Free The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar

“It’s the curse of settled folk. By the end of winter you’ll lose your fear of words.”
    But he was wrong. I have never lost my fear of words, nor have I learned to master them and bend them to my will, to meet them with confidence and strip and twist them as I saw him do on his stool of judgment under the red femka. His decisions grew from hours of talk and the quiet pronouncements of his wife, Amlasith, who sat beside him in a leather chair, while two girls tossed sweet sandalwood into the brazier at her side. These decisions were final and I never saw them questioned. An unhappy man could ride away if he liked. The feredhai were never anxious unless women were involved in the disputes, for an unhappy woman would take with her the male relatives of her ausk and all their flocks, a blow to the larger clan. This never happened while I was there, but I heard of Nith Rudasa who in the year of the yellow rams had cut herself off from Fadhian’s people. They still remembered her and spoke of her sadly, while the men who had abandoned them were referred to as used shoes.
    Winter came after us and we rode faster. We hurried eastward, the wagons clacking over the frozen ground, fleeing into the Duoronwei where the winter camp awaited us and the secret pastures among the folds of the mountains. There was no time to pause on that long run and the women cooked on the moving wagons and cured raush in the flying smoke. The farms we passed were white and still, the doors closed. Bildiri horsemen watched us over the fences, holding their coiled whips. I rode with the feredhai through the stinging sleet and later over the whitened plains, peering through the slit in my wool headscarf, the scar on my thigh aching and my limbs burning with the desire for speed, cold, hunger, and oblivion. After three days the men were silent and no longer stared at me with secretly mocking looks as they had done at first. But the boys who had always loved me for my spurs and my sword in its embossed scabbard remained my closest friends after Fadhian himself.
    “ Well, ” said Redos, when I had brought down the great white ram among the Lihoun, “so the lady can shoot.”
    The snow was falling thickly. The women, with yells of exultation, descended on the silver beast and in moments had skinned and gutted and quartered it. The children were given handfuls of fleece dipped in the blood to suck, and tottered about in their heavy clothes, sometimes falling and dotting the snow with pink. Around me the men sat on their horses and watched. Weafan rode up on her pony and presented me with the liver.
    They watched me cut off a piece and nodded gravely when I had swallowed it.
    I had been afraid but did not feel ill.
    “You’ve eaten it before,” cried Finor, smiling in amazement, and I laughed when I remembered Loma struck down in the north.
    I dug my heels into my horse and dashed away over the snow. I knew that I had a reputation for eccentricity, strange for me who, as a child, had been considered so ordinary that my parents had once forgotten me on a journey to the Valley. Yes, they forgot me, they left me behind with the servants. I laughed as I galloped over the snow, remembering Nenya’s sandals scraping over the flags. She opened the lid of the chest and cried out, “Oh, what are you doing there?” I heard her breath and her soft moan of distress. She reached into the chest and pulled me out, the keys clinking at her belt. My traveling clothes were covered with sawdust, and she dusted me off in haste, sometimes slapping me so that it hurt. I could hear that the house was entirely empty.
    “They’re gone,” I said.
    She snatched me up into the floury smell of her dress. I clutched her collar as she ran out to the lane, bouncing in her arms, her breath about me and the patches of sun in the lane and the trunks of the trees all leaping madly.
    “Here she is,” she cried.
    Mother was standing outside the carriage and she clasped me tight and