of ice bit at her throat, like summer ants. She hit the water and sunk down. Maren thought she should feel cold, but she felt nothing. Her furs weighed her down, dragging her deeper. The ice above her sparkled with the last of the sunlight, and Maren tried to kick, wanting to reach Frida again. She couldn’t die like this, not before she told Frida what she finally understood. 

Silence rushed into her head. 

           It was as if someone had wrapped stones around her feet and thrown her into the water. She remembered when that had happened, a few years back. Some of the younger kids had done it to a baby deer. She also remembered trying to feel bad for it, but never quite mustering the energy. Darkness swarmed her vision. She tried to kick up again, but her cheeks burst, and water flooded her mouth. Maren kicked harder, grasping for the ice above her. She met only a solid ceiling, but she could see shadows flickering through the bubbling blue and white ripples.

            Then she found purchase. Her fingers wrapped around the edge of something, and she managed to haul her head above the water, gasping. Heaving with all the strength she had ever given herself, from hunting and trekking through snow, from wandering the icy landscape and playing games with Brenna, Maren dragged herself onto a solid chunk of ice and coughed up water, laying flat on her back. She could barely move any part of her body, but she saw the sun flash across her vision, the ball of flame warming her.

            Maren rolled over. A mound of shattered ice greeted her. She looked around for Frida but saw nothing on the frozen part of the river. Panic gripped her. She didn’t think Frida had fallen into the water with her, she had seen her shadow on the surface as she’d fallen. 

Slowly, she started to understand what had happened and she rushed forward, circling the pile of ice chunks closer to the edge of the river. They must have broken away from the cliff--much too early in the season for something like that to happen--and crashed into the fragile ice. 

Maren flexed her frozen hands and threw herself onto the pile, dragging chunks of ice into the dark blue water she had just emerged from. Frida had to be under that pile. It was the only explanation. She tore away more pieces. She saw a hand, then an arm, and then Frida’s shoulder. Maren’s motions became frenzied. She didn’t think about her frozen core, she didn’t think about anything except moving the mound of ice that should not have broken to begin with. She hated the ice, she hated the Matriarch, she hated the past few months. 

Shoving with her shoulder, Maren rolled the last piece of ice off Frida. Her eyes were open, glazed over, staring at the sun, the fingers of the hand that lay on her chest bent and broken. The falling ice had killed Frida. Maren wanted something to hit, something to kill. She wanted something warm to approach her--a roamer maybe--so that she could have the satisfaction of the fight, so she could drive her dagger into their chest and watch them bleed, to feel the pain that she felt in her chest right now. 

Maren leaned back on her heels, resting her arms on her knees. She couldn’t take her eyes off Frida’s pale face, off her eyes, fixated on nothing. They had reached for each other. Frida had wanted to save Maren, as she had been trying to do for Maren’s entire life, and Maren almost hated her for it. 

She hated that she now had to feel this way. 

Maren didn’t want to look at Frida anymore. 

She stood up, looping her arms under Frida’s back, rolling her onto her side. 

Red blood stained the ice beneath her. Maren blinked, not quite understanding. Then the harsh orange glow of the setting sun illuminated something stuck in Frida’s lower stomach, so far down her side that Maren hadn’t noticed it before. 

A dagger. The dagger Maren with the ‘F’ carved into the handle that Maren had carried with her since that day with Brenna and the cat. 

Maren sat back down. Frida’s cold body felt heavy on her legs. Blood stained her pants, but she didn’t care. Maren didn’t know what to think now that she couldn’t rage at the ice and want to kill everything in her path. 

Her hand tightened around nothing. Her dagger. Her dagger had killed Frida, which meant Maren had...Maren…

Maren gagged, barely holding back the meager, sinewy venison she had eaten earlier that day. 

She threw Frida off her, jerking up. Maren couldn’t see it anymore. She needed to wipe the image from her mind, to forget that any of this had happened. To rip away the hollowness in her chest. 

Maren hooked her toe under Frida’s body and closed her eyes. Then she heaved her muscles and sent Frida crashing into the icy water with a loud splash. 

She hugged herself and breathed in and out slowly, trying to forget the way Frida’s eyes had looked, just minutes before. Hopeful. Warm.

            Maren looked around. No animals, no wind in her hair. Just a festering silence that made her wish for the depths of the frigid river.  

The skinning knife at her waist weighed her down, as if threatening to pull her into the river in Frida’s wake. Maren grabbed it before she could think about what had happened the last time she’d held a knife. 

Frida’s face flashed in her mind again. 

The Matriarch. The Matriarch had done all of this. The Matriarch had been the ultimate cause of Brenna’s death, she had forced Frida out into the wilderness, she had taken everything from Maren. Every last shred. 

The desire to have blood run across her hands returned. But she didn’t think any animal would give her the satisfaction she wanted. She needed the Matriarch’s blood on her hands, to wipe away the stain of Frida’s. 

Maren stumbled along the remainder of the frozen river, the darkness pressing around her so tightly that she could hardly tell the difference between the shadows and the cliffs. It seemed almost as if animals prowled in her steps, huffs of breath and light paw steps sounding from in front of her, behind her, next to her, the sounds all blended together.

She didn’t feel anything in her body save the throbbing pulse that started in her stomach and pounded through the rest of her body, urging her forward into the cold night. Maren wrapped her arms around herself, as if she could ward off the cold, or perhaps find a way to turn around and go back to camp like nothing had ever happened. 

But so much had happened. And she wanted the Matriarch dead. There had been instances in her life--she remembered them only occasionally--where she had thought she wanted her mother dead. When she wouldn’t let Maren go hunt for the white-antlered deer, when she had left on another trip with Brenna and forced Maren to spend time only with...with Frida. 

The Matriarch had never intended on letting her live to become the next Matriarch. Maren understood that now. Killing the Matriarch now wasn’t because she wanted to keep herself alive--she hardly cared what her “mother” did to her anymore, but she needed the feel of her dagger covered in blood.

So, Maren walked further into the night, until hawks swoop, a hill covered in thorny pine trees sat in front of her. She knew the Matriarch would be waiting for her as soon as she veered off the river and saw a bright flicker of embers illuminating the rocky cliff face that separated them from stars knew what. 

Maren had always wondered what lay beyond the mountain, had wondered what would become of her if she took her snowshoes and her supplies and left with only the moon illuminating her path, disappearing as some of the women had before. 

She also wondered how long it took for the roamers to get to them. 

Maren would rather die at the hands of the Matriarch than by the roamers. 

The firelight grew steadily brighter. She didn’t know if the Matriarch could see her approaching, but Maren wasn’t afraid of what she would do. Not anymore. She didn’t think the Matriarch would kill her from afar, for the same reason Maren wouldn’t snipe her with a long-range bow shot. 

They wouldn’t get nearly enough satisfaction from the kill. 

Maren fingered the handle of her skinning knife. She had just sharpened it, but she had never used it like a dagger--she had never had the need. She paused at the edge of the clearing where the fire sat. Perhaps the Matriarch hadn’t seen her yet. Perhaps she could still retreat above the camp and end this quickly, without a second thought. The arrow would do all the work for her, and it seemed fitting, considering what she had done to the roamer weeks before. 

“The sun set a few hours ago.”

Maren stepped into the firelight. The Matriarch leaned back against a boulder, arms resting gently on her lap. Maren wondered if she had been asleep and had woken to the sound of footsteps, or if simply had never ending patience and enjoyed staring into the empty woods. 

“I got held up.” Maren tried to relax her shoulders, but she was sure she looked tense. Not that it mattered. The Matriarch would expect her to look afraid, after arriving so late. “The river can be so unpredictable this time of year.”

The Matriarch looked up at the sky, as if remembering something. “I used to hate traveling along the river, especially in the summer, when I had to wade along the muddy banks. I always told my mother that I couldn’t wait for the freeze.”

“I can never wait for the thaw.”

The Matriarch quirked what might have been...a soft smile. “It of course, makes sense.”

Maren frowned. She couldn’t afford to let the Matriarch confuse her, not while fire still thrummed through her veins. She needed to end this now, before she let the Matriarch’s honeyed words destroy her resolve. She still held the skinning knife behind her back. 

“I knew it would end up like this.” 

Maren took a step closer to the Matriarch, keeping the fire between them. She didn’t like this version of the woman she had believed to be her mother. She didn’t like that it seemed like the Matriarch had given up, especially given what Frida had told her. The Matriarch wanted Maren dead. 

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” The Matriarch inclined her head toward the trees. “Somewhere out there. She’s dead.”

“Brenna has been dead for months.”

“You know who I mean.”

Maren tightened her grip on the skinning knife. “And I bet that you don’t even care.”

The Matriarch pressed her hands into the muddy snow, wincing as she pushed herself up. She stood with her weight slightly balanced on her right side--away from the leg she had injured that day in the mountains. “Nothing happened the way it should have. You were not the person you should have been.”

“I’m sorry that I disappointed you so, Mother.” The word tasted like rancid meat on her tongue. 

“She wasn’t supposed to die like that!” The Matriarch stumbled into the firelight. Her cheeks were more gaunt and hallowed than Maren had remembered, her skin glowing with an unearthly greenish tinge--perhaps from the light reflecting off the dense pine foliage. 

“Frida said that someone had to die.” And Maren knew that the Matriarch meant it was supposed to be her. It seemed like the Matriarch had always intended for Maren to die, for some odd reason or another. 

The Matriarch blinked slowly at Maren, as if she was having trouble focusing on her face. “It’s all over.”

In another year, another month, maybe even on another day, Maren would have found the space to pity the woman standing in front of her. She had lost her daughter, she was losing her people, and her once strong muscles seemed like nothing but weak saplings yearning for the summer sun. But Maren couldn’t forget the sound of Frida’s body crashing through the surface of the icy water, and, if she let herself remember, the look on Brenna’s face as her eyes stared up at the night sky. They had been sisters, perhaps in the only way that truly mattered.

“Do you think we’re going to survive the next winter?” Maren ran her thumb along the edge of the skinning knife, checking for the sharpness. She thought she felt a slight trickle of blood run down her hand. 

The Matriarch shifted, and Maren saw that she wore the dagger that Maren had carved for her at her waist. The one she had intended to use on Maren herself. 

“The roamers will get to us first.” The Matriarch widened her eyes. “We won’t last through the summer.”

“Frida would say that we should ask the goddess to help us.”

“Did you ever believe her?”

Maren thought she saw a flash of something in the Matriarch’s eyes. Something tugged inside her chest. She wished she could stop seeing this woman, with the ice missing from her eyes as her mother. She wished the woman in front of her wanted to fight, was vile and cruel like Maren had always thought, but she was just...nothing. A shell. 

“You don’t have the nerve,” the matriarch said. “Even Frida would have done it.”

Maren tried not to move her body. 

“Brenna would have done it too.”

“You can’t say that about her.”

“I can say whatever I want about my daughter.”

She stepped around the fire, dropping the skinning knife as she went. The breeze picked up. She could feel it rustling through her hair, though it didn’t bring goosebumps to her skin the way it had weeks ago. Now she thought she could almost smell the damp warmth of spring. The Matriarch blinked down at her, unmoving. A few crackling embers from the fire tugged at Maren’s boots as she passed. 

Maren reached between them. Her hand wrapped around the dagger she had carved--with the half wood and half bone handle. She had never cared so much about something she had made. 

The Matriarch didn’t protest. She still didn't move. 

Beneath the firelight, the dagger’s steel seemed to glow with molten embers. Maren heard screaming when she saw it. She heard screaming because she remember one day, a few years back, when the man who had given her the piece of bone had cauterized a wound his son had gotten from a roamer. The boy had said the roamer attacked him near bear rock, and that was the first time Maren had seen genuine fear in her mother’s eyes--at least a type of fear that she understood. 

Maren made sure she never forgot her dagger after that. She made sure she slept with it under her pillow, so she could close her eyes without hearing that boy’s screams and without smelling his burned flesh. 

“Why did you do it?” Maren ran her fingers over the smooth bone handle. 

“Because I was you.” 

Maren didn’t think she would ever paint the sky blue again, not after spending so long staring into the Matriarch’s eyes. Maren moved the dagger in front of her stomach. She took a step forward, as if to hug her mother.

The dagger slid smoothly through the Matriarch’s tunic, through the dirty fox furs she wore over draped over her shoulders, under one of her ribs, and into her heart. 

The Matriarch’s eyes widened, but she didn’t seem shocked. Her nostrils flared. Her hand drifted to Maren’s wrist, fingers tightening for the briefest of seconds. She heaved a breath. “Pray that you make it this far.” She slumped forward, and Maren caught her weight, blood coating her hand. 

Maren lowered the Matriarch to the ground. She paused for a second, listening. Silence. The breeze she had felt earlier had disappeared, and her hair lay flat against her neck. Even her breath barely brushed her ears. 

She sat down. The damp earth started to seep through the protective leather on the back of her pants, but she didn’t care. 

An animal howled, somewhere off in the trees, or perhaps it was a roamer. Sometimes Maren thought she heard them shouting at each other, though she had never spoken to one. 

Maren’s skin started to stick together. She flexed her hand and brought it up to her face, rotating it so the firelight caught the blood there. 

It wasn’t blood. At least not entirely. Maren twisted her hand around, marveling at the way the Matriarch’s red blood twined with a green goo that had become all too familiar to her. 

Maren pushed at the Matriarch’s body, rotating her around to the front. Maren tried not to look at her face, but instead focused on the stain of blood and garish green that coated the Matriarch’s furs. 

How long before something else found her body? Would the roamers beat the wolves to it? She figured they would kill for furs like the ones the Matriarch wore. 

Maren’s hands hovered over the leather clasps that secured the Matriarch's furs in place. She let her fingers linger on the cold metal, until her skin started to burn. 

What would Frida tell her to do? She could take the furs, so the roamers wouldn’t get them. Anyone deserved that respect. Anything was better than the roamers, even the wolves. But even as Maren thought of Frida, she didn’t think she could move her hands one more inch.

So she rose up and turned to the fire, kicking her feet through the dirt as she went. The flames doused to nothing, though coals still smoldered around the ring. 

At least the roamers hadn’t gotten to Frida. At least Maren had been able to drown her body where no one would ever find it, not even when all the snow melted and the river swelled with the first of summer heat. 

Maren didn’t know where to go. She knew she needed to leave, if she wanted to get away before the roamers. And there was no hesitation on her part as she wandered away from hawks swoop, away from the clearing with the Matriarch’s body. She could see the tundra well, the moonlight reflecting off the glistening ice. Her snowshoes kept getting stuck. The ice was starting to melt. 

She tried again to think of what Frida would tell her to do, but the memory of the woman seemed to slip through her brain like oil. She couldn’t get a firm grasp on the words, could barely remember what her voice looked like, or what her fingers had felt like in Maren’s hair. Maren wished she had known the truth earlier. She wondered what would have changed between them if she had. 

She realized soon that she had wandered from the river. She stopped walking and turned around, trying to reorient herself. Around her, nothing but ice stretched for miles. She could see the looming dark cliffs on hawks swoop, but the moon illuminated nothing save a shroud of fog to the south and east. Maren had never traveled so far from camp. She breathed slowly in and out. She wondered how far she could walk, she wondered if there was an edge to it all, or is she could keep walking for the rest of her life and never reach any sort of end. 

It almost sounded like a good idea. But her feet hurt, and she had no weapons, no supplies. She remembered what it felt like to lay in Frida’s tent and listen to her tell stories of the world before. Maren wished she could go back to those times. 

