The Daughters of Vei, Chapter 3

Several people are looking for Varyta ul-Kogon.

Previously on Daughters of Vei… Prince Varyta found out Ikune is fucked and argued with his father about it. Kivli has been having visions for seven years, and is pretty sure something bad is going to happen. Her solution…do hard drugs, and ignore the warning label. Now, the Kogon has decided to bring Varyta fully into his inner circle—at the exact same time Kivli is seeing a vision of the Prince in his father’s chair...What could possibly go wrong?

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(The Daughters of Vei is a prequel to The Shieldbreaker Saga. You can buy the first novel of the series here.)

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The soldiers were taken by surprise, just like at the last several barracks, and jumped to attention.

“Elakon, Ohta!”

“Relax, boys,” grumbled Metan, just like at the last several barracks.

“What can we do for you, Ohta?” asked Aravan ul-Ganruz, the company commander with the most colorful nickname in the tribe.

“Evening, Limava. We’re looking for the ul-Kogon. Have you or any of your men seen him?”

“Apologies. Prince Varyta hasn’t been about this evening. Have you tried that cluster of little taverns over by the Kuja Nesiir? There are a couple he’s fond of. A few of the gossipier widows I’m friendly with pride themselves on getting to, uh, cook for him from time to time.”

A few of the men chuckled in spite of themselves.

Metan rolled his eyes. Of all the fucking reasons for the Prince to disappear at this incredibly inconvenient time, Limava’s hunch would be the one that annoyed the Kogon the most if it proved out.

He was grateful when Alakuz broke in before anyone else came up with a joke worth breaking discipline for. “Thank you, Ohta. That will be our next stop.”

Limava smiled and nodded his respect to both of them. “Don’t mention it.”

Outside the barracks, back on the footpath, Metan shook his head. “You think ‘Pretty Boy’ is right? You think we’re going to find the Prince hip-deep in one of his favorite cooks?”

Alakuz shrugged. “Frankly, Ohta, now that I think of it, I have no idea why we bothered checking the barracks first.”

Metan groaned. “Gods. His timing is horrendous. Fine. Let’s go.”

—

Varyta was, in fact, just about to walk into one of the taverns at the mouth of the Alley of Mothers.

A woman named Sarivi who’d been briefly married to a warrior in the Kamar would be waiting for him there, as it was the night after the full moon, and that was one of their agreed-upon standing nights to spend with each other.

Unlike the other few women he called upon with any regularity, Sari did not care to advertise the fact that they spent any time together. The attention and status that might have resulted from such a boast seemed completely uninteresting to her. And that, in turn, fascinated him. He might have taken her as his wife if he was not younger than her and if she did not already have a son—it would be awkward for the next chieftain’s heir to be anyone’s little brother. She never brought it up, anyway. Just one more reason he liked her best. That and the constant gleam of mischief in her eyes.

He smiled at the thought of what she might be wearing tonight to meet him. If it was flimsy enough, maybe he would suggest they take a turn right there in one of the tavern’s back rooms, rather than take her back to her place—

“Elakon, Varyta ul-Kogon.”

He spun around and started. A very different woman was standing behind him.

“Elakon, Kivli-Ohta. I hope you’re well.”

“Well enough. I need to speak with you, and it can’t wait.”

“It will have to, I’m afraid. I am supposed to—”

She raised a suggestive eyebrow. “Whatever is waiting for you within that wine sink is not nearly as urgent as what I need to discuss with you.” She took a step forward. “It is not a request.”

Varyta smirked. “I see. An order, then?”

Kivli stared coldly at him. “Not from me, boy. The Goddess has shown you to me. You are summoned.”

“Oh, yeah? What did you see?”

“I saw the end.”

Varyta’s smirk vanished. “The end.”

“I saw an enemy so vast they blackened the plains, heard thunder, and felt the gods abandon us. What would you call it?”

Varyta felt cold all of a sudden. “Thunder?”

“It sounded like thunder.”

Varyta looked down. “The horsemen,” he muttered to himself.

Kivli tilted her head. “What horsemen?”

