Chapter 1 : EIRA - The Lament Comes Home10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9geILQCDEn
The sea was too quiet the morning they brought the body ashore.10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHjTLg8GkrK
Eira Voss stood ankle-deep in black sand with the salt wind pulling strands of hair across her face, and she knew—the way a hunter knows when something's watching from the treeline, the way a daughter knows when her father's been drinking grief instead of sleeping—that the world had just tilted sideways and would never tilt back.
The oarsmen were dragging the skiff up the beach, their bare feet red and raw, their breath pluming white in the grey dawn. They wouldn't look at her. They wouldn't look at her father, who stood at the tide line with his belt-knife in his hand like he expected wolves. They just hauled on the ropes and kept their eyes on the sand and their mouths shut tight as winter graves.
Eira's little brother Aren was somewhere behind her, probably with the village women, probably asking questions no one wanted to answer. He was six. He'd given his first tithe three months ago, a memory of chasing snow-hares in the long summer light, and he'd cried for a week afterward because he couldn't remember their mother's laugh in that memory anymore. The god had taken it cleanly, as it had taken a thousand other small joys from the people of Frostwake over five centuries of covenant. In return, it had kept the passes free of ice and the spring floods gentle and the wolves from the children's doorsteps.
The Lament. Their god. Their bargain written in blood and stone and stolen pieces of themselves.
Now there was a body wrapped in sailcloth in the bow of the skiff, and the sailcloth was stained dark at the chest, and Eira's wrong-sense was screaming so loud she could barely hear the waves.
Her father, Eirik, walked into the surf. The water came up to his boots, then his knees, and he didn't seem to notice. He caught the skiff's prow with one hand and held it steady, his knuckles white on the wet wood. The lead oarsman—a grizzled islander named Torren, face like cracked leather, eyes like a man who'd seen something he couldn't unsee—stepped out of the boat and stood in the cold water with his head bowed.
"My lord," Torren said, and his voice was too careful, the voice of a man carrying news that might get him killed. "We found her in the driftwood at Sorrow's Mouth. No boat. No crew. Just... her."
Eirik didn't answer. He was staring at the sailcloth.
"She was on The Sea Warden," Eira said. Her voice came out flatter than she felt, flat as the grey sky, flat as the dead sea. The Sea Warden was her cousin Laena's ship, a sixty-oar war galley that had sailed north three weeks ago to treat with the Grey Crown's people about the border raids. Laena was twenty-three years old, and she had a gift for making men lower their guard, and she laughed easily and fought dirty and once told Eira, when Eira was fourteen and blushing, that the secret to negotiation was making your enemy think he was fucking you while you were fucking him. Eira had never forgotten that. She'd never forgotten the way Laena had grinned when she said it, all teeth and confidence, alive in a way that made the world seem brighter.
"A sixty-oar war galley doesn't just fucking vanish," Eira said.
Torren shifted his weight. The other oarsmen busied themselves with ropes that didn't need tying, with oars that were already shipped. "There was wreckage, my lord. A broken mast. Some planking. No survivors. Just..." He gestured at the sailcloth. "Just her."
"Uncover her," Eirik said.
Torren's face went greyer than it already was. "My lord, the wound—"
"Uncover my brother's daughter, Torren. Now."
The oarsman's hands were shaking as he pulled back the cloth.
Eira had seen dead bodies before. She'd seen a man gored by a snow-bear, his intestines steaming in the cold, the smell so thick and sweet she'd gagged. She'd seen a woman crushed by a falling tree, her face turned to red pulp, her husband trying to scrape her off the ground with his bare hands. She'd seen her own mother on the birthing bed, grey and still, the blood pooling on the floorboards and dripping through the cracks into the cellar below. She thought she was ready.
She wasn't ready for Laena.
