The Witchwood Crown

  “Nezeru, come and kneel before me.”

  It was the first time Makho had spoken to her since the Hringleit’s captain had returned them to the mainland shore, then hurriedly cast off again, clearly happy to have survived with ship and crew intact.

  She walked across the rough camp the Queen’s Talons had made on the bluff above the ocean. For once, Saomeji did not even look up to see her pass, too fascinated by the sacred bones in his care, which he had been examining for hours like a jeweler who had found a cache of gems from the Lost Garden.

  Nezeru stopped and stood before Makho but did not meet his eye.

  “I said kneel.” The hand chieftain reached out and shoved her down. She hung her head and waited for what would come next, trying not to imagine. Useless speculation gives power to fear, her father had always said, and although Viyeki might not know much about her life as a Sacrifice, the magister understood the need to confront power with a clear head. But although Nezeru knew her father’s advice was good, she could not stop her heart from speeding or her skin from prickling. The Order of Sacrifice was no stranger to battlefield executions and her crime had been one of the most terrible.

  “Sacrifice Nezeru Seyt-Enduya, after being given a clear order, you failed the Mother of All,” said Makho. “Because of that, the members of this hand were forced to fight for their lives. Our mission for the queen might have been compromised or even defeated. Useful Hikeda’ya warriors might have been killed through your fault. Do you deny it?”

  How could she? “No, Hand Chieftain. My crime is great.”

  “Do you have any explanation?”

  That she had decided at the last moment she could not kill a defenseless mortal child? How could that be an explanation? She might as well say she had simply gone mad. “No, Master.”

  “The sacred ghosts of the Garden hear you. It is they who judge you, not me. Now look up.” Makho waited until she lifted her eyes. “Do you know what I am holding?”

  All other activity in the camp, even Saomeji’s study of the sacred bones, had stopped. Nezeru felt a chill all over her body. “That is your sword Cold Root.” So it was to be death. She would do her best to take it bravely, as befitted one of the Queen’s Sacrifices, but she grieved at what it would do to her father’s pride and position, let alone to her mother Tzoja, who would be devastated. Nezeru did not weep, though: Sacrifices did not shed tears from pain or fear. No matter her crimes, she would go to her end still loyal in that way, at least.

  Makho turned the heavy sword over. A bone grip protruded from the leather on the back of the scabbard, just beneath the hilt. He pulled on it and a long, thin branch of witchwood slid free of its own small sheath. Makho held it close to her face. “And do you know what this is?”

  Nezeru shuddered. She had been ready for death, or at least as ready as she could be, consoling herself with the idea that it would at least be swift. “That is the hebi-kei, Hand Chieftain Makho. The serpent.”

  Makho waved the long, flexible branch in the air, watched it dance against a gray sky of almost the same color. “Yes, the serpent. And for your crime, you are sentenced to feel its bite. Kemme! Come here and strip this Sacrifice.”

  Kemme was beside her in an instant. He yanked at her jerkin, barely bothering to undo the straps; within a few moments Nezeru was naked to the waist. At Makho’s nod, Kemme grabbed her arms and dragged her swiftly to a pine tree at the edge of the campsite clearing. He set her face against it, then grabbed her arms and held them from the other side so that she could not move. The rough bark scraped her breasts and cheek. She could not see Makho, but she could hear him walking back and forth behind her. Kemme was carefully keeping his face empty of any expression, but she could tell by how tightly he held her wrists that some part of him relished this duty.

  “I could take your life,” Makho said. “But apparently your gifts are unusual, and both the queen and the High Magister of Sacrifice gave permission for you to join our hand, so I will spare you for the judgment of my superiors. But you have endangered our most sacred mission and that cannot go unpunished. The snake shall strike twenty times.”

  Twenty times! Nezeru’s legs became shamefully weak and her knees suddenly could not hold her. Had it not been for Kemme’s powerful grip she would have slumped to the ground. Even a dozen strokes of the hebi-kei could kill.

