Blood For Wages

Prologue: The Letter

My dearest brother Arlen,

I don't know if you're capable of recollecting. Don't know whether you can even remember me, or bring Mother and Father to your mind, or recall anything that came before what happened. Perhaps you hate me. Perhaps you should. I know I hate myself. Hate myself so that I feel my bones burning with the pain of it. It's long past time for me to write you, I know, but I have been trying to atone. After all these years of wandering though, I cannot help but think that whatever the dead heed it isn't words, and whatever the dead need it isn't the thoughts of them as made them so.

After I left you, I lost myself and tried to die, but the Painted Kyn found me and took me in. Cut my hair and tattooed my skin. They taught me their tongue and taught me their ways. They gave me fresh food, new hope and purpose again.

Three things I bought after left them and fled south through the Foldwood, down past the Frekirie-Arimen Line, over and beyond the Arifold border proper. The first was a cabin at the mouth of the Rosk; sandbanks and mussels and midges for days. I knew how you'd have loved it. The thought hollowed my heart.

Once I was settled and sure that any pursuit had been shaken, I went into town and bought some shitty clothes off a peddler--a suspicious old bird. Worn maybe, but too good for what I'd become. My sword was overly fine too, so I purchased one as looked like it had been used to do more beating than stabbing. Hid mine by the river wrapped in waxed cloth.

I'd heard somewhere that there was work down in Harma Bay. Work I'd been trained for, had been trained for with you, though we never realised it. I went there the next day and hoped that there was.

Things as they stood, green as I was, I was lucky to find work of a sort, but find it I did with a small band of hunters. Hard graft. The men were tough, uncouth and didn't much take to me. Men often don't when you show them up.

My sweat and my wages never seemed to weigh out-I was getting more aches and pains than I was gaining in coin. I started seeing that a woman couldn't keep herself in tall cotton just by working her tail off, day after day. But I found I could hunt and track better than any. Had myself a knack, just as you always said. Could smell trouble and could smell blood, and could listen to the whispers in the grass and the secrets they told.

I walked past a prayer-house on my way home from the forest one day. Popping up all over the place these fucking things. Salvation from sin they reckon they offer. A fine idea, but I've seen too many people treat sin like just another word to think salvation isn't just a word too. A beggar outside this place told me, 'You reap what you sow'. I stopped and laughed at that for the longest while. Slapped my knee even. Probably scared the man. Thought, right there, that if the gods wanted to take me then I was there for the taking. Thought, just then, that even perdition must be better than trying to get by.

Times were hard; different to anything we could have ever imagined growing up in the manner we did. Highwaymen, thieves, and desperadoes, sure. But also things that never worried us one bit: rain for days and being caught out in storms, hunger and thirst, and the blood-frosting cold.

Wasn't long before I went out on my own and started garnering myself a reputation for being able to find things that folk sought; lost children and fugitive witches, stolen cattle, problem wolves and missing treasures. Tried to use the skills that I honed with you to repair the hole I made in the world. Should've come as no surprise when I came home in the dusk to find my cabin ablaze, the few possessions of yours that I'd kept trailing up into the sky with the embers and smoke. You can't try do good without pissing someone off. Folk'll do some fucked up things for pride. Only thing they'll do worse things for is pay. It was only then that I wept, brother. After all that time, would you believe it?

And always you perched on my shoulder like a crow or a ghost, while I tried to make up for what I did.

I sat in a tavern and stared into the fire, feeling lower than a snake's belly in a wagon rut. Reckless. Morose. I contemplated self-destruction, gazing into those flames; of going out and picking a fight I couldn't win. I thought of the gods, but they declined to show face. Didn't bother me none. I reckoned, if they wanted they could hear about me from the town crier the next day: Girl With a Bottle and Pistol Cut Down In Her Prime. Crier would say I was drunken and hostile. He'd say I was manic and desperate. He'd doubtless be right.

I resisted the urge and instead chose to roam.

All this is to say how I have lived these past eleven years whilst trying to make reparation. While you have been wherever you have gone. Always, Mother tried to tell us, when we were young, that we must love our fates. But, after what happened in those woods, I've no love for mine.

I've no notion whether this letter, these words, will find you, or how. There is a darkness growing and calling. I hear it out here in the hills. A looming fate rising above us all like a wave. I don't know how I know such things, but I do. Know it as surely as I know our dear half-brother will continue to corrupt those avaricious, broken and hard up folk in Frekifold with his gold. Continue to degrade all the good that our parents did for his own selfish ends, even while our mother still lives.

I miss you everyday, brother, but I will see you again. Someday soon, perhaps.

For never have I heard the darkness calling so.

Your sister,

Fia