This fic is for the wonderful LogosMinusPity.
I got beta/edit help from Cherepashka.
Both of these amazing writers can be found at Archive Of Our Own.
Promises To Keep
Spring comes late.
Sejuani is small for her eleven winters. Too small. She is skin and she is bones. The winter was long. The spring is late. As she hoists her pack up from the frozen ground and onto her back, her left knee buckles at the sudden added weight. She grimaces and shakes her leg out, then looks out towards the eastern horizon and the weak morning sun.
The sun is too high, too bright. The first hunt should have departed two weeks ago, as soon as days were long enough to travel.
Sejuani's pack, stitched leather on an antler frame, is a hand taller and a hand and a half wider than her torso. She folds up the straps and slips carved bone clips over them to keep them short. The ivory clips are carved with simple figures, depictions of men chasing down a great elk. A prayer for a good hunt.
Sejuani is not an artist and even a long winter could not make her so.
Pack secure, Sejuani takes her spear from where she left it leaning up against the dark stone wall of her family's longhouse. The village has two great longhouses, and the ruins of several more.
The spear shaft is pine, common enough to the Freljord. The spear tip, though – the tip is cold iron edged in steel. There are no mines in the Freljord and it has been seasons since the river brought the gift of Sverun, red-haired lord of smiths and fire. Sejuani's mother, dead over a year now, said that the spear belonged to Sejuani's father, and his mother before him. Sejuani has no reason to doubt that.
Like her pack, Sejuani's spear was meant for someone twice her size and twice her years, but unlike the pack, the spear does not dwarf her. Though she rests it against her shoulder to help support the heavy weapon, she handles it as if she were born with it in her hands.
The other hunters are gathering at the edge of the encampment. Sejuani goes to join them. Mud, the product of a little warmth and too many feet, sucks at her elk-skin boots.
The hunt-leader, claw-chief of the clan, has dark circles beneath her eyes. Her cheeks are hollow. She is Sejuani's cousin-aunt. Like Sejuani, the chief's skin is pale and her hair is white. Like Sejuani, she is skeletal.
She divides the hunt into two. Half will go north with her, the other half will go west. Ten days, she says, no more. Five days out, five days back. If ten days yields nothing, the clan must leave the longhouses and go south, following the river towards the farm-fat Avarosans and the sea. Life grows leaner every year for the Winter's Claw. Ten days.
Sejuani grips her spear tightly as her party raise their fur hoods, lower their bone masks, and set out north.
Two months ago, Sejuani watched the clan abandon her three-year old brother to the frozen forest. The chief took the sick boy up in her arms, still wrapped in thick blankets and fever. The blankets were dyed a fading red, the color of blood and of manhood. The chief walked out of the longhouse. When she returned, she carried only blankets. The clan had no food to nurse a boy-child.
Though her legs protest, Sejuani puts one foot in front of the other foot, again and again. She knows she will not let her family starve.
One month ago, the old woman of the clan, their verthna, rose up from her chair near the fire of the longhouse so that she could kneel before the then ten-winters old Sejuani. This girl, the verthna said, this girl is Serylda's heir. She will lead the clan. She will unite the tribe of the Winter's Claw. She will conquer the Freljord.
Following the line of hunters through the quiet forest, Sejuani shifts her spear to rest more comfortably on her shoulder. She might someday do many things, but first, she must survive. And so, she must hunt. She sees the world before her, a white expanse punctuated by dark trees, through the narrow slits of her bone mask.
Sejuani is the youngest of the chief's party by several winters. For one as young as her to hunt is almost unheard of, unthought of. But the verthna spoke. The past two weeks Sejuani has kept up her asking, asking for a chance to prove the verthna right. She cannot fulfill the prophecy while sitting left behind and waiting in the longhouse with the handful of children too young and sisters too old to fight for the clan.
