Category: Person

She struck my knuckles with the flat of her blade and my small hand sprung open in pain, but I bit into my tongue to stifle the cry. I had long since learned not to cry out in pain, not when my mother was there.

“You stupid little fool,” she said through clenched teeth, pointing at my dropped sword with the tip of hers. “Your father really didn’t teach you a single gods damned thing, did he? Pick it up!”

***

Balthazar sat back in his seat, his hat sparkling—it had changed since last I saw him, though the wound on his face had remained the same since I had tore at it with my fingernails. He didn’t seem to hold it against me. He assessed me in a way that made me shift in my seat—uneasy but somehow pleased—and look away. “You are more intelligent than you let people know.”

No, I thought. You are wrong.

***

I rushed into the house to where my father’s body had fallen, the life rushing out of him in a red fountain he tried to stay with his hands. Even those large, rough hands were not strong enough to hold back the tide. There were tears in my eyes and a scream on my tongue.

Before I could get to him, my mother spun and backhanded me. “Don’t come in here screaming your weakness,” she shouted while I fell and tasted blood. “He failed me. He failed us. He left you weak. Now will you stay weak and sniveling or get back on your feet like a proper fighter?”

***

“You would like sharks. They have lots of teeth.” Jehanne, strange little creature that she was, beamed up at me from her seat. She was clad in yellow, her mismatched eyes seeming hyper focused on my face, her own smile full of sharp white teeth. “And they’re very tough. Like you!”

What does she want from me?

***

I reached out for her—I can no longer remember why, some message I had for her probably, just trying to get her attention. When my fingers settled on her shoulder, she turned. When she saw me, her lip curled like a snarling dog. She slapped my hand away and stood from her seat in the mead hall, pushing me away from her in front of the entire clan. Making my face burn red with humiliation.

“What do you want?” she barked, and I snarled in response.

***

“You should picnic with us!” Florence said with a quirk of her eyebrow and twitch of her eye that might almost have been a wink. She reached into her basket, lifting out a bottle to waggle it at me, and I wondered if she might have already helped herself to a bottle. “We have wine!”

But why? What can I bring to this?

***

Sitting by the fireside, bandaged and still bleeding, barely conscious, my eyes followed my mother as she paced back and forth. Her fists clenching and unclenching at her sides.

“My daughter is a weakling and a curr.” She wasn’t even shouting it, only muttering. Not looking at me. Refusing to look at me. “The shame of the Thrymsfrost. Runt of litter. How can this—” She gestured at me, who had risen from an attack that should have left me dead, who had walked home, but not before slitting the throat of the man who would have seen me dead. “—be born of my loins?”

***

“Undying!” I recognized the joviality in Bjorn’s voice before I ever set eyes on his face and his wide, manic-eyed smile. Setting my eyes on him coming at me like a bear with outstretched arms, I felt a halting wash of…relief, and softness in my heart. I hesitated, but found myself incapable of recoiling. “Friend!”

He has been among the southerners too long.

***

When she slapped me and I tasted blood, I thought, I do not understand. I won this fight. I defeated him. I won. But I did not kill him, only humiliated him, so she hit me. Hard. And again. And again. Harder.

“You defeat a man, but you do not kill him?” Strike. “What weakness did I leave in you that you would let survive a man you had defeated?” With a fist now. “What weakness in you?” She shoved me away and drew her sword. “You fight me now.”

I remembered when I was twelve and first so gravely disappointed her. I remembered her killing my father. My head was ringing but I rushed at her, every strike and curse bellowing out of me as I went—

She hit me on the side of the face with the flat of her blade as I had hit the man who challenged me. She kicked me, then she pummeled me. She was upon me, punching me, her fists pummeling my face until I was aware only of the thrumming pain and the taste of blood. The world was a gray and pink blur, and the ice was brittle in my bones.

Eventually it was over, and I a ruined, bloody, broken mess.

***

“You are fascinating, and you are beautiful!” He shouted it at me after he slipped behind me in our duel, as difficult to get hold of as the wind, and put a knife to my throat—after he took me down to the ground and held me there, the sharp blade nibbling a slow cut into my throat while I looked up at him with all his feathers and shimmering stones and mad, blue eyes. “I want to know you more, Freydis—do you accept my courtship?”