Varyta took a deep breath and blew it out. “You’re right. We do need to talk. Somewhere private.”

Kivli nodded. “Alright. Come with me.”

He went.

—

“He’s not in danger, is he?”

The short, dark-haired woman with the light green eyes looked genuinely alarmed. Alakuz felt a little bad for her. In his experience, widows who took new men tended to assume their new man was destined for the same chopping block as the old. Even in peacetime, apparently.

“No, Nesi,” he replied gently. “His father is simply impatient to see him.”

“He was supposed to be here an hour ago,” she responded, quietly. “If you see him before I do—”

“I will send word back to you.” He made an attempt at a reassuring smile. “I will even recommend that he include some explanation for his behavior.”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. That’s kind of you, but I require no explanation. He is our Prince. I am simply inquiring about his well-being.”

“Alright. Peaceful evening to you, Nesi.”

“My name is Sarivi.”

Alakuz nodded. “Alright. I am Alakuz.”

She smiled. “I know.”

He nodded again, awkwardly, suddenly unsure of himself, and backed away into the entrance.

Metan was waiting. “Well?”

Alakuz shook his head. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago and never came.”

“Well, shit. That’s our last good idea.” Metan sighed and slumped ever so slightly. He was clearly dreading his next interaction with their master.

“It’s not your fault he’s missing.”

“I pushed the Kogon to include him in our planning.”

Alakuz paused for a moment. “Yeah.”

Metan cocked one eyebrow. “What do you mean, yeah?”

“He’s probably going to be pretty annoyed with you.”

Alakuz could not help but feel inordinately proud of causing the involuntary snort of laughter that escaped his mentor.

“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that?”

“Yes, Ohta.”

Metan sighed again, then shrugged his shoulders. “Alright. Let’s go tell him.”

—

“What’s in the cup?”

“Zok n’ved.” Kivli proferred it to the Prince with her left hand. “I watered yours down. I assume you’ve never taken it.”

“Gods, that smells fucking terrible. You assume correctly. Have you?”

“Last night. I am still recovering from the Wound.” Her stomach seemed to be eating itself, and every time she drank any water, the zok led her a dance for another hour. There had been no more signs from Vei, though; she was stuck with the run-of-the-mill hallucinations of shimmering walls and household objects doubling or tripling before her eyes. Very annoying, especially given the enormity of her task.

“So, I drink it, and then what happens? What will it show me?”

“I honestly have no idea. I don’t know how it works. The Goddess shows me what she wants me to see. Hopefully she wants you to see it too.”

“And if not?”

“Then we’re fucked. But only as fucked as we already are. Drink.”

Varyta looked down into his cup, glanced sidelong back at Kivli, and downed the concoction in one draught. She could see him trying as hard as possible not to let himself react to the horrendous taste. It was a valiant effort. She felt a little bad for lying about watering the Gift down.

After a moment, he sat down on the floor across from her.

“Nothing’s happening.”

“Wait for it.”

“Nothing’s.” He blinked, once, incredibly slowly, and his mouth sagged open. He leaned forwards, elbows on his knees. “Oh.”

“What?”

Varyta no longer seemed to notice her presence. His face was slackening noticeably, eyes locked on something across the room that only he could see. Then, without a word, he pitched forward onto the floor, head first, without so much as an attempt to brace himself. He landed with a sickening thud and rolled to his back, revealing a broken nose and split lip. Then he seized up violently, gasping for air like a man with a rope around his windpipe, straightening all four limbs and arching his back so forcefully that Kivli was afraid he’d break his neck.

“Fuck.”

She threw herself down on the floor next to him and slapped his face to try to get him to focus.

“Hey hey hey, come back! Come ba—fuck!” she whispered, mostly to herself.

Maybe she’d poisoned him. That would be an embarrassing way to fail to save her people.

She reached frantically for the water jug a few feet away, grabbed the Prince by his hair, forced his mouth open, and poured.

The gasping stopped.

For a split second, nothing replaced it.