She still remembered what Frida’s furs smelled like. She could still capture a piece of that.

Maren turned to the east and started to walk. 

The Wintering

THE WINTERING

C1.

Maren crouched high in the crook of an old oak tree, the branches split and fraying so strongly that she had to take care where she placed her hands so as not to cut herself. Shifting carefully, she stretched her aching leg along one of the branches. She hadn’t counted how long she’d been sitting, but the few hours of daylight they received was almost over, and she didn’t want to return to camp empty-handed.

She had roamed farther than usual, for multiple reasons. The few hunting patrols her mother had sent out that week had returned empty-handed. Maren didn’t know why the animals weren’t awakening now that the winter chill was lifting from the landscape. The second reason (which she would never admit to anyone, not even Frida), was that she hoped the white-antlered deer she had hunted for months might cross her path, if only she wished it hard enough.

Frida would have told Maren the goddess would send the deer her way only if the goddess wished it.

A rustling sounded from the snow-covered undergrowth, deeper into the trees. Maren reached into her quiver and drew out an arrow, nocking it quietly in her bow. 

She tuned into the rustles. Not nearly loud enough for a deer, but perhaps something bigger than a rabbit. A fox, maybe. Maren didn’t like the taste of fox—too metallic—but she liked the fur, and she supposed suffering through the meat would be better than any alternative.

Maren drew back the arrow. The snow pulsated again.

Voices. Definitely not an animal.

She recognized those voices. Sighing, Maren let her bow string fall slack as her mother and Brenna pushed around the melting pile. They both had bows slung across their backs. Maren wondered if they had been practicing or hunting, or if they had finally gotten to the point where practicing was hunting. Brenna had never had as much skill with the bow as Maren.

“This is ridiculous, Mother, we’re not going to find anything.” Brenna staked the end of her bow into the mud and leaned against it. “We should have headed north. That’s where the others had luck last week.”

“And that means that the animals will have surely learned and will have moved on, as is common sense!”

Maren smiled and shifted into a more comfortable position, with her feet resting on the branch below. She did enjoy the rare moments were her mother chastised Brenna without also chastising Maren.

“Perhaps we should try near the stream that feeds into the river near the bear rock or the frozen lake by—”

The Matriarch tightened her grip on her bow, bending it precariously to the point of breaking. “No! None of those will work! We’re staying here, and we’re going to find something, you just have to work harder.” She faced away from Brenna and Maren.

For the first time, Maren almost pitied Brenna. Her sister’s face crumpled, and she looked confused. Almost.

Another rustle from the berry bushes close to the Matriarch. Maren sucked in a breath and redrew her bow. Her mother hadn’t moved. Brenna still scanned the other side of the forest, as if an animal would approach simply because she willed it into existence.

Maren focused on the bushes. Loud enough to be a deer, she was sure of it. What a wonder it would be if she killed the white-antlered deer right in front of her mother.

Instead, a man leaped from the bushes, arms covered in mud and eyes bloodshot, cheeks gaunt and hallowed. He sailed toward the Matriarch, a sharp stick in his outstretched hand.

Maren fired her arrow without thinking.

It arced through the almost dark trees and struck the man in the neck, just above his collarbone. His scream resounded against the ancient tree bark.

The Matriarch whirled around. Her eyes glazed over the fallen roamer, across Brenna’s stunned face, and then up to the tree, where Maren crouched. “Get down here.”

Maren slung her bow over her back and leaped from the tree, landing neatly on the slick icy ground. She quirked a smile at Brenna as she passed. She knew her sister never would have made that shot, though, she supposed, Brenna could have done it with a dagger instead, a weapon Maren had never taken the time to learn, though she always carried both a dagger and a skinning knife with her, just in case.

Or maybe her mother had just never taken the time to properly teach her. 

Brenna skirted the blood pooling from the roamer’s neck and leaned to touch the ragged clothing that encased his body. It wasn’t like any furs Maren had ever seen—though she had never been this close to a roamer before.

“Get away from that thing.” The Matriarch grabbed Brenna’s shoulder and hauled her back. “He could give you the disease.”

“Frida said the disease the roamers have isn’t contagious. It’s just something the roamers are.” Maren almost expected her mother to hit her for speaking, but her mother only kicked at the roamer’s foot, as if checking to make sure Maren’s shot had done its job.

Maren’s hand started shaking. She moved it behind her back.

“What do we do with the—” Brenna glanced at Maren.

“No.” The Matriarch nocked an arrow onto her bowstring and turned to the west, away from camp. “No one does anything with the body. The two of you will head back to camp.”

“But—”

“Now!”

Maren grabbed Brenna’s wrist and pulled her away, but their mother had already disappeared into the trees, off to do stars knew what.

Brenna didn’t let go of Maren’s hand, so Maren knew her sister could tell that she was shaking, but she almost didn’t care, because her mother hadn’t yelled at her for eavesdropping. She had saved her mother’s life, and the feeling lifted her high above the trees.

“I’ve never seen a roamer that close to camp before. Have you?” Brenna tore herself away from Maren.

Maren shook her head. She could count on one hand the number of times she had actually seen roamers, but she had avoided them, no matter what Frida told her about their disease not being contagious. She found their bodies often enough, scattered about the landscape. The last thing she needed was to turn into that.

****

On their way home, Brenna stopped to pick red berries from a bush beside the river, which roared with fresh snowmelt. Maren climbed onto a large rock and let her feet dangle in the air. When she was little, she used to stare at the rock and think she would be able to see the whole world from the top, like the stories Frida had told her, where people lived in towering tents and could see all the way to the other side of the world. She could never picture it.

“When are you going to hunt for that deer again?” Brenna popped a few berries into her mouth. They stained her lips red.

Maren considered her question for a minute before answering. “I have to find it before it moves on.”

Brenna frowned and tossed Maren a few berries. Maren caught them and plucked the green stems from the tops. “Did you know that Ana is pregnant? I heard her talking to one of her giggling friends. I think the one who doesn’t like guts.”

“Well, I guess that’s her problem.” Ana was Maren’s age, though they hadn’t spoken much. When Maren wasn’t with her family, she ignored everyone else.

“Who, the gut girl or Ana?”

Maren chucked one of the berry pits into the river. She didn’t hear it splash, but assumed it found its mark. “I suppose both of them.” Maren couldn’t wait to ask Frida about the roamer.

“I don’t think you should do that.”

She sometimes wished she could ignore her family too. “Do what?” Maren stared at the red line on her sister’s cheek. Brenna kept touching it, but Maren didn’t think she realized she was doing it.

“Throw things into the river.”

Maren shrugged.

“It doesn’t feel right to me.”

“You feel like you have to argue with everything I do.” Maren’s body exploded with heat. She lay back on the rock and let the cold seep through her furs.

“You were following me and Mother.”

Maren squinted. The sun moved out from behind a cloud shaped like a deer head. “I thought we were talking about throwing things into the river.” She didn’t remember it ever being this warm so early in the spring season.

“You heard everything we said!”

Maren wished Brenna would shut up. She was enjoying the rock, with the soothing cold and the warm sun on her face, the sound of the river gently roaring in her ears. “Just go back to camp and leave me alone.”

A berry sailed over her face. “You’re just still upset that mother didn’t take you hunting with her.”

“I wonder what Mother would think if we ended up like Ana.”

A few seconds of silence. Maren breathed a deep breath, but it rattled painfully in her chest. 

 “You mean with child?” Brenna’s shadow moved in front of the river. A few rocks skittered onto the ice.

“Maybe it would get me out of Mother’s dinners. There’s one next week, for her birthday.”

Brenna appeared at the edge of Maren’s vision. She was frowning. “You mean you want to fake it? That wouldn’t last long.”

Maren shrugged. She’d thought talk of babies would drive her sister away quicker than arguing. Brenna loved to argue. “I guess.” Maren didn’t like babies anyway. She didn’t think her mother did either. Whenever the Matriarch conducted a new birth ceremony, she hurried back to her tent once the new babe started wailing. She sat up and retied her shoes, into knots as tight as she could manage.

“These berries taste funny.”

Maren glared at the berry bush. Maybe if Brenna ate them all, she would finally leave. “Then stop eating them.”

“Didn’t you think they tasted funny?”

“I didn’t think about. I need to get back to camp. I promised Frida I would help her with the skinning.”

Brenna’s cheeks puffed out with berries as she tried to keep her laughter inside. “Have fun with the cripple. Stars, I don’t know why Mother bothers to keep her around. Or, I guess, she’s good for cleaning and sewing. But why she gets to sit at the high table during dinners…I could have kicked her.”

Blood thundered through Maren’s head, making her forehead throb. She had thought the same thing about Frida many times, of course, but Brenna wasn’t allowed to say those things. She ran at her sister, tackling her to the ground before she could stop to think.

Brenna kneed Maren in the stomach, throwing her off. She leapt to her feet and shook her head. “Who knew you were so unstable?”

The river roared in Maren’s ears. A painting flashed in her mind, competing for attention with the wavering form of her sister. She started to grow dizzy with the images. The painting would be a waterfall reflecting the golden red sunset, a small, shadowed person in the valley below. She had seen the waterfall before on her travels, but never during that time of day. She had always wondered if someone would survive the plummet from the top.

Maren forced the thought away, focusing on Brenna, whose face had gone red and blotchy. “I told you those berries tasted funny,” Brenna said, her voice choked.

Maren raised a hand to her lips. They were a little puffy, but not nearly as swollen as Brenna’s face. She blinked again. “Poisonous,” she croaked out. “You stupid rat, you fed me poisonous berries.”

“I wish I was sorry.” Brenna collapsed on the snow, sprawled along the edge of the river.

Maren dropped to her knees and crawled over to her sister. “Brenna?” She put a hand to Brenna’s throat. Her pulse fluttered dimly. Panic started to grip her. The berries couldn’t have been that poisonous. Brenna just ate too many of them. She could try to drag her back to camp, but there was no way she would make it in time. Maren lurched to her feet and tottered around the giant rock, trying to keep her own breathing steady. She kicked clumps of snow aside in a frantic search, racing for the treeline. She was looking for a light green plant with small white flowers. Frida had told her about it once, when a toddler had wandered off and fallen into a hole in the ground that smelled tangy, but not like rotting animals. The toddler had vomited for two nights before Frida found the remedy.

A pine branch smacked Maren in the face. She spit out a needle and shoved the branch aside. Then she stopped walking. What if she never found the plant? What if Brenna didn’t survive the berries? She couldn’t imagine a life without her sister in it; not that she liked her sister all that much. Without Brenna…without Brenna, her mother would only have one daughter. Maren would be her mother’s only daughter.

She walked a little further into the woods, falling to her knees. She crawled through the snow, brushing it away with her hands and knees. She had always found the flowers growing in areas like this.

Where Maren removed the snow, only black plants greeted her. She fingered their decaying stems, her throat tightening. What had caused all these flowers to die, just when she needed them the most?

The Goddess does what she wants with her landscape, Frida would have told her.

Maren shook her head. The Matriarch had told her enough times to ignore Frida’s nonsensical ramblings. Most of the time, Maren obeyed, but now…

She needed to find the flower to save her sister.

Maren kicked away more snow. Finally—she saw one, hidden amongst the dead flowers. 

White flowers, with round yellow centers. She didn’t remember the centers glowing with the brightness of the noon-high sun, but she held them in a clenched fist anyway and raced back to the river. Brenna’s lips were blue by the time she arrived, like that time one of their only yearmates had fallen into the icy river.

Maren didn’t remember his name. They had left his body for the wolves on sunset that same day.  

She forced her fingers to shred the petals. Then she pried open her sister’s lips and shoved the poultice into her mouth.

Maren counted to five. She leaned her head against the cool rock and counted again, when Brenna still didn’t move.

Brenna coughed, her body jerking up and falling back to the snow. She was breathing evenly, color returning to her face. She looked over at Maren and blinked slowly, as if awakening from a deep sleep.

Maren let her racing heart calm. Then she stood up and stepped over her sister, following the winding river back to camp.

C2.

                 

Maren ran away from her tent, weaving between others and hopping over a disused fire pit. She glanced over her shoulder to look for Brenna. She didn’t think her sister would have bothered to chase after her. Brenna would say that running like a child was something she had left behind years ago.

Maren couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten a caribou foot. There had been one winter, perhaps around her tenth year, when a blizzard had caught their camp in a vortex of wind and ice and no one had been able to leave. The caribou foot kept her alive, at least, but she had thrown some of it up that night in her tent.

         “Your mother won’t be happy if you break something.”

         Maren skidded to a stop. She hadn’t even noticed that Harald stood in front of her, his face hewn and rough like one of the granite cliffs, eyes blue but with filaments of a milky white swirling through them. She didn’t know his age, but she assumed he had to be one of the oldest members of their group. She also knew very little about him. She was surprised she even knew his name.

         “My mother is never happy.”

         He rubbed at something on his cheek, but Maren couldn’t tell what. “I heard you were the one who took down that roamer the other day.”

         Maren frowned. “Who did you hear that from?”

         A firm hand wrapped around her upper arm, dragging her closer to the central fire. “We’re going to be late.”

         Maren didn’t protest and let Brenna drag her away, but she glanced back at Harald. He was gone.

         “Mother is going to be angry if we don’t get seated before her.” Brenna tugged Maren faster.

         “I thought you didn’t care what Mother thought of you.”

         Brenna’s only response was to let go of Maren’s arm. They reached the central fire, which roared with a heat that was sure to make Maren sweat through her furs. She rounded it, breathing deeply. The smell of woodsmoke reminded her of one summer night, many years back, when the Matriarch had taken Brenna on a hunting trip, and Maren had cried for hours. She couldn’t remember now whether she had cried because she was jealous, or because she missed playing with Brenna. Regardless, Frida had built a small fire for Maren in one of the clearings nearest camp and they had charred sticks black and then drew pictures on the bark of a cedar tree.

         “I’m surprised she’s bothering with a birthday dinner this year.” Brenna sat down with a deep sigh on her cushion. A ring of low tables surrounded the fire, though most people still mingled about or were on their way to the seats. “I always thought Mother hated them.”

         Maren shrugged. “Well, it is her birthday.” Although Maren wished her mother had decided to skip it this year. She could think of a host of things she would rather be doing. Like carving, or sleeping, or…tracking the white-antlered deer. 

         “Fabulous. You’re here.” Their mother settled herself onto the empty cushion between Brenna and Maren, folding her hands across her lap. She stared at the fire.

         A thought crossed Maren’s mind. Had it been her mother who told Harald that she was the one who killed the roamer? She couldn’t imagine it had been Brenna, and Maren had only mentioned the incidence to Frida in passing. She shifted slightly on her cushion, tinglings of excitement and pride swirling in her stomach.

         Her mother leaned toward Brenna and brushed a smear of mud from her cheek. Her sleeve rolled back to reveal a leather bracelet, entwined with three wooden beads. Frida had told Maren once that each bead represented someone close to the Matriarch who had died, but she didn’t know who they belonged to.

        The table creaked as Frida leaned against it, lowering herself slowly to her cushion next to Maren.

         Their mother’s eyes passed over Maren and settled on Frida. A pang of sympathy shot through Maren when she saw that ice coat her mother’s eyes. Frida seemed to be doing her best, and from the way her shoulders heaved, she had run all the way across camp to keep up with Maren and Brenna. Maren tried to push the feeling down. She knew her mother wouldn’t approve. “The usual time tonight,” the Matriarch said to Frida.

         Frida bowed her head.

