Chapter 1
They met in the cherub-shaped flowers scattered like beads of blood outside their Capitol; red blood, that was, filthy and mongrel, touching the veins of the petals and poisoning their skin. So said their Heda . It was whipped into the scarred back of their culture to accept what their Heda said with little question. Anya said so, albeit in littler words.
She had been sent into the outskirts as a form of punishment for giving Moira a red crown in the teeth. She had it coming. Black blood, the cruel chant rang in her ears, black blood, poisoned blood. Moira was descended from a long line of devil-worshippers who hung a crucifix symbol on their walls. The girl was built with the sinew of a knot, so Moira did not petrify her as she did the other children. Besides. She’d been bounced on Indra’s lap to the lullaby of Jus drein, jus daun. Blood must have blood, red or otherwise.
It was not fair. Anya said she could not return until last light, when the skies blushed purple and the voices in the woods grew shrill. Anya knew the snake of fear that coiled tight around her spine when standing in the leaves. It was cruel. Indra said she couldn’t fear the woods, for she was Trikru, which meant that her limbs were of the same mold as the boughs above her, and her blood ran in a forked current through the earth. Most of the time she was not afraid. But in the night, the trees curved like the knobs pushing against a vertebrate, and the Paunae howled with hunger, her skin pinched like a leather from the cold, and there were mongrel-blood petals at her feet.
She dragged a hesitant heel across the spine of the one closest to her, pressing it neck-first into the mud. It brought an ember of satisfaction to her stomach to watch it sink.
Indra said they must respect all life. Indra’s comment applied only to the life of leaves — she’d taught her how to slit a grown man’s throat in her sixth year. Indra said, in hushed tones, that the trees were their people — perhaps more so than their neighbour clans (the name Azgeda went unsaid) could be. It was all very well for Indra to say this, born of torn, lacerated skin and a stable-bed.
This girl was born with black melting down her face like wax.
Natblida, she was dubbed. They named her after the Macedonian general, Alexander the Great. The other children mocked her for it — Hogeda hail Heda Lexa! — though she could not fault them. If her mind were softer, if her knives were duller, perhaps she’d slink into mockery as well. But. It was cold and the dogs were loud. Anya said that fear was good. It meant she was thinking with her head. But Heda said fear was a weakness, and Lexa was to be Heda one day , so she squared her shoulders and said with misty breath —
“I am not afraid.”
Indra said the only mongrels that feared liars were liars themselves.
“I am not afraid.”
She stuttered. This late, Moira was likely bent over a bowl of warm soup, holding hands with her mother and brother in a strange, heretic practice — the practice of the Mountain Men — and chanting lyrical verses beginning with ‘dear God’ and ending with ‘ amen’. Moira would bow her neck in a long, smooth column, and light would fall in a veil to bring gold flecks in her hair, and she would be solemn, horse-faced, praying for absolution for her wickedness. Black blood, poison blood . Lexa scowled at the memory. It wasn’t just, that Moira now had meat between her teeth while Lexa’s chattered.
A voice sounded behind her. “My mama used to say that anyone who has to convince themselves of something isn’t really convinced at all.”
Lexa spun on her heel, eyes sharp and stance pointed. “Your mama is a liar,” she bit, ignoring the wetness on her cheeks. It framed her face like worpaint , lashes thick and glossy and brow lacerated like torn tissue.
The intruder — a girl, a small girl dressed in Azgeda garb, the lines of a scythe cutting from her temple to her chin. There was a fire that lay dormant, like a rabid cur, in the deep swell of her iris. Her shock-white locks were pinned in a lazy bun that sat not like a crown upon her scalp, but like a hooded piece of flesh. Her face was swollen with half-mirth.
“And you’re crying,” she said, to Lexa’s stilted sobs. “You look like a raccoon.”
Lexa summoned haughtiness into her spine. “Raccoons are scavengers. I am a warrior. You insult your Heda.”
The girl squinted at her, puzzled. “There is already a Heda.”
“And her spirit will reside in my skin one day.”
She was regarded with apprehension for a moment, their gazes caught in a wave of untimely pride that had Lexa’s shoulders roll back. Her swis was sheathed in royal black, its grip still sweaty from the afternoon. If she got close enough, she could perform an upwards kodon, and the girl would bleed like the petals on the floor.
There was something carnivorous in the thought. Let the flames of hunger envelop you, Indra told her, and breathe them in until your lungs are accustomed to the smoke.
The girl picked up the cherub-shaped petal, and raised it to her lips, close enough to smell. Lexa wondered if it smelt of cranberries or rust or a mangy dog’s hide. Heda said that was how the peasant blood smelt.
“So you are a natblida?”
But, a younger Lexa had said, with wide, worried eyes, in Pramheda’s time there were many people who lay in soil with burnt lungs.
And Indra’s scarred lip only twisted. Victory stands on the back of sacrifice, young Heda. Burn your lungs to save your heart.
“I am what I am.” Lexa stoutly said. “Just as you cannot help your insolent nature, I cannot help my poison blood.”
The girl blew on the petal. It stalked through the breeze as though it had legs, then fell to the ground. Lexa breathed the fumes of irritation, allowed its sweat to soak her skin. She was of her ninth year, the compass needles in her eyes magnets to her weakness, who smiled, of her tenth year, a dimple freckling her left cheek.
“At peace. I mean no harm.” she said. “I have never met a natblida before.”
“Because you’re kom Azgeda.” Lexa said, scowling at the scythe sizzling in twisted sideburn down her cheek. “ There are no natblidae in Azgeda.”