  “If you are truly of the blood that makes a Queen’s Sacrifice, you will walk beside us tomorrow morning when we ride out for Nakkiga,” Makho said. “If not, we will leave you to die. The bones of great Hakatri are far more important than any one of us. Is she held tightly, Kemme?”

  “Aye.”

  “Then let the serpent bite.” Nezeru heard his footsteps getting closer. Suddenly overcome with an animal terror she had never felt before, she struggled, but Kemme was too strong. The tree trunk must be scratching her nipples until they bled, she knew, but in her fear she hardly felt it. “Hold steady, Sacrifice,” Makho hissed. “Show courage.”

  She gained a little control of herself and managed to stop squirming.

  “You owe the queen your body,” Makho intoned, and then the first blow of the hebi-kei fell.

  She only dimly heard the loud crack it made, because a bolt of fiery pain leaped through her entire back. Nezeru writhed in agony and almost cried out, but she was afraid to open her mouth, afraid she would vomit with her face pressed against the tree. The pain, which had seemed at first so fierce it would stop her heart, only grew worse as the moments passed.

  “You owe the queen your heart,” said Makho, and struck again.

  Stars seemed to burst and die inside her head, and her bones felt as if they would snap, so hard did she try to push forward, away from the lash, but Makho only waited a few moments, then calmly continued.

  “You owe the queen your spirit.”

  The serpent bit her again, another poison wound, deep and foul. She had never felt pain like this, not even in the worst days of her training, the Fire Ordeal or the Ice Ordeal or the Hall of Spears. She tried to suck air into her body but it would not come. She could not see. Everything was red mist.

  “You owe the queen your life.”

  Again and again Makho struck, and each time Nezeru thought she could take no more, that the next blow would separate her shrieking spirit from her agonized flesh forever. Somewhere near the end a great darkness bloomed in her head like one of the holy black flowers of Nakkiga’s high meadows, filling everything, bringing silence, bringing blackness.

  • • •

  In dreams her mother Tzoja followed her through a lonely forest of dead trees and damp, dark earth, calling for her, but Nezeru did not want to be found.

  Leave me alone! she wanted to shout. You’ve cursed me with your mortal ways! With your weakness!—but her mouth was full, and her limbs would not obey her. Earth. Her mouth was filled with earth. She was buried in the dirt and only the mortal woman who had brought her into the world still searched for her. But the weight of the heavy soil was too much, and even though Nezeru had changed her mind, even though she wanted now to be found, she could not move, could not speak, and her mother’s voice grew ever more faint . . .

  She woke in horrible, blazing pain to discover a weight on top of her. She tried to cry out, but a hand was over her mouth. A moment later, a stinging slap rocked back her head.

  “Be quiet, halfblood! Would you disturb everyone’s rest? We set out in the morning!”

  It was Makho. For a moment, confused and in terrible pain, Nezeru continued to struggle. The chieftain dropped his hand from her mouth to her neck and squeezed until she stopped fighting, but kept his weight on top of her. She felt him untying the laces on her trews.

  “Wh-what are you doing?”

  “Having you.” He yanked her clothing roughly down around her knees. “Do you think punishment means you escape your duty to your people?”

 
The pain was everywhere, each muscle and sinew shrieking as if they had been burned black. She could barely think, but she felt that if he took her now, it would kill her heart stone dead in her breast.

  “No!” she gasped out. “You can’t!”

  “You tell me no?”

  He slapped her again, but it was so much less than the pain of her wounds that she barely noticed.

  “I could kill you for that—”

  “No, Makho, it is . . . I am . . .” She could think of no other excuse, no other way to stop him. “I am with child. We dare not chance harming it.”

  His hand had been raised a third time, but now it halted in mid-air. His face was still contorted in a snarl. “With child? Do you tell the truth?”

  It was too late to take back the lie now. “Yes.”

  “Why did you not say anything before?”

  “I only knew it with certainty yesterday on the ship. I began to suspect when we were on the Island of Bones.”

