Before she died, my mother pinned a new verse to the family song, which caused some consternation among the elders who were left. No one had added anything new for several generations; we’d been able to pass the song off as complete at the choral inspections, during which each extant line of the song had been evaluated and deemed sufficiently unthreatening. Some families hadn’t been so lucky: the inquisitors had hung them in the square, letting the verses die with the throats that had built them.
For three generations our song had remained unchanged. We had verses for growing, for mending, for breaking fever. We had the cleansing verse and the birdcall verse, and far back, sung down through the decades, we had the oldest verse my mother could remember. From before our village had existed, from when our people hadn’t grown anything at all but instead had fished and followed the river along the wheel of seasons, we knew the words for finding running water.
But my mother had bubbled over with rage, dying in our house with the inquisitor spear deep in her gut. She had been raiding the storehouses on the mountainside, where the citadel stored our tithe through the cold seasons while children went hungry in the river villages and in the low-roofed homes of the vale. The inquisitors had caught wind and the patrol sent her running in the dark, bleeding her insides out across the bracken until she tumbled into the water and let it carry her home to die.
Maybe she sang the oldest verse on the mountainside and let it guide her to the river. Whatever she must have been thinking of as she drifted on the current, it solidified in her chest, took shape, word, melody. By the mournful firelight she sang a new verse with blood in her mouth and pinned it to the song with one last furious breath.
Va, as the oldest, inherited the song. In the morning I watched the elders take my sister aside and make her promise to never sing the last verse. To let no whisper reach the inquisitors that our family’s song contained anything new. Inside the house, people were wrapping my mother’s body for burial rites. I sat on the doorstep and pretended not to hear when they asked if I wanted to help. I was frightened of seeing my mother again with all the light gone out of her. I wanted to remember her as she had been by firelight: furious, fearsome, fighting with failing lungs to hold each note true.
Two years ago when the citadel sent the first of its battalions—the armored mountain snakes as thick around as the trunks of the oldest trees, the wind walker scouts at the flank, the inquisitors in phalanxes bringing up the rear—our village put up what defenses it could. You can imagine how the battle went, us armed with hunting tools and river pebble shot, the scant few families bearing battlesong cut down swiftly at the front. As punishment for this insolence, the first tithe levied by the citadel was a heavy one; even with many families carrying growing and foraging verses, the winter brought starvation and sickness. My father’s parents died of lung infections that winter. His sister Yenna, their oldest, carried her mother’s song for a single fortnight before red fever took her, too virulent and strong to be sung out of the blood, though my father sat up night after night and my mother’s voice rasped in her throat as she tried to sway the tilt of probability in Auntie Yenna’s favor.
After our mother died, Va sang of growing to the seeds we had buried in the cold earth, bending luck into strong roots, in hopes of a good harvest that year. She sang of mending to my mother’s grave, though the song could not fix the hole in the world that the grave represented. Together she and I collected the dandelions and wood sorrel that put forth shy leaves as spring thawed the frozen forest floor. Together we sang the birdcall verse and river verse as we worked, so that we’d both keep the words alive, though the magic only worked for Va.
I made up my own spells, in those days. On the mornings our father had to be coaxed out of bed by watered-down tea and Va’s pleading, I hunted in the soft leaf litter for millipedes to fill my pockets. Weighed down thus, I believed it would be harder for sorrow to blow me downstream. Hauling water from the river with the other children, I paused to throw dust behind us in case there were wind walkers on our tail, invisible but for the shadows of their feet like the spots of darkness cast by water striders. On the worst nights, I woke from bad dreams and confused Va’s body in the bed beside me for the body of our mother, whose hands had been strong and scarred and whose voice had chased away nightmares. In the dark I would touch my wet face and use my fingertips to smear runes onto the skin of my chest, imagining they would help her ghost recognize me if she came back while I slept. But on those nights there was no magic I could invent that was enough.