Then the boy sat up and exploded into a coughing fit. The water flew back out of his mouth and across the room. He leaned forward and retched once, twice, and suddenly a torrent of hideous dark red spilled forth, mixing with the blood from his nose and mouth on Kivli’s floor.

He leaned farther forward, getting to his hands and knees, still gasping and heaving, spilling the rest of the contents of his stomach, spilling what Kivli suspected may have been some actual blood.

Then he sank down again. It was only her quick intervention that stopped him from landing facedown in his own sick. She dragged him across the room to her palette, lay him on his side, and lay down next to him, throwing her arm around him so she could have a hand near his nose to make sure he was still breathing, at least.

She lay there, swinging wildly back and forth between terror and relief, guilt and frustration, until she remembered that Rakili had told her to make sure she wasn’t disturbed when she drank the Gift, and the question of what she had looked like on her own journey distracted her enough to let her fall into a light sleep.

—

“So. You’re back. Where is my son?”

Alakuz was only slightly surprised by the lack of preamble.

Metan grimaced and dove right in. “We couldn’t find him, Matavuz.”

Varyta-Kogon scowled and shook his head. “Of course not.”

“We looked in every barracks house save the Daughters’, even went through the taverns down by the Kuja Nes—”

“Arrogant little prick. Probably off coming up with some wild scheme to save our people all on his fucking own. You still think we ought to include him in planning for the Tapaa, old friend?”

Metan sighed. “No, Kogon.”

Varyta-Kogon let out a single derisive snort of laughter. “Yeah. No, I think not. Go home. You’re excused. And give your, you know, well-behaved, responsible son a kiss on the forehead for me when you get home, will you?”

“Yes, Matavuz. Good night to you.” Metan chuckled in spite of himself as he turned to go.

Alakuz saluted and made to join him when the Kogon’s voice stopped him. “Alakuz, are you on duty tonight?”

“No, Matavuz. Murat ul-Uzan and Isaka ul-Edren have the hall tonight and tomorrow night.”

“Good then. You’re excused as well. Oh! And congratulations.”

“You honor me, Matavuz.”

“Yes, I suppose I do.” Varyta-Kogon leaned in slightly closer, any hint of a smile gone. “Don’t fuck up.”

—

“He’s never going to fucking listen to me.”

Kivli’s eyes snapped open. Varyta was muttering to himself, sweating and shaking, still clearly sick—but awake.

“If he just listened to me we could fix this, right? We could protect ourselves, keep all the tribes safe. Maybe even take some more land in the north, get stronger.” He sighed. “But he’s never going to do it.” His voice had an edge to it, all of a sudden. “As long as he rules us, we are lost.”

She sat up abruptly, shaken, and he turned over to look at her.

“Fuck. I said all of that out loud, didn’t I?”

She looked down for a moment, stunned at her own reluctance to tell him the entire truth, but he sat up and faced her.

“What?”

His nose and lip didn’t look quite as bad as they had in the moments after the impact. His eyes were still red, either from the Gift or from the spectacular bout of vomiting that followed, but they were focused.

She took a deep breath.

“In my vision, you were in the chair.”

He seemed not to understand it at first, but she held his gaze. After a moment, he opened his mouth to answer, but instead simply burst into tears. He sobbed openly for a minute, then seemed to remember himself and lay down on the palette with his back to her to hide his tears.

She lay down next to him again, feeling the Gift still twisting and folding and tearing at her insides, and put an arm around his waist. He didn’t resist it. He wept for a few more minutes, then took a deep breath and drifted off to sleep.

He clearly knew what needed to be done.

If she was honest with herself, she had known already, too, the moment she saw him in her vision.

Vei was asking a horrible thing of them.

But even at the beginning of their tribe’s story, the first Oproz had to give his life to preserve his people’s safety—and his own son had wielded the blade to strike the first blow.

It made some amount of perverse sense, then, that the asking price for the survival of all the Etela was the life of the greatest warrior king to walk among them in a hundred years.

A tear ran down Kivli’s cheek.

Her goddess was cruel but fair.

—

Varyta started into wakefulness the moment the sunlight broke over the window and into his eyes.

