A Woman Warrior Born

  *****

  When she woke, it was dark but for the moon, and terrible cramps seized her belly. Between spasms she found beside her head another pile of mushrooms, and a piece of lichen that she did not recognize. She carefully scanned the moonlit forest, but nothing moved except the wind.

  In the morning another grouse lay beside the mushrooms. Why leave food and then vanish? Picking up a mushroom, she noted that it had been torn from the ground, not cut. Around its crown were irregular marks, a few piercing the skin. What did that mean? She couldn’t think through her pain and just lay, enduring.

  Thirst eventually drove her to a pool in the moss and she drank it down. Northward, clouds roiled above the treetops, and she felt the oppressiveness that heralded an approaching storm. From the north it meant chill winds and rain. She would need shelter and firewood. Asking the storm to hold off until she could get to these things, she forced herself into action.

  Shuffling back to where she had last fought Lupazg, her left index finger began to tingle, not painfully, but in a way that could not be ignored. Where she had touched the medallion the day before, a tiny wolf pawprint had been torn out of the tip of her finger. Breea turned and hobbled back to her dead fire. The tingle went away. She bit her lip and approached the medallion once more. At thirty paces her fingertip began to prickle. Walking up, she found the thing frozen to the moss by a thin layer of opaque ice. Her skin and blouse were still frozen to it.

  Breea retrieved the dagger she’d thrown, and the shards of her father’s sword, which she fit back into its scabbard. The black-bladed sword she left where it had fallen. After picking a handful of flowering-star, she ate it with the remaining white-caps and a few sugar fern rhizomes. She rested awhile, then used a long stick to flip the medallion to a pool. With a dagger she cut a piece of flexible vine, and laying an end of it on the medallion, splashed water onto them, freezing them together. She tied the other end of the vine to the stick.

  One-handed, she gathered more fern rhizomes, digging them out with the dagger, rinsing them in pools, and stuffing them into her sling-stone pouch with the strange lichen from the night before. With the grouse in her right hand, and the stick held by her left over her right shoulder, she stood, bent by pain, covered in ragged bandages and dried blood, and stared at the place where she had slain Lupazg the Oregule. All that remained in her heart was relief, and defiance.

  She said to the vanished beast, "I will not be hunted."

  Breea turned away, and began the journey back to Limtir.  

 

  Chapter 2

  SaKlu