The sea had washed her clean. That was the first thing Eira noticed. Someone had closed her eyes—someone careful, someone who'd taken their time—and her dark hair was spread around her head like a pillow, still damp, still smelling faintly of salt and something else, something floral. Sea lavender. The pale purple flowers had been tucked between her folded fingers, a spray of them, delicate and wrong.
Laena's face was beautiful. That was the worst fucking part. She looked like she was sleeping. She looked like she might open her eyes and grin and say something filthy and make everyone laugh. But the wound in her chest was a small, precise thing, just below the left breast, a slit in the fabric of her tunic that had bled and bled and then been washed away by the sea. A blade thin enough to slip between ribs. An assassin's work. Someone who knew exactly where the heart was.
Not a storm. Not an accident. A knife.
Eirik made a sound that wasn't a word. His hand left his belt-knife and pressed against his own chest, over his heart, like he was checking if it still beat. He'd lost his wife five years ago. He'd lost his brother two years ago. Now he'd lost his brother's daughter, and the only thing he could do was stand in the cold surf and press his hand to his heart and make a sound like an animal dying.
Eira looked at the sea lavender. Purple. Northern. A message.
"Someone wanted us to know," she said. The flatness in her voice was cracking now, splinters of something hot and sharp pushing through. "The storm didn't kill her. The sea didn't kill her. Someone put a knife in her chest, and then someone else—maybe the same someone, maybe a different cunt—put flowers in her hands. Sea lavender doesn't grow here. It's a Thawnwood plant. Northern. Grey Crown territory. Someone is telling us to look north."
Torren's mouth opened and closed. "My lady, we didn't—"
"I'm not accusing you, Torren." Eira turned to look at him, and the expression on her face made him step back. "I'm telling you what's in front of your fucking eyes. Someone killed my cousin. Someone sank her ship. Someone wrapped her in sailcloth and tucked flowers in her hands and sent her back to us like a gift. That's not an accident. That's a declaration."
"Eira." Her father's voice was raw. "Enough."
"No. Not enough." She was shaking now, she realised. Her hands were shaking, and her eyes were hot, and she wanted to hit something, wanted to cut something, wanted to find whoever had done this and give them a memory so painful they choked on it. "Laena was twenty-three. She was the best of us. She was going to negotiate a peace, not fight a war. And someone killed her for it. Someone stabbed her and sent her home with flowers. That's not just murder. That's—"
"I said enough."
Eirik's voice cracked like a whip, and Eira's jaw snapped shut. He was still staring at Laena's face, but his hand had dropped from his chest and was hanging at his side, and when he looked up, his eyes were old. Old and cracked and full of something that Eira recognised because she'd seen it in her own reflection after their mother died.
"Tell my nephew his sister is home," Eirik said. His voice was steady now, but it was the steadiness of a man holding himself together with will and rage and nothing else. "Then tell the village elders to convene. Someone carried the knife that killed her. Someone paid for it. Someone will pay for it twice."
He turned and began the long walk up the stone steps carved into the cliff. His back was straight. His shoulders were set. He didn't look back.
Eira stayed at the tide line. The wind was picking up, and the sea was losing its quiet, the waves slapping harder against the black sand. The oarsmen were lifting Laena's body out of the skiff, gentle despite their cold-red hands, gentle the way men are when they're carrying something that might break. They'd take her up to the longhouse, and the women would wash her and dress her in her finest, and tomorrow they'd burn her on a pyre of driftwood and pine, and her memories would go to the gods.
Except the gods were sick. Everyone fucking knew it. The tithes had been wrong for months, the small gods twitching and muttering, the great gods growing strange. The Lament hadn't come for the last ceremony. The cairn-warden at the pass had been found weeping black ichor into the snow. Something was rotting in the covenant, something old and hungry, and now Laena was dead with sea lavender in her hands and a knife-wound in her heart.
"Fuck," Eira said, to no one. The wind took the word and threw it out to sea. "Fuck."
She was halfway up the cliff steps when the first cry of grief echoed from the fortress above.
