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WHILE I AM ALIVE

ONE / SAVASKA

Surrie of Inverisk beheld the deer lying warm and still and very dead in a perfect halo of blood.

     Merciful wolf spirit, she was going to live.

     It was spring in the heights of Savaska. The creak of cracking ice boomed across the mountains as the rivers shook off their icy shackles, and in the forest festooned in snow, the first hopeful patches of black soil had appeared. Surrie, little more than a blur of red hair amid the snow-clad evergreens, sank to her knees in the snow with the wonder of a blind man seeing the sky. In her nineteen years she had never become so desperate, so overcome with relief, nor so smothered by dread as she was now.

     It shouldn’t have come to this. She should have spent the thaw curled up in a blanket in her croft, whittling the little carved animals the village children so loved. She should have steeped tea for two—no, three—while the paint dried on her buckskin canvases. She should not have been kneeling in the snowmelt, her emaciated, twiglike fingers trembling with so much delirious relief and dread that she thought she might vomit. Her impossible task was only half-done; harder even than hunting was sneaking this forbidden meal back into her croft. And she needed to, desperately.

     The smoked salmon had run out two moons ago, and the elk meat had been taken for tax the morning of the early snow the moon earlier. Pangs of hunger had scored her stomach like cat’s claws ever since the Storytelling Moon, and the past fortnight had seen her eat little more than boiled bark and broth rendered from mouse bones. More and more Surrie had woken sapped of strength, so leaden with exhaustion borne of hunger that merely fetching snow for tea drained what pathetic reserve she’d built overnight.

     And through it all she had watched the shipments loading up, the wagons so heaped with dried beef and pork and lamb that the axles groaned with strain. Four-fifths of the village of Inverisk’s meat and vegetables never touched the mouths of the people of Inverisk. With indignation that had long since calcified into stony resignation, Surrie choked down her bitterness each moon as the damnable Living Shadows piled the mule train with meat and furs and vegetables bound south for some lord with more money than compassion. Now, in the Hunger Moon, the Living Shadows slaughtered wild game from the mountain wilderness to fill the trains, overhunting the deer and elk and hare so mercilessly that the woods within a league of the village were as stripped of animal life as glacier cores. Surrie grieved the loss like the death of a cousin. It seemed her whole world was dying.

     With wildlife so rare, hunting was illegal, the ironic sole privilege of the Living Shadows. But over the past two long, hungry, and lonely years Surrie had come to the conclusion that justice and laws were luxuries for the well-fed, for people who weren’t hours from starvation, who didn’t scrape to scrounge one more mouthful, one more twig for the fire so they wouldn’t die starved and frozen in their sleep. This doe, this lovely, scrawny, red-brown beauty, was the first deer Surrie had glimpsed in three moon cycles. Her fatal arrow had skewered the doe’s heart like a needle through cloth, beads of hot blood splattering the snow like paint on one of her canvases, as heartbreaking as it was lifegiving.

     Trembling, Surrie pressed her forehead to the doe’s, curled her fingers behind the great soft ears, and kissed the drab fur between the large dark eyes. “Thank you for your life,” she whispered. With this blessing, she would reverse the slow sapping of strength that had left her thin and brittle and at the brink of starvation. One deer to preserve her life, one fewer deer in the woods—one fewer doe to drop a fawn in the spring—two fewer deer in the woods—less food for the future—a forest silent with loss—oh, wolf spirit, what had she done? As she held the doe’s forehead against her own, she prayed for its forgiveness, too.

     “I had to,” she said, her fingers buried in the still-warm fur. It wasn’t for sport or pleasure or money that she poached. Neither was her work over; she still had to sneak her lifesaving meal home, or everything—her grief, her joy, her hope—would be for naught.

     Surrie lowered the doe’s head to the snow. In the end, there was no difference between the curling edges of her carving tools and the razored edge of her hunting knives. People died, food depleted, and fires burned into cold chaff, but her blades had never failed her. She unsheathed her knife.

     Her palm molded to the leather grip of the blade like a nestled pair of bones. She’d retooled that grip herself, years ago, when her father passed it down to her after her first bleed. Not a day had gone by without her sharpening the steel edge. The cloak she wore had been his, too, tailored and gifted to her on her sixteenth birthday, the leather as fragrant and supple as she remembered from the milk haze of early childhood. Sometimes she fancied she could still smell pipe smoke in the thick fur that lined the collar, hear the echo of his booming laugh.

     Rowan always said she was no good at letting go.

She rolled the doe to the side and sliced the belly open from breast to udder. Steam curled warm and pungent where body cavity met cold air, and she leaned into the warmth, clinging to the promise of life.

     It was stupid, but over the furnace of the doe’s belly, warmed by the knowledge that she would sleep with a full belly, it was hard not to dream, even, just a little bit, about the bows she could carve, the children’s toys she could chisel and paint, and the leather she could work on the side, keeping her larder comfortably stocked with bread, dried meats, and medicine. What would it be like not to be the twitchy, skittering, boney village outcast, to daub something better than watery leaf-made paint on the few scraps of buckskin too stiff to work into garment patches?

     But this was a fruitless dream, one that would leave her belly and heart aching and empty, so like the other times she caught herself fantasizing she snapped herself to reality. She had a deer to butcher, its life to honor. And what an honor it was. Two good meals a day, wolf spirit be praised! Half a tenderloin would pay for soaps, and the backstrap would suffice for the moon’s taxes; a leg steak for wool, another for cloth and yarn and mortar, and the rest—

     A branch snapped.

     Surrie’s eyes flashed. Panther? No—too loud. Cave lion? No—too quiet. A brown bear, wakened by the spring sun? She shifted. A wayward wolf or two she could run off, but a bear…

     She nocked an arrow on the bowstring with a familiar woody click. She would sooner challenge a young grizzly than choke down more mouse broth. Wolf spirit, let the intruder be benign—a very noisy squirrel, or better, another deer—something she could eat—

     Then she marked it: the low hum of voices.

     Human voices.

     Oh, fuck.

     Her stomach swooped like a great bird of prey. Her breath froze into ice in the airways of her lungs, the many vertebrae of her spine fusing into a fragile pillar. Her heart skipped; her palms lined themselves with sweat. Seized with terror, she forced her body low and pulled the hood of her cloak over the red hair that stood out like a brushfire.

     Forcing herself to breathe evenly, she peered over the deer.

     And there they were: some twenty-five horselengths off, half-hidden by the drooping boughs of the evergreens, two men on black horses riding down a trail. Through a break in the trees Surrie spied their cloaks, black as pooled ink and studded with cold silver. An icy stone dropped into her stomach.

     Living Shadows.

     Panic spurred blood down her veins to her fingertips. The Living Shadows were supposed to be holed up in Inverisk, preparing to escort the mule train and its stolen harvests south. If they saw her here, now…   

     She knew the risks. She’d paid the heavy toll before.

     When she was fifteen, the Living Shadows left her back blotched with bruises the size of paving stones after catching her with a poached fox. The phantom ache rippled down her spine as she watched the two Living Shadows pass a cluster of aspens. Earlier, at thirteen, it had been ten lashes with the bullwhip. These six years later she still fancied she saw angry red weals raised parallel to her spine.

     Her stomach constricted as if squeezed by some giant snake. Mule train or not, she had been a fool to presume the woods safe, much less gut her salvation so close to a trail.