Free The Winged Histories by Sofia Samatar Page A

I breathed her different smell of violet perfume. “Why can you not control her?” said Father. I looked up and Siski was at the window, making an evil face against the glass.
    I rode until it seemed my horse’s hooves had trampled that face into the snow. Two days later we were at the winter camp, Fadhian filled with satisfaction because we had reached it on the second Tolie of the month of Mur in the season of Earth Ringing. In the cave we slaughtered a bull and drank its blood by torchlight, and that night the boys were restless and could not sleep, knowing that all the married men were lying with their wives. In the morning we ate fresh meat and a pudding of blood and went back to bed. That deep sleep of satiety and weariness under furs and blankets in the tent that was full of the breath of youth. A child woke me in the afternoon and summoned me to Fadhian’s tent where I sat among cushions and drank hot milk with sama.
    I told him that I wanted to go with the boys, eastward into the winter pasture, and not remain with the women in the camp. “It will be very hard,” he said. He waited for me to answer, and when I did not he clapped my shoulder in his companionable way. “ Forgive me, ” he laughed, and when the boys departed into the Duoronwei I went with them, treading on the edge of the world. The rigid frost, the blue air, and the animals linked with rope on the treacherous ice took me back to my days in the northern war.
    “Are the Lelevai colder than these mountains?” Mantia shouted.
    “No,” I shouted back, and we were overwhelmed with echoes. Finor stalked back down the line and hissed for us to be quiet: he was afraid of the avalanche, the shifting dragon. In silence we plodded along the ridge and after three days we saw the valley, a gash in the mountains filled with a whirling mist. It took us seven days to get the animals to the bottom and my hands bled and I ached and was very happy. There was the day when without the slightest warning the sun struck down on us and illuminated a valley of black flowers, of black fir trees and cold streams and enormous birds that rose up honking, blocking the light with the spread of their huge wings.
    “ Iloki! ” I cried.
    I had heard that they came from the mountains but had never seen them in the wild, where they feed on sleeping fish. The famished cattle cropped the tall black lilies and Amantir smiled and said: “Here is the Paradise of Oud.”
    I thought of Dasya then, how he used to speak of the outlawed Kestneyi goddess Roun: he believed she was only another name for Avalei, and that her paradise, called Oud, was a paradise of song. “Song,” he said, “not sign. Speech, not writing.” I wondered where Dasya was, if he was still at his secret work in the Lelevai, carefully testing captain after captain, pulling together the structure of a war. Or perhaps he was in the Valley now, where peasant unrest was growing. Already it was spreading into the highlands: rumors reached us of a carriage waylaid on the road to Bron, two Olondrians slain, tiny bells found in their mouths. Bells, for prayer. I wondered how Fadhian had received the news—if he, so cautious, was ready to hear the words Kestenya Rukebnar. Delicious motto of the traitorous dead. Sometimes I could not sleep, thinking of how I would say those words to him. Kestenya Rukebnar . In their silver resonance I would be revealed: not merely an eccentric noblewoman amusing herself with highland games, but a link between rebellious Kestenya, the rebellious Valley, and the rebellious north—a key, a chance, a bell, a sword.
    Kestenya Rukebnar . I whispered the words with joy in that cold valley, where I left my sadness among the frosted leaves. All of it, abandoned. It slipped from me in the ache of the rushing streams, in the harsh cries of the iloki. “Do you like hesensai ?” Mantia asked me, grinning, and I said yes, only realizing a moment later why he laughed. Hesensai : to drive the