“You speak ill of my people,” the girl said, raising a hand. “ Ai laik Costia, and you must be Trikru.” her eyes flickered downwards like a flame. “Your stance. Did gona Indra teach you that? She is much favoured by Heda, I hear.”
The wind whistled sharply over the tops of the trees. And yet the sky was not yet dark, and the moon still hid its face behind a veil. There was the chorus of a beating drum somewhere in the distance. It took Lexa a moment to realise it was coming from within, where her heart was locked in a cage. Anya told her, as an aside, that the best defence was a good offence, so Lexa bared her glass-cutting teeth:
“You know nothing.”
“So you say,” Costia stepped forth, eyes glittering amber like the sap that melted down treebark in spring, and Lexa recalled how earlier she’d noted the slight swell to her face — a swell that belied more than its heart shape; there was a bruise, pinecone-sized, at the corner of her mouth. “Your eyes are green. They glisten like jewels but they are of the earth. You have hair dark, like bark, and I would bet it is knotty and rough to the touch. Yes,” Costia breathed, and there was a warm clench in her stomach, unlike anything she’d ever felt before. “Yes, you are the natblida of the Trikru. Is your name Lea? Lenorah?”
Lexa breathed. Lexa breathed until her lungs were swollen and sticky with blackness, and remnants of her frustration were wiped like the radiation scourge of their earth. Lexa was calm. (Lexa was torn between these entities, moored upon another isle entirely, reaching blindly from afar.)
“ Ai laik Leksa,” she said into the cold air. She gripped Costia’s hand and shook it, taking note that it was cold.
“Leksa,” Costia tasted her name. “I think we could be friends.”
*
“ You’re the one who burnt three-hundred of my warriors alive.”
The Skaikru was a head shorter than her, with twisted, blonde tresses frizzing the column of her face. She was striking, like an arrow in the eye. Eyes like the pale wax of the moon, a soft nub for a nose, and a mouth that seemed inclined towards upset. She was hunched, in learned submission, at Lexa’s foot, which ought to have appeased her — but the low flame in her eyes tugged upon a long-dormant instinct instead.
In her hands, Lexa mindlessly gripped a knife, toying the teeth of her blade across her index finger, her third, then catching it on her thumb. Black ink swelled like a bruise where she’d nicked herself, wide and spherical like a dilated pupil. She flicked it away like one would flick dust. It was cold. She thought of Costia.
The girl stood her ground. Clarke. Klark.
“You’re the one that sent them there to kill us.”
Lexa paused her dwelling, swiped the blade into its scabbard. The hiss of pain had long since left her skin, which knitted a seam across the opening she’d made. She blinked, slowly, watched Clarke’s teeth scurry and find solace in capturing the flesh of her lower lip. But she would not marry herself to the floor. (This did not bother Lexa as it once might have done. When you are in your twelfth year, hands shiny and black with blood, things tend to cease to bother you as they once might have done.)
Lexa let the subject lie like a sleeping cur. Allowed it to get fat. In time, she would pierce through its soft underbelly, gouge its insides, leave a red moustache around her mouth. In time. Blood must have blood. Indra met her eyes across the room.
She stood, the scent of mud and straw thick and heavy against her nose. “Do you have an answer for me, Clarke of the sky people?”
Clarke swallowed a thickness in her throat. Her warm gaze flickered to where Lexa had gripped the knife, to where leather clung to the metal of her legs, itching to reposition themselves in the clench of a gona’ s stance. Patience. The virtue that painfully clamped at her nape. Lexa reasoned, Clarke would not die by her hand — today. But she let her stew in a little fear of her own making.
“I’ve come to make an offer.”
Lexa bristled, insulted. “This is not a negotiation.”
Clarke breathed. Lexa tested the waters, inching forwards, watching with heated satisfaction how Clarke’s keen, curious eyes tore at the garment of her body, cool like a scalpel, clinical as a sniper. The sort of white-hot flame that felt cold to first touch. Black paint wept down Lexa’s face.
Clarke said, “I can help you beat the Mountain Men.”
She had a good face for the game they called ‘ poker’. But Lexa sensed the sniffle of a lie, the stalking untruth hiding behind the bite-marks on the edges of her lip. She had a ring of bruise around her eyes — Lexa deduced Clarke’d most likely been pondering her statement’s weight since dawn.
She decided she didn’t believe her. She decided she didn’t disbelieve her, also.
Lexa said, “Go on.”
“Hundreds of your people are trapped inside Mount Weather. Kept in cages.” Clarke’s tongue swiped at her lower lip, but the liquid fire in her eyes did not yield. That was… interesting, Lexa decided, for the scarring that creviced her heart refused for her to come up with another word. “Their blood is used as medicine.”
Lexa knew this. Part of her took offence Clarke felt the need to deliver it upon her. Part of her twitched in sharp curiosity, whittled by the meter of Clarke’s speech.
“How do you know this?”
There was a silence, thin like the air at the peak of a mountain, broken only by the regular tik-tok of Indra’s pendulum-clock.
“Because I saw them,” and Lexa’s perception of Clarke shifted forever. The blue thing in her eyes was a glacier prised close, still and cool, with walling that didn’t chip. The blue thing in her eyes was no flame, it was a tide of fury, foam-streaked and leaping high as a jaguar. Lexa’s throat was in straits. Because I saw them. Because she had been to the Maun , and lived.
“My people are prisoners there too,” Clarke continued, “I was one of them.”
Indra’s tattoo shifted with her snarl. “Lies,” she hissed, eyes bugged-out like those of an insect. She spat at Clarke. “Nobody escapes the mountain.”