He is mad, I thought. He is absolutely mad. But the knife? There is a certain comfort in a knife.

These southern lands are strange—with their formalities, their caution, their thin skins, their lion god. They are suspicious of me, following me with eyes that are wary and uncertain—though a few rare seem drawn to me. That Walt, half a mute that he is, inviting me to join his Black Jacks, for one. And this one—this man I’m watching now, though my eyes are more incredulous today than they were yesterday. It is a surprise to even think I may have found a spirit kindred to my own in this place—kindred of a sorts. A spirit so strange and bird-like. Feathers and all.
Stranger still that I might be so intrigued by a bird.
To watch him walk today, however, he no longer seems a bird. Feathers gone, feet no longer such wings moving him to and fro, today he moves slowly, hunched, a dreary look in his eyes—dreary, not dread. I suppose this is an improvement from last night.
Though last night he was no bird, either. Last night he was resigned dread. How he stared at the ruined flesh of his arm while his own fresh blood still clung in the stubble on his cheek. No bird was he any longer, though his words were as wind. I only listened, and ground my teeth, and picked at the rough edges of my mace.
And pondered.
This Stragosa is a strange place, with its ruins and its Miracle and its monsters. I have been assured that these things are connected, though how? I am as intrigued by this stone that resurrects the dead as I am by this Balthazar, though I do not know how I will learn more about it. Of this bird, however, this Balthazar…
He has promised to test his mettle against mine. Today, he looks in no shape for such a testing. I chew my hard bread and drink my wine while he speaks with some mage about the disease he contracted during the attack last night.
Last night with all its monsters. How he’d rushed without armor and but one blade into the beasts—an attempt at suicide if I’ve ever seen one. And a brilliant one at that. No bird then, but still something wild, perhaps something…rabid. The kind of thing that, when cornered, becomes all claws and ravening teeth. But oh, how he bled on that floor, while I turned away and gathered my mace for the fight.
I would have eaten his heart first, for he did promise me his corpse.
When he was a bird.
Yesterday.
Was it truly so recent?
Oh how his eyes lit up when I told him of how I’d earned my name at the bottom of a glacial crevasse, rending the flesh of my human enemy from his bones with my teeth. When I showed him the skull I kept as a token, and he touched it very lightly with the tips of his fingers and said, “Marvelous.” He had leaned toward that skull with eyes sharp and focused, lips slightly parted—like it were some long-dreamed of treat, finally laid before him.
And when he leaned back and put his fingers over his mouth, eyes gleaming as he assessed me, I delighted in his delight. In his musing fingers over his mouth.
“Should I die,” he said, leaning toward me, “I would be honored for you to eat my corpse.”
I smiled. Should he die, I would lay his body out and peel his skin back from the muscle beneath. I would make gentle work of it, and savor the last remnant of his scent off the nape of his neck. I would do it while the blood was still hot in his veins so that it would slip warm over my fingers. And I would take the flesh from his bones with care—but not before I reached into the hollow of his chest and wrested free his heart.
His heart I would eat first.
“I would be happy to make a feast of your flesh,” I told him, and watched his features alight once more.
It was not much after that—mere stories of sharks and werewolves later—that another of the Jacks, whom I had only seen in passing before, stopped to introduce herself. She carried with her a bouquet of blue roses—more strangeness of Stragosa I assume—and she offered one to Balthazar.
“Instead of Tresser Tag,” she said, “I have been offering these flowers. But—” She withdrew it quickly before Balthazar could take it. “This is only as a friend, Balthazar.”
“Of course,” he said, spreading his hands. “And what a good friend to me you are, Florence.”
Bestowing the flower upon him, she turned then to me. “I am Florence. I do not believe we have met.”
“We have not. I am Freydis the Undying.”
“The Undying?”
“It is a fantastic story,” Balthazar said.
“You will have to tell me sometime.” Florence looked on me with a bright gleam in her eye. I already like her. We would make good friends someday soon, I could tell.
“Perhaps I shall.” I nodded to her, but said no more.
“Would you mind,” Balthazar asked, gesturing with long fingers to the blue roses, “if I might have another? So I may give it to a friend—and then! You can keep watch for it, see if you can spot it.”
Florence had a beautiful smile. She gave Balthazar the flower before saying her farewells, and once she had slipped away Balthazar leaned toward me once more, offering me the flower. “If you would,” he said. I have never been offered a flower before. I have never been offered…well, anything but knives in the back. Or the stomach. And fists to the face.
