S'aahiri

S’aahiri held Alana’s gaze, the question and abrupt change of subjects hanging in the air between them. She had never seen a gem quite like that before. Normally, that kind of thing wouldn’t have interested her in the slightest, but the way Alana had rushed to hide it away had put her on edge. What had she been doing with it—and, more importantly, why try to hide it from her?

“It was pretty,” she said, attempting to pretend Alana hadn’t near enough leaped out of her skin like a nervous fawn surprised by a loud noise.

“What?”

S’aahiri wasn’t quite ready to relent. “The jewel. I’ve seen nothing like it before. It’s… beautiful.” 

Alana’s strained smile, for the barest of moments, eased into a more wistful but genuine one. Her eyes, though, avoided S’aahiri’s as if eye-contact might burn her.

“Thank you. It was a gift from T’saamu. Since he passed, it has helped when things have been especially hard. It—” she paused, then shook her head before finishing quietly. “It makes things easier to bear.” 

As she spoke, her hand found its way inside her fur coat and Alana’s entire body sagged as though a great tension had finally been eased. 

“I can understand that,” S’aahiri said, “my mother’s dagger is the same for me. It’s like a part of her is with me, even now.”

Alana smiled at that, and this one seemed a genuine one, though her eyes still skirted around making eye contact with S’aahiri, settling for looking at the space beside her, as though S’aahiri was sitting a few feet to the left.

“Now,” Alana said, “what actually brings you here, S’aahiri. I would be happy to talk jewellery with you, but in nearly twenty years of knowing you and Mura, I’ve only ever convinced them, which makes me doubt you’re here for that.”

S’aahiri couldn’t help but snort. Alana certainly had tried. It was odd for one of the Su’roi to be overly interested in much of anything that wasn’t inherently useful for survival. Most folk had hobbies, or interests, of course. People needed an outlet for the demands that surviving in a place like this placed on you. 

Shi was an oddity in that he could read, and if he had done his work for the day, you’d not bet against the likelihood of finding him in some nook with some battered scroll or other T’saamu had brought back from Kuchisoto. Mura loved to work with plants; growing food, gathering herbs, and knowing all the strange, obscure names of the hundreds of hardy green plants that S’aahiri couldn’t tell the difference between.

Art was a popular pastime among the Su’roi, but most of all the painted hangings and roughly carved sculptures people made went to shrines and prayer-sites for everybody to use, or decorated homes so that their dwelling didn’t all feel like miserable wooden hovels. 

Not all of those things uses were immediately obvious, but S’aahiri had to concede that they all were. Jewellery and other finery was one interest she had just never found the value in. It just wasn’t useful. 

“Sorry,” she answered, smirking. “I’m not here to talk trinkets. I just came to see how you’re doing—you left awfully abruptly.”

Alana’s smile slipped, and her gaze dropped back to the floor with it.

“I know. It’s just hard to hear people talk about what T’aakshi was doing. The danger he’s in…”

S’aahiri grimaced. She knew that her own worry for her friend paled compared to the sheer dread his mother must be suffering through. There was little she could say in the way of reassurance, either. Alana’s son was walking headlong into the most danger he would ever face in his life. His odds of returning were… Not good. 

Her hand sought the soothing hilt of her mother’s dagger, the bone carved pommel smoothed by years of attention from her palm. Alana’s eyes followed the movement, and her expression softened in sympathy. S’aahiri’s cheeks grew hot—she was here to reassure Alana, not to be pitied by her.

“If anybody can do it—it’s Shi,” she blurted out, eager to distract Alana from her insecurity. “His power—”

“—is possibly more dangerous than the beast.” Alana interrupted, and S’aahiri found herself leaning away from the woman, so fast had her temper changed.

“If you knew what it did to him, you wouldn’t dream of asking of him what you are.”

For the first time, Alana glared directly into her eyes, fists clenched and teeth grinding inside her mouth. Silence rang like a bell in S’aahiri’s ears, a dread weight settling in the pit of her stomach, and Alana went back to staring at the ground.

“Alana,” she said, voice barely a whisper. She needed Alana to know her words for truth, and she needed answers. “Shi is like a brother to me. You’ve been more a family to me than what’s left of my own. What in the names of all the Gods do you mean by ‘if I knew what it did to him’?”

“I’ve already said too much, girl. I was only told because I am his mother.” 

She sighed, hand finally falling away from the jewel tucked inside her fur coat. “Damn their rules—you deserve at least a part of the truth. Shi’s magic, his power—it is incredible what he can do with it, what he will be able to do with it. But there’s always a price for power, S’aahiri, no matter the kind. Just know this: Self is a power that strips away chunks of a person like a butcher—the more of it you use, the bigger the cuts of meat.”

