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WHILE I AM ALIVE

ACT I

ONE / THE POACHER’S PUNISHMENT

She was bound to die, that doe, and it was very good luck Surrie got to the body first. Little more than a boney blur of red hair amid the evergreens and bloodied snow, Surrie of Inverisk pulled her arrow from the deer’s carcass with the awe of a blind man beholding the sun for the first time.

           By the spirit of the she-wolf, by the borealis, Surrie was going to live after all.

         It was spring in the heights of Savaska. The creak of cracking ice boomed across the mountains as rivers shook off their icy shackles, and in the forest festooned in snow, the first hopeful patches of soaked and black soil had appeared. Surrie sank to her knees in the snow. In her twenty years she had never become so desperate, so gaunt, or so relieved.

           It shouldn’t have come to this. She should have spent the thaw curled up in a blanket in her croft, whittling little carved animals for the village children. She should have steeped tea for two—no, three—while the paint dried on her buckskin canvases. But it had come to this, so here she was, kneeling in the snowmelt and preparing to dig through the guts of a wild animal she would’ve rather painted. From birth she’d raised her chin in defiance and done what she needed to do—life was earned, never given—this winter had been merciless. The smoked salmon had run out two moons ago, the elk meat had been taken for tax the morning of the early snow the moon earlier, and pangs of hunger had scored her stomach like cat’s claws ever since the Storytelling Moon. The past fortnight had seen her eat little more than boiled bark and broth rendered from mouse bones.

          And through it all she had watched the shipments loading up, the wagons so heaped with dried meats and wild game that the axles groaned and strained. It was all bound south, Inverisk’s cloth and meat and vegetables, far beyond the empty mouths of those who grew or tended them.

          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. This doe, this lovely, scrawny, red-brown beauty, was the first deer Surrie had glimpsed in three moon cycles. Her fatal arrow had skewered its heart like a needle through cloth, and beads of hot blood had splattered the snow like paint on one of her canvases, a scene as heartbreaking as it was lifegiving. Hunting was illegal, of course. She was a poacher, no way around it. But over the past five 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. Was it poaching if she took only what she needed to survive and used everything, every tendon and bone, every scrap of hair and hide, and not even out of altruism?

          She caressed the deer while her lips, numb with cold, mouthed a prayer of thankfulness. With this stolen 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 barren because of her—oh, wolf spirit, what had she done? As she cradled the doe’s forehead against her own, she prayed for its forgiveness, and thought she felt it granted.

          Her respects paid, her adrenaline leveling, Surrie lowered the doe’s head to the snow. She should have been drunk on the jubilation of success, but unease crept like spider legs up her spine. There were cave lions and bears about, and those were the more humane evils stalking the forest. She needed to spirit her stolen prize home before she was noticed, or cave lions would be the least of her worries. She unsheathed her knife.

          There was little difference between the curling edges of her carving tools and the razors of her hunting knives. 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. 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 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.

          Surrie shook herself. Dreams died, rats got into the pantry, and fires burned into cold chaff, but her blades had never failed her.

          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 Surrie leaned toward 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, 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, her larder comfortably stocked with grain and medicine. What would it be like not to be the skittering village outcast, to daub something realer than watered-down leaf-made paint on the few scraps of hide too stiff to work into garment patches? To be held, safe and warm again, truly alive?

            But she’d abandoned that dream the day she learned to hate, so like every other time 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, 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…

          Then she marked it: the low hum of voices.

          Human voices.

          Oh, fuck.

          Her stomach swooped like a great bird of prey as the breath froze into ice in her lungs. Disbelieving her ears, 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.

          And there they were: some twenty-five horselengths off, half-hidden by the drooping boughs of the evergreens, two men rode black 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 the midnight winter sky. An icy stone dropped into her stomach.

          Living Shadows.