Her aunt's voice. Laena's mother. The sound went through Eira like a blade, and she stopped, one hand on the cold rock, and closed her eyes. She thought about Laena at twelve, catching tide-pool minnows with her bare hands and letting them go because she said they were too small to eat. Laena at sixteen, kissing a fisherman's son behind the boathouse and telling Eira it was like drinking sunlight. Laena at twenty, out-negotiating merchants from the southern ports, coming home with holds full of grain and her eyes full of laughter and her mouth full of stories about the men she'd outsmarted.
Laena at twenty-three, dead on a black sand beach with a knife-wound in her chest and sea lavender in her hands and the sea too quiet, too fucking quiet, like the whole world was holding its breath.
Eira opened her eyes and kept climbing.
The village elders met in the longhouse at dusk. Twelve men and women, grey-haired and grim, sitting around the hearth fire with cups of watered ale that no one was drinking. Eira stood at the back with the other young hunters, the ones who weren't allowed to speak but were expected to listen. Her father sat at the head of the circle, in the chair that usually belonged to Laena's father, who was two years dead and couldn't sit anywhere anymore. The sea lavender was on the table in front of him, wilting now, the purple fading to brown.
"She was murdered," Eirik said. "The wound was a narrow blade, upward thrust, right-handed. No water in the lungs. She was dead before the storm touched her. Someone wanted it to look like an accident. The sea lavender is a message we were meant to read."
Old Arnolf, the village speaker, leaned forward. His face was a map of wrinkles, and his hands shook with age, but his eyes were sharp as fishhooks. "You're saying the Thawn did this? The Grey Crown?"
"Or someone who wants us to think it's the Thawn." Eirik's voice was stone. "Who benefits if we march north? Who benefits if the Salt Throne and the Grey Crown bleed each other dry? There are a dozen factions in the capital alone who'd cheer if we went to war. There are a dozen more who'd cheer if we were too busy fighting to notice a knife in our own back."
"But the flowers," someone said. "The sea lavender. That's Thawnwood. Everyone knows that."
"Everyone knows that," Eirik repeated. "Which is why it's the perfect frame. Or the perfect confession. We won't know until we question every captain who anchored at Tide's End in the last fortnight, until we send ravens north and south, until we—"
"It doesn't matter who sent the knife."
The voice was Eira's. She didn't remember deciding to speak. She was just speaking, stepping forward into the firelight, her heart hammering and her hands steady and her wrong-sense screaming so loud she could barely hear her own words.
Every head turned. Eirik's eyes narrowed. "Eira."
"It doesn't matter," she said again. "It matters for justice. It matters for vengeance. It doesn't matter for survival." She looked around the circle, meeting the eyes of the elders one by one. "The gods are dying. You've all seen it. The cairn-warden at the pass, weeping black. The Lament missing the last tithe. The small gods twitching like poisoned dogs. Something is wrong with the covenant—not just the politics, not just the border raids, something deep. Something old. And now someone has killed an envoy of the Salt Throne and sent her back with flowers. That's not just murder. That's ritual. Someone is sending a message to the gods as much as to us."
The silence was so thick she could feel it pressing on her skin.
"The plague," old Arnolf said, slowly. "You think the plague is behind this?"
"I think whatever is making the gods sick is also making men bold. I think if we march north looking for a human enemy, we'll miss the real one. And the real one is already inside the gates."
More silence. Then Eirik said, very quietly, "Sit down, daughter."
She sat. Her heart was still hammering, her palms were sweating, and she could feel the elders' eyes on her like weights. She'd spoken out of turn. She'd told them things they didn't want to hear. She'd said the word "plague" in a room full of people who'd been pretending everything was fine.
She didn't care. She'd been dangerous since her mother died, since she'd learned that the world didn't reward silence and obedience, that the gods took and took and never gave back. She'd learned to hunt, to track, to read the wrongness in the air. She'd learned to speak when she should have been silent.
