Disclaimer: I do not own King Arthur or the rendering done by the film in 2004, which this piece is based upon.

Chapter Two: Of Oaths of Blood and Oaths in Blood

Anaxilea nursed her daughter because Dnaestre had pushed the thing away from him as soon as he'd realized she'd stolen from him a son. There was a sickly sense in her at that, something that relished in his disapproval.

So she let the half-Scythian suckle at her breast, hissing with pain when the girl gummed her fiercely. The infant gave a little grunt as it was pulled away and held at arm's length more violently than was necessary for the small hurt.

"You'll kill her yet, shakin' her like that," Tereis chided, taking the baby away to offer it goat's milk, something that the babe took more often than her mother's. Of course, the rough treatment Anaxilea had given her since her birth was more than enough excuse.

"She has to learn," Anaxilea defended. "I've only the one breast, Tereis. You and your sisters held me down when I was only a week older than that thing in your arms, and held a red-hot blade against the other." The girl was being petulant, Tereis knew. She'd always been proud that she had the shape of her mother's people until she realized the hardship that came with motherhood.

"You have growing to do, yet," Tereis countered. "If your mother shook you every time you bit at her, you'd have died before you were one of our people."

"If my mother had stood beside her people instead of turning her own blade on herself when she'd lost, maybe I would find the will to care," Anaxilea murmured, covering herself and rising from the thatch mattress.

The girl had been hiding in the birthing hut for the better part of a week since her daughter's birth, not willing to return to Dnaestre's shadow. The tall Scythian hadn't come looking for her either, for which she would silently be grateful.

"Some choose death over servitude," Tereis answered. There were no pretty words that would erase what their queen had done. She had seen their defeat and had taken the coward's way. There was little that could be said in defense except: "Then again, some choose to kill babies instead of themselves."

"I didn't kill the-"

"You deny that if the squalling thing you pushed from your body had been a boy, you'd have laid it to the knife?" Tereis asked, her old face lined heavily with a scowl. Anaxilea didn't argue, and instead, collapsed back to the mattress and held her hands out for the infant.

"Give it here, then, if she's to learn, it better be quickly," Anaxilea said, hands grabbing too roughly when the child was given back to her.

"You'll have to name her eventually," Tereis advised. "Before she is married herself and still being called it."

"I've given her a name," the younger girl said, voice thick with annoyance. "Is it my fault you choose to ignore it?"

"You can't call the girl Atanea," Tereis said, exasperated at the return in conversation. It had been something they'd argued about time and time again.

"Why? Dnaestre was pleased as much with it as any other name. He gave it to his people when they asked."

"I will not call a week old infant traitor," Tereis said firmly. "If you wish Dnaestre to not recognize the child as his own people, let it be Atanea, but I will not hear you giving an exile's name to a babe." The old woman was fiercely demanding, and Anaxilea had to admit that she was damned convincing when she was so threatening.

"Ow," she hissed, down at the child, who gummed her nipple with force. "Gods, she bites like a wolf." Tereis smiled at that.

"A wolf born in the storm," Tereis said with a nod. "Strong."

"Not so much," Anaxilea countered, though despite her want to deny it, she knew the older woman was right. She should be pleased that the girl fought so fiercely; it was a sign that their people would have been thankful for.

"Wolves kill each other over nothing," Anaxilea said. "Perhaps she is a wolf."

"Wolves also kill Scythians who have lost their way," Tereis countered, knowing the imagery would please the girl. The old woman crouched low over a slow boiling heavy pot in the corner. She signed as she looked over at the girl-and she was a girl, the old woman realized-who occasionally winced and gave the infant a firm shake.

"What name would you give her?" Anaxilea asked after a long silence. Tereis's brown eyes studied both girls a long while. Anaxilea was looking down at the girl for the first time with soft eyes. The child had fallen asleep with her head against her mother's breast.

"Lykopis," Tereis breathed, the name pulling fiercely at her heart.

"I don't recognize that name," Anaxilea said after a moment. "No one in the tribe had that name."