In the end, Sejuani's dogged persistence won out. The chief gave Sejuani her blessing. Even so, the chief made herself clear: Sejuani is to stay out of the way. Though she might bring the hunt luck, she is too young, too small, and too precious to lose. When she comes of age, should she succeed in becoming a sister, the chief will take her to the other clans of the Winter's Claw. Until then, she is to stay alive.
If Sejuani had the water for it, she would spit. A sister of the Winter's Claw does not hide. She is not a sister yet, but she will be, someday. Someday, she will be, must be, warmother.
The first day of the hunt is a day of snow-shoe marching. The party travels in a line across the forest, spread out a shout's distance to search as much ground as they can for tracks. They pass the clan's empty traps one by one until evening comes and they have gone beyond the range of winter gathering.
As the sun sets, fast working, they gather up snow and use it to build a shelter for the night. The six of them pile into the snow-house together. They speak little. In the dark of winter, there's naught to do but talk and they've all run out of words.
It's for the best, Sejuani thinks. Now is not a time for words. Now is a time for action.
There is little action on the second day.
On the third day, the claw-chief sights a white fox and an arrow from a sister-hunter brings the animal down. The party thanks the fox spirit for its life and then picks its bones clean. Following a shade of better times, they save the skin, hanging it from the chief's pack. In good years, they trade with the Avarosan settlement down the river by the coast for grain and steel. Sejuani hardly remembers the last good year.
The forest has begun to thin. They are not far from the tundra.
Toward the end of the fourth day, they start to wheel west, preparing to head south again.
She's seen only eleven winters, her pack is too large, this is her first hunt – Sejuani confronts the claw-chief. Ten days – five days out, five days back. The clan needs this hunt. If they come back empty handed -
The chief growls and snaps. She cuffs Sejuani across the ear, then points north.
When the chief points, Sejuani sees it.
A late spring storm.
The hunt was set to last ten days, the chief says, but they carry only eight days of food, if that. Some storms pass easily and some kill. This storm is a killer. The chief knows it in her bones. You can fight men, but you cannot fight the gods. Even if you are chosen. Another day north and they might never return to the village. Even going west before marching south could be the end of them, but the clan is hungry.
Sejuani grinds her teeth and grips her spear. The party can turn back, but she will go north, alone if she must.
The chief cuffs her other ear.
Alone, she will be lost. Alone, even if she manages to bring down game, she will lack the strength to bring it home. The clan is there to protect her as much as it is there for her to someday save it.
Sejuani bites her tongue and joins the party in their westward route.
Shortly after dawn on the fifth day, they find tracks, many tracks, evidence of a herd. The hunters gather around them and the chief kneels to check their freshness.
When the chief rises, she looks north.
Sejuani shifts her weight from one snow-shoe to the other and adjusts her grip on her spear. Around her, the other hunters do much the same.
The chief looks down to the tracks once more, then says a single word, "Hurry."
After days of steady marching, it feels now as if they fly across the snow, the claw-chief leading them. When the tracks tack north, she does not hesitate to follow. They go until night falls and there's not enough light to continue. They build their shelter in the dark.
On the sixth day, the storm finds the hunters before the hunters find the herd.
In one heartbeat, the air is still and silent, in another heartbeat, Sejuani hears the claw-chief shouting somewhere down the line – there is wind, there is snow – the shouting is lost in the snow – the snow piles up and clogs the eye-slits of her bone mask – she shakes the snow clear – she stumbles forward – she must find the claw-chief - the world is white and the world is dark.
There is no light beneath the snow.
It presses down.
Sejuani hopes it will not crush her.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
She does not sleep.
She can't stop digging against the snow with her spear.
If she stops, the narrow vent she's carved out will close and she will suffocate.
How deep is the snow?
She does not sleep.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
Through her vent, she can hear the storm howl.
