That is true, before this all began my skin was pure. Unblemished.
I bore no such mark.
But then that begs the question of how it could have gotten there.
Heimdir seems to draw the same conclusion as me. He reaches up, stroking his beard as he regards me. “You must see the Werma.”
I am already shaking my head to refuse but he holds up his hand to cut me off. “I don’t care about your petty grievances with her. You have beendeathmarked,Laduga. She’s the only one who will know why or what it means.”
“But the journey is treacherous,” I blurt out the first excuse I can think up.
“You have your dragons,” he says unmoved. His steely gaze cautions me that he will not be moved.
“I will go with her, as her shield sister,” Tira declares, pushing to her feet.
Heimdir considers this for a moment before nodding. “Indeed, and you will take the imperial prisoner.”
I look up startled, turning to the Imperial who has finally gone quiet and is now listening to our conversation. “Him?” I demand.
“Me?” he asks in a shaky voice.
Heimdir nods. “You struck a killing blow, and yet, here he stands, and you are deathmarked. He is connected to this somehow. The Werma will know. Bring him to her with all haste.”
I swallow hard, I want so badly to argue, and yet he is our chief. His word is law within this tribe. Besides, he is only saying this out of a place of concern for me. We look after our own, even a fatherless deathmarked like me.
And no matter how much I hate the idea of seeing the Werma again after all this time… he is not wrong. She is the only person who will be able to tell me what is happening and if it’s possible to reverse it.
Chapter Five
The Unspoken Laws of Man
Icanthinkofmany things I would rather do than meet with the Werma. Disembowelment is higher on the list than that.
Tira is quiet as I stuff some provisions into a satchel. The Werma lives in the hills quite the distance from our tribe, indeed she is not just our tribe’s soothsayer. Many clans in the area turn to her and her mystic abilities to see the future. She holds no loyalty to her own, but rather walks many paths. No one worries about her up in those hills though.
The tribes of Nelgata may not get along, indeed many will kill a person from another clan on sight, but there is one thing that we do have in common. And that is a fear of the unknown. No one will harm a wisewoman, they have too great a respect for her and too great a fear of what will happen to them if they did.
After all, without the Werma who will sit in that rickety old hut feeding crows and crooning about things that may never happen whilst inhaling all manner of herbs that addle an already decrepit mind.
Why anyone would trust her to dictate the future I have no idea, she’s more of a madwoman than anything. Besides, if we can do without the gods, we can do without knowing the future as well. Some things aren’t meant for man to achieve and knowing your own destiny is one of them.
Abandoning your family and your people is another of them, but I suppose if the Werma is breaking one of the unspoken laws of man, what is to stop her from breaking the rest?
I sigh, bracing my hand against the table. It’s a sparse, crude thing made of roughhewn wood. My father had started building it, I finished it after he was dead. I believe that he had plans to carve it up and make something beautiful out of it. But now it is merely functional.
My father always knew how to see the beauty in everything. Even the Werma somehow, even after she abandoned us.
I whip my head around to see that Tira is watching me; her own satchel slung over her shoulders.
“You know that you don’t have to come,” I say at last. I may be the only one she confided to about this, but she still has nightmares from the last time she saw the Werma, when the madwoman stated that she would meet her end by the sword.
“I’m your shield sister, Laduga. I will never make you face the world alone.”
I give her a wry grin. “I’m not facing the world; I’m facing a soothsayer. The world would be preferable to this.” I pull my own satchel onto my shoulder and move past her, but she stops me with a hand on my arm.
“I’m not making you face your mother alone either.”
I flinch at the wordmother. That isn’t a word I’ve used to associate with the Werma in a very long time. Not since my father died. Not since she never came to claim me and instead left me to be raised practically as an orphan.
