I looked down at my apron, the meagre assortment, roots drying sadly in their graves of mud.
‘Between us, at least. Here,’ said Kizzy, and tipped half of her collection into my apron. I loved my sister fiercely, but hated her most when she was kind. ‘No Iele mushrooms,’ she sighed. Kizzy was obsessed with the idea that one day she would find a patch of ground blessed by forest spirits. If you ate of them, they would give you visions. ‘Let’s head back.’
Our camp was halfway up the valley. Old Charani’s ideal spot was somewhere where the only things higher than our wagons were the birds; but then birds did not need to struggle over scree, or transport bears, or walk to find water, so her desires for height were tempered by practicalities.
Mushrooms and other things that fed on the dark were found in the valley’s deep forest, gouged through the mountain by a river that once ran fast and glinting as a knife. Now it was slow and settled, lapping at the boulders it had once torn from the ground. If Old Charani were a river, she’d stay slicing and quick all her days, never easing.
Getting down had been a straight scramble, skidding on our heels in our thin leather shoes, Kizzy laughing like a child the whole way and me gritting my teeth to keep from biting my tongue. Getting back would not be so easy, which was why we had picked it.
Had the route been simpler, Mamă would have made us bring Kem. Our brother was ten years younger and quiet, intense. We were alike in that way, as alike to each other as Kizzy was to Mamă. But I was nearly seventeen, nearly a woman, and a twin, so I was protected from the loneliness, the left-behindness we inflicted on him in our role as older sisters. Kizzy and I would put our heads together and talk or not talk, and Kem would look on like an owl, large-eyed and silent. Even the other children his age ignored him, discomforted by his watchfulness. Albu was his only friend, similarly the youngest in the den when Mamă had taken him to train.
As we turned from the flickering shadows, I plucked a couple of fiddleheads, tightly furled young ferns, and placed them into my pocket for Mamă to fry for Kem. I could never stomach them, but he loved their bitterness.
Kizzy was already disappearing into the trees, bent at a slant, eyes fixed ahead. She was bigger than me, her body already settled into soft curves that made Fen and the other boys stare, but she was deft and sure on her feet as a cat.
She waited for me at the first plateau, biting flies swirling around her head, barely sweating by the time I caught up. She matched her stride with mine after that, apron held like a tray before her and yet she never stumbled. She was at ease in the forests, in a way I never was.
A grace, Old Charani called it. That you must be born with.
But why hadn’t I, born under the same sky, been given it too? Kizzy had grace, likely had the gift. And I was uneasy with everything, the world too blunt and jagged all at once. It was a painful thing, this growing up, and growing apart. To understand that forming inside the same body did not mean we were formed the same. And after the divining day, our childhood would be over for good.
I looked sideways at Kizzy as we walked. Her profile was the same as mine, but from the front we were not identical. Her lips were fuller, her cheeks plumper. Her hips were wider, her belly gently rounded. She was wearing Mamă’s braced bodice over her purple top, but I had no need. My chest was flat as Kem’s beneath my cotton dress.
Her eyes flicked sideways, and a smile tugged the corners of her lips.
‘What are you staring at?’
‘You’ve got dirt on your nose,’ I lied, and she brought her wrist up to rub it, smearing it with mud.
‘Better?’
I nodded, the spite sour as fiddleheads.
We were about a half-mile from camp when she stopped again, so suddenly some of my borrowed mushrooms went tumbling.
‘Kizzy, what—’
‘Do you smell that?’ She sniffed the air, like Albu when he caught the scent of a wolf near camp. I felt her fear like a coin under my own tongue.
I took a deep breath, and I did smell something, felt it hit the back of my throat.
Smoke.
‘It’s a fire,’ I said. ‘Mamă will be building one for the stew.’
‘It doesn’t smell right. Not just of wood …’ She began to walk again, faster now, jolting mushrooms from her skirts. ‘And the forest sounds wrong. Where are the birds?’
I ran to keep up, and a moment later there was a noise that broke the absence of sound, an inhuman bellow that struck at my chest like a stone.
Albu. Albu in pain.
Kizzy dropped her skirts, mushrooms tumbling like un-puzzled bones to the ground. She held out her hand to me.
‘Come on!’
I couldn’t move, couldn’t even let go of my apron. I had never heard Albu make that sound, not since the earliest days when Mamă took him, and he cried for his mother. But he had been a cub then, and his mewling had been pitiful. Now it was terrible, terrifying, seeming to crash through my chest to snatch at my heart.
‘Come on!’
Kizzy yanked at me, hard, and like always I followed her, mushrooms quickly trodden into the dirt, my legs and lungs tight, Kizzy pulling me on, on, onwards toward noises I wanted to do nothing but turn and run from.
Because now, it was not just Albu screaming.
We reached the border of our camp, usually invisible even up close, disguised by fallen branches and brush. But now, you could not miss it. Kizzy cried out, and though I did not want to look, I did.
Flames, higher and wilder than any cooking pit, strangely coloured with blues and purples, were dancing at the edge of camp. At first glance I thought them Iele, spirits of the wind and forests that dance in fires and whip them higher. But another blink, eyeballs scratched with smoke, and I saw I was wrong.
It was much, much worse.
Old Charani’s wagon was on fire. The paint was bubbling, loosing its dyes, turning the smoke poisonous shades of green.
And a man, a man I did not recognise, with a white face and a blood-red beard that trailed down his black clothes, was placing a torch to the carefully carved wheels, holding it to one until it caught, before moving to another.
I shrank back, searching for cover in the shadows cast by the trees, but Kizzy charged forwards, right at him, knocking the torch from his hand. He spun around and I saw he had no beard, but that he wore a crimson sash around his mouth and nose, like a bandit, the ends tied diagonally across his chest.
My airless mind raced. Were we being robbed? Did he not know we had nothing to take?
The world sharpened again as he kicked out at Kizzy like a dog, and my sister went down, rolling away from the hot ash, batting at her clothes as they smouldered. Come on, Lillai, I screamed at myself. Move!
I snatched up a branch from the boundary and ran before I could think better of it. As the man raised the torch to swing it at Kizzy, I parried it with the branch, and though he was far stronger it deflected the blow just enough for the torch to fly loose from his grip. He roared as I dropped the branch, my wrist aching at the impact of his strike, and pulled Kizzy to her feet.
The man’s torch had lit the ground before him, and we stumbled away, briefly shielded from his advance by the rearing of flames. As we moved clear of the burning wagon, the wind gripped at the smoke and hurled it skywards, clearing our view of the camp beyond.
The circle of blazing wagons was crawling with black-clothed men in crimson sashes, wielding long, glinting sticks. They brought them down on bundles of cloth at the centre of the caravan, and Kizzy howled. I realised, a moment after she did, that they were not sticks, but swords. Now everything slowed to a nightmarish pace as one of the bundles reached up a hand—