"My mother did," Tereis acknowledged quietly. No one had had the name of the She-Wolf since her mother's passing. None would again, unless it was this child, Tereis knew.

"And did your mother kill Scythians?" Anaxilea asked.

"From the day she was given a blade until the day she died protecting me," Tereis confirmed, the ache of memories heavy on her. Anaxilea nodded, and they sat in silence for a long while, until the smell of the fish boiling in the pot was thick in the air.

"To the people," Anaxilea said as they sat with their hollowed stone bowls. "To the people she will be Lykopis. Let her father's people call her Atanea."

Tereis watched the young woman with knowing eyes for a long while before nodding. The wolf of her people. The opposition of the Scythians. Somehow, Tereis knew, that would prove far more true than anything else she had ever heard.

-RP: Wolf Moon-

Death was something that the Scythians did not spend time relishing. Their enemies died just as easily as their friends, so when nearly their entire army was laid waste by the Romans despite their horses and their fierceness, no one mourned long over the dead.

None except those who knew the weight of their freedom. Fifteen years from all sons. Fifteen years and Rome would return to them men that were no longer Scythian, men that had forgotten their own people, if they returned at all.

Anaxilea nearly reveled in the irony of it. Her future had been stolen away, and not the future of the thing Dnaestre wanted most was gone. Her belly would swell soon, she knew. Dnaestre had returned from their battles with a limp and a scar that split his face, but he had returned virile.

Anaxilea asked Artemis for a girl-child every night and every morning. She had come a long way in the eleven years since the birth of her daughter, and even Tereis had to admit that she was taking this child with more grace than the first.

"It will be soon, mother?" Lykopis's voice startled her from her study of the funerary pyres that had burned to nothing months ago. The men had left them, as a symbol of their dead comrades and the promise to Rome. She looked down to her daughter, with her dark hair and eyes. Often times, looking at the girl was like looking into a calm pond.

"Soon enough," she said with a sigh. Time had tempered the sixteen year old girl into a woman, one that was proud but far calmer. The girl at her side would be much the same way; Anaxilea had seen to that each night. Without her husband there, she was free to raise her daughter in any way she wished, and she had taken that freedom as far as she could stretch it. He had been gone for six of their daughter's years, but it was not enough in either of their eyes.

"How does it fit in there?" Lykopis asked, this time her voice was colored with confusion. It took Anaxilea a few long moments to realize that her daughter's eyes were fixed firmly on her abdomen. The woman threw her dark head of hair back and laughed to the Gods above. She had just told the girl, not even minutes before, how she would be sent a sibling.

"It is very small, at first," Anaxilea said in agreement. "But it grows. You have to defend her when she is small."

"Yes," Lykopis breathed, tearing her eyes away from the front of her mother's tunic. The girl turned then, ran a few paces towards the base of one of the pyres and picked up an old, battle blunted ax head that someone had laid atop the pyres. She ran back with it, holding it out for Anaxilea to see. Fiercely, she brought her little hand down on the chipped blade end, face scrunched up in a grim line until she dropped the weapon.

Anaxilea watched as her daughter upturned her hand, now lined with blood. "I swear," she said firmly, though her voice wavered from the pain.

"I believe you," Anaxilea replied, bending to draw the girl toward her and wrap her hand with a bit of cloth. "Blood is a powerful thing to swear by," Anaxilea told her daughter, but she knew the girl already had heard time and time again.

"It binds a promise," she said with a nod and a grimace as the bandage was pulled tight.

"It does bind a promise," Anaxilea agreed, straightening up and glaring up at the heavens. How many nights had she bound promises in blood with her Gods? How many times had her Gods abandoned those promises?

They broke another promise months later, as Anaxilea lay panting on the thatch birthing mattress again. Lykopis curled in the corner, eyes wide as Tereis - old Tereis who could only half see and who needed carried to the birthing hut - guided her mother through what they called the coming of her sister.

A few other women, women that Lykopis hated because of their whispered words about her mother's feverish skin or her pallor, stood around, helping when Tereis needed something she couldn't reach or see.

