Bringer of Winter- a M/M/M Epic Fantasy Romance

20- Nangwaya

PART TWO: WARRIOR

URIAH—

For two years, I had watched over Naka, protected her, and taught her what I could. I taught her the ways my mother had taught me, taught her Nelek until she was almost as fluent as I, and together we had tried to live out a normal life in the little cottage my brother bought for me and for my little daughter. Naka remembered each of her family member's birthdays and performed a death ritual for each, but then when the anniversaries of their birthdays came up again, she ignored them. This was the Nibean way. You mourn, you grieve, and then you move on. For the ones you've loved never leave you and walk beside you.

In Nibea there is a telling that if you turn your head very quickly as you walk, especially in the night, that you will see their footprints fading into the dirt beside you. For years as a child, I had tried this with my father's spirit, never realizing that my father was truly alive and well... and a monster.

On Naka's seventh birthday, I made her a sweet cake with expensive sugar I bought from an all-but-abandoned Uriok. During the war in Nibea, Uriok had been an easy target for the Nibean war'rog, who had fought against the invading Pryn forces until they were all but destroyed and then retreated. To wait out a new Cailleach, a moment of weakness from the Pryn, or maybe just to wait out the rest of their lives with no more purpose now that their sole reason for being— the Cailleach— was gone.

I should have known they wouldn't simply give up without a fight like that.

Once the cake was eaten, Naka was reading a Nelek novel and I was making a potion for aching bones to be sold to an old midwife in Uriok, there was a sudden pounding on the door. Although I jumped and Naka looked up at me, a bit startled, I could see she had expected whomever it was. I knew for certain when she stood and walked to the door, as regal and graceful as ever despite her age, and pulled it open to the group of warriors outside.

All were war'rog. All fell to their knees the moment they laid eyes on her.

"No, Naka," I said, jumping at her and grabbing her elbow. "Don't go back to that. The Pryn—"

"Are growing weak with the attacks on their far borders," she began studying the men who bowed to her discerningly. "They will have to let Wal'yah go if she fights back when they are weak. This is what the war'rog have waited for. I cannot let them do this alone, Mama."

Naka had only called me mama a few times— once when she was waking from a nightmare, once when she cried because she had fallen from a tree, and another as she was crying when the prince and the golden-haired man had left our home. Each time, I had felt my chest grow tight. Now, I felt fear like I never had.

"You're going to leave me here," I mumbled.

"You will be safe here," she answered, refusing to meet my eyes. I shook her, grabbed her by both of her shoulders, and knelt so that I was eye level with her. She was so tiny, and yet she acted like a woman four times her age. This tiny body was never meant to bear such a burden on its own. "Wal'yah has never treated you as blood. You will not be comfortable there, and I could never—"

"—You are my daughter," I hissed in Nibean, seeing a few of the war'rog out of the corner of my eye exchange looks. They could not be happy with their chosen leader being adopted by an aberrtion like me. "I will come with you, or you will not go. Understood?"

Finally, Naka met my eyes and nodded, and for the first time in a long time I saw the little girl she should have been. She was terrified, but the Bheur in her wouldn't allow her to say no to the ancestors, to the war'rog, and to Wal'yah herself that begged for her aid.