She'd learned that sometimes the only way to survive was to make yourself into a blade.
The elders talked late into the night. They decided to send ravens to Laena's brother, who was fighting a rebellion in the Stepstone Isles and didn't yet know his sister was dead. They decided to question every captain who'd anchored at Tide's End in the last fortnight. They decided, over Eirik's quiet objection, to keep Laena's murder silent for three days—the official story was shipwreck—and see who blabbed.
Eira went to bed before they finished. She lay in the dark, listening to the wind, and thought about the wound in Laena's chest. Small. Precise. A blade that knew where the heart was.
Whoever had killed her had done it before. Whoever had killed her had wanted her dead, not just dead but delivered, a message in sailcloth and sea lavender. And whoever had killed her might be closer than the Thawn.
She slept badly. She dreamed of her mother's face, grey and still, and woke with the taste of copper in her mouth and her thighs sticky with blood. Her moon-blood had come in the night, earlier than expected, soaking through her smallclothes and onto the sheets. She cursed, stripped the bed, and cleaned herself with cold water from the basin, her skin prickling in the freezing air. Her body didn't care that the world was ending. Her body kept doing what bodies did. Bleeding, aching, reminding her that she was meat and bone and fluid, just like everyone else.
The Lament came three days later.
Eira was in the root cellar when it started. She'd gone down to fetch pickled fish for the evening meal, and Aren had followed her because he followed her everywhere now, a small shadow with big dark eyes and a silence that was worse than crying. She was reaching for a jar when the ground shook.
At first she thought it was thunder. Then the shaking came again, rhythmic, heavy, like footsteps. Enormous footsteps.
Aren grabbed her leg. "Eira—"
"Quiet." She pulled him against the earthen wall, under the shelves, and pressed her eye to a crack in the cellar door.
Through the gap, a sliver of the world: grey sky, grey snow, and then something vast and wrong moving across the ridgeline.
The Lament had always been a mountain. A walking spine of black granite and ancient moss, two hundred feet tall when it stood upright, its head a crown of twisted stone that wept a constant cold waterfall. As a child, Eira had climbed its ankle to leave an offering of smoked fish, her small fingers finding handholds in the cracks of its stone skin. It had lowered its immense head and looked at her with eyes that were deep crevasses, and she had felt seen in a way that was terrifying and holy. The covenant was simple: the Lament protected Frostwake, and Frostwake fed the Lament their memories. A tithe of the self. A bargain of blood and stone.
This was not that.
The thing on the ridge was dragging its left flank like a wounded elk. The moss on its shoulders had turned white and brittle, sloughing off in sheets that crashed into the snow. Its waterfall had stopped; the stone crown was dry, cracked, leaking dust instead of water. In its eyes—those deep, dark fissures—something flickered that Eira had no word for. Confusion. Or hunger. Or both.
It was muttering. The sound rolled across the valley, too low to be heard clearly, but Eira felt it in her teeth. Words. Fragments of speech, pulled from memories it had devoured over centuries, stitched together without sense.
"...the bride wore grey wool and her hands were cold cold cold but the salmon run was good that year and I buried my son on the hill the hill the hill—"
It stopped walking.
Eira's breath caught. The Lament's head swung toward the village, slowly, as if trying to remember what a village was. For a long moment, the god stared at the clustered longhouses, the smoke rising from fire-holes, the winter-dry fish racks, the carved god-post at the centre of the common ground.
Then it screamed.
The sound was a rockslide and a glacier calving and the death-cry of something much older than men. Eira clapped her hands over her ears, but the sound went through her skull and into her teeth and down her spine. Aren went rigid against her, and a hot wetness spread down his legs—he'd pissed himself, the sharp ammonia smell cutting through the earthen damp of the cellar. The cellar walls cracked, dust sifting from the rafters like grey snow.
When the scream stopped, the Lament began to move again.
