Halla stared down at her horse’s neck. “Yes, you’re right. I was thinking about myself and no one else.”
“You remember that.” I waved my hand like I was chasing away a chicken. “Your six-year-old self would be disappointed in you. I bet she was a tender, neck-hugging, weepy little thing kissing her bunny rabbits before bedtime.”
Halla scowled at me and then turned away. “Kissing bunnies. How did you know? It is as if you were there watching me.”
I laughed, and although she didn’t look at me, I liked to think she smiled. “Where is this oracle, then? I hope we’re not riding straight away from her.”
“She will be at the Eastlands Crossroads Fair until tomorrow.”
I had been to that place when I lived in Bindle. “Fine.” I kicked my horse into a faster gait and prepared for hours of mud flying up at me from off the road.
Halla shouted, “Not that way! We ride straight across the grassland. That will regain the time you threw away in the stables complaining about this journey.”
I turned to follow her, and we traveled fast enough to make conversation inconvenient. She didn’t seem to mind the silence.
We rode across short, fresh grass stretched as flat as a sheet in all directions. It supported a meager collection of solitary trees, huge and bare. Bindle withered behind us. The Pip River ran through Bindle and now it flowed the same direction as us but half a mile to our left. At last, it curved and blocked our way. The river hurried along, fat with rain, but even at its greatest flood-fed width, a man could slog across it in less than a minute. We splashed across, hardly slowing down.
By midafternoon, the sky cleared. Neither the sun nor the gigantic, gaunt trees had shown me any polite strategies for asking my next question. At last, I bit down and asked, “So, have you spoken to your mother recently?”
Halla stiffened, but she didn’t falter. “It pleases me to say I have not. It fills me with suspicion that you asked.”
I coughed and gazed straight ahead as I tried to decide how much more to say. When talking about gods, it’s better not to say much. It’s often best to say nothing.
Every sorcerer ends up claimed by a god. Harik had claimed me. Such a relationship sounds like it might be unpleasant for the sorcerer, and it almost always is. It’s about the same as a farmer owning a willful pig, except that the farmer wields unthinkable power and whines a lot, and the pig gets butchered alive over a space of years.
The Goddess of the Unknowable, Sakaj, had claimed young Halla over twenty years ago. Few people regarded that fact with the astonishment it deserved. Sakaj tended to leave her sorcerers, her “daughters,” wrung out, crazy, or dead before age twenty. But even as a softhearted girl, Halla had made watchful bargains, dripping with suspicion, and she thrashed over every point like a rabid squirrel with the only nut in the woods.
Sakaj had claimed my daughter too, but Manon had been too young and foolish to be attentive. Sakaj had squeezed out everything Manon loved, and everything she hated, and just about everything else that made her a person.
I said, “I talked to your mother this past winter. Krak and Harik too.”
Halla shifted in the saddle, trying to readjust her seat without appearing uncomfortable. “What did she say?”
“Nothing of great consequence. When Krak is present, it doesn’t matter what anybody else wants to say. Your mother ruined my little girl, though.” I coughed again to cover any strain in my voice.
Halla squinted at me. “Your daughter was a sorcerer.”
I nodded.
She stared down for a few seconds, her brow furrowed. “So . . . you had to kill your daughter. Because my mother took her.”
“I didn’t have to!” I barked. I leaned back and lowered my voice. “I guess I could have done something else besides kill her, but I didn’t do something else.” I kicked my mare, and Halla let me ride on ahead.
I convinced Halla to camp for the night rather than push through. The fair lay eight hours ahead, so we would arrive well before dawn unless we stopped. I didn’t care to shake the oracle out of bed. I had some experience with truth-seers, and if we vexed her, she might tell us a bunch lies and get us killed.
We made camp before the moon rose. Although it was dark as hell, we didn’t build a fire. Anybody who wanted to harm us could have spotted a campfire ten miles off across that flat grass. Of course, anybody who could magically possess a dog, and do it from who the hell knows what distance, could probably find us by starlight if he wanted.
Chewing a bite of dry bread, I mumbled, “I’m tired of calling this son of a bitch the dog possessor. I’m going to call him Lord Floppy-Ass, Bane of Bindle Town. For the sake of efficiency, I’ll refer to him as Floppy-Ass.”
“You still cannot help yourself. You must name everyone and everything. It is a weakness.” Halla said it with no frustration in her voice. In fact, she said it with hardly any interest.
All those miles of darkened grass and trees had bored the hell out of me. I decided to poke Halla into an argument. “You may hold that opinion, but you’re wrong. You think a silly name will make me underestimate him. Actually, every time I call him Floppy-Ass, it will scrape off a smidge of his self-confidence.”
Halla grunted in the darkness. “He cannot even hear you.”
“He doesn’t need to! There are six words in the name I gave him, and six is a shitty number. Three of those words contain four letters, and four is an even less auspicious number. Floppy-Ass has nine letters, which is an especially repugnant number—and that’s the name I’ll call him all the time.”
Halla stood.