I thought, often and angrily, of what I would do if I had Va’s magic. When the inquisitors came to collect their tithe, the forbidden verse jammed itself against the backs of my teeth and I pretended I had the power to tease out one deadly thread of possibility from the fabric of the breathing universe. I imagined the sticks on the path leaping up to trip them so that they would fall on their own weapons; I imagined the blood clotting in their veins; I imagined I only held back out of the knowledge that I alone could not defeat them all.
Autumn came swift and cold that year, and the citadel’s third yearly tithe had not been much lighter than the first two. The elders surveyed our remaining stores and frowned in disquiet. More would yet starve this winter, we all knew. The citadel had burnt enough homes, and whipped enough people at sundown, that we no longer raided their storehouses. No one dared speak openly of the injustice of it, for fear of the wind walkers who spied on us in our own streets, but there was resentment in the air. It simmered through the nights and coated the paths like dew when I rose in the mornings, like an invisible current building up strength to sweep us all downhill.
Va said not to worry, and to stop filling my pockets with millipedes. Said, with the usual stern furrow in her brow, that the citadel did not want us to die of starvation. They relied on our folk to oil the gears of the great war they were conducting across the mountains; they needed our hands for gathering the nuts and roots, and setting the fish traps downstream, and keeping their stores fat with harvest to feed their soldiers. But I worried all the same, whispering my fears into the slashed bark of the blackthorns and hoping they would dissolve by spring.
Where I thought only of vengeance and battle, imagining charms I could cast to unmake my enemies, Va concerned herself with survival. She kept her pockets free of fancies, leaving room to gather a handful of early hazelnuts, a few stalks of yarrow, a shard of flint to replace an old fishing knife. Though she told me not to worry, I often saw that furrow reappear in her brow as she watched our father toss in his nightmare-laced sleep, or when she sorted our stores and counted out meals on her fingers. No tree I whispered against could keep Va from chewing her bottom lip when the inquisitors passed, or halting a harmless verse midword when dappled sunlight seemed to suggest the step-shadows of a wind walker.
I told myself that Va was concerned with the wrong things. She’d taken the elders’ advice to heart, so of course she feared the citadel’s hand; of course she disapproved of my pretend spells. She had the verses of our mother, the power of our family’s song. She had generations of magic flowing through her breath like the river current.
“What if you used it?” I whispered to her in the dead of night as we lay side by side. I was thinking of our cousin Trai, who thought himself grown ever since Auntie Yenna had died, and who had petitioned the elders bitterly for the right to join the storehouse raids before they ended.
“Don’t be silly,” she murmured, half-asleep already. “You know our battlesongs weren’t enough, and we had too few even then. The citadel’s magic was made for war. Ours isn’t.”
“They were expecting it then,” I argued. “They think we only have magic for fishing and gardening now. They think it’s harmless.”
“It is harmless. If we were a warring people, don’t you think we’d sing new verses as easily as knapping a knife? The songs give us what we need to survive, but in their own time. We aren’t like the citadel, wielding magic like we own it, like it answers to us.”
“Maybe we should ask the songs for more,” I said, stung by what lay unspoken—the implication that my play-spells were arrogant, that I was like the citadel, believing I could fashion magic to my own ends instead of adapting to what the world offered.
“It took our mother dying for her to be able to pin the new verse. The first one in three generations. And if they knew what she’d done they would kill me, kill you, kill our father. Is that what you want?”
“Mother fought,” I said. “She fought hard enough to pin the new verse, and she left it for you to carry.”
“Yes,” said Va, “and I wish we had her, instead of the verse,” and she rolled onto her side and pretended to sleep.
Autumn rolled ever onward toward what promised to be a bitter winter. We foraged whenever we could, gathering roots to be dried, and the remaining brittle greens of summer to eat immediately. That day Va and I were harvesting with a large group; Trai accompanied us with several of his own friends, most of them disgruntled to be overseeing younger children.