It screams on and on and on and on and on.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
When the wind quiets, Sejuani sets to digging herself out of her tomb. It is slow work. The snow is deep and she doesn't have the strength to burst forth like a great bear or wild boar or Iceborn hero of old. So she wiggles back and forth until she has enough room to work, and then she sets to widening her narrow vent. When it's wide enough she can see the light shining down along the pine shaft of her spear, she switches to digging at the snow with her gloved hands, hoping that if the snow collapses, it will not collapse so much that she becomes truly trapped.
She slips out of the straps of her pack as soon as she can.
The sun has passed its zenith by the time she emerges.
She is shaking with exertion and beneath her furs she is soaked in sweat. She rips off her mask and gasps when the frozen air touches her burning skin.
All around is quiet except for the sound of her panting. The sounds of the forest are muted by the snow.
The trees are thin here, so close to the tundra. She can see for a great distance. And she sees nothing but white snow.
Sejuani's already pounding heart speeds.
She shouts for the claw-chief.
She shouts for the sister-hunter who shot the fox not but a few days prior.
She shouts for everyone in the hunting party, one by one.
And when she is finished shouting, the silence of the forest descends again.
The sweat on her face is beginning to freeze. Sejuani shivers. She lowers her mask once more. She continues to shake. She can't stop shaking.
It is spring, not summer, and the days are still short. The sun is sinking.
Sejuani digs her way back into the snow.
She chews on dried strips of meat from her pack.
She sleeps.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
The next day, when she crawls up to the surface once more, the forest is quiet and her clan is nowhere. Nothing has changed.
The shaking returns.
Sejuani picks up her pack and her spear and starts walking across clean snow. She judges from the sun that she is headed south. She will be home in four days.
She dwells in anger.
Her mind swirls in a dark, chaotic, fire. Chosen or no, the hunters left her. Stronger than her, they climbed up out of the snow far faster, then assembled, and began the trek back to the village. Perhaps they thought her dead. If not dead, then they'd judged her weak. Not worth saving. Like her brother.
Beneath her bone mask, Sejuani scowls. The verthna said that she will unite the tribe and then the Freljord itself. Sejuani will return to the village and then - then they will see. They will all see that the verthna spoke true.
She pushes herself to walk faster.
Lost in thought, she does not see the wolf.
A snarl behind her – she spins, raises her spear, manages just barely to stop bone-crushing jaws from closing on her.
Rebuffed, the wolf backs away, then circles.
Sejuani thinks that, beneath the animal's light-grey coat, it is as starved as her, more even. A wolf would have to be desperate to attack quick-moving prey and then stay to fight. She matches it step for step, never letting it pass from her sight. Her snowshoes stop her from sinking down, let her remain mobile. While she watches the wolf in front of her, her ears strain. Wolves hunt in packs.
The barest shifting of muscle is the only warning the wolf gives before it lunges forward, aiming to rip Sejuani's throat with its sharp teeth.
Panic and instinct – Sejuani stabs her spear forward.
The wolf screams.
She caught it just beneath the throat and slightly off center. She has run it through, nearly severing its shoulder from its chest in the process.
It fights to get free, but only succeeds in pushing itself farther down the pine shaft of her spear. Screams turn to whimpers.
Sejuani lets go of the spear and draws her knife. As the spear was her father's, the knife was her mother's. The blade is steel, the hilt is finely carved bone. Sejuani's mother, unlike her daughter, had possessed a gift for the crafts.
Careful not to let the dying animal catch her in its death throes, Sejuani cuts the beast's throat, then frees her spear. Her heart beats thunderously loud in her ears. The wolf is her first kill.
She scans the clearing, but she neither sees nor hears any other wolves. If the dead wolf had hunted with family, that family left it to die alone.
Sejuani quickly thanks the wolf's spirit and the spirits of her father and grandmother, previous wielders of her spear, and then sets to work with her knife.
She eats her fill, for the first time in months, then wipes blood and gore from her gloved hands onto her trouser leg. She dresses the dead animal as best she can, following the winter-tales she's heard all her life. With a rope from her pack, she ties the wolves legs together, then uses the remainder of the rope to tow the carcass behind her.
