Cast Out, Crowned

Chapter Eight: Little Cousin

The gold in her eyes was the same as mine. That was the first thing I understood, and it stopped me cold in the middle of a run for my life.

Fenric didn't stop. He stepped in front of me, gold flaring up both his arms, and I felt the temperature of him change beside me, wary in a way he hadn't been even with the hunters.

"Renna," he said.

So he knew her. That told me something, though I couldn't yet say what.

"Fenric." The woman inclined her head, unhurried, like there wasn't a horn sounding behind us and a flood of silver-eyed things pouring across the gathering ground at our backs. Her gaze moved past him to me and stayed there. "You found her before we did. I'll admit I didn't expect that."

"She's not going with you," Fenric said.

"No?" Renna's mouth curved. "You'd keep the last daughter of the sealed line to yourself, then. How very like your family." Her eyes came back to me, and they warmed, or did a good impression of it. "Don't listen to him, little cousin. Whatever he's told you about who you are, he's told you the half that suits him."

Behind us the noise was getting closer. I could hear the hunters crossing the ground, the pack scattering, Aron's warriors falling back. We had seconds, and this woman was standing in the only gap in the trees, blocking the one way out, and she did not look afraid of the thing chasing us at all.

That was what caught me. She wasn't running. The hunters were tearing through a whole pack behind us and she stood in the open with her back to them like they were weather.

"They're not chasing you," I said.

Renna's gold eyes flicked to me, sharper now, reassessing.

"The hunters," I said. "They came for me the second I woke up. They're crossing that whole ground to get to me. But you're standing here in the open with your back to them and you're not afraid." My own gold rose with the understanding. "So either you're one of them, or they don't touch your kind. And you've got my eyes. Which means whatever those things are, they don't hunt you the way they hunt me."

For a moment nobody spoke. Even with the noise closing in, Renna looked at me like I'd said something that changed the shape of the conversation.

"Fenric," she said, not taking her eyes off me. "You didn't tell me she was quick."

"I didn't tell you anything," Fenric said. "Move, Renna. They're almost on us."

"They won't cross to me," Renna said. "He's right about that much, cousin. They won't touch our blood if it's standing with the family that struck the bargain." She held out her hand to me, and where mine and Fenric's gold ran bright and open, hers moved slow and dark gold under the skin, almost bronze. "Come stand behind me and they stop. Right now. It's the only thing on this ground that makes them stop."

The nearest hunter broke through the last of Aron's warriors and came into the open behind us, flat silver eyes fixing on me, and it opened its mouth and made a sound like nothing living.

"The bargain," I said. My heart was slamming. "What bargain."

"Zaveria." Fenric's voice was low and fast. "Don't. Whatever she's about to offer you, there's a price on the back of it. Her family made peace with the hunters a long time ago. You know how you buy peace with something that hunts your blood?" His eyes held mine. "You hand it easier blood to hunt. You hand it the lines that wouldn't bend. You hand it yours."

Renna's face didn't change, and that stillness told me more than a denial would have. It was true, or true enough that she wasn't going to waste breath arguing it with the hunters this close.

"He makes it sound uglier than it was," she said. "We survived, cousin. That's the whole of it. Your line chose to burn rather than bend, and look where it got you. Sealed in a box at the bottom of a pack of animals, marked as defective, kneeling on a stone this morning." Her hand stayed out. "Mine chose to live. You can stand behind me and live too. Or you can run with him and find out how long the old blood lasts against a hundred years of hunters when it doesn't even know its own name yet."

The hunter took a step toward us. Then another. Slow, certain, in no hurry at all, because there was nowhere for us to go.

I looked at Renna's dark-gold hand, held out to me like safety. I looked at the silver-eyed thing closing in, that had crossed a whole pack to reach me. I looked at Fenric, who had told me the ugly truth when the easy lie would have kept me moving, who'd sworn an hour ago he'd never keep me small.

Two kinds of family. One that bent and lived and sold the rest for the privilege. One that burned.

I already knew which blood I had. They'd spent twenty-three years trying to seal it out of me, and it hadn't taken.

"I'm not standing behind anyone," I said.

The gold came up my arms in a rush, brighter than it had been all night, bright enough that Renna's bronze eyes narrowed against it and the advancing hunter actually paused.

"You want to know what my line chose," I said. "It chose not to kneel. I found that out this morning." I felt Fenric shift beside me, ready, his gold rising to meet mine. "So here's my answer, cousin. I'm not going with the hunters, and I'm not hiding behind the family that fed mine to them. I'll take my chances with the one who told me the truth."

Renna's mouth thinned. For just a second something crossed her face that might have been regret, or might have been the calculation of a woman deciding she'd wasted enough time.

"Then you're already dead," she said. "You just don't know it yet." She stepped aside, out of the gap in the trees, clearing the way, and I understood it wasn't mercy. She was getting out from between me and the thing that had come to kill me. "Have it your way. When they've cornered you and you change your mind, call the family name. If there's enough of you left to speak it."

She melted back into the dark, and the way east was open.

And the hunter behind us, no longer paused, threw back its head and howled, and from the trees on every side the answer came, a dozen throats, closing in.

Fenric grabbed my hand.

"That," he said, "was either the bravest thing I've ever seen or the stupidest, and we have about four seconds to find out which. Run."

We ran into the open gap Renna had left, gold trailing off both of us, and the whole silver-eyed flood broke from the trees behind and came after us at once, and somewhere in the dark ahead, faint, I heard water, a river, and Fenric was running straight for it like it was the only thing in the world that mattered.