Morrighan - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,14

even remember that he was my father.

They did not fight back. It sickened me how easily their food was taken. It was a small tribe, only about nine, but none defended their ground. An iron poker lay near their fire, a knife on a rough wooden table, rocks at their feet, but none lifted a hand toward us. Fight back, I wanted to say, but I knew if they did, we would cut them down. Not all of them, but enough to send the message. Do not fight us. We are hungry like you, and we deserve this food as much as you, even if it was gathered by your hand. It had always made sense to me before, but now the words seemed jumbled, different, as if they had been rearranged.

It is them or us. The whisper was faint now, and I wondered if I had ever heard it at all. I couldn’t remember her face anymore, not even the color of her hair, but I still felt my mother’s lips against my ear, warm, sickly, the sour smell of death on them, whispering the ways of the clan. The tribes have a knowing about them, a way of conjuring food from the dry grasses of the hills. As the gods have blessed them, so should they bless us.

I tied a sack of acorns to the back of my horse, while the rest of the clan pillaged or brandished their weapons as warning. I kept my gaze down, concentrating on tightening the rope, avoiding looking at any of them, but I couldn’t ignore the whimpers of a few. These acorns, gathered by another hand, were no blessing to me, and the bile rose in my throat. My father’s scorn surfaced again. What’s the matter with you?

Steffan eyed a girl cowering behind the older women of the tribe.

“Come here,” he called to her.

She shook her head wildly, her wide eyes glistening. The women pulled closer, shoulder to shoulder.

“Come!” he yelled.

“We’re finished here,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Leave the girl alone.”

“Stay out of it, Jafir!” he yelled. He threw off my arm, advancing toward her, but Piers stepped into his path.

“As your brother said, we are done.” Steffan had come to blows with Piers before, but Fergus, Liam, and Reeve were already riding off. The others were also mounting their horses to leave.

Steffan glared at the girl. “I’ll be back,” he warned, and left with the rest of us.

We traveled swiftly over the grasslands and hills back to camp, and with each mile, my anger grew. Fight back. Conflicting words pounded in my head. Them or us.

By the time we got to camp, only one thing was certain to me.

I would never ride with them again.

I would see my kin starve first.

I returned to the raided camp the next day, alone, with two peafowl that had taken me all day to hunt down. All that remained of their camp were the cold ashes of a fire and scattered scraps left behind in haste.

The tribe had moved on to someplace where we wouldn’t find them again, and I was glad to see them gone.

* * *

Our clan from the north arrived the next day. Fergus had told them to come. Liam was angry. Their numbers were greater than ours, but most were women and children. Mouths that would need to be fed. While we had eight strong men in our clan of eleven, they only had four in their clan of sixteen.

“They are our kin,” Fergus argued. “The numbers will make us strong. Look at Harik the Great. His kinsmen number in the hundreds—that means power. He could squash us all in one fist. The only way our clan will be as great is if our sons have wives and our numbers grow.”

Liam argued there was barely enough food in the hills to feed our own.

“Then we will find new hills.”

I looked at the children huddled together, too afraid to speak, their eyes circled with hunger and days of walking. Laurida poured water into the kettle over the fire to make the stew stretch and then added two large handfuls of the salted meat we had stolen from the tribe. The mother of one of the children began to cry. The sound cut through me, strangely familiar—them or us—and for a fleeting moment, I was glad for what we had stolen.

The evening passed, prickly and uncomfortable, the children eating quietly, the heated words between Liam and Fergus weighing on the rest,