When she returns to the clan, she will come with food from a successful hunt. Unlike the chief and the sisters. Eleven winters and a wolf - the verthna will be proud that she chose so well.
Sejuani has gone barely a quarter of a mile before she realizes that she cannot tow the wolf. It drags against the snow, making every step a struggle. She is as tired, perhaps more tired than when she clawed her way free from her snowy tomb. Sweat drips down her face behind her mask, stinging her eyes. She lifts her mask to wipe it away with a blood-stained gloved hand.
She drops the rope and sits down to catch her breath.
She can't tow the carcass, but she's loath to leave it.
How did hunters normally bring game home?
Sleds.
Sejuani berates herself for forgetting, but she'd been caught in the excitement of her first kill and the even stronger excitement of a good meal.
She pulls a hand-axe from her belt and slips the elk-skin cover from its blade. By the sun, it takes her an hour and a half to fashion a sled from tree branches, carving out runners and binding them with strips of skin cut from the wolf. It's not as good as leather. It's not even as good as dried rawhide, but it will do for the time being.
Sejuani mounts the wolf on the sled, tying it down with her rope. When she sets out again, she does so at a much better clip.
When the sun begins to set, she stops to carve out a shelter for the night. She brings her wolf down into her burrow with her for dinner and sleeps with it at her side.
Sejuani sets out again early the next day. The sun is only just touching the sky.
It is too cold to smell, but she suspects she smells. Terribly.
Will the beasts of the forest smell her? Their noses are far sharper than hers. The sister-hunters claim that it is how the beasts hunt.
Worry makes her full stomach unpleasantly twist and keeps her head moving from side to side, casting her eyes about through the slits in her mask, on the lookout for danger.
But the hours drag by with no sign of any great beast come to fight for her prize.
And then the day is over and Sejuani has seen nothing of predator or prey.
On the third day after the storm, Sejuani's anxieties find a new worry to wrap themselves around. Three days she has been walking south. Three. To reach the village, she must walk a distance east, for the hunt took the party north and west. But when should she turn east and how great a turn ought it be? As she journeys away from the tundra, the forest thickens slightly, but it looks much the same, mile after mile.
Has she already gone too far south?
Whatever Sejuani is feeling now, it is not fear. It is not fear because Sejuani does not fear. Fear is for children. Sejuani has seen eleven winters. She is not a child. Fear is for the weak. Sejuani has killed a wolf and is now marching home with it. She is not weak. Whatever she is feeling, it is not fear.
Alone in the forest, she is falling deeper and deeper into her own head and she does not like it.
In a day more, perhaps two, she will be home. The claw-chief and the sister-hunters will be there. And they will see Sejuani with her wolf and they will know that they erred in leaving her. It will be good.
A day passes.
Another day passes.
Sejuani has gone south and she has gone east.
She has not found her way home.
At dawn on the sixth day after the storm, Sejuani stands over what's left her of wolf. There is very little left of her wolf. She has been cutting more and more skin from it to keep her sled together, leaving the carcass a strange picked-over, flayed, frozen thing. She thanks its spirit again, then coils her rope and stows it in her pack. She looks up to the sun, finds south-east, and begins to walk.
Her stomach is full, for now, and she travels faster without the the sled. Her speed is little comfort when she doesn't know where she's going and winter has taught her that being full never lasts.
Just as always, Sejuani puts one foot in front of the other. South, east, west, north - Sejuani only knows that home is forward. She must continue on.
When the sun sinks down towards the horizon, Sejuani digs her shelter. She eats a third of what food remains in her pack. She thinks she can stretch the rest out for three days, maybe even four if she barely eats. She's small. She doesn't need as much as a grown hunter. When she sleeps, she dreams of the cold winter-hunger. When she wakes, she resumes her journey.
