Morrighan (The Remnant Chronicles 0.50)

Morrighan

He didn’t hide in the bushes this time. He strode up the wide marble steps in a frightening way. As if he owned them. Why was this scavenger so hard to understand? His chest was bare, and his face gleamed. He had bathed. With the dirt washed away, his skin was now a golden hue, and his long ropes of hair, brighter. The broadening of his shoulders made his meatless ribs look more pathetic. But the look in his eyes was fierce.

“I thought you weren’t coming?” I said, taking a step back when he stopped in front of me.

He eyed me for a long while before answering. “I come and go, when and where I please. Why does Harik the Great know your name?”

I felt as if I’d been punched breathless. I’d heard whispers in camp between the miadres. Ama and the others hated him. His name was like poison, not to be touched. It alarmed me to think he might know my name. Jafir was wrong.

“He doesn’t know my name,” I said. “He doesn’t even know me. I’ve only seen him from a distance, when he raided our camp long ago.” I stepped away. “And for your information, scavenger, he is not great. He’s a coward, like all—” I paused, measuring the words on the tip of my tongue, fearing it might send him sprinting away again—or worse.

“Like all of us?” he finished. “Is that what you were going to say?”

Why are we here? I thought. We were ever at odds, and yet our paths kept crossing. No, Morrighan, not crossing by chance. You invited him to come back here. You wanted this meeting to happen. I didn’t understand myself, nor all I had been taught to rely on. The scavengers were dangerous to our kind, but I was intensely curious about this one who had shown me mercy eight years ago when he was little more than a child himself.

“Jafir,” I replied, saying his name with respect, “would you like to read?” And then as a sign of truce, I added his own description. “A book of the Ancients?”

We read for an hour before he had to go. It wasn’t our last meeting. The first few continued to be rocky and tentative. Scavengers and those they hunted had no common ground. But here, hidden away by long trails and box canyons, we learned to leave at least part of who we were behind us. Our trust ebbed and grew in turbulent starts, but it was always an unstated agreement that our meetings would remain a secret. If he told anyone, I could die. If I told anyone, I would be forbidden to return.

I never thought it would last. After all, our tribe never stayed anywhere for long. Moving on was our way. Soon we would leave the vale, go somewhere far, and these days would end. But the tribe didn’t leave. There was no need to. The vale was well hidden, and we were able to gather and grow without worry. No one ventured there. Our days turned to seasons, and seasons turned to years.

I taught Jafir letters, and from there, words. Soon he was reading to me too. He practiced writing, his finger tracing letters in the dust. “How do you spell Morrighan?” he asked. Letter by letter, he repeated each one as he wrote it on the ground. I remember looking at the letters long after he had written them, admiring the curves and lines his finger had made and how my name looked different to me than it ever had before.

Over the course of weeks and months, we shared everything. His curiosity was as great as mine. He lived with eleven people. They were kin, but he wasn’t sure how most of them were related. Fergus didn’t explain such things to him. They weren’t important. A woman named Laurida claimed him as her son but he knew it wasn’t so. She was Fergus’s wife, but she hadn’t come to the clan until Jafir was seven years old—from where he wasn’t sure. One day she simply rode in with Fergus and stayed. He had a hazy memory of a woman he thought might have been his mother, but it was only her voice he remembered, not her face.

He asked if Gaudrel was my mother. I explained that she was my grandmother, a term he didn’t know. “My mother’s mother,” I explained. “Ama raised me. My own mother died in childbirth.”

“And your father?”

“I never knew him. Ama says he is dead, too.”

Jafir’s lips pulled tight. Perhaps he was wondering if my father had died at the hands of one of his own kin. He probably had. Ama would never say just how it happened, but her eyes always sparked with anger before she turned away from the subject.

I was curious about his brother. Jafir only shrugged when I asked about him. He pointed to a scar on his arm. “Steffan speaks more with his hands than his mouth.”

“Then I shouldn’t like to meet him.”

“And I shouldn’t like you to meet him,” Jafir said, poking fun at the way I said things differently from him, and we both laughed.

I didn’t know that what we were forging was a friendship. It seemed impossible. But I discovered that the boy who had once kept me hidden from his fellow scavengers had other kindnesses in him as well—a bracelet woven from meadow grass, a chipped plate rimmed in gold that he had found in a ruin. One day he gave me a handful of sky when he saw me gazing up at the clouds, just to see me smile. I put it in my pocket. Other times we maddened each other beyond telling with our different ways, but we always came back, our squabble forgotten. We changed together, imperceptibly day by day, as slowly as a tree budding with spring.

But then one day, everything changed in one leap, permanently and forever.

He had stunned a squirrel that morning from ten paces with his slingshot, and was trying to instruct me how to do the same, but shot after shot, my stones went miserably off course. He was chiding me for my aim, and I was leveling frustrated glares at him.

“No, not like that,” he complained. He jumped up from where he lay in the meadow and marched over to me. “Like thi

s,” he said, standing behind me and wrapping his arms around mine. He took my hands in his, his chest against my back, slowly pulling back the sling. Then he paused, a long uncomfortable pause that seemed to last forever, but neither of us moved. I tried to understand why it seemed so different. His warm breath fluttered against my ear, and I felt my heart racing, felt something between us that hadn’t been there before. Something strong and wild and uncertain. He let go of my hands suddenly and stepped away. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I have to leave.”

He got on his horse and left without a good-bye. I watched him ride until he was out of sight.

I didn’t try to stop him. I wanted him to go.

* * *

The longhouse buzzed with chatter, but I didn’t feel part of it. I stared at the poles and rushes and animal skins that made up the walls as I stacked the clean gourds.

“You’ve hardly said a word all night. What’s wrong, child?”