         “I’m starving. Are we ready to eat?” Brenna ran her hand over the table.

         Maren didn’t know whether Brenna asked to distract their mother from Frida, or because she wanted food, but either way, it served the same purpose.

         “Let’s get on with it before I freeze my ass to this cushion,” Brenna added.

         “Goddess, you really are impatient.” Maren meant it as a joke, but her words were colder than she’d intended.

         A breeze rustled Maren’s hair, then a sharp pain flared across her cheek. She raised her hand to the pain, rubbing her face. She glanced to the side. Her mother’s hand was lowering back to the table. She hadn’t felt a breeze at all, but her mother’s arm, rushing past her face.

         Maren look at Frida, who stared at the table, her hands rustling together under the table.

         “Don’t say that again,” her mother said.

         Maren joined Frida in staring at the table. She just wished the food would come quickly. Had her mother forgotten that she had been the one to fell the roamer?

         “Are you still planning a trip to the waters next week?” Brenna asked. Maren looked up, meeting her sister’s eyes. She swore there was warmth in them.

         Her mother’s shoulders tightened, and she moved her focus to Brenna. Maren rubbed the raw spot on her cheek and tried to think only of the spoon she had started carving the night before.

         “You can’t come.”

         “I didn’t say I would want to. Now where is the food?” Brenna asked again.

         Frida laid a warm hand on Maren’s shoulder, squeezing gently. “When are you leaving next?”

         “I’m so close to finding it, I can feel it.” The white-antlered deer would be hers.

         “No,” her mother said loudly. “You won’t be searching for that deer again.”

         Maren’s heart thudded into her chest. “What do you mean?”

         “No.”

         “But it’s special, I can feel it, I just need to—” From around her mother’s shoulder, she saw Brenna shake her head, warning Maren to stop.

         “The Matriarch said no. Best to listen to her this time.” Frida said, her fingers slipping from Maren’s arm.

         A few women appeared at the end Maren’s of their table with platters lofted above their heads. Frida rose, wincing, and went to help them, pouring a pitcher of pine tea into each of their wooden cups.

         The pins that Frida had put in Maren’s hair dug into her skin. She wanted to rip them out and stab them through the wooden table slats. Or perhaps into her mother’s hands. Not hard enough to pierce all the way through, but hard enough to hurt. She forced herself to face forward, her face a stone slate, and celebrate. 


 

C3.

“She almost died, and she doesn’t even seem to care!” Maren rolled a ball of snow tightly in her hands.

Frida was holding a skinned piece of caribou in her lap, threading a needle with thick black string. She stopped, let her shoulders sag, and watched Maren roll her ball bigger. “How do you know that she doesn’t care?”

It had been a week since Brenna ate the poisoned berries, and they still hadn’t spoken of it. Maren doubted their mother even knew.

Maren gestured toward the other side of camp. They were sheltered by a large pine tree, so she knew Frida couldn’t see where she pointed, but she didn’t think it mattered. “She’s over there eating more berries.” Maren wondered how others felt, seeing Brenna hoarding the first of the spring fruit all to herself. Especially the year prior, when she had first heard mumblings that they would not have enough food to survive the winter. She hoped this year wouldn’t be the same.

“The Matriarch would expect her to get over her fears. You know that, dear.”

Maren finished rolling her ball of snow. She put it down on a rock and tilted her head, trying to decide whether she should make the smallest piece first or second. She tried to tell herself that she didn’t care what Brenna did. Since her sister was older, all her mother’s attention would be on her. And Maren preferred it that way. “Then why don’t you get over yours.” The words came out of her mouth before she’d even stopped to consider their implications.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.” But the needle had stopped moving, the black thread falling slack in Frida’s lap.

Maren wished she could take her words back. Almost.

“I don’t understand what you’re implying.”

The pine branches parted, and Brenna appeared, looking self-important. “Ask her a question, go on.”

“Ask who a question?”

Brenna chuckled and spit a berry pit out into her palm. “These berries are disgusting. They were better when we were younger.”

“Ask who a question?”

“Sometimes I forget that you can be denser than the thickest trunk. Ask Frida a question. If it’s phrased like that, she has to answer it.”

Maren looked at the pants that had started to take shape on Frida’s lap. Unfortunately, Frida still hadn’t returned to her sewing, the hands that gripped the needle and back thread tense. “Why does she have to answer it?”

Brenna stepped between Maren and Frida and crossed her arms over her chest. “Because she has to. Why do you think she’s been with us our whole lives?”

“Because she likes to be around us.”

“Stars, you really are stupid. It’s because she has to. Mother can’t look after us all the time, you know. So, ask Frida what she’s really afraid of.”

Maren hadn’t considered why Frida was always looking after her. She felt stupid. “Why don’t you just leave me alone, Mother is good enough at it? I don’t even think you know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m just looking out for you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

Both sisters seemed to pause, as if waiting for Frida to interrupt their conversation, as she always did when their fighting got out of hand. Frida had always claimed that raised voices made her queasy and interrupted her solace, especially when they wandered the winter woods. Maren had never believed that winter woods were silent. Crackling snow, rustling animals, branches bending almost to the point of snapping. . . Maren looked to where Frida had been sitting. Only an indent in the snow and a few tracks gave any indication that she had been there.

“You’re just jealous that Frida doesn’t help you at all.” Maren didn’t want to be the first to leave her sheltered cove. “I think I heard Mother calling you.

“And you’re jealous that Mother doesn’t care about you.” Brenna swept her hair over her shoulder and ducked behind the branches. Probably off to find their mother, as she always did when she was upset. Maren wondered what comfort the Matriarch could possibly provide. She had certainly received none of it.

Maren thought about searching for Frida, but Brenna’s words had slithered under her skin, and all she wanted was to get away.  

***

When Maren was six-years-old, her mother took her on a trip. She’d watched Brenna leave with their mother on many such outings, but her mother had always looked at Maren and said she was too young, even though Frida said Brenna had started leaving camp when she was five months old.

Maren walked through camp proudly, clutching her mother’s hand tightly and wearing a new rabbit fur coat she had gotten for her birthday. Her mother had handed it to her quickly and then gotten called away, but Maren thought she had seen Frida sewing it a few weeks prior.

They stopped on their way to pluck luscious berries from beside the river. Maren marveled at the rushing waters. She knew from Frida’s stories that people used to drift down the currents on floating pieces of wood—like a massive wooden spoon in the water. She wondered how it didn’t sink.

Her mother showed Maren deer tracks and taught her which plants to avoid. Maren sometimes struggled through the shoulder-high snow, and her mother had to lift her up on her shoulders or re-secure her snowshoes[AK1] . Maren wondered if Brenna learned the same things, and if at sometime in the future they would get to go together.

Close to sunset, her mother guided her back toward camp. They stopped in a grove of stunted cedar trees. In the center of the clearing was a gravestone, carved with crude symbols that Maren couldn’t read, weathered by the ice and sleet. 

“This is your grandmother,” her mother said. “Without her, you wouldn’t be here. I still see her sometimes.”

“In your dreams?”

The Matriarch turned her head to the mountains. “I don’t remember my dreams.”

Maren had heard Frida speak of her grandmother a few times, but never in much detail. Maren squeezed her mother’s hand tighter. The wind that brushed across her cheeks was bitterly cold. Maren didn’t remember feeling as cold as she had that day in the years since.

“I’m happy that I’m here.”

She was too small to see her mother’s face, but she liked to imagine that she might have smiled.

__

By the time Maren returned from her wander around the river, the clouds had cleared, and the full moon took its place at the throne of the sky. As she did every full moon, Maren found her mother’s tent, but rather than walk inside, she traced the perimeter and settled her body against one of the large wooden stakes that bordered the tree line. Only a few occasions in the hundreds of times she had sat in this place did someone find her, but no one ever said anything to the Matriarch. Maren wondered if it was a small piece of disobedience—all they could manage.

She remembered this one woman—Lena, Maren thought was her name. She had left the camp when Maren was seven, to find another group. Lena insisted there had to be more out there. More people like them who survived whatever disease gripped the roamers.

A hunting party had discovered her body a few months later, after the snowdrift she had ended up in started melting.

Tonight, Maren had arrived late, and her mother was already in the middle of a story. For a few years after the outing with her mother, she had held out hope that she would also be invited to the full moon ritual her mother and Brenna had, where her mother told Brenna stories. All kinds of stories, about her travels, her childhood, old tales passed down to her, wild bands of roamers and wolves she had taken out with only a single dagger—the list went on.

Maren felt a certain sort of vindictive pleasure to listen in, knowing that she would never be invited, but also that she would hear all the stories just the same.

She thought she had heard this story before. She wracked her brain, trying to remember exactly when, but then she realized that Frida had told it to her, years and years ago.

“Hundreds of years ago, our people were little better than the roamers. They traveled the ice plains and traversed mountain passes, following the caribou on their routes across the tundra. Their only competitors were wolves, weather, and other humans. One of our ancestors—you have her blood—was the fiercest hunter of them all. She drew others to her. They wanted a better life, one with support and security, and she promised them that.” The first time Maren had heard the story, she’d envied that woman. Now she almost pitied her.

“Remnants of the old world [AK2] [AK3] could be seen everywhere, from rusted pieces of metal to bones, which many collected and wore around their necks as a symbol of their ancestors’ demise.” Maren knew none of those relics had survived the brutal winters that followed—at least not that she had seen.

The candlelight inside the tent flickered, casting her mother and sister’s shadows across the hide. “They followed her wherever she went—five at first, then tens, then hundreds, until finding prey in a desolate world was becoming challenging. There was one man who doubted her leadership. He gathered his own followers and promised a better life. And when people in our ancestor’s camp started dying, more fled to his promises.”

“He probably killed them on purpose,” Brenna said.

“Those poor people,” Maren had said.

Her mother’s shadow shifted. “Summer returned, and hunting game was easy once more. People stopped falling ill, and everything was as it had once been. But when winter roars, it does so loud enough to shake a mountain. Our ancestor struggled to find enough food for our people. One day, she was out roaming the hills and was attacked by a man claiming to be from the rival camp. Caught by surprise, our ancestor stood little chance, but out of the shadows emerged a legendary mountain cat, whose eyes were said to glow golden, more magnificent than a thousand sunsets, its fur entwined with liquid silver.”

“The cat saved her?” Brenna asked, sounding more eager for this tale than Maren had heard in months.

“Of course the cat saved her.” Her mother laughed. Maren had never made her mother laugh. “And when the battle between the two groups finally came, she rode the beast into the thick of it and defeated the man who tried to steal power from her, and either killed or adopted his followers.”

The shadow swirled, the sound of steel thudding into wood. Maren could see her mother’s hand holding something out to the table—like a dagger. “And that is what our line has been given. The strength of that cat.”

“The first, the last, the eternal,” Maren whispered under her breath, in time to her mother.

“And that, child, is all I have for you this night. May you have a blessed sleep and remember all that I have taught you.” Her mother reached out to cup Brenna’s cheek. Brenna stood, bowed her head, and exited the tent, heading for her own.

Maren held her breath until her sister was out of earshot. Then she released it, slow and steady. There was more to the story, at least the version Frida had told. Maren had learned that their ancestor might have killed her first challenger, but she fell in love with the second and bore his children, creating an everlasting peace between the two peoples. She wondered which one was correct. She wondered if it even mattered.

 

A few days into the new moon, Maren figured out what might convince her mother to let her hunt the deer. Maren cornered her near the latrines, where she knew her mother would be trapped with a dense thicket on one side and a sheer, rocky cliff on the other.

“Have you ever seen a deer with pure white antlers?” Maren asked her mother.

The Matriarch sighed. “You’re still on about this deer, are you? I thought I made it very clear that your presence is more needed in the camp?”

Maren had to stop herself from saying then why haven’t you paid any attention to me? “I thought you might like to come with me. It would be a nice break after a harsh winter. You were just telling Brenna the other night how much you missed roaming the wilderness, as you did in your youth.” She had spent the previous evening thinking up the perfect words to convince her mother, even asking Frida for her opinion.

“The world is not the same as it was when I was a child. And you are most certainly not me.”

“Imagine how the others will react when you come back to camp with such a prize. Their fearless leader, with food for the rest of spring.” Maren didn’t even realize she had taken inspiration from the full moon story until the words were out of her mouth. Hopefully her mother would think it a coincidence.

“I came out here to relieve myself, not to keep discussing this asinine deer.”

“It’s been so long since we hunted together. I thought it might remind us of my childhood, when we journeyed to the plains and hunted caribou when Brenna was sick with—”

Her mother’s eyes blazed. “Brenna was sick with a fever because you fed her that spoiled meat.”

“I was only eight, I didn’t know that it was—”

“Even as a three-year-old, Brenna knew good meat from spoiled. You have always been leagues behind her skill. Perhaps it’s my fault for not taking more time to teach you our ways, but I assumed you would be bright enough to teach yourself, but you are still lacking.”

Each word stung Maren, as a swarm of bees once had when she rooted around for honey in the summer months. She had hidden in the trees and waited for the welts to subside, then kept all the honey she’d managed to gather for herself. But Brenna had smelled it on her breath when she returned and demanded Maren show her the hive.

“Please, Mother. If not the deer, then something else. Anything else.”

“Is Frida’s company not enough for you? You must insist on stealing my valuable time too?”

Brenna’s words from earlier sounded through Maren’s head. She had said that Frida only interacted with them because the Matriarch wished it. “You force Frida to speak with us, how could I enjoy the company of a cripple? How could I possibly want to spend time with someone who barely knows one end of a stick from another?” She didn’t really feel that way about Frida, or at least she didn’t think so, but she desperately wanted to spend time with her mother before the summer months drew her away.

The thick berry bushes along the latrine rustled. Maren whipped around, but she saw only the retreating form of a limping woman that reminded Maren of Frida. A figment of her imagination? Or had Frida overheard her?

Her mother laughed, the sound echoing off the rock. “Who really doesn’t know one end of a stick from another?” She laid a cold hand on Maren’s shoulder and leaned in close, her hot breath tickling Maren’s ear. “If you ever speak to me about the deer, I will never let you leave this camp ever again. Now please, go help your sister with the skinning.” Her mother swept down the dirt path leading out of the latrine.

Once she was gone, Maren realized how badly the dirt under her feet reeked. She shook mud from her boots and trailed after her mother, feeling more numb than the chunks of ice breaking from the river banks. She wondered, not for the first time in her life, but for the first time in a long time, what it would be like to follow Lena into the wilderness. Hopefully, she wouldn’t end up dead, or a roamer, but she liked to imagine what her life would look like outside of camp, outside of it all.

C4.

            “Ana is having her baby.” Frida approached Maren where she sat with a pair of frayed leather pants in her lap. She had wanted to do something fun, like paint another rock to weigh down the sides of her tent, but then her pants had split, and she was tired of feeling the wind around her knees.

            “Already? That seems early.”

            Frida shrugged and patted Maren’s shoulder. “The Matriarch is sitting with her family.”

            “I thought you normally did that.” Maren frowned and set down her needle. Perhaps she wasn’t remembering correctly. It had been so long since someone had gone through childbirth. She didn’t even remember when the last time had been.

            “Your mother decided that she would be best suited for this birth. I must go back now, I just wanted to let you know. Perhaps you can tell Brenna?”

            Maren set down her sewing and watched Frida amble out of the clearing and along the river toward camp. Why couldn’t Frida also tell Brenna, if she had bothered to wander this far out of her way to tell Maren?

            Slinging the pants over her shoulder, Maren stood up, shook snow from her coat, and wandered in search of her sister.