She will unite the Freljord. She will unite her tribe. She will lead her clan. To do this all, she will return home. She is fated. She will not fail.
The Freljord is endless snow.
Days ago, the wolf found Sejuani.
Today, Sejuani finds the bear.
She spies it from a distance, a great beast with shaggy blonde fur. At first, her heart leaps and she quickens her pace. The ursine are proud warriors, wise shamans, and, as it suits them, friends to the Winter's Claw. An ursine warrior will know the way back to her clan's village. She might even take Sejuani there.
As Sejuani draws closer, she realizes her error. Her heart speeds up, beating out a frantic rhythm.
Thump – thumpthump – thumpthumpthump.
This is not a proud ursine warrior. This is a great, wild, half-starved animal, only recently come out of hibernation. Sejuani comes to an immediate halt and holds her breath, willing her heart to still. It is so loud – the bear will hear it.
The bear does not notice her. It begins ambling away.
How can it not hear her heart?
As the bear walks out of sight into the forest, Sejuani slowly, carefully, lets out the breath that's been trapped in her lungs. It is a soft hiss. The warm air, trapped by her mask, tickles her chin.
When Sejuani takes a step forward, she stumbles. Her legs have gone stiff. She shakes them out, then continues forward. Still south-east. A freezing, blasting, wind bites at her back, howling, tendril fingers searching for any gaps in her furs to strip all heat from her body.
The bear returns at a run.
There is no doubt that it sees her now.
Sejuani doesn't have time to drop her pack, so she doesn't. She braces herself and holds her spear forward, steel-edged tip leveled straight for the charging animal. Wolf-gore still stains the pine shaft, coloring it a reddish brown.
The bear brushes her spear aside, nearly ripping it from Sejuani's hands. She falls after her spear, hands locked around it in a death-grip – she must not lose her weapon, she will not lose her weapon.
The bear is on her now, bruising weight crushing her ribs, claws digging into her thick furs, maw descending -
Sejuani slides her hands farther apart on her spear and shoves the wood up, a desperate defensive maneuver. The spear shaft catches the bear in the mouth. The bear's mouth closes. The pine splinters. A great glob of the beast's saliva falls down, landing directly on one of the narrow eye-slits in Sejuani's mask. She squeezes that eye closed. The spittle drips down onto her face. The spittle is warm.
On top of her, the bear growls and shakes its head, sending pine splinters caught in its teeth flying loose. The movement causes its weight to shift and Sejuani thinks that her ribs are breaking. She can feel the bear's shaking growl in her chest.
Reversing her grip on the piece of the spear that has the metal tip, Sejuani stabs, half-blind. She connects with bear-flesh. The animal roars and rears back, up.
Sejuani yanks her weapon free and scrambles to the side, narrowly avoiding being flattened when the bear lands once more. Snow scatters, flying in all directions. Sejuani scrambles to her knees, nearly slipping down again when the hand she uses to brace herself sinks down into the snow. She hasn't the time to struggle to her feet.
The bear swings a heavy paw – she ducks forward, thrusts up with her spear.
Again, the bear roars. Again, it rears up – but this time, standing, it takes a step back, then another. When it comes back to ground, it continues to back away, limping, never taking its eyes off of Sejuani. All the while, its rumbling shakes the air. Bright blood seeps from its wounds.
Sejuani returns the bear's respect, keeping the eye slits of her mask pointed towards the beast, even as she fights darkness pushing at her vision, even as she barely stays upright.
When the bear has gone perhaps twenty feet, it turns and it flees, a half-falling, maimed, run, spear still lodged in its chest, dripping blood trailing after.
When it has gone, the forest is quiet.
Unbalanced and unable to right herself, Sejuani crumples, falling to her side.
She lies in the snow.
All around her, the snow is bright red.
Her mask protects her face, keeps her from being suffocated by the red snow.
It hurts to breathe.
It hurts so much.
