The boy stared at her in terror. My mother kept her gun steady, daring him to hurt her daughter. When he hesitated a moment longer, my mother pulled me to my feet. Already, flames were devouring the roof of our house, lit by the embers from a neighbor’s. I didn’t look back at the boy before we ran. Even now, I don’t know whether or not he would have pulled the trigger, if given enough time. He hadn’t fired, but his hand hadn’t dropped either.
Was that saving someone’s life? Or hesitating because you lost your nerve?
Did my mother ever have nightmares about the soldier she’d killed? Or did she thank the skies every day, knowing I could have died instead?
I leave the memory behind and shake my head, irritated at how much it can still shake me.“It was a fool’s act,” I tell my mother now, and I know it. “I shouldn’t have.”
“Why not?”
“He’s a prisoner of war from the Federation, Ma.”
“And?”
I look up at her. I’d half-expected my mother to flinch at the thought that I’d endanger my position because of an enemy soldier. To my surprise, though, she just looks intently at me. “Why did you choose to save him, then?” she asks.
“He’s someone important to the Federation.”I offer her the reasonsI’ve been listing in my head.“There’s more to him that he’s not letting on, and he might be our best chance to learn more about what the Federation’s war scientists are doing.”
“And is that really why you saved him, Talin?” my mother asks.
She thinks I did it out of pity too, just like the Firstblade. I scowl at her and lean back in my chair. Why did I? Looking back, it all seems so stupid. He had run out of reasons to live, an emotion I knew all too well, and his gesture had reminded me of Corian. Corian, who said blessings over the bodies of monsters, who I wanted so much to be like, who would have stepped into the arena to confront the Firstblade had he been there.
But this prisoner wasn’t Corian. He wasn’t me. Had I really bet my entire career on a moment of desperate grief?
“Does it really matter?”I sign instead.“The Firstblade paired him with me as punishment. I wonder if he really means to let a prisoner of war into the Striker forces or if this is his way of executing the prisoner anyway, forcing him out to the warfront with us.”
My mother takes one of my hands in hers. She turns my palm up, massaging it by pressing her thumbs gently into my skin. I think back to when Nana Yagerri, the old woman who lives at the end of my mother’s street, first taught me how to sign in Maran. She had fled to Newage from a small village near the border between Mara and Basea. “Come here,” she’d said to me one day as she watched me try and fail to sell herbs I’d picked on the street to the houses around us. She had patted my hand and led me to her shack to share oatcakes and tea. “We’ve all forgotten how to take pity on one another,” she’d told me. “But you can talk to old Nana. She’ll teach you how.”
My mother had then learned it from me so that she could understand her daughter once again.
“There was one summer when the rains came early,” my mother says in Basean, rubbing the base of my thumb. “You were only five years old.Do you remember that? You went out to the garden when the sky was already black with clouds, and came back cradling a thin branch with a butterfly’s chrysalis hanging on it. You were so determined to save it from the storm.”
It had been a beautiful turquoise-colored chrysalis dotted with flecks of gold, and inside it I could see the first fragile outlines of a wing. The rains would rip it from its branch, I’d known without a doubt.
“You spent the entire week guarding that chrysalis until the butterfly emerged,” my mother continues. “And when the storm passed, you were so proud to release it.” Her eyes soften, and this time, she signs to me. “My Talin. You’re just like your father.”
My father had been the one to help me cut the small branch it hung from, had sat beside me as we balanced that branch carefully between two rocks on the table.It’s a fragile thing, Talin, he’d told me as I sat there, legs swinging impatiently, waiting for the chrysalis to break open.So be gentle to it.He mussed my hair, and I leaned my head against his side.You’ll see, it will come out when it’s ready.
I remember every detail of this moment, but not my father’s face. I can’t even recall where he went. I’ve asked my mother many times what had happened to him that horrible night, whether we’d lost him at the house or during our flight from the Federation. My mother deflects the question each time. All she will tell me, over and over again, is that I have his easy smile, his compassionate eyes. And I’d go to bed each night haunted by dreams of that smile and those eyes, of his soft laughter filling the house on warm, rainy days.
I don’t know how much of his kindness I inherited, though. I have killed men and monsters in ways I will never share with my mother.
“I was just a child then,” I sign.
“You haven’t changed, my little love.” She leans closer. “We aren’t trusted here—not because of who we are, but where we come from. Isthat so different from this prisoner you decided to save? Go talk to him. Find out why you were drawn to him.”
I give her an annoyed frown.“He doesn’t understand my signing. He doesn’t even speak Maran.”
“Aren’t we all always searching for someone to understand us? Find a translator. Your sweet friend Jeran. He speaks Karenese, doesn’t he? You saved the prisoner for a reason, even though you might not yet know what it is. Try to find out what made him flee the Federation.”
I roll my eyes.“Now you sound like the soft one.”
She shrugs. “Everyone has a different story.”
I stare at my mother’s long, graceful hands. They bear new scars since I last saw her: burn marks from the stove and pale cuts and calluses from skinning mice and rabbits—the reliable protein that runs rampant out here—but they don’t make her fingers any less deft. She drums them against the table in an idle dance. My memory of her during our life in Basea comes to me in snatches. Her dark, lush hair, her tall figure. She used those skilled hands to serve as our village doctor and as a huntress who’d come striding home with a young boar slung over her shoulders. The same hands that gutted and skinned an animal could also sew the most careful stitch against a wound or tend to delicate medicinal herbs in our garden. At night, those hands would stroke my hair until I fell asleep. My father had been drawn to that contrast in her, the huntress and healer.
“I’ll go see him,” I sign.
My mother squeezes my hands before pulling away and looking out her window. Despite her strong shoulders, she looks small and alone. “Visit me when you return from the warfront. You will tell me all your stories.”