"She birthed the girl without screaming," one woman whispered. "But listen to her pant. Dnaestre was a big child, or so his mother claimed."

"I've heard the old ones talk about infants too large," another whispered back. Lykopis hated those women for their words. Fiercely, she bit into her bottom lip, trying to keep her tongue in check. Tereis motioned for something else, which was handed to her in silence.

Another woman across the hut muttered something that sparked the old woman's ire. "Out, all of you!" She shouted at the women. "This is not your sewing circle." And they had left, silent and shame faced. Lykopis kept her seat in the corner, quietly wondering at the power in the old woman.

"You will do this, girl," Tereis told her mother, and Lykopis wondered at how silly it was to say. Of course she would. There was no other option. The little girl looked on as her mother grew more and more pale, seemed to struggle with each wave of pain. She would protect her sister until she was big enough to protect herself, she'd sworn over and over. As her mother gave a keening, broken sound that Lykopis had never heard her make before, she quietly promised the Gods she'd protect her mother as well.

"It comes," Tereis said almost too long later. "Push, girl. Show me the strength you showed me in the storm." It made no sense to Lykopis, but it spurred her mother on as she pushed once more, collapsing back to the mattress as a high pitched cry pierced the air.

Tereis took her away, shifting just enough to reach a blanket to wrap the child in. "Is she well?" Anaxilea asked, and Tereis's silence made both mother and daughter uncomfortable.

"Tell me if she's well," Anaxilea repeated herself long, agonizing moments later.

"He is healthy," Tereis said, her nearly white eyes turning toward Anaxilea, whose face crumpled. Lykopis wondered at the thought of a brother instead of a sister. Little did it matter though, in her eleven year old mind, until Tereis laid the child in her mother's arms.

Anaxilea had never been gentle with Lykopis, had never settled for less than strength either with the bow or the practice sword or riding, but she had never been unnecessarily cruel. It was shocking as her mother nearly dropped the child to the mattress and reached with blind fingers until they closed around a heavy object.

Horror and confusion flushed hot in the little girl's chest as her mother emptied a water pot and brought it high above her head with shaking hands, hesitating just a moment over the child before bringing it down hard.

"No!" The girl shouted, and lunged, little arms catching the pot and tearing it from her mother's hands. The weakness there astounded her. Never before had she been able to take something from her mother so easily. Dark eyes glared into dark eyes for a long while.

"It is not your sister," Anaxilea said at last. "It is your father's son."

"Blood is a powerful thing to swear by," Lykopis snarled at her mother, something that had gotten her struck in the past. Anaxilea's dark eyes widened for a moment until she let her arms fall to her sides.

"It binds a promise," Anaxilea said on a sigh that sounded far too exhausted to her daughter's ears. She lay back down on the thatched mattress as if it was her grave and let her eyes slip shut. Old Tereis picked the boy back up, wrapping him securely in another blanket and handed him to Lykopis, who took the child firmly, despite his weight.

"Take him to Dnaestre. A father names his son," Tereis said firmly, and Lykopis complied, ready to flee the birthing tent and the image of her mother - both too weak to sit and too weak to allow a child to live.

Dnaestre called him Galahad and took the boy from Lykopis's arms with a fierceness she had never seen in her father. He did not ask after his wife, and it would be weeks before Lykopis saw her mother again. It would be months before Anaxilea could look at her daughter again.

The first time Lykopis saw Anaxilea, her mother was walking far along one of the rises, a black form against the salt speckled grasses. The Black Sea seemed to make everything a dull grey with its salt and wind. Anaxilea had always seemed untouched by the land, something Lykopis thought magical when she was very young.

Old Tereis had asked Lykopis and another woman to help her to sit out on a hill, and had begged the girl to stay with her while the older left them. The girl had never been comfortable under the pale, milky eyes of Tereis, but she was of her mother's people, so Lykopis sat quietly.

Her mother had appeared just over a rise not long into their sit, and Lykopis set about studying her, trying to find that flaw in her that would let her kill the infant that Lykopis had sworn to protect. Tereis's milky eyes were turned toward her, and it made the girl more and more uncomfortable.

