Chapter 129. Some People Give Their Food Away Because They Know What Hunger Costs

Chapter 129: 129. Some People Give Their Food Away Because They Know What Hunger Costs

I’d never heard her laugh like that... It was a deep, rolling, booming sound, so big that it bounced off the tree trunks and rattled the ice on the river.

It went on and on.

She laughed until she had to lean on the haft of her axe, with tears running down her cheeks, wheezing and gasping and holding her stomach.

It was the best sound I’d ever heard in my life... genuinely.

Behind her, the column had drawn up on the bank. Every Nightclaw rider was staring.

Velora, at the head of the line, had gone very still, with her reins in her fist. Beside her, Sylvara had both hands pressed over her mouth, and her eyes were shining.

I knew what they were thinking. It was the first time since the beacon went dark.

"I’m fine!" I yelled from the ice. "I’m good! I’m just, you know, cooling off!"

Magnara wiped her eyes. She was still shaking.

"You lost," she said, between breaths.

"I’m the reason you laughed," I spat out a piece of ice. "That’s a win."

"And that still counts as lost."

"Emotional victory."

She went off again. She had to sit down in the snow.

I clung to my floating slab, half frozen, and grinned like an idiot, and I’d have fallen in a hundred rivers for it.

...

Camp that night was in a hollow in the hills, a bowl of snowy ground sheltered from the wind by a ring of boulders.

The Nightclaw riders worked quickly and quietly, as they always did, setting up tents, rubbing down horses, and building a handful of small, hot, smokeless fires.

I’d hung my wet clothes on a rack beside the nearest one, and I sat in a borrowed blanket with my feet extended toward the flames, trying to remember what it felt like to have toes.

Dinner was a quick, rough, and plain affair.

One of the Nightclaw quartermasters ladled out strips of dried meat and hard brown bread, and each of us got a portion.

I took mine and sat back down.

I noticed something.

Magnara was across the fire, a little apart from the others, with her back to a boulder. She’d been handed her share like everybody else.

I saw her look at it. And then I saw her get up, quietly, cross the clearing, and set the whole portion of dried meat in the hands of a young Nightclaw scout who’d been sitting by herself, looking miserable.

The scout stared at her. And Magnara said nothing.

She walked back and sat down. She picked up her half of bread and began to eat it, slowly, without anything on it.

I watched her for a minute.

Then I took my own strip of meat, tore it in half, got up, and walked around the fire. I crouched down in front of her.

I held out my hand.

She looked at it.

"Minotaurs eat more than humans," she said. "You do not need to share."

"I’m not sharing," I said. "More like trading."

"What?"

"You gave yours away... I’m balancing the books."

She frowned. "It does not balance."

"It’s very complicated accounting."

She stared at me.

For a long time, she didn’t say anything. She had the expression of a woman who had been handed a very strange, very small present and had no idea where to put it.

At last, she took the meat... She turned it over in her hands.

Then, very slowly, she began to eat.

I sat down beside her.

"Why do you do that?" I asked, after a while. "Give it away... Every time."

She chewed. And she swallowed.

She stared into the fire.

"I have been hungry in front of others," she said. Her voice was very low. "I prefer it the other way."

I didn’t say anything. I tore off a piece of my bread and held it out.

She took it without looking.

The fires burned down. Around us, the camp grew quiet.

The Nightclaw had retired to their tents, and a few sentries paced slow circuits around the rim of the hollow. And I could hear horses shifting.

Somewhere to my left, Sylvara’s tent flap rustled and went still. I knew perfectly well that she wasn’t asleep.

Magnara hadn’t moved.

She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, with the firelight on her scarred face. She looked younger like that.

She looked... I thought... like a girl.

"I will tell you about Redhorn," she said.

I turned.

"If you wish to hear."

"I do."

She was silent for a moment. Then she began, in a flat, quiet voice, as if she were reading from a very old book.

The Labyrinth of Redhorn, she said, was not a city in the way that Elarune was. It was a fortress, and it was a trap.

It had been built a thousand years ago by her ancestors in the shape of a great stone flower, with seven rings of high red walls that wound around each other like the petals of a rose.

There were gates in every wall. But the gates didn’t line up.

A stranger who walked through one would find himself in a blind alley, or in a courtyard with no exits, or back where he’d started.

The paths twisted and doubled and ran in circles.

No outsider had ever reached the center.

"Only a Redhorn knows the way," she said. "We learn it as children... We sing it."

"Sing it?"

"There is a song... Each verse is a turn." She almost smiled. "I have never been good at singing."

Her mother was the Matriarch. Her name was Torga Redhorn, and she had ruled the tribe for forty years.

She was a hard woman, a soldier, and a very great axe. Magnara was her heir, the Horn-Heir, the one who was supposed to take the seat when Torga died.

She was the strongest warrior in the Hold. She had been, since she was twelve.

"But I am not trusted," she said. "I am too angry... I break things to easily."

"You broke a gate."

"I broke a gate."

There was a faint, dry humor in it, like a spark in a pile of ash.

She told me about the Horn-Oath. It was the most sacred vow a minotaur could make, she said, a pledge between two people that was meant to last a lifetime.

It was sealed by snapping off the tip of the left horn and exchanging the pieces. A woman who broke her horn for another was bound to her forever.

"Every minotaur in the Labyrinth has a broken horn," Magnara said. "Almost every one... The old women wear their tips on cords around their necks."

"They give them to their children when they die."

I looked at her horns. They rose from her brow in two thick, dark, perfect curves, as smooth as polished stone.

"Yours are... whole," I said.

"They are."

"Both of them."

"I have never found one who was worthy..."

It was said so quietly that I almost missed it.

"There is a law," she said. "An old one..."

"We do not bind ourselves to the weak... A minotaur who takes a lesser mate is disgraced."

"It is the worst thing that one of us can do." She turned her head slowly and looked at me. "I know how my people would see you."

"A human," I said. "With a stick..."

"With a very small hand."

I laughed.

I couldn’t help it. She’d said it in such a flat, honest, matter-of-fact tone that it went right through my armor, and I laughed until my chest hurt.

After a moment, to my surprise, I saw a smile tug at the corner of her mouth.

"What does ’weak’ mean?" I asked when I could. "To them... and how do they decide?"

"The Gate-Stone," she said.

She explained.

At the very center of the Labyrinth, in the great circular court where the seventh wall met the sixth, there stood a stone. It was the size of a small hill.

Four generations ago, the first Matriarch had set it in the gateway to block it and had sworn that only the one who was fit to lead the tribe could move it.

In all the years since, nobody had even shifted it an inch.

"It is a trial," Magnara said. "It is the test of the Horn-Heir..."

"I tried it when I was fifteen... It did not move."

"How big is it?"

"It is larger than a house."

"Great," I said. "Cool! That’s totally... reasonable."