Blood Over Bright Haven
M. L. Wang
To the DNF Crew
for helping me through the Deep Night.
THOMIL HAD TAKEN the long way back from scouting. Against his better judgment, he let his wolfskin hood down and welcomed the wind’s needles as he pressed through the howling dark. Thomil’s gods were in this cold, as they were in the snow and the crocus stem promise of color fast asleep beneath the freeze. If this was the last time they ever wrapped their arms around him, he wanted to feel it.
What was left of Thomil’s tribe waited for him in a huddle at the edge of Lake Tiran. Massed in the dark, the Caldonnae were alarmingly small against the expanse of ice before them. Of the several scouts who had peeled from the group to look out for direwolves, snow lions, and rival tribes, Thomil was the last to rejoin the clan, his return bringing their number to forty—forty people left of a nation that had once numbered in the tens of thousands.
“No pursuers,” Beyern said as Thomil passed him. It wasn’t a question. The lead hunter inferred everything he needed from Thomil’s body language.
“None, Uncle.”
With life ever dwindling across the Kwen, scouting for danger had come to seem more like a formality than a necessary precaution. It had been six months since the Caldonnae had encountered another clan and years since Thomil had seen a direwolf. The most prolific killer on these plains didn’t stalk on earthly feet, and the best scout in the Kwen could never sense it coming.
“Join your family.” Beyern nodded to where Maeva and Arras leaned into each other in the dark. “And put your hood up, fool.”
“Yes, Uncle.” Thomil smiled and drew his hood over his numb ears, trying not to think that this might be the last time Beyern ever snapped at him.
Maeva was quiet as Thomil slipped into a crouch at her side. Thomil had been taller than his older sister for half a decade now, but to him, she would always be a shelter, a hearth light when all other love had gone from the world. She met his eyes, then turned meaningfully to the glow beyond the lake, inviting him to follow her gaze and share her hope.
Everything about the city on the far shore was alien—the buildings taller than any tree, the spires piercing the sky like teeth, the boom and whir of machinery. It would never be home, but it was a chance at survival. Magical shielding glittered around the city of Tiran, forming a dome that stretched from the sun-eating mountain range in the west to the lower barrows in the east. That bright work of sorcery protected those inside from Blight, winter, and everything that had driven the Caldonnae to the brink of extinction.
“Are you ready?” Arras asked because that was the kind of inane question he liked to ask.
“No.” Thomil tried not to sound exasperated with his sister’s husband, but really, how ready could a person ever be for near-certain death? And if not death, then the enormity of the unknown. The plains of the Kwen were the only mother Thomil had ever known—brutal but comprehensible if one had the stillness to listen and learn her mysteries. Even as he beheld the city across the lake, his mind couldn’t reconcile the idea that safety lay in the incomprehensible sorcery on the other side of that barrier.
Maeva reached over and squeezed Thomil’s hand, her grip as reassuring as it had been when they were children and he came crying to her with nightmares of wolves with many mouths. Thomil wanted to slip his deerskin mitten off and grasp her hand in earnest, in case this was the last time. But there was a silent agreement among the Caldonnae not to say goodbye. They had to keep believing, however unlikely it was, that they would all live to see the sunrise.
“Thomil,” Maeva said with the soft confidence that told him she could see straight to the doubt seething beneath his composure. “The worthwhile run is never the short one.” Old hunter’s wisdom, based on the day it could take to track and hunt the largest prey—followed by the kind of abstract wisdom only an older sister like Maeva could give: “You know we’re not running from oblivion, Thomil. We’re running toward hope.”
Maeva and Arras’s daughter mumbled sleepily on her father’s shoulder, and Maeva betrayed her own anxiety by clutching Thomil’s hand a little tighter.
“And you know Carra’s going to be alright,” Thomil said, wanting to return his sister’s reassurances. “If nothing else, Arras can run.”
“Was that a veiled dig at my intelligence?” Arras raised a bushy red eyebrow at Thomil.
“Was it veiled?”
“I swear, little brother, if my girl wasn’t sleeping, I’d deck you so hard.”
“I know.” Thomil grinned at his broad slab of a brother-in-law. “Why do you think I waited until she was asleep?”
It was a stupid exchange, but it got Maeva to laugh. And that was all that mattered: that their last moments as a family here on this shoreline be warm ones.
The tribe strung out into a single line where the rocks met the ice. It would be a miracle if half the Caldonnae reached the opposite shore. But only death waited in the Kwen behind them. Blight had taken too many of the animals they hunted and the summer crops they would have stored to hold them through the Deep Night.
“It’s nearly time,” Elder Sertha’s voice creaked like an oak above the murmurs between family members. “Get the blood moving in your legs.”
“Leave your tools and weapons,” Beyern added. “They’re just weight.”
As instructed, Thomil unslung his bow and quiver and set them in the snow. Taking his hands off the weapons was harder than he had expected. For a thousand years, the Caldonnae had defined themselves by their hunting prowess. Leaving their bows and spears here on the shoreline felt like a final concession that they were no longer the apex predators their ancestors had been.
“Up.” Beyern walked along the shoreline, pulling the sickly and sleepy to their feet. “It’s not getting any colder tonight. If the ice at the warm end is ever going to hold, it’ll be now.”
Already, the sliver of returning sunlight had conspired with the warmth from the magical barrier to weaken the ice between the plains and the city of Tiran. The full warmth of summer would melt the impassable snow drifts at the feet of the mountains, opening marginally safer land avenues into Tiran, but even the most optimistic among the Caldonnae knew the tribe wouldn’t last until then. The lake was their only chance.
Four-year-old Carra woke as Arras adjusted her weight in his arms.
“Papa,” she said sleepily, “is Uncle Thomil back?”
“Yes, sweetling. He’s right here,” Arras said, and when Carra still looked worried, he put his nose into her mess of auburn hair to whisper something that made her giggle. “Now, hush, my heart. Everything will be alright.”
The children Carra’s age and younger couldn’t run through the shin-deep snow and would have to be carried. Thankfully, Arras had retained his massive strength and stamina through the lean months of the Deep Night. He could make the two-mile run under the extra weight if fate allowed it. But that, too, was a slim hope. The greatest danger out on that lake would not be cold, exhaustion, or thin ice. It would be Blight, magnified tenfold.
“While you can still breathe, keep moving,” Beyern said. “Stop for nothing. Turn back for no one. Not even your own blood.” The words turned white before him and hung there like a mourning shroud. “We are one blood now, one name, with one purpose: cross.”