A doleful look tugged at the lip of her eye. Clarke’s face was weathered, then, like she had not seen sunlight in years. Lexa noticed her eyes had been shot through with blood, too. Then:
“I did. With Anya.”
*
“This walk is long,” Lexa whined, the pack on her back digging into her shoulder-blades like the press of a hot knife.
“This walk is necessary,” Anya snapped. “You cannot call yourself one of us and fear the foliage. Learn from the simplest roach. Adapt.”
“I cannot go on any longer,” Lexa cried — or, mimicked a close approximation of a cry, which was still enough for Anya to turn upon her with a sneer, dark eyes dancing with something another would have called cruel.
“And when you are Heda, is this what you will tell your warriors?” Anya shook her ratty braids, mussed up for she had denied Lexa the honour of sorting through the foliage on her scalp. “That you must stop because you are afraid?”
Lexa was silent for a moment. Then she said, “But I am not Heda.”
“You sound like your Azgeda friend.” came the dismissal. “You are in your tenth year — many have assumed this mantle far before you.” Anya clipped back, swatting through the undergrowth. If it had not been for the perspiration slicking Lexa’s torn shirt to the square of her back or the white flies buzzing around her eyes, she might have appreciated the green, winding for miles like the things in old people’s magazines they called Football Fields, except theirs was dotted with the acne of trees.
“I dislike you today, Anya.” Lexa said, with the full chest of a child. “You say I will become Heda . So I say, when I am Heda, I will order my Ambassadors to drive a poisoned dagger through your heart.”
Anya hissed through bared teeth. “That’s the gratitude I get for dealing with your spoilt, insolent backside for near a decade?”
“My legs ache,” Lexa said forlornly. “ Please, Anya,” she stumbled over a rock, “allow me a moment of respite.” Breathe, she thought, allow the fumes of anger to blacken your lungs.
Anya’s eyebrow arched, the hollow of her voice softening. “You have truly grown weary then?” she said, disappointment aching at her voice. An instinct, infantlike, reached with its grubby hand and tugged at Lexa to scoop this tumour from Anya’s voice. She batted it away. There was little use in stooping to appeasement.
“I have,” Lexa answered honestly.
Anya pondered a moment. Lithe fingers knotted themselves around the hilt of her scabbarbed swis, and she tossed it towards Lexa, who was still as earth. It landed on the ground, point-first.
“Take off your pack.” Lexa did.
“Pick up the knife.” Lexa kept her eyes level to Anya’s own. She gripped the leather hilt in her small palm.
“ Yu want kom gonplei me, goufa? Do so kom mo than your word.” It meant — You want to fight me, child? Do so with more than your word — and Lexa knew right then that Anya, like her, was hoarse from walking even if she hid it well. She hawked up something that looked like resin in her mouth, and spat it onto the ground like it was a coin, freckled red. Anya was in her eighteenth year, teeth rotted from the sweet fruit ire yielded. Eight years younger, Lexa knew better.
Breathe. Allow your lungs to blacken. Breathe.
Anya lunged at her with the aggression of a Pauna, and the black blood in Lexa’s veins sang, each vein and capillary tightening like a thread had been pulled. Anya slashed, pulling her longsword from her sheathe, and Lexa sidestepped.
They danced. At the back of her mind there brimmed a thought in Lexa, a watery swell that threatened a flood — the notion that this was, in a capacity, unjust. Indra said it was to be expected — Anya was of youth, and there was a magnet in the blood of the young that steered them to a fury. You must ride high, Lexa, Indra said . The road is yours to take if you will tread it.
(Because Lexa herself could never be youthful nor young, that courtesy was always denied. At birth, she was crowned in the colour of the cave, at infancy, pronounced a warrior. In time, she would absorb the soul of the Pramheda and those that came after like the bread and wine Moira took at her communions. She was a smooth surface upon whom many felt free to tread. She was a wrinkle in the fabric of time.)
Anya swiped at her stomach, goading. Lexa stepped away. Jus drein jus daun, Indra said, that is our way, and it is well and true. But remember, young Heda, to always sharpen your defence before you oil your offence. Blood must have blood, be it fast or slow, but a redblood must never nick a natblida. But Lexa was not of eighteen years, and her mind was still childlike in all the ways her body was not. Less of a sponge — the soft, foamy material Costia’d acquaintanced her with — moreso the foliage she was afraid to tread post candlelight. It was overgrown with an abundance of thought. Lexa, abashed, forgot.
She sliced at Anya as though she were slicing a block of cheese, swis flicking through the air like it was a whip, or perhaps a wire made for splitting skin. She moved like a column of water, stance thinner, smoother — Luna taught her that, Luna kom Floukru, a natblida whose blood was denser than what Costia called a ‘neutron star’ — her naked feet touched the earth, allowed their fairness to be soiled, and—
Anya caught her with a raised knee. Lexa’s stomach was concave, flattening into the walls of her pelvis, and she was on the ground with a knot in her throat that pushed up, upwards like a noose, constricting the gelatinous space around her eye. There was a dampness there. It was strange. (She didn’t— she didn’t cry. Not really. She—)
She found herself wrestled to the floor, back afire and legs raw, like she was cattle sweltering beneath the flare of the sun. She stank like a corpse. Anya wasn’t smiling. Both her hands were pressed onto the edge of her sword, holding it to the length of Lexa’s throat, effectively manoeuvring her in such a manner she found she could not move her lower half.
“You will not kill me,” Lexa took note.
Anya’s jaw twitched. “I will not.”