"What?" Lykopis finally asked, voice dangerously close to the snarl that she tried to keep from her tone. Of all of the adults that had struck her for it though, Tereis always did so lightly, more affectionate than angry.

"I have a gift for you," Tereis said finally, and drew an old oil skin from beneath the folds of her clothing. How the old woman had managed to keep it hidden, Lykopis would never know.

"What is it?" She asked, sitting forward on her knees, her mother gone from her mind. Gifts were few and far between, and a gift from Tereis moreso.

The oilskin was drawn back reverently, with shaking hands. Despite her half blind eyes, the woman was deft, never fumbling as she unwrapped cloth and leather thongs. Inside, the sharp grey on black coloring of a wolf's pent peeked. Finally, Tereis held it out to her, and Lykopis took it with delicate hands.

A wolf-a large beast, larger than any wolf Lykopis had ever seen-had been skinned completely down, and the pelt stretched. The bottom jaw of the creature fell wide, and the eye holes were eerie and empty.

"A wolf's pelt, for the naked wolf," Tereis murmured, a smile on her lips. Lykopis scoffed at the statement. The old woman had called her naked wolf time and time again throughout their brief interactions. "Put it on. There is a hood, to pull up over your eyes." She did as she was commanded, and surely enough, the pelt at been worked until it stretched up and over her entire head, falling well past her eyes, blinding her.

"It's too big," Lykopis muttered, pulling it off.

"Good," Tereis countered. "If it wasn't, you'd never be able to grow into it." The old woman held it in her lap, and they sat there for long hours, Tereis explaining how to oil the pelt and Lykopis half listening.

The sun was sinking over the harsh wind swept grasses when the young woman who helped Tereis to the hill approached again. "I'll find my own way," Tereis shoo'd her, and the woman went without question.

"I should-"

"There is another gift, in the skin," Tereis said, cutting her off. The woman's voice was hoarse, tired from talking for so long. Lykopis pulled the oil skin toward her and carefully finishing unfolding it. From within, an odd blade fell, and as Lykopis picked it up, she recognized the series of blades as claws.

Tereis took the odd weapon from her and put it to her own hand, showing Lykopis how the worked metal pulled down over her hand, and how to grip the bar holding the claws so that they were pulled firm against the back of her hand, extending forward like the reaching paw of the wolf.

"Mother won't let me have a weapon of my own until I've proved I can use it," Lykopis said carefully as the old woman laid the claws into her lap.

"You made a promise in blood to protect that boy," Tereis said firmly. "You'll need something to keep that promise." Lykopis sat quiet for a long while before pulling the weapon down onto her hand as Tereis had done. It was too big in her small hand, but the bar of it laid directly along the scar she'd made with her promise that day.

"It is perfect," she said, voice thick and gravel through a sudden lump in her throat. Tereis chuckled tiredly at her comment. "You made these?"

"They were given to my mother," Tereis countered. "She shared your name. The claws themselves have to be replaced over time, because they become brittle, but the pelt will stay if you oil it as I showed you." Lykopis nodded firmly and looked at the eerie pelt with new eyes.

Old Tereis sent her home shortly after the sun sank low over the horizon. Lykopis had asked her if she should find someone to help her down, but the woman had shook her head and shoo'd her away.

That was the last Lykopis saw of Tereis. The next morning, the woman was found, dead on the hilltop. The Scythians did not linger over death, and Tereis was laid on a funerary pyre and burned in the early hours of the morning. The ashes of the timber were swept up in the wind, and Lykopis watched them through tear-blurred eyes. Downwind, along the salt-speckled grasses, her mother stood, watching the fire burn. The grey of the ash bespeckled her the same grey as the land.

So-Lykopis thought bitterly with the wolf's claw and pelt hugged tight to her chest-her mother was not untouchable after all.


Tereis had been right, in her final moments, to give her the claws, Lykopis decided a few years later, when she stood in front of her four year old brother. The metal bit into her palm, but the wicked blades were what glinted with blood.

