Prologue
Up until her twelfth year of life, Sira’s world had been measured in the rhythmic thrum of the hand-mill grinding emmer wheat, the smell of grease-carded wool, and the safe, familiar perimeter of the round-houses tucked beneath the limestone ridge.
Then the peace broke like rotten pine underfoot.
Sira never forgot that day.
No matter how many years passed, the memory always remained raw and vivid.
The summer air had tasted of wood-smoke and crushed meadowsweet until the screaming began.
A raiding party from the lower valley — men with painted shields of boiled hide and unwashed copper axes — spilled over the boundary dykes before the morning guards could lift a horn.
The clan’s pastureland turned into a slaughterhouse in the space of a single heartbeat. Thatch roofs caught fire, sending greasy columns of black pine-smoke billowing into the pale sky, and the terrified bellowing of cattle mingled with the harsh war-cries of strangers.
Sira was running before she even understood that her feet were moving.
Through the knee-high, sun-bleached grass of the lower meadow she fled, her bare feet tearing against sharp flint shards and dry thistle roots. The grass brushed high against her ribs, whispering a dry, frantic hiss with every desperate stride. The air was thick with the acrid stench of scorched thatch and burning dung.
In her arms, she held her oldest brother’s son, Breno. He was barely two months old, wrapped tightly in a soiled linen swaddling cloth, his tiny body pressed so fiercely against the crook of her neck that she could feel the frantic, rabbit-fast hammer of his heart against her collarbone. She knew why they were hunting him. In the brutal calculus of clan blood-feuds, a newborn heir was a root cut clean from the future; the raiders were sweeping through the round-houses specifically to purge the bloodline down to the cradle.
Whish.
The sound was like the wing of an eagle striking dry air — a sudden, displaced draft tearing past her ear.
Whish.
Thud.
An ash-shafted arrow buried itself deep into the turf a hand's breadth ahead of her left foot. Another splintered against a limestone boulder to her right. The sky above seemed alive with them, a grey rain of bronze-tipped death whistling through the tall grass, hunting the bundle against her neck.
She squeezed her eyes half-shut, her lungs burning as if she were breathing hot coals, and drove her legs harder through the tangled stems.
Then came the tearing.
It did not feel like steel at first. It felt like a massive, red-hot coppersmith's hammer striking the heavy wool of her tunic — a sickening, dull impact that wrenched her entire left arm backward out of its socket.
The arrow-point, meant to pass through the swaddling and find the infant’s chest, took her instead, driving deep into the soft meat of her forearm near the elbow joint, shearing through muscle and scraping hard against the bone with a dry, sickening crunch.
A white-hot flash of agony shot from her fingertips up to her jaw, so violent that her teeth snapped together hard enough to draw blood.
She did not drop the baby. Even as the shock wave turned her stomach and her knees buckled beneath her weight, her right arm locked around the infant’s back with the desperate, unyielding strength of stone, sealing him against her throat as she pitched forward into the trampled clover.
Through the ringing in her ears and the red haze blinding her vision, she heard the harsh, guttural roar of an enemy warrior closing in through the grass just behind her — a heavy, leather-clad shape lunging forward with a raised bronze dagger, shouting over the din:
"Hold! She is only a child —!"
Before the blade could descend, a second roar split the smoke — deeper, feral, and utterly furious.
It was her oldest brother, leading the counter-charge with a heavy bronze-hilted sword raised high, his face blackened by soot and spattered with gore. Behind him came her other brothers and cousins, their war-cries crashing over the tall grass like an incoming tide of iron and bone.
Sira pressed her forehead hard into the blood-warm earth, her fingers still clenched desperately around the infant’s blanket, while the battle roared and bled itself out all around her in the trampled grass.