“So you will make me walk again?”
There was a shift from on top of her. “You know it is for your own good, goufa.”
Lexa exhaled, her lungs pink and sweet. There was no fire, save for the tingling scent of pinecone embroidering its way up her nose, that could stifle her now. Anya was the flame that burnt the hottest of them all. She realised — anger could not come close.
But. Lexa was the Heda.
Lexa’s legs were out of commission, but her arm worked fine. Anya’s sword was an inch away from snapping the cord of her jugular, but Lexa’s fingers were white around her knife. She inched, body writhing like that of a centipede. Anya’s jaw was rigid.
“Do not move. You only extend your punishment.”
Lexa arched. “You will not kill me. If you hurt me, we will return to Polis. You will have to carry me and you will answer to gona Indra.”
Anya’s lip puckered. She was silent. It gave Lexa those valuable grains of moment, time clasped like granules of dirt in her clenched palm. It stained. Her hand was silent.
“I will forbid Costia from your hut the next month,” rasped Anya.
“You would not dare.”
“You forget yourself.” Anya’s voice cracked like a whip, the timbre of teenage deepness rattling in the locket of her throat. Her shout rang like a broken record, dusting the sweet-tuned whistle between the trees. Lexa looked into the eyes of the sky a moment, then back into black spots of fury. “That girl,” was hissed into her face, “brings only trouble.”
“You are very prejudiced, Anya. Costia is—”
“—not one of us. You do not listen, Lexa.” Anya shook her shoulder. Her voice thinned with desperation. “We have been at war with Azgeda for thirty years. We have been at an uneasy peace for ten. Costia is—”
“Eleven years old, inept with a spear and arrow, and a refugee with the softest hands I’ve touched. She is no threat.”
Anya ground her jaw. “She is a weakness. She is a distraction. She is—”
“Did I ever tell you what Costia taught me?” Lexa cut in suddenly, still as a grave. There was nothing on her face that betrayed her. “Her father was a healer of her people. So was her mother, until they cut off her arms and sealed the stumps with molten bronze. The natblidae cut me, Costia disinfects my wound. The other children mock me, Costia soothes my ego’s bruise. I teach Costia the discipline of the sword some days. And on other days…” Lexa allowed her mouth to thin into a smile, though the side of her face was mottled black-and-brown from earthly residue and sweat, and though her tailbone hurt as though she’d been sitting on a toothy throne from first light till candlelight — Lexa tasted pride on the underside of her tongue. It tasted like earth.
“And on other days,” her eyes bloomed green, alight like lanterns lit in the streets of Polis on Ascension Day, abright like the soft, thready mirage of gold weaving through six-fingered oak leaves. Her pupils were black. “Costia teaches me how to heal. Costia tells me of the wounds she sees. Costia tells me there are only seven places that, when cut, could not be healed.”
Anya’s face turned the colour of curdled milk.
“The most obvious target is the throat,” said Lexa, jutting her chin upwards and revealing the sweat-slicked column of her neck as though giving Anya a hands-on demonstration. “but you like to talk, Anya, so I will spare you your voice. Of course, there is the heart, though cutting through the cartilage is more dexterous work than it may sound. The severance of the spinal cord causes instant paralysis, but the nape is hard to reach. The abdomen contains many of your major organs, but I’d lose my head before I’d get an inch in there. The same applies for your underarm and wrist.”
Anya didn’t move. Her grip on Lexa neither tightened nor loosened. “What are you saying?”
Lexa pressed the mouth of the knife to Anya’s inner thigh, kissing the leather with such softness that it went unnoticed — until she said: “You do not shield your legs. The femoral artery is left unguarded. I slice through it, you die.”
The leather on her thigh parted with a soft hiss. Anya jumped back as though Lexa burnt her with hot coals, her longsword forgotten in the dirt. She breathed heavily, expelling mist through her nostrils, armourless upon her feet. Lexa picked up the sword, regarded it with curiosity, and sheathed it at her hip. Her scabbard felt warm. The trees circled her like stalwart shields.
“I have your weapon,” she said, chin high as though she were combating a weight pushing onto her head.
Anya’s voice was low. “You were going to—”
“No.” Lexa cut her off. “Not yet. Your fight is not over. Not yet.” she repeated. Anya’s eyes were cast low and hooded like the caps of a mountain, a thin veneer of shame creasing her sharp-lined brow. Lexa stepped forth, brushing off her excess of pride. She extended a hand, as Costia’s once extended to her —
“May we return? I believe I’ve seen enough.”
Anya didn’t bow nor bend to her as stalks of wheat and insects bent to the sun. Lexa would never ask that of her — she did not take joy in the toil of crushing spirits like they were scuttling invertebrates beneath her heel. Anya won their fight. Lexa, as the powerful and prosperous did, merely cheated defeat.
Still. Beyond the scorn, there was a glint of something gleeful — dare she say proud — in how Anya looked at her. Wordlessly, she shouldered her pack again.
When Lexa attempted to follow suit — “Rest,” came the sanded command. Lexa blinked owlishly, and Anya sighed. “Drink up. Then, yong Heda, we return.”
*
The Mountain Men are turning your people into Reapers, Clarke’s eyes crackled, voice pitched low. Lexa’s fingers trembled, the cadence of her voice inciting a battle inching up her spine she was too weary to fight. Breathe.
I can turn them back. I’ve done it, she said. With Lincoln.