The sky was heavy with rain, the cold gray clouds pressing down upon us as if to flatten tree and person alike. I stayed close to Va as she picked the last pockmarked sloe plums from the blackthorn thickets as we passed. I kept glimpsing familiar trees in which I had already planted my worry. A fool’s move, my thoughtless spellwork. I should have kept my fears in my own chest, where they could not hurt anyone else. Instead the trees hemmed us in, so when we heard the voices of a citadel phalanx, we couldn’t scatter.
The inquisitors came down the mountainside not in full battle formation but in the casual, predatory saunter of a patrol: half a dozen of them, and two of the mountain snakes, whose huge armored bodies shunted aside the thorned branches of the thicket as they pushed through. With the sun hidden, we couldn’t see the wind walker shadows, but the citadel always sent a few with its patrols.
The lead inquisitor’s helmet was wrought in the shape of a lion roaring; the mane flowed like molten metal down to his shoulders. When he shouted at Trai and Va about rot in the storehouses, when he accused us of poisoning the tithes, I counted the ravens hunched in the surrounding branches. I told myself an even number meant we would not be harmed, meant nothing bad would happen to us. I had nearly finished the count when one of the inquisitors lost his temper and threw Va to the ground.
I lost count; I lost count of everything; I heard the crack of her head striking rock, a sound that pinned itself to the inside of my skull. There was winter cold running through all my limbs. I knew I’d carry that sound all the rest of my life.
I ran to Va as the inquisitor stepped away, wiping his hands on his thighs. I dropped to my knees and clutched her small cold-bitten hand in mine. There was blood on the rock where her skull had struck it—but still her chest rose and fell, rose and fell.
The lead inquisitor shoved back the one who had grabbed Va, growling something about idiocy, about the river folk being a powder keg as it was. I barely heard through the whine in my head, a cicada sound of grief and horror. I pulled on Va’s sleeve, willing her eyes to open, but we had no verse to mend this. All my worthless invented magics amounted to nothing. Was this what my mother had felt, dying in her bed with the wound in her gut? Helpless anger, anger with nowhere to go but the lungs, the throat, fastening its jaws to the tail of the song and fledging itself into verse?
My mother had burnt incandescent with fury, but had she been so different from the other parents who raided supply lines and suffered cold nights and softly seethed against the weight of the citadel across our shoulders? Was she so different from Trai watching fever take his mother, my Auntie Yenna whose song had only carved wood and bloomed violets? A hundred years ago our people had followed the river through young forest and new stone, and our songs had given us the verses we needed. Now, when what we needed was death, dealt on the tips of our tongues, why should it be any different?
The light shifted, not in the tear-blurred lens of my vision but somewhere inside me. I knew well enough how many of our people had raged in the aftermath of the citadel’s destruction—and what if the rage possessed form, weight, harmony? I thought of parents and children pinning new verses to their songs, each led to believe they were the only ones, each sworn to secrecy in turn. I thought of how I’d pretended to hold my mother’s song charged in my throat, restrained only because I was alone against many.
The elders’ faces had pinched with worry as they told Va what would happen to our family if anyone were to find out. I couldn’t blame them. They wanted us to survive, and maybe they had decided a slow death was the closest thing to survival we could get. Maybe they could imagine no path to victory. But I could imagine it. Imagination, for too long, had been all I had.
My mother, I thought, hadn’t been alone, and we weren’t either.
I squeezed Va’s hand. Then I squared my shoulders and I sang the killing verse.
The magic didn’t work for me, of course. Not while Va’s heart still beat. But the inquisitors didn’t know that, whipping around towards me in fear and fury. Beside the mountain snakes, tiny maelstroms of dead leaves leapt up as the wind walkers contorted their bodies to spring.
But Trai and his friends looked at me in shock, something flickering in their faces: a kind of wonder, a setting of the jaw. Trai’s basket of roots slipped from his hands, celeriac and nettle spilling across the earth.