  “You took twenty strokes of the serpent without telling me this? You risked the life of a new subject for the Mother of All?” He seemed to want to beat her again. “Selfish she-crow!”

  “I did not think—it all happened so quickly . . .”

  He grabbed her arms and yanked her up into a sitting position. He was not particularly rough, but sudden movement still brought agony from her wounds. “Is the child mine?”

  Panic rolled over her like an avalanche. The deception had popped out of her mouth as quickly as the decision not to kill the fleeing boy on the mountainside, but the results would be just as long-lasting. O Mother of the People, what am I becoming? Still, she had no time to consider consequences: if she took too long answering, Makho would begin to doubt her story. “I . . . I think it must be, Hand Chieftain. I have coupled with no one else since we left Nakkiga during the last moon.” Nor with anyone else for some time before that, she knew, but there was no reason to complicate things with too many details. Even when you are forced to tell a lie, her father had once said in a moment of unusual candor, tell one that contains as much simple truth as possible, so you will have fewer invented details to recall later on.

  Nezeru realized that, almost by chance, she had chosen the one falsehood that could genuinely change her situation. Nakkiga’s ancient laws had changed after the terrible losses they had suffered during the failed War of Return, and the Hikeda’ya now encouraged nobles to couple with mortals or halfbloods. The blood of mortals was more fertile than that of the immortals, somehow, and their offspring, even with a pureblood Hikeda’ya parent, reached maturity at a startlingly early age. Nezeru herself had solved Yedade’s Box and begun her path through the Order of Sacrifice at an age when many true Hikeda’ya children were still infants, and she had reached a high level of achievement in her order when pureblood Norn children born the same year remained babes in arms. The one thing that all Hikeda’ya knew was that new births were a sacred necessity. Makho’s ability to use her or even punish her had now been sharply curtailed, all to protect the children the Hikeda’ya so badly needed.

  But there was no child.

  “Dress yourself, Sacrifice,” Makho told her. “Despite your punishment you may ride, not walk, but you still will do everything else your position demands and that I order.”

  “Of course, Hand Chieftain Makho.”

  He was clearly disappointed, but Nezeru didn’t think it was only because he could not couple with her. “We set out when dawn touches the treetops, Sacrifice. Be ready—you will receive no special favors. The Hikeda’ya do not pamper those who breed our new Sacrifices, lest we create a generation of the weak.” Then he walked back across the campsite, leaving her alone. She pulled her trews back up, then wrapped herself in her cloak and turned her back on the places where the others lay.

  Now I am twice a liar, she thought, floundering in the enormity of her crimes. If the truth of either of them is discovered, it will seal my execution.

  Despite having avoided the humiliation and agony of being taken against her will, Nezeru felt as though she had lost something unspeakably important. Tears filled her eyes for the first time since the habit had been driven from her in early childhood. She felt like a husk, like something left behind. She lay wretched and unsleeping for a long time afterward, unable to understand how her life had gone so badly astray.

  • • •

  Later, Nezeru could scarcely remember the first two days of riding after her session with the hebi-kei. The hours blurred into one long fever dream—in fact as well as in feeling, because a malady had gripped her in the night and would not let go. The trees swayed before her as if in a high wind, although she could scarcely feel a breeze. Her skin, especially on her back, felt as though red-hot ants swarmed across her. None of the others would speak to her, and though Makho might avoid harming her outright, he lived up to his promise of doing her no favors. Among the Hikeda’ya, pain and even death were small sacrifices compared to the greatest sacrifices of all, the queen’s decision to leave first her home in the Garden, and then later to separate from the rest of her family, all for the good of her people. All Hikeda’ya knew that, for more than a hundred Great Years—many thousands of seasons as the fleeting mortals counted them—Queen Utuk’ku had survived the loss of both her husband and son, living on without them all these long years because the People needed their monarch, and that was the only measure by which suffering could be considered.

  “Everything we have, we have because of our queen,” her father had always told her. “Just look at all the gifts she has given to me, and through me, to you. We owe her more than our lives. We owe her our very thoughts. Never doubt, she knows when you are not grateful and it disappoints her.”