Now, there was no lie in her eyes. No whitening of the mouth, no hollowing of the cheek. Clarke would not divorce herself from honesty. Lexa could not tell one how she knew — just that she intuited it, sure as her heart was a black muscle clingfilmed in ink. Intuition was a dangerous scent to chase. She steeled herself, scabbard warm against her hip.
I know we can do the same for others.
Lexa believed her. Lexa’s smile was soft, like the flat knife that cut through the domestic sizzle of scrambled eggs-and-toast. There was a layer of a chuckle hidden in there, somewhere, a perfume that curled around her tongue like a malignant vine. You may have your truce.
Clarke said, with no difficulty, Thank you.
But it was not so simple. It could not be so simple, for Lexa read the warning tattooed in Indra’s eyes. To lead was to balance, to watch the scales with aching eyes in candlelight, to oil their bolts and scrub them clean, to add her weights just-so, as though it were grains of sand she managed, rather than both the blades of grass she tread, and the blades of metal that she pointed. Thinking of the smell of eighteen corpses slickened in blood, fester and rain, Lexa said, with much difficulty — I just need one thing in return.
Clarke, of eighteen years, each for the lives another took, was innocent of Lexa’s turmoil. Tell me.
Lexa’s fingers crept up the hilt of her swis, sheathed in the scabbard, and she thought, with a stab to her ribs, of Anya again. It will not do, she thought. Bring me the one you call Finn, she said. With Anya’s voice, with Anya’s tongue unwinding the strange algorithm knotting her throat, the knot that was cherub-shaped like the cranberry-coloured petals in the mud. It was Anya’s conviction that bled through, Anya’s strength, Anya’s way — Blood must have blood — the lust for vengeance that could never dilate Lexa’s pupils or harden her teeth, for the call was a stranger to her transplanted heart.
Our truce begins with his death.
Clarke’s slight smile dropped like a stone. A feeling Lexa had only once felt knitted together her throat.
Lexa knew of their customs. Ritual burial stated that for his crime, Fin kom Skaikru would burn and smoke, that his raw flesh would be branded, that his arms be severed, that his legs be amputated — that he would suffer and writhe for the agony of eighteen deaths. And then, at first light, the Heda’ s blade would touch upon his throat and relieve him of his suffering. Those that made it to such a time died with a smile on their face.
It was a day later that her people, red-blooded and hungry, built Finn’s stake with great eagerness. Its spine threatened to touch the canvas of the sky and alit it would be a great beacon of orange and purple, devouring the night. She wondered if its smoke would billow so far as to touch the noses of the Mountain Men. Part of her worried for this.
Finn had the hunched look of somebody with ghosts living under his skin. There was a well of pity in Lexa that turned for him — he was not alone in his muddied hands. She saw regret in his young eyes, the eyes that had opened eighteen years ago and eclipsed the passage of eighteen deaths, but regret was too shallow a currency to pay for a debt as deep as the one he owed. Lexa knew this. Lexa carried the pains and angers of her people in her heart. Finn had to die.
Clarke disagreed.
You bleed for nothing, Lexa told her with gentleness, watching her attempt to gut herself on the tooth of Indra’s spear, her shirt weeping a crimson plea. There was a need for blood this night, but Clarke’s was not the one Lexa’s people hungered for. You cannot stop this.
Lexa thought of a poem Costia once unearthed: Tyger, Tyger, burning bright. Thought of how earnestly she’d wished to cup the golden fire that licked the hearth of her iris, to hold Costia’s wholeness close to her mouth, where to kiss her would be to cannibalise, where they would merge to form a whole. Mine. The depraved instinct rolled its fingers down her spine.
Clarke was not like this. Clarke was the opposite of what Lexa had revered — worshipped, even — she was not a forest fire that smelt of incense and pine. And yet, even now, there were ugly rashes peeling at Lexa’s throat.
Clarke said, earnest, But you can.
But Finn is guilty, Lexa stepped forth, eyes flickering to the metal seam on the underside of Clarke’s wrist. She wondered, eyes green-and-orange in candlelight, if that was what Clarke came to do. She looked to the sky gashed in mist, and thought she saw Costia’s face there. And what, if Clarke killed her there? They’d both die in the end.
No, Clarke vehemently denied, trembling, gaze flickering to Finn like he was white powder and she was an addict overcome with withdrawal pains. He did it for me.
It was resolved. Then he dies for you.
Clarke’s lip puckered. Can I say goodbye?
Lexa nodded. Clarke embraced Finn, and walked out with her hands bloody. Finn hunched over like a wounded animal, a rabbit tied to a tree for target practice, his insides weeping onto the ground, eyes empty as the silver hole in the sky.
He appeared content. The Trigedakru were not. They swarmed Clarke, whose eyes were blue, so blue, like the deepest waters and highest of cliffs. Her face was streaked with blood, grime, sweat and tears; Lexa wondered, offhandedly, how such a mixture would taste on her tongue.
Her people were not of a similar thought. Anger was the demon that possessed them, that scarred their mouths to yell cruel words and hurtle crueller gestures. Clarke appeared to accept this, shrivelling like a leaf in autumn’s dusk, as though it was her worth, alongside Finn’s life, that wet the soil. Lexa would not have this.
It is done.
The body would be given to the people of TonDC, murderer and murdered joined by fire. Only then could her people find their peace — the construct that burnt her neck that was once twelve, and that was now twenty — the hope that turned their chests concave and upended the contents of their stomachs onto the ground like stars falling from the sky. It was trivial. Ritualistic. Had Lexa been a different person, she might have laughed.