Galahad was on his back in the sea-stained grass, a cut across his little forehead. She'd been slow, just a little too slow. It didn't matter though. The older boy, eight or nine, had gotten a good blow in, hitting Galahad in the head with his wooden practice sword.

The other boy had paid for the blow four-fold where the wicked claws had slid deeply into his shoulder. It was the first time Lykopis had drawn blood with them, the first time that she'd really used any weapon more than on her own in practice. Anaxilea had retreated back from even her daughter after Tereis's death, leaving her to learn on her own under the firm and unfair hand of her father.

As he had aged, there was a softening to the man, especially after the ailment last year, where half of his body had refused to function. To that day on the plain, when Lykopis used the claws for the first time and pulled the wolf fur over her head, the left side of her father's face refused to lift up.

"Atanea," Galahad said from the ground, his voice thick with tears. "Atanea, help," and she had, turning from the younger boy and letting him run to his own mother. She eased Galahad upright, sharp brown eyes studying the gash on his forehead for a long while before sighing and letting the claws slip away from her knuckles.

"Let's get you to father, little cub," she said, but her voice cracked. At fifteen, the daughter of a reclusive Amazon war-prize and the wearer of the morbid wolf pelt, Atanea was not well accepted into the Scythian village. Lykopis was even more feared.

Galahad clung to her back without second thought, and let himself be carried back down a rise in the plain and toward their hut, where Dnaestre would be waiting. Not for the first or last time, Lykopis wondered at the slightness to her brother, the weakness to his body.

It would be a little over a year later that that weakness would truly become tragedy, when the red-maned Romans came riding over the rise. Dnaestre had spotted them first, just cresting one of the taller hills in the distance, and he had gone silent, gathering a pack without words to either of his children.

The stories that the men whispered to themselves around fires at night were coming true, and Lykopis knew her brother would be gone with the high sun. She sought out her mother for the first time in years.

"Anaxilea," she called across the small wind swept garden they kept behind the hut. Little would grow in the saline ground, but they tried anyway. The woman was bent over a stubborn bit of greenery that Lykopis couldn't identify in her sixteen year old mind.

"Does a daughter call her mother by her name?" Anaxilea asked but didn't bother to straighten.

"I wouldn't know. I haven't seen my mother in five years," Lykopis countered, and her mother's dark head of hair fell slightly before the salt-speckled woman straightened slowly and turned toward her daughter. It was laughable, really, Lykopis thought as she looked at her mother directly for the first time in years, that she had once thought this woman perfectly untouchable.

"Fair enough," Anaxilea answered, wiping soil stained hands on her tunic.

"Romans came over the rise," Lykopis said, explaining her interruption.

"The Scythians have what is coming to them," Anaxilea said bitterly, turning back toward her garden. "Let Dnaestre suffer." The pair stood there a long time, neither talking or looking at the other.

"Then you will suffer alone," Lykopis said finally. "I will follow him, and I will bring him back to the only thing he knows." Her mother's startled eyes looked to her then, truly, for the first time in so long.

"You punish me," Anaxilea said at last. "You won't bring him back. The Romans will kill all of their sons in fifteen years."

"Probably, but not what is mine," Lykopis agreed. "I've been protecting him from everything since you tried to kill him."

"He was the son of the man that took my people!" Anaxilea defended herself, voice firm and angry.

"He was your son!" Lykopis growled low, her voice had taken on the rough rumble nearly constantly from lack of use over the years. "And he is my brother. If you've done anything for him it was making me strong enough to protect him from this." Lykopis turned and left her mother there, knee deep in failing plants, ever the failure of a mother.

The Romans came with little fan-fair, which settled well enough with everyone. Lykopis watched with sharp eyes as six men waited for their boys to leave their mother's skirts or their father's sides.

Galahad went first, and for that, she was silently proud. The little boy, smaller than the rest and the second youngest to be taken from the village, left Dnaestre's side with a too-big sword strapped to his back.

"It's too heavy?" Anaxilea taunted as Lykopis tried to lift her blade. "Good, this ends lives," her mother told her, bending in front of her and lifting the sword with ease. "It should be the heaviest thing you ever carry."