She should get up. She should track the bear and put it out of its misery. She is so close to home, she must be. She's traveled for days – in the right direction. Home is just over the next ridge. She should take the bear back to her family.
Sejuani lies in the snow, mind grasping at wisps of thoughts, mind full of things that she ought to do, that she must do.
It is cold. Very cold.
They will be so happy to see her – with her eleven winters and her bear. They won't have to trust the verthna, they'll have proof. She'll take a few days, a week even, to recover, and then -
But first, she should sleep.
The bear is bleeding. She can track it when she wakes.
She is tired and the prophecy, words of the verthna – the prophecy is very far away.
Sejuani closes her eyes.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
Sejuani sleeps.
In her sleep, she thinks that, perhaps, she should wake.
She drifts.
She is warm.
It is good to be warm.
She does not wake.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
The wolf found Sejuani.
Sejuani found the bear.
The boar finds Sejuani.
The boar is easily more than twice the size of the bear, even though it too is lean after a hard winter. Its coat is white like the snow. With its pink-grey nose, it sniffs Sejuani top to bottom as she lies still. When it's done examining her, it digs that same snout into the snow under her, then picks her up. With Sejuani bonelessly laying draped over its nose, the boar lumbers off.
The other half of the spear slips from Sejuani's limp hand, falling down to the snow, hitting with a soft thud.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
Sejuani comes into the world in pain, biting back a scream. Her chest – her chest is ablaze. Her eyes fly open and she sees only white and she knows she is blind.
Her limbs are heavy and stiff. She wills herself to sit up, but her body only twitches.
Over time, the pain does not lessen, but it does move, awful roving pressure points all across her body. The white in her vision clears slowly.
There are tiny wild boars dancing on her chest, walking all up and down her, sniffing her thoroughly.
Sejuani lets out a weak groan.
The baby boars startle. Their sudden tenseness drives stakes of agony through Sejuani's chest.
She groans again.
This time, the baby boars scramble to get off of her, jumping off her chest and then scampering away. For a moment the pain becomes unbearable, but then it's mostly gone. Mostly. Her chest still hurts, but it's now just an awful ache.
Summoning up every drop of her will, Sejuani rolls onto her side. More pain. Bearable pain.
She has been mauled by a bear.
And she is alive.
She is in a cave. There is sunlight. She's near the mouth of the cave. Maybe it's a shallow cave, an overhang more than a cave. The baby boars have fled to cluster around a truly majestic sow. She has great curving tusks that are broken at the ends and stained with what Sejuani knows is old blood.
But even as Sejuani moves, the mother boar does not. She lies on the stone floor of the shallow cave with her side to Sejuani. With a single bright blue eye she regards the girl before her, a queen inspecting a peasant. The inspection lasts and lasts and lasts and while it lasts, Sejuani remains perfectly still. Finally though, the mother boar closes that great regal eye and sighs softly. All around her, her children huddle together, still staring at the stranger in their home.
Sejuani lets out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding.
The baby boars are a motley assortment of light browns and blondes, except for one, which is as white as its mother. They don't have a full coat of shaggy fur yet, but they have enough to protect them from the harsh spring of the Freljord. They're small now, maybe the length of Sejuani's forearm. The white one might be a little smaller than the rest. Sejuani doesn't trust her sight much in this matter. In a year the boars will all be juveniles nearly half as large as the great sow who birthed them. As it is, they are now probably on the cusp of being old enough to forage with their mother.
Sejuani shifts to get up, but can't. Even the marrow of her bones must be bruised beyond recognition.
The boar doesn't seem interested in killing her. Do boars eat meat?
Sejuani's eyes close once more.
Maybe – maybe it would be alright if she rested just a bit longer.
[ ] [ ] [ ]
When Sejuani wakes, she still hurts but she also feels more alert than before. She's able to push herself into a sitting position.
