Morrighan - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,3

and always.

I loaded my sack and rode farther south, looking for her camp. They had no horses—we made sure of that. She couldn’t be staying far from the pond, but there was no sign of her.

“Morrighan,” I whispered, testing the feel of it on my tongue. “Mor-uh-gon.”

Harik didn’t even know my name, called me something different each time he visited. But he knew hers. Why would the greatest warrior of the land know the name of a thin, weak girl? Especially one of them.

When I found her, I would make her tell me. And then I would hold my knife to her throat until she cried and begged for me to let her go. Just like Fergus and Steffan did with the tribespeople who hid food from us.

From a hilltop, I looked across the valleys, empty except for the wind waving a few grasses.

The girl hid well. I did not find her again for four more years.

Chapter Four

Morrighan

“Here,” Pata said. “This is a good place.”

A twisted path had brought us there, one not easily followed, a path that I had helped find, the knowing taking root in me and growing stronger.

Ama eyed the thicket of trees. She eyed the jumble of potential shelters. She eyed the hills and stony bluffs that hid us from view. But mostly I saw her eyeing the tribe. They were tired. They were hungry. They mourned. Rhiann had died at the hands of a scavenger when she refused to let go of a baby goat in her arms.

Ama looked back at the small vale and nodded. I could hear the tribe’s heartbeat as well as she could. Its rhythm was weak. It ached.

“Here,” Ama agreed, and the tribe laid down their packs.

I surveyed our new home, if you could call it that. The structures were dangerous, mostly made of wood and in ruin from neglect, the passage of decades, and of course from the great storm. They would collapse at any time—most already had—but we could make our own lean-tos from the scraps. We could make a place to stay that might last more than a few days. Moving on was all I had ever known, but I knew there had been a time when people stayed, a time when you could belong to one place forever. Ama had told me so, and sometimes I dreamed myself there. I dreamed myself to places I had never seen, to glass towers crowned by clouds, to sprawling orchards heavy with red fruit, to warm, soft beds surrounded by curtained windows.

These were the places that Ama described in her stories, places where all the children of the tribe would be princes and princesses and their stomachs always full. It was a once-upon-a-time world that used to be.

In the last month since Rhiann’s death, we had never stayed anywhere for more than a day or two. Bands of scavengers had run us off after taking our food. The encounter with Rhiann had been the worst. Since then we’d been walking for weeks, gathering little along the way. The south had proved no safer than the north, and to the east, Harik ruled, his reach and reign growing every day. To the west over the mountains, the sickness of the storm still lingered, and beyond that, wild creatures roamed freely. Like us, they were hungry and preyed on anyone foolish enough to range there. At least, that is what I was told—no one I knew had crossed the barren mountains. We were hemmed in on all sides, always looking for a small hidden corner to settle. At least we had each other. We knit closer to fill the hole Rhiann had left.

And the hole Venda had left too. I was six was she went away. Pata said she was sick with storm dust. Oni said she was curious, making the word sound like an illness. Ama said she was stolen, and the other miadres agreed.

We set about making a camp. Hopes were high. This small vale felt right. No one would venture here, and there was ample water nearby. Oni reported there was a meadow of maygrass just over the knoll, and she spotted a grove of oak beyond that.

Altogether there were nineteen of us. Eleven women, three men, and five children. I was the oldest of the children by three years. I remember that spring I felt distanced from the rest. Their play annoyed me. I knew I was on the brink of something different, but with all the