Not toward the ridge. Toward the village.
The door above Eira burst open. Her father's shape filled the light, his face white as the snow outside.
"Run," he said. "Take your brother and run to the god-post."
"The god-post won't stop it—"
"It's a boundary stake. It might remember that. Eira, go." He pressed something into her hand. Her obsidian knife, the ritual blade used for the memory tithe. The blade her mother had used, before the birthing bed, to give her last memory to the Lament. The blade Eira had used at twelve, to give her first. "If it catches you, make it remember you. Give it a memory it can't swallow. Something that hurts."
He was gone before she could ask what that meant.
Eira pulled Aren from the cellar and into a world that had come undone.
Villagers streamed past her, some carrying children, some dragging elders, all moving toward the common ground where the carved god-post stood. The post was a pillar of pale driftwood, twelve feet tall, covered in spiralling grooves that represented the covenant: human memory in exchange for divine protection. The Lament had always stopped at the post during the tithe ceremonies. It had never crossed.
But that was before it forgot its name.
Eira ran, dragging Aren by the wrist. Behind her, the ground shook harder. She glanced back once and wished she hadn't.
The Lament had reached the edge of the village. Its foot—a clawed thing of stone and root—came down on the fish racks, crushing them to splinters. Another step, and the Hevren family's longhouse collapsed sideways, roof thatch exploding into the wind. Old Agna Hevren had been inside, sitting by her fire, knitting the same scarf she'd been knitting for three winters because she'd given her last memory to the Lament and couldn't remember that her husband was dead. The god's foot came down on her roof, and the longhouse folded like a stomped egg, and old Agna's knitting was still in her hands when they pulled her body out the next day.
Aren was screaming. Eira couldn't hear him over the roar of the god's footsteps, but she could feel his small hand jerking in hers. She pulled him harder. Her lungs burned. Her legs ached. She'd been running her whole life, it seemed like, running from things she couldn't fight and couldn't fix and couldn't fucking understand.
The crowd reached the god-post. Old Arnolf, the village speaker, stood before it with his arms raised, his thin voice carrying a prayer to the old covenant.
"Lament of the Pass! We are Frostwake! We gave you our joys and our griefs for five hundred years! We are your people, and you are our god!"
The Lament paused.
For one heartbeat, Eira believed it had worked. The god's head tilted, those deep crevasse-eyes flickering with something that might have been recognition. A memory, surfacing through the sickness. It reached down toward the god-post, toward Arnolf, with a hand the size of a longship.
And then its fingers closed around the driftwood pillar and snapped it in half.
Arnolf didn't have time to scream. The Lament's other hand swept sideways, and the village speaker vanished into a red smear across the snow. Not a body anymore. Just a wet stain and a spray of bone fragments and something that might have been a hand, still twitching, still reaching for a god that no longer remembered his name.
The crowd broke. People ran in every direction, and the god began to harvest them.
A woman Eira had known her whole life—Maren, who'd taught her to weave and told dirty jokes that made the old women blush—was plucked from the ground and crushed in a stone grip, her body bursting like a stepped-on berry, her blood spraying across the snow in a fan of red. A young hunter named Torvin, who'd once kissed Eira behind the boathouse and tasted like salt and youth and something she'd never felt again, was trampled under a foot the size of a longship. He didn't burst. He just flattened, his bones cracking like green branches, his face—that face she'd kissed—pressed into the snow until it wasn't a face anymore.
The Lament's mouth moved the whole time, a ceaseless stream of fractured human speech, memories pouring out of it like blood from a wound.
"...the sea was warm that year and my daughter wore a crown of seaflowers and the blade went in so easy so easy so easy..."
Eira didn't run. She couldn't. Her legs had locked, and she was holding Aren against her chest, her arms wrapped around him so tight she could feel his heartbeat hammering against her own. The Lament was twenty paces away now, turning its head toward them, drawn by the sound of a child's terror. The sickness was eating its mind, stripping away centuries of covenant, leaving only a starving animal wearing the shape of a mountain. Its eyes found her.