            She found Brenna along the river, near her favorite fishing spot. She held a rod in her hand and was yelling something incoherent at the hole she had sawed in the ice.

            “That’s not a very nice circle.” Maren seated herself next to Brenna and rested her feet on the ice. She had always known her sister to carve a perfect fishing hole—something Maren had never been able to emulate.

            Brenna flicked snow off the top of her rod. “It was already like this when I got here. Do you really think I would commit such a grievous error?”

            “No wonder you haven’t caught anything.” Maren nodded to Brenna’s empty basket.

            “It was a roamer. The diseased ones probably don’t know how to cut a proper hole.” Brenna wriggled in the snow and jerked back her rod, making a clucking sound when she realized she had caught nothing. “Anyway, did you come all the way out here just to bother me? I wouldn’t be surprised.”

            Maren shivered, drawing her knees close to her chest. The pants she wore in place of the ones she had started sewing were old and threadbare. “Ana is having her baby.”

            “Already? Isn’t that a little early?”

            “Me neither. But it seems early. That’s what I told Frida.”

            Brenna snorted. “I’m sure the cripple had a lot to say.”

            Maren ignored the jest. She didn’t have the energy to defend Frida. “Not really. She seemed worried.”

            “Maybe we should go back to camp and see what’s happening. Stars know I could use some excitement.”

            Maren followed Brenna along the river and through the barren berry bushes that separated the forest from their camp. There was something about the mood that she didn’t like. People stared at the two of them as they passed, and the central fire had been stoked down to hot amber coals.

            Before they could approach the Matriarch’s tent—women normally went there to have their babies—Frida crossed their path and grabbed Maren’s wrist, dragging her into the shadows cast by two tents. “Don’t go near there. You don’t want to see it.”

            “What don’t we want to see?” Brenna hovered over Maren’s elbow. She looked more interested in what Frida had to say than ever before.

            Frida rubbed her thumb over Maren’s wrist. “Be careful.”

            “Of what?”

            “Look!” Brenna pointed to the Matriarch’s tent. Their mother stood in the circle of mud that separated her tent from the snow, a bundle clutched tightly to her chest.

            Frida tried to drag Maren deeper into the shadows. “I told you not to look.”

            The Matriarch spotted them. She beckoned them forward, her face void of expression. Brenna rushed to meet her. The Matriarch peeled back the blanket.

            Brenna gasped.

            Frida’s grip around Maren’s wrist tightened, but Maren jerked herself away. She needed to see. She needed to know what had caused Brenna’s reaction.

            The baby—if it could be called that—seemed malformed, though Maren didn’t have much experience with babies. The left side of the head was indented, the foot that stuck out of the bottom of the blanket twisted almost in half. Maren thought she heard Brenna retching in the bushes, but she couldn’t tear herself away from the babe’s face, which was almost translucent, the cheeks filled with a garish green glow.

            “I don’t know what’s happening,” the Matriarch said.

            Maren covered her mouth with her hand.

            “Mother always said—”

            “Enough,” the Matriarch said.

            Maren blinked. She had thought the word ‘mother’ would come from Brenna, but it had come from Frida.

            The Matriarch re-covered the baby with the blanket. Others were starting to gather in the vicinity, though they seemed wary about getting too close. The Matriarch waved for Brenna to follow her, and Brenna wiped her mouth clean with her sleeve. The two of them disappeared into the trees.

            Frida laid a hand on Maren’s shoulder. “Where are they going?” Maren asked.

            “To dispose of the thing, I’d imagine.”

            Maren bit down on her lip.

            “Maybe a roamer will find it.”

            Maren hoped so. She hoped she would never have to see anything of the sort again.

 

“I realized I was quite unfair with you the other day, I thought we might do something together.”

Maren looked up from her carving. She hated to set down her knife when she was almost finished detailing the branches of a pine tree on her spoon, but she thought she might be imagining her mother’s words and didn’t want to lose the dream figment. “The other day?”

“In the latrine,” her mother said, with a hint of impatience. “I have been ignoring you in recent months, and I don’t think that’s fair.”

Maren wondered if Frida had said something to her. She hadn’t spoken with the woman since that day in the latrine, when she suspected Frida might have overheard her harsh words, but she hadn’t found the courage to go and confirm it. She had seen Frida talking to her mother last night, though it had seemed like they were arguing. “Okay.”

Her mother crouched down and motioned for Maren’s carving. “Can I?”

Maren nodded and passed it over. The tree was inspired by one she had seen on one of her trips. She was planning on adding a deer beneath its boughs, but she didn’t want to mention that to her mother.

“It’s beautiful.”

Maren didn’t want to say thank you because she didn’t think she’d ever heard her mother say anything like that to her. “What did you want to do?”

Her mother leaned back against the pine tree. “We could take a hunting trip, or climb to the top of the tallest mountain for sunset and watch the last of the aurora.”

Maren knew where her mother had gotten those ideas from. “Perhaps you should ask Brenna instead, I’m sure she would love to go with you again.”

“I’m trying to make an effort here, Bren—Maren.”

Maren picked up the spoon from where her mother had discarded it in the snow. She began to whittle away the rough edges, more harshly than she would have done otherwise. “It’s like I said before—perhaps you should ask Brenna.”

“Ask me what?” Brenna appeared over Maren’s shoulder.

Maren could see her mother’s patience wearing thin. She was amused by it. While her mother tried to reconnect their relationship for unknown reasons, she didn’t think she would get in trouble for her poor attitude. “Mother wants to take you to the tallest mountain to watch the sunset. She was asking me for ideas, and I just knew how much you would love that.” Now that she thought more about the plan, Maren liked it. Almost a full day of missing both her mother and her sister. The deer might have roamed close enough to camp for her to hunt it down in that amount of time. She wished she had never wanted to spend more time with her mother. What had come over her?

Brenna still loomed behind Maren. “Aren’t the passes still snowed in?”

“You could take the cliff route.”

“We could, but then the –”

“Would you two let me speak!” Their mother exploded.

Maren smirked. She knew the niceties wouldn’t last.

“I think both of you should come.”

Maren hadn’t expected that. She couldn’t imagine a worse scenario than having to spend concentrated time with both her sister and her mother. She said nothing and continued to darken the roots of the tree on her spoon.

“Maren?”

 “I see you’ve remembered my name? Forgot that you had a second child all these years, did you?”

Brenna stumbled over a stick, the snap splitting the air.

Icy filaments returned to her mother’s eyes. “Do you perhaps want to rethink those words?”

“I want Frida to come.”

Her mother gave Maren a long look. “Why? You still think she’s a part of the family?”

 “Hauling a cripple up a mountain should be fun,” Brenna said.

“You will tell Frida of the plan,” her mother said. “You will carry her things and if needed, carry her. I will not slow my pace for anyone.”

Maren bowed her head, hand wrapped tightly around her carving. It seemed a small price to pay for any hint of relief from her mother and her sister. She had pushed her mother far, that day by the latrines. And if anything, she wished she could go back and undo it.

 

Maren hadn’t given Frida much choice about the trip, not at all, really. She had expected some form of protest. Frida rarely left the direct boundary around the camp, and she certainly never seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the trips Maren took. Excited because Maren was excited, but never because Frida wondered what her life might have been like had she been able to walk better.

If anything, Frida had seemed eager to leave. Asking how soon they would go, how long they would be gone.

Maren figured it was better than disappointment. She figured that Frida just welcomed a chance to get out.

She hadn’t counted on how exhausting it would be to carry her pack and Frida’s up the side of a mountain. They left just before sunrise, and by the time they stopped for lunch on a rocky cliff overlooking the dense pine forests and winding rivers that reflected the hazy sun, her legs burned and her back ached.

Maren paused to catch her breath. She hadn’t traveled this way in a long time, but the last time she had wondered how roamers made any progress through the pass without snowshoes. Now, she thought she might be able to make it without them, though still not easily.

“Do you want me to carry that for a little while?” Brenna asked, dropping back to walk with Maren. They had walked in the same formation since the first latrine break. The Matriarch in the front, Brenna always a single step behind. Then Maren, struggling with double the packs, and Frida, panting and red-faced, but uncomplaining.

Maren couldn’t tell whether Brenna was serious, so she shook her head. With a shrug, Brenna returned to their mother.

Maren had to stop on the crest of the next rise to wait for Frida.

“That was nice of her,” Frida said, panting.

Maren shrugged. “I guess.”

“She can be nice sometimes, you know. Maybe it was a genuine offer.”

“How did you know that’s what I was thinking.”

Frida tapped her nose. 

Their path took them through the rest of the mountain pass, the snow clearing to reveal mounds of rock fragments and boulders that they spent the rest of the day and into the evening scrambling over. Soon, it grew too dark for them to safely continue, though Maren could see the way her mother looked up at the mountain they still had to climb and knew that she would spend the rest of the night trying to find ways to bring the sun back. Maren huddled by the fire they had built, smoke pluming straight into her face. She coughed but didn’t bother to move away.

In the morning, when she finally cracked her crusty eyes open, Brenna wordlessly handed her a strip of dried salmon that Maren chewed on during the rest of their climb. By mid-afternoon, Frida could barely walk, and Maren had to drop back to support her lame side.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Frida asked.

Maren watched the dark shapes of her mother and Brenna disappear around a curve in the mountain. “No.”

“Then you should go. Come back for me when you know the way.” Frida gasped in pain and clutched her hip.

“What happened to you?” Maren blurted out. She had posed the question once to Frida when she was a child and Frida had almost slapped her. Almost. She had always suspected an accident when Frida was young, but that didn’t seem right.

“I wonder if we’ll make it there by the time the sun sets.”

Maren was half-tempted to stop giving Frida support. To see if the older woman ever managed to make it to the peak. Before she could talk herself out of such a cruel idea, they emerged over another rise. Brenna and the Matriarch stood just ten feet away from them, staring at a grove of black, wilted trees that seemed to have collapsed from within. From the way Brenna and her mother were looking, Maren guessed that the forest had not always looked like this.

“Perhaps lightning,” Brenna suggested to her mother, glancing sidelong at Maren and Frida as they walked up.

The Matriarch shook her head. “I was just up here in the fall. We only get storms like that in the summer.”

“An insect?” Maren suggested. “Some sort of rot?” She stepped closer to the trees, intent on one of the fallen branches. If she could study it, she might know more.

A hand wrapped around her wrist, yanking her back. Sharp nails dug into the tender skin on the underside of her arm. “Don’t you dare go into those cursed woods.” Frida’s dark eyes gleamed with malice. “Especially if you are too naïve to know what has occurred here.”

“Don’t infect my daughters with any more of that nonsense,” the Matriarch scoffed. “I heard enough of it during our childhood.”

“And you chose not to teach it to them! The Goddess is angry, and it’s all your fault!”

The Matriarch narrowed her eyes. “There is no goddess, there never has been. I thought I taught you well enough not to speak back to me, especially in front of my daughters.”

Frida’s cheeks flushed. “You will regret that.”

Maren backed away. She didn’t know whose side to take. She barely understood what they were trying to say to each other.

“There was no storm, there was no disease!” Frida swept her arm out to the trees. “It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you for months.”

“And I’ve told you that your voice doesn’t matter to me.”

Brenna stomped her foot on the ground. “Stop it! Would you stop it! What does it matter how the forest got destroyed?”

Frida turned to the two sisters with unease in her eyes. “Because the Goddess is angry with us. Livanna thinks that we have forsaken Her. She is poisoning our water and killing our plants. This patch of trees is just the beginning. What animal would want to make its home near ours if their home is gone? We will have nothing.”

Maren clutched her cold hands to her chest. She still didn’t understand what Frida was trying to say.

A swish of steel. The Matriarch had drawn her dagger and pointed it to Frida, the tip glistening under the pale pink sky above. “Don’t listen to a word she says,” she said to Brenna and Maren. Her eyes returned to Frida, who stood resolute on the barren rock. “Your threats mean nothing to us. And if you don’t remember your place, I’ll cut out your tongue.” As if to add emphasis to her statement, the Matriarch bent down in front of the fallen tree and snipped off a twig, rubbing it between her fingers until it crumbled to dust. “If your ‘Goddess’ is truly angry with us, she will kill me where I stand.” She looked up at the sky, spreading her arms wide. “I dare you, Livanna. I dare you.”

Maren held her breath, but nothing happened save a brief pickup in the wind.

“She’s crazy,” Brenna whispered.

Maren nodded. Her mother seemed ready to murder Frida over nothing. Unless history had predicted this moment.

 “Of course there’s no goddess poisoning us,” Brenna continued. Her sister had meant Frida, not their mother. Maren still nodded mutely. Her mother still held her dagger out to Frida.

“We should make camp before it gets too dark,” Maren said.

Both women turned to her. She swallowed. The Matriarch leveled her weapon to Maren, the same icy frost in her eyes as when she looked at Frida. Maren squeezed her frozen fists together. She hadn’t chosen those words carefully, as Frida had always told her to do.

Suddenly, Brenna turned and ran through the grove of blackened trees. Frida’s agonized wail carried on the wind, heightening the echoing pitch. Maren gaped at her sister. Did she want to trifle with this place, real curse from a goddess or not?

“Brenna! What are you doing?” The Matriarch stared into the deadened woods. She swiveled her dagger back to Maren. “Go after her.”

Maren hesitated. She had already saved her sister’s life once, when she had eaten the poisoned berries. Wasn’t one enough for one life? Hadn’t she paid whatever debt she owed to the universe? And besides, did she really think the forest would do any harm to Brenna?

“Don’t do it, Maren.” Frida said.

“Go,” the Matriarch said.

The Matriarch’s dagger whirled to face Frida. Without stopping to think, Maren dashed into the dead forest, following Brenna’s footprints through the snow.

“Neither of them will come back alive!” Frida yelled.

Twigs snapped at Maren’s face, the smell of decay hanging heavy in the air. Maren’s lungs burned. The sensation reminded her of the time Brenna had fed her poisoned berries, but that hadn’t lasted long. The more she ran, the tighter her chest grew and the dizzier she became, but she didn’t know if it was because of Frida’s cursed forest or because of her activity.

At least, according to Frida the forest was cursed. And Maren had never been led astray by Frida’s words. It was like some of the stories she had heard the Matriarch tell Brenna. The hero in the story always had some sort of wise council guiding their steps. Perhaps Maren could be the hero. If Maren saved Brenna in front of their mother, the Matriarch would surely thank her.

Maren increased her speed, her muscles quivering. She laughed as her hair blew out of its bindings, whipping around her face. The wind howled in her ears, so loudly that she could hardly hear anything that happened in the forest around. She smiled, the cold nipping at her gums. She hadn’t run like this in weeks.

“Maren, stop!”

Frida’s voice carried on the wind, but it was still far behind her.

Brenna’s footsteps grew fresher, the deadened trees thinning. Maren was almost there. She just needed to take a few more steps…

Brenna kneeled in a clearing at the base of a jagged, rocky cliff. She was bent over something large, perhaps a dead animal.

“What—” Maren started. She slowed down and arced around her sister, so she could see the animal. Her eyes widened. The deer. The deer with the antlers so pure and white that they blended into the snow. It lay dead at her sister’s feet, blood pooling from a slash wound across its neck, its black eyes glassy and blank. “What did you do?” A thundering wave filled Maren’s ears. She could hear her pulse beating, still racing from her run. A fog slid through her mind, distorting her thoughts. The deer was here. So close to their camp the entire time, and she hadn’t been the one to kill it. “What did you do!”