Clarke attended the burning of the body with sunken, hollow eyes. Lexa respected her grief, even if she did not respect the man it was reserved for. She handed her the torch, dabbed with water gon faya, the stuff that got flames to spring up with the strength of a Pauna and crackle harshly, and decided to dip her toes in the pool of Clarke’s sorrow.
“I lost someone special to me too.”
Clarke’s eyes were blue with interest. Lexa lost herself in a riptide of memory and blurted, where she was so normally guarded, “Her name was Costia. She was captured by the ice nation, whose Queen believed she knew my secrets.” She breathed. The smoke touched her black lungs. Clarke had turned away. “Because she was mine. They tortured her, killed her, cut off her head.”
Her lips barely moved when she said, “I’m sorry.”
Lexa was cold. The hand of sympathy, a phantom notion to her armoured shoulder, did not rest well in the gallows of her stomach. It turned over. What are you sorry for? She thought. Could you have grasped Time by its leathery, wrinkled face and forced it to step back? She thought.
“I never thought I’d get over the pain, but I did,” she said.
“How?”
Lexa breathed. The flames bit at her lungs, exhalation could not dispel her ire. She was unused to being questioned. Titus had said, in her younger years, Better to be knowingly uncomfortable than ignorantly content. So Lexa forced her hot cheeks to cool.
“By recognising it for what it is. Weakness.”
“What is? Love?” Now it was Clarke whose voice was choked by the snare of rage, even if it were clipped and cold. “So you just stopped caring about anyone? I could never do that.”
Clarke called upon her at a time of great fragility, her iron-dense bones now wax-thick. She burnt, even if she was made of stronger stuff than fire, like a lit wick. Lexa would allow her to use her like — what was it they said in Gonasleng? — a shoulder to cry on. Lexa would allow her to dry her tears and harden her heart. (Titus later said Clarke weakened Lexa — this was an untruth, Lexa’s heart was a reaper, red from Costia’s handprint. All Clarke had done was give it life.)
Then you put the people around you in danger, and the pain will never go away.
“The dead are gone, Clarke,” Lexa softly said. “The living are hungry.”
It hurt, when Clarke twisted the knife of betrayal into her spine. It hurt more than it should have. Gustus warned me about you, but I didn’t listen.
Lexa— please—
Lexa gripped that blade, her back crying soft, black tears that would solidify into worpaint, the Heda’ s crown. It was thin enough to pick her teeth with — that poison, thick as water, turning her heart to acid, her bones to Maunon -chow, her blood to something weak and diluted. That blade was translucent in her hands, and in her loss, Anya’s spirit translated itself onto her tongue. She asked a question she’d pondered the past day —
Tell me something, Clarke. When you plunged the knife into the heart of the boy you loved, did you not wish that it was mine?
(Lexa was embarrassed to be wrong. Lexa was ashamed for baring herself in such a manner, so brusque, so lewd — for offering a chunk of skin unguarded for the predator’s taking, smooth and glistening beneath Clarke’s charcoal eyes. The shame ended when Gustus’ heart stopped. She carried on.)
*
“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”
This was the rallying cry that tore itself from the earthy throat of Polis. It was the cloud that shifted day to nightscape, first light into candlelight. It was Moira who brought her the news, grubby face gleeful and silver crucifix dangling like a pendulum around her neck.
“ Heda kom Sandgedakru ste stedaunon, Leksa,” she said, voice sharp like one of Costia’s scalpels. “The Commander from the gathering of the sandspeople is dead. Does it flurry your poison heart?”
They were in Lexa’s hut; a small structure swollen with light. Costia liked to gift her candles, and Lexa liked when Costia gifted her the candles, liked how they smelt after being licked with light, liked how they gloved her skin like a stamp. Moira’s brick teeth looked orange in the light.
Lexa had been reading a scroll. It belonged to Costia — it was about a girl who scorned love, claiming it a weakness, but who ultimately failed to guard her heart from the touch of another. She thought, before that day, that she too would not have minded being opened up like a vault. Moira’s walnut-eyed crinkled cruelly.
“Are you deaf, mokswoma, or just stupid?”
Lexa stood up. “You’re trespassing, rotblida.”
“ Heda kom Sandgedakru ste stedaunon.” Moira repeated. Then snickered, twisting the rings on her fingers. “Long live Heda Leksa!”
“You lie,” said Lexa, poised and stout as a raised shield. Like a warrior in battle, she did not flinch. She stepped forth, and Moira stuttered back as though there was a buzz of contagion surrounding her.
“I do not lie!” Moira’s voice went pitchy like that of a mouse. “The Lord says it is a sin to lie! And what would you know — you have the Devil in your blood! You are a hideous misfortune child. You should have been left on the rocks and had your liver pecked out by vultures!”
Lexa’s cheeks were red-hot fury. “Get out!” she pronounced, and though her lip was curled the click of her throat quivered like an arrow in a taut-strung bow. A sickness impaled itself through her skull.
Moira stuck out her tongue. It was pink and fleshy, like a worm. Lexa pictured sticking in a hand and ripping it from the caverns of her mouth, and stomping it into the earth like she’d done to the rust-coloured petals an angry night ago. She was of twelve years and Moira’s receding footsteps and cacophonous laughter fell upon her ears like a veil.
“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”
“You must be calm, ai gona,” Costia was gentle like the mists that streaked their skies now in forlorn winter, blanketing the silver circle from their eyes. Normally, Lexa would have felt only warmth clawing in pink scratch-marks through her skin at the endearment, but that day Costia’s reassurances were cold water to her spine. “I will see you on the other side.”
“You might not,” Lexa hinted. Costia, who had been tightening the shoulder-straps of Lexa’s armour, stilled.
