Morrighan - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,2

the pond anymore. That it is his pond now. And then he left with a sack of corms.”

Her face hardened. I knew what she was thinking—they take it all—and it was true. They did. Just when we had settled on the far side of a valley, or meadow, or among the abandoned shelters, they would come upon us, stealing and sowing terror in their path. I was angry with myself now for showing Jafir how to loosen the tubers. We owed the scavengers nothing when they had taken so much from us.

“Was it always so, Ama? Wouldn’t they be part of the Remnant too?”

“There are two kinds who survive, those who persevere and those who prey.”

She scanned the horizon, and her chest rose in a weary breath. “Come, help me collect the beans. Tomorrow we leave for a new valley. A far one.”

There were no valleys far enough from their kind. They sprouted as freely as burrs in the meadow grass.

Nedra, Oni, and Pata grumbled but said nothing more. They deferred to Ama because she was the oldest and the head of our tribe, the only one among us who remembered Before. Besides, we were used to moving on and searching for a peaceful valley of plenty. Somewhere there had to be one. Ama had told us so. She had seen it with her own eyes when she was a child, before the foundation of the earth was shaken and before the stars fell from the sky. Somewhere there had to be a place where we were safe from them.

Chapter Three

Jafir

I wiped the blood running from my nose. I knew better than to draw my knife—but I would not always be a head shorter than Steffan. He seemed to know this too. The back of his hand came less frequently these days.

“You were gone all day, and you only have a bag of weeds to show for it?” he shouted.

Piers puffed on his pipe, gloating over Steffan’s display. “It is more than I see dangling from your hand.”

The others laughed, hoping the insult would escalate Steffan’s wrath into a brawl, but he only waved away Piers’s remark with disgust. “I can’t bring home a suckling pig every day. We must all contribute things of worth.”

“You stole the pig. Five minutes of effort,” Piers countered.

“What is your point, old man? It filled your stomach, didn’t it?”

Liam snorted. “It didn’t fill mine. You should have stolen two.”

Fergus threw a rock, telling them all to shut up. He was hungry.

So it went every night, our camp always on the edge of hot words and fists, but our strength came from each other too. We were strong. No one crossed us for fear of consequence. We had horses. We had weapons. We had earned the right to cut others down.

Laurida waved me over, and I dumped out my bag. We both began cutting off the tender corms, then peeling the tougher stalks. I had known she would be pleased. She favored the green shoots, frying them up in pig fat, and ground the larger stalks into flour. Bread was a rarity for us—unless it was stolen too.

“Where did you find them?” Laurida asked.

I looked at her, startled. “Find what?”

“These,” she said, holding up a handful of the cut stalks. “What’s the matter with you? Did the sun fry your brain?”

The stalks. Of course. That was all she meant. “A pond. What difference does it make?” I snapped back.

She hit me on the side of the head, then leaned closer, examining my bloodied nose. “He’ll break it one of these days,” she growled. “For the better. You’re too pretty anyway.”

The pond was already forgotten. I could not tell them that the girl had found me at the pond today, stalked me, fallen upon me without warning, rather than the other way around. I would suffer more than a bloody nose. It was shameful to be taken by surprise, especially by one of them. Their kind was stupid. Slow. Weak. The girl had even revealed her stupidity when she showed me how to take her food.

The next day I went back to the pond, but this time I hid behind some rocks, waiting for her to come. After an hour, I waded into the rushes to harvest the stalks, thinking that might lure her out. It didn’t. Maybe she wasn’t as stupid as the rest. Maybe she had actually listened to my warning. Yes, Jafir had frightened her. It was my pond now. Jafir’s pond, forever