Marghe said nothing.
“Don’t fear Aoife on account of me. What you say here is between us two.”
Marghe wondered if that was true. “What do you know of the world?” she asked eventually.
“Much,” Borri said dryly. “What is it you think I don’t but should?”
Marghe felt her cheeks go red. “I meant, what do you know of the physical shape of your world?”
“‘Your’ world?” Borri said thoughtfully. She leaned back a little, but Marghe saw the muscles around the healer’s eyes tighten.
She decided to trust Borri. “There are many; the moons in your sky are worlds, but nobody lives there. The world I come from is something like this one, but the people are different, and the diseases.”
“Have you told anyone else this?”
“Only Aoife. Will you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Listen to me.” She laid a hand on Marghe’s knee. “Aoife was right to protect you. You must never, never speak to anyone of what you’ve just told me. No one.”
The hand on Marghe’s knee was brown; a vein blue‑snaked across it from below the base of the thumb. Marghe lifted her eyes from the hand to Borri’s face and could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “ Aoifeprotect me? Who from?”
A draft blew a spark from the fire. Borri sighed. “ Aoife’s, soestre. Uaithne.”
Aoife and Uaithne? “ But I thought…”She thought Aoife had no family; she thought that, like her, Aoife was alone. But soestre usually lived together as family; as tent sisters, if not lovers.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Ask Aoife,” Borri said. “It’s not my story to tell.”
Aoife would never tell her, they both knew that. She tried another approach. “Why would it be dangerous for me if Uaithne found out I’m from another world?”
“Not just dangerous for you. For all of us.” She glanced at the entrance flap, and Marghe hoped Aoife and the two younger women would be a long time at Aelle’s.
“Something happened to Uaithne a long time ago,” Borri said eventually. “It disturbed her mind. She believes she’s the Death Spirit returned. We have a story, an old story, about the goddess of death and how we came into this world.”
It was quiet and dark outside, with wind slow and steady from the northeast. Marghe wondered what the stars would look like this far north: Jeep’s sun was one of a huge constellation. Beyond the clouds, the sky probably blazed. She wished she could see it.
She levered a few taar chips free and shoveled them into the sack. Aoife, Borri, Marac, and Scatha were inside rearranging the tent. She had volunteered to refill the sack; she did not want to be near Aoife at the moment, not until she had time to think over what Borri had said.
She touched RECORD. “The Echraidhe have a legend that clearly links the virus with their reproduction, and with their retention of languages and customs already dead a thousand years before they left Earth. They tell of a death world, a spirit world which contains all the peoples and monsters there ever were.” Marghe found herself adopting the same singsong cadence Borri had used. “In this spirit world, death is the goddess of all. Or almost all. Long ago, some of these spirit people renounced death: there must be more, they said. Yes, said the goddess, you shall find out. And she cast them forth. At length, they came to a place where the goddess in her normal guise could not follow, a place of strange beasts and too many moons.
“But in this place where the goddess was not, her spirit still lived, though sleeping, in the hearts of fully half the people, and in this place, her spirit awoke and claimed them in a great sickness. But the goddess is ever‑merciful. To those who survived was given a miraculous gift: children. It is said that the spirit of these people lives on in their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters, so that all who come after may remember back to what once was, and what may be again. However, it is also said that the spirit of the goddess of death has come to live within all who survive, waiting. It is said that she will rise again in her chosen one, and that there will be an accounting.”
To Marghe, most of the story was clear enough. It was a fable of the original settlers’ journey from Earth and their arrival here, the place of strange beasts and too many moons. The goddess of death was, of course, the virus. According to the story, the virus somehow made it possible for the survivors to conceive children. The memory references of the fable were not clear, though the allusions to a Chosen One were not too different from the kind of messiah myth found in scores of cultures.
What was unusual was that Uaithne, Aoife’s soestre, believed that the Death Spirit had returned within her. Borri had not told her how Uaithne had come to believe this, but apparently the tribeswoman was adamant, saying she was only waiting for a message. Borri, like Aoife, believed that if Marghe let it be known she was from another world, Uaithne might think she was the messenger. And nobody knew what Uaithne would do then.
Thick indigo clouds moved overhead like a school of whales.
Borri and Aoife had both told her: stay quiet. For their own sakes, or hers? Was this something she might turn to her advantage? And did they know Uaithne was already watching her?
She sat back on her heels and watched the sky. It matched her mood: slow‑moving, benthic. What had happened between Uaithne and Aoife, the two soestre? She needed to know.
Over the next few days, Marghe watched Aoife. In a tribe where women prided themselves on self‑sufficiency, Aoife was more alone than any. She was liked and respected, she was Agelast, but Marghe never saw her smile, never saw her reach out and pat someone’s hand while they talked, or lean her head on another’s shoulder. None shared her bed. Even the Levarch and her family, Borri, and her own daughters, Marac and Scatha, were kept outside, unable to reach through her solitude.
Out on the plains with Marghe, Aoife seemed content. Marghe understood that, too. Grief was not a spectator sport. After her mother had died, she had spent hours roaming the Welsh hillsides, her only company the sheep that still lambed on the bleak hills in spring. But Aoife’s was a constant grief, a wound that could not heal: Uaithne was still alive.
Once, when they were alone with the herd and the wind, Marghe cut out a limping taar from the rest and dismounted to check its hooves. Aoife reined in and joined her. Marghe lifted the beast’s forefoot to look at the tender spot.
“Tell me why he’s limping,” the tribeswoman said.
“I think it must have been ice. Gone now.” She let go of the leg and slapped the taar on the rump. Aoife nodded approval and then went to her saddle pack and took out a palo. She held it out to Marghe.
“You know enough to have this.”
Marghe hefted it in her hand. It was as long as her forearm and thick as a spear shaft, made of polished hardwood. Near one end was a carving of a horse. Not a shaggy Echraidhe mount: Pella.
“You made this for me?”
Aoife said nothing. Marghe flicked it experimentally; it snapped into a slender pole almost two meters long. Another flick of her wrist telescoped it back in on itself. She did not know what to say. Wood was precious, but it was not only that: Aoife had made this, carved it, polished and stained it in secret. For her.
Aoife held out her hand for it, showed Marghe the tiny leather strap at the end. “This is to secure it for traveling.”
Marghe did so, then fastened it to her belt. It hung to mid‑thigh. She ran her finger down the carefully stained wood. “Aoife, thank you.” But Aoife was already swinging back into her saddle.
On their way back that afternoon, they saw a figure galloping away into the stretching white at a furious pace. Aoife bowed her head, as at some old hurt, and Marghe knew it must be Uaithne.
“Where does she go at such a pace?”