She remembered the knife in her hand. The obsidian blade, cold and black and sharp. Her father's words: Make it remember you. Give it a memory it can't swallow.
What memory could possibly hurt a god?
Aren was sobbing into her coat. She could smell the piss drying on his legs, sharp and human and alive. The Lament took another step, and the ground shook, and Eira thought about her mother on the birthing bed. The blood. The grey face. The way her father had screamed.
She raised the knife.
"My name is Eira Voss," she said. Her voice came out small and cracked, but she forced it steady. "Daughter of Eirik the Hunter, of Frostwake, which is under your covenant. I gave you my ninth summer, the day I caught a bright-winged moth and my mother called me clever. You took that day from me, and I never mourned it, because it was the price of your protection. You owe me. You owe all of us."
The Lament's head lowered. She could smell it now—wet stone and ancient rot and the faint, terrible sweetness of decaying flowers. Its mouth opened slightly, a cave of darkness and old ice.
She slashed the knife across her left palm. Blood welled, hot and red against the snow. The pain was sharp and clean, almost a relief.
"Take this memory," she said.
And she let it flood to the surface of her mind. The worst one she had. The one she had never offered the tithe because it was too precious in its horror.
Her mother. On the birthing bed. The blood, so much blood, pooling on the sheets and dripping through the floorboards. The midwife's hands, red to the elbow, reaching inside, pulling out something that wasn't a baby yet, something that was just meat and silence. Her mother's face, grey and still, her eyes open and empty. The way her father had screamed—not a word, not a name, just a sound that had torn something in Eira's chest that had never healed. The weight of Aren, a newborn, placed in her six-year-old arms while her mother's body was still warm.
Take care of him. Your mother is with the gods now.
But she wasn't. The gods didn't take the dead. They took memories. Her mother was just gone, just meat, just blood on a birthing bed. And Eira had been holding Aren ever since, holding him and holding the memory and never giving it to anyone, because it was hers, it was the worst thing she had, and she would not let it go.
Until now.
She pushed it outward, toward the god, an offering and a weapon.
The Lament recoiled.
Its roar split the sky. It staggered backward, crushing two more longhouses beneath its bulk—the Voss longhouse, her own fucking home, collapsing into splinters and dust. The memory had struck something deep in the tangle of its dying mind, something that didn't want to taste a child's grief, a mother's death, a love so sharp it bled. For a moment, its eyes cleared. The flickering stopped. It looked at Eira with something that was almost lucid.
Then it turned, and began to walk north.
Away from the village. Away from the survivors. Toward the high passes, where the snow never melted and the oldest things slept. It was still muttering, but now the words were different.
"...I remember... I remember... the covenant... I remember... but it is eating me..."
The ground stopped shaking.
The silence that followed was worse than the noise. It was the silence of twenty-three dead. The silence of crushed longhouses and shattered bodies and a god-post snapped in half. The silence of a village that had been there at dawn and was now a graveyard.
Eira fell to her knees in the bloodied snow, clutching her brother and the obsidian knife. Her left palm was still bleeding, hot and red, dripping onto Aren's hair. She watched the Lament's shape grow smaller against the white peaks, a mountain walking away from everything it had protected, everything it had loved, everything it had just destroyed.
Aren was still sobbing. She held him tighter. Her body was shaking now, the adrenaline fading, the cold seeping in. She was alive. She was fucking alive. She didn't know why.
Around her, the survivors were creeping back. Some were crying. Some were staring at her with something that looked like awe or terror or both. She didn't care. She couldn't care. She was empty, hollowed out, the memory of her mother's death still burning in her chest like a fresh wound. She'd given it, but it hadn't been taken. The Lament had rejected it. Or fled from it. Or both.
She didn't know what that meant. She didn't know anything except that her hand was bleeding and her brother was alive and half the village was dead.