“You people’s customs—” Costia diverted with a swallow, looking as though Lexa had punched a brick-sized hole through her heart. “They are ridiculous. Must the others die?”
Like the sword sheathed at her hip, Lexa was steel. “They must. We all must prove our strength, as we would on the battlefield. Gona Indra says so, and so it is true.”
Costia’s lips, full and dewy normally, though now scarred in haggardness, pulled downwards in a grimace she attempted to hide. The implant of her fingerprints on Lexa’s clothed back made her skin flare like the expulsion of an ember to the sky. “And has gona Indra fought these battles?” asked Costia, voice light and steeped in challenge. “Have her hands been sullied by the blood of children at your age? I would think not.”
“Costia,” Lexa raised her chin in warning, “do not tread waters you do not understand. Stick to your medicines.”
“Do not condescend to me, jewel. I am your elder, do not forget,” Costia bit, the fruit of righteous anger darkening her noble teeth. Lexa felt forlorn. Part of her wished to envelop her friend. Part of her was afraid to acknowledge what that meant.
(She recalled the night Anya had exiled her as punishment, recalled it as a prize. She’d spent the night having clung to Costia like she wished to make the valleys beneath her skin her home. Costia lived with her father, she found out, who’d pinkened her jet-black gashes when the other children cut too hard. Costia had good taste in books, and candles, and she had expensive eyes, iris slotted in deep-gold. She recalled this with sadness tainting the corners of these memories. Time was the single thing Lexa could not buy.)
“If I die today,” Lexa said, “then I die forever. It is my duty to my people.”
“But you will not die,” Costia said tearfully. “You can not.”
Tears were a thing infectious as yawns. Later, Lexa would regain control of this horrible, pointless function, but now she bled freely from her bitten eyes, hearing the canals of Costia’s throat close up.
“I will not die,” Lexa said, seeking Costia’s hand. There was a roar outside the tent, sweeping through the crowds like an infection, like wildfire, poisoning their hearts, their lungs. Lexa felt pity for all those gleeful. They must have been terribly bored these years.
“I have been telling you this for years, Costia. I am Heda. Today, the Commander’s spirit shall choose me.”
“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”
There were nine of them, pincushion soldiers, holding swords twice the length of their arms and clad in leathers that slid off their short bodies, clinging to what little muscle they could find. Some were fearful. These were to be the first to go — a gona could not show fear, let alone a Heda feel it.
Lexa knew them. Luna kom Floukru. Iria kom Sandkru. Brie kom Boudalankru. Rawing kom Podakru. Natali kom Ouskejonkru. Phoebus kom Delphikru. Atlas kom Ingraronakru. Kleo kom Trishanakru. These were the children she ate with, laughed with, played with, fought with. These were the children who lined themselves up like they would line up for a bowl of soup. These were the children who bared their necks to death.
One by one, their names were called. Each child stood forth and saluted the Fleimkipa, a ghoulish man dressed in pasty robes that hung from his skin like cartilage, with deep, sunken beetle eyes. Their names were called in order, and the crowd blushed in a roar, scrabbling with stained fingers for ballot papers, calling out their favourites in hushed tones.
Luna was the eldest. At fifteen, she stood a head higher than the rest, skin bronzed and a mane of rusted gold sweeping from the knife-tips of her cheekbones to the hilts of her collar. Her name was the first to be called. She bowed in accordance, but her eyes were raised to the sky, ablaze with a torture to which young Lexa could not put a name.
Lexa was not the youngest of these children. No — the youngest of these were six and seven, with thumb-shaped dirt streaks around their eyes. Neither was Lexa the least afraid. In fact, as the resounding cry of ‘ LEKSA KOM TRIKRU!’ sounded and she was made to kneel, every fibre of her being trembled in protest. She rose, her knee smudged in dirt. Rain anointed her windswept braids. The skies are weeping for me, she thought bitterly.
The Fleimkipa brought the horn to his cold lips and blew thrice. Lexa’s scabbard was warm against her hip.
“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”
The first to be slain was kom Ouskejonkru, a girl with plaits the colour of sand-and-stars, with seafoam eyes that receded into the wells of her pupil, with skin the colour of Azgeda snows Lexa only knew of from Costia’s lips bleeding black. She had charged kom Ingraronakru, who had shared the soft of his bread with Lexa at lunch, and he had pushed the point of his spear through her stomach. She fell to her knees and the crowd cheered in wild, drunken ecstasy. She was nine years old. The boy was thirteen.
Lexa’s first challenger was the boy Rawing kom Podakru, whose weapon of choice was the studded arrow flecked in poison that was honey-gold. His thick fingers stuttered with a fletchling, aiming for the apple of Lexa’s throat. He was fourteen. When Lexa was seven and they’d gone cave-hunting and her tent had been soaked through, he’d lent his for cover and chosen to brave the rain. The petrichor on the bottom of her tongue tasted something like sorrow. She remembered something Heda had once said — Love is weakness — and as he shot the arrow, she caught it in the teeth of her palm.
It scratched at her arm, leaving behind an inky welt. Lexa closed her eyes and thought of Costia, fear palpable as the mud sloshing beneath her feet. She charged kom Podakru before he had the time to blink, thought of his seesaw smile and stuck the arrow into the hollow of his neck. She felt nothing tracing the surprised run of ink, watching his pupils shrink and iris turn dove-white. With two gluttonous fingers from both hands she prised open his wound and faced the crowd, smearing kom Podakru’s lifeblood across her eyes. The people — her people — delighted in this, and a faint glow sank in Lexa’s chest.