  Nezeru had never actually seen Utuk’ku, who had been slumbering all her short life and had only recently awakened, but she had seen the queen in dreams and imagination a thousand times. In those dreams the queen’s expressionless silver mask somehow seemed to convey her monarch’s sadness better than a living face ever could—sadness at Nezeru’s unfitness, her diluted heritage, her failures to hide her feelings properly and curb her temper. How much greater would Utuk’ku’s sorrow be now, to see how the halfblood had failed her?

  She left the Garden for us, her father often said. The holy Garden. How can we give back to her anything less than all we have to give?

  • • •

  “Makho says that I may clean your wounds,” said Saomeji on the third night, when the Talons had finished their meager meal. “Will you let me see them?”

  Nezeru was strangely reticent about showing herself to the Singer, not least because she could not guess whether he had some way to discover the lie she had told about carrying a child, although that was not the only thing about Saomeji that disturbed her. Perhaps her discomfort with him was because he was a halfblood like herself, but had not failed the Mother of All—a halfblood who had not lied to his chieftain, and who did not face shameful death several times over if the truth about him was discovered.

  Reluctantly, she undid her jerkin. Though she removed it with great care, still it tugged at the healing skin of her back, each tug a knife stab. She threw the jerkin aside, but lifted her cloak to cover her breasts. Had she not felt so sick and so pained, Nezeru would have been sourly amused at her own modesty, something more befitting a lady of the Nakkiga court, some pampered noble, not a halfblood and certainly not a Sacrifice. The men and women of the Order of Sacrifice bathed together, ran naked in the snow together. Her body was only a weapon in the queen’s service. How could she be modest about something that was not her own?

  But somehow the nakedness that had felt wholesome in the order-house of Sacrifice felt different in front of this Singer. She could feel Saomeji’s breath as he leaned close to examine her wounds. “Deep but healing,” he said. “The bite of hebi-kei is cruel but clean.” He sounded so matter-of-fact she could almost forget it w
as her own ruined flesh he spoke of until he dabbed at one of the weals with a dampened cloth and a bolt of hot misery crackled through her. She gasped and nearly dropped her cloak. “Ah,” he said. “Still tender. But this must be done, Sacrifice Nezeru. My mentor taught me that a deep wound untended is a death unlooked-for. And it would be a shame for you to have come so far only to fall before we see the gates of home again.”

  After he had finished cleaning her wounds the halfblood Singer took something from inside his voluminous robe and removed the lid. “Ice moly,” he said of the pale substance in the small bone pot. “Precious. It is my own.”

  “Why should you waste something precious on one such as me?” Saomeji had said nothing about the supposed child as he worked, so she guessed that Makho had not told him. It was doubtless safest just to assume so and remain silent, but she had asked the question without thinking.

  “Why waste it on you?” said Saomeji. “Because I see something in you that intrigues me, Sacrifice Nezeru.”

  She did not want to share anything with him, not even conversation, and for the moment it was easy to avoid talking: as he rubbed the paste into the longest, deepest cut, Nezeru had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. If she thought cleaning the wounds had been painful, she had been a fool. The ice moly felt like a handful of gravel being rubbed into the fissures in her raw, oozing flesh. But after a few moments she felt a coolness there, where before she had felt only hot agony; it did not make the pain go away but pushed it to a slightly greater distance so that she could regard it with a more philosophical mind.

  Saomeji was talking again. “I do not know many others who share my . . . encumbrance. Unlike Makho and these other purebloods, I spent my earliest childhood alone, without even the company of my fellow halfbloods. I suspect you did too. Perhaps we have things to share . . . even to teach each other.”

  Nezeru was having trouble concentrating on what he was saying. The soothing coolness in her back was making her realize how many hours, how many days that she had been forcing herself to take each step, to survive through the anguish of each moment. For the first time since the whipping she just wanted to let go and sleep. But what was he prattling on about? Was he offering some kind of friendship? What could it mean if he did?