Brenna stood up and turned to Maren. Her eyes were almost apologetic.

Maren looked at the deer again. She knew that her sister couldn’t have inflicted such a wound—not even with her daggers, but she didn’t care. “It’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Maren’s chest heaved. “I was supposed to be the one who killed it.”

“You know, there’s a lot of things I wanted to do that I never got to. The deer doesn’t matter. Have you seen this forest?”

“Please, Brenna, enlighten me on what you’ve ever been restricted from doing. Mother would serve my face to you on a platter if you asked.”

A howl sounded, carried by the gusting wind. Maren jerked around, searching for the source of the sound.

“It’s nothing,” Brenna said, waving her hand. “You know how the wind can get up here.”

“I wasn’t worried.”

“You’re right, by the way. Mother would serve your face to me on a platter if I asked. But I haven’t. Shouldn’t that make you feel special? I know how you like to feel special.”

Maren tackled Brenna to the ground. They rolled away from the dead deer and toward the cliff, Maren’s back jamming into a sharp rock. She gasped and yanked out a clump of Brenna’s hair. Brenna snarled, kicking Maren’s stomach. With a sharp release of breath, she rolled off her sister and reached for her dagger, only to find the slot empty. It must have fallen out during her frantic dash through the trees. Maybe this was why Maren had come here. Not to save Brenna, but to kill her.

Another howl, closer this time, close enough to reverberate off the cliff face. Maren ignored the sound.

She leaped again, just as a dark shadow passed over her head. A blur of fur landed on Brenna, pushing her against the cliff wall.

Maren ducked and ran a few feet, her snowshoes catching on the ground. She tripped and fell and pushed herself back up, hands on her knees. The moonlight caught on the blur of fur. Maren stood frozen, hardly believing what stood in front of her. A giant cat—a mountain lion, with creamy brown fur. She hadn’t seen any tracks. That didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Brenna screamed but managed to avoid the raging cat’s claws. “Brenna!” Maren yelled, petrified.

“Do something!” Brenna hollered. The cat dug its claws into Brenna’s thick hide coat. She shrieked and bucked her hips, slamming her fists into the cat’s muzzle.

Maren combed her belt with shaking hands. Her dagger. It wasn’t there. She had no bow, no other weapon. Frantic, she scanned the forest, but the shadows all blurred together, creating a milky soup of images. A heavy branch, maybe. If she could find a heavy branch she could knock the cat unconscious. That might be enough. Maren dropped to her hands and knees and started pawing the ground.

 Brenna’s screams grew strangled. Maren’s hands wrapped around a thick piece of wood, pine needles tickling her palms.

A dagger whistled past her head, embedding itself in the cat’s stomach. The beast howled and lurched away from Brenna. Maren jerked forward and ripped the dagger from the cat, dancing away from its claws. She stabbed down, steel puncturing flesh and muscle before meeting bone. She wondered how many strikes it would take to fell a legend such as this. Not nearly enough, she answered herself as she thrust the dagger down again. The cat shuddered and moaned under her feet.

“One more for good measure, I think.”

Maren’s mother stood behind her, another dagger in her hand. Maren twisted the dagger that was already jammed into the cat’s neck, silencing the last of its cries. She looked down at the dagger. A shaky ‘F’ was carved into the reddish wood handle.

Maren’s mother wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Good. I’m proud of you.”

Maren’s chest grew tight. She closed her eyes, basking in the cool silence of the winter woods, of her mother’s strong arms around her shoulder, and of the moonlight bathing her face. Frida was a fool, she realized. Of course, her mother was right. There was no goddess poisoning their lands. The forest probably burned down earlier that winter, perhaps roamers playing with fire they didn’t know how to control. Maren turned to face her mother, a smile teasing her lips. Her mother was proud of her.

Their eyes met. The Matriarch’s eyes widened. She opened and closed her mouth. Her hand slipped from Maren’s shoulder. She took a step back.

A heaving breath from nearer to the cliff. The Matriarch dropped to Brenna’s side, ignoring Maren’s presence. Brenna lifted a shaking arm up, her chest rattling. Her hand dropped back to her side, and then Brenna’s dark eyes focused on a single point in the sky. They didn’t move again.

C5.

The Matriarch pressed her hands over the giant gash in Brenna’s chest, her hands soaking with blood, though it still pooled from Brenna’s body and stained the snow.

Maren took a deep breath, the sound of air rushing through her nostrils almost louder than the slight crunch of melting snow. What did she say, if she bothered to speak at all?

Her sister was dead.

Everything had happened so fast. What if Maren hadn’t lost her dagger? Would she have been able to kill the cat sooner? She had loved the feeling of that dagger ripping through the cat’s flesh. One more for good measure.

 “You killed my daughter,” her mother said.

Maren swallowed. The way her mother had said daughter. “My sister died.”

“You didn’t protect her. I told you to protect her!” The Matriarch whirled, the veins in her eyes popping.

“I killed the cat. I did protect her.” Maren took a step back, eyes narrowing on the way her mother’s fists clenched at her side. Her foot landed on a twig. It snapped.

The Matriarch unclenched her fists, eyes flying to Maren’s boots. Maren knew they were covered in dried blood. “I have to punish you, you should know that, Maren. I have to punish you for what you have taken from this world. Two lives lost tonight, two precious lives. I think two fingers ought to be payment enough, yes, certainly only two fingers. More than that and people might talk, that wouldn’t be good, we don’t need people talking any more than they already are.”

Maren’s hand went numb. She flexed her fingers inside of her glove, her frazzled brain struggling to comprehend whether she couldn’t move them because of the cold or because they were already missing. She tried to find words to argue, but her mouth moved without sound. Three lives had been lost. She squeezed her eyes tightly, trying to banish Brenna’s face from her mind, but it floated there, as if permanently entrenched.  

“You manipulated me into bringing you here and then killed my daughter. My daughter!”

Maren frowned. Her memories were fuzzy. But of course, her mother would tell her the truth. She always told the truth.

“Come here,” her mother said.

Maren took a step. Her mother was right. She had killed her sister. Why had she ever thought otherwise? If she hadn’t forgotten her dagger, Brenna wouldn’t have died. And if Maren hadn’t originally confronted her mother about this trip, Brenna wouldn’t have died.

Her mother extended a hand to Maren’s face, stroking her fingers down Maren’s cheek. “Your nose has always looked like mine. But those eyes…”

Like the raging summer river, not like ice that never thawed.

“Are you going to finish my punishment?” Maren asked. She could still hold a paintbrush with her other hand. If she was lucky, she could still carve. If not, then perhaps that was her punishment for killing her sister.

“Hold out your hand.”

Maren squeezed the tip of her glove with her other hand. There was blood on the fur.

A sound from the bushes. Maren slid her glove back on. Frida emerged, hair askew and face red and patchy. “The Goddess has spoken,” Frida said. “We have offended Her, and she has shown us what happens when we don’t listen to Her wise words. Brenna’s death is our punishment.” Frida stepped behind Maren and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, drawing her away from the Matriarch.

“There is no Goddess!” The Matriarch snarled. “My daughter is dead because of her.” She pointed her dagger at Maren’s throat. Maren had to cross her eyes to see the end, dangling precariously in front of the big vein in her neck.

“She’s going to take my fingers. As a punishment,” Maren said. It made sense when her mother had explained it to her, but as she spoke, she wondered what had happened. She had tried to save Brenna that day with the berries. Why would she now choose to kill her? It didn’t make any sense.

Frida moved closer to them. She seemed to move without as much of a limp, but her spine remained locked in a hunched position. Perhaps Maren just wasn’t seeing clearly. She blinked, but Frida’s steps remained sure. “Do not do this to Maren, Helke. She doesn’t deserve this.”

Helke. Maren had never heard her mother’s name before.

“Silence!” The Matriarch yelled, her dagger drifting between Maren and Frida. Sweat shone on her brow, but her hand was steady. “You and your Goddess have no right to speak here. Not in front of my daughter.”

“We must bless her,” Frida said. She spoke so calmly, and Maren wondered whether she should listen to her. Every time the Matriarch spoke, Maren wanted to cover her ears and run from the mountain. “Before she passes into the realm of darkness, we must shroud her in blessings, so the Goddess will accept her despite any wrongdoing on our part.”

The Matriarch’s chest heaved up and down.

“The fingers can be part of the blessing,” Frida said. “By giving our own blood to the earth, it will signal to the Goddess that we mean well and that she should accept Brenna as one of Her own.”

Frida turned to Maren, her eyes wide. “It wasn’t you, Maren, you have to believe that. You didn’t kill Brenna, she would have died regardless of what happened here tonight.”

Maren flexed her fingers. She could almost feel them again, and the more Frida spoke, the more she started to remember. She hadn’t killed her sister. She had killed the cat, she remembered driving the dagger into its heart, over and over. “I didn’t kill my sister,” she said, not caring that the Matriarch had started speaking again.

“I must punish you for what happened,” her mother said, leveling the dagger back to Maren’s throat.

“Take my fingers instead, if you must spill more blood.” Frida stepped in front of Maren and extended her hand toward the Matriarch. “I don’t really need them.”

Maren didn’t know what to say. She didn’t understand why Frida would take Maren’s punishment away, even though she thought Frida deserved it. Frida was the one who had said not to venture into the forest. Frida knew that Brenna always did whatever someone told her not to, and that Brenna might encounter something dangerous.

Thankfully, the Matriarch didn’t look at Maren again. She grabbed Frida’s hand and pushed back her sleeve. Maren realized that Frida wore a black leather bracelet with two round wooden beads. It reminded her of the bracelet her mother wore, though she thought their similarity had to be too much of a coincidence.

Maren thought she should look away. Months ago, she might have looked away, but she couldn’t stop watching the dagger lower itself to Frida’s two smallest fingers, the steel edge laying flat against the joints. Frida started screaming, the sound echoing off the stone cliff wall. Blood gushed to the ground. Maren watched the dark stain spread, until the color reached her boots and slid under her feet to slink further into the forest.

Eventually, the screaming stopped. The Matriarch drew back, her breathing ragged. She wiped her dagger clean on her sleeve and sheathed it. Maren didn’t know what happened to Frida’s fingers. She didn’t think she wanted to see them again. Quietly, Maren handed Frida a cloth to stop the bleeding, though she didn’t know how else to help her. She had never treated wounds like that before.

“I must bless Brenna now,” Frida said, staggering over to Brenna’s body.

“Stop,” the Matriarch said quietly. “Take another step and I’ll take another one of your fingers.”

Frida took another step and drew back the cloth, letting her blood drip onto Brenna’s stomach. She started mumbling words that Maren couldn’t make out.

The Matriarch looked to Maren, her icy blue eyes duller than Maren had ever seen. “Watch out for Frida. It’s important that the two of us stick together now.”

Maren nodded. She didn’t think Brenna’s death should make her happy, but in that moment, she was elated, the feeling rising through her chest and consuming her thoughts. Perhaps in a few months her mother would start inviting Maren into the tent to hear her stories, and she wouldn’t have to sit outside in the cold snow with Frida to learn about their ancestors. She watched Frida rewrap her wound.

They would have to return to camp and leave Brenna to the wolves. Bodies were not buried. Frida had always taught Maren that a person’s soul could become trapped by the earth, and that if they gave nourishment to another creature, they would roam on in the herds of mythic animals that fled across the ice.

            But now Maren didn’t know if that was Frida’s goddess speaking or a real tradition.

            The Matriarch turned from Brenna’s body, arms clutched tightly to her chest. She started walking away from the cliff. Maren watched her body jerk forward and then stumble, but Frida lunged and caught her. The Matriarch growled and threw Frida off, regaining her balance.

            The Matriarch pushed through the bushes, a slight limp in her step, Frida walking close to her heels, leaving Maren in the clearing.  Maren studied the ground where her mother had tripped. A gleaming white bone, illuminated by the moonlight, staked into the dirt. Maren didn’t bother to uncover it before she followed her mother and Frida back to camp.

C6.

Maren approached her mother slowly, settling herself on the opposite side of a low table. She crisscrossed her legs and then straightened her spine—but not too much—and then let her eyes settle on her the Matriarch’s face. She settled on the nose. Close enough to the eyes to read her expression, but not close enough to experience that locking sensation that she so hated. 

            Her mother said nothing, gripping the ceramic mug so tightly in her hand that her fingers turned white. She swirled the contents around twice and then stopped, her own eyes fixated on the table. 

            Three weeks. Three weeks since they had lost Brenna to the mythic cat.

            From over her mother’s ear, Maren caught a shadow moving at the back of the tent. She hadn’t seen much of Frida since that day—well—Maren should amend, she hadn’t spoken much with Frida or seen her, but Frida seemed to always be there, lingering, watching, waiting. Maren didn’t know if Frida followed her to the latrines, or if Maren had simply grown so used to having a shadow that she couldn’t tell the difference. She both hated it and felt comforted by it at the same time.  

            She waited for the Matriarch to speak first. How did Maren begin to form words? Frida stepped into the light. She carried a vase of water across the tent, setting it on the back table. Her stunted hand dragged at her side.

            “Drink the rest of this if you want.” The Matriarch set her tea on the table and pushed it toward Maren. “I don’t find I have the taste for it.”

            “How is your leg, Mother?” Maren ignored the tea.

            The Matriarch stopped massaging her arm. Maren almost smiled. “I saw you trip over something on our hunting trip. I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay.”

            Frida carried the vase of water toward them. The smell of her made Maren want to shirk again. She had the same earthy smell as Brenna.

            “Matriarch,” Frida bowed over the table and offered the water.

            The Matriarch moved while Maren was mid-blink. A thud. One of the Matriarch’s daggers was embedded in the wall, a thumbs-width from Frida’s head. “Shut up.”

            Maren swallowed, though she could still hear the dagger vibrating. “That was pleasant.”

            Maren was curious, how far she could push her mother. She didn’t know how to handle this new dynamic—without Brenna, Maren was heir. Without Brenna, Maren would become the next Matriarch, which was never something she had wanted. She still didn’t want it.

            Frida slipped back to her table near the tent rear.

            The Matriarch, seemingly unfazed by Maren’s words, unrolled a set of daggers on the table separating her from Maren. “Which one should we use?”

            “For what?”

            “Skinning?”

            Maren selected her favorite from her mother’s collection. A long thin dagger with a reddish-brown wooden handle. “What are we skinning?”

            “What do we always skin?” Her mother extracted the dagger from its case and set it in the center of the table, discarding the rest.

            Perhaps the dynamic between the three of them would remain unchanged.

            “Frida, bring the platter here.”

            Frida appeared almost instantly at their side, a silver platter lofted above her shoulder. She bent crookedly and placed it on the table, her deformed hand lingering for more than a few seconds in front of the Matriarch’s face. She stepped away, her body revealing the carcass of a dead squirrel atop the platter.

            Maren poked at its cold flesh. A part of her had almost hoped that her mother would want to tell her a story or talk to her about Brenna. Not that Maren necessarily wanted to talk about her dead sister, but she would rather have had that conversation with her mother than stare at another dead animal. She had seen enough dead animals recently.

            Only once had Maren left camp since they’d returned without Brenna. She had thought she could handle it, facing prey with her bow and arrow, but she couldn’t.

            And not because she couldn’t kill, but because she hadn’t found anything alive. A few rotted out rabbits and one deer with its decaying carcass cut clean by roamers, but nothing for her.  

            “I thought this was an activity we could do together.”

            Maren breathed deeply.

            “Are those packed bags? Are you going somewhere?”

