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WHILE I AM ALIVE

ACT I

ONE / THE POACHER’S PUNISHMENT

She was bound to die, that doe, venturing off on her own. With wonder and gratitude, Surrie of Inverisk wrested her arrow from the deer’s heart. By the spirit of the she-wolf, Surrie was going to live after all.

It was spring in the heights of Savaska. The creak of cracking ice boomed across the mountains, where Surrie was little more than a blur of red hair amid the evergreens. In the forest smothered in snow, the first hopeful patches of black soil had appeared. In her twenty years she had never become so thankful to see spring.

            It shouldn’t have come to this. She should have spent the thaw curled up in her croft, warm and fed, whittling carved animals for the village children. She should have steeped tea for two—no, three—while the paint dried on buckskin canvases. But it had come to this, and the past fortnight had seen her eat little more than boiled bark and broth rendered from mouse bones.

Surrie pressed her forehead to the doe’s, curling her fingers behind the great soft ears, and kissed the fur between the dark eyes. This doe, this lovely, scrawny beauty, was the only deer Surrie had seen in three moon cycles. In better times she would have painted it, marveled at its wild grace, but today her arrow had skewered its heart like a needle through cloth.

She was a poacher, no way around it. Over the years Surrie had decided that laws were for people who didn’t scrape to scrounge one more mouthful and one more twig for the fire so they wouldn’t die starved and frozen in their sleep. Her lips, numb with cold, mouthed a prayer of thankfulness. As she cradled the doe’s forehead against her own, she prayed for its forgiveness, and thought she felt it granted.

In a blaze of winter silver, she unsheathed her faithful knife, slicing the deer’s belly open from breast to udder. Steam curled warm and pungent from the body, and Surrie leaned toward the warmth, basking in the promise of life. It was stupid, but over the furnace of the doe’s belly, it was hard not to dream, just a little bit, about the bows she could carve and the leather she could work with a larder comfortably stocked with grain and medicine. But she’d abandoned those dreams the day she learned to hate, so like every other time she caught herself fantasizing, she snapped back to reality. Dreams died, rats got into the pantry, and fires burned into chaff, but her blades never failed her.

A branch snapped.

Surrie’s eyes flashed. Panther? No—too loud. A bear, wakened by the spring sun? She shifted. A wayward panther she could run off, but a bear…

Then she marked it: the low hum of voices.

‍ ‍Human voices.

Oh, fuck.

Her stomach swooped like a bird of prey and the breath iced in her lungs. Surrie 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.

Some twenty-five horselengths off, half-hidden by the evergreens, two men rode grey horses down a trail. Through a break in the trees Surrie marked their cloaks, black as pooled ink and studded with cold silver like stars in winter midnight. An icy stone dropped into her stomach.

Living Shadows.

It couldn’t be. It was the eve of the full moon. The Living Shadows were supposed to be holed up in Inverisk, preparing to escort the harvest south. If they saw her here, now, with this poached doe…

When she was fifteen, they’d left her back blotched with bruises the size of paving stones after catching her with a poached fox. At sixteen, it had been ten lashes with the bullwhip. These four years later she still fancied she saw angry red weals raised parallel along her spine. Forget bears, forget even winter. Cruelty was a human specialty.

Surrie pressed herself into the hard snow and shivered, but not for cold. For one unimaginable second, her right hand twitched toward her bow, as if to load an arrow of its own accord. She balled that rebellious hand into a useless fist. Patience, she told herself. Patience.

Seconds stretched into eternity. Surrie watched with bated breath as the Living Shadows vanished into the woods. She breathed with dizzy relief. Safe. Until they made another pass.

With fresh urgency she hauled out the deer’s organs—the slippery liver, the lungs, the large, carmine heart—and rolled the hide off, spooling grey intestines onto the snow. With weather this cold the meat would keep overnight, so she could return the next morning to retrieve what she couldn’t carry today. But then, if there were any bears blinking awake from hibernation, they would be on the carcass by midnight.

Her hands slowed. Was it worth risking a bear?

She hadn’t feared it until recently. Full stomach aside, she missed her father’s burr of a voice and the wine-dark eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Sometimes when the wind lagged in the gully she hallucinated wiry dark hair snagged amid the lichens.

Rowan always said she was no good at letting go.

Surrie shook herself. She stowed her bow and quiver, bundled the deer meat into her hunting pack, and wiped her fingers clean on the snow. She knew the path home like she knew her own body. The broken bridge over the curve in the creek, the sundry boulders where copper snakes sunned themselves midmorning. The landmarks etched into the atlas of her mind guided her until the snow turned to rock at the surly cliffs that loomed over the village.

She paused on the ledge, drinking in the familiar sight. Inverisk in springtime was a watercolor come to life, a patchwork of crofts pitched across a lush oxbow valley midmelt. Banners emblazoned with bluebirds hung from shopfronts with steep, sloping roofs that siphoned off snow. Most of the villagers bustling through the muddy lanes below were redheaded like her, pinpricks of color as they trundled toward the butcher or baker or tanner.

But her heart jolted as she scanned the village for its familiar color and found it awash in silver and black. Living Shadows swarmed about the village like a mass of ants. She swallowed the bile rising in her throat. It was a fool’s errand to venture into that hive of Living Shadows with poached meat on her shoulder.

But that was fine. She knew more than one road to her destination.

        The sun had nearly sunk by the time she slipped out of the woods and onto the steps of a timber trading post. A weather-beaten sign hung crooked on the door, and though Surrie had never learned to read, she knew what the sign read: Inverisk Trading Outpost.

            She pushed the door open with one foot and welcomed the heat of the hearth washing over her bare face. The familiar room—the squeaking hinges, the musky furs, the third creaking floorboard—eased some of the malcontent she had been nursing since espying the Living Shadows. And there he was, at the back of the post, at his usual perch by that decrepit oak table. Brown-haired, brown-eyed Rowan.