The lead inquisitor pointed at me, marking me for death. His hand was gloved in fine silver mesh. The red gems set in his helmet’s lion eyes were burning their own kind of killing song, no music I knew.
Then Trai stepped forward and sang something. It was sharp and beautiful and vicious; it was nothing we had ever heard before. The words wrought direction into the ambient probabilities in the air around us and lightning leapt down from the sullen clouds. It struck the lead inquisitor and charred his scowl to ashes beneath the helmet’s maw.
One of Trai’s friends tackled him into the earth, taking a spear through the shoulder as several inquisitors fired at the space where Trai had just been standing. More lightning struck the earth in ionized flashes that sent the rest of the phalanx staggering back, clawing for balance.
An inquisitor dead—our lives were forfeit. An inquisitor dead—so they could still die, and at our word. That was all it took—the crystallization of imagination into truth, the sweeping current of it, carrying us forward—and then we were all singing.
I reached the end of the verse and began again, as loud as I could, past the fear and the wild plum stones sitting low in my belly. Someone was singing of bone breaking; someone else was singing of stopping a heart. Someone sang and the mountain snakes went mad, throwing their riders, lunging at the unarmored wind walkers, steel fangs swinging down from oiled hinges as they scented out their invisible quarry. Trai’s friend, the one with a spear through his shoulder, raised his voice clear and ringing as a struck bell, and the ravens took flight. They whirled around us in a great clawing gyre and the inquisitors ducked their helmets and pointed their spearguns skyward. Metal bolts flew over our heads, the shots going wide as the men of the citadel shouted in pain and confusion.
We didn’t know, I thought, my heart beating like a wing a bird has not yet realized is broken. All this time, each of us guarding a tiny lonely flame of fury, and we didn’t know. Now we fought in the glade of blackthorn and raven, we who had lost again and again, and our voices knotted together like the braided river itself.
I crouched beside Va, afraid that if I looked down I would see the puff of her last breath dissipating in the autumn air. If my sister died, if the song came to roost in me, I knew I would be unable to think of anything except for what it had cost. This was the weight that hunched Va’s back and creased her forehead. My sister had known our music would not survive if we did not survive. My mother had known too. Each time she risked her life she was risking the song of those who’d come before, but she’d raided the citadel’s outposts anyway. She had stolen back our harvest anyway, and died for it.
My mother had cursed the citadel by firelight and built our killing verse with blood in her mouth. At the time I’d thought she’d built it out of fury. I’d thought fury was all we had. But now I had Va’s hand in mine, and in my mouth the taste of the plums that she’d gathered painstakingly from each barren tree, because she wanted us to live.
The riderless mountain snakes thrashed away into the bracken; the men from the citadel bled their cruelty into the river-rinsed loam. I pressed Va’s knuckles against my chest. For once, I had nothing in my pockets, but I asked the world to shift the currents of what was possible, and give me what I needed more than magic.
The inquisitor who threw my sister had a dying raven in his fist. He crushed its neck and threw it to the earth. There was blood running down his face where his brow had been pierced by a beak, and when he saw me, his expression twisted with hatred. I thought, paralyzed, of spells I could perform tonight, to lock the memory of that face away where it could not haunt me. I could walk seven times around the cooking fire and he was turning toward me and I could burn an acorn till the shell blackened and split and the blood ran into his eyes and I could not move. I could not move.
“Witch-child,” he spat, his phalanx dying at his back. His speargun lifted and the bright diamond of its point winked at me, a slow flash in the pearly light. The inquisitor squeezed the trigger and I watched the speargun shatter. Some unseen mechanism jammed in its barrel and the force of the shot ricocheted back into the gun itself, sundering it apart, burying splinters of metal in his throat, his face, his eyes.
He fell, writhing and screaming, but I barely heard. All I heard was the whisper of Va’s voice, mirroring mine, our mother’s song on both our tongues, the killing verse dropping like river ice from Va’s mouth as her hand clasped mine tight.
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