FANTASY
129K words
DAUGHTER of the CROSSLANDS
1
THE LAMB must have died in the night. Not what Senya expected. Only yesterday she’d watched the little guy run free over ragged strips of remaining snow, dancing on unsteady legs. Healthy and happy. High piercing bleats ringing in the breeze. The first lamb of the season born, and now the first to die.
Senya saw no sign of movement as she approached. No flick of an ear, no tail wag. Crouching to examine limbs and snout and eyes, she found no blood or wounds. No sign of injuries. Just its little black face with a few black spots over delicate hooves, stretched across a fleeting patch of late sun. Probably only dead for a few hours.
Hockby approached from the lakeshore. “That same fox, you think?”
Senya shook her head. “No tracks. Not a scratch on him. Like he just laid down, took a nap, and that was it.”
Hockby stood tall and lean. Years of laughter had wrinkled the corners of his kind eyes, and a short, uneven beard braced his ready smile—blank now as he stared at the lamb on the ground. “Probably just the cold,” he said. “Shouldn’t be out on its own like this.”
Senya’s role here was simple—keep the lambs alive, and stay out of the way. She was typically pretty good at both. She’d seen plenty of death around all the farms she’d served over the years, and knew all the ways to stave it off. But somehow she’d missed the signs of sickness and disease. She’d lost focus. Been distracted. Clearly she hadn’t culled properly. Maybe she’d been too gentle with the ewes, or too harsh. Either way, she should have known better.
“It’s not your fault,” Hockby assured her.
Senya breathed. She glanced at the thick fog gathering over the water, slowly creeping up the slope to climb the rocky bluffs above. Her waning abilities were not what they used to be. She couldn’t hide that fact forever.
“You did what you could.”
She said nothing. A sinister disquiet had haunted her all day, escalating through the afternoon. Discovering this first dead lamb didn’t help. She rose. Darkness pooled under huddled branches as a breeze pushed fog through trees dotting the hills. Nothing moved along the high sheepfold wall. Misty fingers split apart and then joined again to settle among the pine groves like itinerant spectators waiting for some hidden doom yet to come.
“We ought to get the rest of them in,” she said. “Keep an eye out. See if we’ve got any more trouble on the way.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed this little guy to be the first to go,” Hockby said, still staring at the lamb. “All full of piss and vinegar just yesterday.”
“If you want to get started, I’ll find a good spot for him outside the fold, up the hill a bit. Away from everything.”
Hockby agreed, and they got to work. They both had plenty to do without distractions from vague suspicions that only Senya could feel. She needed to focus. The ewes were ready, and more lambs would come tonight.
Without warning a sudden sharp chill hit her, honed and keen. Stumbling a little, she caught flickering movement in the corner of her eye. A figure, standing among the trees, just out of sight. A woman, maybe. Pale skin. Shining blue eyes and a long gray cloak.
A second woman appeared several paces away. Both seemed to shimmer and glint. Senya turned to get a better look, to shout and ask their business, but the two women vanished back into shadow.
Gone. As if they were never there.
Senya’s heart froze.
“What is it?” Hockby called, following her gaze “Did you see something?”
She only stood and stared. Hockby had always been good to her, even when she’d first arrived exhausted and wary nearly three years ago, and he had remained her friend ever since. Hockby was a good man. Always took her seriously. But some things were better left alone.
“I don’t think so,” she replied finally. “Just the fog playing tricks.”
The morning watch also reported glimpses of a strange lone figure on a ridge outside the sheepfold. Maybe two. They’d had trouble seeing for sure with only torchlight along the walls, but a few separate watchmen swore to it. Brinsfallon’s eastern frontier saw plenty of strange folk and plenty of odd events, but nobody had seen pale shadows like these before. Ashen figures cloaked like smoke and fog. Ghosts maybe. Certainly more than just the fog playing tricks.