            The Matriarch frowned at the squirrel. The cold black eyes seemed to stare straight at Maren. She had never liked looking at the faces of dead animals when she had to skin them. Much like how she looked at her mother. Her mother snatched the mug of tea from the ground and took a few more small sips. “Do you want to start, or do you want me to start?”

            “I want to know why you’re packing.” It wasn’t like her mother to get up and leave without announcing it to everyone.

            The Matriarch’s eyes sharpened. “Why?”

            “It’s just that now that Brenna is—”

            The Matriarch raised her hand. Maren blinked, prepared to dodge her mother’s slap, but it never came. Something strange and urgent flashed through the Matriarch’s eyes, and her arm seemed to stop in midair, as if someone had taken it and yanked it back. 

            Maren didn’t understand. She grabbed the skinning knife and slid the tip under the squirrel’s fur, just over its spine. She continued sliding it along the length of the animal, splitting the fur in half. “I probably deserved that hit,” she said, but Frida didn’t seem inclined to move from her perch above the table.

            “Frida, let us be,” her mother said, voice dangerously low.

            Thankfully, Frida obeyed the Matriarch and retreated to the shadows. Maren would hold her tongue. But only so Frida didn’t feel the need to intervene to protect her, as she seemed apt to do of late. 

            “Does that knife need to be sharpened?” her mother asked. “I thought it might.”

            Maren shook her head.

            “Shall we go through the first rib, or the second?”

            Maren stopped moving the knife.

            “First. Or second?”

            Maren lofted the knife and stabbed down at the squirrel, but then suddenly, the squirrel wasn’t an animal but Frida’s hand. The knife pierced through bones and flesh. Blood welled slowly. Dead a while. “Second rib.” She looked up.

            Her mother held out a hand, asking for the knife. Maren debated handing it to her, then passed it sideways, so the metal wouldn’t be facing her. The Matriarch dragged the platter toward her. The metal screeched across the wood, like a bird shot with an arrow, squawking in surprise. Her mother sliced the dagger through the rest of the squirrel and pried it open.

            Maren almost vomited. The smell emanating from the squirrel was like nothing she had experienced before. Like rotted flesh, but…worse. Like when she uncovered a half-decayed roamer deep in the woods, but worse…

            “What…”

            The squirrel’s veins shone fluorescent green, like fresh summer grass. Sludge bubbled in the decayed and ash-charred muscles, organs practically mush.

            “I told you it would happen.” Frida’s voice echoed from the back of the tent. 

            Maren wanted to laugh. She knew Brenna would have. But she could only see what was right in front of her, and what sat in front of her was not something she could explain. She had never seen a color so bright, and had never been so close to believing in Frida’s strange Goddess.

            But her mother just chuckled and reached down, scooping some of the goo onto her finger. “This poor squirrel must have eaten a piece of rancid prey.”

            “If you touch that, you will be poisoned, and there is nothing I can do to help,” Frida said. 

            Maren didn’t need any convincing not to touch the squirrel, but she was fascinated by the color. How vibrant a shade for her to paint with? Her grass might finally look like how she imagined in her head, for those few days of summer when the sun shone with a brutal intensity and she could finally shed her furs and lay back on the soft ground, miraculously free of snow.

The Matriarch stared at the substance on her finger. Then she left her hand to her mouth and sucked it off. 

Maren blinked. She didn’t necessarily believe that the goo was as poisonous as Frida claimed, but she still didn’t think she would have eaten it. 

            “I can’t do this right now.” Maren stood up and rubbed her forehead, not caring what happened between her mother and Frida. She pushed through the tent flaps and into the snow, racing for the tree-line. People parted for her, though she didn’t know whether it was the expression on her face or because they knew her face and knew she was now heir and knew that they had to get out of her way or she could have them punished. Nobody wished for the Matriarch’s punishments.

            Maren reached the trees and knelt before an old oak, vomiting her breakfast over the roots. She watched the contents of her stomach sink into the earth and wondered what other creatures roaming the forest around her had decided to glow.

 

Maren pulled the deer-hide cover from a boulder wider than the length of her body. She set down the piece of bark with berry-stained paints and chewed on the end of her paintbrush. Mountains and pine trees lined the bottom of the boulder, but she thought it needed something else. She couldn’t think of anything.

“You’re doing this again? Last I looked, that rock was covered in flowers.”

Maren didn’t turn at the sound of Frida’s voice. She knew what the older woman would say next, and she didn’t need to see her face to know what her expression would be. Blank, with slightly quirked lips, as if she was ready to smile if Maren gave any indication that she wanted to smile. “Last I checked, it wasn’t your sister who just died.”

“I understand why you’re angry.”

Maren bit into the wooden handle of her paintbrush. Frida moved into view on the near side of the rock. “It’s been a month since that too, and I bet your arm still thinks it has two extra fingers.” She nodded to Frida’s hand, which twitched as if in response. Three fingers. Frida was missing two fingers on her left hand. One for dead Brenna, and one for the dead Matriarch, who wasn’t dead, but might as well have been.

“The Goddess has given me strength to face my struggles.”

Maren contemplated throwing her paintbrush at Frida, but she knew it wouldn’t do nearly enough damage to satisfy her. If Frida hadn’t tried to stop them from entering that forest with stupid tales of her imaginary goddess, then Brenna wouldn’t have run off, and she wouldn’t have died. And she wouldn’t have left Maren alone with their Mother.

“She’s coming for me again, isn’t she?” Maren swirled her paintbrush in a blob of white paint and poked at the rock, a light trickle of snowflakes popping up amidst the trees.

“Not this time. She wants to talk to you alone.”

Maren tried not to imagine what Brenna would have said. What Brenna would have told her or done wouldn’t help her anymore. The Matriarch didn’t care if Maren acted like Brenna. “Like I told my mother the last time she came searching for me. I don’t care for anything she has to say. She can kill me if she wants.”

Frida’s hand shot out and gripped Maren’s wrist, smearing the white paint into the fresh green trees. Her painting was ruined. She would have to start all over again, which meant she would need more black paint. Black, for the night sky behind the trees. “Do not throw your life away to her. Do not throw away everything I have ever given you.”

Maren stared straight ahead, but Frida moved in front of her. “If that’s what you want to continue to believe.”

Brenna’s face swam in Maren’s mind. She leaned back against the rock, not caring if she smeared her painting or ruined her clothes. “My sister is dead.”

“Yes.”

“She’s not ever coming back.”

Frida furrowed her brows. “No, she’s not.”

“And neither are any of us, according to you.”

Frida rolled her lips. “I didn’t say that. I never said that.”

“That day in the woods—you said that neither of us would come out of those woods alive. But I did. I’m still here. Did you mean me? Or did you mean us—all of us?”

Frida reached out and grabbed a strand of Maren’s hair, twirling it around her fingertip. “Your mother wouldn’t be pleased that I’m speaking with you about this.”

Maren had forgotten what it felt like to have Frida’s hands in her hair. She hadn’t needed it done since her mother’s birthday, weeks before. Maren leaned into the comforting touch, as if she could salvage pieces of something she couldn’t identify from the contact. “I want to know that you believe. But I can’t. I know I can’t. I believe my mother. I follow my mother. That’s final. That’s her word, and I must do what she says.” She tore herself away from Frida’s outstretched hand.

Hurt might have flashed across Frida’s face, but Maren didn’t let herself spend enough time studying Frida’s face to know for sure. “The Matriarch can’t find us alone together again. I wish you would leave me be.”

Frida stared at her. “I’ll always be here.”

Maren shrugged and threw her paintbrush into the mud. “That’s what I’m afraid of.” She walked away, knowing that her mother waited for her. And that spending more time with Frida would only lead to misery, though she couldn’t say exactly why or how.  

 

Before, Maren hadn’t thought much about speaking with the Matriarch. She was her mother, she never wanted to think the worst. Now, Maren considered only two things when visiting her mother: where to look, and where not to look. She knew the places not to look well. Her mother’s eyes, first and foremost, because Maren’s own eyes looked too much like Brenna’s, and then perhaps the lips, because they were too close to the eyes, and the ears were no good because then her mother would simply assume she was purposefully avoiding her. Though after her conversation with Frida, Maren didn’t know how much she cared. She wondered if the best way to avoid her Mother’s anger was to act more like her mother.

Maren reached a hand for the leather tassels of the Matriarch’s tent, which was by far the largest of them all. Numerous beads lined the deer-hide strips, a few of which she had carved herself. Back then, she had carved entire days away. If she held a knife now, she wanted to feel it slice through something softer than wood.

            “She’s not in the best mood today.” asked an old man behind her.

            Maren’s gaze shifted. It was an elder she recognized. He always conducted death ceremonies. People approached her more in the past four months than they ever had. She was growing tired of it. But also used to it, which made her less tired of it.

            Her hand went to her leather bracelet. It was tradition at each ceremony to carve one, to remember the dead. She hoped the motion didn’t draw his attention or make him think she didn’t simply have a nervous tick and was remembering the most recent addition to her bracelet, carved with the letter ‘B’. She hadn’t even thought about making one until she saw everyone else do it.

            “She never is,” Maren slid her rabbit-fur trimmed sleeve back over the bracelet, careful to move the rest of her body so it absorbed the motion. She couldn’t let the old man study her too closely—he was old enough to know her mother well. To care more about the desires of the current Matriarch than the Matriarch to be.

            Maren knew she should step toward the tent, for the man would never follow her, but she found herself staring at a piece of antler stuck in the snow. For a moment she had thought it was stark white. But no, that would have been impossible. She had only ever known one animal with antlers so pure.

            “I’ve already heard a few screams coming from there today.” The elder said.

            “Screams?” asked Maren.

The elder leaned down and picked up the piece of antler. He held it up to the light. “Never know when you’re going to need this.” He passed it into her palm and hobbled away.

Maren watched him until he disappeared behind another tent. Surely her mother would have sent him to watch her—to observe and make sure Maren didn’t break any of her “precious rules.”

            Wiping her face blank, Maren pushed through the caribou hide flaps of the Matriarch’s tent and paused. Her mother was sitting on a grass mat, holding a cup in her hand, staring at it.

            Hopefully not the same tea as last time. Maren still couldn’t banish the rancid scent from her nose. Not even after smelling so much blood.

            “Do you ever actually drink that, or do you just like to look at it?” It had been two months since Maren realized she could talk to her mother like Brenna used to without any punishment. “Are you going to speak with me today?” Maren asked.

            Maren would have preferred a slap. At least that was something she could understand. A slap meant that she had done something wrong, and that she could try to reframe next time or never speak that way again. Silence she couldn’t interpret. “I don’t really understand what’s happening.”

            Her mother reached behind her and placed a rectangular block of wood on the table between them. Maren knew what the wood was for. She used the same shape when she wanted to carve something, like a spoon or a…

            “I want you to make me a dagger.”

            Maren blinked. Her mother’s voice was scratchy, the purple circles under her eyes more like bruises than from lack of sleep. “You have plenty of daggers already. Remember, I had to sort them for you last week? Only you wouldn’t tell me whether you wanted it done by size or by lethality, so I had to do both. Took a long time.”

            “Make me a dagger. Out of whatever you want. I’ll watch.”

            Maren reached for the wood. It was soft and supple in her hands, but heavy. The perfect piece of wood for a dagger, though she had never made one before. She supposed it wasn’t all that different from an eating utensil. “All right.” At least if her mother insisted on Maren’s presence, she would have more to do than contemplate the merit of stabbing herself with her own fingernails just to make an escape.

            She drew her carving knife from her waist sheath and studied the wood, holding it up to the light. Her mother had prepared this block for her. She could see it in the length of the strokes. No one else had such consistency. No one else save for Maren, who had only learned by watching her mother carve by the fire, back when the Matriarch used to spend time outside of her tent.

            Maren tried to picture how curved she wanted the handle. She supposed it depended on what her mother wanted to use it for. Carving, she liked a simple round handle, easy to grip, not too much strain on her hands. For throwing, she wanted more weight. For skinning, she didn’t care.

            “What are you going to use this dagger for? What makes it so special that none of your others will suffice?”

            The Matriarch swirled her cup around. “It’s for something special.”

            “What else does your mother use her daggers for except drawing blood?” Frida asked.

            Maren’s finger caught on a sharp corner of the block and she winced, bringing her hand to her mouth to suck away the salty blood before it dripped on her mother’s floor mat.

            Frida emerged from the shadows in the back of the tent. Maren hadn’t even seen her, though she hadn’t looked either. Maren waited for her mother to lash out, but the Matriarch continued to stare at her cup. “Perhaps she’s changed in recent months.”

            “Of course, she’s changed.” Frida laid a hand on the Matriarch’s shoulder.

            Maren flinched.

            “She’s just lost her daughter,” Frida said. “I can only imagine how distraught I would feel, losing a daughter.”

            “The tea is for my pain. Some days it feels as if my limbs are attacking me. Frida has been brewing it for me.”

            Maren frowned. She had never known Frida to make healing teas. She always passed Maren on to someone else when she complained of headaches or stomach cramps. “How nice of her.”

            She tried to ignore the way Frida lingered over her mother’s shoulder and examined the wood piece. Why did her mother expect her to carve a dagger when she had never attempted anything of the sort before? Maren shucked a splinter of wood off experimentally, to test the quality.

            Some of the finest she had ever seen.

            “Do you want more tea?” Frida asked.

            Move the dagger faster. That was all Maren could do. She could already see the basic shape of the handle in her head, and her hands followed her mind without much additional effort from her. After she finished the wooden part, she only needed to find a suitable piece of metal for the blade.

            Frida rustled around in one of the baskets and pulled out a stack of clothes She joined Maren and her mother at the table, setting the stack on the floor in front of her.

            Maren continued to carve, but she watched the Matriarch, waiting. Her mother had never let Frida sit with them before. “Are you okay?” Her mother’s eyes drooped, and she kept starting awake.

            The Matriarch clutched her head. “I’m fine! I was up late last night.”

            “You don’t look fine.”

            “I said I’m fine, Maren, just leave me alone!”

            Maren didn’t bother to remind her mother that she was the one who had asked Maren to her tent in the first place, and who forced her into companionship when Maren knew her mother wanted Brenna instead.

Frida pried the cup from the Matriarch’s grasp, just as Maren’s mother slipped back against the mat and started breathing deeply.

            Maren threw the wood away and crawled over to her mother, feeling for a pulse.

            Frida’s warm hands cradled Maren’s face, drawing her away. “Let her sleep, child. She’s been through a lot these past few months and it’s perhaps best to let her have a few moments of dreamless comfort.”

            Maren pushed Frida’s hand away. “I’m not a child. And you put something in her tea, I know you did.”

            “That’s silly. I’m only trying to help your mother so that I can help you.”

            “Just leave me alone, I don’t want your help!” Maren stood up and stalked for the tent exist, swiping the piece of wood from the table as she went. 

 

“Can I come in?”

            The Matriarch poked her head through Maren’s tent flaps. Maren quickly covered her carving with her rabbit-fur blanket and nodded, not quite letting herself smile. She hadn’t seen her mother in her tent since she was delirious with sap fever six years ago.

            “How is it coming along?” The Matriarch winced as she settled herself on a stack of fox fur opposite Maren.

            Her limp was getting worse, despite Frida’s tea. Unless, Maren thought, it was Frida’s tea that made her mother’s limp worse. “How is what coming along?”

            “The dagger I asked you to make.”

‘          “Why do you need it?” Maren tried not to look at the bulging mound next to her. She was almost finished, she just needed a few more days.

