Her mind spun with so many questions that she was getting dizzy. “What do you mean,things can be how they were meant to be?”
Iryana wanted to ask about the mourning bouquets, but her throat was tight as she was dragged through the kitchen toward the hall.
“Wait, Hadima,” she protested. “I’ll give you the map; you can tell the clan without me.”
“Shh,” her sister shushed her. “You don’t understand yet, but you’ll see.”
The talking she had heard from the courtyard was nothing compared to the roar when Hadima pulled Iryana past the thick wooden doors and into the family’s hall. Almost every Kleesold had squeezed into the room. Some sat on the edge of the benches looking ready to burst to their feet, others paced the edges of the room, while a few were planted in wide stances with arms crossed over their chests. There was whispering, shouting, and somewhere, one of them was crying.
Iryana’s eyes flitted across them, trying to determine who was missing.
“We’ve been a guardian family for almost three hundred years; we can do this!” Iryana’s cousin Kladara was shouting, her face reddened and her usually neat braids wild. Iryana had never seen her cousin in such a state.
Vesima stood at the center of them all, her back stiff as a decades-old pine. “How?” she snapped at Kladara. “Our numbers are falling. We can’t go beyond the post to gather supplies and hunt, and our enemy does not weaken. The dakii have only gotten harder to kill. We may be guardians, but we are Kleesolds first. If we can’t even protect ourselves, how are we to protect anyone else?”
“There has to be something else we can do.” It was Tonhald who called out this time. One of his arms wrapped around Teshya, and the other held little Anara.
Iryana stared at the little rosy-cheeked babe, at how she was holding herself up in her father’s arms. Anara could do little more than wiggle the last time Iryana had seen her. They grew so fast. In the blink of an eye, Anara would be running around the room.
With dread in her gut, Iryana’s eyes dragged over the room until she found Misha. A sigh of relief almost left Iryana’s lips, for Misha looked much the same.She may have grown an inch, her braids longer than last time, but Iryana recognized the dress she wore and the ribbons in her hair. Then she saw the expression on Misha’s face, and her chest was painfully tight. Her sister was only thirteen, but there was a tightness to her eyes and a stiffness to her jaw that wasn’t there before. Fear, anger, exhaustion, or some combination of all three. Iryana didn’t know her sister well enough to know for sure anymore, but it was an expression that shouldn’t be made by little girls.
Iryana could remember when Misha was Anara's age. Hadima was more than a decade older than Misha, bustling around like a little mother, but Iryana was too young herself to help their mother much. But she had held Misha while the others went about the chores, laid on piles of blankets on the floor with her and showed her all her toys. The image of her baby sister’s grabby hands pulling on Iryana’s favorite doll’s hair seared across her mind. Misha’s hands had been so chubby, and the pale yarn slipped from her grasp easily when Iryana pulled the doll back. She would giggle every time, a high-pitched sound that made Iryana laugh with her. She had loved making Misha laugh.
A jerk snapped Iryana out of her memories. Hadima was pushing the pitcher into Aunt Emadya's arms and heading toward the center of the room. Her hand still tightly gripped Iryana’s arm.
“Hadima, no,” she hissed under her breath. But Hadima just kept dragging her.
“But, Grandmother,” Hadima called out as she forced Iryana forward. “Iryana, tell them what you’ve done.”
Iryana’s eyes spun around the room, taking in the shocked and confused faces of her family. She had once known them as well as she had known herself.
She accidentally met Misha’s eyes. There was undeniable hurt there. Iryana looked elsewhere, but everywhere she looked, she found doubt and accusation in their features. Iryana wanted to tell them; she wanted them to know, but her throat was as tight as freshly tanned leather.
Why was she so afraid? She hadn’t failed, not this time.
But next time…
Hadima sighed and pushed Iryana forward again. “She didn’t really go to Lake Vranna, I’ve been covering for her. She joined the 18th Brigade to earn their trust, to find their well.”
There were gasps, and the First’s eyes narrowed. She looked ready to berate them, but Hadima kept going. “And she did it. She’s forged!”
“Metal-forged?” One of the cousins called out, but Iryana couldn’t tell which one in the chorus of whispers.
“Show us!” another called out.
A rush of nausea overtook her, and Iryana briefly worried she was going to collapse. Her head was light, and she couldn’t feel the tips of her fingers anymore.
The First walked up to Iryana, her gently swooping brows lifting toward her silver-streaked hair. Iryana recognized the sternness her grandmother had always worn when disciplining the younger Kleesolds, but there was something she didn’t recognize in that gaze.
“Well?” Vesima demanded. “Show us then.”
Forcing her hands to steady, Iryana held her right hand out and pushed her magic out, the great, sharp spear appearing in her hand. It was the unmistakable color of purple storm clouds: a metal-forging. Gasps and cheers filled the room. No longer able to stop the trembling, she turned all her concentration to what she had practiced the entire trip there. She raised her left hand and let her bow form. The bow was strung.
“A metal-forged bow?” Uncle Byorsh stared at the metal-forging, likely comparing it to his own air-forged one.
“You did this for us?” came a soft voice to her side, and Iryana saw Misha had slipped through the crowd to face her.
Iryana’s lips parted as she took in her sister.Of course she had.