This sense of dread wasn’t anything new for Senya. Odd, disturbing visions had come to her ever since she was young—a body walking upright but not quite alive, maybe a wraith of some kind, maybe something else. Shifting glimpses would flash and then disappear, brought to her from the living and the dead alike. Typically things only she could see. Sometimes she would witness an event before it occurred, but she never talked much about any of it. She kept quiet. People found her odd and different enough already, and mentioning this sort of thing just made her that much more of a stranger.
Senya’s fire-orange eyes were usually the first thing that made people talk. Often they would gape and gasp. Some would mutter among themselves. The look of a Brohndai, they’d whisper—just like those immortal men of the far north who roamed all the known lands before their banishment by the late empire. Orange eyes, black skin—the telltale signs. But nobody had seen a real Brohndai in decades.
You don’t belong here, people would say, either directly with words, or in silence without.
The Clanmother called for a search of the nearby hills. Keen weapons and fierce dogs could generally deal with the occasional bandit or whatever hungry creature wandered out of the Hallonath, but the Clanmother needed to make sure no unseen threat was gathering without their knowledge.
Senya had long since given up trying to explain herself. Nobody cared who or where her father was, or who her mother had been. Nobody wanted to know about fallen immortality and what that might even mean. They only cared that she was different. A slight, unassuming woman with an uncanny ability to heal. She was good with sheep and livestock, and a ready hand in the garden—both of which gave her dependable worth. Out here among the fortified farms on the Brinsfallon frontier, she’d at long last found a place that welcomed her, a place that finally felt a little bit like home.
The night was long, and Senya was exhausted by morning. Out in the lambing shed since midnight, she’d struggled to help two of her favorite ewes manage their labors, and stood helpless while a third passed away after giving birth. Three others agonized for hours before pushing out a collection of tiny and sickly lambs. A few managed to stay alive, but most were born weak and feeble. It took everything Senya had just to keep them breathing. She sang. She nursed. She scooped sludge from mouths and struggled to clear tiny airways. Nothing worked. Not like it used to.
As evening fell, Hockby joined Senya in her tiny house at the edge of the sheepfold with a few of the fieldhands. Hockby’s wife Brin brought their new baby along. They ate and spoke of Winter’s passing and the coming Spring. Senya sat and watched the child’s round pink face near the crackling fire, happy sounds gurgling as his tiny hands wrestled meaning from the air. Crawling to the edge of the light. Fat round fingers reaching to examine the gyrating shadows flickering across the floor.
“You’d make a good mother,” Brin said, watching her.
Senya smiled. “Oh I don’t think that’s in the bones.” She admitted she loved children, but motherhood probably wasn’t for her.
“You’re young. There’s still time.”
Senya let out a laugh, tinged with sadness. “You’re very kind, but I’m not as young as I look.” In truth she had seen more winters than any mother she’d ever known, even her own. Her time for having children had likely long since passed.
“You have such power of life in you. I think you would shine.”
Senya shook her head, forcing a smile. “Maybe I used to, but not so much anymore.”
In any case, men were not for her. She’d tried all that before. The lives of men were too fleeting, their love too short. She was satisfied to remain as she was, a mother to sheep and goats out on this narrow slice of windswept lakeshore. She worked hard to keep it at that.
“The time will come,” Brin assured. “You will find your voice again. You just need to let yourself free.”
Senya said nothing. She watched the baby crawl across the floor, soft palms slapping stone. The fire popped.
“Someone like you shouldn’t hide out here forever,” Brin added quietly.
Senya turned to her. Brin was a lovely woman. Red curls dangled playfully over plump cheeks. Young, unblemished skin. Firelight reflected in her wide, friendly eyes. Senya gave her a final smile.
“Not everybody sees me like you do,” she said.
They spoke no more about it. Senya’s cozy home emptied once the meal was finished and the day’s tales had all been told. Senya thanked them all. She sat in silence near the hearth for a time, and then rose to clean up a little before bed.
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