She didn't know how long she stayed there. Long enough for her father to find her and pull her upright, his face wet with tears and relief and something that might have been pride or might have been terror.
"You stupid, brave girl," he said. His voice was raw, scraped out. "You stupid, brave, fucking stupid girl."
"I gave it my worst memory," she said. Her voice felt foreign in her throat, like it belonged to someone else. "It didn't like the taste."
Her father stared at her. Then he pulled her into his arms, and she let him, and for a moment she was six years old again, holding a newborn and a dead mother, and the world was ending.
It was still ending. But she was still here.
The messenger came at dawn.
He rode up from the south on a horse that was lathered and blowing, its flanks bloody from a hard ride. The man wore the grey wolfskin cloak of the High Council's messengers, and his face was hollow with exhaustion. He took one look at the shattered village, the broken god-post, the bodies laid out in rows on the common ground with cloths over their faces because there weren't enough blankets to cover them all, and his expression didn't change. He'd seen worse, Eira realised. Or he'd seen enough that worse was just more of the same.
"The Lament," he said. Not a question.
"Gone north," Eira's father said. He hadn't slept. None of them had. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his hands were crusted with dried blood from pulling bodies out of the wreckage. "Sick. Mad. It killed twenty-three of us before my daughter drove it back."
The messenger looked at Eira. She was sitting on a broken beam, her bandaged hand in her lap, Aren asleep against her shoulder. The boy had finally stopped crying, finally stopped shaking, finally slipped into an exhausted sleep that was more like unconsciousness. She met the messenger's eyes and didn't look away.
"You're the one," he said. "You wounded it."
"I gave it a memory. It didn't like the taste."
The messenger was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his cloak and pulled out a scroll, sealed with the black wax of the Council of Nine.
"You need to come with me," he said. "The Lament isn't the only one. Six gods have gone mad in the last two moons. The leviathan of the Deep Roads turned on the fishing fleet and drowned a hundred souls. The Elk of Hoarfrost walked through the walls of Thornwood Hold and spoke a single word that killed everyone who heard it—men, women, children, fucking livestock. The small gods—the river-spirits, the cairn-wardens, the tree-watchers—they're forgetting too. Faster than the great ones. Some of them are already dead. Some of them are worse than dead."
He held out the scroll.
"The Council is calling every god-speaker, every memory-keeper, every survivor who's made contact with a sickened god. Because we think it's spreading to us now. The plague. The forgetting. We think it's in the fucking air, or the water, or the tithes themselves."
Eira stared at him. The world tilted. Her hand throbbed. Somewhere in the north, a god that had been a protector was wandering into the ice, trying to remember its name while something ate it from the inside out.
She took the scroll. Her fingers left a smear of blood on the wax seal.
"Tell the Council," she said, "that I need a horse. And supplies. And someone who can explain to me what the fuck is happening to the gods."
The messenger blinked. Then, slowly, a smile cracked his hollow face. It wasn't a pleasant smile. It was the smile of a man who'd seen too much and was grateful to find someone else who spoke his language.
"I think," he said, "that you and the Prince are going to get along."
Eira didn't know who the Prince was. She didn't care. She was looking at the broken god-post, the crushed longhouses, the bodies in the snow. Something had killed her cousin and sent her home with flowers. Something had driven a god mad and sent it screaming into the mountains. Something was eating the covenant from the inside, and whatever it was, it wasn't finished.
She tightened her grip on the obsidian knife. The wound on her palm pulled, and fresh blood welled up through the bandage.
"Then let's go," she said. "Before another god decides to visit."
The wind rose. The Lament's distant shape had vanished into the white. And in the silence, Eira could almost hear the memory it had left behind—a fragment of an ancient voice, spoken long before the covenant, when the gods were not gods but something older and far less kind.
...the cold was the first word, and the cold will be the last...10Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡhUqQuGlF8y
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