            The Matriarch massaged her thigh muscle. “It’s part of your training. Even my mother had me make a dagger during my eighteenth winter. I know you’re not quite there yet, but given the recent circumstances…”

            Brenna would have turned eighteen at the end of this winter. Maren dipped her head. “Of course, Mother, I understand.”

            “I’m leaving on a trip in three sun rises. I was hoping you could have it completed by then.”

            “What kind of trip?”

            “Can you have it finished?”

            Maren picked at a scab on her finger. How fast did her mother expect her to work? “I can try.” A trickle of pus spilled from her popped callus.

            “It would really mean a lot to me, you know. I haven’t been on a long hunting trip in many years, and I thought it would be…fitting for me to use the dagger you’ve made me to make my kills. The closing of a circle, if you will.”

            Maren gave her mother a half-smile. “You haven’t started on with Frida’s goddess nonsense, have you?”

            Maren swore her mother almost smiled in return. The gesture made her feel good, it made her think about how her tent didn’t have Frida lurking, and how that fact alone let her connect with her mother on a deeper level than she ever had when Brenna was alive. “Of course not.”

            Maren patted the bundle at her side. “I’ll have it done by sunrise on the third day, Mother.”

            Her mother flinched and then started to rub her thigh again, as if it pained her.

            “Are you sure you’re going to be okay with a long hunting trip? Perhaps you should wait until your leg feels better.”

            “Getting away will be the best thing for me right now.” Her mother stared at Maren’s covered carving. “And of course, I can’t wait to use what you made for me.”

            Maren nodded. Now that her mother had informed her of her intentions with the dagger, she couldn’t wait to start carving again. Her fingers itched with the desire to feel the power of the knife under her palms, as if she really did have the power to become her mother’s favorite heir. She could become better than Brenna, if she really tried. If she stopping thinking about painting or about roaming and started focusing on what her mother wanted from her.

            “And of course, I want you to join me on the trip.” Her mother smiled. “I need a day or so by myself, so I’d ask that you meet me by that gully near Hawks Swoop at sunset on the second day after I’ve left you.”

            Maren quickly calculated the distance. She would have to leave early in the morning that same day if she didn’t want to cut her travel too tightly. She bowed her head, though adrenaline still pounded through her veins. A trip with her mother. She had never gone on a long hunting trip with her mother before. “Of course, Mother. I’m honored that you would think of me.”

            The Matriarch narrowed her eyes and then nodded her head slowly, picking herself off Maren’s floor without a hint of pain. “Don’t forget, I expect the dagger in three sun highs.” She pushed herself from Maren’s tent.

            Maren let out a long breath. She had lied to her mother—and to herself. She was much closer to finishing the dagger than she had originally thought, though now she wasn’t so sure her mother would be happy with her choices. Maren reached down and peeled back the fur from her work.

            The night her mother had made her request, Maren had trouble falling asleep. She realized it was because she had never taken the piece of bone the man had given her out of her furs. When she extracted it and held the shard up to the moonlight, it seemed to glow, and she thought of what miracles it might work in a dagger, though she didn’t believe it had to do with the goddess, as Frida would have.

            And so, the half-finished dagger handle that now sat in front of Maren had both. An intertwining of bone and wood. She had spent a few long nights chipping carefully away at the bone, and then a blessedly hot day near the river fusing them together.

            The weapon had to please her mother. She knew it had to.

----

            Maren stared at her bags. She had packed and unpacked them what felt like hundreds of times in the past two sun highs, but she thought she finally had everything. She had gifted the dagger to her mother, wrapped in oiled cloth, and made her promise not to unwrap it until Maren joined her at Hawks Swoop.

            Giddiness swarmed through her veins. She could almost feel herself bouncing for how fully the sensation filled her. In the moment the cat had sunk its claws into Brenna’s chest, Maren had thought her world would never be the same. She thought she would never find the urge to paint again, or that her sister’s death would open a gaping hole inside of her that she would never have the strength to repair. But instead, she had found this...this trip with her mother, this new dedication to becoming the best heir she could be. Maren would make her mother forget about Brenna, and forget that Brenna was ever supposed to become the next Matriarch.

            Maren hauled her leather packs over her shoulder and twined the beads cords of her tent closed. In a few weeks she would sleep under those warm furs again.

            The sun wouldn’t rise for some time, but Maren knew these parts of the landscape well, even with only a sliver of moonlight to guide her. She trudged through the snow, wound her way across hills and plateaus, always following the winding curve of the river as it meandered west.

            A few hours into her trek, the sun finally peaked above the eastern mountains, illuminating her path in the golden glow of morning. The snow sparkled beneath her bootprints, and Maren’s giddy sensation roared its return.

            Eventually, the landscape grew too curvy for her to walk easily along the river banks. Cautiously, Maren pressed her toes onto the ice to make sure it could support her weight. She had never known the ice to melt so early in the season, but she had also never seen a squirrel with glowing insides, or the giant cat that had killed Brenna, or the deer with the pure white antlers, or the forest that Frida claimed was the work of her goddess. Either way, Maren didn’t want to spend the end of her life chained to the bottom of an icy river.

            Her worry was unfounded. The ice was firm and thick beneath her feet and she walked down the center of the river as the sun chased her, warming her back even through her thick pack.

            Soon, a shape began to manifest further down the river. At first Maren thought it was an errant deer or caribou, but the faster she walked and the more she squinted, the figure came into focus as something that decidedly walked on two legs. A fellow human. She had seen random roamers around before, when she traveled many hours from camp, but she normally took care to avoid them. Cliffs lined the river on either side of her. If she wanted to make it to her mother before the deadline, she would have to stay on this path and risk whomever she encountered.

            Fiddling with the straps of her belt, Maren extracted her dagger and clutched it tightly in her palm. Stab first, think later, her mother had always told Brenna when her sister started her own wanderings. Maren had no doubt she could face that roamer. They were normally weak and underfed—not that Maren had eaten well that winter either.

            Maren walked faster, her breath escaping in foggy puffs.

            She was close enough now to realize the figure had a slight limp and dark hair. Maren could hardly believe what she saw. She blinked fast enough to draw tears. Maren’s shoe crunched packed snow, the sound echoing down the river corridor.

            The person turned, though Maren already knew what face she would see before it happened.

            Frida. What was Frida doing almost five hours from camp, following the same line as Maren did to reach Hawks Swoop.

            Frida was going to Hawks Swoop.

            Maren didn’t put away her dagger. “What are you doing here?”

            Frida blinked slowly at Maren, as if she were coming out of a daze. “I’m going to meet the Matriarch.”

            “Does my mother know that you’re coming? She never said anything to me.” And why hadn’t Frida simply asked to travel with Maren if they intended on the same destination?

            “Your mother knows that I am coming.”

            “Okay,” Maren said slowly, her grip on the dagger increasing. She didn’t like the way Frida was looking at her. Or the way Frida spoke about the Matriarch, or the way Frida had spoken of the Matriarch for the past few months. “Why is my mother’s limp not getting better?”

            “Brenna is dead.”

            Maren’s face twitched and she scratched it. “Right. She is. What has that got to do with my mother’s limp?”

            “Doesn’t Brenna’s death have to do with everything?”

            Maren remembered when she was younger and Frida used to braid her hair before important ceremonies, and cut it when it grew too long for her to manage herself. Frida would whisper soft words of encouragement into her ear, and Maren remembered wondering at the time why she never did Brenna’s hair the same way. When asked about it, Frida simply said that the Matriarch did Brenna’s hair. So why hadn’t the Matriarch done Maren’s hair too? Because Brenna was heir, not Maren. And now, Maren was heir. Her mother treated her with the same level of reverence she had reserved for Brenna. The level of heir. In that way, she supposed she could agree with Frida. Brenna’s death did have to do with everything.

            “I don’t think you should keep walking,” Maren said. “I think you should turn around and head back to camp before you get lost and before it gets too dark.”

            Frida laughed. “Do you think I don’t know where I am right now, child?”

            “You almost never leave camp. You were so uncomfortable on our way up the mountain.”

            “Was I?”

            Was she? Maren couldn’t remember the instance clearly now.

            “You are lost in the clouds if you think I’ve never been further than the perimeter of our camp. Who was the one who gave you advice on the best caribou hunting grounds? Who talked you through your first solo trek and warned you against heading into the Forlorn Mountains to the north during storm season? Did you think I picked all those details up just by listening to the Matriarch? I used to be just like you—no wonder you are the way you are.”

            Maren frowned. Because Frida had taught her all those things? That’s why she was the way she was. It seemed so clear now. Frida had always encouraged her to roam whenever she got the chance. To get away from her mother and to see the world for herself, since the Matriarch refused to take her anywhere.

            “So no,” Frida readjusted the pack on her back, but she didn’t wince. “I don’t think I’m going to head back to camp. I think I’m going to go with you to meet the Matriarch.” A flash of something passed through her eyes.

            “You’re not going to,” Maren said, surprised by the harsh reality of her own words. She didn’t exactly know why, but it was like a force pressed down on her. A force that told her she couldn’t let Frida near her mother, whatever happened.

            Frida adjusted her pack again. The sun flashed overhead, emerging from behind a cloud.

            And then Maren saw it, a glint of steel hidden beneath Frida’s furs. The blinding reflection of a dagger.

            Frida had never before carried a dagger, only a skinning knife.

            “What are you doing with that?”

            “Your mother gave it to me.”

            Maren knew her mother better than anyone, at least anyone who was alive. Her mother never would have trusted Frida with a knife. She barely trusted Maren with a knife. “Give that to me!” Maren shot forward, intent on tackling Frida to the ground before she could draw the weapon. Blood thundered through Maren’s neck. She thought the adrenaline would help her do what needed to be done to protect her mother. She would do anything to protect her mother.

            But Frida moved faster than Maren had ever seen her, sidestepping Maren’s frantic lunge. She kept her hands twined behind her back, as far from the dagger as possible.

            “Please don’t do this, Maren,” Frida said softly. “You must trust me, just as you used to.”

            “I never trusted you!” She had been stupid to think more highly of Frida than of her own mother. Once Frida started spewing nonsense about her goddess, she had seen the truth and realized that everything her mother and Brenna had ever said about Frida was correct. “I’m going to see my mother now, but I need you to give me that weapon and go back to camp.”

            Frida dodged another of Maren’s lunges. “Did you give the Matriarch that dagger you promised her?”

            Surprised by the question, Maren blinked, the sun flashing behind her lids. “Of course. I carved it from bone and wood myself. If only I had bled on it too. That surely would have pleased your goddess, right? It’s special. She told me so.”

            “Stop acting like a child, Maren, you’re smarter than this!”

            Maren drew her dagger, though she realized with dismay that her hand shook. She hadn’t thought this far ahead. She hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to drive her dagger through Frida’s heart, to feel her bones and flesh shattering. Nothing at all like any of the animals she had killed.

            “And what do you think your mother is planning on doing with that dagger? Do you think she’s going to take the life of a simple deer or rabbit? Do you think she’s going to use it to skin something, when any of her other weapons would do? Or do you think the Matriarch wanted it for something special?” Frida stepped closer, but Maren no longer felt like using her dagger. After all, Frida hadn’t made any move toward her own.

            Maren grappled with Frida’s words. She didn’t understand what the older woman was implying about her mother. It was Frida who intended on doing something special to her mother, not the Matriarch. All the signs had pointed Maren that way, like the universe itself wanted her to believe. So she had believed.

            Frida blinked slowly. “You foolish girl. You foolish, foolish girl. All this time.” Her hand reached out and wrapped around Maren’s. Maren could feel her warmth radiating through her deer-hide glove.

            Maren started to understand, but she still felt like the pieces swarmed in her head, slipping through her fingers.

            The dagger in her hand suddenly felt much heavier than it had before. She didn’t think she wanted to kill Frida. 

            “Do you remember that one summer? Where it was so hot that we thought our tents would boil in the high sun?”

            Maren filtered through her memories. After a while, all the summers of her childhood blended together. After a while, she didn’t know if she could separate which activities she did with Brenna, which ones with her mother, or which ones with…Frida. The name sounded wrong in her head now, but so did mother. The word mother no longer fit with anyone Maren knew. But despite not knowing who she had spent the time with, she didn’t think she could ever forget that summer. “There were a lot of deaths that season. More so than usual. That’s what stuck with me most.”

            “Of course it was. You were young. You probably hardly remember how harsh those winters before were.”

            Maren thought of the meager offerings the hunt had brought back the past few months. “Worse than this winter?”

            Something shadowed passed over Frida’s face, the warmth in her eyes fading. “Different. I can’t think of any other way to explain it.”

            Maren ground her teeth together. She didn’t understand why Frida would bring up that one summer. She glanced past Frida, to the rapidly setting sun. She would need to run for quite a distance if she wanted to make it to her meeting with the Matriarch. Maren started to take a step. Then she paused, remembering what Frida had said about the Matriarch. Did Maren even want to bother heading there anymore? Did she want to go back to camp and await her mother there? Neither seemed like a worthy option.

            “That summer was the first time I realized you would be different than Brenna,” Frida continued. “I took the two of you to the warm waters for the first time, while the Matriarch was away on a hunt. She didn’t want the two of you to go, but I thought you deserved to experience it so I took you anyway.”

            The feeling of hot water steaming across her bare skin, her furs shed for the first time in recent memory. Brenna’s sharp laughter as she splashed across the slick rocks, and Frida’s soothing hands in Maren’s hair. She hadn’t even been old enough to realize what Frida had risked by taking them against the Matriarch’s will. “Brenna broke her wrist. I remember her crying, and her hand hanging at that strange angle.”

            “I told the Matriarch that Brenna slipped and fell near the river trying to catch a fish. I don’t know if she believed me.”

            Screaming. The sound of something harsh slapping against flesh. The shrillness against the silence of the night had woken Maren up, but she didn’t know if the time periods or even the instances were connected, of if it had been Frida screaming at all. Though she thought she had felt the truth of it that night, she had been too young to really understand anything. “It was worth it.” Maren smiled slightly. “If only to see Brenna pout for missing the summer months while her wrist healed.”

            Frida returned the smile, and Maren felt something warm in her chest. She could hardly believe that she had stepped onto the river and drawn her dagger with the intention of ending Frida’s life. Frida had done so much for her—more than just the warm waters. She had comforted her after the Matriarch’s punishments, had smuggled her the freshest venison, had given her more than her own mother ever…

            Than the Matriarch ever had. Because Frida had, of course, given her as much as a mother should, especially given her circumstances.

Maren rotated the dagger, gripping the steel handle between two gloved fingers.

She stretched it into the space between them. Frida’s eyes widened.

A soft breeze tickled the back of Maren’s neck and she breathed in deeply. If she thought hard enough, she thought she could smell spring flowers, the fields of them to the south that Frida had taken her to visit every year since she could remember--every year, save this one. 

            Frida reached out to take the dagger, the veins on her hand flexing. Her fingers had grazed the leather handle that Maren...no, Frida had given Maren that handle for her birthday, after the Matriarch had forgotten. 

A crack split the air. Maren felt herself start to fall, her ankles giving way beneath her. She saw Frida’s face, as if frozen in the sky above her. Frida’s hands were extended for her, and Maren reached, forgetting that she held the dagger in her hand. It flew forward, but Maren kept falling, and she didn’t get to see what became of it, she saw only Frida’s frightened face. The woman who had done what the Matriarch could not. Who was what the Matriarch was not, and Maren felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner. 