So I took it, and found the smile on my face as strange as the rest of this place.
The flower is on my belt now—two blue flowers, side by side—while I watch Balzathar move about the tavern like a de-winged bird. Sagging toward the floor. When he spots me I look away.
I had thought to be interested in the man, but last night…
Last night when his eyes could focus on nothing and his voice moved like a breeze through the air. Speaking of this sister of his.
A wretched bitch she sounds, like someone who could make trouble in the future. For Balthazar clearly, for myself, for the Jacks. She sounds like someone who must be put down.
Where I might find this sister of his though, I have no idea. I have only just arrived to Stragosa, and only just begun to learn of the strangeness here. It may take some time to learn enough of the sister to track her down, let alone to put her down, and besides…there are so many things here yet to be explored.
For a moment last night, I had thought of simply putting him out of his misery. His suffering was so great, I could feel it like spilled acid on my skin. By the looks of her, Florence could feel it, too—while she looked away from him and drank her wine, and he spoke of not even knowing if he was real, or just a figment dreamed up to be played with by his sister.
And the man had wanted to die. Rushing into battle without armor. It would have been easy enough to go to him where he laid in his bed. To sit beside him and say farewell to whatever possibilities he might have offered and slit his throat so that he could be done with it. I wonder what Walt would have thought. What Florence would have thought.
I take another bite of the hard bread as Balthazar eases himself into a seat at the table, moving as though every bone within him aches. “Good morning,” he says. His voice sounds more solid than it had last night, though rough around the edges. Not drifting like the clouds, but…rattling. Like the leaves in the trees.
“How are you feeling?”
“Better,” he said. “I still…need to have this—this disease, tended to, but…I feel quite a bit better than last night.”
Good. It is good that he is recovering, and quickly. It seems, at least. It is yet to be seen, I suppose, what strength still lingers within. “Tell me of this sister of yours.”
He is quiet a moment. I am unsure if this quiet is hesitancy, or if it’s a careful choosing of words. When he finally did speak, he told me of his sister—his twin, who was trained in the same arts as he, who never came to him himself but sent mind-controlled people to him instead. “Meat puppets,” he called them. The phrase made my spine feel as though it were full of worms. I assessed him again while he spoke.
Air mage. I still not quite understand what that meant. I still was not sure that I wanted to.
“She is powerful,” he says. “She’s the most powerful person I know.”
He said it as though she has no weakness. But even the most powerful of people have weaknesses. They have only to be uncovered.
“And what do you plan to do about it?” I asked.
A frown passes over his face. “There is nothing that can be done—”
“She must die.”
Balthazar withdraws—the smallest of motions—and the frown on his face deepens. “She is more powerful than me, and—and her mind, it is connected to my own. She can hear what I think, and I can hear what she thinks. It doesn’t happen as frequently as it once did, but it does still happen. Anything I plan against her, if I even think about it, she’ll know. And, besides—” He shakes his head as though disgusted. He would not be the first to be disgusted by me. I only met the man yesterday, so I grit my teeth refuse to care. “—she is my twin sister. I will not kill my twin sister.”
A fire flares in me. I refuse to have been tempted to be interested in a man whose spine so easily bends.
I refuse.
“Tell me,” I say through my teeth and a curling sneer. “Are you a weak man, Balthazar?”
His body goes rigid, and for a moment he stares into his breakfast. When he lifts his eyes, they are dark. His mouth—smiling so fiercely yesterday—is set in a hard line. His jaw is tense, his shoulders stiff. With barely parted lips, through gritted teeth he says, “I am not weak.”
Good.
I lean closer and stand, my body bending over and toward him as I snarl: “Then make your choice, Balthazar. You, or her. I am going to make sacrifice. You make your choice.”
Before he can voice a word to break in, I leave, bringing my unfinished breakfast with me. I throw wide the door and let myself into the chill and the snow. The sound of it crunching beneath my boots brings me peace. I close my eyes, I breathe in the cold and breathe out mist.
My fingers pluck the blue flower from my belt. I lift it as I turn toward the forest. I eye it while I walk, but only for a moment before I press it into my pocket.
I will not have been tempted into being intrigued by a weak man.