In a great furry mass, the baby boars swarm around her, prodding her with pink snouts, prodding her with tiny beginnings of tusks. They squeak softly, as if chattering to one another. Their mother watches the scene unfold from her place at the far side of the cave. In shadow, her blue eyes gleam.
As her audience continues to mob her, Sejuani slowly attempts to stretch. Her muscles protest, but they do move. Her chest aches like it never has in all her eleven winters, but she thinks it won't stop her from anything. Her furs are torn, and the leather beneath them is punctured, but her clothes beneath the leathers, and more importantly, her flesh, are intact. Gingerly, she stands. Her legs, it would seem, also still work.
Her pack is gone and so is her spear.
She has come out quite well for having been mauled by a bear.
A bear that she fought.
A bear that she stabbed with a broken spear.
A bear that she defeated.
She clears her throat.
A faint noise, soft, weak. Unacceptable.
Sejuani lifts her mask. As soon as her mask is raised, she feels the bite of the early spring breeze cutting into scrapes on her face she didn't realize she had. She clears her throat once more.
"Thank you, mother," she says. Speech drives the ache in her chest deep. "I must return to my clan now."
The great boar turns its head so that both her eyes are trained on Sejuani. She blinks her brilliant blue eyes slowly.
Sejuani wets her lips, tongue just barely flicking out, the briefest exposure to the cold.
"They need me," Sejuani says. Her words hang in air – outside the snow muffles all noise. In the cave, it is only her voice and the shufflings of the small boars at her feet. "There's a prophecy," she continues. "I'm the heir of Serylda. She was one of the three sisters. I'm going to lead my clan. I'm going to unite my tribe." Sejuani's chest still hurts, but her voice is gaining power as she continues to speak.
Unimpressed, the boar continues to watch her.
"I'm going to be like you," Sejuani says. "I'm going to unite the Freljord."
At this, the boar huffs, a deep, resonating exhalation that shakes the ground. With far more grace than anything of her size ought to have, she rises.
Sejuani hardly moves as the boar approaches her. Up close, she thinks that just one of the boar's blue eyes is as large as her own head.
Girl and boar stand facing one another, an arm's length apart.
The boar raises its head and Sejuani starts to flinch, then stops herself, as the boar presses its nose against her grimy forehead.
The nose is dry, warm, and soft.
The touch lasts only a moment.
Sejuani blinks.
The boar shifts around her now, sets its snout to Sejuani's rump and gives her a gentle push towards the mouth of the cave. Sejuani nearly trips over the squeaking lumps of baby boar at her feet, but catches herself in time.
Sejuani goes out of the cave and into the harsh light of Freljord day. She lowers her bone mask.
Ten paces from the cave, she pauses.
Sejuani takes a deep breath that sends pain shooting through her chest. She does not look back.
It hurts to walk. She manages. She finds south-east and she goes.
She's gone not even a quarter mile when she hears the soft cries behind her.
It's the smallest boar, the white one, all alone. It's not big enough to plow through the snow like its mother, and it's just heavy enough to sink down with every step. It is clearly struggling to keep up. In its wake, the boar has left a trail of upturned snow, evidence of its determination.
Sejuani waits for the boar to reach her before bending down and picking it up. It goes willingly. Cradled in her arms, it weighs more than she was expecting, almost as much as her lost pack. Sejuani hooks her hands into her elbows, locking her arms in place, and begins to forge ahead once more.
It is harder going carrying the boar.
An hour passes, judging by the descent of the sun, then two.
And she does see the sun – more sun than in the deep forest. There's a clearing ahead.
Sejuani's pace neither speeds nor slows. She will get there when she gets there.
As she approaches the place where the trees open, she hears rushing water.
It's too large to be a creek. It is wide and has rocky banks and it is deep and fast enough that it isn't still frozen over. The edges have unbroken sheet ice, but in the center, floes careen along, riding the spring swell.
