Read Online Heaven's Needle by Liane Merciel - Free Book Online

syllable. “ Sigrir. You have no word like it. ‘Honorable virgin’ might come close. Among the tribes it is an ancientcustom, although one that is fading. I cut my hair, swore never to marry, and took the brand; then I was allowed the rights of a man. I was thirteen.”
    â€œThat’s why you have those scars?”
    â€œThat is why I have this one.” She touched the center sigil etched on her left cheek, just below the eye. The ridges were old and familiar under her finger; she had worn the mark for more than twenty years.
    â€œWhat about the rest of them?”
    â€œThose came later.” Asharre’s mug had gone empty. She leaned back in her chair. The happiness seemed to have drained out of the evening; a great weariness had settled in its stead. “Most sigrir take only the first oath. The clans do not feud as they once did. It is not necessary for most girls to fight, only to handle property and find good husbands for their sisters.”
    â€œWhat was different for you?”
    â€œOralia … the youngest of my sisters was Blessed. By Celestia.” The smoke was stinging her eyes. Asharre rubbed it away irritably. “The Frosthold Skarlar live in the true north, close on the shores of the White Sea. We keep to the old ways. Split Pines Skarlar do not even have sigrir anymore; they have taken to summerlander customs, and are barely worthy of their clan name. In the true north it is different. We still have wildbloods and white ragers.
    â€œThere is—there has always been a great enmity between wildbloods and the servants of your goddess. The wildbloods believe that there are only a few souls in the clan strong enough to join them. When such a child is called to Celestia as Blessed instead, that is a theft from our faith: a strong soul, one that should have belonged to the old spirits, leaves our people for a foreign temple—and, to the wildbloods’ way of thinking, is turned against them.For this reason they hate Celestians. I remember once, when I was very young, they took a solaros in a raid against a summerlander village. The warriors brought him back with them to die in the snow, far away from his goddess. All the children were called to watch.”
    It had been the first death she’d seen, and it remained one of the ugliest. They had broken his teeth and smashed his face into a slimy red pulp. Unable to scream, the priest had moaned instead: a hideous whistling sound that lasted long into the dark and echoed in her nightmares. In the morning he was silent, and the meat of his face was black with mosquitoes.
    An old memory. She put it away, as she had done a thousand times before. Heradion was still watching her, waiting for the end of the tale.
    â€œIf she had stayed there—if what she was became known—Oralia would have ended like that priest. She had to go south. But I knew that it would not be easy, that many might try to stop us. So I learned to fight.” Her fingers traced three more sigils in a line down her right cheek. “Sword, spear, axe. This one, for reading the stars and the waters as dragonship guides do. This one, for tracking and trapping prey in the snow. So that we would not get lost on our way south, you understand, or starve as we traveled. For every man’s secret I wanted to learn, there was another scar to take.
    â€œI might have had more, but by then Oralia was losing control of her power. There was no one to train what she was. So we left. In time we came here, and she was able to become what her goddess wanted her to be.”
    â€œThat is an extraordinary sacrifice,” Heradion said quietly.
    â€œIt was a long time ago.” She shrugged. The preparation was the easy part; it was the journey that had been hard.And she’d failed in the end anyway. “I was sworn as sigrir already. There was no reason not to use the privileges of the oath, and no sacrifice in it.”
    â€œSome might