He spent a fleeting instant hoping against all hope that he’d dreamed the whole thing and Sarivi would be next to him when he turned over, that the evening had gone the way he’d expected to and maybe she’d be even up for one more round before he had to leave, but then he felt his clothing still on him, stiffened with dried sweat and (what he hoped wasn’t, but had to admit probably was) piss, and a wave of pain and nausea hit him, starting from his throbbing face and crashing down his whole body, and he knew where he was and who was lying next to him.

He turned over. Kivli was sleeping on her side facing him, fully clothed just like he was.

She looked completely at ease. It didn’t make her any less intimidating.

In spite of himself he found himself wondering idly if any other man had ever woken up next to her, if she’d ever been with anyone before she found her calling. Everyone knew the Daughters were off-limits. If he were anyone but the son of a Kogon she’d probably cut his throat just for thinking about it.

Or maybe it was only the other thing between them that was protecting him.

He shuddered and pushed himself up off of the palette, stumbling for a second when his balance took longer to get to his feet than he did, groped around for his cloak in the shadows, and lurched as quietly as he could for the exit.

It was not worth waking her up. The thing they’d decided to do last night was decided, and it was not worth talking about it any more than they already had. Any more discussion would make him lose his nerve.

—

Kivli sat up slowly, head still aching, and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, hoping that by now she might be able to keep down some food or water. It took her a moment to remember to look for the Prince and realize he had gone.

It was for the best, probably, even though it might have been useful to have him around when she told the girls the plan.

No matter.

She trudged across the room to the chamber pot in the corner and took a piss, then gingerly reached for what was left of the jug of water that she’d poured down Varyta the night before. The clear water hit her lips and gave her a moment of new life, followed by a horrible head rush. The room changed color for a moment, grey walls glowing purple and then red and then grey again but much, much closer to her, and she closed her eyes as she thrust her arms out for balance—and to keep the walls from crushing her.

Two birds with one stone, as that Eastern saying went.

The dizziness subsided.

When she opened her eyes, the walls were back where they belonged.

She shrugged. Apparently the Wound was not done with her yet. And that was fine. The Gift had shown her the path to saving her entire people; how could there not be a heavy price to pay for such a vision?

She would still try to eat something. It was the smart thing to do.

She stripped off the tunic she’d been wearing since she took the zok n’ved two nghts ago and looked down at her chest and arms, taking stock of the various battlescars that lined them. The story of her eighteen years as a Daughter of Vei (not to mention the four years of training before she came of age) were written all over her body, carved into her skin and musculature, a chiseled legend as violent as the story of the tribe itself, carved into Varyta’s chair.

A father who was never named, but whose identity was clear enough to anyone willing to trade in gossip—which, in a tribe this small, was practically everyone.

A mother forced to run from her family’s house in shame, who never forgave her daughter for being the product of such an accursed union, who raised her in silent hatred until the very first moment she could separate herself. Who paid her so little attention that she could think it fitting to give her to the fucking Sisters.

Who had the gall, on the day Kivli was raised up to Ohta, to show up as if she deserved some credit for Kivli’s accomplishment—to demand a measure of gratitude for keeping Kivli alive long enough to find her true purpose.

As if Kivli would not have survived without her.

As if she hadn’t.

As if she hadn’t had to fight her way out of the Priestess’s tents, through girls bigger and better-fed and stronger than her simply to earn her place in the Daughters, through ranks of even bigger, even stronger, fully-armed men to make her reputation. As if she hadn’t slashed the miserable piece of shit who called himself her uncle into bloody ribbons a few nights after she came of age. (The gossips knew about that, too. Or, at least, they could guess.)

She owed Kalani nothing. She’d told her so.

She had but one mother, and now that mother was calling her home, and whatever else she had to do to make that happen, no matter what it was, should be considered done.

She looked herself up and down once more; she was a fucking sight, wasn’t she?

She pulled a new tunic over her head, pulled on her sword and belt, and strode to the door to assemble her shieldmaidens for their appointment with their destiny.

—

Read Chapter 4.

Read back: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2

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