Free The Raven Warrior by Alice Borchardt

was a boy—looked up at me with the beautiful incomprehension that is absolute innocence.
    He died, but didn’t know how or why and didn’t even resent that he had. All he knew was that one moment he had been warm, sleeping snugly between his parents with his brothers and sisters. And the next, a confused impression of shouts, the stench of thick smoke, and then the knowledge that he was part of the dark, cloudy water and would be for some indefinite time.
    I drew my mind back and let him go. I had a brief impression of dark hair and eyes looking up into mine, then the eyes faded to hollows in a small skull. Then it also vanished away and again I was looking down into my own reflection.
    Then she came. Finger bones clutched my right hand. I could see them glowing whiter than flesh, wrapped around my hand. The nails bit into my skin, I think drawing blood.
    Rage was all that remained of her. She didn’t think or know who or what she was. She knew she had been murdered, drowned not in water but mud, after she had been used by the attackers. Used in a variety of painful and ugly ways.
    She wanted her man and her children, but couldn’t find them. She rode the sea tides daily, tumbled along the bottom in the green gloom. Boundless rage and despair soaked into my mind the way water sinks into dry earth, seeming to vanish but changing the nature of the soil as it saturates it.
    I felt weak and ill, and I wanted to vomit. I was full of that vile wine that Gray, Maeniel, and Ure practically forced down my throat. It clouded my mind and weakened me.
    So I didn’t pull my hand out quickly enough. But let’s be fair. Even had I been capable of considered reflection and clear thinking, I might have welcomed him, because I needed help desperately and I wasn’t sure what it might take to burn that fortress and the men inside of it. If you are going to do evil, you can’t cry off just because the means to your end turns your stomach.
    But I did vomit when the snake coiled around my wrist. When my stomach emptied itself, I tried to be careful not to let the spasms alarm the reptile. I saw the triangular head through the water and knew if it cared to strike, I was doomed, because it was one of the poisonous ones.
    The musculature of a snake is wonderful, tight, hard, and almost infinitely flexible, yet cold and menacing at the same time.
    I go back and forth about whether he ever was completely human. I have never been able to really decide. But on balance, I think he was.
    I do know how he died, though. The rite is an ancient one, but once so widespread that even the Romans knew about it, though their favorite way of propitiating the gods directly is burial alive. When victims were intended to be placed in the divine presence intact, not used for entertainment the way condemned criminals are, fed to beasts or forced to fight as gladiators do, the Romans buried them alive and left them to suffocate in stone chambers underground.
    But we preferred to shoot them to death with arrows. The man—and it is always a man—is hung up, then the archers fire arrows into his body, taking care not to kill him because the longer the offering lasts, the better the oracle is and the more the dark powers are pleased.
    He died this way twice, when the people who built the village came to settle here, his blood running into the water as a life stream hallowed their efforts. And at the end, when the Saxons stormed and burned the houses, they gave him to their gods.
    But I don’t think they could take him. He was too much part of the fens. I felt them in him, the deep channels where the water is clouded and green and silt drifts along the bottom pulled back and forth by the tide. Not water, not land, a shadowed ooze that nurtures the creatures of both land and sea. Fish, shrimp, crab, and crayfish, a hundred kinds of ducks and geese fed on the abundant crustacean life and pale-green waterweed that filled the pools, canals, ponds, and ditches. Bog