Flecks of ice bit at her throat, like summer ants. She hit the water and sunk down. Maren thought she should feel cold, but she felt nothing. Her furs weighed her down, dragging her deeper. The ice above her sparkled with the last of the sunlight, and Maren tried to kick, wanting to reach Frida again. She couldn’t die like this, not before she told Frida what she finally understood. 

Silence rushed into her head. 

           It was as if someone had wrapped stones around her feet and thrown her into the water. She remembered when that had happened, a few years back. Some of the younger kids had done it to a baby deer. She also remembered trying to feel bad for it, but never quite mustering the energy. Darkness swarmed her vision. She tried to kick up again, but her cheeks burst, and water flooded her mouth. Maren kicked harder, grasping for the ice above her. She met only a solid ceiling, but she could see shadows flickering through the bubbling blue and white ripples.

            Then she found purchase. Her fingers wrapped around the edge of something, and she managed to haul her head above the water, gasping. Heaving with all the strength she had ever given herself, from hunting and trekking through snow, from wandering the icy landscape and playing games with Brenna, Maren dragged herself onto a solid chunk of ice and coughed up water, laying flat on her back. She could barely move any part of her body, but she saw the sun flash across her vision, the ball of flame warming her.

            Maren rolled over. A mound of shattered ice greeted her. She looked around for Frida but saw nothing on the frozen part of the river. Panic gripped her. She didn’t think Frida had fallen into the water with her, she had seen her shadow on the surface as she’d fallen. 

Slowly, she started to understand what had happened and she rushed forward, circling the pile of ice chunks closer to the edge of the river. They must have broken away from the cliff--much too early in the season for something like that to happen--and crashed into the fragile ice. 

Maren flexed her frozen hands and threw herself onto the pile, dragging chunks of ice into the dark blue water she had just emerged from. Frida had to be under that pile. It was the only explanation. She tore away more pieces. She saw a hand, then an arm, and then Frida’s shoulder. Maren’s motions became frenzied. She didn’t think about her frozen core, she didn’t think about anything except moving the mound of ice that should not have broken to begin with. She hated the ice, she hated the Matriarch, she hated the past few months. 

Shoving with her shoulder, Maren rolled the last piece of ice off Frida. Her eyes were open, glazed over, staring at the sun, the fingers of the hand that lay on her chest bent and broken. The falling ice had killed Frida. Maren wanted something to hit, something to kill. She wanted something warm to approach her--a roamer maybe--so that she could have the satisfaction of the fight, so she could drive her dagger into their chest and watch them bleed, to feel the pain that she felt in her chest right now. 

Maren leaned back on her heels, resting her arms on her knees. She couldn’t take her eyes off Frida’s pale face, off her eyes, fixated on nothing. They had reached for each other. Frida had wanted to save Maren, as she had been trying to do for Maren’s entire life, and Maren almost hated her for it. 

She hated that she now had to feel this way. 

Maren didn’t want to look at Frida anymore. 

She stood up, looping her arms under Frida’s back, rolling her onto her side. 

Red blood stained the ice beneath her. Maren blinked, not quite understanding. Then the harsh orange glow of the setting sun illuminated something stuck in Frida’s lower stomach, so far down her side that Maren hadn’t noticed it before. 

A dagger. The dagger Maren with the ‘F’ carved into the handle that Maren had carried with her since that day with Brenna and the cat. 

Maren sat back down. Frida’s cold body felt heavy on her legs. Blood stained her pants, but she didn’t care. Maren didn’t know what to think now that she couldn’t rage at the ice and want to kill everything in her path. 

Her hand tightened around nothing. Her dagger. Her dagger had killed Frida, which meant Maren had...Maren…

Maren gagged, barely holding back the meager, sinewy venison she had eaten earlier that day. 

She threw Frida off her, jerking up. Maren couldn’t see it anymore. She needed to wipe the image from her mind, to forget that any of this had happened. To rip away the hollowness in her chest. 

Maren hooked her toe under Frida’s body and closed her eyes. Then she heaved her muscles and sent Frida crashing into the icy water with a loud splash. 

She hugged herself and breathed in and out slowly, trying to forget the way Frida’s eyes had looked, just minutes before. Hopeful. Warm.

            Maren looked around. No animals, no wind in her hair. Just a festering silence that made her wish for the depths of the frigid river.  

The skinning knife at her waist weighed her down, as if threatening to pull her into the river in Frida’s wake. Maren grabbed it before she could think about what had happened the last time she’d held a knife. 

Frida’s face flashed in her mind again. 

The Matriarch. The Matriarch had done all of this. The Matriarch had been the ultimate cause of Brenna’s death, she had forced Frida out into the wilderness, she had taken everything from Maren. Every last shred. 

The desire to have blood run across her hands returned. But she didn’t think any animal would give her the satisfaction she wanted. She needed the Matriarch’s blood on her hands, to wipe away the stain of Frida’s. 

Maren stumbled along the remainder of the frozen river, the darkness pressing around her so tightly that she could hardly tell the difference between the shadows and the cliffs. It seemed almost as if animals prowled in her steps, huffs of breath and light paw steps sounding from in front of her, behind her, next to her, the sounds all blended together.

She didn’t feel anything in her body save the throbbing pulse that started in her stomach and pounded through the rest of her body, urging her forward into the cold night. Maren wrapped her arms around herself, as if she could ward off the cold, or perhaps find a way to turn around and go back to camp like nothing had ever happened. 

But so much had happened. And she wanted the Matriarch dead. There had been instances in her life--she remembered them only occasionally--where she had thought she wanted her mother dead. When she wouldn’t let Maren go hunt for the white-antlered deer, when she had left on another trip with Brenna and forced Maren to spend time only with...with Frida. 

The Matriarch had never intended on letting her live to become the next Matriarch. Maren understood that now. Killing the Matriarch now wasn’t because she wanted to keep herself alive--she hardly cared what her “mother” did to her anymore, but she needed the feel of her dagger covered in blood.

So, Maren walked further into the night, until hawks swoop, a hill covered in thorny pine trees sat in front of her. She knew the Matriarch would be waiting for her as soon as she veered off the river and saw a bright flicker of embers illuminating the rocky cliff face that separated them from stars knew what. 

Maren had always wondered what lay beyond the mountain, had wondered what would become of her if she took her snowshoes and her supplies and left with only the moon illuminating her path, disappearing as some of the women had before. 

She also wondered how long it took for the roamers to get to them. 

Maren would rather die at the hands of the Matriarch than by the roamers. 

The firelight grew steadily brighter. She didn’t know if the Matriarch could see her approaching, but Maren wasn’t afraid of what she would do. Not anymore. She didn’t think the Matriarch would kill her from afar, for the same reason Maren wouldn’t snipe her with a long-range bow shot. 

They wouldn’t get nearly enough satisfaction from the kill. 

Maren fingered the handle of her skinning knife. She had just sharpened it, but she had never used it like a dagger--she had never had the need. She paused at the edge of the clearing where the fire sat. Perhaps the Matriarch hadn’t seen her yet. Perhaps she could still retreat above the camp and end this quickly, without a second thought. The arrow would do all the work for her, and it seemed fitting, considering what she had done to the roamer weeks before. 

“The sun set a few hours ago.”

Maren stepped into the firelight. The Matriarch leaned back against a boulder, arms resting gently on her lap. Maren wondered if she had been asleep and had woken to the sound of footsteps, or if simply had never ending patience and enjoyed staring into the empty woods. 

“I got held up.” Maren tried to relax her shoulders, but she was sure she looked tense. Not that it mattered. The Matriarch would expect her to look afraid, after arriving so late. “The river can be so unpredictable this time of year.”

The Matriarch looked up at the sky, as if remembering something. “I used to hate traveling along the river, especially in the summer, when I had to wade along the muddy banks. I always told my mother that I couldn’t wait for the freeze.”

“I can never wait for the thaw.”

The Matriarch quirked what might have been...a soft smile. “It of course, makes sense.”

Maren frowned. She couldn’t afford to let the Matriarch confuse her, not while fire still thrummed through her veins. She needed to end this now, before she let the Matriarch’s honeyed words destroy her resolve. She still held the skinning knife behind her back. 

“I knew it would end up like this.” 

Maren took a step closer to the Matriarch, keeping the fire between them. She didn’t like this version of the woman she had believed to be her mother. She didn’t like that it seemed like the Matriarch had given up, especially given what Frida had told her. The Matriarch wanted Maren dead. 

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” The Matriarch inclined her head toward the trees. “Somewhere out there. She’s dead.”

“Brenna has been dead for months.”

“You know who I mean.”

Maren tightened her grip on the skinning knife. “And I bet that you don’t even care.”

The Matriarch pressed her hands into the muddy snow, wincing as she pushed herself up. She stood with her weight slightly balanced on her right side--away from the leg she had injured that day in the mountains. “Nothing happened the way it should have. You were not the person you should have been.”

“I’m sorry that I disappointed you so, Mother.” The word tasted like rancid meat on her tongue. 

“She wasn’t supposed to die like that!” The Matriarch stumbled into the firelight. Her cheeks were more gaunt and hallowed than Maren had remembered, her skin glowing with an unearthly greenish tinge--perhaps from the light reflecting off the dense pine foliage. 

“Frida said that someone had to die.” And Maren knew that the Matriarch meant it was supposed to be her. It seemed like the Matriarch had always intended for Maren to die, for some odd reason or another. 

The Matriarch blinked slowly at Maren, as if she was having trouble focusing on her face. “It’s all over.”

In another year, another month, maybe even on another day, Maren would have found the space to pity the woman standing in front of her. She had lost her daughter, she was losing her people, and her once strong muscles seemed like nothing but weak saplings yearning for the summer sun. But Maren couldn’t forget the sound of Frida’s body crashing through the surface of the icy water, and, if she let herself remember, the look on Brenna’s face as her eyes stared up at the night sky. They had been sisters, perhaps in the only way that truly mattered.

“Do you think we’re going to survive the next winter?” Maren ran her thumb along the edge of the skinning knife, checking for the sharpness. She thought she felt a slight trickle of blood run down her hand. 

The Matriarch shifted, and Maren saw that she wore the dagger that Maren had carved for her at her waist. The one she had intended to use on Maren herself. 

“The roamers will get to us first.” The Matriarch widened her eyes. “We won’t last through the summer.”

“Frida would say that we should ask the goddess to help us.”

“Did you ever believe her?”

Maren thought she saw a flash of something in the Matriarch’s eyes. Something tugged inside her chest. She wished she could stop seeing this woman, with the ice missing from her eyes as her mother. She wished the woman in front of her wanted to fight, was vile and cruel like Maren had always thought, but she was just...nothing. A shell. 

“You don’t have the nerve,” the matriarch said. “Even Frida would have done it.”

Maren tried not to move her body. 

“Brenna would have done it too.”

“You can’t say that about her.”

“I can say whatever I want about my daughter.”

She stepped around the fire, dropping the skinning knife as she went. The breeze picked up. She could feel it rustling through her hair, though it didn’t bring goosebumps to her skin the way it had weeks ago. Now she thought she could almost smell the damp warmth of spring. The Matriarch blinked down at her, unmoving. A few crackling embers from the fire tugged at Maren’s boots as she passed. 

Maren reached between them. Her hand wrapped around the dagger she had carved--with the half wood and half bone handle. She had never cared so much about something she had made. 

The Matriarch didn’t protest. She still didn't move. 

Beneath the firelight, the dagger’s steel seemed to glow with molten embers. Maren heard screaming when she saw it. She heard screaming because she remember one day, a few years back, when the man who had given her the piece of bone had cauterized a wound his son had gotten from a roamer. The boy had said the roamer attacked him near bear rock, and that was the first time Maren had seen genuine fear in her mother’s eyes--at least a type of fear that she understood. 

Maren made sure she never forgot her dagger after that. She made sure she slept with it under her pillow, so she could close her eyes without hearing that boy’s screams and without smelling his burned flesh. 

“Why did you do it?” Maren ran her fingers over the smooth bone handle. 

“Because I was you.” 

Maren didn’t think she would ever paint the sky blue again, not after spending so long staring into the Matriarch’s eyes. Maren moved the dagger in front of her stomach. She took a step forward, as if to hug her mother.

The dagger slid smoothly through the Matriarch’s tunic, through the dirty fox furs she wore over draped over her shoulders, under one of her ribs, and into her heart. 

The Matriarch’s eyes widened, but she didn’t seem shocked. Her nostrils flared. Her hand drifted to Maren’s wrist, fingers tightening for the briefest of seconds. She heaved a breath. “Pray that you make it this far.” She slumped forward, and Maren caught her weight, blood coating her hand. 

Maren lowered the Matriarch to the ground. She paused for a second, listening. Silence. The breeze she had felt earlier had disappeared, and her hair lay flat against her neck. Even her breath barely brushed her ears. 

She sat down. The damp earth started to seep through the protective leather on the back of her pants, but she didn’t care. 

An animal howled, somewhere off in the trees, or perhaps it was a roamer. Sometimes Maren thought she heard them shouting at each other, though she had never spoken to one. 

Maren’s skin started to stick together. She flexed her hand and brought it up to her face, rotating it so the firelight caught the blood there. 

It wasn’t blood. At least not entirely. Maren twisted her hand around, marveling at the way the Matriarch’s red blood twined with a green goo that had become all too familiar to her. 

Maren pushed at the Matriarch’s body, rotating her around to the front. Maren tried not to look at her face, but instead focused on the stain of blood and garish green that coated the Matriarch’s furs. 

How long before something else found her body? Would the roamers beat the wolves to it? She figured they would kill for furs like the ones the Matriarch wore. 

Maren’s hands hovered over the leather clasps that secured the Matriarch's furs in place. She let her fingers linger on the cold metal, until her skin started to burn. 

What would Frida tell her to do? She could take the furs, so the roamers wouldn’t get them. Anyone deserved that respect. Anything was better than the roamers, even the wolves. But even as Maren thought of Frida, she didn’t think she could move her hands one more inch.

So she rose up and turned to the fire, kicking her feet through the dirt as she went. The flames doused to nothing, though coals still smoldered around the ring. 

At least the roamers hadn’t gotten to Frida. At least Maren had been able to drown her body where no one would ever find it, not even when all the snow melted and the river swelled with the first of summer heat. 

Maren didn’t know where to go. She knew she needed to leave, if she wanted to get away before the roamers. And there was no hesitation on her part as she wandered away from hawks swoop, away from the clearing with the Matriarch’s body. She could see the tundra well, the moonlight reflecting off the glistening ice. Her snowshoes kept getting stuck. The ice was starting to melt. 

She tried again to think of what Frida would tell her to do, but the memory of the woman seemed to slip through her brain like oil. She couldn’t get a firm grasp on the words, could barely remember what her voice looked like, or what her fingers had felt like in Maren’s hair. Maren wished she had known the truth earlier. She wondered what would have changed between them if she had. 

She realized soon that she had wandered from the river. She stopped walking and turned around, trying to reorient herself. Around her, nothing but ice stretched for miles. She could see the looming dark cliffs on hawks swoop, but the moon illuminated nothing save a shroud of fog to the south and east. Maren had never traveled so far from camp. She breathed slowly in and out. She wondered how far she could walk, she wondered if there was an edge to it all, or is she could keep walking for the rest of her life and never reach any sort of end. 

It almost sounded like a good idea. But her feet hurt, and she had no weapons, no supplies. She remembered what it felt like to lay in Frida’s tent and listen to her tell stories of the world before. Maren wished she could go back to those times. 

She still remembered what Frida’s furs smelled like. She could still capture a piece of that.

Maren turned to the east and started to walk.