Iria kom Sandkru was eight and wiry, wielding a swis in her left hand. She had been the Heda’s favourite, and the proud raise to her eyes was significance of this; the belief that she could wade through unchallenged. Such a belief softened her otherwise-formidable strength.
She charged Lexa with all the foresight of a bull, swiping at her leather-crusted leg. She cut a thin gash and prompted Lexa to turn on her heel, longsword emerging from her scabbard and slashing down across the junction of her shoulder. Kom Sandkru’s mouth parted in a wordless scream alongside her stomach, forced open by the blade of Phoebus kom Delphikru’s sword.
He looked at Lexa, his thick hair stuck to his angular, chiselled face, his eyes shallow and breaths irregular, and swung with the strength of a fourteen-year-old boy at her chest. Reflex sprang into her like a disease, and Lexa ducked, dropping to the ground with sand dirtying her eyes. She raised herself, head shielded, and aimed for an upwards kodon, which nicked him through his mail.
His eyes went dark and round like buttons as though he were surprised she could touch him, and he reared himself up like a warhorse, kicking in her stomach.
“Die,” he muttered thickly, bracing himself against her, angling his longsword to her chin. “Just — die, die already, just—”
It took Lexa a moment to realise that it was not rain trickling down his face.
He had a mother, she realised. He was the only one of them who did. A mother who kept him fed and clothed and changed his bedsheets and taught him their trades. Lexa thought of Costia’s sterile-scented lessons, her warm hands guiding Lexa’s mud-streaked ones, pointing out the points of a cold body, and she thought of Anya and her flared nose pushing her to the earth — and with a viciousness that sat in her like a circle in a square, she kneed kom Delphikru back and scrambled for blank-faced kom Sandkru’s swis, pushing it through the skin of his thigh. Kom Delphikru’s mouth parted with a soft hiss, forming a ‘Please’ resorted for his mother, the last woman who cared whether he lived or died.
Across the field, Luna kom Floukru’s broadsword had found the target of Kleo kom Trishanakru’s neck. It was with a surprised grunt that he fell to the earth, everything up to his calves drenched in muck, and Luna’s dark eyes, almond-shaped and wide like medallions, met Lexa’s across the field. All the remaining challengers were slain. The crowd was nearing in on them.
Lexa trembled around the grip of her longsword. Her naked scabbard was cold.
And then, Luna did the unthinkable. Luna sheathed her sword. Lexa’s hold over her own slackened. The crowd died to a murmur.
Luna bent her knee. She said, “I yield.”
“ Natrona! ” Fleimkipa Titus thundered, face puce in his outrage. “Rise and fight, in the name of Heda Nike kom Sangedakru, natblida!”
Luna’s teeth were blackened as though they were a row of cavities. Lexa remembered her best of all. She had taught her how to wield the swis, taught her how to notch an arrow, how to catch a minnow and how to rub smoke from two sticks. Lexa bent to her, voice wobbly as a tide.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered, mouth set and black stars glittering around her eyes.
Luna only smiled. “Look at you, you in your worpaint. You’ve only ever wanted this honour. Who am I to snatch it from you with such cruelty?”
Lexa grew hot in misunderstanding. “You dishonour me by refusing to fight. Pick up your blade, kom Floukru. Put an end to this.”
Luna was hollow-cheeked. “You listen to me not. If I fight you, I will win.” she raised her head, crowned in her glorious, thick mane, dampened in rivulets of rain and blood alike, and shouted — “I YIELD! YOU HEAR THAT?”
“You yield,” Lexa repeated, tongue numb on her lips. “You yield.” her worpaint dribbled down her chin.
“And I pray that you are merciful,” Luna sighed, “ Heda Leksa kom Trigedakru.”
“Then your faith is misplaced.”
“HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON! HEDA KOM SANDGEDAKRU STE STEDAUNON!”
The flame was sealed into her nape. The traitor was banished come dawn. Costia visited as Fleimkipa Titus jammed a needle into her back, inking scriptures along the trunk of her spine. Seven circles ran down the bottom — each for the natblida that had been slain, commemorated not as tombstones but as reminders on the flesh.
“I do not know which is worse,” was murmured into the shell of Lexa’s ear, “thinking you would die at the points of those swords, or knowing you willingly drove them into the cavities of those childrens’ chests.”
Lexa turned her large, wide eyes on her, still streaked with the blood of the fallen, pupils dilated and mouth atwitch. “I am a child too, Costia. You act as though I have committed some great sin.”
“But you have, Lexa,” Costia said with a heaving chest, a hot tear rolling down her cheek. “Do not tell me the worpaint had blinded you too? Do not tell me you do not see?”
“You said I must win,” said Lexa sullenly. “And now I have won, you are unhappy.”
“I apologise,” said Costia, with more meekness than Lexa liked to allow. “I apologise. I recognise you had no choice.”
Lexa raised a hand. The needle stopped biting into her back, and she felt the power of the Heda course through her fingers, the power to control when lips sealed and when stones fell.
“ Ai laik Heda,” she said gently, cupping Costia’s face in the heart of her palm. “I always have a choice. Luna made hers, and I made mine.”
“LONG LIVE HEDA LEKSA KOM TRIGEDAKRU! LONG LIVE HEDA LEKSA KOM TRIGEDAKRU! LONG LIVE HEDA LEKSA KOM TRIGEDAKRU!”
That night Lexa awoke with a cough. She covered her mouth, felt something come out. It was a petal, red like the fur of a mangy dog’s hide.