It's not large enough to be a river though. Sejuani knows rivers well. Her village sits at the bank of the Hverta, the white river of the Freljord. They have an old stone pier that they use to load trade boats for journeys down to the coast during the summer. She's never been on any of the boats and never been down to the Avarosan township that exchanges her clan's furs and antlers and crafts for steel and grain. Trading is for the older sisters who are nearing the end of their useful lives.
Sejuani knows a little of the other great waters though. For example, she knows all water flows to the sea – or so the verthna says.
Baby boar still cradled in her arms, Sejuani follows the not-river.
Even the deep snow along either bank cannot deaden the roar of the spring waters. When Sejuani digs her shelter for the night and settles down with her companion, she thinks of home.
Sejuani wakes to the boar pawing at her masked face. His tough nails scratch against the bone of her mask, making a terrible grating noise. Stiffly, Sejuani begins to rouse her muscles so she can push boar away. All the while, she finds herself making soft noises and assuring the baby boar that she's still alive.
When Sejuani has finally convinced her tired body to move, the sun is just cresting the horizon.
The clan tells tales of old Iceborn heroes who raised mountains and slew ice drakes and woke at the first touch of morning - every day of the sun, during the short days of spring and the long days of summer. Did they have boars to tell them when the sun rose?
When the verthna spoke, the clan thought that Sejuani might grow to be such a hero. Sejuani thought that she might grow to be such a hero.
Sejuani picks up her boar and sets her tired legs to walking.
It is another long day of walking.
Whenever she comes across a stretch of rocky bank where the snow is shallow and washed away, she sets the boar down and lets it walk.
Without deep snow to hold it back, it walks following the not-river faster than she does.
At the end of this day, Sejuani is exhausted and hungry.
She does not eat the boar.
Nestled in the snow, she thinks about it.
As if the boar knows what she's thinking, it stares at her with eyes as blue as its mother's and she swears its fur stands up a bit – a baby boar trying to bristle.
Sejuani informs baby Bristle that it is not dinner and then goes to sleep.
Noon on the third day of traveling with Bristle and Sejuani sees motion from the corner of her eye. Among the trees near the water, she finds a trap in the snow. There's a snow hare caught in the trap's iron jaws. The tiny animal is shaking like a leaf in the late autumn wind. It's a wonder the poor thing's heart hasn't given out already.
Sejuani kills the hare, opens the trap, and then divides it between herself and the boar. Three quarters to her, one quarter to Bristle. She's bigger, after all.
Together, they pick the bones clean, and then Bristle crunches on the bones.
As it turns out, boars do eat meat.
Only then, having staved off hunger as well as she can, does Sejuani consider the trap.
Traps mean people. All traps look the same, but the only people who trap this far north are the clans of the Winter's Claw. Maybe this trap wasn't set by her clan, but all clan members of the Winter's Claw are blood-kin.
She could wait by the trap. Surely the hunter who set it will forgive her for taking the catch.
If the hunter ever comes.
Memories of calling out to the empty forest force Sejuani to her feet once more. She wipes her knife clean with her furs and sheathes it. A word to Bristle and they're back on the move.
By the end of the day, Sejuani thinks she recognizes the forest.
Late morning of the fourth day and Sejuani is sure she recognizes the forest.
She forces her weary legs to move faster.
The sun continues its march across the heavens, and Sejuani grows closer and closer to home.
Soon – soon she will be home.
They will be glad to see her. If the other hunt was not successful, the claw-chief may push for the clan to journey south, but Sejuani will fight that. She'll challenge the chief if she must. She killed a wolf and survived a bear. What can the old chief do to stand against her?
Her clan has little, but they can send word to other clans. Someone will have enough food that they can provision another hunt. There are wolves and bears aplenty in the forest, it's only a matter of finding them.
Sejuani's aunts and cousins will let her sit close to the fire. She has gone out on a hunt and returned. She'll be a sister now. The youngest sister of the clan.
Behind her bone mask, Sejuani's lips curl upwards into a smile.
Soon – she will be home soon.