Alana smiled bitterly, clenched fists trembling in her lap. “I’m not afraid that Shi will fail, S’aahiri. I have every faith in my son. But how much of himself will he have given up to do it? Will it be my boy who comes back victorious, or just the bare shell of him, the parts that make him who he is stripped away? What scraps of him will be left?”

S’aahiri’s head span. She had known that Self could make Shi tired when he went overboard. Gods, she even knew that if he had to use more of it than he was used to, he wouldn’t be able to sleep properly for days afterwards. But the kind of side effects Alana was hinting at? She’d had no idea. None of them had. 

Her hand tightened on her mother’s dagger, an entirely new worry settling in the pit of her stomach. She had never considered that there would be any consequence for killing the beast as long as Shi returned alive. Even worse was the sickening thought that in all years of seeing Shi work his magic, she had seen no sign of the terrible price he might be paying.

S’aahiri opened her mouth, still trying to force out a response to what Alana had told her, but before any words could leave her mouth, panicked shouts from outside the tent shattered the uncomfortable silence. She leapt to her feet, keeping to a half-crouch so as not to damage Alana’s shelter.

“Stay here,” she said, peering out into the darkness of their camp. “If we need to move, I’ll come and get you. Make certain you’re safe.”

She didn’t give Alana the chance to respond, slipping through the hide hanging covering the entrance and emerging back into the camp. People scurried back and forth, gathering up family members that had been visiting fires other than their own. Folk that were not hunters had gathered together at the base of the statue, huddling for warmth and safety. Meanwhile, men and women gripping spears and axes strode doggedly to the exterior of the camp, faces grim. 

She licked dry lips, and joined them, pausing only to gather up her spear from the fire she had been sitting beside earlier—left behind to chase after Alana.

“What’s going on?” she asked Kess, pulling up beside him at a jog.

The man looked pale, his dark eyes glaring out into the coal-black space away from the safety of their fires. He was gripping his spear as though he meant to strangle it.

“Wolves,” he said. “Look for yourself.”

S’aahiri’s eyes widened, and she snapped her attention in the same direction he was staring, heart in her mouth. Is it happening again? For several moments, all she could see was darkness, the inky black swimming in the way the dark did when you stared into it for too long. Then her eyes adjusted, and her breath caught in her throat.

Wolves. Hulking black shapes prowled the perimeter of their camp, silent as spirits. They were the same wolves that had attacked the village: big—far bigger than the plainswolves S’aahiri was used to seeing out on the hunt, and easily the largest she’d seen. A thought clawed at the back of her mind, urgent, but too distant to fully grasp. Why weren’t they attacking? Why hadn’t they just swarmed like they had at the village? 

Now, they were too far away to charge the camp without the hunters raising spears and putting up a defence. Large though they may be, several had fallen to Su’roi spears during the village attack, and it appeared they hadn’t forgotten. Instead, gleaming amber eyes watched from a distance, waiting, searching for some weakness—some opportunity to strike.

The thought seemed to strike more than a few of the surrounding hunters at the same time. Muttered instructions came forth from a few of the older hunters, and they shuffled awkwardly into two arced lines of spears.

Ever so slowly, they inched back towards the statue where the rest of their people had gathered, S’aahiri’s eyes never leaving the wolves, even as she stepped over and around empty tents and low-burning fires. They formed a deadly barrier between the beasts and their most vulnerable people, and waited. 

The dark shapes had stopped their prowling. Two dozen pairs of eyes watched them with an intensity that made it difficult to breathe. Then, without a sound, they melted back into the darkness, disappearing as though they had never been there to begin with.

Not a single one of them made even the slightest of movements. S’aahiri stared out in the black, looking desperately for any sign that the creatures were still out there, watching them. The frigid kiss of the Tagayan air against her cheeks, and the soft crackling of their still-lit fires, were all she found.

They waited like that for what felt like hours, the bitter cold seeping into their flesh until their fires fell so low that the dark the wolves lurked within encroached upon their camp, forcing them to break rank to build them back again. Even then, they moved like mice that knew the cat was on the prowl, jumping at every unexpected sound or touch, none having the courage to speak and break the deathly quiet. 

Nobody broke it—not until dawn’s early light crept over the horizon, filtering through heavy clouds and confirming for grateful eyes that the Su’roi were indeed alone. But how long had that been true for? The bitter wind from the night before had passed, but S'aahiri shivered and pulled her furs tight around her regardless.