Tears had fallen silently down Dnaestre's face as his son took the first steps away, leading the others toward their future. Lykopis couldn't help but think that they were taking the long walk to their own funerary pyres.

She watched for only a moment before ducking into their hut and pulling her the wolf pelt cloak and the claws from her bed furs. Tereis had been right, she was growing into both of them.

"If you're fool enough to go, you'll need more than a pelt," Anaxilea's harsh voice cut through the hut, freezing Lykopis where she stood. How long had it been since her mother had entered her own home? There were rumors that the woman simply slipped into the earth at night, disappearing and reappearing when the sun rose. Lykopis wasn't so sure that they weren't true.

"What else do I have to take?" Lykopis asked, her dark brown eyes locking on her mother, who crossed easily to a small trunk that had been pushed to the end of Dnaestre's sleeping pallet. From within the wooden trunk, Anaxilea pulled an old blanket, bulky and useless for travel, setting it down on the ground. "I can't carry-"

"Quiet," Anaxilea told her daughter, a small smile on her lips. "Look," she said, unwrapping the blanket and pulling from it a set of leather armor, old and of a make Lykopis had never seen before. "Mine, from before. Dnaestre kept it as a reminder of what he had conquered."

"It will never fit me," Lykopis countered, but her mother was undoing buckles with deft fingers and pulling pieces across her chest and abdomen, arms and legs without difficulty. When it had all finally gone into place, Anaxilea took a step back, a hand across her mouth and eyes lingering over the leather.

"Bend, move. Feel the weight and the give," she ordered, and begrudgingly, Lykopis followed her mother's commands. The leather moved well with her, hampering little, but it wouldn't hold up to a blade or an arrow.

"It's not going to protect me from anything," she said, trying to find fault with the gift. Wearing her mother's armor was something that would have thrilled her as a child. Now, she almost felt like it was a betrayal to her brother.

"It isn't meant to keep you from being run through," Anaxilea countered. "You have to be quick and smart. This will keep glancing blows from doing any damage and let you be faster than your opponent." She looked down at the leather one last time before looking at her daughter again. The woman's breath caught in her throat as she took in her dark hair and eyes, the scowl on her face. Truly, she marveled, this was like looking into a polished shield. She silently prayed that her daughter's time in the armor wouldn't end like her own.

"Why are you helping?" Lykopis asked after a long silence. The Roman horses were nickering outside still, but the sound was growing more and more distant. "You want Galahad gone."

"And he will stay gone," Anaxilea countered. "For fifteen years, he will be gone and so will my daughter." She drew a long breath, and Lykopis could see the years on her face in that moment. "I was not meant to be a mother," she said simply. "Tereis was the only reason I was successful with you. You were a girl. You were of my people. Now, I can't even remember what my people looked like. That boy...that boy is mine. He is my family, and as damned as I am for wanting him dead, I'm more damned for asking you to bring him back."

"You aren't asking," Lykopis said, suddenly uncomfortable in the armor and the hut. "I'm going on my own."

"And I'm letting you," Anaxilea said. "I'm letting my only daughter go after a boy I never called son. Tell me how my Goddess would forgive that?" The woman asked, tears running down her cheeks. Lykopis had no answer, so she gave none. Instead, she pulled the claws across her hand and picked up the rucksack she'd packed earlier, when the red maned bastards had first come up over a hill.

"Fifteen years," Lykopis said simply. "We'll talk if you're still alive."

"Fifteen years," Anaxilea agreed. "They'll sing songs about you in fifteen years." The idea wasn't as repulsive as the scoff Lykopis gave suggested it was. "You remind him of who he is; don't let him forget like I've forgotten." Anaxilea gave the command firmly, and Lykopis nodded. It was all the communication either could handle, and Lykopis ducked out the front of the hut while Anaxilea left through the back.

Quietly, the younger woman followed the Romans as they picked their way from village to village across the Crimea. It would be a long fifteen years. She looked back over the wind swept grasses that she was crossing, wondering if she'd miss the salt-speckled nothingness.